Make Mine Mike

I know there was a big summit in Kansas City last month, in which the Seven Deadly Sinners got face-to-cute-face time, but when it comes to individual encounters, I’m becoming the Blogland Ambassador, the L.A. Online Welcoming Committee. Let’s see, there was AJ, Leese & Stanks, Gooch, and last month... Varla Vixen.

[We both took a while to write about this, but she beat me to the post .]

One big difference between Varla and previous visitors is that she’s not married with kids and wasn’t in town for family or work. She and her friends drove down from San Francisco to see the Body Worlds exhibit -- a display of real cadavers, dehydrated and preserved in clear plastic, and placed in athletic poses. I didn’t get to go, but the way they described it, my stomach churned, as well as my morbid curiosity.

Backing up for a moment... I need to get a new cellphone. I was waiting for a call from Varla and Jerry, whom she also wanted to meet (Gooch, too, but he once again used that whole “I have a six-month-old baby” boo-hoo routine). And why hadn’t I heard from my cousin who was in town for a job interview? Or from that chick who I thought was hot for my bod? Man, I was getting dissed all over.

When I met Jerry at Versailles (the excellent Cuban restaurant that Varla and her friends had chosen) he told me he just left me a message. I glanced at my handheld piece of shit. It looked normal. Power was on. Plenty of bars indicating reception. But where was the love, baby? Why no ring-a-ding?

Turned it off and back on. Boop-be-doop! Four new messages. Ahhh...

Varla was running late -- damn, thanks for tellin’ me, Samsung. So Jerry and I caught up over garlic chicken and black beans and plantains. He didn’t want to stay out late, so after dinner I met up with the Bay City Rollers at some of my local watering holes in Santa Monica.

Yeah, I was quite the stud, hanging out with three hot mamas. Varla’s adorable --gorgeous red hair and those cats-eyes glasses accentuating her cute little Irish nose. At the first bar, all the guys were checking her out, and at the second one, was she feeling up some other woman?. Varla’s friend Spaz was tall and slender -- beautiful hands -- and fuckin’ hysterical. Easily the least bashful of the three, and I imagine her frenetic style earned her that nickname.

I love the way Varla refers to all the characters on her blog with descriptive pseudonyms. Instead of using initials (“HL talked to D about CZ”) -- confusing us with alphabet soup, or doing bland replacements like I do (Tom becomes Tim, Stacy becomes Stephanie, and a lot of dudes are just “the schmuck”), her stories are populated with names like Lemur, Muscles, and Jesus Chris.

Her third friend hadn’t been mentioned yet, so I wasn’t sure what to call her. Varla was still deciding. Maybe Culito Bonito, which may translate to “pretty little tush”. Honestly, it was so cold and damp in LA, everyone was too overdressed in heavy coats for me to check out any asses, but I’ll take her word for it. Culito was definitely a captivating little cutie. She didn’t say much, but when she did, you were transfixed on her squeaky voice with the New York Jewish Latina accent.

We had a great time. Talked about bloggers, life in Northern and Southern California, and dominatrixeses. Y’know, the usual stuff.

Sorry, I can’t give you the juicy details. Not that I’m sworn to secrecy... I just had too many scotches to remember.

I do recall stumbling from the second bar back past the first one, near my place. I was still enjoying the recent memory of a lengthy goodbye to Varla, Spaz and Culito Bonito (if I call her CB, will that be confusing?) when I spotted a fight breaking out on the boulevard.

From what I could discern, it seemed like this drunk was stumbling across the road, and got in the path of another guy’s yellow SUV. The driver honked and cursed, so the drunk spit on his car... and of course that's a harbinger of the apocalypse. The two schmucks (see how handy that term is?) started duking it out right there in the street. A couple of barflies were trying to break it up and a few more were enjoying their ringside seats. And the SUV driver’s girlfriend was running over and kicking and flailing at the drunk.

I felt like I should do something, so I whipped out my cellphone and called the cops. One glimpse of a black and white flashing blue and red would put and end to the black and blues. But the call didn’t go through. I tried again. 9. 1. 1. Send.

Nothing.

Piece of shit cellphone.

I sighed and ran into the street. I know, I coulda just walked away, but I figured if I can't save the world, I could at least bring peace to my little corner of it. In a minute, I was another poor would-be referee, sayin’ things like, “C’mon guys. It’s not worth it. Let him go and forget about it.” and trying to separate these two grappling 250-pound apes.

I felt bad for the drunk. He was bleeding, drooling, glazed-over... drunk.

What was the other jerk’s excuse? His precious vehicle had saliva on it. And while his tiny girlfriend wasn’t really hurting anyone with her bony arms thrashing at us, I really wished someone would put a leash on that shrew.

Our scrum finally ended with us dividing up the quarter-ton of idiocy. I kept thinking that one of these slugging sumos was gonna miss his target and break my nose, or worse. Then in a nasally voice I’d be calling up Samsung -- not from my crappy cell, of course -- to sue those bastards.

Fortunately, I lived to tell the tale. It’s a dangerous job, but someone’s gotta do it. You’d think after all my experience, another installment of “Bloggers I’ve Met” would be so easy I could just phone it in.