The Baja Fluffitado 1500

or

The First and Last (?) Race of bc and Mudge

Part III: Manny, Moe and Hack

or

Two Fuels for Love

By bc and Curmudgeon

From Curmudgeon’s Official Logbook:

Mile 487.8: With new water pump, two fan belts, and a broken piñata half that has been stuffed with refried beans, we make good time heading south in the Achenblog Beano Thelma-Louise and Hortense Stostakiewzchewski Flyer . After our grueling day doing yardwork, our clothes were torn and sweaty, so in the last moments before we left, the townspeople donated more cast-off clothing for us to change into. bc is wearing a discarded toreador’s shirt of white silk, with puffed-up sleeves and chest ruffles, similar to a shirt Seinfeld once wore. The padre, meanwhile, has given me an old cassock of his, and a piece of rope to use as a belt, so I look like an ill-tempered Friar Tuck. But at least we are back on the road…er…path…er… cactus-strewn wagon track.

Mile 781.6: We reached the halfway checkpoint dead last, and now we’re heading back north to Tijuana and the finish. Clearly in the mood for a celebration, bc pulls out a flask he’s had hidden under his seat and offers it to me with a lopsided smile. Just as I reach for it…another disaster, as the engine begins to sputter, miss and then stall completely. bc thrusts the flask to me, stops the car, jumps out and works furiously under the hood. He emerges with something in his hand. “Fuel filter,” he says. “Clogged, and then part of the mesh shredded, and it’s leaking. We need a new one. That old carb will clog muy pronto without it.”

With no choice, we start walking down the track, and after two miles (19.3 kilometers, if my math is correct) we come to a small town. There are many old, abandoned buildings, but no obvious sources for a fuel filter, so we go into the cantina.

“Ola,” bc says. “We’re looking for an auto parts store, like Trak Auto, or NAPA.”

“No comprendo,” the owner says, eyeing bc’s frilly shirt and my cassock.

“El Trako Auto-o,” I say. The cantina owner looks back at us dully. “No comprendo.”

“Pep Boys,” I say. “Uh, Peppy Hermanos.”

“Peppy Hermanos? No comprendo.”

“Tres Peppy Caballeros,” bc says. “Um, little Caballeros. “ He makes a gesture, belt-high, indicating short people.

“Manny, Moe and Jack,” I say. “Or would that be Manny, Moe and Hack?”

The cantina owner looks from bc to me to bc again. “No comprendo.”

“Peppy…little hombres…tres hombres …uh…tres peppy hombreslitos.”

“No, no, Mudge,” bc says. “That’s all wrong. Let me try it. We want—Deseamos – let’s see, peppy is like excited…excitado –“

“Excitado? You’re kidding me, right?” I say. “Like fluffitado?”

“Yes. But no. Shut up,” bc says. “Senor, por favor, deseamos tres …uh…pequeños hombres excitados.”

In Spanish, the bartender says, “You want to excite three little men?”

“Whaddy say, whaddy say?” I ask bc, but before he can answer the bartender reaches under the bar and brings out a rusty-looking old pistol and lays it on the bar.

“Vamos,” the bartender says, threateningly. And again in Spanish: “And you, padre, you should be ashamed of yourself!”

“What’s going on?” I ask bc, but he’s pushing me briskly toward the door.

“C’mon, Mudge, I think we better get out of here,” he says, breaking into a run.

Buzzards follow us through town until we find a gas station. It’s closed, unfortunately. Rummaging through the station’s trash dumpster rewards us with a used but serviceable fuel filter, 3/4 of a Twinkie and two sombreros. Then the buzzards follow us back to the car. Never seen so many buzzards.

I took my sombrero and hit bc with it.

But I made sure not to drop the Twinkie.

From bc’s diary:

We are not going to note this in the Official Logbook, but I feel compelled to make a confession here in my personal account of the race: The Achenblog Beano Thelma-Louise and Hortense Stostakiewzchewski Flyer does not run on pure pump gasoline. Due to the unusual requirements of the big old Merc Grand Prix engine, the fuel is a blend of gasoline, alcohol, and nitroglycerine. We buy pump gas, and have been supplementing it with home-brewed Tequila purchased at gas stations and roadside stands (Mudge is a very experienced haggler. He’s clearly in his element there, probably something he’s learned at docks all over the world.) as well as a prodigious supply of medical-grade nitroglycerine pills that we found secured underneath the chicken truck as we came across the border. Apparently, we were someone’s smuggling asses - I mean, mules. So, we decided to get rid of the pills by dissolving them in the fuel tank, throwing a bottle’s worth in with every fill-up. We can use every erg of power we can muster, and I think the nitro must be helping. I suspect Mudge slipped a few under his tongue when we were flying along the cliff roads near the start, too.

[Insert blurry “Mad Max” fast forward time sequence.]

From Curmudgeon’s Official Logbook:

Mile 1,296.2: We’re out of gas in the middle of nowhere about 200 miles south of Tijuana. There’s an abandoned service station a hundred yards away, with a cluster of free range cattle jostling for shade around what’s left of the building. The cattle don’t even look up when the buzzards take a break from the circling and perch on the roof of the service station. The half-piñata of refried beans and Twinkie are gone, hundreds of miles back. Well, I ate the refried beans and the Twinkie and bc ate the piñata they came in, claiming that at this point, anything other than refried beans was “comfort food.” We are stuck, despondent, out of gas ourselves, out of energy, out of strength, out of ideas. Hungry. Tired. Thirsty. Starting to acquire significant accretions of buzzard droppings on our sombreros.

“What’s the name of this bustling metropolis,” I ask bc. He looks at the sign over the abandoned gas station.

“Santo Guano de Buitre,” he says.

“What’s that mean?” I ask.

“I dunno,” he says. “I’ll look it up.” He thumbs through his little Spanish pocket dictionary. “Near as I can translate, it means ‘Holy Buzzard Poop.’”

“Sounds better in Spanish, doesn’t it?”

“Si.”

Near the gas station, one of the scrawny cattle breaks wind. It was the only breeze we’d seen or heard for hours, and we were too far away from it to even feel it.

“We’re doomed, aren’t we?” I ask.

“Si.”

“Even a plate of refried beans would be good right about now.” I say.

“Si.”

Suddenly, bc sits bolt upright. “Maybe we aren’t so doomed after all,” he says. With that, he jumps up and runs into the abandoned gas station. There isn’t any gasoline in the building, but there is a room full of Freon Classic in there, for recharging ancient American automotive air conditioners, along with some empty propane tanks. I hear noises, crashes and incoherent cursing as he begins rooting around in the junk and rubble. I go investigate.

bc starts rigging the portable Freon compressor with several inline condensers for the inlet side and a box around them more or less the size of a 19” monitor. I ask what I can do, and bc hands me 100 feet of air hose and a tin funnel, and says “The cows, Mudge. Hook this up to the cows. Cattle flatulence! Don’t you get it? We’ll pull their methane in, and send it out from the compressor through our Freon condenser box, which should liquefy it, and then we’ll use this electric fuel pump to compress it into these old propane tanks, which will be our fuel tanks. I’ll have to adjust the fuel system to get it to run on methane, but I think we can do it.”

“OK, Mr. MacGyver Smartypants, how do we carry this contraption to the next dairy farm?”

bc points at a small utility trailer outside the garage, “It’ll take me a couple of minutes to rig up a bumper hitch. I know that it’ll look funny for a race car to tow a little hay trailer, but I don’t think we can load the portable refinery onto the MG.”

I sighed. “I suppose that’s appropriate for a car powered by intestinal bovine disturbance.”

bc flipped the compressor on and hummed “Yakety Sax” while working on the liquid methane and carburetor/supercharger systems and watching me chase the cows around, trying to get a positive seal on the bovine posteriors.

About 45 minutes later, the MG had a running engine, and a trailer containing three full tanks of liquid Mexican cow flatulence and the Portable Very Natural Gas Refinery. 

I sat in the passenger seat fuming, pretending to look at my race notes and sporting a shiner from a bull that didn’t like my approach to his nether regions with 100 feet of rubber hose.

The exhaust smells awful and has a visible brown tinge, but we’re back on our way. ScienceTim keeps insisting methane doesn’t smell. Hah! Have I got a bulletin for the British Journal “Nature” for him!

Mile 1,498.4: I can’t believe we’re gonna make it! We’re almost in sight of the finish line up ahead in Tijuana, just over that hill. We’re rocketing along the coastal cliffs (OK, rocketing along at about 8 miles an hour, towing a trailer with three scrawny cows facing aft, with hoses running from bc’s methane tanks, over the trunk, over  the cockpit, over the windshield, and down into the engine compartment in front of us. But we were going to finish, and the Achenblog Beano Thelma-Louise and Hortense Stostakiewzchewski Flyer has become an alternative-fuel vehicle at that. Our “Beano” sponsor would be so proud! We were a day or two behind the leaders, but by God, we were sure as hell going to finish.

bc looks over at me and says, “Let’s finish with a flourish, Mudge. Open ‘er up!” So I turn around in my seat and dump two bottles of nitro pills into one of the methane tanks, then tighten my seatbelts and buckle my chinstrap. bc’s knuckles whiten as he grips the steering wheel. We accelerate to perhaps 9 miles an hour.

Looking down at the beach, I could see the huge dead whale we’d passed on our way south, a few hundred feet below. There were lots of people down on the beach, but none within a few hundred yards of the whale, which was REALLY bloated now after several days in the scorching sun, and really rank. In fact, you could probably have powered the entire Baja Fluffitado 1500 field with the gaseous interior of the poor dead cetacean. There were red flags around it, and some sort of cables running from it. I nudged bc and pointed, and we looked, trying to figure out what was going on down there. Suddenly, it dawned on me: the only way they had to get rid of that whale was to blow it up, and let the shattered smelly fragments of minced whaleburger get washed away by the tide in manageable pieces, or input to the local buzzard guano distribution system.

“bc,” I said, “I think they’re going to—Look out!”

Up ahead, they’d blocked off the road because of the demolition project. There were a couple of saw horses and barricades temporarily blocking the road – after all, all the other race cars had finished a day or two earlier. bc saw them at the last second and jammed on the brakes, but it was too late! With that overloaded trailer of methane tanks, refining equipment and Lady Holsteins behind us, our old friends Euclid, Pappus, and Ike Newton reminded us we weren’t as smart as we thought we were. We fishtailed wildly as bc fought to retain control, all flailing hands, flying elbows and pumping feet, and then jack-knifed. I’d been used to looking back for the last few hundred miles at three cow butts, but now I looked to my right and there was the trailer, with one of the Bessies looking at me contentedly, chewing on some tumbleweed, as we swerved right, then left—and after what seemed like a nauseous eternity - off the road and over the cliff!

“AAAAAEEEEEEEEEEEEEiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii,” said bc, in a manner that I would have described as lacking his usual aplomb.

“AAAAAAAAAEEEEEEEEEEEEEEiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii.” I believe I may have replied somewhat whimsically. Then I started hitting bc with my sombrero.

Down below, but rapidly coming up to meet us, was the immense carcass of that bloated dead whale, and the last thing I heard was one of the demolition engineers shout, “Despida en el hoyo!” (“Fire in the Hole!”) as he pushed the plunger…

Coming in Part IV: A Celebrity Roast, Flambé, Cookout and Funeral All in One! Aww, You Shouldn’t Have!

© Copyright by the authors 2008, all rights reserved.