Why eating at a Japanese restaurant in West Virginia can be a bad idea

Note: In this and any subsequent writings when I refer to a Hummer, I am speaking of the "real" Hummer not some GM bullshit H2 Tahoe with a body kit or H3 Mini-truck with a body kit, I'm talking about the civilian version of the Humvee. 

From the mid 1990's to the mid 2000's I spent most of my time doing something Hummer oriented.  We attended numerous "Hummer Events" which were factory sponsored and sanctioned, long weekends spent in some of the most beautiful places in this country.  The AMG General factory would sent out a tractor trailer full of tools and spare parts as well as a full compliment of mechanics.  These guys worked their asses off, day and night, fixing all the shit we broke and we broke a lot of shit!  I also raced in a short lived racing series known as the Hummer Challenge.  The Marines entered a race or two but never finished one, stating as they left and I quote "you guys are out of your fucking minds".  To be fair we could and did modify our trucks while they had to make due with stockers.

Several regional Hummer clubs sprung up across the country, I became affiliated with E.C.H.O. the East Coast Hummer Owners club.  We were the animal house fraternity of all the Hummer clubs.  Picture full grown adolescent minded pranksters with the resources to buy $100,000.00+ trucks, modify them extensively and beat the ever loving shit out of them off road, before buying new ones and starting over again.  I'm not proud or bragging about this, I'm just trying to paint a picture in your mind.  We lived the script of a teen movie.

We learned early on that if we did every event as a benefit for a charity, coupled with how much money 100 Hummer owners would spend in three or four days in a relatively low income part of the country, well, we pretty much could get away with anything...and we did.  It was our miscreant behavior that led to the founding of H.O.P.E. Hummer Owners Prepared for Emergency's.  To date we are the only private organization that is covered (insurance) and endorsed by the Red Cross.  That is a story for another day...

At one particular Hummer Event, in Beckley West Virginia, we were in our normal long weekend (Wednesday to Sunday) modus operandi; Load the trucks on the tractor trailers, drive ten hours or so to our destination, check in to the hotel and begin drinking.  In the morning, after catching a few hours sleep we would head out and unload the trucks and the plethora of shit we brought.  We would create a base camp complete with EZ-Up canopy's, folding chairs and tables,tool boxes, air compressors, air jacks and coolers...lots of coolers. Then we would divide up into groups of ten to fifteen trucks and hit the trails for the day.  We all had radios for communication, each group had a "trail leader", "the pack" and a "tail gunner"  The leader and the tail gunner were always very experienced off-roaders, the packs were separated into several experience levels and levels of insanity.  The way we found the trails was by contacting the local government and finding out what land was available for our use (send them money), then several of use would "pre-run" the event by driving there spending a few days exploring the area and finding good trails.  We would then mark them with GPS and this was long before every soccer mom had a GPS in their car.  We had to run laptop computers with special software and attached GPS antennas but I digress...

On this particular event loggers had come in and clear cut the forest between the pre-run and the event.  The trails were pretty much non existent. After a day of really boring offroading we headed back to the hotel.  After a quick shower and a bite to eat we headed to the parking lot as was de rigor, for an evening of catching up with friends from around the country and drinking.  After several hours of this we noticed that behind the hotel was a huge drainage culvert.  A fucking HUGE culvert.  We soon figured out the best way to get down into it was from the east side of the hotel, down a steep embankment, across a short field, hang a right and there we could enter a boulder strewn culvert.  It was about 100 feet wide and a 1000 feet long and damn near a 100% grade (45 degrees) with portions almost vertical.  Boulders the size of garden sheds.  You could not walk up this thing without falling, tripping or spraining an ankle.  In other words PERFECT!  We send two trucks down into the ravine, where we quickly find out that there is no dirt, only liquid mud with some sort of vegetation growing quite happily on/in it.  The trucks immediately sank into the mud.  Not sank into the mud in the way you are thinking of it, I mean they sank into the mud!  Not to the frame, past the frame.  So sunk that the mud was oozing into the windows.  I'm not exaggerating when I say that all that was visible was half of the windows and the roof.  The drivers had to climb out the windows to get out of their trucks, hence the open windows into which the mud oozed.  For hours we tried, in vein to extract the trucks.  We brought in a "deuce and a half" with a 20,000 pound winch.  That didn't work.  Around three in the morning most of us decided to call it a night and go to bed.  The two guys whose trucks were stuck decided to stay and keep working on the extraction.  That and drinking.  When we got up the next morning they were still at it.  The rest of us did what we could to salvage the event and took the "packs" to some trails that we knew well and had run many times.  After a decent day of wheeling we returned to the hotel to find our two buddies (their collective nickname was the idiot twins) finally extracting their trucks with two deuces, three other hummers and a shitload of tow straps and winch cables.  The highway department had shown up as well as the local news to watch the idiot Hummer guys who did not know better than to drive down into an earthen culvert...after torrential rains.  We all got cleaned up and decided to go get some dinner.  I'm not sure how but somehow we decided to go to a Benihana type place.  I don't know, so don't ask me how we decided to go to a Japanese restaurant, smack dab in the middle of west bum-fuck West Virginia but we did.

So here we are sitting around a large griddle table watching our chef flip and toss our meal into our mouths a freshly grilled bite at a time and truth be told the food was pretty good. It was midway into our meal when we noticed that one of the idiot twins was missing from the table.  On a good day this was bad but this time he had been up for two days with zero sleep and tons of beer.  We went to DEFCON one.  You would have to know John (one of the idiot twins) to understand.  Some people have brass balls, John's are made of unobtanium.  Walk into a hotel and if there is no one behind the desk, John is over the counter in a flash answering the phones and greeting the public.  He has also "valeted" cars arriving at the hotel.  On one occasion I remember a guest returning from his daughters wedding reception only to inform the desk clerk that the valet appeared to be drunk.  The desk clerk informed the guest that they did not have valets.  John had taken the guys mini van, loaded with all the wedding gifts on a beer run.  (we bumped the bridal couples honeymoon room up to the best suite in the hotel in order to smooth that one over).  That's John.

John is on the loose and we are desperately looking for him.  We check the parking lot...nothing.  We check the restaurant...nothing.  We looked everywhere and still no John. After searching everywhere we can think of we call off the search, after all John has been up for over two days, drank a few cases of beer, he must have passed out someplace.  We head back to our table.  On the way I mention to David that I need to hit the bathroom for a quick leak, he says that he has to as well and joins me.  So there we are standing at adjacent urinals when I notice John's omnipresent Doc Martin, black boots sitting in the stall next to us.  Dave and I start talking trash about John and his truck... no response.  We really lay on the trash talk, still nothing from John.  He is passed out cold on the shitter!  This is too good to be true.  Dave, normally one of the more reserved members of ECHO leaves the bathroom only to retrieve a large rock from the Zen garden in the restaurant and hurl it at the side of the stall.  It hit the stall with the force of a wrecking ball against a tin shack.  The sound was thunderous, the dent immense.  Still not a word from John, boots still firmly planted on the floor.  I walked over to the sink and proceeded to unroll a full roll of the brown "elementary school" paper towels into the sink and soak them in cold water.  I gathered up this mass of dripping wet paper towels which had to weigh 20 pounds and heave it up and over the stall wall.  It hit him with a huge splat, like a giant spitball hitting the blackboard. We ran, knowing that he was about to try to kick our asses.  As we rounded the corner, back to our dining room we looked up to see John sitting at our table calmly eating his dinner.  It wasn't John in the bathroom, it was some poor bastard who is probably still traumatized to this day.  John was in a little alcove, on the phone with his wife.  Ooops!