The audience has roughly seven white people in it, all of them wearing ridiculous alpine hats with quills like Clark Griswold in National Lampoon’s European Vacation. The other 97 percent of the audience is made up of El Salvadorian crime lords, aspiring El Salvadorian crime lords, and 30-40 Hispanic police officers that the city’s police department believes look close enough to El Salvadoran that those in attendance might refrain from rioting.

As you might expect from my description, this Oktoberfest is – to use the popular slang of Californian valley girls – “like, totally amazeballs.” I did nothing but sit at a table not moving for seven hours, and I was grabbed and forcibly molested by heavyset El Salvadoran women no fewer than 467 times. Beer is served in your choice of 1-liter mugs or enormous glass boots. Salted pretzels are the size of pizzas, and kettle corn is served in large plastic bags that one could conceivably use for laundry.

Around 11pm, a man spilled beer on a teenage 300-pound woman at the table next to us, causing her to jump up from her seat, smash her 1-liter beer mug over his head, and then chase him down the aisle and continue bashing him with the remains of her mug. The police walked over, asked what happened, and after she explained that she bashed a man’s head in with her mug, the police said, “Oh, okay. Well don’t do that again.” Then they left.

On the bright side, that event did clear out nearly all of the seating within a two table radius of that large woman’s group of teenage friends. My friends and I were the only people who remained, and we quickly bonded with her group. They spent the rest of the evening removing their belts and whipping each other with them, and performing slightly pornographic stripper moves on any unsuspecting victim who dared to occupy the newly-open seats nearby.

Our group was accepted by theirs because we had the only authentic German in the entire place. My friend’s buddy from Germany, thick accent and all, was quite the hit of the event. Being the only actual German at an Oktoberfest grants a person untold powers of picking up women. The trouble was, he was so drunk he could barely speak full sentences, let alone hit on women properly.

Around midnight, with us questioning his lack of having picked up a woman at the point, our German friend said, in his deep German accent, “I saw these two blonde girls who looked Swedish, and I told them they looked Swedish, but they were not Swedish, they were from Ohio.”

Half an hour later, he was on a roll with the ladies, but he made a fatal mistake when he briefly left the ridiculously attractive woman he had been courting to use the restroom. As is standard with all women who are so drunk they can barely walk, when he returned two minutes later, she was gone, likely making out with a fat guy across the room. He spent the entire car ride home alternating between angrily shouting German curse words and napping.

If you’re ever in Torrance during October, I’d highly recommend their Oktoberfest. Beer is only $11, a bratwurst and potato dinner is only $147.50, and if you murder a man by smashing your glass boot full of Spaten over his head, the police will just politely ask you to clean up the blood with paper towels. It may not be a real Oktoberfest, but it rivals Germany itself in terms of tackiness and dangerously untreated alcoholism.

Terminix Man: Can they?

Orkin Man: No, but people don’t know that.

Terminix Man: Let’s tell people bedbugs live in their clocks and TV sets.

Orkin Man: There you go!

Terminix Man: Let’s tell everyone bedbugs are immune to chemicals and can only be killed by burning your house to the ground.

Orkin Man: Now you’ve got it!

Terminix Man: Let’s tell people bedbugs live in the hair on their back, riding them like a man in a sombrero rides a donkey.

Orkin Man: Um… you can use that. I’ll just stick with the other ones.

Terminix Man: We could compare bedbug bites to sexual assault, warning people that not getting preemptive treatment will cause their children to be raped.

Orkin Man: That’s much better. Good work.

Terminix Man: Is it possible for bedbugs to live in people’s beards?

Orkin Man: It’s possible, but we can also cover non-beardy people by saying they can hide in your clothing.

Terminix Man: That’s nice. Granted, I’m pretty sure I’d notice if bugs were crawling around inside my shirt sleeves, but people will believe anything when they’re scared.

Orkin Man: Let’s increase their paranoia by also telling them that maids and cleaning services transfer bedbugs. It’s unlikely to happen, but racism will fuel the rumor nicely.

Terminix Man: So how do we start these rumors? Bedbugs have been rare in Minnesota since the 1940s.

Orkin Man: We’ll just release reports saying bedbug infestations are up 2,000 percent, or something like that. Newspapers and TV newscasts will eat it up like free boobs. They’ll probably even compliment each story with a huge, close-up photo of a bedbug to frighten people worse.

Terminix Man: Won’t people know it’s bullshit since we’re the ones compiling all these reports? I mean, come on, a report by Orkin and Terminix, the two businesses most likely to get rich off bedbug paranoia?

Orkin Man: No, journalists are desperate for customers, so they won’t pass up an opportunity to inspire fear in their readers and viewers. And people are stupid, so they literally believe anything they see printed in a newspaper.

Terminix Man: Won’t journalists research further into our findings?

Orkin Man: Nope. They’re lazy. The faster they file the one story required of them each day, the sooner they can sit at their desk and look at boobs on Google Images.

Terminix Man: I’ve never tried that before. Are there lots of boobs there?

Orkin Man: There’s infinity boobs there. I’ve sometimes scrolled down the page for hours, and no matter how long I scroll, they never end. And even if they did end, you could just search for a slightly different term like “hangy boobs” or “large bazoombas” and get an entirely different endless supply of photos.

Terminix Man: Oh. Well I’ll be sure to check that out.

Orkin Man: Make sure to set an egg timer to go off a few hours after you start looking, otherwise you’ll become mesmerized and forget to come to work on Monday.

Terminix Man: So back to the bedbugs things. We’ve got mainstream journalists in our corner, but what about the alternative press?

Orkin Man: Ha! Those middle-aged burnouts? All they ever write about is boring politics and how pot should be legalized even though they’d hate if it was because the price would go up.

Terminix Man: What if that handsome columnist from the Reader Weekly writes about us?

Orkin Man: Paul Ryan? My God, he is handsome, isn’t he?

Terminix Man: I’ll tell ya, I’m not gay, but that’s the sort of handsome mug you want looking back at you while you’re eating breakfast in the morning.

Orkin Man: I know. His beautiful face looks like it was chiseled from a rock pooped by God.

Terminix Man: I’ll bet his penis is enormous.

Orkin Man: What were we talking about again?

Terminix Man: Raccoons. We’re going to make people frightened of invisible raccoons that hide in their clothing so we can make money for killing invisible things.

Orkin Man: No, we decided on bedbugs, remember?

Terminix Man: Oh yeah. Let’s start by publishing an article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune before they go out of business.