"We Were Rhyming Things with Things" and How to Hurt Yourself in 1 Easy Step: Part 3

The train keeps on rolling, folks. Gather round for story time. How do I start this one off?

I could mention that Catherine slept like a rock thanks to her bottle of medicine. I could also mention that I did not. I could bring up my complaints about how little a $15 sleeping bag actually does (warmth? padding? nada.). I'll skip all that. All you need to know is that I woke up cranky, Catherine woke up drunk and we wasted no time hitting the road again; this time for Vegas.

In retrospect, we probably should've spent a little more time doing more touristy things at the canyon. Sure, it's just a really, really grand hole but a part of my brain is left to wonder what it looks like from the bottom. At least now I have a legitimate excuse to go back I suppose. C'est la vie.

Ok, on to the drive.

"Oh! Hey, look! We're gonna pass the Hoover Dam, that's kinda neat."

Turns out, passing the hoover dam isn't neat. Turns out, they were supposed to finish a bridge that might have made that neat sometime last year. Not the case, even though the GPS swore it was completed and kept yelling at us to drive the highlighted route (right into Lake Mead, mind you). Never trust the machines. So instead of being kind of neat, you're weaving your way through security check points, cars looking for parking spots and some of the slowest moving fat people who ever waddled to a scenic overlook (too mean?).

No big deal though. It's not like we're trying to make it there by so and so a time or stay on such and such a schedule. We're just leisurely working our way up to Vegas. No sense in getting bent out of shape over a 30 minute detour; until you realize that wow, with the top down, that sun is hot. Really hot. But we got a convertible and paid serious money for it. Fuck it, the top stays down.

A few hours later, we're in Vegas and I'm burnt through my shirt. My arms are fine cause I was able to get sun screen on them. My shoulders were not quite so lucky, so I wound up with a very red circle on my upper left arm (what the hell is that about anyway?) and a general crispiness everywhere else. Goddamn deserts. I'm not gonna let this ruin my mood though: I'm in Vegas on a Saturday night. Let's rip some shit up.

First things first, though. We need to rent a room somewhere. Mind you, we have been remarkably foolish budgeting the first couple days of this trip. Between trips to walmart (I still shudder) and food and drinks and hotels...we'd both dropped considerably more than we had intended at this particular point in the trip. So we decide to cut some corners.

We needed to be close to the strip for obvious reasons, but without a reservation, can't afford to stay on it. No problem - there's a Motel 6 a block off the strip, and they offer internet. Sold. And since we're making great time, we can stay in Vegas for 2 nights. Yeah, live the dream.

I never thought I would chalk up "Lack of (visible) blood on the carpet" in the "Pros" column for a place, but when you're reaching for anything, it'll do. The place was an amazing shit hole. I'm pretty sure everyone else who was staying there busted out of the hotels on the strip and was now living there. Either that or they were there for the 4 hour special. Not my concern; I mean, who am I to judge and in Vegas, no less.

A quick shower and we were off to explore the strip...

This is probably the time to mention that Vegas really freaked me out. It just didn't feel right. There was something off about it. It took me both days before I finally realized what was bothering me: I thought Vegas had no defining personality of its own. Everything about Vegas, from the buildings to the people was borrowed from somewhere else. It was like a Family Guy episode. There was the New York, NY casino that was a strange parody/tribute to NYC. There was the French one with the Eiffel tower, there was the Luxor (shaped like a pyramid), etc, etc. Everything about it was borrowed.

This bothered me tremendously when I let myself think about it. What kind of place would just settle for borrowing from other people without contributing their own identity into it. But then it hit me like a ton of bricks: the fact that all this stuff was in one place; that was Vegas' contribution. Everything for everyone from everywhere: that's Vegas. Ok, now I get it.

Just had to get that off my chest. Back to the narrative.

I'm sure I mentioned this earlier and Vegas is where this idiot idea really took hold: Catherine and I decided that when in doubt, we should try to stay on eastern standard time. Giving yourself 3 extra hours of stupid in Vegas is a terrible idea. Time loses all meaning fast enough when there are no windows in the hotels/casinos, and if you take on trying to tell time relative to two distinctly different time zones while drinking heavily...you'd have to be completely retarded. We were more than up to that particular task.

So we get to the casinos and figure we should probably start out with dinner/lunch. I'm experiencing total sensory overload so I have no idea what I want to eat or where. We settled on a rain forest cafe (which I had never heard of) but apparently they do mock thunder storms in there and a ton of really kitsch-y stuff that has probably come from the destruction of a few rain forests. My kind of place.

We wrap up our meal and then it's off to find drinks (of course). I settle on a $7 beer and Catherine picks up a beverage that will change the course of the next two days: she gets her sippy cup. For $20 (give or take; these details get a little fuzzy), she purchases what amounts to a liter (more on how we found that out later) of vodka drink mix. With the first drink of the day procured, it's off to find a place where we can get more of them at a considerably discounted rate. I mean, how are all these people hammered at $7 bucks a pop?

We search casino bar after casino bar. Nothing seems quite right; sure, it's only 3PM local (but 6PM in our heads) and maybe people haven't settled in yet but I don't think that was it. None of the places we tried felt like any place that we could sit down and get down to the business of the day. Finally, after some wandering, we found our home for the next few hours (and I shit you not): the irish pub in the New York, NY casino. Go figure.

The fat italian bar tender seemed amicable enough and the prices were close enough to home that we were willing to overlook all the goofy shit they had plastered to the walls of this 'irish' pub (seriously, it looked like a real pub fucked an Applebees and this place popped out). An added perk, they had an outdoor patio thing going on so that was nice.

As the hours passed and the drinking continued, we had to form our plans for the remainder of the evening. We settled on finding another bar to hop to. We weren't looking to be creative, folks. So we were off again, a few drinks drunker and a few bucks lighter.

At this point, it's closer to normal bar hours local time so that might've helped improve the mood of a few of the places we had initially rejected. For phase two, we settled into some martini bar looking place (which unexpectedly had better prices than the irish pub). And here was where the shots started flowing.

But before I take you further down the rabbit hole, I'd like to relate a story of one of the more retarded aspects of the Las Vegas casinos. Turns out, you can smoke in the casino proper but the second you enter an establishment INSIDE THAT VERY SAME CASINO, you can no longer smoke. Think about that for a second (lord knows I did, and for a lot longer than a second). You can smoke in at point A, but 2 steps to the left, no smoking. My head almost exploded. This is the same city that has escort service catalogues available on every street corner. I'm just baffled.

Anyway. 9PM (local) finally rolls around but that's midnight eastern which means happy birthday Catherine. Birthday shots and birthday texting commences. All very nice and sentimental. Then it dawns on us: it's only 9PM local. That means it's still early and Catherine wants to get a tattoo. At least, that's what it meant to us at that particular moment. Realistically, it meant we were hammered way too early. But that's OK; no one's here to judge. Right?

Strange phenomenon: Everybody out west has ink. Everybody. Logically, we started asking people where would be a good place to get a tattoo. Stranger phenomenon: Apparently, no two people got their tattoos done at the same parlor.

We start asking people with nice designs, and they're recommending this person and then we bump into someone else who recommends that person. At this point, I can't remember if it was two or three cab rides that we took before we could find two people to recommend the same place. We finally get to the tattoo parlor in the Hard Rock casino and things start to get really dumb.

Luckily for Catherine, the computers were down, otherwise she'd have a giant Mr. Met head tattooed on the back of her shoulder. With no clear Plan B, we scoured the walls and a display book for reasonable flash art. Score: a nice flower design that's girly but not gay. Into the chair she goes and out for beer I go.

I track down a deli of some kind in the casino (sure, and why not?) and pick up some beers and smokes. This is gonna be a while so I'm drinking, making phone calls, pacing the hallways a little, trying to keep occupied. I check on Catherine periodically to make sure she was still awake (that was a little touch and go at a few points, I have to be honest). At one point I ask her if she's OK and she's a little slow in answering so the tattoo artist asks her if she's alright. Catherine wakes up just enough to tell him she's sleepy. He nods and gets back to work. Only in Vegas, I tell ya.

By the time she finishes getting her tattoo, I can't even guess what time it was. We'll say 11:30 Vegas time. My dear sister has fulfilled her birthday wish with time to spare. Mission accomplished.

Except I'm in Vegas, I'm hammered and I get it in my head that I still want to hang out. But it's my sister's birthday and she's hammered and ready for bed. How could I deal with these conflicting issues? Well, there was only one mature way to proceed so far as I could see...

After putting my sister in a cab and pointing the cabbie in the right general direction, I proceeded to debase myself in all manner of ways (nothing illegal though, I do have standards). I'm going to skip the next 7 hours of this story (I'll be damned if I put that shit in writing), but I learned a few valuable lessons that night. The one that I really feel I earned was learning the hard way that Vegas is a 25 hour town, no exaggeration. There's no last call. The clubs don't close. You can get drinks until you can't afford them and watch the breakfast crew take over as the overnight crew leaves. It's absurd. The second lesson I learned is that aside from Denny's, there are no diners in the NY sense out there, which means there's no place to get breakfast or a cheeseburger deluxe or anything that you might crave after a night of retarded drinking. So after almost 18 hours of binge drinking (kids, don't try that at home), it was time for bed.

I wish I could tell you that after a day like this, we learned our lesson. I wish I could say that we had gotten the stupidity out of our system with this after school movie behavior, but alas, there is one more depraved chapter to tell. Hopefully it won't take another three months to write.

Stay tuned.

Rob