THE WORST STORY I KNOW : SHIT HAPPENS
THE WORST STORY I KNOW: SHIT HAPPENS
BY
STEVE BOEHNE
There are some stories so bad that the teller is embarrassed that he even witnessed it, to retell it again, he must re live the whole thing. But, how else would you know? So here we go.
In the 1970’s and 1980’s in-between tandem surfing competitions, Barrie and I competed at national level in Prindle Catamaran racing. The Prindle Catamaran is similar to a Hobie Cat. We also became Prindle dealers at our Infinity surf shop in Mission Viejo. The Prindle factory sponsored and organized races throughout the USA. We were part of Fleet 1 out of Dana Point Harbor. Fleet 1 was very family oriented and there were always many kids and family members at the races.
One outstanding race was held in San Felipe, Mexico. San Felipe is a beautiful little town on the Sea of Cortez. The Prindle factory had rented a whole resort right on the water. Since there were over 300 racers and family members, the resort let the over-flow just camp right on their beach. My parents, Jerry and Carole, came to many of the races and followed along in their van. Another friend of ours, “Muscle City” and his girlfriend, Brandi also came along. Muscle City was a big guy and earned that nick-name while he was playing football. Brandi and he teamed up as a tandem surfing team and became “an item”, but they had a pretty stormy relationship. Muscle had a very short fuse and Brandi knew just how to light it. He was the kind of guy that when he walked into the bar in San Felipe, he knew he was the baddest guy in there. The problem was that the other big guy in the bar also knew he was the baddest guy in there. Before long, the two baddest guys would inevitably be in each others face with some kind of beef while the rest of us were trying to pull them apart and cool things down.
Brandi was a good single surfer and traveled to Hawaii in 1966 to surf with Barrie and Barrie’s tandem partner at the time, Pete Peterson. Brandi was very attractive and had long blond hair, which she combed meticulously. She was nicknamed “Hair” supposedly because she surfed pretty big waves at Sunset. She was tough, independent and she could find a multiplicity of faults with how Muscle did things, but they were an “item”.
In addition to my catamaran, Muscle and I both brought our 500cc. motorcycles. In the afternoons, after cat racing, Muscle, Brandi, Barrie and I would get on the two bikes, cruse into town or out into the desert. One afternoon, we headed up a sand wash towards the mountains. When you ride a motorcycle in deep sand, you have to go fast to keep the tires planning. It works almost like planning on a water ski. As soon as you slow down, the bike starts “squirreling”all around and spinning the back tire. About a mile up the wash, we came across a pack of wild dogs ripping, shredding and eating a dead cow. They were mean, snarly and in a feeding frenzy. As we passed, they turned and began to chase us. I always like to mess with dogs and go just a little faster than they can run to egg them on. Barrie was on the back and didn’t see the fun in that, but had to put up with this testosterone thing. As they approached, I let them think they could get us, but then I hit the throttle when they were about ten feet away. Instead of charging ahead, my bike started to chug and loose speed. I realized that I had forgotten to turn on my gas valve when we left the beach and the carburetor had run out of gas at the worst possible moment. I reached down and flipped the gas valve on, but it takes a few seconds for the gas to refill the chamber. On hard ground, you just coast about ten feet until the motor kicks back in, but in deep sand, the bike won’t coast far so you have no momentum to keep the motor running. The bike was quickly lurching to a stop. Just as the blood crazed snarling dogs were about to clamp down on our legs, pull us off the bike and start ripping, shredding and eating us just like the unfortunate cow, the motor started to pop again. Just inches from the jaws of death, the bike came alive and the big 500 cc four stroke blasted us out of there.
We rode on into the hills and followed a very steep, zigzag horse trail up the mountain. I was leading and just before we got to the top, the trail turned into a deep talcum powder dust bowl. Barrie and I made it through, but our bike threw up a giant dust cloud. Poor Muscle and Brandi couldn’t see a thing. They ran over a large rock, got thrown off the bike and literally hit the dust. We had stopped above them and were looking back down to see what happened to them. We couldn’t see a thing, but we could hear Muscle cussin, rantin and ravin. As the dust cleared, Brandi was giving him hell for dumping her in the dust and he was stomping and kicking his bike as hard as he could. It was so funny, they looked like berserk dust creatures.
We were laughing pretty hard, but we sobered up quickly when they finally got going again.
The next morning was a beautiful day for catamaran racing which would start about noon. Everyone was getting their boats ready for racing and cooking breakfast. Muscle’s van was parked over by the catamarans on the beach. While my van and my parents van were parked about 100 feet away, closer to the resort. I walked over to Muscle and said: “ Hay, after breakfast why don’t you and I ride down to the hard sand on the beach and do some wheelies on the bikes”. Brandi was in Muscle’s van cooking eggs. She said: I want to go too. Muscle said: I’ll take you later; Steve and I want to go do wheelies. They began to argue about whether or not she was going to go. These two don’t just argue; they do battle. Brandi said: If I don’t ride, you don’t eat and she threw Muscle’s fried eggs right out onto the sand. Muscle said: If I don’t eat, you don’t stay in my van and he started throwing her stuff out onto the beach. She went nuts, grabbed a big, old butcher knife and leaped out of the van swingin’ the blade at Muscle.
The nice people and kids at the catamaran race were aghast. I was embarrassed that I had brought them. Everyone was just staring with their mouths hanging open. As she lunged for Muscle, he sidestepped, spun and kicked her across her butt as hard as he could with the lace side of his motorcycle boots. She flew about six feet through the air and landed in the sand. She was spitting fire and charged again with the knife, he grabbed the knife from her and punched her right in the face. She did an arching back dive and landed on her head, dazed. I grabbed him and said: you’ve got to cool down, get in your van and go park it in front of mine. Brandi had made friends with some people in the other direction, so I took her and her stuff over to their camp. I made arrangements for her to get a ride home with them.
After that ugly episode, we all assumed that everything was over with those two and that they would avoid each other from that point on. I advised Muscle that he aught to just split to avoid any more trouble. He said that he wanted to hang out for a while, but would leave that evening,
(a day early). Brandi seemed to recover from her injuries and hung out all day with the other people.
After that days cat racing, Muscle and I took off on another motorcycle ride while Barrie hung out in my parents van. Barrie kept noticing Brandi walking past with a big half gallon coffee can in her hands. She yelled out the window to Brandi: What are you carrying? To which Brandi answered: Oh I’m just collecting shells. Barrie thought it kinda weird though because she came past with the can about five times.
The resort had two flush toilets, which all three hundred racers were using. They became stopped up and were overflowing with an ugly mixture of you know what! We were lucky because my parents van had a toilet and holding tank. It turns out that Brandi with her fine tuned sense of revenge had been taking coffee cans full of shit, piss and toilet paper from the toilets and tossing it into Muscle’s van. She covered his sleeping bag, food, dashboard, everything. After she emptied both toilets, she went back and sat by her friend’s campfire.
Muscle and I returned from riding and stopped into my parents van for a beer. After we were done, Muscle went to his van where he was overwhelmed by the most gruesome, disgusting sight he had ever seen. He scooped up a big brown shit loaf in his hand and stomped over to Brandi’s campfire. She was facing the other way and didn’t see him coming. He came up behind her and mushed the shit all over her face. When she started to scream, he continued to mush the shit into her mouth and it went in-between her teeth like a Hershey bar. They were both grossed out, Muscle headed for the restroom to wash up and Brandi ran to a water hose to rinse her mouth and face off. When she was done, she ran over to Muscles van, opened his five gallon gas can and poured gasoline all over the inside of his van. Then she stepped back about ten feet and started striking and tossing lighted matches into the van. From my parents van I could see the smoking matches arc through the air and blow out just before landing in the gasoline-shit soaked van. As I was getting out to stop her, Muscle reappeared. He was some kinda pissed! He punched her so hard that it looked like one of those slow motion fights on TV. She got back up and charged again with the matches. This time, he kicked her in the stomach which lifted her about four feet off the ground and into a heap in the dirt. Undaunted, she got up and charged with another lighted match. I didn’t want to mess with Muscle, so I ran up and grabbed Brandi around the waist and pulled her away from Muscle’s van. She was yelling: He made me eat shit, he made me eat shit! When I saw it between her teeth I could see she was right. As I was dragging her away, I yelled for him to get in his van and get out of Mexico.
She was a mess. I took her back over to the hose to get cleaned up and keep her away from Muscle until he could load up his motorcycle and clear out of town. After she got cleaned up and calmed down, Muscle had already left, but she walked over to the San Felipe police department and filed an assault charge on Muscle. The Police believed what she said because she looked pretty beat up, so they took off after Muscle. They never caught him though because he crossed the border before “anymore shit hit the fan”.
Not one person in Fleet 1 ever said a word to me about the whole thing, not even; who were those guys?
Post script: They avoided each other for about six months and then got back together for a while until she got pissed about something and broke an empty Sparklets water bottle over his head. They both found more suitable partners and have both been happily married to someone else ever since. Muscle died in the early 2000’s.
