Unfinished Business: My Last Day in Las Vegas

(Warning: This is a long post, 3,000 words or so.)

As a one-time writer – I don’t count this blogging business; any schmuck with a keyboard and an opinion can do this shit – it hurt the most when I thought I had a story to tell but never was able to finish it. It didn’t matter why I couldn’t finish it; all that mattered was that I had failed. This sort of thing became a recurring theme after I left college. I would come up with something, feel great about the possibilities, write a few paragraphs and then give up. Maybe I lack passion or ambition. Maybe there was no story to tell to begin with. Whatever the case it’s always discouraging and I’ve never quite had the gumption to get back on my feet.

I thought that maybe my trip to Las Vegas would help me write. Surely I could come up with something universal yet intensely personal about Sin City. I had it all planned out after the trip was over; I was going to write about, even with all the glitz and glamour, that somehow Las Vegas was soulless. I can make anything a bummer.

I had imagined this piece as a travel diary in chronological order, from takeoff ‘til landing four days later. I even went to the trouble of coming up with clever section headings. Of course, I got through two sections and felt as though I had written myself into a corner. Failure reared its ugly (and unfinished) head once again.

***

I’ve been obsessing about Vegas lately. I desperately want to go back and I’m not entirely sure why. I’ve been tracking flight prices and hotel deals for weeks now and pestering my girlfriend even though neither of us really have the money for such an excursion.

“You’re obsessed!” she said in one text message.

“You need to find a new hobby,” she replied after I text messaged her that I’ve read every hotel and casino review on CheapoVegas.com.

I went back to that story I wanted to write about Las Vegas to try and find some clues as to why a trip there would excite me so much. Obviously the story was unfinished and revealed nothing, so I began to daydream about it. Even after that I still can’t think of anything that’s remotely logical beyond there being 24-hour gambling and drinking and the fact that Las Vegas is far, far away from the cold, snowy winters of Milwaukee.

I could see wanting to go badly if I were single. If there’s one thing Vegas advertises in their commercials besides gambling, it’s sex and sex and more sex and I’m not just talking about the hookers. They have a nightclub called “Tryst” for God’s sake. It should be noted that I’m neither good-looking (not enough, anyway) nor rich enough to get into an ultra-lounge like that. Besides, even if I did get into the land of $12 rail drinks, if the girls there weren’t thinly-veiled “ladies of the night,” they surely wouldn’t be looking for a little bit of Kevin; they’d be looking for a lot of something a sugar daddy with more money than brains could offer them.

I guess, in that respect, being single and in Vegas would be a lot like being single and in college. Would I hook up with somebody I met in the casino bar? Not likely. At least there’s the idea that lingers somewhere in the back of my mind that some girl would actually want to hear about my record collection and contempt for mankind. And then, of course, we’d do the bow-chicka-bow-wow.

Know what else would make sense? If I were looking for some quality male bonding time. Call it a man-cation if you want – and could they have come up with a gayer name for it? – but it sounds, at least from the marketing that I have been bombarded with and the stories I have read, that it would be a hell of a time. Blackjack and booze and boobs – can it get any better than that? Perhaps not, but there’s a slight problem with that. I don’t have enough male friends to fill a blackjack table. One of them I haven’t seen in two years; the other one is chronically poor and hates gambling unless its small-stakes tournament style poker. As you can see, this cannot possibly be a reason I long for Las Vegas.

You may be reading this and thinking that I’m suggesting that the trip with my girlfriend was boring. That couldn’t be further from the truth. It wasn’t the kind of fun found in the commercials, true, but it was fun nonetheless. Maybe all I was really looking for was the comfortable – not intense – satisfaction of going on a vacation with the woman I love, to a place that features two of my all-time favorite vices: gambling and drinking.

It doesn’t look like I’m going to get to go in the near future, so to tide me over until then, I will attempt to recall my last day in Las Vegas. I feel like it was the best day to write about because there was none of the sensory overload of the first two days and no feelings of being fed up with the fakeness of the third day. I hope I can put it in the proper perspective and do the city of Las Vegas some justice.

***

We had to check out at by 11 o’clock which for some people might seem like cruel and unusual punishment considering Vegas is a 24-hour city. However, neither of us was up late into the night at the slot machines or roulette wheel so this wasn’t a problem. We checked our bags – I kept my man purse, a bad decision – and we set out to walk up the strip.

In the previous three days we had made it as far north (we stayed at the Excalibur) as Treasure Island. Looking at the map of the strip, there’s really not all that much to see after that until you get downtown. Still, we didn’t come to Las Vegas to see half of the strip, so we decided to hoof it as far as we could before coming back to make our shuttle to the airport at 9:30 PM.

It was so nice to be able to skip past all the swankier places on the Strip where we (well, at least I) didn’t belong anyway. It was even nicer to be able to say to the approximately 100,000 street salesmen “No, we’re leaving tonight. We don’t need tickets!” and actually be telling the truth. We made our way north and eventually hit the first of many “North Strip” casinos, The New Frontier.

The New Frontier was probably one of the last bastions of “Old Vegas” left on the strip. I say “was” because it was demolished this past year, and both my girlfriend and I are kind of sad to see it do. Despite the fact that it was kind of dingy inside, especially compared to newer places like Bellagio, it was still had a strange kind of charm to it. A lot of the slot machines were old school – they only paid out in coins instead of the tickets that are in every casino now. Even better was the fact that they had a deal going at the bar: 1.99 margaritas and $2.00 pints of draft beer. I would be lying if I said we didn’t load up on the phenomenally cheap (for the Strip) booze.

For some reason, I wanted to take it easy on the gambling as my stockpile of $450 or so for the first two-and-a-half days had dwindled to somewhere around $150. I wanted to return home with something so I played some penny and nickel slots before getting bored out of my skull and moving onto the quarter slots. Neither of us won much of anything at the New Frontier, so we ordered one more drink for the road, took it with us, and headed still northward.

You may not know this, but it’s perfectly legal to walk around Las Vegas with a drink in your hand. And it’s not legal in the way “Oh, the cops don’t care because they have better things to worry about like dead hookers and rappers getting shot,” no, it’s actually on the books that it’s A-OK to booze it up on the street. In the words of Yakov Smirnoff, “What a country!”

***

As I remember it, there’s a whole lot of nothing between the New Frontier and Circus Circus. Actually, there is a place that is more or less in the Circus Circus parking lot: the Slots-of-Fun casino. We stopped in there and it actually wasn’t as bad as it could have been.

The place itself is criminally small – the cheap gaming is of much appeal to me – and naturally packed wall-to-wall with people. I searched and searched for the $3 blackjack table, and when I found it saw that the waiting line to get a seat was three people deep.

A note on blackjack: the game now terrifies me. I dropped a couple hundred bucks on it in Milwaukee because I suck at it. Add to that the fact the people insist on telling me how to play – I realize there’s a basic strategy to follow – and I just get fed up with it. The last time I played it, I was in a small casino that just happened to have a $3 minimum. It went okay for a few hands, then the dealer went on a brilliant run of eight straight hands where she either hit until 20 or 21 or got blackjack outright. Most people would curse under their breath at this; I decided to laugh hysterically after about the 5^th hand or so. Now you know why I’m a gigantic pussy and only play slot machines.

The machines at Slots-of-Fun weren’t all that friendly, and they paid in tokens to boot. After a while we got the hell out of there, but not before we bought the “world famous” 99-cent ½ pound hot dog. Interestingly enough neither of us got sick. While outside we spent a few dollar bills on the gigantic slot machine – again, not winning a damn thing – and watching a piece of white tarp burn. The fire department was called to put it out. Our interest soon faded and we made our way into Circus Circus.

If your opinion of Las Vegas is that it’s loud and obnoxious, Circus Circus certainly validates that opinion. There were two things that we set out to find in the casino: more $3 blackjack tables (no luck there) and the bar with a 2-for-1 happy hour (bingo!) The happy hour only lasted until 4PM (it started at 8AM) and it was going on 3, so we had to act fast. Steph was already feelin’ it from the margaritas, so she didn’t have a whole lot of beer. I, however, was ready to get drunk for the first time all trip, so I double-fisted those mothers for all they were worth.

We settled on some nickel and quarter slots across from the bar and played for a while. Neither of us won a whole lot (a theme for the latter part of the trip) but at least the casino didn’t rape us of our money right away.

We made our way to the Wynn and looked around a bit, but that place is way too rich for our blood, so we didn’t spend a lot of time there.

Our last stop northward was the Riviera. My boss had told me before we left that there were statues outside of the casino of naked mermaids or something that she always rubbed for good luck as she passed by them; I don’t know if it was the beer or what, but I didn’t see any naked statues.

We spent a good amount of time there. As such, I decided to bust out the $100 bill I’d been saving and tried to regain my slot machine swagger of old. Between playing quarter and dollar slots I’d managed to parlay that into $150. Briefly, I thought of calling it a day, which would have been the wise thing to do.

Nope. I played that whole $150 trying to get back to my former glory… and for my effort I lost it all. Being out of money and unwilling to take any money out of the ATM, we left the Riviera, me penniless and her down for the trip.

***

We walked down the strip silently; only stopping at a McDonald’s to get a soda. I think both of us were bummed that we didn’t win any money, me more so because I had won and won big compared to the $100 that I originally had taken out. It was kind of tough once we got to the heart of the strip seeing all the people reveling in the fun knowing that we were going to leave soon.

Darkness descended. We soon realized that we hadn’t a single picture of the both of us together. We could’ve had one from when we saw the fake Beatles – fucking awesome, buy the way – but for $13.00, we passed. In fact, not only did we not have pictures of us together, we had no pictures whatsoever. So we took out our cameras and snapped recklessly all the way down towards our hotel. Depressing signs, the New York New York skyline, the fountains in front of Paris and Bellagio… all taken haphazardly but pictures of Vegas nonetheless.

And then, the opportunity arose to take a picture of the what we deemed the Holy Grail pictures: a snapshot with the guys on the strip who hand out cards of “escorts” to call. We talked about it all trip; we even thought it would be a coup if we could get them to hand over one of the t-shirts that they wore.

Well, I didn’t have the balls to ask them for a t-shirt; I didn’t want to trade them my “Cudahy” shirt (white trash represent, son, woo woo!). But as you can see below we did get a picture and it was awesome.

***

Finally we got back to the Excalibur with a half hour to spare. Steph went to the bathroom, and in that time I rationalized with myself that taking out another twenty dollars wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. So I did. It turned out to be the best decision I made all trip.

She still had some cash on her, so we sat down at a circle of dollar Wheel of Fortune machines. One three dollar spin…nothing. Next spin… I got the bonus spin which I had gotten a quite a few times before at other casinos. I watched it go round and round before it settled on my biggest win to date: FIVE. HUNDRED. DOLLARS!

I’m not really one to show my emotions – this was no different, all I could say was “Steph, come here and look at this!” – but in my mind I was running through the casino with my hands raised and screaming Ric Flair style “WOOOO!s” at the top of my lungs. The guy next to me told me to take the money and run, which I did. I cashed out at $517 dollars, up about $120 for the trip. All of this happened about 15 minutes before our shuttle was to leave.

I left for the airport a happy, happy man. Steph was happy too, if only because I wouldn’t be surly and bitchy the entire flight home. This would’ve all been a great coda to our trip except that when we got to the airport, we found shortly after that our flight had been delayed. Apparently there was a storm in Milwaukee, and the plane that was going to pick us up hadn’t left yet.

I dealt with it the only way I knew how – with beer. The lounge in the airport charged six bucks for a 20 oz. Budweiser. I drank a few of those until they made me tired, then we made our way back to the gate.

By now it was almost 1 in the morning, and after walking around the airport a while – and wasting money on their slot machines – we tried to take a nap. Trying to sleep in an airport is hard enough, but when there’s people still playing slot machines it’s damn near impossible. “WHEEL! OF! FORTUNE!” kept repeating itself over and over again, impeding my ability to drift off, but eventually I did. I awoke maybe an hour and a half later, in time to see some very travel-weary people get off the plane.

You’d think that after such a long day that I would be able to fall asleep on the flight home, but no. Steph was out like a light after taking some Dramamine, but I stayed awake for the entire thing. The images I saw outside of the window were straight out of a dreamscape. The blues and purples and oranges of the sunrise in the clouds seemed surreal and were so vivid I can still see them now. In those three or so hours, I was able to put the trip in perspective. True, the place is incredibly fake. It’s impossible to get drunk there just playing slots or video poker at the bar. But I’ll be damned if it wasn’t an escape of the highest order. There is seriously nothing like it that I have ever experienced. At its base it might just be gambling and booze and pretty people, but unless you’ve been there, you really wouldn’t know the extent of the excess.

We touched down somewhere around 9:45AM local time. Exhaustion set in as we waited for our bags; nothing seemed as welcoming as our own bed. Finally, we left the airport and went home. Thoughts of slot machines and roulette wheels and palm trees danced in my head as I headed towards a deep sleep. You’d only be kidding yourself if you think that, when I woke up, I didn’t immediately want to head back to Sin City.

(I realize this post was really long; I tried to do the "read more" code thing, but it worked like shit. Perhaps it's the scotch or perhaps I am an idiot, but either way I'm fed up with it. )