It’s been eleven years since the first intrepid explorers from our merry little band strapped on the vacation hats, threw three cartons of cigarettes in a bag, and lit out for four days in Las Vegas. Since that first trip, in the Year 2000, we have been back ten times. Once a year, we put it all aside, pack up the party clothes, and take a big swing at the Bright Light City. The integral elements have remained the same, though the proportions have been fluid. Little gambling, little shoppety shoppety, lotta eating, lotta drinking, little pool time, the occasional lapdance, the occasional smoke….it’s a good time. This team won a few titles, peaking, roughly, the year some of us were invited to leave the Riviera around one am. Immediately. Dominant year.
The past three years or so, though, we have begun to struggle with success. We’ve stopped doing the little things that led to titles, and instead have become content to sit around with pina coladas or buffet passes, talking about how great the trips used to be. How much more fun we used to have, in the years when people fell asleep in strip clubs, or spent hours watching a mob boss yelling into a cellphone at Caesar’s topless pool, or met Wayne Newton, or had to deploy our last $18 to a bartender to invent a drink that’d offset seven hours of Red Bull & vodka drunk with strippers, or went to buffets and ate nothing – nothing – but desserts. The team has grown complacent. Ain’t hongry. We are, it pains me to say, no longer the Big Loud Machine. We are riding into the sunset, and making room for the rookies got next. This is how the mayhem ends; not with a bang, but with two glasses of wine and an eleven o’clock bedtime. It happens. Greatness fades and the wheel goes ’round.
I, however, was determined go down swinging. So I was looking for some new traditions this year, and one thought was a communal bottle to christen the trip. One arrival shot apiece. We were expecting our largest roster ever, seventeen, and, while those are some pretty light shots, it seemed like a nice foundation for the trip. A team-building exercise. So the night before we left, I went up to Cardinal for a bottle of El Dorado. (I would have brought Black Seal 151, once upon a time, but I wanted participation, plus the Seven Seal might push the boundaries of “explosive liquids” even in a checked bag.)
No El Dorado, but I found a heretofore unknown-to-me black spiced rum in a two-finger bottle. “The Kraken”. Into the bag with you, beastie.
We rolled out of bed and down to the bus at six the next morning. One bus and two trains later, we were on the 820 flight and cashing in the drink tickets. Two Irish coffees pair surprisingly well with a blueberry muffin.
We had a layover in Albuquerque. Big Man and Patti the Mayor-
Digression I
Two notes on nicknames and pseudonyms:
Note the First: I like nicknames. There’s an affectionate familiarity to them, like a friend-version of Honey or Sweetheart. Forced nicknames, like SNL’s forced catchphrases, generally don’t work. One generally has to try on a few before finding one that both fits and sticks. The best nicknames evolve organically.
Note the Second: Where otherwise as yet unnicked, names have been changed or concealed, because not everyone is as cheerful about Googleable misbehavior as I am. And when she discovered I was doing this, my friend, Mayor Patti, charmingly requested that I use her name as one of the pseudonyms. Fabulous idea. I chose with care, Your Honor.
End Digression
-had been in Albuquerque perhaps three weeks before, and I had suggested to Patti the Mayor that she do a dead-drop for in the airport, tape a Snickers to the bottom of a chair or something, just to see how on the ball the ABQ TSA was.
“Not very”, it turns out, though there was a near miss when I had to wait for the greying mastodon occupying the seat under which was taped my KGB-style drop to pry herself up and waddle back to the TCBY for another cup of frozen M&Ms before I could retrieve the prize. Wound up getting out of the boarding line, and I confess I did have a few seconds of wondering exactly what a big shiny government-issue shoe feels like on the ol’ neck. Made the pickup, though, and no thugs jumped out to drag me off to Gitmo. All good.
Upon a arrival at the Flamingo, our mustering point for the next four days, we were confronted with a check-in line that looked like it might take roughly as long as the flight. What to do, what to do? How to pass the time in this interminable line? With the casino in PLAIN VIEW? And four bars in sight! And a brace of hot moms in swimsuits organizing their day over pink daquiris just feet away? (I could swear I heard my name mentioned at least twice.) Whatever do you do when everyone around you is having fun, and you are standing in a line longer than Lent?
What do you do?
(Ready?)
(Say it with me!)
You RELEASE THE KRAKEN!
Shockingly good, this stuff. Goes down nice in a long-ass line. Brown sugar and smoke and tubinado sugar, with a little date and a nice bite. Also helps provide that little extra touch of aggressive slickness necessary to slip the guy $20 and ask for an upgrade to a suite. Done and done. 28th floor. Up we go.
Unpack, shower, text-bingo from the phone:
Digression II
A word about communications in Vegas. Outside of talking directly into a person’s face over two drinks, texting is the best form of communication in Vegas. Generally no fan of the cellphone am I, but when trying to herd a crowd in a city where you cannot hear much of the time, are surrounded by interference-generating electronics all of the time, and are often in sportsbooks where they (rightly) ban cellphone use entirely, the ability to send a sentence or two to one or a dozen people simultaneously simplifies organizational matters considerably. This is part of the reason why you could rip out ten percent of the pics from the Facebook Photo Ridealong and put on an retrospective titled “Frowning At Smartphones”.
End Digression
Drags: In checkin line.
Me: On way down
With a finger of The Kraken, of course, which Drags dispatched quickly. He and I caught up a little — Drags is from San Diego, so we text with some regularity during football season, and email if there is news of substance, but otherwise usually take a little time to get up to speed in Vegas — while Luna wandered off with a semipro hockey team. (Really.) We would encounter this team again a few days later, all of them wearing tiny pink cutoffs. (Really.)
Once we stowed Drags’ gear and peeled Luna away from drinking Budweiser with the hockey team, we needed some lunch. Made our way over to Beijing #9 Noodle (or something) at Caesar’s, which has passable Chinese in the most astonishingly decorated room. The walls of the entry are built of giant tanks brimming with goldfish.
While I am aware of the role of goldfish in the Chinese restaurant, I prefer a small, monitorable number of fish in my luck-tank. This place must have five thousand fish, and the attrition rate accompanying that many decorative swimmers means I will not be ordering fish off the menu. Especially not anything visually unidentifiable, like “shrimp toast” or “seafood dumpling”.
After lunch, we rescued C2C from her trade show, admired some pastry, and put her up against the terrible sea-monster. Also she was good enough to loan me her cell charger, a kindness I suspect she came to regret when it turned out my charger was not merely not-yet-unpacked but outright AWOL, where it remains to this day.
Big Man: We and the Texan are here. In line.
Me: En route
RELEASE THE KRAKEN!
(It just got funnier as we kept downing the stuff.)
Big Man, Patti the Mayor, and the Texan threw back the Kraken, exchanged hugs and reunions — C2C is married to the Texan — and got squared away. During this process, Notorious and Dre arrived. They had been routed to Las Vegas from Chicago via Los Angeles and handed keys to a rented car. The airline’s explanation of why this made sense made me want to buy a rocketlauncher and start blowing up some stock prices. “We know why you fly.” Oh? Wanna know why none of us fly with you?
On to Margaritaville, where we drank more, snacked lavishly on things featuring sour cream, and watched a girl slide down a volcano and into a giant blender. I was a little startled by that. Hadn’t expected them to go there. But then they just fished her out, without turning it on, so I was wrong about what was going to happen. By the way, Penn, Teller, call me. I have an idea for a magic trick. Little graphic but right in your wheelhouse. By the way, y’all like blood orange margaritas?
As a general rule, since The Incident At The Riviera, I don’t like to visit Las Vegas without an attorney present. This year’s lead counsel – who I last spent significant time with when Reagan was in office, more anon – sized up the other fourteen of us and called in backup. A very useful idea, as in doing she provided a solution to a group-trip problem that has vexed me for years; a hateful, tedious little game called “I Don’t Know, What Do You Want To Do?”
We assigned one of the lawyers, who knew none of us and was therefore impartial, the role of Arbiter. Anytime someone took longer than seven seconds to make a decision, the issue was submitted to binding arbitration. I cannot begin to tell you how much dithering and mallwalking was prevented by the mere presence of the Arbiter. Why this never occurred to anyone sooner, I have no idea, but it’s a permanent feature of my life now. I may patent this idea; in a world that embraces life coaching, impartial binding arbitration for minor decisions is a license to print money.
I bring this up now because the Arbiter arrived, along with someone who assigned herself her own nickname, which I’m not going to use because it’s ten thousand times filthier if I leave it to your imagination. Suffice to say that the term was hers and it references her enthusiasm for bed rest. (Something I too would need if I Tweeted every nine minutes as The Sleeper does.)
I was at this point carrying the bottled Kraken in the pocket of my cargo shorts. The two of them — go ahead, shout it — and we walked over to meet the rest of the team at Casa Fuente. (By the way, it took several rewrites of that sentence to construct it to avoid coming out as a double entendre. Or a single entendre. “I reached into my pocket and RELEAS”…no. “We unzipped my pants and out came the Krak”…no. “The Arbiter and The Sleeper took a tug off the bottle in my shor”…you see the problem.)
Casa Fuente, you recall, is the cigar bar in the Forum Shops with a waitress who remembered us and an exhaust fan that could push an airboat the size of the QEII. We settled in with sticks and glasses to await the Final Four. A raucous few hours ensued, made merrier by the arrival of the Mongoose, Vacation Wife, and Vacation Wife’s sister, newly of legal drinking age and christened “21″ by Luna. 21 instantly endeared herself to me by asking for “the drink with tobacco in it”. She was – let me be clear about this – requesting the original Casa Fuente version of a drink that, when I attempted to replicate it at a barbecue earlier this winter, nearly killed two of us on the spot and caused another of us to fail a physical seven days later.
Yes, you may indeed have the Caipirinha of Death, child. But first, Mongoose, V-Dub, 21, you may wonder why I have this bottle. I have this bottle because it’s time. Time to what, you ask?
(You’re laughing. Go ahead, say it. You know you want to. In fact, here, say it with him.)
The floating rep company spent a little time just chilling, smoking, bullshitting; the social equivalent of playing catch and stretching three hours before a ballgame. Not serious yet, just sorta getting a rhythm. Two things stick in my head from this time.
One of them is not presently publishable in any coherent form. It would have to look like this “Hey, is Smurf Smurfing the Smurf? Yeah. Smurf? The Smurfing Smurf that Smurfed Smurf Smurfily. Oh, Smurfette. (laughter). ‘Smurfette.’ Smurfy. Smurf the Smurfed Smurfing Smurf.”
The other is the Sleeper claiming she was “fragile” while drinking something made primarily of Tabasco sauce and silver tequila. Fragile? Brock Lesnar isn’t tough enough to drink that, dude.
The evening wore on. That’s a nice expression, isn’t it? With your permission, I’ll say it again: The evening wore on.
I’m quoting in honor of the final piece of the puzzle: AD, this trip’s lead counsel and a Facebook reconnection who I last spent time with in 1988, when we were in “Harvey” together. She was, if I recall correctly, Myrtle Mae Dowd, and I was the stage manager. We had a quick catch-up beer at Christmastime, and six beers and four hours later figured out that we were probably friends again.
Not for no reason do I tend to stick up for Facebook.
AD 2010 features the same kind of work/not-work personality schism that Luna does, except in Luna’s case the work half is Gordon Gekko and in AD’s case the work half is closer to Blake from Glengarry Glen Ross. (”PUT. That coffee. Down.”) Their nonwork halves have similar sensibilities; I knew they would get along when, in the course of relating the only hilarious pet death anecdote it has ever been my pleasure to hear, AD described chinchillas as “fluffy squirrel monkeybunnies.”
AD slayed the Kraken, and we were open for business. A few late-night drinks, a few late night cheeseburgers, and some of us picked our faces up off the table, did the time-zone math and realized we’d been up for twenty-one hours and to some degree drunk for eighteen. We set a time and place for the morning and called it a night.