Glendale Cherry Creek Chronicle

Blasting With Boyles

Summer Roundup: How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Everybody remembers your first writing assignment in junior high as you trudge back to school following Labor Day. Unlike today, where children require a helmet to take a shower and people go to school year-round, I can’t even imagine how much that must suck. Your mom sends you to bed when it’s still light out and I definitely can’t imagine how much that sucks. Although, once you start getting up at 3 a.m. to do radio, there are plenty of nights I still go to bed when it’s light out and I can still hear some kids playing outside.

So generally your English teacher would give you an assignment: What did you do on your summer vacation? So I thought I would give myself that assignment for this column. Today when I talk to people about where they went on their summer vacations, as kids you hear great stories about lakes, camps, Disney, the ocean and space camp. We went to grandma’s house. My grandma lived on the second floor above my Aunt Dorothy, my Uncle Barney and my gay Uncle Chuck. I thought it was a cool place to go because they had a fan and television set. Even then I really knew how to live.

So meanwhile, back to my writing assignment. Gee, let’s see . . . my divorce is pending, my son got hit by a car, I adopted a cat “Blanket” (a.k.a. the cat from hell), and I went to Sturgis. Like I said, I sure know how to live.

Blanket was named after Michael Jackson’s son Prince Michael II (a.k.a. Blanket). I chose the name because Blanket the cat doesn’t know who her mother and father are either. As you can see from the photo, Blanket loves to lay on top of the speaker of my television set and catch the bass vibes. I met her at a fundraiser for an animal rescue center. Six hundred dollars later, Blanket becomes the most expensive free cat and has a blue ball with a bell inside of it. (My father would kill me if he knew I spent $600 on a cat. As I’ve said before, when I would bring stray animals home as a boy, the next day they would disappear, and my mother would tell us that our father found them a good home). I can never find that damn ball until 1 a.m. when Blanket finds it. About 1:15 in the morning I think it’s a red alert with her beating the bell inside across the hard wood. And then at 3 a.m., I wake up wearing a cat hat after Blanket has curled around my head in the middle of the night. So far, so good for me and Blanket.

My son, as I’ve written about before, was hit by car while distance running. Here’s his photo… he’s recovering and back at work and doing well. Thank you everyone for the e-mails and calls and especially thanks to everyone at Denver Health Medical Center. But I guess the real highlight of my summer vacation was the hajj to Sturgis.

Along with about a half million of my closest friends, everyone convenes in Sturgis, S.D., for 11 fun-filled days. BTW… Sturgis was named after a lieutenant who died with George Custer. I believe the last thing that George Custer told the people of Custer, S.D. was, “Don’t build anything over two stories before I come back.”

I love Sturgis but it’s not for the faint of heart. As you can see in some of my photos, we’ve got dirty girls, along with a photo of my favorite attraction in all of Sturgis, The Bare Knuckle Saloon, where people gather to watch other people pound each other senseless. Is this a great country or what?

People literally challenge other people to fight, people can pick others out of the crowd to fight or you can simply sign up to fight. This applies to both men and women. The man who announces the show makes Buddy Hackett look like Dick Clark. It is unquestionably not for the meek biker to attend. However, in the rare atmosphere of Sturgis, you gotta get there at about 3:30 in the afternoon to get a good seat for the 5 p.m. fights. At the end when the winner is declared or someone is knocked out, people throw money into the ring. You can fight, get a broken nose, black eyes or internal injuries and still make $25!

I asked the proprietor why he allows the participants to drink and fight and he told me, “Hell son, if I didn’t let them drink they wouldn’t fight.” I thought to myself, “Is this a whole town of Irishmen?” In the words of a Bethlehem steelworker, “If we ever get into a bar fight, always grab the green bottle, they don’t break as easy.”

I rode a lot in the rain; got soaking wet, got sick and then I rode home. And so Mrs. Alexander, that’s how I spent my summer.

Pete Boyles

Age 12, going on 66

Peter Boyles is a nationally acclaimed radio host who can be heard Monday through Friday on 630 KHOW 5 to 9 a.m. He has a monthly column in the Glendale Cherry Creek Chronicle. Visit Peter’s blog and comment on his column, or let him know anything else that’s on your mind, by going to the Chronicle Web site at www.glendalecherrycreek.com.