I should have seen that coming.

Okay, sometimes certain ingredients shouldn't be put together. In this case, the ingredients are two pallets of tequila, inexpensive machetes, and a Friday night crowd. In retrospect, I should not have had a party with the theme of tequila and machetes. Looking back, I know that now.

First of all, a machete isn't as easy to handle as Michael Douglas makes it look (Romancing The Stone, 1984, Zemeckis). The incredibly powerful performance by Machetes de Fuego made good machetemanship look so simple and easy that all the dudes in the crowd were convinced that they too could juggle six machetes or fillet a giant salmon in two lightning-fast strokes, if given the chance. Extremely unfortunately, this was not the case.

Since machetes were for sale at the party, and that performance was so inspiring, pretty much everybody shelled out for their own machete, and soon all sorts of challenges and contests sprang up. Two dudes staged an underwater machete fight in the pool...have you ever had a lot of liquor and then tried to do strenuous underwater activity? Let's just say that it makes you pretty "seasick." Before too long their little battle turned into big surface slicks of half-digested doner-kebab and mezcal. That was a lame thing to be skimmin' outta the pool come Saturday morning.

More serious damage was yet to come, though, as the night wore on. This guy Supreme, one of Lyle's buddies from some old kitchen job of his, decided that he could do the machete juggling thing. Before too long a mis-timed machete had sliced his right thumb off at the base, and he fell to his knees all screaming and crying and holding the stump like Luke Skywalker.

This was just a sign of things to come.

Another guy, some mechanic dude I had invited from earlier in the week when I was pickin' up the Escalade after its 500-mile maintenance, decided that he could swallow a flaming machete. The doctors say that he'll never speak again, and I say he's damn well never gonna work on my car again. What a bonehead.

Sothar, this big silly dude we always been kinda chummy with, got pretty jerked up on the mezcal and started mocking the guys from Machetes de Fuego. They are a real serious bunch, and they were not into watching some chubby guy in Lakers shorts and a "Got Blumpkin?" tshirt making fun of their craft. He stepped over the line when he grabbed one of their sacred machetes and hacked up one of their prop saguaro cactuses, so they took him out behind the garage for this ancient form of machete torture. I don't want to say too much about it, but it involved horizontally slicing every inch of his chest very slowly with machetes. When he finally passed out, they put a weird green beetle down his throat. I didn't watch the rest because I left.

I don't usually do this, but I ended up calling the cops on my own party. Sgt. Bill don't do me no harm, and his officers just came and broke it all up and confiscated the machetes. There were some pretty bad wounds, and there was a lot of property damage (all the plants in the yard had been hacked down to the root, including my nice Japanese maple), but on the whole...well, next time I throw a party I am probably gonna run the concept past a few dudes beforehand.