Bike Week: Local idiots, free adrenaline and the chaos below.

Bike Week, Myrtle Beach 2006. A grand and demented festival celebrating the day that mankind finally made centripetal force our bitch. And I was right there in the middle of it. Illegally parked, mind you.

I was circling the block in search of free parking when Brandon posed a very valid question: "Why do you care if you get a parking ticket in Myrtle Beach?"

"Good point."

After a quick U-turn into a parking spot, we deposited a few nickels into the meter to make it look good for the nearby cop and were on our way.

We had agreed that if anything weird happenned, I was Leo C. Holbrook and Brandon was E. J. Douglas. In a city where most pedestrians have a well-grounded fear of losing an eye to errant ejaculant and "titty beads" are just a few steps away from being accepted as legal tender, it is always best to have a well-rehearsed alias.

Something weird happening in Myrtle Beach is both an inevitability and an understatement. The circus that is Bike Week has its tent-stakes firmly planted in a bedrock of strung-out locals, bored freaks and a myriad of colorful others all thoroughly tweaked on a combination of expensive drugs and free adrenaline.

Especially during bike rallies, the beer flows like the murky waters of the nearby Pee Dee River and it is not at all uncommon to see a man stagger across eight or more lanes of traffic hugging a half-empty case of beer to share it with some thirsty teens on the other side.

On the strip internal combustion abounds. Slow moving chrome glistenning in the neon glow of the city. The warm breath on your ankles as you walk behind one of these idling beasts. The almost musical snarl of three hundred thousand rolling sculptures all being manned and maintained by nearly half a million of mankinds most terrifying representatives. Big, bearded, tattooed men and big, bearded, tattooed women.

At one point we encountered a man perched awkwardly atop a three-foot wall that ran along the sidewalk. He was only wearing two things that were not black; his blue jeans and the enormous pair of fake plastic breasts hanging from a string around his neck. "Nice tits" I said not really expecting a reply considering that the man was visibly drunk to the point that he was having obvious difficulty focussing on the stream of sheet-metal flowing by in front of him.
His head lurched to one side as if it were about to slip off of the pile of body beneath it. He spoke with the distinctive growl of a man who has spent so much time around bikes that he has begun to sound like one, "You think thats funny look at this." At which point he lifted a large leather flap that was covering his lap to reveal a foot-long plastic penis. He then croaked out "How d'ya like me now?"

Yes, the freaks were out in full force and in rare form. Terrible things were happening on the strip so we retreated to the safety of the roof of an abandonned, ocean-front bar to await dusk, the time when the weird energy begins to rise and all the lunatics lose what little inhibition they had. It is best to find a safe place to watch from when the feeding frenzy begins.

On the roof we found piles of crushed beer cans and empty bottles, bridges to other rooves and human sized nests made of matted clothing and fabric. All evidence of some indigenous hobo society. I sat in the center of the roof in the lotus position while Brandon stood and observed the chaos around us. "That helicopter is looking at us." I turned to see what he was talking about. A police helicopter, a "ghetto bird" for all of you inner-city youth out there. I had not even heard it over the drone of the bikes but it was becoming constantly more audible as it changed trajectory to come investigate us.

Me: "What the hell is it doing?"
Brandon: "It's staring at us."
Me: "Stare back at it."

At this point the helicopter was hovering just past the far end of the roof and about 150 feet above the street. "Stand your ground", I thought. "Do not be intimidated by the machine."
After a few more awkward moments of being probed by the camera on the side of that damned flying squad car it finally gave in and flew south. "Bastard... Ok, let's go."

We found ourselves minutes later sitting on a bench on the Boardwalk. The Myrtle Beach Boardwalk, coincidentally, has no boards and is a horrible place to walk. It's a classy place where classy people wear classy shirts that say classy things like "In case of emergency give me head" and "Guiness... Not just a breakfast drink anymore." It's the kind of place where if you sit still long enough some raving idiot will approach you and share with you the life lessons that have served them so well. And that is exactly what happened after just a few short minutes of sitting and observing. I was on the phone with an old friend from the area, Kyle, trying to figure out if anyone I knew was also caught up in the mayhem when some nut-job began poking me in the chest and trying to solicit my help to "fuck somebody up".

Kyle: "Who the fuck is that?"
Me: "I don't know."
Nutjob: "Yo, lets fuck some people up."
Kyle: "What's going on?"
Me: "I dunno. Some crazy bastard is yelling at me and poking me in the chest."
Laughter on the other end of the line. "Tell him I said to fuck off."
Me: "Hell no. His teeth look glued in."
Nutjob: "You should tell him to get off the phone with his bitch."
Brandon: "That's not his bitch."

I ignored the man and finished my conversation while he made violent small-talk with Brandon. After finding out that no one I knew was in town I hung up the phone and decided to join this hellish exchange. He told us that the source of his current woes was the fact that "some punk ass bitch" threw him out of the "club". The "club" that he was referring to was actually a small, quiet, mom-and-pop diner just twenty feet down the boardwalk from where we were. Brandon and I had quietly watched the man get ejected just moments earlier.

Me: "Alright."
Nutjob: "Where are y'all from?"
Brandon: "Wilmington."
Nutjob: "Yo, I have been here for eleven years. I moved here when I was nineteen. That means I'm thirty now yo."
His math skills were top-knotch. Brandon had aparently decided to have some fun with the poor bastard:

Brandon: "Yeah, we are writers from the Star News."
Nutjob: "YO! YOU HAVE FOUND THE RIGHT MAN YO! I got so many stories. Yo, I saw Tara Reid sucking dick in the back of Club Kryptonite. I promote for these clubs yo. I know how to work the clubs ya know what I'm sayin'? Ya gotta cross the floor like this."

For some reason he felt the need to demonstrate this concept by briskly pacing from imaginary barstool to imaginary barstool in his imaginary club filled with imaginary people in the middle of the now nearly desserted boardwalk. Brandon and I watched this uncomfortable spectacle wondering how long it would go on and how it could possibly get any weirder. Then, it happened:

Nutjob: "You can't just sit like this."

He proceeded to take a seat between us and silently stare out at the imaginary dance floor. This continued for some time. For a moment I thought that his heart may have stopped so I leaned in slightly to look for signs of life. Nose-hairs moving. Eyes twitching. Anything that would reassure me that I was not the last person that this weird-ass was ever going to pester. Suddenly he sprung back to life scaring me shitless and yelling excitedly about his need to urinate. "Yo! I gotta piss! But I'll be right back."

He ran off towards the mouth of a nearby alley momentarily pausing en route to terrify a passerby. We needed to quickly formulate a plan.

Me: "Well, if we run he will probably catch us."
Brandon: "Yeah, he IS on meth."
Me: "On the other hand... Run like hell."

While sprinting I removed my hat and fluffed my hair while Brandon took off his jacket. We knew that such cheap trickery would probably not fool his amphetamine fueled mind. The truth of the matter was that he had probably already forgotten all about the conversation and what we were wearing but if he ever saw our faces again, chances are it would bring back fuzzy, detailless memories that would only remind him that, for some reason, he should be angry at us. His drug addled mind would then try to formulate some sort of back-story from half-assed context clues and shards of his fractured memories. Who knows, if we slowed down we could have ended up getting our asses kicked for pissing on his TV or any number of weird offenses that he has suffered in the past.

We ended up several blocks from the boardwalk between the row of ocean-front sky scrapers and the ocean itself. Night had fallen by then but the sand was still warm from the day. The distant rumble of V-twins came in waves with the doppler-effect being heavily emphasized by various alleys. I could catch glimpses of shimmering chrome between the multimillion dollar high-rises as we made our way back up the beach.

One motel had several jacuzzis surrounded on three sides by glass walls. My legs were tense and desperately needed relaxation so I figured "Why not?". As I was fiddling with the door and looking for other ways in Brandon noticed a tourist getting into the Myrtle Beach spirit. "That man is getting a blow-job." We left them to their play (or perhaps work) and tried to gain entrance into the actual tower itself. I had all but given up when I noticed an emergency door that appeared to have been accidentally left open by maintanence. We quickly ducked in and found ourselves in a small room full of locked doors and an elevator. We pushed the button for the penthouse and were upward bound.

The elevator was far more lavishly decorated than my apartment. Black marble walls with sand-colored marble inlays. Chrome railings specifically designed to not show fingerprints and other smudges. All I could think about was that this is still Myrtle Beach and no matter how much this elevator cost, some rich bastard has fucked a hooker in it.

The fifteenth floor consisted entirely of a bathroom, several maintanence rooms and an empty ballroom with an enormous panaramic view of the city. The lightning tearing through the sky in the distance seemed to be at eye-level. The chaos below seemed so serene. So eerily peaceful looking down at what I knew to be a hellstorm of lights and noise and instead hearing only the sound of the wind howling around the corner of the building. This seemed to be a glorious punctuation to the end of this twisted trip. All that was left to do now was dodge building security on the way out, start a dumpster-fire and be on our way.