The Drunken Blog

Sin City, or as my good friends call it, “Oh, Vegas,” certainly is a sight to behold. Flying in on the plane at 2AM EST, the area around Vegas was completely dark. The city itself was lit, and surprisingly flat. I didn’t really realize how big Vegas was when I drove there several years ago, I had always been confined to the strip, which contains very tall and grandiose buildings. Flying into Vegas, though, you quickly realize that there are people that live in Vegas, and surprisingly they don’t live in high rises.

Vegas, by definition, is a debacle, but this particular trip would have an elevated debauchery level. We got a hotel room in Caesar’s Palace, in the new tower which has an exquisite view of the Bellagio fountains. The room we got was normally $500 a night, we got it for half that thanks to a friend I have living in Vegas. However, because we went through somewhat unconventional means to secure our reservations (two rooms for three nights for seven people), the group wasn’t sure if the trip would even pan out, or if my friend would fall through.

Personally, I was kind of hoping the trip would fall through. I had a good weekend of activities planned that wouldn’t require me to take off from work and would be a lot cheaper than going out to Vegas. Of course, I was excited to go to Vegas up until the point that I had to pay $700 to get my car repaired, basically my entire Vegas budget. I could have backed out at anytime, but I decided to go through with the trip. Doug is being sent oversees for his job at the end of the month for a year, so it would be one of the last times I would get to hang out with him.

Because I had waited so long to get my ticket, my flight options were a bit limited. Flights within my budget left DC at 9pm either on Thursday night or Friday night. My budget, by the way, was a $300 Jet Blue gift card that I randomly won from a contest on Gizmodo.com. My options were get there at 11pm on Thursday and somehow manage to occupy myself until I could check into my room at 4pm on Friday, or get in at 11pm on Friday night and miss almost a full day of Vegas. I opted for the Thursday option, I figured worse case scenario - I was in Vegas.

The flight itself was pretty cool, I got to see the entire season opener for the NFL, aka the Colts destroying the Saints. But getting in with no place to stay was kind of weird - fortunately, my buddy Ahab had been living in Vegas for the past 5 years and he obviously had a place to stay, so he let me stay with him for the night. Although, it was kind of odd getting to his place before him and seeing his mom for the first time since high school, but it brought back a lot of memories – she hasn’t changed a bit. She’s extremely friendly, kind of short and squat, and bit of a homebody. The interactions between her and Ahab were nothing short of hilarious.

I worked all day Thursday, so I was pretty tired when I got into Vegas at 2AM EST, but still managed to stay coherent enough to chat with Ahab’s mom until he got home. We all then stayed up until about 2AM PST just shooting the shit. Sleeping on the cushions from the love seat, my slumber was restless. I woke up around 8AM local time and I was tired, which is not the best way to start your first full day in Vegas.

However, the day actually started out very well. I was the only one awake, so I popped on the TV and started doing some channel surfing, and I’ll be damned if Top Gun wasn’t on. I watched the cinematic masterpiece in its entirety and I couldn’t help but thinking about when the remastered HD version would come out….

The AVP volleyball tournament was in town, and it just so happened that the women’s championship was that day, and it just so happened that Ahab was working the event that day. I tagged along with my nice camera. I got to hang out in the player’s tent, drink their Fiji water, put on their sunscreen, do just about anything the players could do except for actually play and use their bathroom. I was taking pictures of the players warming up and while I was doing that Ahab’s boss came to me an asked where my credentials were. It seemed as if when I was looking through the viewfinder on my camera, Ahab had walked back to the player’s area and I was left by myself. I vehemently explained that I was with Ahab and amazingly Ahab’s boss was fine with me being there, in fact, he came back about 30 minutes later and gave me an all access pass so that I wouldn’t be Ahab’s lapdog the entire time.

Have I ever mentioned that volleyball players are hot? Especially the bathing suits they wear – they’re not thongs, but they’re also not quite big enough to completely cover their ass. It’s stupendous. I would love to be a professional women’s volleyball picture taker, I think it would complete my life. The only problem is that some of the girls are a little tall for me, so maybe I could follow around the amateur women’s volleyball tournament. The amateurs have to be shorter than the pros, right?

Eventually Doug made it in, but he waited at the airport for Ella, whose flight didn’t get in for an hour after his. They didn’t actually get into the hotel until about four. The rooms weren’t ready yet so we dropped off our bags and started doing what everybody does in Vegas, we ate food. And we drank, and there even might have been just the slightest bit of gambling involved.The place we went for food was out of draft beer (wtf?). The waiter could tell how distraught this made me and promised to make my rum and coke sufficiently rummy to make up for the lack of beer. He did not disappoint – after my second drink my mom called me, and she probably thought that I was drunk (I wasn’t drunk at that point, just buzzed, and in a good mood, which has similar effects to being drunk and lowering inhibitions).When we finished dinner our rooms were ready. While we were checking in we had this super nice checker-inner lady. I suppose it’s her job to be nice, but I swear she was hitting on somebody in our group – my money was on Ella. Anyway, our conversation moved to the way of late night happenings in Vegas. We explained that we had a hook up at Pure and that we would be going there on Saturday night, but we didn’t have plans for Friday night yet.Our lovely lady friend suggested Tao. Tao is a place that we tried to go to the last time we were in Vegas with only slight success. If you can’t tell by the name, it’s an Asian-themed club, not that the theme really matters. Every place in Vegas sells the same $8 drinks (up from $7 a couple of years ago). But this year was going to be different because instead of trying to go in blind, we had a connection through our front desk friend. She was going to give our number to the promoter for Tao and we would get on the guest list, and we would get right in, and girls would flock to us, and we would all have a grand time.Vegas is a magical place, but one of two conditions has to be true: 1) you are an extremely attractive female, or 2) you are an extremely rich male. However, even though I think I look good in a dress, nobody else does. Also, even though I’m baller enough to go to Vegas when all of my trip money was used to repair my car, the $700 wouldn’t even be enough to cover a single night in the life of an extremely rich male in Vegas. So basically what I’m saying here is we were about to get he raw end of the shaft.

Manuel called us up not too long after we got into the room. He asked how many people there would be (eight) and then he asked what the ratio would be. I told Doug postmortem that he should have said the ratio would be 16%. That would have been a lie, but converting fractions to decimals isn’t easy after you’ve been drinking. The correct percentage would have been 12.5%, or 1:7 as Doug told Manuel.

Manuel then went on to tell us the dynamics of clubs in Vegas. He explained the two conditions necessary to have a magical time in Vegas, although he wasn’t quite as blunt. Even the most attractive Vegas girl couldn’t get seven guys into a club, so Manuel went the other route; he gave us the benefit of the doubt and thought maybe we brought some benjamins to burn. He offered to let us get a table for the low low price of 3 bottles of Champaign, priced to move at only $275 each. Manuel then proceeded to once again explain how it was that Vegas actually worked, and also what a great deal we were getting. Paying nigh $900 to guarantee admission is not particularly my idea of a great way to start the Vegas experience, despite the fact that it would only be a little over $100 each.

At this point, I took a nap. It was pretty nice; I slept in the clothes that I planned to wear out for the night, which is a great idea. You might think that sleeping in a dress shirt would put wrinkles in it and possibly mess up the collar, but it actually does the exact opposite. When the shirt is pressed between the bed and your body, it miraculously flattens out all of the wrinkles; it also presses your collar. Basically, I don’t know why I don’t sleep in my work clothes to get them ready for the next day of work; I could save myself loads of time by not needing to get dressed in the morning, nor having to iron!

In order to kill time before everybody else got in around 11 that night, we went to the liquor store and paid extremely marked up prices for liquor. The worst part about it was the fact that they didn’t even have Captain Morgan, my choice for rum. But, when in Rome, as Ron Burgundy would say.

Doug, Ella, and I went back up to the room and began consuming said liquor. Doug got the ingredients for vodka tonic, Ella got Parrot Bay something or another, which is the primary ingredient for a bad night, I believe, and I got the rum, of course, and Pepsi, which makes for a horrible rum and coke.

After a few primer drinks we headed out to a bar in Caesar’s called Shadow Bar. It’s like a strip club combined with a Bond movie, which, as we all know, are PG-13. So, instead of having girls fully nude and fully visible, they have the fully nude girls behind a screen with a backlight on them, so you can only see the outline of their naked bodies doing erotic dances. It was a nice place to kill time; I almost didn’t feel bad paying $8 per beer.

Everybody else eventually made it to Vegas, and we headed out. Where it was exactly that we were heading was unclear, but that wasn’t the point. We were in Vegas, and I’ll be damned if we weren’t going to drink like we were on vacation. We started off at a casino called Bill’s. With a name like that you know it has to be good. Drinks were only $2.50 which you know means trouble. After a while we decided we would try to explore some. We came across a place that had $2.00 beers, unheard of in Vegas, at least from my own experience. This place was so classy that the bathroom had not just a condom dispenser, but a cock-ring dispenser. Oh, Vegas. We eventually meandered our way back to Bill’s for the after hour club contained inside (I’m pretty sure the beers were $8 down there, and it was a cash only bar!) Unfortunately, our 12.5% ratio was too low to get us admitted. Doug decided it was time to go so he left, Ella and I were not far behind, but before we did leave a girl came up to me and asked what I was doing on Monday night.

I thought to myself for a bit, it was a Friday- what would this girl care about what I was doing on a Monday? Was this some sort of code that prostitutes were using? Was she some sort of promoter for some event happening on Monday? Was she hitting on me and she couldn’t hang out on the weekend because she was actually an indentured servant and her boss wouldn’t let her do anything on the weekend? I may never know, although I think I will go with it’s code for her being a prostitute, but instead of me saying that I then asked for a picture with her, for which she obliged. However, in order to make this non-story into a somewhat interesting actual-story, I will say that she threw in the picture for free after a particularly bad romp in the sack, for which she charged me her first born son. As an aside, always double bag it in Vegas.

And that concluded my first night in Oh, Vegas.

Other posts by Justin

This entry was posted on Monday, September 17th, 2007 at 11:18 am and is filed under good times, friends, observations, alcohol, girls, Ahab . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.