Postcards have been few and far between. I haven’t wanted to mention it, not hearing from Vook and Pepé. Some days I figure they’re just out there seeing America and other days, I worry that Vook is roadkill on a hot stretch of highway and Pepé finally succumbed to his joi de tequila. But hark the herald, they live! This morning I got a raucous voicemail at work from none other than Vook and the Pepéster high on life, or something like it. It was, after all, left at 4am.

Apparently, Pepé chatted up some ladies at the bar of some swank Phoenix hotel and it turns out they were upstairs in the penthouse partying with a celebrity cornucopia of the likes of Valerie Bertinelli, Rowdy Roddy Piper, and Ted Nugent. Vook said the tunes alone pouring out into the hallway were too hot to handle, and once those little dudes cleared the threshold I guess they were knee deep in heavenly sins. The booze was flowing, Val was dancing the jitterbug on the coffee table, and Ted Nugent was doing target practice on far off cacti from the balcony. And as it turns out, Rowdy Roddy had received a massage just that morning from a little lady cockroach named Dolores. Pepé’s mom. She’s somewhere in the building. Apparently Pepé was so stoked he made the moves of one of the party girls and she let him sit on her shoulder until the sun rose over the hazy pink desert horizon.

Those dudes sure are living it up while I’m here trying to live it all down.