El Ranchito

Casey and I went to lunch at El Ranchito today.



We took my Olds Mobile because I wanted to take a hit from the Arizona Iced Tea can that I had malformed into a weed pipe.


Casey asked if the Olds was my O.G. car, like from Arizona. I explained that it was from Arizona but it was not my O.G. California car. My O.G. car was a beautiful 1994 Thunderbird, snow white and low to the ground. It was the type of car that Tron would drive when he wasn’t mounting laser bikes that travel at ferocious speeds, leaving laser-colored jet streams in their wake.


I told him that at the time that I drove the Thunderbird my only job was selling pot. This was an awesome job because it left me with lots of time to explore other interests. The only down side was my close proximity to all sorts of other delicious and tempting drugs. These drugs often took a lot of the time for activities that I was afforded by vocational choice of being a pot dealer.


Steffi was in school at the time and I would wake up every morning, after doing lots of exciting drugs the night before, to drive her the 4 or so miles to USC from Downtown.



On one such morning I was returning to our Downtown apartment when I was smashed with a wave of nausea from the previous night’s ecstasy or vicodin or some fucking mix of salvia and opium.


I began to puke out the window and for some reason had a knee-jerk reaction that caused me to swerve the T-Bird to the right every time I leaned my head to the left, to huck out of the window. It was a very strange reaction, the swerve corrected itself in the exact same degree as my head returning to postion, post-huck.


I was pulling into the underground parking lot of the Pegasus building on 6th where I then lived when I spewed one last puke n’swerve, this time hitting an exposed water pipe and screeching to a halt dead center in my own reserved parking spot.


I was concerned that my car was totaled and I was concerned about the water that was now quickly rising in the basement of the Pegasus but my main concern was getting the fuck out of there.


About a week later the manager of the Pegasus called me into his office, leaned very close to me over his big, oak desk and explained that he knew what had happened in the basement.


“I’m not going to do anything, but I know it was you that hit that water main and flooded the basement”


“I just don’t want you to think you got away with it”, he said.


“if you're not going to do anything then I sorta did get away with it”, I thought .