So we coast into LAX and grab a bus downtown. Our destination: the Downtown LA Hilton Towers. "Ver nahce." To spice things up (like the trip needed it) the 20 or so of us were playing a little round of the Assassination Game. Check-in was pretty bloody. But we didn't let it distract us too much from the serious business of relaxing and having a good time. We hit the pool.
Lying there in the sun, watching the cheerleaders and womens players saunter by, we reflected on our situation. "What time is it, Bob?" I inquired of Bob Bananacone. "3:30 pm local." "This can't possibly be right," we all agreed. There we were, lying in the sun, in 74 degrees, in the afternoon, in downtown LA. When we had left Charlottesville, at 5:30 that morning, it had been 38 degrees, with pouring freezing rain and a driving wind. Between us and that was 1 flight, 2 bus-rides (one of them 2 hours long), 1 inflight cocktail party, lots of baggage juggling, several shooting deaths, and other assorted mayhem. None of us could believe that we had been in the freezing rain in Charlottesville on the morning of that same day we were lying there by the pool. It was surreal.
We toured the town. We ate out. We drank heavily. We did our best to spend the obscene amounts of per diem the Athletic Department and the NCAA had thrown at us. The Stanford Band dropped by, briefly. We would see them again shortly, at the semifinal game where our team was to play theirs. The big day came.
And went badly. This was one of the sloppiest women's basketball games in history, which is a shame because many people tune in to the Women's Final Four, and it is billed as the best Women's Basketball of the year. It was also clearly the worst officiated sporting event of any sort that has ever occurred anywhere. Our team lost the game, largely due to the referees, at least one of which we are still convinced was being paid by someone other than the NCAA. Our entire starting lineup fouled out. Calls only went one way. At the end of the game when we were down by 2 points with 8 seconds left and possession of the ball, we could not get a time-out. For 8 seconds Dawn Staley made extravagant "T" formations with her hands, and the refs let the clock run out, and then ran off the floor for the portal. When Coach Debbie Ryan stormed the Table and demanded justice, they agreed to put time back on the clock and restart the game. The ref had to be retrieved from the locker room. He then proceeded to wave off Staley's last second shot which she launched with about a second left on the clock (it missed anyway).
You can imagine the reaction of the Pep Band. We were seated right on the baseline. At first our criticism was constructive: "C'mon ref, call it both ways." "Hey, ref, our player's getting mugged down there - call a foul!" But before the first half even ended, most of us were standing with our toes on the baseline, leaning out onto the floor and screaming at the refs, who were often no more than 10 or 15 feet away: "YOU FUCKING SACKS OF SHIT!!!! YOU PATHETIC ASSWIPE MOTHERFUCKING PRICKS!!!!! YOU'RE UNBELIEVABLE!!! YOU SUCK!!!! YOU SUCK!!!! FUCK YOU!!!! FUUUUUUCKKKKK YOOOOUUUUUUUUU!!!!!!!!!!" They probably didn't appreciate all that, but we didn't appreciate being robbed. To say we were livid would not capture the emotion. Bob said he was seriously considering rolling out onto the court and taking a swing at the ref at the end of the game. He claims he would have done it, if the guy hadn't disappeared before Bob could make sure someone was willing to bail him out of jail. Depressed as hell, we left.
We were supposed to get together with the Stanford Band that night, but, after that game, the last people any of us wanted to see was anyone from Stanford. We made a beeline back to LAX, this time to the car rental kiosks. We picked up some sweet rides. Wisely, we invested in the full insurance package. We started up the Pacific Coast Highway, and nothing would ever quite be the same again.
Going north, the sun setting to our left, we rolled for Santa Barbara, where Bob's cousin went to school at UCSB. We did circles around eachother on the road. We played bumper cars. We drove really fast. We were getting giddy again. Reaching Santa Barbara, we had dinner out with Bob's cousin Carol and her roomate Laura (or was it the other way around?). We went back to their place and drank heavily. We frolicked on the (very) nearby beach until the wee hours. Mike "Short-As-Shit" Silberglitt and I, asserting latent Judaism, tried to defile a church we passed - we were going to christen it as the 1st Episcopal Church of St. Enis the Penis, referencing a really bad sequence of humor that had had us rolling earlier. Alack, we were thwarted by a mysterious ragged figure lying in the doorway, who we immediately became convinced was the resurrected Nazarene: "It's Christ Almighty - the Body of Christ!!!" we screamed, running from that holy ground. In the morning, we nursed our hangovers and headed back.
Going south, having all day, we took a more leisurely pace. We stopped at all the beaches. We saw Malibu, Santa Monica, etc. Realizing that nothing we did to these cars would have any consequences for us whatsoever, we tried to destroy them. Roaring down the PCH at high speed, at one point, Mike was tearing at the sun visor, Andrew "Werdna Namlips" Spilman was in the back trying to pull my headreast out, and I was banging on the steering wheel. None of us could stop laughing. We were suffering from excessive activity, sleep deprivation, and the Everything-Is-Funny Syndrome. The diagnosis was undeniable: we were completely Shitty.
"No, Mr. Fuchs, I'm sorry," Bob anticipated having to report. "Your son's completely Shitty. No, there's no hope. We had to leave him sitting on the beach, laughing uncontrollably." "You're all like a bunch of giggling apes," Bob further opined. We were laughing too hard to protest.
On the way back, we swung through Beverly Hills and Rodeo Drive, just for the hell of it. We made it back to the hotel shortly after sundown. We were done with the West Coast. For the time being.
