When you and several friends are preparing to drive 10,000 miles from London to Mongolia, in a car with an engine powered by handicapped gerbils, there’s few better ways to celebrate than riding a saddle made from meat.
“Sweet Jesus, is this a crime against nature?” you wonder, googling PETA.
Nature? No. But both schemes are crimes against common sense, chiefly the Mongol Rally. It’s an inane adventure in which entrants race crappy cars (think Yugos) across a quarter of the globe. My three-person team, Mr. Dinosaur (slogan: “Stupidity isn’t extinct!”), will embark July 21 in a white hatchback Subaru with a busted driver’s-side door bought for $585.
“Don’t tell me the details,” my mother said, exercising the blind ignorance that allowed her to think my teenage years were cigarette- and alcohol-free, despite my cigarette-burnt clothes and Friday-night slurring. I agreed not to divulge details. Even I don’t want to contemplate cruising across countries with unruly consonants (hello, Kyrgyzstan) and corrupt cops. But American ignorance is another tale. Today’s topic is: Why did Mr. Dinosaur build a meat saddle?
“Genghis Khan rode a meat saddle!” explained Andrew, the hairiest third of Mr. Dinosaur. We were discussing methods to make our going-away party amazing or, barring that, utterly terrifying. “When the Mongols killed animals, they sliced off flesh and stuck it beneath their saddles. While riding, their butts softened it.”
Myself and Mims (yes, that’s his name), Mr. Dinosaur’s remaining two-thirds, nodded sagely. A world with Mongolian ass-tenderizers was truly a reason to be alive.
“Are you sure?” I asked, utilizing my probing fact-checking technique.
“Yes,” Andrew said, eyes widening with unhinged glee. “And people will ride the meat saddle. Just like Genghis!” Why not, we said. A meat saddle made as much sense as the Mongol Rally itself.
“Great,” Andrew said, smiling. “Now we just have to build the damn thing.”
Crafting a meat saddle is far simpler, and infinitely more dangerous, than it sounds. “It’s not like we’re building something that must obey common sense,” Andrew said several days later. He dropped two-by-fours onto my apartment’s wood floor. “We can just…wing it.”
“Wing it” meant sawing and nailing together an open-sided rectangle roughly 3-feet high and 6-feet long. “But what’s going to be the meat saddle?” I asked Andrew, as the 73rd nail squealed into wood.
The answer was in the trash. My apartment contains salvaged coffee tables, bookcases and a toilet seat, mostly discovered in a nearby apartment building’s refuse mountains. Once more, the mountains bore fruit.
“Look what I found,” Andrew said, hoisting a wooden, tail-less rocking horse. “Now that will make a meat saddle.” He tied the horse to the structure with sturdy Boy Scout knots, suspending it mid-air and hopping aboard. “Yippee!” he shouted, bucking wildly. The contraption quivered like half-hardened Jell-O, but remained intact.
“Now,” he said, “we just need meat.”
This task fell to Andrew’s girlfriend, the dreadlocked Rachel, who recently graduated from a craft college, specializing in fiber arts. Fashioning a meat saddle provided a new challenge not found in her ex-college’s curriculum.
“Mwahahahaha,” she said when asked, roughly translated to “Yes, you sick bastards.” Rachel received several pounds of roast beef, salami and ham and set to work, weaving black thread through fibrous veins to create a multilayered masterpiece. “Next time, get thick-sliced roast beef,” Rachel said, threading a thin, rough-edged disc of cooked cow. “We’re gonna ride this rough.”
When our party arrived, the completed meat saddle attracted abundant onlookers. They eyeballed it with curiosity and revulsion typically reserved for watching a caged monkey masturbate.
“What is this?” a tee-wearing girl asked, fingering ham.
“A meat saddle,” I said.
“Those two words should never go together,” she replied, walking far, far away.
Yet the meat saddle and my behind were made for each other—especially after alcohol emboldened me with false bravado. I slipped on waterproof ski pants, aka “the meat shorts” provided for the occasion.
“Here comes the Jewish cowboy,” I said. The saddle was slick, cool and incomparably comfortable. Besides raping and pillaging, Genghis certainly understood ergonomics.
“Ride it! Ride it! Ride it!” the drunken crowd chanted. I bucked back and forth gently, like I was riding Tiffany glass, gathering my bearings and fighting the urge to upchuck. Despite the watertight pants and my Herculean alcohol intake, the lunch meat grinding against my buttocks remained disconcerting.
“Faster, saddle boy!” someone screamed. I responded with gusto, riding as hard and spastically as I did when losing my virginity. Back then, I wasn’t following a manual either.
“Yee-ha!” I squealed, waving my red cap in the air like Genghis, feeling the flesh disintegrate beneath my wide and infinitely misguided rump.
