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Risto
illustration: Juergen Strigenz
I have a fever, caused by years of pent-up water-skiing rage, and healing can only be (legally) achieved via old-school venting, so here goes: Ski season in Michigan is about 32 days long, and half of those days are tainted by gale-force winds. Oh mama, supply and demand is all out of whack. So when it is 85 degrees, sunny and calm, I start itching like the Wolfman just before dusk during a full moon. We might get four days per season like this up here in the crotch of the Rust Belt, so as you might expect, every douche waffle and his posse head to the water on days like this. Can you hear the train a-coming?
Now, I don’t have the honor of skiing on professionally designed private ski lakes. I’m friggin’ out there on public bodies of water, furthering the legend of “the world’s greatest free-skier.” Oh, you want 15 consecutive on-the-dime turns at 36 mph/41 off? Boom! It’s a good thing I brought a case of ShamWows, because my moves make the ladies drool.
To make matters worse, my home lake restricts all water sports to the hours of 11 a.m. until 7:00 p.m. Yes, the damn wind comes up at 10:59 a.m. and dies down at 7:01 p.m. But don’t even think about breaking the sacred restricted times, or you will be shot to pieces by the seemingly endless supply of stir-crazy blue hairs out policing the lake in their giant pontoon boats. So, I wobble down to the starting dock, knowing full well what is about to occur, yet again. The local aqua-mania reaches a crescendo near summer’s end, and I could practically smell the anticipation and angst building around the lake as the witching hour of 11 a.m. approached. I could hear PWCs, wakeboard boats and scrap yard runabouts firing up, anxious to be the first on the water. I mean, in order to properly tow five giant tubes with your bow pitched up at a 70-degree angle, you need totally glass conditions, right? The same goes for little Billy with dad’s new $65,000 wakesurfer MonsterCraft. But who am I to judge? After all, I’m just a semiretired
adult film legend who now makes his living selling bogus indigenous “artifacts” to gullible and/or drunk tourists.
So, there I am on the platform behind the greatest ski boat in the history of the world — the 2000 Moomba Boomerang. I pull the cheap tension string on my brand-new front binder and snap! My top lip starts quivering like the lid on a boiling pot, and my bloodshot eyes bug out like a cartoon character who has just been hit over the head with a mallet (RIP Hunter S. Thompson). It’s only 10:53 a.m., and my “friend” Dr. Geege beat me to the punch, hauling booty behind his top-of-the-line-in-2002 river barge crossover model with deck boat wakes. Geege (aka Wheelie George) normally offsets his indiscretions by loading his boat with succulent MILFs, but this is a huge breach of etiquette.
My spirits momentarily lift as I watch Wheelie George being run down by a gang of boozy teens on souped-up PWCs. But then my gaze returns to the treasonous snapped string on my front boot, and I realize it’s time to start my figure-eight barefoot endurance training. Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.–By Rev. F.
