Las Vegas: Resolving To Get Away (cont.)

So I flag her over and order a Wild Turkey on the rocks.  Five suspiciously long minutes later she reappears with a three quarter sized tumbler packed full of ice cubes and maybe a half a shot of bourbon sloshing around the bottom. 

“Nine dollars,” she smiles as she hands me the thing. 

My jaw loosens from its hinges and drops to the floor.  I convince her to take it back to the bar and tell the bartender her customer had split and gave her five bucks for her trouble.  It is only time I have ever paid someone to not give me a drink. 

Obviously, we are not in the right tax bracket to receive the complimentary services of even the second rate casinos; so we decide to take in the night air and brainstorm. 

A couple of blocks down the strip, a huckster give us some two-for-one drink coupons for at the Kahunaville bar in Treasure Island.  Kahunaville is modeled after the bar in the movie, Cocktail, waiters juggling the bottles and making oversweet, under potent drinks with cute tropical name. 

I know it will be a bad scene before we even step inside, but my veto proves impotent.  Two for one seems like a good deal on the surface, but when the drinks are small, seemingly without alcohol and $10 each, it is slightly misleading. By the time the DJ takes “My Humps” for a second spin, we are climbing over each other to get out the door.

Getting a legitimate drink without breaking the bank is proving harder than expected.  We decide we have to do it the old fashioned way: a liquor store.  At this point, $32 for some of Kentucky’s finest seems like a hell of a deal.

We spend the rest of the night sneaking into the different hotels on the strip, filling our stolen cups up with ice from the hotel ice dispensers and pouring Wild Turkey out of a brown paper bag.

It's 4:30 AM and we are sitting in the main casino of the Luxor, much further from the Circus Circus than we want to be.  James lights up one of the cigarettes he bought somewhere along the way, and it occurs to me what a group of degenerate swine we have become. 

I scan the faces of James and Andrew in an attempt to gauge what I, myself, might look like.  I see tired, haggard, uninspired faces.  I look around and see the same faces all around us.  From the chain-smoking grandmother pulling the cranking the slot machine to the off-track bettor wearing sunglasses in the windowless parlor, it is all the same.  Everyone kept awake by a dangerous mixture of booze, vice and electricity. 

It's depressing enough to make me snap.  Angrily, I yell at the others for being slothenly drunkards.

"What in hell are we doing?" I shout.
 
So we trod outside, hail an overpriced cab and plop down in our hotel room at the Circus Circus. As uneventful as it sounds, this first night is actually the best night I have in Vegas.

The next morning, I wake up bright and early. I look out the window to see an overcast day. I look down to the Strip to see it already bustling with cars and pedestrians. I decide that I no longer want to be in Las Vegas.  Fortunately, the Circus Circus has a hot tub, which is a great place to pretend you’re somewhere else.  So I wake up everyone and recruit the ladies to accompany me. 

After several hours of hopping from hot tub to pool, I feel I am relaxed enough to face another day.  I am wrong.  Any way you slice it, you need a lot of disposable income to have a good time in Las Vegas.  Gambling aside, entertainment here costs money.  If you’re not willing to shell out $100 for a seat, the Broadway-style shows are not for you.  And if you can’t seem to justify paying $65 for a hockey puck sized steak “medallion,” you’re relegated to food courts and buffets.

The only remaining option is to be a fly on the wall.

Watching people blow large wads of cash on card games with funny names sums up my December 30th.  I can’t help but notice as we walk around that even the devoted gamblers, throwing their extra cash around the game table, look just as bored as we are.

So what is it about this town that consistently draws so many millions of tourists into its grip year after year?  This is a question I cannot answer; but even as I write this, I feel some perverse yearning to be back in one the main casinos of the Bellagio at 3:30 AM. 

But I digress.  What draws the six of us from all over the United States to Las Vegas is the promise of a world-class New Year’s party.  On the day of the big event, anticipation is high.  What ensues in the fifteen hours before the clock strikes midnight is too ugly to recount in full detail here—I can only say that it involves a bottle of expensive tequila, no clothes, me kissing my best friend with tongue in front of my girlfriend, vomit and a big fight.  Everyone ends up mad at everyone else except for Andrew who has the yaks and zonks out on the bed.

The next morning I am beyond ready to get out of Vegas.  I wake everybody up at sunrise and convince them that we have to “beat the rush.” We check out of the Circus Circus at 7:45 AM. 

As we finally pull onto the freeway heading to Los Angeles, I find myself in the best mood I had been in since the evening of December 29th when we were driving into Las Vegas staring at all the bright lights—which leads me to conclude that the only thing better than going to Las Vegas is leaving.

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