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The most absurd, hilarious, and ridiculous travelogue ever told, by two hit-TV comedy writers who raced each other around the world-for bragging rights and a very expensive bottle of Scotch
It started as a friendly wager: two old friends from The Harvard Lampoon, Steve Hely and Vali Chandrasekaran now hotshot Hollywood scribes, challenged each other to a race around the globe in opposite directions. There was only one rule: no airplanes. The first man to cross every line of longitude and arrive back in L.A. would win Scotch and infamy. But little did one racer know that the other planned to cheat him out of the big prize by way of a ride on a quarter-million-dollar jet pack.
What follows is a pair of hilarious, hazardous, and eye-opening journeys into the farthest corners of the world. From the West Bank to the Aleutian Islands, the slums of Rio to the steppes of Mongolia, traveling by ocean freighter and the Trans-Siberian Railway (pranking each other mercilessly along the way), Vali and Steve plunge eagerly and ill-prepared into global adventure.
The Ridiculous Race is a comic travelogue unlike any other, an outrageous tale of two gentlemen travelers who can't wait to don baggy cardigan sweaters, clench corncob pipes between their teeth, and yell at their sons, "You lazy bums! When we were your age, we raced around the world without airplanes!"
| ISBN-13: | 9781627796682 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Holt, Henry & Company, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 03/26/2024 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 334 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
Steve Hely writes for the Fox animated comedy American Dad! He was twice president of The Harvard Lampoon, and has been a writer and performer on Last Call with Carson Daly and a writer for The Late Show with David Letterman, the latter earning him an Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Writing for a Variety or Comedy Show.
Vali Chandrasekaran writes for television's My Name Is Earl. In 2006, his script Jump for Joy was nominated for a Writer's Guild Award. He has been an editor of The Harvard Lampoon and a management consultant for Boston Consulting Group, and he runs the Web site Vali's Views. In a memorable turn on-screen, he played the role of "Vali" on the NBC hit comedy The Office.
STEVE: What to Expect
Off the coast of Kamchatka, Siberia, bundled up and standing on the deck of a German container ship, I gripped the railing with oil-stained gloves to avoid being pitched into a heaving ocean the color of a wet gravestone. Snow was falling up, a meteorological phenomenon which I did not then and do not now understand, but which I saw with my own human eyes. "Well," I thought, "I hope Vali is this miserable."
VALI: A Taste of What's to Come
I sat exhausted and disheveled, clutching my luggage in the backseat of a Checker taxicab driving north on La Brea Avenue, and wondered if Steve was already back in Los Angeles. Had he beaten me or was I the winner of the Ridiculous Race?
I looked out the window at the huge beige oil pumps and reflected on all I had experienced since I last saw them.
I smiled. I was proud of what I had done.
Did I, having circumnavigated the globe, consider myself to be some sort of better, modern-day Marco Polo? I wouldn't say that. People who know a lot about both me and Marco Polo probably wouldn't say that either. But some people, who know only a little bit about me and almost nothing about Marco Polo, might say that.
Those are the people I'm trying to impress.
STEVE:How It Started
This story begins on Sixth Street in Los Angeles, which can hold its own in any index of "world's craziest places." Sixth Street is home to the La Brea Tar Pits, pools of tar and water where woolly mammoths used to get stuck and eaten by saber-toothed tigers, which would then also get stuck. Across from the still-burbling tar pits is the office of Variety, the showbiz newspaper devoted to reporting on which idiots just became millionaires. Just around the corner is the Peterson Auto Museum, where Notorious BIG got shot. Sixth Street runs past the barbecues of Koreatown, by Antonio Banderas's house in Hancock Park, and into LA's apocalyptically vacant downtown.
It was also home to the Sixth Street Dining Club and Magnificence Consortium, a society I'd founded. The members — myself, Vali Chandrasekaran, and our delightful young associate Leila — met weekly for the purposes of wearing preposterous suits, inventing cocktails, attempting to cook forgotten foods of the 1920s, drinking wine from the 99 Cent Store, sampling expired medicines, and proposing toasts to one another. Our meetings were held on Monday nights. This was a mistake. Members were often hungover disasters well into Thursday. But Monday was tradition, so Monday it remained.
Vali and I were Sixth Street neighbors, but we'd been friends at least since the time in college when I bailed him out of jail at five in the morning after he broke into the wrong building during an abortive prank. Five years later, he had cleaned up his act just enough to get a job writing jokes for actors playing well-intentioned rednecks to say on TV. My job was writing jokes for a cartoon alien, and, while this was incredibly fun, I sometimes wondered if I should try something more adventurous.
"See, some day all this will be over. We'll have wives and children and dogs, and we'll have to live responsibly."
I said this as Vali and I were sitting in the hot tub of his apartment building in the waning hours of a Monday night. I was drinking a bottle of ninety-nine-cent wine which contained some kind of kernels, and Vali was putting bubbles on his face and pretending they were a beard. Which doesn't sound all that funny, but he was really committing to the bit.
It's possible that I'm misremembering all this. Vali may have been pretending the bubbles were a hat.
"I assume my wife will be fine with me getting drunk and getting in a hot tub," Vali retorted.
"As of right now, my biography would be very boring to read," I said.
"Yeah, I've been meaning to give my future biographers more material."
"We should have an adventure." To get the last of the kernels out of the bottle of wine, I tilted my head back and pointed it at the stars.
"I'm in," said Vali. It's worth mentioning here that Vali was wearing boxer briefs.
"Should we become hoboes?"
"Mmm, too dangerous. I think these days hoboes are always getting stabbed."
"Maybe we should circumnavigate the globe."
"Maybe we should race around the globe."
"That would be something. That would be an adventure. But we would have to not use airplanes. Otherwise it would be too easy."
"No airplanes? Is that even possible?"
We didn't worry about that.
Once we thought it up, there was no way we weren't going to do it.
VALI: How It Started: Corrections & Amendments
The preceding is not even close to the truth of how Steve and I came up with the idea for this book. I have no idea why he fabricated the story. The truth is as follows:
One night I had a dream about lifting weights with Bob Dylan. During the workout, my trainer, Abraham Lincoln, told me I should race my friend around the world without airplanes.
The next night, I had dinner with Steve. When I told him about my dream, his eyes widened with amazement and he spit out his soda. I knew something big had happened because Steve really hates to waste soda.
"I had the exact same dream last night," he said.
Then we both knew what needed to be done.
STEVE: Circumnavigation: Why It's Awesome
In the next few days it became all I could think about.
It's not the craziest adventure ever. These days any men's magazine has an article by someone who backstroked the length of the Amazon, skateboarded the Kalahari, or Segway'd the Andes.
But 26,000 miles by sea and land is nothing to scoff at. Bear in mind that the first guy to try this, Magellan, ended up dead.
There's an old-fashioned grandeur to the idea. It's the kind of journey the great nineteenth-century adventurers dreamed up at the gentlemen's club and began on a whim. It summoned up cafés in grand, decaying train stations, and the bowels of steamships, timetables, and engine whistles and half-true tales told over card games with strangers.
The route is full of names that still ring with the exotic, even in a globalized age. The Forbidden City. Ulaanbaatar. Siberia. St. Petersburg. Warsaw. Cologne. Ohio.
Ironically, it may be harder to pull off than it was in Jules Verne's day. No one travels the oceans anymore. Long railway journeys are left to eccentrics. This trip would require stitching together transportation from the artifacts of the past and the new engines of the modern age. Vali and I were prepared to ride whatever beasts presented themselves, or to test the inventions of lunatic engineers.
Perhaps the best part would be that the "no airplanes" rule would keep us literally and figuratively close to the ground. We would see the world. We'd have to.
But to be honest, what I couldn't stop thinking about was me, in the near future, walking up to beautiful women, and saying this:
"Hello, my name is Steve Hely. In 2007 I circumnavigated the world by boat and train. I was competing in a race against a worthy and devilish foe. The prize was a bottle of forty-year-old Scotch. I won."
STEVE: The Rules
We agreed on certain details.
• We would start in Los Angeles and go in opposite directions. Because I'd done slightly more thinking about this than Vali, I quickly called dibs on heading west. My advantage would dawn on him over the course of the trip, when he lost an hour every time zone while my sleep was extended every two days.
• No airplanes, helicopters, or hot air balloons. Hovercrafts were a gray area.
• Both competitors would cross every line of longitude on Earth. You could do this any way you liked. If you went to the North Pole, ran around, and came back first, you'd win. But good luck getting to the North Pole without using airplanes.
• The winner would be the first person back in Los Angeles. Two glasses of Scotch would be poured and left in the care of Vali's roommate. The first man to round the Earth, arrive back from the opposite direction, and drink his Scotch would be the winner.
The schedule for network television has a two- to three-month gap, usually between the middle of April and the middle of June, when shows shut down production to prepare for the coming year. As a result, Vali and I both had two months off. That's when we'd go.
All we needed now was someone to pay for all this.
STEVE: The Prize The first thing we bought with our advance money was a bottle of Kinclaith 1969. This was the most expensive Scotch available in Los Angeles. It cost so much that upon paying for it I thought I might throw up. But this was a Ridiculous Race — it needed a ridiculous prize, a prize you could think about winning while you sat in some remote village choking down a warm glass of rainwater and ape blood.
STEVE: Planning
Back when the Ridiculous Race was just a funny idea, we debated about all kinds of crazy plans.
But then a gullible publisher decided to take us seriously.
The battle of wits began.
We agreed all planning had to be totally secret. Neither racer could let the other know what he was up to, or we'd risk falling into a trap set by our opponent. We'd need to outgame each other to win.
We agreed to start on April 14. This gave us about three weeks to plan our trips around the world.
That is not enough time.
* * *
We needed to get visas, work out timetables, map railroads, get vaccinations, buy equipment, and write taunting e-mails to each other. It turns out that planning a trip around the world, especially one without airplanes, is a lot of work.
During all this Vali and I were at least nominally working at our "real" jobs for nine hours a day.
I tried to get a travel agent to help me. This was a mistake. He was used to setting up old ladies with package tours to Disney World. Meanwhile I kept calling with questions like "Can I rent a hydrofoil in the Ukraine and drop it off in England? I just need to know if that's possible." We agreed to part company. I'd plan alone.
I sent e-mails to billionaires Paul Allen, Larry Ellison, and the sheikh of Dubai, because they own the three biggest yachts in the world. I asked if any of them wanted to give me a ride across the Atlantic. An employee of the sheikh wrote back. He politely but firmly informed me that the sheikh was a busy man who had better things to do than help me win a stupid race. The Irish, British, and American navies expressed similar but more harshly worded disinterest when I asked if I could hitch a ride across the oceans.
Complicating all this was the Unspoken Awesomeness Contest. I knew Vali and I were in a game of chicken, a round of Adventure Poker. I intended to win the race, but I was also going to come back with the better stories.
Both Vali and I were about to crack under the stress of all this when Departure Day rolled around. We'd have to figure most of it out on the road. It was time to begin.
VALI: The Departure Debacle
Handcuffing someone is much harder than it looks.
I was awakened by a loud knocking on my apartment door. Loud noises are not my preferred wake-up mechanism. I prefer to be slowly massaged awake by a couple of bikini-clad ladies who know how to give a good compliment. Unfortunately, I also prefer not having to pay money to a bunch of ladies every time I wake up. This combination of preferences means I'm unhappy in the mornings no matter what. And the morning of Saturday, April 14, was no different.
I turned and groggily looked at my alarm clock. It was 9:00 a.m. — the time Steve and I agreed to begin the race. I should have insisted on a later start.
We had been out late the previous night at Trader Vic's where Steve and I spent a significant portion of our book advance throwing a party for ourselves. The consumed cocktails were now sloshing around my brain, affecting my balance. I rested my throbbing head against my bedroom wall for a moment, then made my way toward the knocking.
Before I swung the door all the way open, Steve leaped into my apartment wearing a suit and tie, a scarf and sunglasses, and carrying a backpack that appeared to be filled with Tecate beers.
There was no way this was really happening. Five hours ago, Steve couldn't complete a sensical sentence. (Though he had been aggressively completing many nonsensical ones.)
Without even looking at me, he poured himself a tumbler of Johnny Walker and began drinking it. I was still in my boxer briefs and couldn't quite focus my eyes yet.
Jesus, I thought. I had seriously underestimated Steve. I've never read The Art of War, but there's probably something in there on never letting your opponent see you in your underwear. If not, I bet that subject is covered in Sun Tzu's sequel, The Attire of War.
If Steve's intent was to psych me out at the beginning of the race, it was working.
I had to pull myself into my shape. I told Steve I needed to "freshen up" and slipped back into my bedroom to take a Provigil — an antinarcolepsy drug that would help my body ignore both the effects of the hangover and the long day it was about to face. Then I quickly threw on a suit and rejoined Steve, who was now flipping through a copy of Alec Waugh's In Praise of Wine, which he had brought with him.
Why am I friends with this jackass? I wondered.
We sat down at my dining room table and opened up the Kinclaith 1969. I poured my glass first and took a long deep breath. It smelled Scotchy, like a drunk hobo in the morning. Then I slid the bottle over so Steve could pour his own glass. As he did this, I walked up behind my foe, slipped a pair of handcuffs out of my pocket, and cuffed one of his wrists.
Earlier in the week, I had purchased the handcuffs from the reputable Utah company Cuffs4Cops. When I ordered them over the phone, the saleswoman asked me if I wanted my police unit engraved onto the handcuffs. I thought for a moment, then asked if she could just engrave the phrase "keeping our children chaste" onto them. This aroused no questions. I'm not sure how much of Cuffs4Cops's business is actually 4Cops, but I would venture that the figure is closer to 0 percent than 100 percent.
My plan was elegantly simple: Just as Steve finished pouring his glass of Scotch, I would slap the handcuffs on him. Then, before he could process what had happened, I was going to affix two bumper stickers to Steve's body — one sticker for the front and one for the back. Both bumper stickers, which I had specially made for the occasion, simply read PEDOPHILE. I figured that the stickers combined with the "keeping our children chaste" message on the handcuffs would make it a bit more difficult for Steve to get the handcuffs removed and thus give me a nice little head start in the race. After I successfully restrained and stickered Steve, I expected him to laugh, congratulate me on a well-executed prank, shake my hand and bid me good luck. This is not what happened.
It turns out that people sometimes dislike getting handcuffed. Furthermore, it turns out that people can draw upon emergency reserves of strength while resisting arrest. Especially arrest by non-cops. So at the point where Steve was, according to my plans, supposed to be congratulating me, he was actually wrestling me on the floor of my apartment, fighting hard to prevent me from cuffing his other wrist. Largely, but not entirely, due to our hangovers, the wrestling match was incredibly pathetic — most of our energy was spent trying not to throw up.
After about two minutes of this nonsense, I finally pinned Steve to the ground and cuffed his other wrist, binding his hands in front of his stomach. I found this to be much easier than that behind-theback garbage real cops insist on. I don't know why they bother. Showboating, probably. Then I fastened the PEDOPHILE stickers to Steve's torso.
Victorious, I started toward the door so I could begin the serious work of circumnavigation. Steve also started toward the door. Then he tackled me to the ground. And then he started choking me with the handcuff chain.
So this is why cops cuff behind the back, I thought.
While trying to maintain the unbroken status of my throat, I began to wonder how police officers ever successfully handcuff criminals. According to my experience with handcuffing, 100 percent of perpetrators should either escape with a free pair of handcuffs or choke a police officer to death. Then I realized cops had some advantages that I didn't have. I wish I had a gun so I could shoot my friend Steve, I thought.
Steve's face was now grotesque with anger. His mouth was fixed in a gargoyle's snarl. His eyes went what seemed like minutes between blinks. When he did blink, he did it with only one eye at a time — alternating left, right, left, right. ... I assumed this was to ensure I didn't pull any other stunts while he wasn't looking.
Excerpted from The Ridiculous Race by Steve Hely, Vali Chandrasekaran. Copyright © 2008 Steve Hely and Vali Chandrasekaran. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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