THE HARLEY, THE CAMEL AND A MACHINE GUN

It was supposed to be a simple corporate presentation. 

By midnight, the Harley Davidson was dead, the ballroom smelled like gasoline, and the Vice President of a Fortune 500 company was learning how to fire a Thompson submachine gun in heels.

John was a sound engineer working a gig in Orlando in the early nineties at one of those giant entertainment empires built on fireworks, themed architecture, and aggressively maintained optimism. The kind of place with theme parks, golf courses, matching polo shirts, and enough meeting space to launch a small war. They also employed entire legal departments for reasons that would soon become obvious.

What should have been a standard executive presentation had evolved into a full Indiana Jones production themed around “destroying the competition.”

The CEO and Vice President would enter through the ballroom on a vintage 1940s Harley Davidson motorcycle with a sidecar while dressed as Indiana Jones and Marion. The Vice President would fire a forty-caliber Thompson machine gun loaded with blanks into the air as they rode down the center aisle through an audience of more than two thousand employees.

A stunt performer would be shot, crash through a window, and fall onto an airbag. Pyrotechnics would erupt near the stage. Scenery would collapse. Smoke and fire would fill the room.

Then the CEO and Vice President would calmly dismount the Harley and deliver the keynote address.

On paper, it sounded spectacular.

Stunt performers were hired. An armorer was hired. Everyone was hired except for someone willing to say, “This is probably not a good idea in a hotel ballroom.”

Load-in commenced.

While sound, lighting, riggers, and pyro crews handled their departments, a stuntman began teaching the CEO how to drive the Harley with the sidecar attached. The CEO had apparently never ridden a motorcycle before.

The ballroom slowly filled with exhaust fumes as the Harley lurched, stalled, restarted, and lurched again across the carpet. Stagehands began feeling lightheaded. The room had almost no airflow, and the smoke hung beneath the ballroom ceiling like weather.  

By that point the entire room smelled like gasoline, hot metal, and overworked electrical cable. Several stagehands had started quietly drifting toward loading dock doors just to breathe fresh air for a few minutes.

The Head Rigger finally started toward the motorcycle, clearly intending to stop the lesson before someone either passed out or drove through a pipe-and-drape wall.

Then the CEO managed a reasonably smooth turn around the center aisle.

The Rigger stopped walking.

He watched a couple more passes, decided this was not the hill he wished to die on, and let the lesson continue.

Meanwhile downstairs, the armorer was teaching the Vice President how to fire the Thompson machine gun.

She had never fired a gun before and now stood in a hotel ballroom holding something just short of artillery while wearing business attire and safety glasses.

The first burst rattled the room hard enough to make everyone upstairs stop working.

Even loaded with blanks, the Thompson was deafening indoors. If you’ve never heard one fired inside a ballroom, imagine someone detonating car doors beside your head repeatedly.  Every time it fired, stagehands flinched instinctively while ceiling dust drifted down from the rigging above. The Vice President lowered the weapon after each burst with the expression of someone simultaneously thrilled, horrified, and far too committed to back out now.

The crew agreed that the audience was probably going to love being ambushed by simulated machine-gun fire at eight in the morning.

The rehearsals continued anyway.

Final rehearsals began around ten that evening.

At some point during a pass through the ballroom, the Harley ran out of gas. Dead as a hammer.

Calls were made from backstage office phones, but most of the hotel’s maintenance staff had already gone home for the night, leaving only janitors, plumbers, and a few electricians still on property. Even the owner of the Harley wasn’t answering.

Panic spread beautifully.

The show was to start at eight the next morning.

At five o’clock in the morning, someone from Landscaping finally responded and said they had gasoline.

They arrived backstage carrying a gas can and filled the Harley to the brim. The motorcycle started briefly, sputtered twice, revved hard once or twice, then died completely.

In the exhaustion and confusion of the moment, nobody had clarified that the Harley required actual motorcycle fuel and not the fifty-to-one oil-and-gas mixture used in lawn equipment.

The landscaping crew had essentially filled a vintage 1940s Harley Davidson with weed-eater fuel.

Attempts to restart the engine only made things worse.

The Harley was finished.

As stagehands pushed the Harley toward the freight elevators and eventually the loading dock, the Stage Manager proposed an alternative.

The property had a circus nearby, and in keeping with the Indiana Jones theme, he suggested using a camel instead.

The show was now only a few hours away.

Nobody objected.

More phone calls were made.

The production adjusted the show accordingly. Another stunt performer was hired to handle the machine gun from a newly added riser near the stage.

Even under the circumstances, the Director apparently felt that firing a machine gun from camelback represented a bridge too far.

Time was running out.

Within the hour, a horse trailer arrived backstage carrying the angriest camel John had ever seen in his life.

Camels are notoriously temperamental animals. This one was apparently a union camel as well. His first scheduled appearance wasn’t until eleven that morning, and here he was being dragged out of bed at six, loaded into a freight elevator at a luxury hotel, and hauled toward a ballroom to participate in what was clearly an OSHA violation.

He was already furious.

Somehow, the trainers managed to get the camel onto the elevator, up to the fifth floor, and through a service hallway without hitting a single fire sprinkler, which remains one of the more impressive technical achievements John had witnessed throughout all his years in live entertainment.  Crew members flattened themselves against the hallway walls as the camel passed through the service corridor from the freight elevator. Nobody wanted to be responsible for startling a thousand-pound animal inside a luxury hotel before sunrise.

With zero rehearsal involving the animal, the CEO and Vice President climbed aboard while the trainer, dressed more like an Arab sheik than an animal handler, took hold of the lead rope.

The show began.

The lights dimmed and John cranked the Indiana Jones theme music to rock-concert volume.

Pyro exploded near the stage.

The machine gun opened fire.

Spotlights snapped across the ballroom, catching the gunner and various dying competitors with corporate logos strategically placed on their costumes.

The room instantly dissolved into chaos.  Coffee cups overturned across banquet tables. One man in the front row crawled beneath his chair while another stood frozen with a conference tote bag clutched against his chest like emergency equipment. Somewhere near the rear of the ballroom, someone screamed for security.

     Others ducked beneath tables or pushed toward the exits, genuinely convinced a terrorist attack had begun in a hotel ballroom before breakfast. A few simply froze in place, unable to decide whether this was entertainment or an emergency.

Then the spotlights found the camel.

The camel froze midway down the aisle.

John had opened the microphones on the CEO and Vice President as they entered the ballroom. Somewhere inside the chaos, the executives remained committed to the performance.

“Greetings to all!” the CEO shouted enthusiastically over the gunfire and screaming audience. “Let’s get ‘em!”

Over headset, the Stage Manager immediately yelled, “Cut the spots! Cut the spots on the camel! It’s freaking out! Focus on the client!”

The spotlights snapped away from the animal.

It did nothing for either the audience or the camel.

It was at this point the camel decided to pee.

“Oh shit,” someone said over the open microphones.

Dogs pee. Horses pee.

Camels can go for weeks without water, so when they finally let go, it is biblical.

The animal released gallons of steaming, syrup-thick, rancid horror directly into the center aisle of a packed corporate convention.

The smell hit first.

Then the splash radius.

Gallons of rancid camel urine hammered into the ballroom carpet and bounced onto audience members seated near the aisle.

People immediately began climbing over chairs trying to escape. Some gagged instantly. One attendee abandoned an entire row of conference materials and climbed directly over the backs of banquet chairs trying to escape the widening puddle. Others ran for the exits like they were scrambling for lifeboats on the Titanic.

Somewhere beneath the screaming, laughter, and unfolding biohazard, the Indiana Jones theme continued blasting through the PA.

The crew completely lost composure.

One cameraman laughed so violently he had to bite down on his own shirt to keep the broadcast shot from shaking. The Producer ripped off his headset and threw it at the Director.

Those not laughing were yelling, “What do we do?”

The Director watched the camel for a long moment before calmly replying, “Never had this happen before.”

John simply leaned back, crossed his arms, and watched the spectacle unfold in quiet, amused awe.

The camel eventually stopped peeing and, with the trainer tugging gently on the lead rope, resumed walking up the aisle.

When it reached the stage, the trainer gave a small command and the camel lowered itself to the floor, allowing the CEO and Vice President to dismount with whatever dignity remained available to them.

The trainer then led the animal back toward the freight elevator and eventually home to its stall.

The camel hadn’t signed up for this. Screw these people. He was going home.

The executives dismounted.

More pyro exploded.

The final stunt performers died theatrically near the stage while the Indiana Jones theme finally began to fade from the speakers.

Then the CEO stepped to the podium and began delivering the keynote address in the same emotional tone people use to explain printer toner.

Hundreds of audience members were still drifting toward the fire exits and lobby while the smell of what the crew had already begun calling Camel Pee Lake hung over the ballroom.

The speech had been written to inspire confidence in the future of the company. It had roughly the same emotional effect as the rehearsal the night before.

When the keynote finally ended, a coffee break was announced to the visible relief of the surviving audience members still inside the ballroom.

A cleanup crew descended on what was now universally known as Camel Pee Lake armed with wet vacs, mops, towels, and industrial deodorizer. None of it helped much.  

Every pass of the wet vac seemed only to redistribute the problem into new sections of carpet. The smell settled into the ballroom with astonishing persistence, as though the building itself had accepted defeat.

Camel urine, it turned out, was both syrupy and strangely heavy. 

It was like trying to vacuum a broken jar of watery strawberry jam with a Dust Buster.

The smell remained overwhelming. 

The cleanup crew for Chernobyl wouldn’t have been prepared for this situation.

One janitor began gagging almost immediately. Another threw up into a trash can. A third looked around at the ballroom, reconsidered several life decisions, and walked out entirely.

The owner of the Harley arrived shortly afterward to retrieve the motorcycle.

The moment he learned what fuel had been used, he completely lost his mind.

He didn’t even wait to take the bike home before beginning to dismantle the engine in the loading dock. As he removed part of the motor, thick goo dripped from the internals like syrup sliding off a stack of pancakes.

It was a vintage 1940s Harley Davidson. Replacement parts were neither common nor cheap.

The engine was destroyed.

The owner immediately demanded to know who was paying for it. After several deeply uncomfortable conversations, the bill was assigned to the same people who had approved the production in the first place.

Satisfied for the moment, the owner loaded the Harley back into his trailer and left.

The ballroom remained unusable for weeks even after entire sections of carpet were replaced.

Among the staff and crew, it became permanently known as Camel Pee Lake.

Meetings were relocated. Cleanup reports were filed. Insurance conversations occurred behind closed doors.

Somewhere deep inside a corporate accounting department, there is probably still a line item nobody fully understands involving a camel, a destroyed Harley Davidson, and biohazard-level cleanup costs.