Enduro

My invite from Dr. Palmer came via U.S. Mail:

The 1979 North Las Vegas Biennial Enduro

Friday evening March 22

·         Opening Ceremony

Saturday March 23

• Tennis – cutthroat format, best of 3 sets
• Pissing for distance
• Ambidextrous bowling – 1^st ball  left-handed, 2^nd ball right-handed
• Craps – Union Plaza Casino, $25 buy-in, last man standing

 Sunday March 24

• Batting cage – switch hitting, 10 pitches per side
• One-eyed miniature Golf
• Blind-folded pinball
• Two-deck pinochle

Competitors:

• Dr. Palmer, Deming, NM
• Munson, Alhambra, CA
• Gardiol, Eagle Rock, CA

The invite was no stranger than the circumstances that had led up to it.  Dr. Palmer and Munson had both relocated to North Las Vegas and were living next door to each other.  Surprisingly no effort was made by the authorities to prevent this from taking place but it was decades prior to the formation of the Department of Homeland Security.  If ever such an act were to go unnoticed, one would be hard pressed to find a better place to carry it off than North Las Vegas.  This seedy little suburb was even more depressing than Vegas itself. 

North Las Vegas was inhabited by the victims of the casinos that were so wiped out on their first trip to Vegas they didn't have enough money to go back where they had come from.  Having been bitten by the bug and wanting to get even, these sick bastards found a North Las Vegas rat hole to live in so they could commute by bus to their day jobs bedding johns, washing dishes or parking cars and their nights gambling. 

Dr. Palmer was the first of the two to arrive having found work running a Nevada State substance abuse program.  One can only assume he was considered qualified for the position based on having lost his license to practice medicine in California due to drug and alcohol dependency.    Dr. Palmer's personal recommendation evidently carried a great deal of influence as he landed a job for Munson as a drug rehabilitation counselor despite having no prior relevant experience whatsoever.  Munson had come south from Reno where he had been working as a blackjack dealer in a casino to support his own excessive gambling and drinking. 

Once the two of them were settled in they hatched a scheme to run a bookie operation on football weekends.  This came about when their friends and families found out they had moved to Vegas and began sending cash and checks with requests for Palmer and Munson to place wagers for them at the Vegas sportsbooks.  During football season there were lots of requests for both college games on Saturday and pro games on Sunday.  After a few weekends of placing bets for friends, Palmer and Munson saw that all the money wagered eventually found its way to the casinos.  They decided to continue taking bets but without bothering to tell anyone, they would take the action themselves and no longer place the bets with the sportsbook.  Technically there was no financial difference to those entrusting them with their wagers as long as they paid out when someone won.  However, from an ethical standpoint it left a lot to be desired.

At first things were on a very small scale and the whole affair amounted to nothing more than some light entertainment for Palmer and Munson on the weekends.  Their friends and families would bet on the outcome of several games over a weekend and almost always came out a loser.  Their money would go to Palmer and Munson instead of to the casino.  If anyone actually came out ahead at the end of the weekend, Palmer and Munson could easily handle it with the money everyone else had lost. 

Five weeks into the sixteen-week football season, Palmer and Munson were spending their weekends anxiously monitoring the six televisions stacked up in Palmer's living room where they tracked game scores against the bets they had agreed to take.  Light entertainment had been replaced by a weekly horror-ladden roller coaster ride fraught with serious consequences.  The number of wagers and the dollar amounts bet had radically escalated as people started looking for ways to recoup their losses.  Every dropped pass, penalty flag or missed kick in every game had serious money riding on the outcome.  Operating under false pretenses contributed additional stress.  On those occasions where Palmer and Munson were in jeopardy of being wiped out, they would rush down to the sportsbook and place insurance bets to cover potential losses.  As they started taking on more and more customers, each weekend turned into an intense forty-hour long, pharmaceutical-enhanced psychodrama.  When football season ended Palmer and Munson's addictive personalities suffered through withdrawal on weekends. 

It was now March and in an effort to spice up a weekend they came up with the idea for the Enduro.  Attached to the invite were nine additional pages devoted to rules and details for each of the events and an explanation of the elaborate scoring system.  In an unusual twist, the opening ceremony was not only to be scored but in fact would be worth more points than the rest of the events combined.  The opening ceremony was to be conducted in Dr. Palmer's living room where each participant would be given 10 minutes in which to present to the others the significance of his 35 years on Earth. 

I flew in from San Diego late Friday night.  Palmer and Munson picked me up at the airport and we went straight to Palmer's place.  After the lighting of the Enduro torch in the backyard we made our way to the living room where we threw dice to determine the order of the opening ceremony presentations.  I desperately needed to go last.  Not only did the two of them have a home court advantage but they had also spent days in an anal retentive frenzy fine tuning their monologues.  I knew they were both going to take the full ten minutes to spew forth a morose self analysis that would be gut-wrenching to sit through.  My strategy was to throw a two-second farce at them to counter their labored bullshit and win the opening ceremony.  To my great relief I won the dice toss.

There was however a definite downside to going last.  I had to sit through two ten-minute diatribes that were byproducts of Palmer and Munson being ensconced in North Las Vegas and spending Monday through Friday surrounded by heavyweight drug addicts.  Before each of their presentations while they reviewed their scripts I had time to retreat to one of the bedrooms to ready my props.  Palmer and Munson finally finished and it was my turn.

I had them lay back on two lazyboy recliners as well as put on the blind folds that would later be used in the pinball competition.  I explained I needed them to stay put for five minutes while I readied myself in the bedroom and not to remove their blindfolds until instructed to do so.  They were both completely drained by their respective outpourings and welcomed the chance to vegetate.  Once they were blindfolded and reclining, I placed a small wooden chair between the two recliners and ran an extension chord from an outlet to the wooden chair.  I turned out the living room lights and put on an audio cassette that featured an Indonesian woman singing ethereal dirges accompanied by exotic instrumental sounds.

I returned to the bedroom where I removed from my carry on luggage a roll of Reynolds aluminum foil, Christmas tree lights and two aerosol can air horns.  I stripped down to my underwear, wrapped my torso and four limbs with foil and used masking tape to attach the strings off lights to my chest, arms and legs.  I then put on the Chiquita Rivera balloon headdress I had assembled earlier between presentations. 

I went back to the darkened living room where Palmer and Munson appeared to have been put to sleep by the music.  I grabbed the extension chord and mounted the chair I had set between the recliners.  I wanted it to appear as though I was hovering above them when they removed their blindfolds.  My headdress was in fact rubbing against the ceiling.  The Christmas light wires fed into a plug that I had taped to the middle of my chest.  I connected the extension chord to the Christmas lights and the room went from pitch black to a blaze of colors.  I took the two air horns from my hips where I had taped them and held one in each hand pointed directly at Palmer and Munson below me.

I had failed to take into consideration that being covered in foil can warm you up a bit.  I suddenly became aware that I was sweating profusely.  Perspiration was rolling down my arms legs and chest and it started shorting out and making sparks when it hit the Christmas bulb connections.  It looked like I was headed for spontaneous combustion.  I hit both air horns and began screaming repeatedly, "TAKE OFF YOUR BLINDFOLDS!!!  TAKE OFF YOUR BLINDFOLDS!!!  TAKE OFF YOUR BLINDFOLDS!!! "

The shift from a sleep induced by a soft melody to air horn blasts and terrified screaming was more than Palmer and Munson could handle.  They froze in their respective recliners too stunned to remove their blindfolds.  Their only movement was violent spasmodic wrenching in sync with each blast from the air horns. 

The snapping and popping of the sweat reaching the light bulbs began to increase just as Palmer and Munson finally managed to remove their blindfolds.  They both opened their eyes to a glow-in-the-dark metallic creature towering above them, covered in flashing lights, showering them with sparks and horns blasting away like an oncoming locomotive.  Their screams drowned out mine.  As soon as I knew they'd had a good look I immediately unplugged myself and the room went black again.  I began furiously ripping and shedding balloons, Christmas lights and wet sheets of foil, all of which fell and landed on Palmer and Munson, producing a second round of screaming. 

The Enduro was abandoned the following afternoon three hours into the tennis match when Dr. Palmer went down on one knee at the net in the 108 degree heat and began projectile vomiting.