Vegas Trip Report (8/13-8/15)

[Michael Davis]

I left for Vegas about 2 a.m. Saturday morning (Friday night) after hanging out with jason t and sponger and bikestealer and others at the Commerce the night before. It was sort of fun, but the game was full of nits and honestly I’m not a big fan of young people or overdressed old people. Plus, Sponger sucked out my pocket jacks that I told everyone were pocket kings on the first hand and I had difficulty controlling my anger.

I get there exhausted at about 6:30, pulled into the Bellagio parking garage and tried to nap in my car since I figured I couldn’t check in. I am severely sunburned so sleeping against the grainy surface of my now-decrepit 2003 Taurus was near impossible. To remedy the situation, I took the plastic off of my newly drycleaned shiny blue Diablo-style shirt and placed it under my body. I woke up one half later near dead of double suffocation, first from the plastic, second from the desert heat.

Bedraggled and thankless to be alive, I wander up the Bellagio poker room looking like hell and for some action, but none of the cocktail waitresses are in house and I return to my car to rub one out instead.

75 seconds later I return to the poker room and sit in a bad 15-30 game and proceed to flop a straight on my first hand and lose. So I quit and go play 8-16 and lose $500 there and then I go check-in and go to sleep after playing with the drapes.

I wake up at some point and go to the Venetian to have dinner with my friends who are supposedly the reason I am in town. I walk the wrong way to dinner and end up on the north end of the strip by Mandalay Bay. On the way there a drunk Irishman is going on and on about Rafael Palmeiro and trying to start fights with passersby. It ends when he says, “Rafael Palmeiro likes to cream in his hands,” at which point a police officer intervened. On the wrong end of the strip, I take a cab to the Venetian and arrive 20 minutes late, the earliest I’ve ever arrived to a large group gathering.

At dinner I make ten or so new acquaintances but none of them are memorable. My actual friends who aren’t really friends but people I happen to know who think I like them are near passed out before dinner starts. We converse about working out, getting drunk and consequential stomach cramps, and teaching math in Los Angeles County. I find some toothpicks to stay awake and then go to some place called the V-Bar for about ten minutes before bowing out because dance clubs intimidate me.

The meal I had was giving my stomach the fits, so I walk back to the Bellagio, this time going the right way. I go to my room and take a huge dump and decide to go back to sleep because I’m pretty damn tired from playing double flop hold ‘em anyways. Before I go to sleep I check out the fine selection of erotic films and decide to blow $29.99 on something called Sexcapades (I think), where you actually get to pick and choose scenes, fast forward through them, and stuff. Before I did this I tried to connect my computer to Bellagio wi-fi but the connection was terrible.

I rub four out and my penis now looks like the rest of my sunburned body. I go to sleep.

Somewhere along the way I wake up and 2+2er geormiet calls me and says, “Hey, I just broke up with my girlfriend, I’m coming to Vegas after all.” My only hope is that he doesn’t get there before noon, when my subscription to Sexcapades (I am now certain this is not what it was called) runs out. Alas, he gets there very early, and I am forced to give myself one final go before returning his call and welcoming him to the room.

I played some more poker and lost lots more money without managing to play any memorable hands. If George didn’t show up, I wouldn’t have played enough hours to get the room comp rate because I was just getting killed.

In the morning I call up my friends- I use the name for sake of simplicity- who are supposed to use the room key I gave them to come to the Bellagio’s pool for breakfast and to ogle the cabana boys who are probably fat women like the one who denied them access when they tried to sneak into the pool the day before. But when I call them they say, “Sorry we’re gone, have a safe drive back,” but I’m not driving back until Monday so now I wonder why I am in this godforsaken town with this awful stomach ache and some guy who is probably going to bitch about his ex-girlfriend the whole time while not listening to me bitch about my blisters or my masturbatory habits or the girl I had a crush on three months ago that I can’t get over, all more important matters than some stupid breakup and I am not an emotional tampon.

So I go down to the poker room and find George frothing at the mouth while playing in the 30-60 game. He says something to me about going to sleep, I ignore him for twenty minutes while relaying all of the bad beats I suffered earlier, and eventually he finally gives in and goes to sleep. I go back to the casino to play some blackjack and end up losing a cozy sum.

There’s not much to do because I don’t like to do much, so I just wander the streets thinking about how much I’d like to nail 8 out of 10 women and 2 out of 10 men that walk by me. But since I don’t have any game I decide to look for hookers and begin by approaching women on the street and asking, “Are you a hooker?” The first few say no so I asked them what motivated their fashion choices and when some responded by laughing I had a revelation that I will have to elaborate at a later time. Finally I find an actual hooker and tell her George’s sob story.

The hooker, who tells me her name is Marilyn but it’s really something like Spicy or Vixen or Anal Annie comes up to the room and tells me it will be $500 for both of us, but I inform her that I’m still burned out from Sexcapades and that she should just take care of my lovelorn friend who actually isn’t lovelorn. I don’t know what happened after that but Vixen never took a dollar from me and she seemed very pleased three minutes later as she was leaving.

Somewhere along the way I end up outside the Bellagio watching the water fountain spray up into the air and people being impressed. I call mike l. to tell him how great my weekend has been and he starts yelling at me about some nonsense hands he posted and how he plays good even though I think he plays bad, and how I play bad even though I think I play bad. I tell him some hands and he doesn’t respond but he laughs and says sorry, his wife made a joke and I can continue relaying my hands but his wife is a comedic genius and the conversation isn’t going anywhere. Then I just start dropping f-bombs and talking about hookers loudly enough so that I get dirty looks from all the families walking by hoping to see that spectacular waterworks show that just ended. I decide to go back into the Bellagio but I stop in at Hermes first and think about buying a $1000 sweater, but decided I would only buy it if Hermes were spraypainted across the chest.

I think about going to the Wynn but last time I tried to tell Clarkmeister all of my bad stories he wouldn’t listen, and I was afraid I would walk the wrong way again.

George went back to sleep for awhile and I think I tried to get internet access again but when that failed I just wandered the halls drooling. Then I got bored and went to play blackjack and won about a million dollars and cashed out a mountain of black chips that made up for all my poker losses. At least I play blackjack good. I talked to a chick named Tatiana from Venezuela but despite her name she was truly hideous and I’m glad she kept getting 14 while I was getting 20.

George is playing poker now with The Mason in the 30-60. I was going to introduce myself but I was a little scared because Mason is bigger than most math nerds and looks like he could take anyone at the table. So George gets up and comes watch me play blackjack, at which point I stop winning of course, cash out, and make it almost to the noodle bar before being sucked in by pai gow. I win there because I’m a damned fine pai gow player.

Then George and I went to play poker and I played 20-40 stud and ran into an old friend, a dealer from Detroit who goes by Sam but is really named Essam but probably wants to lose his ethnicity in lily-white Las Vegas. I sit down and he doesn’t remember me, so I ask him if they let him come to work drunk here like they did in Detroit. He doesn’t think that’s very funny but only because he actually was not drunk this time. He proceeds to deal me a lot of bad hands and I misplay all of them and lose $500 in about twenty minutes, so I go play 4-8 with George. He is drinking and makes a terrible fold that costs him half of a pot. He was raising a lot and the table was getting angry, but thankfully a guy wearing a leopard print shirt with a faux diamond-encrusted watch keeps order. George, apparently not hungover from Spicy, is trying to pick up the old chick next to him and the even less attractive old chick to my left asks me to buy her a drink, but she is stupid because she works there and she didn’t even know drinks were free, and obviously I’m not buying a stupid chick a drink.

The evening ends uneventfully and I arise the next morning and go the Bellagio buffet where, despite not having a chair and being forced to sit on the floor, I enjoy some chicken ‘n beer while George tries all of the finest delicacies, including venison, spicy leg of lamb, and anchovies, which he says remind him of his girlfriend.

I can’t wait to go back.