Balls to the Wall

Let me be the first to say I have no idea where I met those East Germans. It was one of those things where one minute you're ordering a vodka drink named after a Muppet, the next minute you're one of the founding members of a kraut-rock quartet and then the next thing you know you're smuggling guns into the harbor on an air skiff. Or whatever the hell was going on, I don't even speak East German and those guys sucked at Charades.

Needless to say, it was an interesting weekend. What I can remember of it, which is about an hour total of choppy flashbacks. All I know for sure is that I was blindsided by happy hour Friday night and I woke up this morning in the barrel of a cannon on a Navy ship. In-between it's like cable TV the week after your descrambler crapped out.

There's a slight possibility those guys were just tearing around the harbor on the skiff and trying to run over ducks just for fun, but they were pretty heavily armed for just some general drunken mayhem. Usually a pellet gun or a homemade egg salad cannon is plenty for that kind of action. So that definitely doesn't explain all the assault rifles or typewriter parts or whatever it was strewn all over the hydrofoil. It was dark.

There was definitely a little old guy with wire-rimmed glasses involved, usually a dead give-away as the evil mastermind behind the whole thing. He had some phony cover story about being pissed that I'd honked on his houseboat, but I'm pretty sure it was all a covert passcode, like "the raven barfs at midnight," the kinds of things you hear in the spy movies all the time.

Hands and Balls played along and bare-assed the guy as we were hydrofoiling by, they were definitely hip to what was going on. Come to think of it, I'm starting to doubt those were their real names, they sound kind of fake in retrospect. At the time I was wondering what was up with Fritz and why he didn't get a body part name, like maybe he wasn't really East German. But really, those guys were so hard to understand I might have thought they were saying their names when they were really saying "Pass me the screwdriver" or "I think you peed on the police." German definitely wasn't written to be understandable by English-speakers.

East German or no, these were some clever bastards. I'm pretty sure they were just using yours truly to pin as a scapegoat once everything went down, otherwise I don't know why they would have carried me from the short bus to the hydrofoil. I mentioned the short bus, right? Too late now if I didn't. Yeah, we spent a couple of hours riding around with the Special Olympics hockey team, singing the Chuck Wagon song. I'm not sure how that got started; I think we may have barged onto the wrong bus after the bar ran out of cocktail cherries.

The whole cherry thing happened while Balls was going on about how the Great Wall of China was overrated and how the Berlin Wall could take it any day of the week, and I dumped a whole jar of cherries down his shirt to save his ass since the Chinese guy down at the end of the bar was starting to look like he was going to put his ass-kicking shoes on. We left in a hurry after that since there were at least ten dollars worth of cherries that had gone down Balls' pants, and this burly-looking biker guy at the bar had just ordered a Shirley Temple.

Most everything is a blur after that as the East Germans' plot kicked in and I was along for the ride like a suitcase that barfs and yells out requests for Neil Diamond songs. When the cops finally got wise to the whole scenario the East Germans predictably tried to pin it on yours truly, wheeling out this cock and bull story about how they were tourists who came to see the museums and the next thing they knew they were being dragged around town by the collars by some psychotic drunk who had Fritz's wallet. They had the whole thing sewn up pretty tight until I played the ace up my sleeve and ran like greased hell.

Nice try, East Germans. Next time you'll have to find yourselves a bigger sucker. I'll give you Rok Finger's number, I'm still pissed he gave me that Wild Draw Four for Christmas.

Bricks Out.

Nude Year's Resolution
Like any God-fearing man, Omar Bricks is careful to make a New Year's Resolution every year. Not that I'm all that religious, at least not since being banned from church for impersonating the Pope at a bake sale years ago. But the way I see it, it's... (1/6/03)

Shut-In and Shit On
I have to admit, after my high-voltage high colonic, I almost gave up on the idea of building my own car. Actually, "almost" is too strong a word: I shitcanned the whole plan at a high rate of speed. It takes a wise man to realize his limitations,... (12/23/02)

Pulling a Franklin in the Garage
If you were paying any attention last column, and not just skimming for mentions of supermodel sex, you'll remember I started a story about building a new Bricksmobile and running down to Sears to get a floodlight for the garage, and how those cheap... (12/9/02)

Let There Be Light
The solution to The Great Omar Bricks Transportation Dilemma of 2002 came to me in a dream last Friday night. In the dream I was running away from this big car-wash monster thing, some kind of snuffleupagus made from those shaggy spinner... (11/25/02)

Silly Attorneys, Tricks is for Bricks
I've got two good reasons why you should never, ever name your semi-weekly column My Friend Polio, and here they are: One, you would be seriously stepping on my toes and repercussions would be quick and deadly; and two, it's just bad karma, and let... (11/11/02)