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15 november 2000
----- Bless me father, for I have sinned. It's been 45 days since my last cigarette. "Yes, of course I'd like a double shot for a dollar more." Why do they bother asking me? Or am I just assuming that all airport bars are exactly the same just because they look and feel exactly the same from airport to airport, and from city to city. I feel as if I should be able to walk into any bar in any airport, and everyone will know my name and my drinking preferences. As for now, I'm in the "Cheers" bar in terminal one of McCarran International. Nobody knows my name here, and I requested a seat in "non-smoking." My flight leaves in ninety minutes and I'm on standby for first class. I managed to snag first class on the way out, sunday morning. I had picked up Brutus at 5:45am and we caravaned together to LAX. We were on different planes, mine about fifteen minutes behind his, but we met up once we landed and took a taxi to the Hilton, where we smoked a quick joint and proceeded downstairs to the conference facility to give our sales presentation. We did rather well, I think, as the magazine publisher invited us out to the Sahara for dinner and fun at the Nascar Cafe. I plopped myself down at a roulette wheel to kill some time at the Hilton. I won $100 and ran away. At the bar, I nursed a comped bloody mary and spoonfed the video poker machine until it was time to leave for dinner. The Nascar cafe was fun. We were given a large buffet, free drinks, and a wristband that would get us into any of the hotel's attractions. I was quickly led by the group to "Speed: The Ride," which I hoped wasn't going to be one of those virtual reality puke-a-thons. I was both relieved and rather apprehensive when we walked through a door to a very traditionally styled rollercoaster train, backed up against a wall with a large tunnel in front of it. I hopped in and pulled the restraints over my shoulders. "Keep your heads back," the ride operator said. "OK, raise your hands if you're ready to go." Everyone but me raised their hands. I had no idea what to expect, and I was quite shocked when the little train jerked forward into the tunnel, accelerating from zero to seventy in a split second. Next thing I know we're outside the casino, going down a drop into a hole in the sidewalk, through a tunnel, back up out of the sidewalk into a loop, out of the loop back into the sidewalk, through another tunnel, up out of the sidewalk, through another sudden surge of acceleration, and straght up a 250 foot vertical tower. Staring at the sky, I simultaneously realized that one, I was weightless, and two, we had run out of track. Not to worry, as gravity carried the car back down the tower and we went through the whole thing backwards. Weird and exhilarating, it was. I continued to drink heavily throughout the evening and made friends with one of the sales team from our Chicago office. We had fun just hanging and talking for the rest of the night. I finally crashed around 2am in the company's suite in the Hilton, lying on the couch, fully clothed and freezing. Brutus woke me up at around 9am, and we proceeded to the Bourbon Street hotel to check into our actual rooms. The place was a shithole, "old-school vegas" in the dirtiest nastiest sense of the term. We smoked some more pot and went out for a walk. Paris was a letdown, but the new Aladdin was pretty incredible. We had lunch at P.F. Chang's China Bistro and finally got the cell phone call that the rest of our department had arrived and needed checking in at the Riviera. So we grabbed a cab and headed over there, where we met the two lovely ladies of our department, got them checked in, and headed back down the strip to Caesar's Palace, where we hung out until it was time for our departmental dinner at Smith and Wollensky's steak house. Two martinis, a porterhouse steak, and four bottles of Opus One later, we took a taxi downtown to Fremont Street. There I proceeded to lose $100 at the roulette wheel, bringing myself back to even. I grabbed a cab home rather early, around 1:30am, and found my room at the Bourbon Street. I was welcomed by a king-size bed that sagged in the middle, and a heater that didn't work. I bundled up and fell into a series of incredibly nasty dreams that left me waking up without a will to live. And I can't even remember what I dreamed specifically, but the theme was consistent: incredibly realistic montages of me single-handely dismantling and destroying my life, being an asshole, drinking too much, getting thrown in jail, losing the little self respect I had to begin with ... I dragged myself to the shower and somehow felt well enough to cab it to Circus Circus for a bad buffet brunch with our network administrator and his flight attendant friends. I cracked bitter sarcastic jokes all morning that people seemed to find funny. Finally they left and I arranged for our new and cute production assistant to come meet me at the sports bar under the big top. She showed up about thirty minutes later and watched me lose $20 at video poker. We walked over to the Hilton and I found our relationship becoming very flirtatious, an incredibly dangerous thing to be with a close coworker. I backed off a bit, and luckily we got to the Hilton quickly and she had work to do. As we walked in, I saw my new friend from the Chicago office and walked over to say hi. She seemed rather cold... "Why were you so rude to me last night?" "Huh? Whaddya mean? When was I rude?" "You just were." "I don't understand. When? Tell me." "Just forget about it, ok?" And she walked away. And I'm thinking to myself, OK, in addition to fucking up your entire life and having depressing dreams, now you're being mean to people and not remembering it. I went to the giftshop and got her a blank card, onto which I wrote an apology. I handed it to her right before our big awards show and ran away. Apple won Product of the Year with the G4 Cube, and I watched as our new flirty production assistant interviewed one of the Apple VPs about how much he loved our stupid award. Finally, work was over and I grabbed the cute, flirty, production assistant (I'll call her "A." for the purposes of this entry, as opposed to "B.," the Chicago person who I was supposedly so rude to) and we walked over to the Stratosphere. We rode the elevator to the top and had a dizzying drink at the "Top of the World" Lounge. Brutus crackled in on the two-way radio and invited us to dinner at Benihana at six, but wanted us to meet him first at Quark's Bar in the Deep Space Nine starport at 5:30. Quark's bar happens to be the only place in the Hilton with a pool table, an electric-blue felted pool table at that, appropriately themed for the 23rd century, I guessed. I grabbed a beer from a wandering Ferenghi waiter and perused the table... "So, can I have winners..." "Nah, you're up second," Brutus said. "Hey, why don't you go over to the other table and shoot with B..." And I looked over, and there she was, sitting looking rather dejected in the corner. I walked over... "Thanks for the card. I'm sorry if I freaked you out..." "No, I just don't remember being rude, that's all, and I feel like an idiot if I'm having blackouts on top of all the other shit going on in my life right now." "I think it was me. I made a bad assumption about you and me. I kinda thought we were hooking up that night. I couldn't talk about it before because A. was standing right there." I looked across the room at A. She smiled and half-winked at me. I looked back to B. What the fuck do you say in a situation like this? I made a big production of swallowing my beer. "Oh god, now I've made you even more awkward." "No, no, it's ok, I think I know what you're saying..." "Maybe we were both just really drunk." (um, yeah, we were, but what does that have to do with it? NOTHING HAPPENED) "Yeah, maybe..." "Friends?" 'Friends." "Cool, gotta go, seeya at dinner." And she left. I was quite bewildered. A. came over. "She has the hugest crush on you, doesn't she?" At this point A. was leaning against me in a too-close-for-discomfort type pose. I almost grabbed her and kissed her right there. Self restraint is a good thing. I didn't answer. We just headed to dinner. (I'm continuously amazed at how close Las Vegas Airport is to the actual city. We just took off, and crusing down the runway, within walking distance is Mandalay Bay, the Luxor, MGM Grand. .. and then we were airborne, doing a heavy bank over the city, and I saw all the places I hung out over the past few days, and the plane was so low, and it was like a scenic helicopter ride or something, kinda beautiful in a superreal way. I dunno, I just can't imagine the airport being so close to the city anywhere else and then the double-chime from the cockpit, indicating 10,000 feet, a safe altitude for the flight attendants to get up, and a safe altitude at which to wake up my computer and finish writing They boarded me to seat 9A, and then ten minutes later the flight attendant came and told me they had a seat for me up front. so now I'm typing from 1A, ready for another drink, and to end this parenthetical remark and pick up where I left off) Dinner ... Benihana ... steak, lobster, sake, more sake, nuff said. B. kind of avoided me, so I sat next to A., and she was getting really tweaked on the sake, and the time came for us to hop a cab to another Japanese restaurant where the rest of our department was. From the moment we got there it was "Pick on Chuck" night, and it went too far, and I shot the whole table the middle finger and walked out. I did the quarter mile walk back to Bourbon Street and took a hot bath, sobering up and reflecting on the state of my overreaction in the restaurant. My phone rang while I was soaking and I was instructed to meet Brutus and A. and crew upstairs. So I toweled off and threw my clothes on and headed up, where we proceeded to get stoned and apologies were made and we headed downstairs where I too-quickly lost another $100 at roulette. No more even, now $100 down. Shit. Bad mood. We hung out and drank for a while longer and then A. said she was tired and would I take her back to her room at the Riviera. I told Brutus my plans and he insisted upon coming along, most likely because he didn't want two of his star employees jumping into bed with one another, which I daresay might have happened. Instead Brutus and I headed back to Barbary Coast, a rather seedy yet soulful establishment tucked in between Bally's and the Flamingo Hilton. I once again sat down at a roulette wheel with my last twenty dollars. On my first bet I hit a 36-to-1 payoff. Same on the second bet. I sat out the third bet. On the fourth bet I hit it again. I was up to about $140 in chips. Brutus was sitting there in awe. I made four more $5 bets and lost them all, and promptly walked away from the table with $120, happy that I had regained my losses. We headed back to Bourbon Street and met our East Coast IS Director at the bar. We drank and flirted with video poker, went upstairs and smoked a final joint, and headed to our individual rooms at around 3am. Another night of horrendous nightmares, waking up this morning depressed with nothing going through my head save for "you have destroyed yourself, your life is over, why are you even bothering anymore...." Yep, this is what my subconscious is saying to me, and I'm trying my best to ignore it, but it's not working. Perhaps my subconscious is out to destroy me. Then again, maybe I just need to get laid. Who knows? I had a really bad steak+eggs for breakfast, and then taxiied over (driven by a Walter Matthau look-a-like) to the Riviera to meet A. for brunch. She was really hungover, but we flirted some more to the point where the conversation got outright sexual, and finally I hitched a cab back to the airport, where I found a not-too-generic bar and started this entry. Full-circle, some might call it. Funny thing is, the company sent me out here to go to COMDEX. Somehow, I forgot to attend the show. I find myself strangely undisappointed about that. We're starting to descend. My beer's getting warm, and I need to figure out how to kill three hours in West LA before band practice... Think I'll go nap... 15 november 1999: : on hiatus til december 15 november 1998: : didn't write 15 november 1997: flatulent theories : Finally, he understood and voraciously devoured the remains of the steak. And I wonder why an hour later he showed up at my bedside, stuck his rear end in my face, and let loose. Maybe it's a dog's way of saying "Thank you." Another theory to ponder. [ swim back | email me | swim ahead ] |
