The Sleestak's Conundrum

We had been rambling through the desert landscapes of Western Colorado and Utah for a week, and ended up a few days before Halloween in Springdale, Utah, with an appetite and a thirst. So, we made our way to the Bit&Spur, where a Halloween sort of night was going down, and a charismatic Sleestak was tending bar. As he fixed us a couple drinks and slid them across to us, he leaned over and said in a confidential tone; “Did you know that Bill Laimbeer was a Sleestak?”

That was a decade ago, and those words have haunted me ever since.

To recap for anyone under the age of 50, in 1974 the guy who wrote the Star Trek Episode “The Trouble With Tribbles” hooked up with Sid and Marty Crofft (the Canadian Puppetwizards responsible for such majestic fare as H.R Pufnstuf, the Banana Splits, and Sigmund and the Sea Monsters. God they must have done a lot of acid), to create a 3-season television series called “The Land Of The Lost.” Basic premise – family gets sucked through some kind of cosmic wormhole into an alternate universe populated by dinosaurs, these heavy browed little primates called Pakuni, and menacing lizard beings known as Sleestaks. They make friends with one of the Pakuni, have a whole mess of adventures with dinosaurs, and are constantly in some sort of conflict with the Sleestaks. This is blatant bias on my part, but the show kind of sucked. Compared to the imaginative whimsy and costuming genius of H.R Pufnstuf and Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, Land of the Lost seemed like a cut-rate mashup of the worst Star Trek episode ever colliding with the Flinstones and Gilligan’s Island, only with all the funny bits removed.

But the Sleestaks, god bless their rubbery suits, they ruled. They were bug eyed, lobster clawed, nightmare bringers. Total scene stealers. Sadly, as with most television in the 1970s, they never really benefitted from any character development, so they were basically one-dimensional tropes. Yet another scary thing for Rick Marshall and his kids Holly and Will to somehow survive while trying valiantly to find their way back home to Thousand Oaks or wherever it was in California they had somehow got sucked through time and space from. Nevertheless, in spite of the lack of character development, and the fact that the budget was so tight that there were only three Sleestak costumes, the Sleestaks were still the best thing about The Land Of The lost. I guess you could say I’ve always had a soft spot for Sleestaks, a place of warm regard in my heart for these enigmatic and menacing lizard creatures.

So, when a smooth talking bartender in a Sleestak costume hipped me to the fact that the most vilified player in the history of the NBA, one William Laimbeer, had been one of those three Sleestaks, my mind was blown. At the time, Bill was a high school senior in Palos Verdes, and his storied career being a central figure in a legendary and intimidating Detroit Pistons lineup was a very long was away.

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” Can I get a Hell Yeah, Robert Frost?

Abrupt shift of gears here – we’ll get back to Sleestak stuff in a bit, don’t you worry. I know this is why people come to nsmb.com. A thirst for Sleestak knowledge.

Anyway, speaking of that well, well, well used Robert Frost quote, I have been wondering lately a lot about the forks in the road and the choices I have made. Especially with regard to bicycles. I’m pounding stakes and stapling arrows into trees at the Breck Epic this week, and there are people racing here who I have known for about as long as I have been riding bikes. They are getting grey around their muzzles but are still animals on the bike, still absolutely kicking ass and taking names. I remember when I used to be able to go toe to toe with them, but that was a couple decades ago, and I wonder how they keep such a fire to race going for so long, how they got presented with so many choices in life and somehow kept managing to choose paths that honored their desire to compete. And there is Riley Amos tearing the legs off the Pro men’s field, still so young that he maybe hasn’t had to ask many of those “which path do I take” kind of life direction questions yet.

My whole life, in retrospect, has felt like a prolonged trust fall. I have never had anything resembling a plan, and have made major life decisions on gut feelings and coin tosses. I do not recommend this, by the way, but at the same time I do not not recommend it. A brief recap of forks that led me to be writing here, on nsmb.com, about mountain bikes (and Sleestaks), could be encapsulated as follows: Decide without too much thought to move to US from New Zealand, one way plane ticket and a job offer crushing grapes. Fork in the road taken. Start working construction, meet coworkers with mountain bikes, get bitten by mountain biking, hard. Fork. Move to San Francisco, ostensibly to get that English degree that I’ve been dragging my heels about, discover Mt Tamalpais just across the bridge, and Velo City Cycles three blocks from my apartment. Drop out of college to become a bike mechanic at said shop. Fork. Start racing. Fork. Go to work at another bike shop because a guy I was racing with was working there. Fork. Get laid off because sales were slow, start answering phones part time at a cycling newspaper. Fork. Move to Santa Cruz, because riding and racing. Fork. Move to the mountains because of the trails. Fork. Move away from the mountains for a Big Career Move. Fork. Regret that one. Move to the mountains again many years later, once again for no reason more solid than “so much singletrack.” Fork.

I have faced these life choices time and again, and have always made my decision based on the potential for riding and exploring, even if at times I have not ended up making the most of those opportunities. Almost everyone I know has made their life choices based upon far more weighty and grown up responsibilities and goals, and have usually made those choices based upon a much more rationally defensible set of parameters. Sometimes I wish I had chosen differently, but here I am, pounding stakes and stapling arrows into trees, and the afternoon thunderstorms are incredible, and just getting out and marking the course is brutal enough that as much as I admire and even envy my old friends who are hammering out six days of high altitude competition, my back starts to spasm just thinking about that level of suffering. And damn, the coincidental meetings that blossomed into friendships that transpired to bring me here, to keep me coming back here, I would need a couple other long articles to map out. Fork upon fork upon fork.

But still, I can’t help but wonder, every once in a while, what might my life have looked like if I’d taken the other fork. What kind of life would I have had? Would I have ever found bikes, fallen in love with them and through them, fallen in love with mountains and concurrent with that fallen in love with places where the population density is low and the coffee questionable. Would I have started writing about bikes, or if bikes hadn’t wormed their way into my head and heart, what would I be writing about? Anything? Who would I be now?

What if Land of the Lost had better production values? What if the scripts took some time and really got into the gestalt of the Sleestaks? Do they love? How do they raise their young? What do the Sleestak believe? What, in the deep down of it, motivates them to be so creepy? What if the show took off, and had a run like MASH or Fantasy Island? Would Bill Laimbeer have been seduced by Hollywood, found himself in high demand as a 6’11” reliable character actor? Would he have even gone to Notre Dame? And IF he had taken that other fork, what of the Detroit Pistons? Would they have become known as the Bad Boys? Would they have won those titles? Who would be the coach of the Detroit Shock, and would he or she lead them to 3 WNBA titles? Would Bill instead be touring the sci-fi convention circuit, pulling in William Shatner or James Earl Jones size crowds?

There is a part of me that hopes Bill Laimbeer wonders about this sometimes. I hope this partly so that I have company when it comes to wondering these things. But really, what I hope more than anything is that Bill still has his Sleestak costume, and every once in a while he likes to pull it on and listen to creepy synthesizer music. Because Sleestaks rule. Probably can’t pound stakes or run course ribbon worth a damn, but still, they rule.