Category: Roam

It’s a little silly given that I have a honeymoon to deal with first–including those dick-twisters who create the nonsensical airfare bafflemazes (aren’t they supposed to be going broke, for Christ’s sake?)–but I’ve been feeling a jones to get back to Our Nation’s Most Appealing Cesspool, Las Vegas. It’s a little hard to write about a place that was seemingly covered back to front by a certain Mr. Hunter Thompson, but hey, that was thirty years ago, and goddamn it, I love the place, even while I fully understand that the whole thing is a glutinous, cynical, cardboard fuck-factory that eats the weak and picks its marquee teeth with the bones.

The last time I was there was about a year ago, when I went down with about a dozen friends for a birthday jaunt. So we threw our Antabuse pills into the dumpster and hopped on America West (aka Afterthought Airlines) for a couple of hours before being kicked out into McCarran Airport’s cheerless smoke ‘n wait ‘n slot desmesnes. Then a quick taxi-cram to our hotels (Paris for the birthday boy, Bally’s next door for the rest of us), hurl our shit onto the bed and off to the Strip we scampered.

I can understand why people would object to the atmosphere of–or even idea of–someplace as fundamentally perverse and crass as Vegas, but I still maintain that if you can’t get over it long enough to even have a tiny bit of fun there, you’re just being obstinant. At the very least you can people watch: the racked-out trophy dates (or brides); the loutish, appalling white trash tourists; the horrid old-person-shaped giant funguses rooted in front of the slots. You can at least enjoy these things ironically, can’t you? Hey, is that a really attractive hooker? Or a pretty showgirl? Or a knockout cocktail waitress? Answer: it is a man in drag.

Over the course of our visit, we of course went all over the place. I always like to visit the desperately terrible Excalibur casino, if only to walk into the joint. Entering visitors “enjoy” (when it’s working) a moving conveyor belt while your ears are entertained by actors with awful plummy Olde Englishesque accents trumpet nonsense about the “MERLIN’S MAGIC!” being on your side as you gleefully yank the nickel slots. Meanwhile, on either side of the belt are two concrete alleys: these are for people leaving the casino, on foot, not as the Vegas Gods intended, which would be in either a limo or an ambulance. No, people exiting the casino in such an ignominious fashion not only walk out on their two sad loser feet, they walk past the glorious soon-to-be-winners who only have to stand there and be whisked inside without any perilous effort at all. Nothing else in the town for me sums up so succinctly what I think of as Vegas’ unspoken credo: LOSERS WALK.

At one point, a bunch of us decided to take a walking tour of wherever we led ourselves, with the idea that we’d just grab drinks wherever we were moved to. Unbeknownst to me at the time, a couple of them had some ecstasy, which they had gulped down (because yeah, in Vegas, you need heightened senses to pick out the subtle details, like the twenty-foot tall billboard showing a winged, double-dicked incubus sportfucking the Barbii twins on top of a Humvee). This led to trouble for one of our merry band; we settled down in some piano bar in the Venetian, and K. seemed jumpy and tense, and it was a little odd that he was wearing sunglasses, but whatever. We’d been carousing for two days, and we were all feeling kind of soul-mashed anyway. But what was going on with K. was, the ecstasy was warping his perceptions, and he kept catching a sideward glance of this tiny Asian woman at a nearby Pai-Gow table. She was enthusiastic about the game, and loud as hell, and she’d toss the dice in the shaker and wave it over her head and scream “PAI-GOW!” K., we found out later, was under the impression that she was staring directly at him as she did this, and that the screams of “PAI-GOW!” were some kind of terrible tooth-baring threat, and the dice sounded like bones rattling in a crypt, and that every time she screamed afresh, she was implacably inching closer and closer to him. K. held himself together all right, but I can still make him flinch by bugging out my eyes and howling with menacing cheer, “PAI-GOW!”

In the end, we naturally lost all of our fucking money–especially heart-tugging were the losses of C., the birthday boy, who went bottomlessly broke so quickly that the process seemed to require the employment of tachyons–and when we finally hit the airport to return home, we looked and felt like wraiths. “I feel like death’s chilly asshole,” I moaned when I hit the seat. “Me too,” said the fiancee. “I can’t wait to come back.”

As I made my way home today–as always, on foot, it’s about a 20-minute walk, a distressing bit of exercise that I neatly negate by smoking a couple of cigarettes–I naturally encountered other good citizens of my fair city. They included:

The Couple Making Out

You know, it’s appalling enough to see people you don’t know mashing away just anywhere, but it’s really also very eerie to see them do it in the Starbucks parking lot. Not even leaned up against a car or anything: they were just going at it in an empty space. Did they imagine they would get towed elsewhere? Actually, there’s an idea–it’s a little tamer than my original fantasy, which involved sauntering over to them and hitting them with a pickaxe–Starbucks should tow them. “Kids makin’ out in the lot again.” A simple phone call, and then a beefy guy in a greasy t-shirt would drive up and swiftly attach a massive towing cable to the startled couple. “Hey, let us out of here! We’ll move!” they’d shriek, their passion taking a decidedly sudden downturn. “Take it up with the city,” the guy would grunt, and then he’d take off with a lurch, and you’d see the unfortunate couple dragging behind the truck, bouncing off the asphalt and howling like Pandemonium’s own PA system.

The Unnerving Not-A-Rapper

As I crested the hill and approached Broadway, my cardiovascular system shuddering and lurching like a poorly coordinated rugby scrum, I spotted a horrifying apparition. It was an unkempt figure, nearly six feet tall, with knotted dirty blonde hair flying this way and that, limbs keeping an uncertain, frenetic tempo modeled, seemingly, on the flight patterns of frightened hummingbirds. It held a soft drink cup to its lips, and screamed terrible rat-a-tat-tat near-rhymes and assorted ravings in rough accompaniment to the tempest ravaging its tortured body, using the cup as a megaphone, which was hardly necessary; the noise had several people in a nearby bus kiosk pinioned to the plexiglass wall, and they writhed helplessly. The figure capered a while longer, and somewhere grandmothers cried piteously, without knowing why; it was because of this awful shambling thing near Broadway. I turned away from the spectacle. I cannot discount the possibility that it was Joni Mitchell.

The Dead-Eyed Bank Shufflers

I had to use an ATM, and of course as I approached the bank, there were lines of people waiting to use them all. I took my place at the end, and patiently began becoming enraged with all of the other people failing to use the ATMs quickly and efficiently. I pride myself on this skill; being able to execute a rapid succession of neatly timed keypad punches at an ATM is, to my mind, one of society’s most underappreciated abilities. But apparently it’s only me, because, yes, this person was staring at the screen, definitely not punching any buttons, apparently befuddled by the dozens and dozens–no, strike that, six options available to him. You want a withdrawal, you wretched troublefuck! That’s all anybody ever wants! Press “withdrawal!” More monklike studiousness. Then the scales fell from my eyes, and I saw that the ATM inside the bank had nobody in line for it. What cruel trick was this? Nobody else seemed to notice or care; they were all boring holes into each other’s backs. So I skipped inside, got my money, and He Who Notices Things was on his way. Nobody else had moved.

The Cold Girl

I don’t want to dwell on this, because I don’t want to sound creepy or sexist or anything, but. As I left the bank, I approached a girl in a tiny little tank top, and it was cold out, so of course her nipples were plainly visible through the microgram of fabric she was wearing. And I saw them, and because I’m me, I was instantly consumed with a burning shame, and I flushed violently, and cursed myself for being a man who noticed a woman’s nipples, and snapped my head downward to stare at my shoes, and almost certainly became the perfect representation of the creepy guy who wanders around the streets in the daytime with nothing better to do than leer at womens’ tits all the time, and who should be killed. I kind of wanted her to punch me as she passed by, but she didn’t. So to the cold girl: I’m sorry I noticed your nipples. If it makes any difference, it made me feel just awful.

Nice Girl

There’s not much to say here except to note its bewildering improbability: a pretty girl smiled at me. Fresh from the psychosexual horsewhipping I had just experienced, I was reeling uncertainly down the street, and paused at a stoplight, which is always a good idea when you don’t feel like getting hit by many fast cars. So I was standing there spacing off, and I noticed a pretty girl looking at me from across the street, smiling. I performed my usual maneuver and immediately looked away, because, you know, girls are scary. I sneaked a look back. She was still smiling at me! Some poorly-trained lonely genetic algorithm clumsily managed to execute itself and cough out some Pig Latin instructions to my brainstem, and I feebly grinned back, a sad rictus. Her smile broadened. Then the light changed, and we passed each other, and the crazed ordeal was over.

I have, of course, a beautiful, wonderful fiancee, so I don’t want to make too much of this, because it’s really silly, but there you have it: it’s nice to be smiled at by a pretty girl. I dashed home to see if someone had tattooed a humorous joke on my forehead, or perhaps I’d grown a tiny, adorable new head that I couldn’t see, but it was just me.

USA! USA! USA!

That felt good. And with that, I’d like to publicly just remind my fiancee that I love her. If she wants, I’ll go make out with her in public.

Because we are incredibly unique people with rarefied tastes, my fiancee and I are making the shocking decision to honeymoon in Europe. I know, I just freaked everyone out, but we are. Go ahead, Mr. and Mrs. Joe American, have your tired old Qatar, your played-out Liberia, your faux-frisky Laos! Fuck that, we’re funky! It’s crazy Europe for us!

Specifically, we’re planning on going to Belgium, but I haven’t yet secured the tickets, but only because the airline industry is a rat-chewed bunch of malevolent crotch-kickers whose sole aim in life is to make planning air travel an incomprehensible, tedious, life-destroying debacle that makes Prometheus look like a contemptible loafer sunning himself on a fucking rock all day with his adorable pet cockatoos and his nonstop triple martinis, because fuck you, regenerating liver! At least he was heroic; he gave us fire. What does Expedia give me? Nine hundred dollar fare quotes and a deep, abiding despair, that’s what. Any of the services–they’re all identical–are basically like experiencing Kafka as interpreted by Disney. Baffling, vicious bureaucracy methodically meting out cruel punishments served up with straight-faced outrageous gall in a world where nothing makes sense and the only real assurance one can count on is the simple feeling of pain, but in a cute way. Sound familiar? Yes, exactly, standing in line for the “It’s A Small World” ride, and buying plane tickets off the net.

Because of course travel agents don’t exist any more, and you can’t even get into the airport any more without tickets, ID, and a wholly subdued sense of moral outrage. “Can I see your ID?” “Sure.” “All right. We’ll need to scan your luggage.” “Okay.” “Now eat this dog turd.” “WHAT?” “I want you to eat this dog turd before I let you go sit desolately to wait for your late, crowded plane.” “Why? Why are you doing this to me?” “New rules.”

You examine the little horror. It’s wrapped in foil, which you notice is embossed. It says “EXPEDIA!” Down the hatch.