First off, I was all ready to come home and write a new post with the title=”Ugh” and the body=”kill me” before slogging off to bed for a few days. However, I just couldn’t bear to be so flippant to Hadley Kalish. Here’s looking at you, kid. Word to the wise from your Uncle Whazzmaster: don’t ever go to Vegas. Congrats to mother and father!
So, just got back from Vegas. I’ll start with the hard stats:
- I didn’t sleep from 9am Sat morning until Sunday at 1pm when I finally hit the pillow on my own bed here in California.
- I took $1000, had to make a $400 ATM withdrawal Friday night, and at one point had only $100 left. I’m now sitting in my house with $700, which I’ll gladly take.
- I had a great time meeting the Cast of Dozens that were on hand for Stacy’s roomate’s birthday.
- My Blackjack-Fu was strong this trip.
- Coyote Ugly, The Bar is far, far stupider than Coyote Ugly, The Movie. And for the record, this movie review pretty much says everything that needs to be said about the movie.
During our vacation, when we paid to watch The Replacements, we kind of assumed that we were scraping the bottom of the barrel, movie-wise. Imagine our surprise when we discovered that the barrel had a false bottom which concealed a compartment that contained every movie Lorenzo Lamas has ever made beneath which we found a hatch that led to Coyote Ugly. But you don’t need us to tell you that Coyote Ugly’s bad. It’s the type of instinctive knowledge you can feel in your bones, like the way your bones tell you that you shouldn’t put poop in your mouth, or the way they tell you that if you do somehow get poop in your mouth, you shouldn’t mistake the experience for the pleasure you get from screwing.
- NA NA NAH-NAH-NHA-NHA-NAH, NA NA NAH-NAH-NAH-NAH-NAH
My weekend started on Thursday as I zoomed to the airport straight from work. I was through security with 40 minutes til my flight when I found out that it was delayed another forty. Eighty minutes til I leave? Double crown and cokes at the aeropuerto bar? Yes, sir. My time in the airport bar was both hilarious and uncomfortable. I made a new friend: Vinny from San Diego. We started talking baseball, and Vinny was going on and on about how the Red Sox suck this and that appendage. Then, without warning or being prompted, he pulls out his laptop and starts showing me photo albums. One album is him at Safeco Field when he was in Seattle, which I suppose at least partially related to our conversation. He was attempting to explain to me the mechanism by which the dome opened and closed. I cared not one whit for what this “Vinny” had to tell me about baseball stadium engineering– can’t you see I’m drinking, Vinny? But then he took the whole shebang off in a new direction by opening a folder that had about a thousand pictures in it and started randomly showing them to me. What were they? Every time anyone sent him a forwarded email with a “funny” picture attached, he saved it and then forwarded it on to everyone he knew. Yeah, he’s basically this guy. The one I remember him showing me was one with a retarded kid running a race and it saying, “The Special Olympics: Even if you win, you still lose.” He then laughed uproariously at the plight of the under-IQ’d while I busily gathered my things. So I’m swaying my way onto my Southwest flight. I sit in the last row for easy air waitress-access, and end up becoming P A Ls with the crew. They gave me some free vodka, and by the time I got to Vegas I was once again swaying through the terminal. A short cab line and I was whisked off to the Monte Carlo Resort & Casino.
Stacy (who needs a whazzmaster name) and Friends were at The Bellagio where they had dinner, and they were given free passes into Light (the nightclub) by some guy whose job it probably is to find and cajole hot chicks into coming to their club. Oops, though, one of them is now puking, so it’s time to head home to Excalibur. I had built my buzz with Crown, Air-Vodka and Tonic, and Bellagio Gimlets, so I did the only logical thing: drank more vodka. I lost a good size of money at Excalibur before taking a cab home and falling asleep at a paltry 2am.
On Friday we managed to cramalamadingdong everyone into one corraled group for 10 minutes so we could ride the roller coaster at New York, New York. I hadn’t been on a coaster in four years, and it was pretty fun. We had some drinks and I was still slightly hungover so I got a Bloody Mary. I think then, and still think now, and have witnesses who tasted it agree that that bloody mary tasted like shrimp. I never actually found a shrimp in it, but I could only finish half before every sip made we want to puke. Then Stacy and I sat out by the pool at the Monte Carlo for awhile. The Monte Carlo pool area is really nice; they’ve got a lazy river and a wave pool, and every square inch of it is packed with people. We somehow managed to find two chairs, but then when we went to jump in the lazy river some dude had literally thrown our stuff away, and then sat down. When we protested his claimed-ownership of our chairs he didn’t even respond; he just grabbed his shit, grunted, and walked away. An example of how busy the pool was: I went to go get us drinks at the pool bar (where they sell those big plastic footballs filled with tropical juices and booze) and they were out of just about everything. Instead of a full bar they had the equivalent of a sparsely populated basement wet bar. Pfft. Friday night we ended up at Coyote Ugly, The Bar. Hurray, a place where size A Jillion bachelorette parties dance on the bar with size 0 hotel workers dressed like coyote ugly bartendresses. They pour booze into young womens’ mouths and scream at the dudes that they are gay assholes before throwing drinks on them. Does that sound like my idea of a good time? Later on we escaped and everyone had the bright idea to go to Studio 54 in MGM Grand. A good idea, except that at 2am the line was still about 150 people and did not move for the 15 minutes we stood in it. Pfft. Back to Excalibur for more patented Gambo-Gambo-Lose action. In a happy surprise, the same cab driver who delivered a Drunken Me ‘n’ Stacy to the Monte Carlo on Thursday night also happened to be the guy who zoomed up to the cab stand on Saturday night, too. I appreciate small coincidences like that.
On Saturday I made a rookie mistake that veterans of Vegas should absolutely not make: I rolled out of bed, hungover, and rolled to the pool at Excalibur. ‘Ugh’ does not do the experience justice, and I quickly napped my combination hangover/heatstroke while The Ladies got ready to go down to Fremont Street for some Old Vegas action. It was down at The Golden Nugget that my Gambo’ing turned around, trip-wise. A couple of guys made a bunch of points and I scored a quick $125 before Stacy and I took off on a grand adventure to get to dinner at the Eiffel Tower Restaurant. We had 1.5 hours to get from Old Vegas to our hotels, shower and get dressed fancily, and then make it to the restaurant where, if we were 15 minutes late, they would release our reservation and charge my credit card. Story climax: we made it on time. The restaurant is in the Eiffel Tower in the Paris hotel and our table overlooked The Bellagio fountains, which did two shows while we ate. It was a great French dinner (foie gras for an appeteaser!) and afterwards I made another quick $175 at the Paris craps tables.
The group had purchased tickets to a Chicago concert at MGM for Saturday night, so we had to rocket back up the strip, change clothes again, and meet up with everyone to get to the show by 9:00. I’ll say right now I didn’t really know Chicago all that well, but the show was really fun and I had a good time. Afterwards we sat in front of the Tropicana and drank 24oz cans of Miller Lite while Rascal Flats (?) did about a thousand takes of a music video for the Academy of Country Music Awards that’s going down on Tuesday, I guess. We sat there for awhile trying to figure out what to do next; it was 11pm on Saturday night and the whole gang had to leave for the airport at 4:30am. My flight didn’t leave until 9:15am. We wished there was a karaoke bar in Vegas, and groused for about a half hour that we wished someone would be Not Lazy and find a karaoke bar. It turns out there was one in the Tropicana, but the time was Less Than Perfect as the crowd (a vast mix of ages, races, and styles) was thoroughly unimpressed by Bust A Move. I should capitalize each letter to give you a better idea: Thoroughly Unimpressed. On the way out of the Tropicana I went on a really hot craps roll, though, and came up $500. Then back to Excalibur so the ladies could pack it up. I started to get really tuckered out and the night became a blur. Have you ever been awake for so long that at some point, mentally, you decide on a single action as a seperator between what happened “today” and what happened “yesterday”? For me that moment was the 4:30am cab ride from Excalibur to Monte Carlo; it only took 5 minutes, but I might as well have slept for 8 hours in that space.
Back at the Monte Carlo I sat at the blackjack table and won another $200, so overall I was pretty happy with final day gambling stats. I went upstairs, shoved all my clothes back into my bag and stumbled, crankily, to the cab line to await my ride out of that godforsaken hellhole in the desert.
good times.
