LOCAL SPIN: 06.27.13 - A secret public bike race prompts an epic email battle.

A column in two parts, both on the theme of strange goings-on in Salinas.

Part One: My 64-year-old sister, who moved in with us last year following the death of our mother, has woken me up twice in my life. The first time, the summer of 1988, our house was on fire. (Drunk ex-in-law meets unattended cigarette meets couch.) The second time was 3am last Saturday.

“Mary!” she said. “There’s something happening on the porch!” She was backed up by my wide-eyed 15-year-old: “Yeah, mom, there’s something happening on the porch!”

I woke up my husband, who can sleep through live-fire exercises, with a sharp elbow to the ribs. “Get up!” I hissed. “There’s something happening on the porch.”

I crept downstairs, followed by the husband, the sister, the kid and two of the loudest yet most useless terriers on the planet. And voila! Banda music! On my porch!

Also: two guys lying about a foot from the front door in what I thought was a loving embrace. Then I rubbed my eyes and saw they were beating the crap out of each other. I flipped on the porch light; they kept beating each other. They rolled off the porch and into the front yard, flailing away, banda thumping from a portable radio.

Say what you will about the Salinas police, but I had four cars in front of my house within three minutes of dialing 911. One officer knocked on my front door a few minutes after they arrived

“We had to tase one of them,” he said. “We’re taking him in.”

I shrugged and nodded. “Yeah. Sometimes tasing happens.”

A few hours later, after 4am leftover pork-fried rice from Eagle Chinese and some reading (World War Z), I opened the front door and found a jacket, a backpack, a bag containing pills, a grinder (probably for said pills) and an iPad, still functional but with a broken screen.

It all belonged to the other guy – the untased one the cops let go home. I called Salinas PD again (the non-emergency number this time), and the police arrived a few hours later to take it all away.

And then the guy knocked on our door Sunday morning, embarrassed, apologetic, looking for his stuff and completely unaware of what went on.

“They told me I was here,” he told my husband. “But I don’t remember any of it.”

I wish he remembered. I would love to know how he ended up on my porch in the first place.

Part Two: This is pure speculation on my part, because I didn’t hear any of their conversation over the banda and beating, but it’s entirely possible the two guys on my porch were fighting about the greatest non-event Oldtown Salinas has seen in recent memory: the Downtown Salinas Criterium, sponsored by the Monterey Bay Racing Team under the leadership of Don Chapin III, fruit of the loins of local cement magnate Don Chapin. (Or, as I will refer to the son, Cubed.)

CHAPIN DIDN’T DO ANY OUTREACH, THE CITY DIDN’T DO ANY INFORMING AND THE ASSOCIATION DIDN’T DO ANY MARKETING.

While Cubed got all of his ducks in a row, he apparently lined them up at the last minute. Race day had most of Oldtown auto traffic rerouted and street parking prohibited along the 1-mile course. City public works, police and fire signed off on Cubed’s permits last week. The race was blessed by the Oldtown Salinas Association (OSA), the street closure by CalTrans.

But Oldtown shop owners’ first sign of an impending day-long race was when the traffic barriers (stamped property of Chapin the Elder) went up three days beforehand. Cubed didn’t do any outreach, the city didn’t do any informing and the OSA didn’t do any marketing.

And you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting someone pointing the fickle finger of blame. OSA members sent one hostile email after another in an internecine game of who knew what and when. Sang’s Cafe owner Jim Sang (who types in all-caps, all the time) queried OSA Board President Amit Pandya, “IS IT TRUE YOU KNEW ABOUT THIS EVENT FIVE MONTHS AGO?” Pandya shot back with a warning: Sang “should be really careful about putting out false, third-party information,” along with a “shame on you.”

The fact is this: The event was a huge woulda, coulda, shoulda. The streets of Oldtown are at their liveliest on Saturday, and race-day Saturday was deader than dead. Lots of merchants lost business. But rather than throwing any individual under the bus (OSA Executive Director Brian Higgins, who signed off on the assocation’s June 19 support letter, was a popular target), maybe it’s time for a wholesale rethinking of how the organization can bring value to a district in desperate need of it.

Also, Cubed? You did a poor job cleaning up the hay left in the streets from the bales that lined the course.

MARY DUAN is the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at mary@mcweekly.com.