Guapo’s Geyser

It was roughly 10 pm on Friday evening. Mounds’ girlfriend and I were already a bottle of wine deep, and decided to head a block or so down the street to quench the insatiable thirst that had overcome us on a quiet start to the weekend. Being the caring doggy mommy I am, I thought it would be a good idea if we took the boys along for a walk with us as we enjoyed the sights and sounds of Friday night traffic. After about 25 “Sit Down’s” we finally had the leashes attached and were ready to venture out into the night and pay a visit to our friendly, neighborhood, beer man.

That is the beauty of California, if it happens to be 10 pm and you run out of wine, fear not, you can use your legs to get you to the nearest rationing station and stock up on as much alcohol as you will need for the rest of the evening, or the rest of the week for that matter (the ‘you can only buy what you can carry’ rule only seems to apply in Pennsylvania). The four of us – Guapo, Tucker, Biz and myself all patiently waited in front of the beer store while Mounds lady selected a top quality assortment of convenience store beverages, including the beer of champagnes – Andre. We stood for awhile watching the people fill up their gas, were momentarily distracted by a chubby man wanting to introduce his chihuahua to us, and finally rested our eyes on the life-sized tanning salon model window stickers.

Our way home once again lead us past Jack in the Box. On our way to the store, Guapo had been pulling at the chain as if he wanted to go steal a Jumbo Jack or some curly fries, but his attempts were futile and we remained on course. The way back was different, I was too busy in my own world and laughing with the Mounds lady to realize that Guapo was hatching a sneaky plan to attack one of his favorite water displacement devices – the sprinkler.

Before I knew it, he had jumped up the 4 foot wall and was completely terrorizing the first sprinkler. Within a few seconds he had ruined the small water spraying device and quickly set his beady little eyes on the next water sprayer about a foot away. Before I could stop him, he had already jumped back up the wall, falling in to the puddle on his way up, and was wildly chewing and snapping at both the water shooting out of the sprinkler and the plastic sprinkler structure itself. Once he had killed this sprayer I could see he had his eye on the next one, but no sooner could he give up and move on to the next shooter, all of the sprinklers along the street side of the road shut off. For a moment I considered that maybe his naughtiness had been seen by a JITB employee and they simply shut off the water to end his reign of terror, but that was when I heard it…

WOOSH! Then I saw it, I almost hated to turn around because I knew what that sound meant… To the right of the Jack in the Box, on the side opposite the drive thru window, there was a massive geyser shooting about 15 feet into the air. I imagine what happened is that so many of the portals were broken down the line that the built up pressure at the start of the sprinkler system had no where to go, no where to go but up! Guapo, dripping wet and exhausted, could not have been more pleased of his work; he has been sporting the perma-grin ever since, and I think he may have even winked at me as I was reliving the tale this afternoon with a friend. So the next time you are in town I will be sure to take you by our city’s newest national historic landmark – Guapo’s Geyer (conveniently located right off the freeway with an abundance of surrounding shops and restaurants).