The High Water Mark Continued

Dammit people.

I can’t actually be too lazy to keep up with the blog I started because I was too lazy to do my dissertation. Though a day late, the story continues now.

So after waking and introducing ourselves again to the person who urinated on our floor, we again divided into two groups to pursue entertainment during the daylight hours. One group (we’ll call them Team Bankruptcy) immediately left with Mr. Tilty for the tables. At this point our unofficial tally put Mr. Tilty approximately $1000 in the hole which was approximately $900 more than he could afford to lose and $1000 more than his fiancé would condone. A large part of his problem on this particular trip was the composition of Team Bankruptcy. His gambling friends were all people he met in high school while attending a tremendously expensive private school that catered to children of the exceptionally wealthy and uninvolved. This meant they were both rich and fucked up. The combination lent itself to some truly stupendously high-stakes gambling that made Mr. Tilty’s paltry $1000 seem like chicken shit. It is a well-known phenomenon in psychology. Outrageous behavior can seem normal provided that the social context is even more outrageous. This dynamic underlies binge drinking in college, the prices of souvenirs in tourist areas, and all of the Girls Gone Wild videos. Unfortunately for Mr. Tilty, this dynamic also seemed destined to underlie the cancellation of his honeymoon and his castration at the hands of an infuriated fiancé.

The other group of which I was a part (let’s call them Team Dumbass) retired to the pool to plot our next move. Ultimately we decided upon a stroll up the strip followed by the buffet at the Aladdin and a nightcap of a little bit of Studio 54. Our plan was to attempt to steal Mr. Tilty from Team Bankruptcy before going to the club and save him from a repeat of the previous night’s financial disaster. Every step of this plan was an unmitigated disaster. While walking down the strip we got distracted by a stage show at the Tropicana. This led to 2 hours of sketchy gambling. Our trip to the Aladdin was equally dumb. Most of the people in Team Dumbass were from San Francisco. Being young and from San Francisco they are incapable of undertaking any activity without some form of weed. Luckily for them, three separate member of the San Francisco crew brought some form of semi-legal ganja from the stoner motherland. After smoking some sort of bizarre weed/hash/tobacco combo they accompanied the rest of the team to the buffet and promptly ate enough food to render them comatose for the rest of the night.

However, one of the San Francisco members of Team Dumbass did not go gently into that good night. Though a friend who happened to be a chemistry Ph.D. student at a highly respected Bay area university he managed to acquire some very potent upper. In order to combat his fatigue, he took two.

The diminished Dumbasses then went to retrieve Mr. Tilty and stand in line at Studio 54. Unfortunately when we found Mr. Tilty he was wearing tennis shoes. Knowing this would not fly in a club as pretentious as Studio 54, we asked Mr. Tilty what he would like to do. Not surprisingly, he told us that he wanted to gamble.

This could not be allowed to occur. We had to come up with some sort of alternate plan fast. Luckily one of the Dumbasses who was not stoned came up with the idea of a strip club. As we were participating in a bachelor party, this seemed an entirely appropriate way to save what little remained in Mr. Tilty’s savings account. Of course, we couldn’t tell Mr. Tilty that we were going to a strip club; then he would have refused and insisted upon persisting in pursuing his lemming-like path of self-destruction. So we did what any honorable group of friends would do … we lied and told him the strip club was a casino.

At the strip club everything just got dumber. The group ordered bottle service which means you are given mixers and a bottle of liquor for the paltry sum of several hundred dollars. More important than the money, however, was the unfortunate fact that a group of sleep-deprived people who had been drinking fairly continuously for 24 hours now had an entire bottle of Jack Daniels to finish. While this was bad news for all of us, it was particularly bad news for our new speedy friend. We discovered something very important that day, passing out can be highly beneficial. Our speedy friend just kept getting more and more drunk but would not pass out because of the uppers he had taken. Eventually his behavior became too bizarre to continue in the strip club. He kept trying to steal this one dancer’s purse. Then he started pointing at other customers for no particular reason. Then he menaced another dancer with an ice scoop. Clearly he had to go.

And go we did … BACK TO THE CASINO. Oh no, we certainly couldn’t go back to sleep in the room. There was drunken, speedy gambling to be had. First Mr. Speedy sits at a pai gow poker table and tries to play blackjack. This doesn’t work and the dealer sends him to the BJ table. Now things get really weird. He sits down at the blackjack table muttering gibberish and immediately is on fire. He wins his first 5 hands all while being largely unable to count. It turns out conscious mediation of behavior deleteriously affects Mr. Speedy’s blackjack skill. He was amazing. At the end of the night he managed to go up $300 (and he started down $200).

The rest of the trip proceeded without incident and we were able to make our escape before the Flamingo was able to figure out all of the ways we had defiled their hotel.

So what does this have to do with a friend from high school’s website? I was looking on his blog the other day and encountered an entry talking about buying a house. This made me realize how much time has passed since I was actually a kid and how impossibly adult my world and the world of my contemporaries has become. I found it difficult to think of houses and marriages and children connected to the same group of people whom I last remember wearing fuzzy hats and terrifically unattractive plaid band uniforms. It highlighted for me how long it has been since I was that kid with a stupid hat and my own piece of tartan plaid. It was then I finally understood what bothered me about the Vegas trip: I wasn’t the subject of any of the stories. In the past I would have been. More accurately, in my youth I would have been.

If it has not already left entirely, it must be said that my youth is leaving me. I can pierce my tongue (I have) or get arrested at a protest (I might) and it will not change the incontrovertible fact that I am now and will forever be more of an adult than a child. I wasn’t part of the Vegas stories because I couldn’t be; there were wives and careers and dependent dogs at home to consider. The responsibility that comes with maturity killed the insouciance of youth forever, and I mourn its loss. I am reminded of a quote from Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. While writing about the decline of the ideals of the 60s, Thompson remarks that as he looks west out of Vegas he can just make out the high water mark where the wave of idealism broke and receded back into the sea. The high water mark I saw is far less profound yet equally powerful to me. As I looked out over the fountains at the Bellagio standing amongst a dozen drunken men in my suite at the Flamingo I saw the receding wave of my youth rushing ever faster back towards a sea of inevitable death