The High Water Mark

Those of you who have faithfully read my blog realize that I have yet to describe my recent, extra stupid, trip to Las Vegas. Until today I didn’t really understand why I found it so hard to chronicle. It was, after all, a trip very similar to a dozen trips I have taken before. We showed up, raged for 48 hours, and then departed. It wasn’t until I read another blog maintained by a contemporary of mine from high school that I came upon the reason for my reticence; this trip was different from those preceding it in a very important way. But first, the trip …

The excuse we had all marshaled to justify our trip to Vegas was the bachelor party of a college friend. I characterize this as an excuse since most of the people who attended the party were not actually invited to the wedding and hadn’t kept in close contact with the groom over the preceding 3 and ½ years. The real reason we convened in the great state of Nevada was a reunion of sorts. While it was certainly true that we intended to show our friend an appropriately good time before he married, we also wanted to see each other in some sort of neutral state from which we could be banished with few consequences in our future lives. (You may think I am exaggerating, but two of my college friends are no longer allowed to enter Canada. There was some unpleasantness at a casino in Windsor. They can never return.)

The plan was standard guerilla tourism. Descend en masse, engage in senseless acts of excess and absurdity, and leave before the authorities could fully appreciate the bizarre and depraved character of that which befell their city. Our home base for this operation was a suite at the Flamingo hotel. This room was clearly intended for two well-heeled Vegas travelers -- the sort who booked a suite because they enjoyed having a living area in their room to facilitate afternoon tea. The Flamingo’s first indication that our group had little in common with the elderly couple they hoped would be visiting came at check-in. We asked for four keys. The room sleeps two. The front desk noted this discrepancy and asked, “what exactly is going on here?” Now the really amusing part of this exchange isn’t that we were questioned within FIVE MINUTES OF OUR ARRIVAL regarding our sketchiness; it isn’t that the Flamingo was objecting to four people in their two person room when we would eventually have 14 staying there; the truly hilarious part of this exchange was that the person checking in had absolutely no idea what the front desk was referring to with their question. It didn’t even occur to us that it would be odd to ask for four keys when two people were checking in. On our sketch-dar (our inner sense of things that might be considered sketchy) this did not even register.

Most of Friday night was consumed with people arriving, meeting up with the others, and watching the groom lose tremendous amounts of money. This was to be expected because the groom is a terrible, yet enthusiastic gambler. He managed to max out his daily ATM withdrawals within an hour of his arrival and was talking about a “cash advance” by 10 PM on the first day.

It should be said that we did not decide the location of the bachelor party. The groom is our friend after all, and we wouldn’t have been able to live with ourselves if we had been responsible for his near certain financial demise. The groom insisted upon going to Vegas, and all we could do was try to limit his losses by distracting him with women and booze. We largely failed. At about 2 AM I ended up leaving the groom (let’s call him Mr. Tilty) and going with a group of more modest, yet skillful, gamblers to the Boardwalk casino so that we could be insulted by the surliest dealers on the strip. After three hours of abuse, a heated disagreement about addition with the dealer (2, 8, 4, 1, and 6 equals 21 not 22) , and a near fight with some jack-off from LA we left Boardwalk to find Mr. Tilty and a casino that was still willing to serve us drinks. And find Mr. Tilty we did. He was incoherently drunk at a $25 minimum bet table in the MGM Grand. In the 2 minutes it took us to walk to his table after we noticed him he lost $150. Mr. Tilty is not a rich man; he is a graduate student. There is no reason for Mr. Tilty to play at a $25 minimum bet table under any circumstances much less when he is trashed. We extracted him from the table and were treated to 15 minutes of pure gibberish about how he hadn’t done well at the tables. No shit Mr. Tilty! We just saw you hit an 18. There was some disturbing talk of a savings account and then we thought he said he was going to bed.

We decided to follow Mr. Tilty to “bed” a few hours later. We discovered upon entry into the room that nothing resembling a bed was available. Somehow in the course of the evening 14 people showed up in the room. One of these people (a friend of a friend’s brother) passed out several hours before the only person in the group who knew who he was went back to the room. He showed up at the Flamingo wearing a filthy, half tucked dress shirt, sneakers that had somehow shed their laces during the evening’s festivities, and a vacant drunken expresses. He mumbled something about a bachelor party and the people in the room considered this sufficient bona fides to let him sleep on a chair. Later that morning he stood up in the middle of the room and urinated on the floor because he mistakenly believed someone was in the bathroom. All in all, he made quite a first impression.

The four of us that arrived to the room last made a valiant effort to sleep in the hallway leading to the bathroom, but this effort was met with little success. I gave up at 9:30 AM when another person arrived.

I would like to continue this chronicle, but suddenly there are too many authority figures around my office. I guess I better look as though I am doing something productive for awhile. This story will continue tomorrow.