Lo Hai Qu Rides the Napa Valley Wine Train

It's been quite a while since my crazy intern, yup, still an intern, Lo Hai Qu asked to take over HoseMaster of Wine™. I never quite know what to expect. Oh, well, here we go again...


So, like, me and my girls Loqueesha and Shizzangela, and Loqueesha’s weird cousin Klamydia, who was visiting from planet Dumbshit, which is right next to Uranus if you know where to look, decided we’d go to Napa Valley and ride the Napa Valley Wine Train. What a stupid fucking idea that was. Might as well ride the Napa Valley Wine Bus. It’s cheaper and you can get off when you want to, like the guy in the back playing with himself. I mean, I guess some people find trains romantic. Like the same people who think square dancing is cool. You’d never get me into one of those gigantic square dancing skirts, not me, I’d look like some fucked-up Tiffany lampshade for orphans or something. But Loqueesha had to take Klamydia sightseeing and she talked me into going. I don’t know what Loqueesha was thinking taking Klamydia there—yeah, that makes sense, take a fucking train wreck to a fucking train wreck.

Of course, Shizzangela is wearing her usual tight shirt that shows off her gigantic rack. This one says in big, sparkly letters across her boobs, “ALL ABOARD!” Klamydia’s wearing some bright orange blouse with tassels that says, “In Emergency, Pull Cords,” which I can tell Shizzy wants to steal, only it would never fit her, it’s way too small. If she put it on it would be like trying to shove a cantaloupe into a condom, but she wants it anyway. So already I’m thinking there’s going to be some trouble. But I don’t give a shit, I’m just looking for somewhere I can smoke. I just figured you could smoke on a train, but the annoying train boy, or train steward, or train dick, or whatever he was, tells me I can’t. Really? Like what if I hang out the window, who’s gonna know that it isn’t the train belching all the smoke? How am I supposed to drink if I can’t smoke? I just got on this stupid train and I’m already in a bad mood. And Loqueesha is none too happy either cuz they put us in the Chardonnay car. “Like we’re a bunch of Oakies,” she says. Klamydia doesn’t care, she’s climbed up in the luggage rack and is making choo-choo noises. She’s pretty weird, but Loqueesha told us her mom drank a lot of Barefoot when she was pregnant so Klamydia’s got Feetal Alcohol problems. It’s gonna be a long train ride.

I don’t think I was ever on a train before I went on the Napa Wine Train. Maybe at Disneyland, but that’s not the same, that’s like saying you’ve had wine before but all you drank was Meiomi Pinot Noir, which isn’t wine, really, it’s kinda more like a Hostess Cupcake, you just think you had wine. And why does anybody go to Napa Valley, one of the most famous wine regions in the world, as famous as, like, Champagne or Spumanti, and then ride a train through it? It’s like going to Vegas for the culture. There’s like 200 tasting rooms, and you’re riding around in a steel box like you’re Houdini, or some fucking wine country astronaut gazing out the little window at the Earth and drinking Tang and recycled urine, which I had a glass of at Castello di Amorosa. Plus riding that train is like going around wine tasting with a bunch of strangers piled into your car. Strangers that don’t like you, not that I give a wet Bieber. I mean, the four of us get on that train, the little Asian girl and her friends of a certain color, and Shizzy’s titzillas are all up in everybody’s face introducing themselves, and Loqueesha is carrying a foreign load from drinking rosé all through breakfast to put up with Klamydia building sausage robots, and Klammy is making choo-choo noises, and I can see the other people in the Chardonnay car making stony faces at us like the woman in the rocking chair in that famous old painting, “Kistler’s Mother.” I’m pretty sure nobody wanted us there as soon as we got on. Which makes all of us.

Pretty soon we were chugging up the Valley. So was the train. Haha, good one, Lo! I put the L-O in LOL. I’m actually starting to enjoy myself. The train isn’t going very fast, which is a surprise to me, actually, because Loqueesha told me it was a bullet train through Napa Valley, so I thought we’d be going up and down the Valley faster than divorce attorneys. I’m thinkin’ the ride might last about ten minutes, so I’m drinking wine like it’s ipecac and I’m a runway model for Donna Karan. So are my girls, and now the fun begins. All the people in our Chardonnay car are staring at us, and not just because Shizzy is makin’ up rap songs about the wineries we’re passin’. She’s rappin’ into a bottle of Cabernet like it’s a mic, shit like, “Frankie Ford Coppola/owner of Inglenookie/Here’s an offer you can’t refuse/come eat my cream-filled cookie.” Klamydia is laughin’ so hard she falls out of the luggage rack and breaks wind when she hits the floor, which makes me say, “Hey, don’t worry, that wasn’t a fart, she’s just playing her Duck Horn.” OK, not that funny, but I was pretty lit. Now people are shushing us, which doesn’t go over too big with Loqueesha. “It’s the Napa Valley WINE Train,” she says, “the ‘wine’ part is the point. We’re just havin’ fun.”

Now the wine dick comes over and asks us to keep it down. He’s telling us that if we don’t, he’s going to have to stop the train and have us removed, like we’re skin blemishes that are the wrong color and might be cancerous. I can see Shizzy is pissed, but I get it. Maybe we’re a little loud, but we’re just having fun, not trying to ruin anybody else’s vacation. Everybody was laughin’ at Shizzy’s rap, and Loqueesha was taking pictures with everybody, but I guess there were a few folks that didn’t like it and kept complaining to the wine police.

And, well, fuck, it’s an Asian chick and some black chicks in the whitest of white counties outside of Racist Cop, Idaho. I know, dropping the race card kinda upsets folks in the Napa wine biz because they’ll swear up and down that it wasn’t about us being minorities, it was about us being rude. All these white people, white wine police and white marketing people and white wine writers, talking about how marching a bunch of women of a different color off of their tourist trap wine train into the arms of the local cops they’d called wasn’t about racism at all, it’s because we didn’t behave ourselves. People like us should know better, right? Stay in our place. No, hell, no, it wasn’t racist. They always call the fuckin’ cops to take dangerous people off the train, right? And people sayin’ it can’t be racist because, hey, I’m married to a minority person, so I know racism when I see it. Yeah, marry a sheep and then you’ll stop wearing wool, too, I guess. It’s all bullshit, it was all about my girls being the wrong color, like they’re Negroamaro at a clambake.

They tossed our sexy asses off the train, well, once they got Klamydia out of the luggage rack even though they didn’t have the right baggage claim check for her. The local cops had the sense to see it was stupid, that four slightly buzzy chicks weren’t much of a threat to the community, and they split, though Shizzy has this thing for guys in uniform and she offered the cute one a complimentary cavity search, which she thinks is what dentists do, so luckily the cop declined. The wine train police wouldn’t let us back on the train. We could hear the people in the Chardonnay car clapping when we left, but those smelly old white people probably thought that the clapping would turn the lights on and off, or their pacemakers.

Me and my girls, we’re used to being stared at in wine country. It’s why Shizzy wears those crazy, sparkly shirts—people see those instead of her skin color. I was mad as a proctologist with a Latex allergy, but Shizzy and Loqueesha just shrugged. I guess that says it all.