Had to finish moving before I could finish this. Thanks for waiting. On we go.
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8am. Four hours and fifteen minutes after Day Three wrapped. Been a long time since I felt this bad. Or this good. Forget aspirin and Gatorade and dog hair and Tabasco and Vitamin C: You know what makes a potential hangover just evanesce? Euphoria. What a joy was yesterday. The band has come back together. My fastball is touching a hundred on the gun and the curve is moving like it hasn’t in years. The whole team is loose, joking, grabastic, swaggering, unstoppable.
Unfortunately, anticipating another trip foundering in lukewarm mundanity and nostalgic paralysis, almost everybody had booked tickets out of Vegas first thing Sunday morning. I understand the assumed tedium; the preference for getting home, maybe cut the grass, rest up, little Epsom soak for the feet, maybe a nice cup of tea before an early bedtime. But champions do not leave early to beat the traffic. Champions leave it all on the field. I don’t care if the sun was in your eyes or your foot hurts or you have gout or you have to see your cardiologist or whatever. If you’re putting on the team colors, you play hard. I forgive you people the 2010 early departures. But don’t do it again.
The Final Five – me, Luna, Big Man, Patti the Mayor, and The Kid – went over to see City Center. The inside of City Center looks like Woodfield crossed with Terminal Two at O’Hare. I am totally in favor of industrial minimalism, but not the kind that just looks unfinished. I wonder what it was supposed to look like. You know, before MGM and Dubai World ran out of money. We walked around for a bit, scoping restaurants and hoping this was a false front for the real City Center. But looking for the main action at City Center seems like looking for the main downtown area in Los Angeles. Not crazy about the place. Hadn’t expected to be, really, from the dioramas and mockups I’d seen. I like my Vegas weird. Pyramids, castles, Paris, Venice, Rome. Tasteful luxury hotel with a discreet casino? No no no. Build a replica Taj Mahal, wrap a roller coaster around it, bring the whores through the front door, and slop the vodka on the bar while you’re doling out twenty-four frozen double-troubles for the three-deep crowd holding smokes up high at the $5 craps table at 3am. Yes yes y’all. That’s how you do it.
Thus disappointed, we elected to hit a sure thing: Burger Bar. We paused at the pastry-and-coffee shop on our long walk to the cab stand, to reprovision. I got another in a weekend series of multispressos, Big Man bought white chocolate, Luna and The Kid tasted a bunch of gelati, and Patti the Mayor jogged cheerfully off to the ladies’.
You know the episode of M*A*S*H* where Henry Blake finishes up his stint and goes home? And at the very end of the episode Radar comes into the operating room and says Colonel Blake’s plane was shot down and he’s dead*? Patti the Mayor came out of the can looking like Radar coming into the OR. Pale, clammy, weak-kneed. We tried to make it to the cab stand, but wound up sitting in the lobby, feeding her granola bars, trying to remember the CPR compression count, and asking a bunch of serious medical diagnostic questions. (”Dude…are you okay?”)
What we witnessed, in retrospect, was a rare, rare thing to see: The transition from Drunk to Hung-over. I think, because it is a thing that usually comes on in sleep, we all just assume the transition is gradual. Oh no. We were all taken aback by the speed with which the Mayor’s condition went from cheerful-happy-loose to sweaty-headachy-doomed. It was like watching the batteries die in a cymbal-playing monkey; CLANG CLANG CLANG…CLAng…clang…….clunk………….clunk………………click.
Big Man poured her into a taxi and accompanied her back to our room – they had checked out of theirs – where she changed into grubbies and waited patiently to die. Lovingly, he left her there and rejoined us. Admirably bold move, sir.
After Big Man and Patti the Mayor rolled back to the Flamingo, Luna and I took The Kid over to the Luxor. High on my “Must Do” list for first-time Vegas visitors is “Go see the Luxor from the inside.” The outside, that black glass and searchlight, are pretty cool, but the inside is shocking. There is an optical-illusion quality to it: The pyramid looks large enough from the outside, but it looks twenty times the size from inside. I have a series of pictures of people’s faces the first time they see it, and The Kid was kind enough to indulge me in another.
We walked to Burger Bar and found a forty-five minute line. Normally this would be a dealbreaker, but 1) It’s Burger Bar and 2) There was a Mexican restaurant next door, and the bar was open. We put our names in at Burger Bar and passed the time with tequila shots.
Hubert Keller’s place, Burger Bar, is ridiculous beyonddescription, and we happily seized the indulgence. The Kid got a burger buried in black truffles and spouts. Luna had a chicken sandwich with avocado and grilled onions, and Big Man had what looked like a blue cheese and bacon sandwich garnished with a burger patty. I was jealous of everyone else’s burgers even though I would not have given up my own, topped with bleu cheese and pineapple, at knifepoint.
Only In Vegas: There was a sixtyish woman at an adjacent table, decent-looking all things considered, but still not someone you’d expect to see wearing a t-shirt we’re all pretty sure said “I (Heart) Sex”. There’s no gracious way to ask her if she’d mind putting down her sandwich and leaning back, plus if it did say what we thought it did at least one of us was probably going to have to make a difficult decision, so we never scored a definitive answer. But it did lead directly to what I suspect were some splendid double-takes when The Kid got home and posted the I (Heart) Sex Cafe Press store to my Facebook page without comment, and I elected to savor the ensuing awkwardness by ignoring the faux-casual, obliquely phrased questions that inevitably follow the posting of I (Heart) Sex memorabilia to one’s Facebook page by a cute girl no one knows after one spends a weekend in Las Vegas.
When Vacation Wife decided to bring her baby sister to Vegas this year, I’m sure she & the Mongoose considered the implications exhaustively. Tried to suss out how it might go. Examined probabilities, team chemistry, and possible outcomes. You don’t bring anyone into this gang lightly. So you figure they gave some thought to the possible outcomes of what they were doing. That said, I’m still pretty sure there wasn’t a lot of money on the result being Drunk Malevolent Batman & Robin.
Speaking of drunk, it was time to go see if Patti the Mayor needed a cup of coffee or a pine box. We headed back to the Flamingo via Mandalay Bay, stopping to take a careful, discreet picture of the Saddest Shirt I Have Ever Seen. It was a long sleeved shirt designed to look like full-sleeve tattoos. Think faux douchebag. Horrific.
We carefully positioned the cameras before knocking vigorously on the Mayor’s door, of course. It’s a good shot. Somebody did not come gently out of that good night. Still, a couple of painkilling shots out of the guitar – remember that? – a long deodorant shower, a couple lines of crushed aspirin off the bathroom counter, and she was ready to be taped up and sent in for the fourth quarter. A gamer, Patti the Mayor.
It was time to put The Kid in a taxi. We helped her pack up quite a bit of stolen souvenir glassware and an emptied, rinsed plastic guitar stuffed with stolen towels and waved her off. You, young Skywalker…we will watch your career with great interest. Good luck at the liver clinic in Zurich.
And then there were four.
The Mayor was in dire need of food and the rest of us were in dire need of a couple of large redeyes. By the way, it turns out “redeye” is not a Starbucks term, but a universal one. Means “Cup of regular coffee with a shot of espresso in it.” A combination which, ordered from a coffeeshop, has the merit of actually tasting like good French-press coffee.
Fortified, we walked off some of the hangovers in the Forum shops and out on the street. Saw some unnerving displays, including the creepiest mannequins ever and a shudder-inducing window display at La Perla urging you to remember Mother’s Day. I love my mom, but not in an Italian-lingerie way, thanks.
En route back to the hotel to send off the Mayor and the Big Man, we chanced upon a promotional offer for Michelob Ultra. (I had been hoping for Tecate.)
Digression VIII
Some years ago, on the legendary Banned From The Riviera trip, my older younger brother implemented a policy that everyone on the trip got to make one rule that no one else could break. Everyone on the trip was bound by this First Rule.
We will be reinstituting that policy next year. Everyone on the trip gets to make one rule, so long as that rule does not invalidate or offset someone else’s rule. And my rule will be this: No team member may refuse a promotional drink called for and paid for by someone else.
End Digression
Four Michelob Ultras it was, and the race was on. At least, it was until halfway through the race, Big Man pulled the bottle from his face and in an surprised voice said “GAH! THIS TASTES LIKE ASS!”
You’d think he’d never drunk a pint of cheap beer from a metal container before. It was as though he was on Candid Camera: “We’ve replaced Big Man’s Guinness with a cold can of Pennzoil. Let’s see if he notices.” He did. In such a way that we almost had to buy a rack of cheap purses from the outdoor vendor we were standing next to when Luna responded to his aggrieved shock with a huge classic Bugs Bunny spit take.
After a final adventure in the cab line, discussing the use of tiny pink shorts as a pickup device with the hockey team, we saw Patti the Mayor and Big Man off to the airport. Well done, soldiers. Safe trip home.
Luna and I had a short restorative nap and went off in search of dinner around 745. There were a couple of places in Palazzo that we’d been interested in, so we read a few menus and then stopped to discuss our options at Laguna, a new “Champagne Bar” in the casino. Not a Champagne Room, mind you, but a bar specializing in the drink. Here I learned about “Champagne Bang-Bang Shooters”. Heavy tumblers of bubbly, with a little extra alcohol for flavor, that you cover with your hand, pound on the table, and then drink before the fizz explodes in the glass. I had two. Oh, will this discovery haunt some of you the morning after a barbecue this summer.
We dined for some time at Dos Caminos. Flashy Mexican food. I had a margarita made of pineapple, lime, reposado tequila, and brown sugar. I will work out the proportions on y’all guinea pigs this summer, and it will be worth the trials and errors. Also we had goat tacos, tinga, and a banana dessert with cajeta sauce that was so good I have a photograph of the clean plate.
Walked back to the Flamingo, and called it a night.
* Spoiler alert