This yarn is about a guy and the ways he was defeated by a town that is not entirely dissimilar to an open sore on the genitalia that is the Nevada desert.
First of all, I should've gone to Chinatown. Because Chinatown has dim sum and dragons, so really the minute you've reached Chinatown you've already won 10 points.
But, I was doing the Vegas thing, which in hindsight was not really the Vegas thing that everyone else does. I had always had a vision of what my first time in Vegas would be like, ever since I read Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I thought it was mandatory to blast into Vegas, narcotics steaming out of your pores like you just finished a three-day soak in a Columbian sweat-house, wearing nothing but cargo shorts and a tropical shirt. I thought they handed out convertibles and overweight Mexican sidekicks at the border. The same way Luau girls await your arrival in Hawaii to give you leis, I thought an Elvis impersonator would be standing at the Nevada border to hand you fifth of Absinthe, two tablets of LSD, a loaded Magnum Revolver, and a Tourette-addled hooker named Chastity that suffers from a deviated septum.
But they don't do that. Maybe when the mob ran the place things were different. But now it's all $7 a day for parking and middle-aged waitresses in vaguely-Roman costumes and ergonomic shoes.
Then again, I would be the wrong guy for Thompson's Vegas. An overweight, bespectacled nerd with a few too many washed-out X-Men t-shirts and an overly-cautious on-hand supply of Purell Hand Sanitizer isn't exactly the counter-culture, "fuck-the-man" demographic that Hunter S. was portraying. I didn't blast into a Vegas in a swirling storm of dust, vulgarities, and fleeing Toby-Maguire-yokels. No, I set the cruise for a moderate 65 m.p.h., wore respectable shoes, and had two different sets of directions (Mapquest and GoogleMaps, of course). In fact, I think my friend and I were listening to friggin' Keane the whole ride there. Nothing like rolling down the windows and feeling the blazing desert air whip across your arm, while Brit-pop alterna-easy-listening washes over you. Hell. Yeah.
We were meeting a cousin of mine. A good guy who suffers from the eternally unfortunate disposition being a 6'4" young-Vince-Vaughn lookalike. And, if that doesn't make you want to slit your own throat with the rusty handle of a cereal spoon, the dude has one of those lilting-yet-manly Irish accents that insures American girls will, at his first and slightest utterance, swoon, which is my very politically correct way of saying "will do anything up to and including tranquilizing him with a potent mixture of tryptophan and Cialis, drag him up to their palatial suites (yes, he gets the rich, hot ones because he's fucking Superman) and proceed to use him, in much the same way a feral dog tears apart a Cabbage Patch Kid, as their own personal rag-doll o' love."
We met with him in the casino. To protect the humble Board of Trustees of this casino, I will not use it's name. Let's just say it's named after a famous sword once brandished by a character that Sean Connery played in First Knight. Which is one of the many useless facts that I, apparently, can't un-know despite my best intentions.
What followed next would best be described in a montage of sorts: I walk in. I pay for parking I go to a buffet. I eat food from all corners of the fried-food globe. I pay for food. I go to the room. I notice the bed has wholesome and charming semen-esque stains on the sheets. I react accordingly and douse the bed in a combination of industrial-strength bleach, acetone, and lemon-zest PineSol. I gamble. I lose money. I drink profusely.
Despite all evidence to the contrary, up until I thought it was a good idea to combine recycled, stagnant air and hard liquor, I was actually having a pretty fun weekend. All I needed now was women. Because, clearly, I was in state of mind that the fairer sex would not be able resist.
And if that weren't bad enough (which it was), I didn't just want a quick lay with the nearest willing contender. Blame it on the lack of exposure to natural sunlight and therefore a dearth of Vitamin D, but, for some reason, I didn't just want a woman. I wanted a connection. I wanted someone lively and funny and ready for a life together. We would stroll through a New England Autumnal woods, clad in cable-knit sweaters, and then go home and read to each other from the latest column by Calvin Trillin. I was determined to find this girl. In Vegas. That night.
For most of that evening I had been more than happy to play wingman to the veritable Adonis that is my cousin. And he had a much simpler, more binary-based system -- talk to the ones showing cleavage, any cleavage.
And then he spotted the Bachelorette Party.
One of these fine, classy ladies (I could tell she was the classiest of the bunch because she only hiccuped once and her lipstick was smeared, but not on her teeth) was holding what I have come to call "The Chamberlain."
The Chamberlain was a two-foot-long, phallic-shaped piece of silicone, designed to do either one of two things: pleasure a woman or beat back invading packs of bloodthirsty cybernetic-werewolves.
The cousin sidles up alongside the one wielding The Chamberlain and says: "How did you get an exact replica of my penis?"
She snorted (so charming) and said, "Yeah, like I haven't heard that one a million times tonight." She then, for some reason that will remain a divine mystery for the rest of my life, looks at me and says, "I bet this is like yours though." She might have even accompanied that oh-so-subtle line with a come hither stare... or she had a lazy eye. Could've gone either way with that crowd.
Now there's me: still lost in my fantasy of tobogganing on Sundays with a wife straight out of a Ralph Lauren catalog. And there's her: still lost at the bottom of a bottle of Vanilla Baccardi. But, nonetheless, I was chuffed. And I, like a realist, started to think, "Is this her?" Of course it was! I mean, she resisted the charms of my cousin! This is straight-up kismet!
Not wanting to start our relationship off on a lie I, like a genius, responded with the very charming:
"Well, you would be disappointed."
Go. Me.
I didn't say much after that. Neither did anyone else, save for the Fail Golem that was dancing in my hair, chanting an epic limerick about how I'm a retard. But then again, I might have imagined that.
Thus my Vegas yarn comes to a close. Ah, well.
Forget about it, Jake, it's... Vegas.
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