La Brea BBQ Pit

La Brea BBQ Pit. April 13th, 2025

It’s a beautiful Palm Sunday in Los Angeles. The Mexicans are parading around their churches bearing palm fronds. The Powder Blue Tuxedo Boys are in their booth at the Frolic Room. The Masters Golf Tournament is playing on the TV above the bar. The boys are drinking their usual Beck’s beers.

Patrick: Those greens at Augusta National are as slippery as a good woman’s thighs.

Timothy: I’m amazed you could keep your putt online to the hole.

Patrick gives Timothy a look.

Patrick’s phone rings.

Patrick: Hello… yeah… okay…how many people?…by noon. Okay, we’ll be there Tuesday morning.

Timothy: What’s the gig?

Patrick: It was Tommy Cruise. He wants us to cater his movie crew at the La Brea Tar Pits for lunch on Tuesday. It’s just the second unit crew and Tommy, so about fifty people. He wants us to make our special Serrano Chili.

Timothy: Okay. We have plenty of fresh Serrano peppers, tomatoes, and onions in our garden.

Patrick: The Frolic Room RV-Food Truck and BBQ grill is in my storage barn. We’ll get the tenderloin at the Tenderloins Restaurant and have Eddie do the grilling.

Timothy: Can Eddie grill tenderloins?

Eddie: I heard that. I’m from Texas. Of course, I can grill you some tenderloins. I have my own grilling tools and apron, and I know the secret of grilling a good tenderloin. Why, my Uncle Stubbs taught me all I know about grillin’.

Patrick: Well, I’m sure your Uncle Stubbs would know. Meet us here at 7 AM on Tuesday. We’ll supply the grill. It’s going to be for fifty people. We need the meat cooked quickly to put in our chili.

Eddie: I’ll use blacksmith’s hard anthracite coal. It burns hot and cooks the meat fast.

…

Tuesday, 7 AM, Frolic Room

Patrick and Timothy drive up to the Frolic Room on Hollywood Boulevard in their Frolic Room RV food truck. They are towing the grill. The boys are wearing their powder blue tuxedos. Eddie meets them on the sidewalk.

Eddie is wearing jeans, snakeskin cowboy boots, black shirt, black vest, sunglasses and a black ten-gallon cowboy hat. He looks like an overweight Johnny Depp in a Western.

Eddie: What the hell kinda grill is that?

Patrick: We customized it from the coal car on the old Disneyland train.

Timothy: Yeah, we found the coal car in the Disneyland scrap yard next to the old Matterhorn bobsleds. We jacked it up, took off the train wheels, put on wheels and tires, and towed it out of there with our Frolic Room RV.
Patrick: Back at my storage barn, we converted it into a BBQ grill. We use it to grill tenderloins for our Serrano Chili.

Eddie loads up the old coal car with coal, and the boys get in the RV to head for the La Brea Tar Pits on Wilshire Boulevard.

Timothy: So what is this stunt that Tommy’s going to do at the tar pits?

Patrick: He’s going to jump the tar pits on his motorcycle. It’s part of the new Mission Impossible movie.

Timothy: Tommy must be nuts. If he falls into those tar pits, he’s not coming out. He’ll be like all those fossilized remains of dinosaurs and mammoths they have in the museum there.

The boys set up their grill and cauldron by the tar pits. The movie crew is 50 yards away, setting up for the big motorcycle jump over the tar pits.

Patrick puts coal under the cauldron and adds water into the huge cast-iron kettle.

Eddie: Where the hell did you get that big cast iron kettle?

Timothy: New Guinea, from a nice guy with a bone in his nose.

Patrick: He told us that it had only been used about a dozen times. It took us a while to clean it. There were some crucifixes and teeth at the bottom.

Eddie fires up the grill. The cauldron water is boiling. Patrick and Timothy are chopping up Serrano peppers, onions, tomatoes, and other spices in the food truck. They add them to the boiling water. Eddie brings in tenderloin as it’s cooked, and the boys cut that up and add it to the chili in the pot.

Tom Cruise is on his motorcycle, ready to do the jump over the bubbling tar.

Patrick: Look! Over by the tar pit. There is a sparrow. It dipped its wing into the tar, and now it’s fallen in. The sparrow is doomed.

Timothy: Oh, the poor sparrow. He’s tarred and feathered.

Patrick: That’s an ominous sign.

Eddie notices that the ground under the cauldron and the grill is starting to glow orange. It soon turns red.

Cruise launches his motorcycle up the ramp and flies over the tar pits, but lands ten feet short into the bubbling asphalt. The movie crew scrambles to throw him a rope and drags him out of the tar. Tommy won’t let go of his motorcycle and pulls it along. A hoist lifts Tom, the bike, and something hanging from the rear wheel of the cycle. It looks human.

Patrick: Well, they finally found Jimmy Hoffa.

Timothy: The tar pits are on fire!

Eddie: I think we should leave. The ground under the grill and kettle is turning red.

Patrick: Everyone into the RV!

Timothy: I think we may have used a bit too much heat.
Patrick: Yeah, putting coal fires around a tar pit might not have been a good idea.

At the museum, the fossil exhibits are ablaze. A skeleton of a T Rex goes crashing through the plate glass, covered in flames. A group of schoolchildren on a field trip runs away screaming in horror.

Timothy fires up the Frolic Room RV food truck. Patrick turns on the TV in the kitchen area.

Male TV Anchor: Breaking news! A fire has broken out at the La Brea Tar Pits. The entire complex, including the Fossil Museum and the nearby LA County Art Museum, is ablaze. The art museum is currently showing an exhibit of impressionist art from Europe. Picasso and Cezanne paintings are in the exhibit. We fear that they are a total loss.

Female TV Anchor: Tom Cruise and his film crew are at the La Brea Tar Pits today shooting a stunt for his new Mission Impossible film. They may have caused the fire.

Male TV Anchor: We have live helicopter footage from the scene.

TV shows a man on fire running as fast as he can down Wilshire Boulevard.

Male TV Anchor: We believe the running man is Tom Cruise.

Female TV Anchor: Oh, yeah, that’s Tom Cruise. I recognize his ass.

Patrick turns off the TV.

Patrick: We need to leave NOW!

Timothy floors the accelerator, and the RV heads down Wilshire Boulevard at high speed. They see Tom Cruise ahead of them. He’s surrounded by locals pouring their water bottles over his head to put out the fire. Cruise tears off his hot helmet and motorcycle leathers. He’s wearing Star Wars underwear.

Everyone in the crowd films him with their iPhones. Tom Cruise in his Star Wars underwear has millions of views on YouTube in minutes.

The Powder Blue Tuxedo Boys pull up their RV next to the Frolic Room. Eddie unlocks the front door, and they go to the bar.

Eddie: Whisky all around.

Eddie pours them all three large whiskies and turns on the TV. Timothy and Patrick are still wearing their powder blue tuxedos, which are singed and giving off some smoke. The brim of Eddie’s ten-gallon cowboy hat has been burned off.

Male TV Anchor: The La Brea Tar Pits Fire has covered Los Angeles with the smell of burning asphalt. Health officials tell citizens to stay inside their homes.

The TV shows helicopters dropping water onto the fire at the tar pits. The coverage then shifts to a reporter on the ground asking the fire chief about the fire.

Fire Chief: We don’t know how to put this fire out. There’s a bottomless pit of asphalt down there, and it’s hot. Whoever started this fire should be thrown into the tar pit.

Patrick calmly walks over to the jukebox and plays “Ring of Fire” by Johnny Cash.

Eddie: I think it’s best if none of us ever talk about this again.

Patrick & Timothy in unison: Talk about what?

TJM & PK