THE MEADOWS

CHAPTER 1

2009-01-22T19:32:00.000-08:00

The back of Leroy’s head is on the check-in desk at the MGM Grand hotel. He’s laughing and shaking his head back and forth, his upper body and limbs pulsating and writhing like the exposed pipes and gears exploding from the guts of a cuckoo clock gone berserk. His eyes are even laughing, and his legs are wobbling and splaying and almost buckling under him while he arches his back, as if almost wanting to attempt a back dive but not quite being able to extend back far enough. There’s something fizzy, maybe froth-like in his mustache, which I take to be some sort of illicit substance, or maybe just foam from the warm beer in his dangling left hand. The desk clerk pays him no attention. Chet’s trying to check us in this whole time, and I decide suddenly that I need to take Leroy away from the desk. He’s spry and reckless. Something about the whole situation seems dangerous, like at any moment something will just crack and send him over sanity’s Maginot line, or over the desk to strangle the attendant or a baggage handler, or attack the lady in a pantsuit who is hovering about the lobby clutching a clipboard to her chest and eyeing us suspiciously. So I grab him and mumble something about a cigarette. He jumps up like a break-dancing Gumby and high kicks at the domed glass ceiling way above us, tearing free of my grip and darting off into the Byzantine ornamentation of the lobby. I follow.

After consoling him with a smoke we stumble around an extravagant flower planter in the middle of the lobby. A good-sized, gold-coated statue of a lion is perched on it guarding things. It looks bored. The planter is an elaborate, well-kept garden filled with diverse plant life of many petals of vibrant colors, and shapes of stem and leaf, a wild collection of flora and inflorescence from all over the world. Bermuda Buttercups unfold in careful yellow curls, while the pristine white swirls of Lilies mingle with the scented wings of Roses and spikes of violet Hyacinths whose star-shaped leaves tremble in the breeze of the air-conditioning. A Blue Pimpernel’s petals are the soft shade of a chalk drawing’s sky. Leroy starts ashing in the flowers. And then there’s a moment where I glance up and see the clipboard-hugging woman coming over to us and I just know she’s up to no good. I try to grab Leroy but she beats me to it.

“You know there’s no smoking in the lobby.” Her lips are thin and tiny and crusted over with some brown flakey matter. They barely spread wide enough to let air pass through. Everything about her is tight and constrained. The pantsuit is only about four sizes too small for her. “You can only smoke over there on that side, where the red carpet is.”

We look over to where she is pointing. I strain my eyes trying to find some rigid, insuperable non-smoking parapet, this supposed bulwark of the lobby’s pristine atmosphere. It’s only about twenty feet away. We don’t see any physical barrier there. It’s just the place where the red carpet ends and the lobby’s tile floor begins. This strictly enforced regulation makes no sense, but maybe the smoke can’t penetrate the tile floor’s zone of smokeless air. Maybe an invisible wall emanates from the carpet’s edge and is made of fibers too porous and resilient for any carcinogens to pass through.

Leroy arranges his face in a serious manner and, with much savoir-faire, deeply inhales on his cigarette. As he blows the smoke out he says, “We are deeply sorry. Our most sincere and humblest apologies to you and the great lords of MGM Grand. Though what you say makes absolutely no sense, we agree, we acquiesce, we concede that we are most egregiously wrong and will sashay over to the carpeted area to partake in our nicotine indulgence.”

We begin walking away as he continues talking in this odd way. The lady just smiles and nods and holds her clipboard a little tighter to her chest. I start to wonder what the hell is on that clipboard. If I could just get it away from her. Maybe it’s filled with her penciled sketches of the lion statue, or maybe a manifesto outlining the only sure fire way to win at Black Jack, or good recipes, or maybe just the names of people that MGM is keeping a watchful eye on. Maybe my name is on there.

Leroy is now smoking on the carpet and wandering around checking out all the slot machines, his arms circling like the cracked and crooked blades of a broken windmill, his head cranking around energetically looking all over the place at once. I come up behind him and stick a finger in his back. “I told you not to ash on those fucking flowers. You mindless twisted shit-licking idiot!” Leroy puts his hands up and tilts his head back nodding from side to side. He finishes his gesture with a crippling flourish, a frazzled cadenza of his limbs like the last surge of motion in a windup toy, and then every twirling thing comes to an abrupt stop. He stands there frozen in a very awkward pose, his arms hanging out like thin, crooked, gnarled tree branches. A bent and squashed cigarette is sticking out of his mouth. He seems to be chewing on it slightly. Somehow, through all of this, he has managed not to spill a single drop of beer from the can that he is now slightly crushing in his left hand. He looks like the Tin Man, all rusted in place before Dorothy comes along and oils him up.

I try some more abuse. “Come on man. Keep it together. We need to get into our hotel room. We can’t make any more mistakes. Just look. There’s Chet over there trying to convince that damn clerk to give us the keys. Look at that poor fuck.”

Chet is gesticulating madly at the clerk and seems to be having quite an animated conversation. It worries me. I decide, in a sudden epiphanic flash, that he needs some succor. I grab Leroy’s chewed and flattened cigarette from his mouth and put it out on the plush red carpet. While giving him a menacing glare I direct a hushed stern voice towards where his face is. “Come on man. Look at Chet. He’s in trouble. He needs our help.” The ends of his mouth turn down making his mustache droop like a black hairy caterpillar. He glances lazily towards the lobby. I take the hush out of my voice this time. “And wipe that spume off of your mustache. It’s making me sick.”

So we start running like purse snatchers over to Chet at the desk, which is longer than any football field, like a baggage check station at an airport. We speed by the long marble countertop. Only a few clerks are standing behind it, and they’re busy punching keyboards and looking at computer screens. Chet is all the way at the other end.

I see immense cream-colored drapery suspended from a gold banister. I stop and stare at it. It is lovely. It is flowing down in all kinds of folded egg-white textures. I am lost. My head is melting in meringue. There is no escape. This body doesn’t seem to be holding me inside of it anymore. I want to reach up and grab all that fabric, let my hands run all over its milky marshmallow skin and then pull myself up into to it, hang from it like I’m catching a ride on a cloud, kick my feet in the air and laugh at all the middling creatures twittering and bustling around below me. You don’t need a body to do these things. Mine will be alright without me. Let me just get out of this skin here and…There is no place to put things here. There is no here here. No space to be in. Drowning in drapes. No air to be…can’t be…falling…down.

Damn. I can feel my toes again.

I start back up with the running.

Leroy beats me to Chet by a first down and puts his face right up in the Desk Clerk’s face. “Is something wrong here what seems to be the problem gentleman can I be of any help here?” He breathes it all out at once with his last puff of smoke just before I show up. Shit. I’m too late. This could get ugly. I try to stand very still and quiet. I try to make my face look resolute.

Chet seems calm. The Clerk seems okay. I can’t figure it out. I give Chet a confused glance. He just smiles and says, “Oh. We were just talking about this blind girl I work with and how fast she types, and how the computer screen can’t even keep up with her and it just goes blank.” Leroy and I just look at each other and then we stare back at the Clerk who doesn’t look even slightly amused by anything happening. Nothing makes sense, but soon we have our room key and some oleaginous guy with a pencil-thin mustache comes over and puts all of our luggage onto a cart for us. This is good. I don’t feel like carrying anything up to the room.

The mustachioed bellhop is like a crane, gaunt and towering over us. He is all knobby elbows and knees, with Nile-long, skinny drumsticks for legs. Leroy pulls me aside and whispers in my ear through a cupped hand, “This lummox of a man is filled with paranormal activity. He’s a walking nuclear waste dump. Don’t follow him too close. We could be sprouting ears from our necks soon. He may be an apparition, a slim poltergeist, some sort of lost figment of the ether spiriting around this place like a… ”

A severe and mechanical look from this gangly fellow stops Leroy mid-sentence. Then the bellhop smiles, again rather stolidly, and I push Leroy away from me, trying to distance myself from his lunacy, and Chet is walking up ahead towards where we are told the elevators are. The skeletal Bellhop stretches his long arm out for us to go on ahead with Chet. This seems like a good idea. We go on ahead hoping the guy will come up with our luggage behind us. There’s no way to know for sure.

I start imagining ways to grab that clipboard away from the irascible lady in the leotard-tight pantsuit. I mumble to myself things like, “Got to just…burglar it away…somehow…burglar the damn thing. Just have myself a little…looksy,” as I swivel my head around like a blind man playing the piano, casting my eyes her way. She’s still standing in the lobby behind us, which for some reason has gone all out-of-focus. The planter, the ceiling festooned with lines of many bright light bulbs, the tiles glinting under them, the gilded lion baby-sitting the planter, and a thousand other stippled explosions of gold and coruscation are all just a woozy blur. This does wonders for her appearance. The faceless-blob-look suits her well.

Everything is mashed-up. Some kind of flocculation going on. Not sure. I start to say something resembling the word, “quicksilver,” but all that seems to come out is a dull moan. Am I here? Where’d my…how’d I get to this…walking? Walk. Yes. I must walk to the…Damn! Clipboardhuggingwoman…where? Gone…dematerialized. Now, if I keep this…watch out! Buttons…el…E…Vador? Numbers and lights, murders and fights, lumbers and nights…well, well. Hello there Mr., um, W.A. Spooner I presume? Stop it! Got to keep things…that thing, that giraffe, that thin man pushing that luggage cart…got to keep him away from me…he’s stealing our…clothes? Just the clothes on my back…Run! Run you fool! The carpet needs a shave. A mow…needs to be mowed…mowed down…lower its damn ears…toast popping up, a fire alarm, a dial tone, a blip, a beep, a bong on a gong…time’s up…soup’s up…order’s ready…somebody’s at the door…no! The opening of a tomb. Get in that little room. All aboard. Cram in there. Hold the door! I’ve got to go…Up…Up…and…away…

This is not then. This was now. Either way I start to, started, I start, I am starting, I will be…I started yodeling.

We got a place up on the 20th floor. We are strangers here. They gave us keys. They were given to us. There we are, and there we were, walking all together, lost in stunned disbelief as we ride up, then, in an elevator, now. The room was, and probably still is, a fucking miracle of air-conditioned splendor. Immaculate. Commodious. I am content at last. I was content then. When is it now? When is then? What is this now? Where are these things, this television, this incredible view of the Las Vegas strip, New York New York out the window? Is there a now? The beds are huge and luxurious. Is this a Sunday? The bathroom is clean and large and I want to shower in very hot water for a very long time. There are clean glasses and an actual ice bucket. I appreciate every last beautiful detail of this clean large and plush room. I was there in a when that seems like now and there are many pools below and maybe a tropical paradise and 110° heat. Cool air, clean air, a remote control, a large metal tray of unknown use, my face is no longer melting off of my face. This is nice. This was nice. This will be a good thing.

CHAPTER 2

2009-01-22T19:31:00.000-08:00

Everything began for me at 5 a.m. Friday morning in San Francisco’s mission district. I’d fallen asleep on somebody’s couch and was awoken by a cat licking at my face. After that I couldn’t get back into any dreams so I just lay there waiting for time to go by. I was planning to go to Vegas that day anyway with Leroy and Chet, who were roommates and lived only 7 or 8 blocks away from where I was, and we were supposed to leave early. I stared at the ceiling for a bit and awaited a phone call from them. After a while I got tired of that and got up, put on my shoes, and went out to get some coffee. The sun was bright and it felt good to be outside early and walking in the sun. I wasted some more time sitting outside the coffee shop watching buses go by, trying not to stare at other people, and trying not to drink my coffee too fast. It was exciting stuff.

Soon eight o’clock rolled around and nobody’d called, so I went back to the apartment I’d fallen asleep at the night before and rang the bell to be let in. After much buzzing and noise and confusion, somebody let me back in and I went back to my supine position on the couch. Lying there, not thinking much, not sleeping, I started getting anxious and soon turned on the television. People kept trying to sell me things I didn’t want, making it seem as if I needed these things when I really didn’t. It got tiresome. I clicked off the TV and stared at the walls.

I finally called Leroy around nine or so, and he answered in a gravelly, unslept growl. When he said my name it sounded like a needle being obstreperously scraped across a badly warped record. It turned out he was on his way to score some cocaine and that Chet was on his way to pick up the rental car. I knew this would take a while. I resigned myself to a long morning of waiting. Staring at the walls wasn’t so bad.

They finally showed up at about eleven. They’d rented a Mercedes. The place had somehow run out of Cadillacs, which is what we’d originally wanted. Turns out the Mercedes was a great choice. It was a nice big car and it fit all of us nicely, including the girl Leroy had spent the night with, who was, for some reason, sitting in the front seat. I got worried for a moment that we’d be a foursome for the weekend, until Leroy started telling Chet how to get to her house. This turned out to be quite an ordeal unfortunately, as Chet was not used to driving and Leroy was confusing everything with his distracted outbursts of, “Turn here!” at the last second. I just sat back and tried not to worry. Eventually we made it to her house and Leroy hugged her and said goodbye and we were finally on our way.

So, Leroy had been up all night ingesting various illegal and dangerous substances into his system, and now he was just aching to break open the bag of cocaine he’d purchased that morning. I advised him against it, as being on any kind of a stimulant in an enclosed environment sounded about as fun as getting locked in the trunk of a car to me, but since he’d let me ride shotgun I stopped caring and told him he should do whatever the hell he wanted. Chet’s erratic driving was starting to make me a little edgy, so after our first stop at a Burger King off the I-5 I offered to drive. He said he hated driving and gave me the keys, and we all went in to get some breakfast. After ordering, Leroy went into the bathroom and stayed in there for a long time. I ended up eating all the fries he’d ordered. It was good service. They brought the food to the table for you. Chet and I ate our soggy fast food while Leroy finished doing whatever it was he was doing in the bathroom. I felt bad for the person going in after him. It wasn’t going to be pretty in there.

When Leroy finally emerged from the bathroom and sat down at the table we decided to head out. Chet and I had eaten all of the food. I backed the Mercedes out of our parking space, after taking a long time figuring out how to shift gears in the damn thing, and then we were off onto the freeway and onward on our journey into the lights, glitter, mayhem, bloodlust, and insane heat that are Las Vegas.

CHAPTER 3

2009-01-22T19:30:00.002-08:00

The drive from San Francisco to Las Vegas is a long and strange journey. We’d chosen to take the 5 down to the Lost Hills exit and then head east from there, eventually going through Bakersfield and taking the winding ways of highway 58 through the Mojave desert until we met up with the 15 around Barstow, making a beeline for Nevada from there. It’s about a 8 or 9 hour drive, and there are a lot of points where you stop and go through odd desert towns that seem like they should be in Mississippi or something, and you drive on some two-lane highways where semis won’t let you pass. It’s a strange country of hicks and unimaginably squalid liquor stores and one-pump gas stations in places with unpronounceable names like Tehachapi. Chet bought a model Cadillac at one. The bathrooms were all hot, humid, and fetid, stunk-up like the plumbing had had a heart attack many years before and nothing had ever recovered. After standing in line for the crapper under the hot sun for way too long at one of these sorry-looking filling stations, all three of us went in at once and just pissed all over the place. The obese gentleman who had been using it before us had stunk it up to high hell in there, and we all had to hold our breath while we wildly micturated like befuddled clowns in the clouds of brown steamy gas. But we drove on. Leroy broke out the cocaine and started doing lines off a cheap plastic ashtray in the back seat, and I drove and drove into that desert heat. I kept seeing motorcycles crashing on the road in front of us, skidding out in wavy blurs against the macadam—nothing but mirages fooling my eyes in the sun. Chet did a few lines after a while and those two started jabbering on wildly. Leroy kept blowing his nose like a out-of-tune trumpet every five minutes into a waded up old handkerchief that was caked with old dried snot. He’d shove it back in his pants pocket when he was done. The thought of it made me nauseated so I tried to ignore it.

I’d met Leroy through and ex-girlfriend of mine a few years earlier and we’d become fast drinking buddies, staying up all night many times running from bar to bar and through the streets of San Francisco howling, crashing hipster parties, getting kicked out, one of us trying to balance on the handlebars of a bike while the other drunkenly pedals away, hanging out in his garage playing records, smoking many cigarettes, falling down stairs, starting fights and running from cops, watching the sun come up from a barstool, losing what was left of our inhibitions and our minds. We both liked hanging out in dark bars during the day, and we both liked our liquor a little too much. We got along swell from the get go. Leroy ’s the kind of guy that will do any drug you put in front of him. He’ll even get high on the nitrous oxide in an aerosol can of cool whip if you leave it out too long around him. There’s a robust and deeply unaffected confidence in him, a feeling that everything’s okay, an eternal rhythm of some sort that keeps you ticking right with the primordial it of all things when you’re around him. A kind of intensity seems to emanate from him and surcharges the air around him with a kind of importance and excitement, like a chainsaw’s buzz of perpetual and frantic locomotion. He is also the most flexible person I’ve ever seen. He can contort his wiry limbs in all kinds of fantastic ways, and walks as if he were playing a game of Twister on a busted, torn trampoline. Sometimes we’ll be hanging out in a park and I’ll look up at a tree and see Leroy hanging there by his legs, his shaggy head lobbing back and forth like a metronome. He climbs up telephone poles, balances himself dangerously between barstools and walls, rolls himself up into a ball and goes barreling downhill on crowded sidewalks, and he is a damn good arm wrestler to boot. But mostly he just smokes cigarettes, closes bars on weeknights, and growls a lot. He usually sports a large black mustache and black glasses, along with an ever-changing array of bandages and scars on his face. He sure is a damn gritty sumbitch, as my grand pappy used to say.

Leroy was growling and twitching in the back seat. “This coke is barely keeping me awake, I hardly slept and it’s just making me feel like I’m just sinking into my seat back here, look really, like I’m just slowly slipping and melting into the fucking seat. My eyes. Everything’s wide open you know. Shit. That Gina girl. She’s built. So I don’t care about trying to dangle around with this one. I’ve got to cut out somebody, can’t keep doing this, but I don’t care, so, I’m gonna keep with her I think. It’ll help me do less coke, you know, because she’s got a heart murmur so I can’t really do it around her anyway, well, I guess I could, but she couldn’t, so that might stop me from doing it so much. Ahhhh. I’ve gotta stop, but I can’t keep staying awake like this all the time. We’re going to make it not too late of a night tonight, right? I mean I want to go out and fucking go wild and all, but we can’t stay up all night. I need to fucking sleep! At least some. But, I mean, Saturday’s another story. We can go all night Saturday. Or, fuck it, whatever. Why limit ourselves? Shit, did you see that guy in the liquor store back there with his shirt all unbuttoned and he’s walking around smiling with his gut hanging out and those fucking shorts on like he’s Tom Selleck or something. Shit people around these desert towns are fucked-up. Anyone got a snack or something or some gum? I’m going crazy back here. I need another line. You guys want some? Oh shit, I love this song. Turn it up. You guys seen my lighter? I need a cigarette. Ahhh. Shit. Can I roll the window down? Ahhh. It’s fucking hot out there. Hot fucking wind. Arghhghghg!!! Shit. I need a beer. We should really stop and get some beer. Should I have more alcohol right now? Ah. Yes. Yes that’s what I need. Pour a little beer over all this shit in my stomach. You guys wanna stop somewhere? Get us some beer or something?”

We did stop, to get gas, and Leroy bought a 16 oz can of Budweiser in a paper bag at a rundown little liquor store in some arid, dust-covered place off of Highway 46 called Wasco. So now Leroy was sitting hunched over with the brown-bagged Budweiser in-between his knees while he continued his garrulousness and inveterate smoking. I started thinking about slowing down, I’d been keeping the Mercedes around 90 the whole way, just in case a cop came creeping around flashing his lights at us, as we did have a lot of illegal substances in the car, now including Leroy ’s opened beer, and even though Leroy said he’d take the rap, and I was completely stone sober at this point, I still didn’t want to push my luck too far. I lifted my foot slowly off the accelerator right in time to blow by a speed trap just above the legal speed limit. I kept checking the rearview for lights. Luckily they never came.

For a while I started daydreaming. It must have been all those barren hills going by with all those jagged rocks jutting out like tumors on the desert’s skin, or maybe it was just the sun burning my eyeballs, or more likely it was the influence of my rancor at being stuck behind Big Rigs, but I somehow got to thinking about some odd things. I began wondering about what it would be like if I were somehow to invent a way to run vehicles without gasoline, or maybe invent isn’t the right phrase, maybe more like buy, and at this point I had to explain to myself in a vague but not impossible kind of way how I would come across this ridiculous sum, though thinking about Vegas always gives you a kind of gambler’s delusion of the big win I really wasn’t too big on getting my hopes anywhere near what someone might refer to as “up” before heading out to the cash burning town in the desert, and instead I contented myself with the even grander, though blithely less realistic fancy of winning the Lottery or some such thing, even though I know it’s about a thousand times more likely to get struck by lightning when there’s not a cloud in the sky, or to randomly punch seven numbers into a phone and get the Vice President’s daughter on the line, than it would be to actually win this imaginary sum, that I had for some reason settled on, of $332 million. In my oneiric sunstroke sapped head it seemed like a good place to start from. So I would take a bunch of money and invest in this new alternative power, maybe something like solar power but way more efficient and completely pollution free, or yes, maybe just a really super powered kind of solar power, like taking 10 minutes of sunlight and turning it into enough power to make a large Mercedes run at 90 MPH for 8 hours. After getting all this technology together I would then start a trucking company. Chet had been talking earlier about trucker unions and how they had a lot of power in keeping a large amount of trucks on the road, clogging up the freeways, causing a majority of the traffic accidents, sucking up gas, and causing much air pollution along the way. I don’t know even the first thing about starting a trucking company, but that didn’t stop the fantasy. There’s a point you reach when the reality of things starts to matter less and less, and you don’t sweat the small stuff, when you’re getting involved in this kind of stuff. It’s mostly just a nice distraction from life. Anyway I figured I could undersell all the other trucking companies because my truckers would never have to stop for gas, and my company would never have to spend a dime on fuel. I figured I could pay my guys more and reap profits at the same time. Pretty soon truckers everywhere would want to work for me. At least that’s what I told myself. Like I was some munificent God trying to free men from the bonds of wage-slavery and oil dependency, or something stupid like that. I was pretty sure I’d have to take on the trucker’s union, who I took to be some pretty badass thugs of some sort, but I figured I’d just hire bigger goons to protect me and let my money do the rest. At some point I would start to buy out other trucking companies that were going under because they couldn’t compete with me and my line of NoGas 18-Wheelers. Soon I’d own almost every truck in the state, somehow keeping my new solar technology a secret from everybody else. Maybe the hired goons would guard it with machetes and crossbows, hands clenched and ready to squeeze the life out of any spy sent to purloin my “solar papers.” These things would just work themselves out. After I’d cleaned up the trucking industry I figured the whole oil industry would go into a tailspin. Just think of how much money these long haul truckers spend on gas. Gas prices would have to leap so these damn oil companies could keep reaping profits, and this in turn would really piss-off consumers. With gas prices soaring over 5 dollars a gallon and drivers all over the nation ready to look anywhere for relief I would then unveil my NoGas line of cars. Somehow, again I overlooked many things I didn’t know about, like the causes of gas prices rising and their relation to oil prices rising and probably the relation of the free market to less demand for gas, but somehow I would figure out a way to start manufacturing all of these solar vehicles. It seemed simple. And because they didn’t require gas, and you could drive them as far you wanted on just a little sunshine, people would pay a little more for them than the average gas-powered car. Now I started to worry about the government coming in on the side of the oil companies, but I figured with all my money and my goons, and with people buying these cars in droves, that I’d be able to win that fight. So my little company is now growing into a behemoth, a gargantuan of sunlight if you will. I started to think that I would then somehow, after investing much of my profits in new technologies that would turn any regular car into a solar-powered one, start to open up car converter shops all over the country. Maybe just start out with a couple here, a few there, maybe buy out a few auto body shops, train the mechanics to retool any car into a brand new “Heliocar” at a three-week camp where they’d learn all they’d need to know about this new field, and get to cook hot dogs and sing by the campfire too, like some kind of new age heliolatry or something. Then people would start to come in and get their cars redone, for what I figured to be a reasonable price, I mean considering the savings of never having to purchase gas again. With oil prices rising higher than ever this would appeal to pretty much everyone, and soon I’d have thousands of the converter shops running day and night just to try to keep up with demand. I would then, after pretty much dismantling the way we think about driving, start to invest a lot of my profits to use my new and always improving technology in the mass transit systems of every major city in the country. Imagine a solar powered subway, or a bullet train that could run from Los Angeles to New York on nothing but the sun’s juice. The possibilities were endless. What about putting solar panels all over Las Vegas? I dreamed of solar-powered slot machines. And what about Taxi cabs? How could I have forgotten about all the cabbies? Shit, they’d be broke with gas prices that high. So I’d start a cab company too, and put all the other guys out of business because my cabbies would never have to pay for gas, and they’d make much more working for me than anyone else. After a while I’d start buying out other taxi companies too and, well, the same thing as with the truckers, I’d own every cab in the city. Or something along those lines. It all started to get a little fuzzy around that point, as I was swerving in and out of traffic and madly stomping down on the gas, probably drooling a little bit, and Leroy spilled some of his beer when I hit the brakes to avoid running into the back of a pickup truck, so I had to flip back to reality.

CHAPTER 4

2009-01-22T19:30:00.001-08:00

Out the window hundreds of white wind turbines were turning in the desert wind. A lone tree stood on an otherwise barren mesa casting a ridiculous shadow on the tawny land. Chaparral filled up the distances along with a few Joshua trees. Chet was sitting sideways in his seat next to me, his head craned back and his body almost completely turned around, twisted in what must have been a very uncomfortable position, with his knees sometimes coming up onto the seat as he excitedly talked over many wondrous things with Leroy. They would pass the plastic ash tray with lines of coke on it back and forth between them, holding it very delicately, and sometimes offering it to me by mistake, which I refused with a strong-will and almost puritanical fastidiousness and dedication to my purpose of getting this vehicle to Las Vegas as efficiently as possible with all of us still alive inside of it. I looked out at the clouds. They were drifting by like continents, all cracked apart and torn ragged at the edges, just a lispy whisper of sky like oceans between them. I felt at ease. Gripping the wheel tighter, with no obstacles in my way now, I slammed down on the accelerator and pushed the Mercedes up past 90, sending Chet and Leroy flying into the back of their respective seats. Luckily, no cocaine was spilled. I smiled and sped on.

Turning the scanner control knob on the radio, as reception got bleary in the middle of all the nowhere we were driving through, I said, “You know, there are only two types of people in this world. People who find a good song on the radio and leave it, and then those people who keep turning the dial, changing the station, always thinking they’ll find something better on the next station, never satisfied with where they are, always thinking the next place just up ahead will be better than where they are.” The radio went all the way up from 88.1 FM to 107.9 FM without ever stopping. “No reception out here in this depopulated land of dust and wind. The thing’s gone kooky. It’s lost its mind! Flipped its lid! Lost touch with its innermost self and come back a stranger, tremulous, wacko, blowing all its damn gaskets.” I turned off the radio. “There. That’ll teach it!”

Leroy leaned up into the front seat, his head right between Chet and me, his eyes staring straight ahead, his tongue hanging out, panting, kind of reminding me of a dog that’d been in the back seat too long and wanted out. He said, “What kind of person does that make you?”

“A nihilist I guess.”

Chet fed a CD into the stereo system’s thin mouth and Leroy went back to the backseat. I could hear him snorting up some more of the coke, a brief and nasal-ripping cacophony followed by a few hacking caterwauls of phlegm. Chet turned up the volume and rested his head against the palm of his right hand with his elbow propped up on the windowsill. His eyes closed behind his sunglasses and he began to nod his head to the music.

Chet has a reserved kind of stillness to his movements, a sort of mellow and soft way that he treads through the world, almost invisible in his shadowy ways, though he never seems to be hiding from anything, just kind of part of the scenery, not rocking the boat. That is most of the time. There are times when he can also be just as ribald and disastrously rambunctious as Leroy, only it’s in small bursts, like a mechanism for releasing all of this bound up energy that’s gathered inside of him from attrition during the mostly laidback and unassuming moments of his life. He nods and smiles a lot, is agreeable to most things without saying much, and seems to kind of just be going along for the ride most of the time. But in those rare moments when he goes ape-shit, well, he really lets it all hang out, screaming and throwing things, kind of like a comatose schizophrenic during a manic episode, releasing himself from the bonds of his easygoing, cool and composed existence, this bonhomie and tranquility that determines his path-of-least-resistance lifestyle. He has stramineous hair, which is usually a bit unkempt and shaggy looking, and most of the time there’s a reddish-blonde trim layer of beard growing on his pale face. Hidden behind sunglasses is the liquid-Tide blue of his eyes. He’s unkempt without being slovenly, and good-natured without being overly amicable. There’s a texture to his speech that reminds you of a surfboard bobbing softly up and down on the ocean in the lull between waves. When he’s manic it is more like a Tsunami has hit and all hell is breaking loose. You just run for cover and try to ride out the storm. Or you jump in the water and start splashing around with him, maybe losing a few teeth and banging yourself up pretty good in the process, but you’re a better person for it, and no worse for the wear as they say. Luckily it’s mostly the calm and not the storm that you get from him. I guess everything evens out in the end. I’d just rather not be there when it does.

So the sun baked the windows and I navigated our way along unfamiliar highways that seemed to unravel and float away and flap around like over-cooked spaghetti whipping against the mountains in the distance. The Mercedes was fun to drive. I took it up close to 100 a few times. It didn’t feel that much different from 70 really. I tried to make a big deal out of it, announcing the speed in intervals, creating tension as the hand of the speedometer moved up, but in the end we were all still just sitting inside of a car listening to music. I rolled down the window and screamed at the pounding wind.

This was how most of the first part of the trip went. At least as long as I was driving. Somewhere around Barstow my leg started to cramp up. My back was killing me and I was really starting to see a lot of those imaginary motorcycles skidding out in front of us. So I pulled off the highway and stopped in the ravaged parking lot of some closed, burned out, decomposing old diner and handed the keys to Chet. All the diner’s windows were knocked out. All the walls said DO NOT ENTER. I walked over the broken glass and pissed on the ripped up leather remains of what used to be a booth in the diner. It was so hot out I swear my piss started boiling. I looked around at all the old cracked bulb-less lamp fixtures, broken beer bottles on the floor, paint peeling off the walls, sand strewn all over the place, barstools with legs of coral-reef-like rust the color of dried blood, their vinyl seat covers worn thin and cracked with little patches of yellow fluff poking out—the ruined remains of what was once a quaint and cozy little diner off the highway in the middle of the American night. I wanted to stay there for a while and look around, but Chet and Leroy were ready to move on. I told Chet not to drive over any glass and made sure Leroy didn’t drop anything out of the car when he moved into the front seat. I took my seat in the back, wiped some coke off of the leather below me, and tried to relax for the rest of the drive up the 15.

That’s when Leroy picked up an old copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas that I’d brought along just for luck, and started reading from it out loud in a very theatrical, boozy, cigarette-shot voice. It was perfect. All that superfetation of drugs and travels down the fistulas of a paranoid and chemically altered mind. Leroy’s smoke-coated, cocaine-stained growl grew more intense as it built from page to page, rendering Thompson in all the glory of his prose with an almost cartoonish intensity. He was smoking cigarettes and reading at an incredible pace, and barely stuttering or skipping words at all. Chet and I just sat there and listened to this stunning feat of stertorous oration coming at us from the passenger’s seat. It was like Hunter S Thompson was alive again, and his every cadence, every nuance of his rabid style was being brought into a spluttering, disastrous, and mind-blowing being. His hyperkinetic voice, more raspy than a turpentine-gargling Aldo Ray, filled my head as I watched all that tamarisk and cholla and larkspur and yucca and saltbush and creosote bush and whatever the hell else was out there among the dry winds and sand of the Mojave go rifling by out the window.

He’d gotten through almost half the book by the time we reached Vegas. We put AC/DC on the stereo as the thousand-room hotels lit up off the freeway all around us. It felt like we were floating by on some hallucination of wings and smashing guitars wailing and all these things that seemed like they were gushing and banging on our senses like some montage or opening scene in a movie where everything just happens right in time and is perfect with the music and the way your feeling and all the things going on around you. Chet steered towards downtown and the electric thermometers all read 110° high up in the twilight onion-red skies of Las Vegas. The streets were not empty or ancient or dead for dreaming. They were alive and singing and sharp with excited waves of light, unfurled, unleashed, like the chaotic flickering splinters of fireflies trapped in a glass jar. With a bottle rocket’s force shooting fecklessly at the moon the streets flooded with energy and shotgun blasts of movement, the constant stream of dynamic and irreconcilable motion headed in all directions at once. The billboards sang the price of admission like a love song. As the music rang in my ears like an angry beast, I looked out at all the tremendous sights outside the window. There was good old New York, New York with its plasticine Lady of Liberty and imitation skyscrapers faking a city skyline. Paris’s Eiffel tower was shooting up like an oil derrick right next to a King-Kong sized blowup of an almost naked dancing lady with a top hat on who hovered over Ballys’ 50-yard plasma screen, which was hectically flashing advertisements and pixilated million-dollar smiles. Luxor’s sleek and dark pyramid made of a million sleeping computer screens seemed to need its own zip code. The crenellations and red, blue, and gold turrets of The Excalibur’s many castle towers jutted up like pointed witch hats in a children’s book. It was all an enigmatic cartoon, a universe of its own where everything was portioned out in heaping, ululating spoonfuls of electric and incessant activity for the ever-expanding appetites of the masses who journeyed through its maze of lights like ants in an ant farm that some kid has just shaken up. We drove on past it all as Chet steered us uneasily towards the Downtown exit. The music died down and my head filled up with static.

CHAPTER 5

2009-01-22T19:29:00.001-08:00

Leroy had secured a room at the Gold Spike just off Freemont Street downtown for only 26 dollars a night. Though we knew our pockets would be picked by strippers and slot machines and bartenders and overpriced buffets, this seemed like the best deal in the world, as just down the street rooms were going for 150 dollars a night at the Plaza Hotel. But, as we were about to find out, The Gold Spike wasn’t quite the Taj Majal. After circling around to find the makeshift parking lot we found a spot, jumped out of the car, and stretched out in the unbearable sunshine, almost immediately weltering in this sun-blinded vision of Eden set on fire. The concrete felt like it could cook a pizza. Heat rose as if from hot coals under our feet. We grabbed our bags. Every inch of my skin was instantly sticky with sweat as I cowered and lost my footing a few times, almost spilling over to be roasted on the ground. But I righted myself and regained my composure by chanting many times very loudly in my own head, “Into the breech once more my friends, into the breech once more, once more!” I put on my Huey Lewis sunglasses and began staggering, with my bag slung over my shoulder, towards the lobby.

When you walk into a casino in Las Vegas you expect to be immediately hit with an ice cold wind of air conditioning, to be able to breathe a sigh of relief at being out of the sweltering heat and inside where the slot machines ring and the beer is ice cold and the weather has nothing to do with being out in the middle of the desert. It should be like stepping into a wintry country, an arctic chill should rush at you and console you and make you feel sufficiently better about the world. The air conditioning system at the Gold Spike must have dated from, well, the invention of air conditioning by Willis Haviland Carrier, and it probably hadn’t ever been repaired or upgraded through all the summers of its existence, eventually falling into a fuliginous desuetude. Needless to say, it wasn’t a big difference going from the calescent world outside into the inside of this place, and we began to see some reasons for our big savings on the room. All around were degenerates of myriad kinds, mostly of the senescent and chain smoking variety, anachronisms of some seedier era of Las Vegas history who were shoving nickels into slot machines and staring off at some lost vision of the nothing that had become their lives. Old men with bristly eyebrows and rugose faces filled with bulging bluish veins, slumped over at slot machines, which they were not playing, instead pondering highballs in which the ice had long ago melted. The small bar at the edge of the place was a hodgepodge of young Mexicans drinking dollar Tecates; amphetamine junkies, all bandanas and ripped jeans and sweat crusted T-shirts, with bad teeth, sallow scabrous faces, jumping eyeballs, and disastrous tangles of dirty hair; lepers; escapees from nut houses; older ladies with pot bellies and fake boobs; and the shadowy, half-dead, wan and gaunt, white-haired remnants of what used to be somebody’s grandfathers slithering around and half-watching the three television sets above the bar while they waited for a bar stool to open up.

We carried our bags in and sat down by the checkout desk, oddly exhausted yet filled with some sort of expectant energy that kept us from passing out right there and letting the world do with us what it may. There was a sign over the check-in desk that read, “A ten dollar deposit will be required for any guest wishing to have a remote control for television set in room.” Considering the place didn’t even have cable this seemed like an unnecessary luxury. We signed some forms and made our way upstairs in the ancient, humid, and slow moving elevators that seemed to mechanically grimace under our weight.

Chet had a room at the Tropicana with his brother, who was celebrating his 30th birthday and was our ersatz reason for going on this trip in the first place, as if we needed an excuse to load up on drugs and booze and drive out to this mad place in the desert for a weekend of profligacy. So after we checked in Chet bolted for his better air-conditioned accommodations, leaving us with a bottle of Jameson that was so hot I thought it might start boiling at some point, and a plastic container full of pot cookies. We also had a surprisingly large amount of cocaine left, even after Leroy ’s binge on the trip in. Our room was small and smelled musty. It was clean on the surface, and I didn’t want to contemplate anything beyond that. So we threw our bags on the beds and checked for an ice bucket, as Leroy had proved that the Jameson was way too hot to drink when he’d mistakenly taken a swig from the bottle and burned the hell out of his mouth spitting the hot umber liquid all over the already multifariously stained carpet, and then screaming, “Damn it! We need ice. This shit is on fire.” There were two cups in the room, plastic and wrapped in cellophane, but no ice bucket. Leroy was beginning to freak out a bit.

“Ahh. I can’t handle this. That fucking damn air conditioner, is that what that is? Ahh. It’s so fucking loud! Can we shut that thing off? Uhhh. It’s so damn hot. My face is peeling off.”

I decided to take charge. “Don’t worry man. I will get ice. I will find something to put it in. I will bring cold beer from the bar and ice for the whiskey.”

“Okay. Okay, I just need to shower and just relax and just lie here for now. God this room is almost as hot as it is outside. Hurry with that damn ice.”

“Just relax. Wash yourself in cold water. I will return with beverages.”

I made my way back to the bar downstairs, hoping that I could at least find somebody that would know how to get ice back to our room, as I’d already scoured the floor for an ice machine and only found an ancient stentorian air-conditioning unit that seemed to bellow at me to get away quickly, which I did. The first thing I did downstairs was to go to the bar and grab some beers. I was damn thirsty. It turns out the Tecates at the bar were only a dollar, and they were ice cold. I pushed my way threw the throng of ne’r do wells and smoking septuagenarians to the bar where a curly haired, walleyed woman— who looked like she was born during The Hoover administration—tried her best to ignore my little hand signals for service. Finally she came around to me, after playing with the computerized screen of the cash register for what seemed like hours, and informed me that I’d better have exact change because the register wouldn’t open. All I had was a twenty. Could I really get a dozen or so beers and carry them up to the room? I was in a state of total muddled confusion. I tried to talk but all that came out was, “Um. Oh, I can, whaa…change? Could I may...be…um. Two beers?” So she walked away and I cursed my damn luck. Shit. Where the hell could I get change around this damn place? All I wanted was some beer. I considered buying a whole bottle of whiskey, but that didn’t seem possible at the bar. Then I thought about getting a few really fancy drinks or a bunch of souvenir shot-glasses maybe, but I’d have to carry them back up to the room, and I needed ice too damn it! But then, like the parting of the red sea, the cash register banged open and the bar tender let out a little whoop of what I thought to be joy or maybe just relief or surprise, or a mild orgasm. The next thing I knew I was walking away with two Tecates and shoving 17 dollars into my pocket. I left her a dollar tip for her trouble.

Now for the ice. I stacked the beers on top of each other, carrying them in my left hand, and wandered around looking for somebody who looked like he might work at the hotel. There were some older gentlemen walking purposefully around the lobby all dressed in the same way, a kind of dusty croupier style with suspenders and what I think might have been money belts filled with change tied around their waists. I asked what I took to be one of these attendants—or maybe he was a retired attendant who still hung around the hotel because he had nowhere else to go, nothing else to wear, and had gotten so used to being at the hotel every day of his life that he just couldn’t leave—where I could find some ice for my room. He told me to go into the diner, ask the server for an ice bucket, and then go to the soft drink serving machine and fill the bucket up with ice. It seemed like a reasonable idea so I headed over to the diner.

It felt like the whole place had been lifted out of 1972 and then set back down with all the same people and things still inside of it upon my arrival there 35 years later. On the wall there were pictures of the food. Almost all the pictures showed a bag of chips with a sandwich on a paper plate and had a generic Styrofoam cup with a straw poked in the lid to the side. The sandwiches were all on white bread and the chips were mostly Lays or Fritos. There was a small Filipino guy behind the counter. I tried to get his attention, but to no avail. He seemed to be taking the order of a bald man seated at the counter who was about the size of a sumo wrestler. But the chunky fellow wasn’t speaking. Maybe he was grunting or something. The Filipino guy was starting to get pissed for some reason, and soon the big dude threw some bills and change on the counter and there was some hissing and general vituperation. Big bald boy just sat at the counter staring and the other guy started walking my way. I made some kind of strange semaphore with my arms, as I was balancing the two beers in one hand, like I was signaling him without really trying to seem like I was signaling him, and he cussed and called the other guy an asshole or something, and I think I said something about ice for my room, though it didn’t seem like he was paying me any mind. But then, like a miracle, Lazarus rose from the dead, and the short Filipino server filled a small bucket with ice while he continued to curse Bald Fat Boy, who sat steely eyed and staring ahead at the counter. He gave me the ice-filled bucket without even looking at me and walked away again. I took the bucket and kept balancing the beers and was on my way.

CHAPTER 6

2009-01-22T19:28:00.002-08:00

I couldn’t reach my keys to get back in the room so I knocked on the door with my head, and a noticeably less frazzled Leroy pulled it open with a big greasy smile under his mustache. He was happy to see the beer and immediately pulled one from my hand and started downing it. I popped mine open as well and the cold liquid going down seemed like the sweetest nectar in the world, and for only a dollar too. What a deal.

So we sat around for a while drinking our beers. I’d put the Jameson in front of the mediocre and deafeningly loud air conditioner before I’d left the room earlier, and it had cooled down a bit. Soon we were filling the plastic cups with the quickly melting ice cubes and pouring ourselves whiskey that was slowly becoming a more drinkable temperature. We lit up some cigarettes and finally lay back and relaxed in our beds. There’s just something about being in an old hotel room, smoking, having a drink, and watching the fuzzy reception of one of the only three channels on a 1982 television set that makes you feel good about life. I smiled and lay there smoking, waiting for our adventures to begin.

It didn’t take long for us to start in on the blow. A few more Jamesons on the rocks in my plastic cup and I was revitalized from the long drive. It was almost sunset. I went to the window, pulled the thick curtains opened, and stared out at a thermometer reading 105°. Clouds like strange cauliflower floated by in the now cupreous tarpaulin of purpling sky. I thought of taffy being stretched out and cotton candy and thin wispy strands of toilet paper dangling from trees in some unlucky bastard’s front yard. All the light coming in the room must’ve roused Leroy from his stupor and he began cutting up lines on the knee-high table by the TV. I watched the sky for a little longer as the sun sifted down the hazy edges of the horizon and slipped like a drowning golden apple into a pit of smoldering lava. I felt triumphant for some reason and wanted to celebrate. The cocaine was all cut-up into fives lines on the table.

I’m very affected by drugs. I say this full well knowing my affinity for them, and my lapses into the extremes of over indulgence when it comes to a binge. But then again I’m very affected by music, the weather, the sound of birds in the morning, car alarms late at night, cop cars, black & white movies, the people whom I happen to be around at any given time, popsicle sticks, rust spreading on old metal things, wind thrashing tree branches, talk radio, cats sleeping on a couch in the afternoon, fog horns mooing, bombs exploding, that particular pale inky heartbreaking blue the sky becomes just before sunrise, and, well, whatever else seems to be happening at any given time in this holy, diseased, beautiful, rotting, dead world of ours.

I sucked in some cool air from the air conditioner, walked over to the table, bent down, put a straw up one of my nostrils, held the other closed, and quickly inhaled a line of cocaine. I leaned my head back and screamed, “God damn!” I’m not sure why I did that. Someone once told me that your first line of coke of the night makes you feel like God for fifteen minutes. I disagree. It makes you God for fifteen minutes. I was pulsating with recrudescence to newfound internal rhythms, grinding my teeth and doing my jaw twitch, which is when I constantly push out my lower jaw like I’ve got an under bite, and talking and not listening and talking and rolling my unlit cigarette around between my fingers and looking for a light and then forgetting about it and then talking some more and then remembering that I wanted to light my cigarette and thinking just a little more just another tiny line and I’m done that’s it no more for tonight save it for to-morrow because tonight I’ve got to sleep and damn I need a drink I’ve got to calm down and where the hell’s a lighter in this place oh there’s one in my pocket that Leroy gave to me that’s right damn I’m a fucking idiot I just want to sit in this chair and smoke and slowly drink the whiskey with all this melted ice in it and shit Leroy stop doing all the lines maybe I’ll just do one small one now and then it’ll keep me going for a while and my great grandfather was a whiskey bootlegger and I want to sing in a Ramones cover band right now get me some fucking tight jeans and a leather jacket inhaling this cigarette smoke feels so good right now give me an air guitar and I’ll tune it to whatever song’s stuck in my head and I’ll start a band called Davy K and the Four Squares that plays weddings and covers old standards and Sinatra songs and I’ll croon like Elvis over it all.

Leroy ’s voice intruded on my inner monologue, “Hey. What the fuck’s going on with you? You keep fidgeting and mouthing words and mumbling. Are you playing air guitar?”

“No. I’m just…Wha…Is there another line or did you suck them all down?”

“What? No. There are three more right there on the table. What the hell are you talking about?”

“Nothing. Just one more small one. That’s all I want.”

I went over to the table and snorted up a thin line through my straw.

So there we both were sitting in our cheap hotel room in Las Vegas all coked-up and getting a little drunk and talking and talking and talking and starting to feel everything about what time really is and all its manifestations and machinations melting into the so-called now that we found ourselves swimming in.

“Hey man look at this.” Leroy was calling me over to the lamp on the nightstand between our two beds. He lifted up the lamp shade saying, “This bulb is like fucking melted and falling over.” It was hanging on by some miracle, one last thread of metal connected to the glass, the filament still glowing incandescent as the bulb lay on its side. It looked like some kind of trick photography. We both poked at it for some reason. Luckily it didn’t fall off and leave us in darkness. I told Leroy we better leave it alone.

I went back to talking. “So the whole reason Vegas was ever settled at all, I mean after the Indians left, was because of these Artesian springs that some explorer found here in like the 1840s. I forget his name. You know I’m not good with names, but, so they found this place with a good water supply in the middle of the fucking arid desert climate and they camped out here, and they started calling it Vegas and then Las Vegas which means ‘The Meadows’ in Spanish, and so eventually more people started stopping by and then the railroads came and that really busted the place open. This was a good stopping place for a lot of people taking the train from coast to coast around the turn of the century—shit, I need a light. Thanks. Damn good cigarettes. Are these Luckies? Anyways. Yeah. So that’s the last turn of the century, not this one, around 1900, you know? So the place started growing with all theses camps and saloons springing up and all the railroad workers started gambling in these place and drinking and doing all their wanton business, but eventually, around nineteen hundred and ten I think, Nevada made gambling illegal. I know. Fucking weird. So then, shit, I need another light. This fucking cigarette keeps going out. Somebody’s thinking of me. Thanks. This Jameson’s actually pretty good now. It’s getting back below room temperature. Um. Oh yeah. So at some point, I think in the thirties, gambling was legalized again. The state wanted all that tax money it had been going without for twenty some years. And during the great depression they started building the Hoover dam out here, and this place was really booming during a rough period for the rest of the country. So again Vegas becomes a kind of boom town, and I’m leaving a lot out, but eventually you get some gangsters like Bugsy Sigal coming out here to build resorts, and places like The Sands and The Dunes start popping up. I can’t remember the name of the first one but it was El something I think. All these former racketeer types started coming out from L.A. too, after the whole Clifford Clinton expose, the busting of this scoundrel Kynette who was head of the Police Intelligence Bureau and the corrupt Mayor, his name was Shaw I think. Have you ever eaten at Clifton’s Cafeteria? Indoor waterfalls…slide your tray along…on Broadway. Great place. It might not still exist. Anyway. And then in the forties you get all these hotels getting built and all this money coming in from gambling and entertainment and Vegas starts to become a kind of vacation destination. During the sixties a lot of corporations started buying hotels, I think Howard Hughes had something to do with this, and started calling gambling ‘gaming’ and looking at it as a legitimate way to make money. Then you start getting these mega resorts and things just start to explode from there, and then eventually… damn this is some good shit. Where’d you get it? I don’t think I want any more right now, but maybe later tonight, yeah. Bring it along.”

I took a breath.

Leroy was laughing his ass off. “Man. What the fuck are you talking about?” He fell down on his bed and started writhing with laughter. He kicked his legs up in the air and shook them like a beanbag man being electrocuted.

“Leroy. Let’s go. Shit. Let’s get outside. I’m getting a little claustrophobic in here.”

“Ahh. Fuck. What the hell? Okay. Let’s go. Let’s walk around or something.”

“We’ll go down to Freemont Street. I had a good time there once. I was on Ecstasy. It was like ten years ago. A bunch of us took it and wandered around the whole ‘Freemont Street Experience’ and had our own kind of experience watching all those fucking lights for hours.”

“Okay. Let’s do it. Let me grab some stuff and we’ll go. Then we can go meet up with Chet at the Tropicana and see what’s going on with his brothers.” Chet actually had two brothers who were both in Vegas for the weekend. “Let’s get dressed up.”

We’d both brought a few thrift-store-bought suits with us. So we got dressed in our plaid and paisley suits, decked out in full motley regalia with variegated accouterments of odd eccentric ties of many bright colors and stripes. I even had brown and black-striped socks on to go with my suit. Leroy’s yellow and brown suit jacket was frayed badly at the sleeves and mis-matched his red, blue-checkered pants horrendously. He had striped socks on too, and we both took a moment to compliment each other on our respective outfits. The top button on my shirt was gone. I hooked a safety pin in the top buttonhole, jabbed it through the other side where the button was supposed to be, and clicked it shut, so as not to expose the upper regions of my chest to the elements. I looked in the mirror at myself and all of a sudden hated my shoulders.

“Look at my shoulders. They’re so straight and, shit, they make me look so, I don’t know, stiff, boxy, like a robot or something. I always look stiff in suit jackets. Like I’ve got something up my ass. I want to look relaxed damn it! Like you. I want the suit to just hang off of me, lazily. Not like this. Shit.” Leroy came up behind me.

“You should take the shoulder pads out man.”

“I did!” I was inconsolable. I shouted at the mirror. “Bukowksi said, ‘Please let me lose my father’s face!’ I just want to lose my father’s shoulders! These are my fucking father’s shoulders. Please, let me lose my father’s shoulders!”

Leroy just stared at me.

Somehow I had an odd moment of clarity here. A strange compulsion seized me, and I grabbed Leroy by the worn lapels of his suit jacket. “Leroy. Remember. Your cigarettes are in your pocket. Your cigarettes are always in your pocket. Remember I said that. Keep repeating it to yourself. You’ll thank me for it later. The cigarettes are in your pocket.”

Leroy pushed me away and grabbed a pot cookie out of the plastic tub in my open suitcase. “These things aren’t even melted. I can’t believe it. You want one?”

“No. I mean, okay. Not right now. Well, maybe just a few crumbs. Pot makes me insane. I can’t handle that stuff. It might make me freak out and grind the gears in my head for hours. Remember when we were at that party and I ate a few of those pot brownies they had and then I was sitting in a chair sweating all night and rubbing my hands on my pants and trying to look directly at some imaginary point on the wall, and, well, I’ll just have a few bites I guess. I’ll be alright.”

Leroy ate a whole cookie really fast. I had a few bites of one and that was it. I’m not big on sweets anyway. It was just then that I remembered I hadn’t eaten any of the Pepto-Bismol that I’d brought along to keep the shits away, or at least keep them at bay. I didn’t want this trip to turn into a diarrheathon, running from one bathroom to the next, even though Vegas does have some of the best public bathrooms in the world, at least that I’ve ever done my business in. I ate a bunch of the pink chewable tablets really fast, and then downed the rest of my Jameson to get that damn peppermint taste out of my mouth.

CHAPTER 7

2009-01-22T19:28:00.001-08:00

We journeyed down past the gambling machines and out into the blast of heat that was the Las Vegas summer night. Down Freemont street I grabbed two bottled waters—Leroy was too scared to venture inside the uterus of a Disney-like souvenir shop with me to buy the water—and we swilled them down fast, realizing that we were both really parched. I figured we would need as much water as we could if we were to survive in these hell fire conditions. Zigzagging back and forth we took long strides among the fat-bellied, fanny-pack-wearing, bad-T-shirted crowd of Midwest vacationers. The canopy above blocked out the desert sky, and there wasn’t even a light show to look at yet. I couldn’t really settle on a place to go into. We wandered by the Glitter Gulch with its booted gal eying us from her neon perch above, almost meandering our way in, but I told Leroy it was too soon for stuff like that, and that first we needed good strong drink. The Plaza hotel loomed at the end of the street where an old railroad station had once stood long before what happened in Vegas stayed in Vegas.

I motioned to Leroy, extending my forefinger in an exaggerated point, “Look. There it is. The Plaza. They’ve got a great band that plays there, this like Japanese crooner sort of band. Hard to explain. They might be playing. It’s Friday night. Let’s go.”

So we hurried out from under the fake white sky of Freemont Street and into the really well air-conditioned lobby of the Plaza hotel. It seemed kind of deserted in there, and everything was going by really fast. We must have been really moving through that place. At one point I shouted out, “Ah shit! The curtains are closed. The band’s not here. Fuck. That sucks.” Leroy wanted to keep moving towards a bar. I told him there was a really nice long bar at the back somewhere, but for some reason we kept not finding it. My head was kind of scrambled and I kept getting distracted by the buzzing hum and whirring roar of people hitting mini-jackpots on the gaming machines. But in an auspicious and very singular blink of the eye it shot out of the distance and I saw it and there it was and then there we were sitting at the bar and staring at the video poker screens there in front of us, and the bar tender was a really old guy who was just standing around not really doing anything or serving anybody drinks and we were the only ones sitting at this side of the bar and it was really long and he wasn’t doing a damn things and we both really needed a drink. The coke was working its furious way through my limbs and I was chomping at the bit and Leroy was freaking out and waving his arms to try to get the old slob’s attention and I put a fiver in the video poker machine and then finally the fucking moron ancient bartender guy comes over and we both are struck dumb for some reason and can’t even think of anything to order…

…and so then Leroy was saying, “Why yes. Hello there. My companion and I will have two Irish car bombs please. Yes. That will be all. Two car bombs. That will be just great my dear man.” So the guy kind of gave us a funny look and he didn’t really seem to know what the hell he was doing, and the last thing I wanted was a fucking car bomb in my stomach, but what the hell. I then became very immersed in the video poker, which was quickly draining the quarters from my five dollars. The guy appeared again seemingly out of nowhere holding two plastic cups half-filled with Guinness and two tiny plastic cups filled with some strange yellowish liquid that made me think of pineapple juice for some reason. Leroy and I both looked at each other in disbelief. Leroy tried to explain to the poor chap our situation, and ended up just telling him to, “Get some fucking Baileys in the god damn cup and some Jameson for christsakes! We want IRISH fucking car bombs!” The guy muttered something penitent and unintelligible and went back and did what Leroy had recommended. When he came back with the proper drinks he said something like, “Oh. Irish. I see. Irish cab bums.” We just looked at each other and laughed. The poor sap. Stuck in this dead end job serving shitty drinks to even shittier people who keep gambling away all their money on a video game. We decided to drink up. Most of mine spilled all over the table, curdling in boggy pools all across the video poker screen. About half of this diseased mixture was left in my cup. These cups were obviously not the proper size for this endeavor. I tried to drink the rest of it off, and ended up spilling most of it all over my pants. Leroy had his downed in an instant and was ready to go. He’s one of these people who can just open up his throat and pour anything he wants to down really fast. I’m not. I’m more of a sipper. So we were off to catch a cab over to the Tropicana on the strip, and I figured it would feel good to be outside again. The Plaza had almost destroyed us single handedly. We needed a change of scenery.

CHAPTER 8

2009-01-22T19:27:00.001-08:00

Outside it was an oven and we needed a Taxi to keep us alive. Luckily they were all lined up on the street waiting for fares. We hopped in one and told the guy to take us to the Tropicana hotel and he said sure thing and we were off headed towards the strip via the freeway. The cab driver was some kind of old hippy and said that he used to smoke two joints every night before driving, but that he didn’t do that anymore of course, and that we were safe with him at the wheel. He asked if we were musicians or something. I told him some story about us being a folk duo that did some gospel hymns and Carter family songs and did a lot of yodeling and that kind of stuff. Told him I played a stand up bass because I was tall and Leroy played the banjo. He just laughed. He got us to the Tropicana. That was good enough for us.

As we made our way through the swinging glass doors and up the red needlefelt-carpeted stairs to the lobby I remembered something my Uncle had told me a long time ago. He said when you go into the Tropicana remember to look up. I couldn’t remember why. I had to take a leak so we went up to the 2nd floor where I knew there were nice bathrooms and decided, upon entering the empty and clean facilities, to actually let off a little steam as well. And in fact I did sit down in a cozy, pristine and plush stall with plenty of toilet paper, some nice Elvis music playing, and took myself a nice dump. A well-stocked silver container for seat-covers was hanging from the back of the stall door, and I stared at it while I sat there on the nicely warmed seat contracting my intestines. Little black letters ran across the top reading, “Provided By The Management For Your Protection.” Mighty nice of them, I thought. But, as I’d already failed to take advantage of their nice offer for protection by sliding my bare ass across the—for some unknown and possibly scary reason warm—surface of the porcelain ovate seat, I tried not to think about what this management could possibly be protecting me from. It was very pleasant in there. Glittering recessed lights hung like yellow eyeballs from the ceiling, and the tile floor was an impeccably grime-free, sparkling chessboard of chartreuse and sapphire squares. The stall doors were high, wide, and thick, coming almost all the way down to the floor. Music was playing and the air was crisp and fresh and clean. The only thing is, I heard someone else go into the stall next to me, and I don’t like company when I’m pushing out a winner like that, so I got a little perturbed. That was until I looked down and saw Leroy’s shoes under the stall door. I couldn’t help laughing. I just got the fucking giggles. And they must’ve been contagious because Leroy started cracking up too. So there we were, both sitting there shitting our brains out while Elvis crooned, and we were laughing our asses off. I kept asking Leroy if he could spare some toilet paper or at least hand me a seat cover and he kept freaking out and screaming and then laughing again. That was when I started singing as I shat, and I do a damn good Elvis too. And of course Leroy had to join in and do the Jordaneers part, which he does quite well actually, and all this going on between grunts and multifarious movings of the bowels and heaves like bellows roaring and many ploppings and plashes of water. After the song ended we both started laughing like mad men again. At some point I decided enough was enough and I grunted out one last disastrous cringing coprophiliac’s wet dream of brown splendor. I flushed and left Leroy there to laugh alone and finish his own cathartic doings.

While I was washing my hands I noticed a pair of shoes in another stall on the other side of Leroy’s. Poor shmuck. Sitting there trying to take a nice clean dump with two maniacs shouting and singing. I made a quick exit and hoped Leroy would leave before the guy saw him. I didn’t want him to finger us as troublemakers to some casino security guard. I would think bad bathroom etiquette is probably frowned upon in a nice place like that.

So I left and walked out onto the bridge that looks over all the gaming tables. That’s when I heeded my uncle’s advice and looked up. The ceiling there really was fantastic. It was like a thousand stained-glass mirrors all arching over everything. Actually that’s exactly what it was. My uncle used to make stained glass windows, and I remembered the time I’d dropped a basketball down the stairs when I was a kid, and how the ball crashed into the glass he’d recently stained with blue and yellow flowers at the bottom of the stairs, and how the ball had hit the bottom stair and shot out like a rock from a slingshot, breaking a panel of the thick opaque window into a thousand cloudy pieces. My parents’ sadness had been unbearable and I’d locked myself in my room for days as they pined away for their dearly departed window. As I stood on that bridge at the Tropicana staring up at more stained glass I found myself wanting to chuck a basketball at the ceiling, imagining all that beveled and textured colored glass falling all over the people below like a sudden downpour or a bomb exploding in the sky. I didn’t have a basketball so I just looked out over all the people playing blackjack and roulette and poker or whatever else it was that they were playing on the green baize of those tables down there, and I felt an old, forgotten sense of disquiet surge back through me again. I felt triumphant. It didn’t last long, but it was alright for the time being. Soon Leroy came around and I told him about what my uncle had said, and he liked avuncular advice as much as the next guy, so he looked up and said how that was nice but we’d better get up to Chet’s room. So up in the elevators we went.

After spending some time drinking beer in Chet’s hotel room we went out wandering around various hotels on the strip, trying to meet up with Chet’s older brother at the MGM Grand, getting lost numerous times. We finally ended up at some high-end hotel bar filled with very drunk and ordinary people. As I was trying to order a drink some very bibulous young fellow kept tugging at my sleeve and telling me how tall I was and mumbling about drink orders or something. Finally he ended up standing on his stool and yelling, “Look who’s taller now!” I’d had enough of him and I grabbed my drink and left to find Leroy and Chet. It seemed they’d met some other nice young inebriated gentleman who kept following us around and talking non-stop. Finally we all started ignoring him and went on looking for a place to sit. He kept following us and asking us if there was room for him to sit down too. I told him that there wasn’t and then he said, “Okay. I can see you guys are in your own little chill zone here. I don’t want to interrupt that,” and he left us alone finally. I didn’t know what the hell a “chill zone” was, but I was glad he was gone. We found three seats and drank our drinks down. Some guy whom Leroy knew named LT had recommended that we go the Hard Rock Hotel. They had a circle bar there and it was supposed to be a good place to do some drinking. Chet called his brothers, whom we’d somehow failed to find in our peregrinations across casinos, and told them we’d meet them at the Hard Rock.

CHAPTER 9

2009-01-22T19:26:00.002-08:00

I am in the Hard Rock Hotel. I am at the circle bar and I am trying to order a drink. Either the bar is spinning around like a carousel or my head is. I can’t decide if the difference between the two even matters. There’s some tucked-in bro trying to talk to Leroy. Why is everyone always trying to talk to him? He needs help. Chet is back there somewhere. No he’s not. He’s right next to me and he wants a beer. Should I order him a beer? How do the bartenders not get dizzy spinning around like that? It’s making me sick. Fuck the drinks. I need a bathroom. Chet’s face looks like a beige and blonde pixilated blur. What’s that guy saying to Leroy? I will go over and stand next to him and I will hear everything. I will know everything.--------“Hey bro, you see that girl over there, that brunette girl there sitting there, no not that one, that’s my sister, the other one, yeah, she’s all about you bro, I’ll bring her over to you, no, bro, it’s no problem, she’s all up on you bro, I’ll bring her right to you.”---Leroy sees me or maybe he’s just looking at the place where I’m standing. I move past him thinking nothing except bathroom. He’s following close behind me now. Why is he following me? Should I try to lose him? I twist among the throngs of people. People are everywhere and everybody is moving and everything is its own shape and we are all just different shapes and pieces of things and I see rivers of people flowing into the air more dollar signs instead of bodies flowing into all the spaces of this place and there is nowhere left to move I see signs that say restrooms and I am strong and happy and I can hold my breath a long time and my legs are rubber but they are moving and Leroy is gone and there are long lines of people endless people wearing jeans and steadily flowing into and from the bathroom stalls and I am in and there are people waiting for stalls to be free. Should I be waiting too? Who am I? Why is this fat man smiling at the stall door? Where are the urinals? I can pee standing up. A long row of crowded sinks. Check for feet under the doors. Check for plastic bags too. Could be two men in one. You never know. Is this the line? Is this stall unoccupied? The door is open. The fat man is smiling into whatever he considers to be distance. I push open the door and it is empty and I am the king of the universe. I am the rock of the hard rock hotel. I am Woody Guthrie singing, I am the words he sings, he is singing hard rock hotel, and I am peeing, yes, at long last I am peeing and it is shooting in a white hot stream into the bowl and the water flushes and I am done and everything is back to where it should be. Buckling up my belt is very difficult. These prongs…tines? No! Buckles! They won’t fit into these holes in the leather of my belt. They just keep going between the holes. I need to make new holes in this belt. I need an awl. I need a hammer and a sharp spike and…there, there. No. That’s from…Marnie. Yes. They are in and my pants are on straight and now I will, um, turn around and unhinge this stall door and open it and go…Outside! Now there are trillions of voices intermingling and merging and migrating back to themselves and ricocheting off of mirrors and walls and I can hear someone talking near by—“Hey. Can I go next bro?” “As long as you’re not Jewish.” “I ain’t no heeb.” “OK then.”—I must leave. Anti-Semites abound in this damn place. They’re all over, crawling on the walls, spying on me in the bathroom, Hitler’s little ears, they’ll come storming for me soon. Outside, fast, not even water on my hands, and it’s all malls and crowds and really bad music and as soon as I see Leroy it’s splitsville. Whoever invented this place was a demonic bastard, and an anti-Semite. One more drink at that damn circle bar and that’s it for The Hard Rock Hotel.

It’s crowded but I make my way to the bar and order two Ginger and Jamesons and I feel sticky but the first sip brings my head back to a nice and cool and calm place and I see Leroy and Chet and his two brothers and their wives or girlfriends or whatever they are and I go up to them and I make some kind of awkward introduction and then tell them we all have to get the hell out of this place and they concur and so we all leave. It is a great big gaggle of us now, like about 7 or 8 of us walking through the casino and out into the burning night. We join a long line to wait for a taxi. I’m not sure of what’s happening. I’m sweating. A vague sense of lights flashing brightly in the darkness. The moon is just a yellow sliver, a fingernail clipping thrown on top of an oil slick. Chirruping and shrill voices are ringing at every turn. There is a well-dressed man talking to Leroy and pretty soon I hear him offering all of us a ride in a limo. So we get the hell out of the long line and jump into the back of a limo. It’s air-conditioned very well. Leroy and I light cigarettes and the driver hands us a booklet through the window that separates him from our compartment in the back. It seems to be a book of hookers, their pictures and short descriptions of their personalities on each page. And the guy’s saying that these are his girls and we should give some of them a call or something. But I’m smoking and ashing on the floor and the limo has a TV and some kind of controllers for a video game but we can’t get the TV to turn on and I end up throwing the remote control at Chet’s brother, not on purpose, hell, I don’t even know the guy. He gives me a look like he thinks I’m an asshole, and nobody really tells him he’s wrong, which kind of worries me. There’s a young blond girl with an outlandish snaggle tooth sitting across from me. Chet’s older brother has his arm around her. Why haven’t I noticed that tooth before now? It’s jutting out like a mint tic-tac from her mouth.

Soon we’re at some place called Olympic Gardens, or just OG as it says on the matchbooks. It’s a strip club and it’s 30 bucks to get in, plus the limo driver is asking Leroy for 65 bucks for the ride, and I tell him we’ll split it, it’s worth it, it’s Chet’s brother’s 30th birthday after all. So we somehow manage to get inside this place and it’s all tits and glamour, and it’s really dark inside, but light enough to see your way to the bar, which is where Leroy and I head right away. Turns out the beer is $7.50 and the drinks are ten. The ecdysiastic entertainment brings up the price of the alcohol I guess. So soon we’re sitting around on various chairs, as there are no seats available at the stage where the strippers are dancing topless and catching dollar bills between their breasts. I’m a bit out of my element and nervous and am drinking my beer with much celerity, and this stripper comes up to me and I immediately try to get her to go away with myriad gestures and some other kinds of guttural grunts and throwings of my voice, but it’s no go. Turns out she just wants to tell me about things, give me a lay of the land so to speak. So I apologize and listen to her spiel about twenty-dollar lap dances and forty-dollar dirty dances and 600 dollar half-hour sessions in the VIP room, $1,000 for one hour. I guess you get a bargain the more time you buy. There’s not much money in my wallet so I thank her for the most valuable information and go on drinking my beer and watching the almost-nude girls on stage.

Everything you know of as the world, that place in which you maybe might think that you exist and do your daily doings in, gets smashed, ground-up, macerated and rearranged in a place like this. You step out of the ordinary world where everything you want is far away and unattainable, and you move into this ridiculous, spotlight-flashing thing of a place where every ordinary cliché fantasy gets blown up on steroids and hung up for the whole world to see, smiling, overdone, with really bad loud music thumping like an insane throbbing pulse through all the pseudo-sexy, tame, unemotional, sweet smelling and unimaginably (for some reason) desirable girls who wander around making small talk (where are you from? Is this your first time?) with any man sitting anywhere without a girl in his lap. There is no such thing as the real world once you enter into the discord of a place like this. Everything is overwrought, every inveigling move is well rehearsed and done only with the hopes of some sort of monetary compensation, every last breath is calculated to titillate and allure more money out of your hip pocket and into some girl’s under garments. Nobody cares about your ennui or your weltshmerz or your broken heart or the stupid poem you wrote for you mom in 5th grade, or your dreams for that matter, except the wet ones maybe, but even then it’s just the price you're willing to pay that might make anybody pretend to care about this thing you keep referring to as yourself, as who you are, whatever that is or might be at this particular moment in time. None of this matters. I keep yelling into Leroy ’s ear that, “I would give a whole week’s paycheck just to rub the skin of that girl’s legs for a minute,” whenever a stripper walks by us. He keeps yelling back into my ear that I could get a lot more for my money than just that. For some reason I keep failing to understand this concept.

After much waiting around and gawking and ogling and drinking of 7-dollar Budweiser we finally find some seats at the stage where the girls are dancing. There’s a counter there for you to put your drink on and the girls on stage have a couple of poles they can use to do stripper moves on, and we all sit down there, Chet’s brothers and their girls too, and somebody orders a round. You’ve got to keep throwing ones on the stage if you want to keep your seat, so the first thing I do is ask the waitress, who I kind of wish was offering lap dances too, for change for a twenty in all ones. Once I have a wad of ones I am happy and much contented. I shove the wad into the top pocket of my shirt and get ready to start flinging them out one by one at the succulent dancing girls. This is the only thing I really like doing at strip clubs, this sitting at the stage, sipping my drink, watching nude girls dance, and throwing them dollar bills for tips. I find it very entertaining for some reason. A few beers into this I look over at the girl sitting next to Chet’s brother, and for some reason, forgetting, or choosing to ignore, that this is Chet’s brother’s girlfriend, I lean over to Leroy and ask him how much he thinks a lap dance from her would be. He screams at me something about me being an asshole and that I can’t get a lap dance from Chet’s brother’s girlfriend, and then he laughs and orders two more beers and another roll of ones from the extremely hot and now a bit ornery waitress. The show goes on. New girls come up on stage to dance every couple of songs. Sometimes two girls dance at once. They give a whole lot of attention to some guys who look like they’re investment bankers or something. Our money must be worth less. We spend a lot of time sitting there, and throw many one-dollar bills at the girls on stage, but after a certain point it all starts to feel the same. All the girls do the same moves, some abridged dance of the seven veils, involving kicking their high heels very loudly against the stage floor and doing some kind of gymnastics with the pole, and always pretending to rub themselves while kneeling on the stage-end in front of some guys who are trying to slip ones into the girl’s bra or other lacey fringed undergarments.

After using the restroom, which was crowded and disgusting, I went back to the bar and just started standing around looking at things. There were all kinds of scantily clad girls roaming around and whispering into guy’s ears as they went by. Some girls were giving guys lap dances, very frictional ones sometimes, but mostly they just seemed to be wandering around aimlessly like they were bored at some idiot’s party that they didn’t want to be at in the first place, but had to keep a smile on their face and pretend to be happy and social for the host’s sake. They swaggered around, preoccupied and confidently casual, knowing that a raft of lecherous eyes were upon them. None of them had on sequined outfits with feathers. I started dreaming about tigers in red weather, and Gypsy Rose Lee, and the infamous Miss Belle Jangles of Mugwumps strip club in 1968 who started this whole pole-dancing thing before I was even born. I always miss the good stuff.

So some girl comes up to me and tells me that my friend’s just paid for me to have a lap dance with her. I start to say no thanks and walk away, but catch myself just in time, figuring I have to do it. It’s been paid for. All I’ve got to do is sit there and let her dance on me. I can do that. I look over at Leroy who is giving me a thumbs up from the bar. The bastard’s put up the money for this girl to writhe around on top of me for the duration of two songs. Soon she’s dancing on top of me. Now, I’ve had lap dances before, and I’m not one to shy away from lust or desire when it happens to perch itself in my lap, but it is just uncomfortable. She keeps trying to grind up against me, and I keep having to adjust my pants whenever things are starting to chafe. So she’s rubbing her nakedness all over me, and I’m thanking H.L. Mencken for giving dignity to this girl’s chosen vocation, and she is really good at what she’s doing, but it’s just that the damn chafing is really starting to bother me. But I’m not supposed to touch her. So I just sit there and try to enjoy things while constantly moving my pelvis and hips around, trying to rearrange things so there’s no pinching or twisting of vital parts. Every once in a while her ass hits my crotch just right and it is great, but for the most part I just keep wishing that she’d keep away from my lap and concentrate on just rubbing her tits in my face or something. When her skin rubs against my cheek I finally know why this is a multi-billion dollar industry. The prurient thrill of her closeness sends the dopamine spurting and gushing to all sorts of recondite and hidden places in my brain. She rubs herself on my face and then I am lost in the perfumed wilderness of her hair. I am dizzy with some pseudo-infatuation that lasts for almost half a minute, and leaves me with a gut ache of empty dreams. She whispers something in my ear as she’s getting up to go. All I can do is smell her hair. The music has stopped and she’s putting her top back on. I smile and say, “Thank you. You were really good. That was nice.” The look on her face is indescribable.

CHAPTER 10

2009-01-22T19:26:00.001-08:00

It’s six in the morning when we finally exit the sultry dungeon that Olympic Gardens has become. By this point we’re all a bit weary. We wander around towards Las Vegas Boulevard and I realize that I’ve got to piss, so I meander into a liquor store and can’t figure out what the hell’s going on in there, and stumble back out and piss on the wall outside while Leroy and Chet keep screaming that they see a cop car coming. I feel much better after I zip up and look up at the Stratosphere looming over us as the sun rises. It’s like a Space-Needle-sized queen from a chess set that’s been stretched out by a torturer’s rack, or some magnificent antennae for Pantagruel’s radio. I start screaming, “We have to go to the Stratosphere while the sun’s rising. We have to go all the way to the fucking top of the thing and watch the sun rise from up on top of the world!” This seems like a good idea to them, so we run across the street and into the doors of the Stratosphere’s lobby. It’s nice and cool inside. For some reason we’re all running. I think I had convinced them that we were going to miss the sunrise if we didn’t hurry.

Empty slot machines were everywhere. It felt like we were the only ones alive in the world. We kept following the signs hanging from the roof that were supposed to give directions to the different areas of the hotel, but we couldn’t concentrate long enough to remember in what direction they’d told us to go. I kept looking for a sign that said, “The Top of The World” but kept not seeing any, which only made me run faster towards the next sign. Finally we found some lone security guard sitting by the escalators. He was just a blur of blue. I said something like, “Top of the World. Now. We need. Running. Soon? Elevators or things that go up?” Needless to say, we never made it up there.

*

We are in a bathroom at the Stratosphere and I am in a large handicap stall with Leroy and Chet, and Leroy is cutting up lines of coke on the burnished surface of the toilet basin lid and the bathroom is empty and peaceful and echoes a lot and nobody is coming, don’t worry we’re the only ones here right now stop fucking freaking out here do this line okay and this toilet is so smooth it is so much like melted porcelain almost like a thick white liquid and it shines like it’s been polished all those powdery lines cut-up like chalk dust sitting there and not sinking, and now everything feels good again and they never stop serving alcohol in Vegas and this is good because I could really use a drink right now. Where are the mirrors? I need a mirror. I want to look inside my nose. Every little noise is amplified into echoes that rebound off of the walls like a hundred bouncy balls shattering the stillness of this grand and shining and empty bathroom.

*

We kept having to remind ourselves of how early in the morning it was. Time seems very strange when you don’t sleep. It’s like the night never happened, but it is still happening at the same time, and the sun doesn’t make sense, like weather on another planet, and your brain keeps flipping upside down and telling you anything is possible, that is before dejection sets in and tells you that everything is wrong and horrible and that it’s all an empty dream of nothing, and that’s where the cocaine can come in handy. After doing the last of Leroy’s stash of blow in the Stratosphere’s bathroom, though he assured me he still had more back at our room, we walked out to Las Vegas Boulevard and sat at a bus stop for a little while. Buses kept not coming, just long moments when there didn’t seem to be any sound anywhere in the world. I kept listening. A giant man made of PVC vinyl sheets stood superciliously with his hands on his hips above the casino towers. His name was Danny Gans and he was smiling. I stood up too and put my hands on my hips and smiled like Danny Gans. The billboard he was on proclaimed him, “ The Man of Many Voices.” I started talking like Bill Cosby. Then I sang the chorus to Deep Blue Something’s ‘Breakfast At Tiffany’s,’ except I sung it with an operatic baritone and changed a lot of the words and ended up singing something like, “And I said what about My Breakfast With Blassie, and you said that Andy Kaufman sure hates women, and I said, well I know what that’s like, dah dah dah dahdah!” Leroy and Chet ignored me. It wasn’t a good performance. This Danny Gans sure was something.

We finally decided to take a Taxi back to the Tropicana and go swimming in the pool. I also wanted to ride on the NYNY roller coaster, which I had assured my two companions would still be running, even at this early hour. So it was back in a Taxi and back to the Tropicana. I remember sitting on the floor of the hotel hallway there with Leroy while Chet went into his room, where his brother and his girlfriend were sleeping, and checked to see if he still had some Coke left. We were starting to fiend a little at this point and Chet kept telling us to keep it down. He must’ve found some because I also remember doing a fat line in his hotel room bathroom while being shushed as I yapped on about something or other so as not to wake up the sleeping pair. Chet was trying to be considerate. I was cockeyed. He pushed me out into the hallway at some point where I stood grinding my teeth until Leroy also came bounding out, and we both ran to the mirror by the elevators to check to see if we had any white dust in our nose hair. We didn’t.

Unfortunately, the NYNY roller coaster was closed until ten a.m., but I think it was past seven by the time we made it over there, and it didn’t seem unreasonable to us, being coked out of our gourds, that we would just go hang out somewhere else for a while and come back. I remember screaming to the guy at the NYNY rollercoaster’s reception desk—who had kindly informed us with a really scared look on his face, like I’d been holding up his dead grandmother’s skull or something, that the roller coaster would be opening up at ten sharp—“We’ll be back at ten! This thing better be running because we’re going to be ready to ride. You can bet all your bottom dollars on us being back here at ten. We’re not going to miss it. You better be here.” I kept going on as we all walked away with much alacrity and a great sense of purpose. Chet suggested we go swimming at the Tropicana pool. Leroy and I didn’t have swimsuits, but somehow this didn’t seem to matter, and onward we trod, making our enfeebled way back to the Tropicana at last, then following and trying to make sense of ceiling signs again. All these arrows pointing in all these directions, some even seemed to be pointing back at us, but eventually we found the pool, and discovered that it opened at 8 a.m. This was disappointing, but again, we figured we would just wait it out.

We ended up hanging out in a video arcade where none of the games were turned on, except for this photo booth that engraved your picture on a metal keepsake for 5 bucks. So we put in our five bucks and sat in various poses while the thing snapped a bright light at us. I had a prominent under bite in the picture that we chose to have engraved. It was actually kind of cool. This little metal plaque kind of like a dog tag or something with our picture on it. Chet kept it. He went up to his room to change or something. Leroy and I sat in the dual bucket seats of a race car game staring at the blank screens, pretending to drive and shift gears, talking very loudly as some guy vacuumed the carpet all around us.

“Shit. You know what I want to do? I’ve always had this dream, this kind of plan for myself, how I’ll end up.”

“Dead. Just like the rest of us. That’s how you’ll end up no matter wha…”

Leroy cut me off with a barbarous war cry. “Shut the fuck up! No. Just…listen.”

I was having a hard time just listening, but I tried.

“So, I’ve got all of this money in this 401k account, you know, for when I retire, but shit, I don’t want to wait. I mean, who knows? At the rate I’m going I might not make it much longer.”

“Could get hit by a bus to-morrow so eat, drink, drain your bank account.”

“I’m going to take all of that money and buy a trailer and go live out in the desert somewhere where nobody can find me. I’ll drive it around for a while maybe. And I’ll just end up somewhere, and that’s where I’ll stay. Every morning I’d go outside and sit in a lawn chair and drink coffee, smoke, and watch the sunrise. Just look up at the sky and think about things, take things slow, enjoy life, watch clouds go by. I’d get a dog and buy some guns and I don’t know, I’d just live out there on my own.”

“Do you even know how to shoot a gun?”

“What? SHUT THE FUCK UP!” Leroy was howling now and I decided to change the subject.

“Hey. What do you think about moving to France? I know this guy in Paris named Dominique. Good guy. Works in real estate. Has all kinds of connections. We could just get all of our money together and get some place to live there and we could learn French and you could just paint all day and I could walk all over the city and meet people and invite girls back to our place and we could go out at night and have wild times and…”

The vacuum cleaner turned off and my voice was all of a sudden ridiculously loud. Leroy and I were quiet for a few seconds and then we started laughing uncontrollably.

CHAPTER 11

2009-01-22T19:25:00.001-08:00

Chet came back all dressed for the pool: swimsuit, sunglasses, flip-flops, t-shirt, a weary smile and a few white towels that he’d taken from his room draped over his shoulder. Leroy and I just sat there for a while wondering if the arcade would ever come to life. The pool wasn’t opened yet, but we saw some early risers creeping outside and lying out on the deck chairs, and after wondering about what kind of people get up this early on a Saturday to go to the pool, we made our way out there too. We lay around on the chairs, cranking the rusted metal levers on the backs to put them in the all-the-way lying down position, and after also laying our towels down on them, we looked up at the morning sun and ate the rest of the pot cookies that had crumbled inside the vest pocket of Leroy ’s suit jacket. Leroy was not happy about the mess in his pocket and he kept screaming, “What kind of bizarre idiot put this fucking cookie in my pocket! It’s all crumbs, damn crumbs everywhere! Eat them you nitwits! Eat all these fucking crumbs. Get them out of my fucking pocket,” and then went on grunting and having fake mini-seizures and convulsions as he threw all the bits of cookie at us. I ended up eating a lot of cookie crumbs lying there half asleep on the deck chair. I was downright hypnagogic at this point, and I kept having waking dreams about gargoyles eating mice out of my hair, and I’d jump up and start thrashing my fingers around in my hair screaming something like, “You can have them! Here! I’ll get them all out for you! Assholes! Eat all you want!” Leroy and Chet would start laughing uncontrollably in their respective deck chairs every time I’d do something like this. They hadn’t eaten as many of the cookie crumbs as I had.

The next time I looked up, somewhat momentarily free of my stupor, I saw Chet swimming around in the pool. Then I saw Leroy jump in after him. Then I was in the pool, and it was a little chilly, and we were all in our underwear, and we were just floating around in circles there trying not to drown too fast. We swam over to the fake rock formation that usually had a waterfall pouring over it, but there was no waterfall. Some lifeguard started yelling at us, “The pool is closed you guys. Out.” We tried to argue, but I guess the pool opened an hour later on the weekend, which really pissed us off, but we got out and went back to lying in the deck chairs, maybe hoping to sleep for the whole hour until the pool actually opened.

The shakes started hitting me. I was just lying there, recumbent, having my own insane little visions and snake-filled dreams, when I started shaking uncontrollably. And I don’t mean just physically. It was as if my whole mind were rattling around, all my thoughts getting shot across my head like popcorn shooting around in a glass popcorn maker. I couldn’t concentrate on anything, and I started gathering up all my stuff, which was difficult because every time I’d think of one thing to grab I’d also start thinking about another thing I needed to take with me, and soon I was putting stuff down and picking up other stuff at the same time, and I couldn’t control how fast I was moving, which was pretty damn quick, and I just ended up screaming at Leroy to, “Wake the fuck up and give all my stuff to me!” I’d pick up my towel, then try to grab my shoes, but then I’d think damn I need to wear shoes to get out of here, and then I’d think, shit I need to put my pants on, I’m in my fucking underwear here, and then I’d start putting my pants on only to discover that I’d put my towel down, and I needed to take my towel with me, but then I’d think, this isn’t even my towel, it’s the hotel’s towel that Chet had brought down for me from his room, so I’d concentrate on my pants, and then I’d start thinking about my shoes, and then my wallet which was in my shoes, and then I’d look at a palm tree and think about what a palm tree was, and fronds, and then the sun would be there and I’d start wondering about the sun and how it might be burning my skin, and maybe melting my skin, and then I’d start rubbing the skin on my face to make sure it wasn’t melting, and it maybe could be melting, I couldn’t convince myself of anything. I did this for what seemed like a really long time. Somehow this wave of decisiveness shot through me. I bundled up all my stuff in my arms and strode off sedulously on the hot cement. I was still in my underwear, but I had my shoes on, and I walked briskly through a concrete tunnel, coming out where the spa was, and I kept heading towards the hotel lobby. It was then that I looked across the pool at where Leroy and Chet were now sitting up in their deck chairs. I looked at them staring at me and for some reason I started mouthing, “Chaise lounge,” to myself. Their heads looked to big for their bodies, like paper heads on Popsicle sticks, and it seemed like both their mouths were empty ovoid holes, like that guy in the Munch painting. It was then that the waterfall came on. I smiled at the sight of water falling into more water. Chet and Leroy were now both yelling at me to come back. I started to think about swimming again. Things were going to be alright. I could swim and go under the waterfall and all that water would just rush over me and pound on my head and everything would be better from now on.

I walked back around the pool, through the tunnel again, this time thinking about how foolish I must have looked carrying around all this stuff in my arms with this wet underwear on, and in my shoes with these strange multi-colored socks I’d chosen to wear the night before. Then I stopped caring and joined the guys back at the pool. They were happy I hadn’t left them. I threw all of my stuff back down and it was back to lying in the deck chair.

I opened my eyes and people were swimming in the pool. Chet was swimming around in the pool. I wanted to dive in. It was too shallow for a good dive. I slowly submerged myself in the cool water. The whole world was a sarcophagus and I was trapped inside, and it was cold inside.

Leroy got me swimming and we went over to the waterfall where the water was a little warmer. I was pissing like crazy at this point. I couldn’t get it all out for some reason, and I kept letting out little spurts here and there all over the pool. Everything smelled really strongly of chlorine. I started talking again.

“Leroy, my friend in Riverside has a salt water pool.”

“Huh. What?”

“Yeah. It’s got no chemicals. All natural.”

“Is it clean.”

“Yeah. Super clean. The salt cleans it. Salt is actually really similar to chlorine, I mean, chemically. Shit it’s cold.”

“Come over here by the waterfall you moron. You insane person. Come over here where the water is warm.”

A guy and a girl entered the pool across from us. I kept staring at the girl in her two-piece.

“Stop staring at her,” Leroy growled. “You’ll get us killed.”

I heeded his advice and said to him very low, “Let’s go in the spa”

Leroy ’s eyes lit up and he whispered conspiratorially, “You think it’s on?”

“Only one way to find out.”

We hopped out of the pool shivering and jumped into the spa. It was nice and hot. No bubbles though, and the bottom scratched my feet up something awful, and it was really dirty with all kinds of leaves floating around in it. The water was kind of brownish-yellow. All my piss finally left me in one final gush.

We yelled at Chet to join us and he ran over shivering and leapt in, splashing the tepid water all over the fake rock walls around us. We just sat there enjoying the warm water. I took my hand out of the water and tried to hold it straight, but it was shaking so bad it actually went down and splashed water all over Chet and Leroy. I decided to keep it submerged for a while.

My eyes weren’t right. Every time I closed them I saw red blurs seeping into my eyelids, and there were all kinds of things around that I shouldn’t have been seeing, like mutant moths devouring my fingers. I kept trying to hide my hand under the water, but it didn’t help. The damn moths kept swimming underwater to bite me. Chet got out and figured out how to turn the bubbles on. Every time a bubble popped I thought my head would explode. An old man with a cane kept hitting me on the head. Or was that a tree branch? A palm frond? A kid with a hammer? I couldn’t tell, couldn’t keep anything straight. Was Chet just floating there across from me? Was he still breathing? He must be breathing because he’s afloat. Air keeps you afloat in water, right? Do dead bodies float to the surface? Yes. Like that game we’d play in my mom’s pool when we were kids, dead man or something, where you’d take a deep breath and float there on your stomach for as long as you could hold your breath. Like doing the back float. I was always good at doing the back float. I should have a fucking gold metal that says, ‘Back Float Champion of the 5th Grade,’ on it.

The water was getting too hot, and my feet kept getting cut on the bottom of the spa. I started thinking there was sandpaper down there. So I got up out of the spa and sat on the side dangling my legs in the water. Chet and Leroy were cooking in there like it was a muddy stew big enough to feed a couple of armies. I started trying to stir the water with my legs. I’d make those two dolts get caught up in a whirlpool and send them sinking down to the bottom in the eye of the thing. I got back in and started swimming around in a circle really fast. Soon they joined me and I thought, “Suckers. They don’t even know they’re bringing about their own demise.” In my mind ten-foot roiling waves started splashing around, and then it was like a black hole, all this water going around and down into a fine point, into a nothing that sucked in everything around it. We were all going to go swirling down and around until we got sucked into the pit in the middle, until the violent storm sucked us all up and the world would go on without us, whatever was left of it. I was mad with circling, faster and faster, and I was so dizzy that I felt like my eyes were crossing over to different sides of my face. Somehow I leapt out. I lay there panting on the pavement, water dripping off of me, my head spinning like a top, like I was stuck on a merry-go-round that some stupid person kept pushing faster and faster around.

My head is the rolling drum of a dryer…no, a washing machine whirring on the spin cycle.

Every single neuron in my brain, all 100 billion of them, is pulsating. I can feel every single one. All my synapses are flashing, febrile and fantastically, all these neurotransmitters just flowing, and this randomly shifting chaos of depolarizing and hyperpolarizing of my shit-faced post-synaptic membranes is making me crazy. I know this. It’s the fucking pot cookies. I ate too much. My gears are grinding, all the cogs going crazy with mis-use, turning in on themselves. All these strange and hollow synaptic voices getting lost over the hillocks of cannabinoids. My brain cells are eating themselves rather than go crazy.

It becomes hard to convince myself of anything. My head is expanding. Everything is soft and growing and quickly vanishing to be replaced by some other weirdly formed shape that then re-adjusts and fills out and then goes too into the dust of things. Bees with faces like undertakers bite my toes. I put my feet in the water but the bees just change into eels with thousands of claws, sharp thin talons that cut into me and send electric shocks through me, burning the hair on my legs. I feel flies landing on me. But then they aren’t flies, they’re gobs of spit. Is it raining? Is rain just God spitting on us? The spit turns into lava as it melts and rolls off of me. I’m be burnt alive! Good thing these boils on my skin are giving birth to bubble gum balls. I try to take one and put it in my mouth to chew, only to discover that it’s changed into a chicken egg. The taste of the raw egg is so horrible I try to vomit it out, but all that comes out is a deep black oily liquid that grows into a huge oil slick covering the surface of the spa water. I yell at Chet and Leroy, “Get out or you’ll both turn into oil-covered birds!” They stare at me and then go back to floating in the spa. I’m happy. I’ve recovered my ability to speak. “Come on. We’ve got to go. Now. The sun is burning all the lilies in my brain!”

I get up and walk over to the deck chairs. Again I go through the tunnel that leads back there. It’s like I’m in some underground cave. It seems to take a really long time to walk through the tunnel. I feel really ashamed of being in my underwear. I try to walk really fast but it’s no use. The tunnel keeps getting longer and longer. I start to think it will never end. I’ll just be walking through this tunnel forever, cursed like Sisyphus, walking the same trail over and over again for all of eternity. I start to think about sleeping dogs, about letting them lie, but what if those same dogs are really telling the truth?

The tunnel ends. I gather up my stuff. Chet and Leroy took a short cut, swimming across the pool, and are already getting their stuff together. At least Leroy is. Chet is just lying there with his sunglasses on. I hate him for being so damned relaxed. Then he gets up. He turns his pockets inside out. He goes rummaging through all his stuff and then he jumps back in the pool madly diving all over the place and scouring the bottom, staying underwater for a long time. I start to yell, “I can hold my breath for a really, really, really long time!” I believe that I am Ted Danson.

Chet comes out of the water looking very dejected, like a truck has just run over his favorite pet turtle. He says, “My ID is gone. My room key is gone. Where’d they go?” He looks under all the deck chairs but to no avail. Leroy and I look around too but we can’t find anything.

I start to talk again. “Chet, um, sorry, but we’ve got to go. I’m kind of freaking out.”

“That’s cool. I’m going to stay here and keep looking. Fuck. I’ve got to meet up with my brother. He wants to get breakfast.”

Leroy tells him, “Don’t worry. They’ll turn up. Some kid with a scuba mask will probably find them down at the bottom of the pool. Kids love doing shit like that.”

“Yeah. Fuck. I can’t believe I lost my ID. I kept checking for it like every five minutes to make sure it was still in my pocket, and now it’s not. See you guys later.”

The next thing I know Leroy and I are wandering around in some odd building and he keeps telling me that we’ll just get a taxi, it’ll be soon, and we’ll be out of this place. And we’re walking through a glass bridge and I look out and there’s the pool beneath us, and we look for Chet but he’s not there. That bastard’s left. He’s gone. Where’d he go? Why did he leave us? But then we keep walking and inside the hotel there are all these postcards on a turning rack, and we see Chet with his brother and they are both looking at postcards. I don’t want to see this. I can’t see things like this right now, not with all these parrots eating my shoulders and this rat trapped in my mouth chewing up my gums. We walk by waving at Chet and he kind of smiles at us in recognition. Does he not recognize us? Was that really Chet? Maybe it was a phony, a doppelganger, a guy that just kind of seems to look like Chet. What color hair does Chet have? Blonde? Do I even really know who Chet is? Does he have ID to prove who he really is?

Somehow we get in a taxi. I can’t talk. Everything is too loud. I can hear the little chime of wind slipping in the crack in the window. I try to get the window all the way up, but I still hear the noise. The infinitesimal space where no two objects can ever really touch is too much space to block out the noise. I can hear the power lines buzzing, the street lights clicking when they change, cells dividing in my nostrils, long, long, long distances and even longer thoughts about those distances, the clicking of the cab meter as we go along, every click taking hours to click up the fare. Leroy tries to talk but I just ignore him. It’s all too much. My head against the glass is a symphony. The glass is becoming part of my hairline. Every few minutes I come out of my trance and mumble something and fake laugh about some other thing, and the cab driver must really think I’m a nitwit. He may be right. He may be crazy. But it just might be a lunatic that I’m looking for. What? What was that? Easy there. Did I say that out loud? Is this a cop car or a taxi?

It was a very long taxi ride. That guy must have driven us to Jersey City or something.

Blundering somehow into the hotel we headed straight for the elevators. All around me were unimaginable monsters lurking in the shadows of slot machines. I didn’t have time to contemplate them. I wanted a bed and I wanted sleep and I wanted it right away. Up we went in the hot elevator with the stupid fan buzzing in the roof.

I am finally in a bed. I have taken two 15mg Restoril capsules. At least I hope that is what they were. They were in a small white bottle that was supposed to have words like “temazepam” and “bedtime” and “for sleep” and “may cause drowsiness,” printed on it somewhere. There is no way to tell for sure. My eyes have gone bad. They were the last two pills in the bottle. They should help to slow my brain’s circuitry down. Leroy is pacing around madly and everything is coming in and out of focus, melting, changing size, turning into other things. Mirrors blend in with the wall. I scream out, “You’ve got long hair!” to Leroy, and then I realize Leroy doesn’t actually have long hair, and I look again and the long hair is gone. It’s just Leroy with his mustache and his tight plaid pants that I keep thinking are his pajamas, and I keep wanting to ask him why he brought fucking pjs to Vegas, but before I get a chance to talk I’m distracted by the air conditioner, which sounds like an airplane taking off. I am here in this bed with these shitty, paper-thin sheets, this disgusting comforter, this rock of a pillow under my head, lying prone in my wet underwear, listening to Leroy yap on and on about things I can’t understand, words that don’t make sentences, just words with no meaning, and all around me ordinary objects are taking on all kinds of shapes they’re not supposed to have. The roof is coming down. The cottage cheese on the ceiling is attacking me. It keeps getting closer. It will suffocate me. I yell at Leroy, “The cottage cheese is eating my face! Stop it! Get it away!” Leroy laughs and goes on talking. He seems to be getting ready to go somewhere. He seems to be excited about going out. What kind of maniac goes out after being up all night, after taking loads of drugs and booze and with the ceiling coming down to eat my face and all these little gossamer tails of dust mites shooting like rockets all over this place? What a dope. He’ll never make it. I try to communicate with him but it is no use. My mouth has been glued shut by the lampshade-headed man’s glue gun. He gets me to shut up finally. What a brave man with a lampshade for a head. No more lights. No more noise. Leroy is gone. I pull the thick curtain over the window and throw my immalleable…coarse…stiff, stuffed…unfluffy?...no…burdensome comforter over the curtain to keep it that way. Words don’t matter. Everything is quiet except for the roar of the air conditioner. I can stop hearing it if I hear it consistently for long enough. I won’t notice it after a while. I am certain of this. I close my eyes and I see images that fall through time and space so gracefully I am at once at peace, grateful for them, lost in this world of chaos where nothing makes sense, where colors are dark and dark is light and everything moves on its own volition, everything done without my having anything to do with the doing of it, every last velliety completely out of my powers of control. Star-shaped creatures with bicycle pumps for arms turn me over and put me to sleep on a bed of soft heather and rose petals.

Somebody is knocking softly. Is it too soft to wake me up? Can I be awakened from a dead sleep by soft knocking? Do I wake or sleep…?……I am moving towards the door and my body is very heavy. Leroy’s face. Leroy. Who am I? He’s talking but it is far away, like a bad overdub in a foreign movie. I am in bed again. I see Leroy taking his room key. He forgot his room key. He is laughing and then he is gone. I stop thinking again. Everything is heavy and soft and everything is blackness. I no longer care about the world I live in.

CHAPTER 12

2009-01-22T19:24:00.000-08:00

I woke up around three. I thought about James Agee for some reason. Leroy was curled up in the fetal position on his bed, fully clothed, snoring. I’d had enough of being asleep for the time being. I put on some pants, buttoned up my shirt, wrapped a tie around my neck, and went down to the bar to grab a few beers and think about my next move. I decided to let Leroy sleep.

The bar was much the same, but a lot more crowded than before. I was really thirsty, hot and dehydrated. My tongue was a snake with sandpaper skin and there was a line of people waiting on drinks from the same surly bar tender I’d dealt with the night before. The shakes hit me as I was standing in line. I’d never wanted a beer so bad in my life. I kept cursing the slow moving people in front of me and repeating my order in my drug-addled head, ‘Two Tecates,’ and I kept reaching in my pocket and rubbing the three dollar bills in there together, kept counting them over and over, yep, there’s three, two for the beers and one for the tip. Everything was annoying me. Every little nudge from some idiot standing next to me, every idiot standing next to me, every bovine hirsute disaster of a person in-between me and a beer, it was all too much and I started screaming inside of my head at everything, cursing the whole damn place, all the fake scintillation, the beer mirrors behind the bar, the upside-down Tequila bottles set up like Slurpee machines, the B.O. that just lingered everywhere.

All I wanted was a beer. Two beers really. But that didn’t matter. I needed this line to fucking move. I started cracking all of my fingers, then moved on to my toes. The bar tender winked tenderly at somebody and ripped open a new box of Tecates. Ice was dripping off of them and this enraged me. I wanted to jump over the bar and grab all of the beers and punch out the bartender, running off screaming like a jack-in-the-box run amok, shot-gunning beer as I went and throwing the empties at the ceiling fans. My eyes were burning. The guy in front of me, his thick growth of red curly back hair just inches away, with his “I’ve Got Real Class and a Big Ass” tank top soaked in grime and sweat, kept shifting back and forth and squealing a little bit, which was really destroying my will to keep myself together for the time being. But I didn’t move. I just stood there and waited and opened and closed my eyes a lot, my hands curled into fists so tight my nails were starting to cut into the skin on my palms. I tried to focus on the baseball game that was on the television on the wall. Every pitch was another pitch closer to getting some damn beer in me. I spent a lot of time wiping sweat from my forehead and cracking my stiff neck. I’m not sure who was playing. I just stared at the screen to keep me focused.

After what seemed like 14 months I made it to the front of the line and leaned on the bar in relief. I tried to smile at the old rat-toothed maid behind the bar, but it didn’t work and she went over to wash out some glasses or something. For the first time in a while I tried to speak, “Hey. Hi. Um, could I get two Tecates….please?” I tried to look nice and presentable, kind of straightening up a little and pulling my tie up tighter around my neck.

“Okay hun,” she said very low as she kept piling dirty glasses into some kind of dishwasher below the bar.

I tried to wait her out and pretended to be really interested in something I was pretending was happening to my left. She eventually came over and said, “Now what was that that you wanted hun?”

“Um. Two…Tecates? Please?” I was completely falling apart.

She ripped open a box and said kind of softly, “Two? Sure. That’ll be two dollars hun.” She popped open the beers and put two slices of lime on the tops. I set down what I thought were three dollars, but which turned out to be a two tens and a one. It was a confusing way to pay. I tried to take the tens back but then realized that it wouldn’t work that way, so I guffawed at my contretemps and tried to leave a ten and a one there. She saw I was confused and took the ten to the cash register. When she turned away I threw the lime slices in the garbage, picked up one of the beers as quick as I could and drained it to the lees. It was very cold and tasted so good I couldn’t stop. I just kept pouring it down until it was gone. She smiled at me when she brought my change back saying, “You sure musta been thirsty, huh?” and giggled like a fucking schoolgirl getting tickled. I left the dollar on the bar for a tip, burped, and said, “Yep. Thanks,” and walked away with my change and my other beer, feeling pretty good. Everything was better and I started in on the other beer.

After walking around for a little while I stopped at a nickel slot machine. I figured, how much could I lose in just nickels? Then I accidentally put a ten in the machine instead of the one I thought I was putting in. So now I was going to lose ten bucks instead of one. Shit. That could’ve bought me more than half a dozen more Tecates. Well, there was no going back. I decided to just sit there and play the damn machine until my money ran out.

The sun was setting. The glass swinging doors of the entrance were about ten feet to my right and I could see outside from where I was sitting at the slot machine. I set my Tecate down beside me and started to hit the buttons to make the thing spin. I kept hitting the “Bet Max” button and I kept losing. Soon I started playing a bit slower, trying to enjoy the moment of sitting there at the machine, sipping my cold beer, watching all the colors of fading orange and yellow sun come through the windows. Dust motes lit up in streaks, whirling little hurricanes of dead skin and cigarette ash, shooting in at all angles from the odd refractions of vespertine light. There was something very melancholy about the whole thing and I started to get a little sadly nostalgic and maybe a little maudlin too, sitting there watching the slots spin, like it was my last chance for stillness and a little peace. Not too many people were around, and I wasn’t at all sleepy. My beer tasted good. The light was that romantic tinge of sepia that comes around every so often when the gilt-like glare of the sun’s last stand against oncoming night makes its way through the window, and you look up, not even realizing why you’re looking up, and all at once everything is transformed into a ideal image of itself, a facsimile of God, and everything is God and God is in everything, and for at least this short time all is beautiful and effulgent and real and right there basking in the glow, like terra-cotta reflecting sunlight on the façade of an old building, all the angles are perfect and all the world is caught up in the supervenient display—a dusky moment in time. The slot machines were all glinting specks of joie de vivre, everything was in efflorescence, and for the first time in months my head was steady and my thoughts were few. All was right with the world. I sat there and spun the reels and drank my beer and watched the sun fade from the room. The sound of a hundred slot machines purring all together in a cacophony of mechanical buzzing, Huey Lewis and The News singing about the heart of Rock’n’Roll, all that whirling of wheels rolling and all the beeps and the chime of constant motion, it was all a riotous gallimaufry of clanging and chirping and the sudden stops and starts of tinny digital songs like a prototypical robot making an attempt at speech through binary music.

My ten bucks eventually turned into 3 nickels, and I bet them all at once and lost. I pounded my fist against the soft rubber bar on the protruding ledge of the machine. The Gold Spike had ten more of my dollars and I didn’t feel like giving them any more, so I took what was left of my beer and got up and left. It was starting to get a little crepuscular out, all kinds of long shadows taking shape, the sky a deep mailbox blue, and it was still over 100 degrees out. I must’ve been sitting there at that damn nickel slot machine longer than I was aware of. I decided to head down to the Walgreens on Freemont Street. My stomach was grumbling and I wanted to nip any kind of impending shitstorm in the bud. I bought some chewable Imodium and a large packet of Pepto-Bismol. After walking back outside in the heat I stood there fumbling with the packaging while tourists brushed by me coming from all directions like swarms of vespine beasts. I ripped open the pepto, threw away the box, and started chewing it all up, then I popped a few Imodiums in there for good luck.

You can’t wear a jacket in this kind of weather. That leaves you with few options of pockets. I shoved everything into my pants pocket where it bulged out like a tumor. The street was flowing like a river of blubber with all kinds of mindless automatons set on stun, and I walked in fast Zs trying to avoid them like a skier on a slalom run going through flags back and forth on a crowded mountain. A couple in matching neon green visors might cut me off at a turn, and I’d pivot and streak back across the street just missing crashing headlong into a burly, thick legged bicycle cop in tight black spandex. Then I’d sharply spin and cut back, somehow narrowly avoiding the large, butt-pack sporting family who for some reason decided to halt all at once right in front of me to watch a really horrible cover band playing on a stage in the middle of the street. The band was covering, ‘There ain’t no Mountain High Enough’ in a hard rock style. I hate that fucking song. I moved on, darting back and forth and scampering around in this fashion, like an electrocuted epileptic with his hair on fire desperately trying to find a vat of water to dowse the flames. I’d brush up against people and mumble my apologies. I’d start jogging at times, and then would realize that I was jogging and I would stop. Booths were set up all over with people doing caricatures and people selling tchotchkes and all kinds of Las Vegas souvenirs. Crowds would gather to watch a break-dancer, or some guy doing, ‘Graffiti Art,’ or a woman air brushing glamour shots of really ugly people. I almost ran headfirst into a woman holding a cardboard sign reading, ‘Jesus wouldn’t gamble away his salvation!’ She started screaming for all of the sinners to atone. She looked at me with steely and determined eyes for a moment. I smiled and she looked away fiercely screaming, ‘This is the devil’s work. Let Jesus show you the way!’ She was very angry and I decided to leave her alone. Jesus was alright, but I don’t think that he had that lady in mind when he was thinking about saving the world. I started humming that song, ‘Jesus is just alright with me.’ It made me feel better. Finally I decided I needed to get inside a damn casino and out of the boiling crucible that was the Freemont Street Experience. I saw the green leprechaun of Fitzgerald’s Casino and headed in.

I’ve always liked the bar inside Fitzgerald’s. A lot of old people hang out there. It feels safe. So I pulled up a bar stool and ordered a Guinness. The bar tender gave me a small glass and a pint can. I love drinking beer out of small glasses. I don’t know why. It makes me feel like I’m in some old Italian movie or something. So I started pouring the beer in the small glass and drinking it down and I felt good again. I decided to put 5 bucks in the video poker game on the bar top. I won a few hands and finally felt like I was getting somewhere. Then some idiot came up next to me—why is it that no matter where I am the biggest fucking moron in the whole place will find me and start trying to talk to me?—ordered 5 shots of tequila, took a seat on the stool to my left, and pointed to my beer slurring, “Is that a good beer?”

I tried to ignore him but he was really insistent. He kept pointing at my beer. I told him that it was good and I pretended to be really into the video poker game I was currently losing my money on. He didn’t shut up easily. He kept moving closer to me, and he was a big boy and stunk like a rat’s ass, and kept trying to get my attention about something. The bar tender, whom I liked very much because he was nice and efficient without being smarmy, brought over a tray of tequila shots and asked the guy if he wanted limes. The guy looked kind of dumbfounded and started messing around with his cell phone for a minute, then said, “Yeah. Sure. Why not? Shit. I can’t get no reception in this piece.”

I can’t stand this kind of talk.

By this point I was starting to lose more hands then I was winning on the poker game. I just wanted this annoying, petulant fat fucker to leave, but he just kept sitting there pushing the buttons on his cell phone. I finished off my beer and asked for another. The bar tender gave it to me for free, or “comped it” in the parlance of Vegas, because I was playing the poker, and gave me a receipt saying something to that effect. It’s incredible how many receipts you get in Vegas. They give you a receipt for everything. I guess they have to have proof of everything they do. They’ve got to be real careful that they’re not getting ripped-off while they’re taking your money. I lost another hand and softly cursed the machine. The fat man next to me found this funny and moved over so he could see what was going on with my poker game. He started giving me really bad advice about what cards to hold and his breath had the essence of a shit-filled outhouse roasting in the sun. I tried to shoo him away, but it was no use. All the tequila shots were sitting on the bar still. Who the fuck orders five Tequila shots and then just lets them sit there? At least down one of them. I started to get angry and took a long drink of beer. The Guinness was cold and tasted delicious. I cheered up immediately and got three kings on my next hand. The fat guy patted me on the back and told me I was a champ, and then, not soon enough, went back to his seat and started messing around with his phone again. By some grace of God the guy finally gathered up all the Tequila shots and left. I breathed a monsoon of relief. The old people at the bar all looked like zombies slowly sipping their highballs and cheap Martinis. Softly pressing the hold buttons I started to slow play the video poker game.

After losing my money again I decided to head to the Bay City Diner across the street from the Plaza to get a steak. I needed some food in my gut. I ended up getting a chicken fried steak with hash and eggs, and eating all alone at the end of the long counter. I started thinking about all the diners in old America, and all the countertops, the Formica, the mashed potatoes and gravy and glasses of milk pushed across a century of Diner countertops, and all the stools stuck into the floor and all the asses that had sat on them throughout all the years, and how many diners were now gone forever, given way to chain stores and McDonalds. There was an America that I felt nostalgic for, an America that I’d never known, only read about in old books, or maybe seen glimpses of in old movies. My grandfather’s America of Diners and Hank Williams on the jukebox, advertisements painted on the sides of brick buildings, soda fountains and hitchhiking across the country—an America that would never exist again, that was long gone by the time I was born. I always feel nostalgic for things I’ve never known. Freemont Street somehow made me feel a part of that old weird America for some reason. Maybe it was all the aged light bulb and crayola-bright signs, or all the geriatric gamblers, relics of another era, or maybe I was just seeing what I wanted to see. It was all a dream and I was making everything up as I went along. Rotary phones and vinyl records give way to cell phones and iPods, but one day the cell phone too would seem like an antique. I decided to just enjoy the time I was living in by pretending that I was visiting it from the distant future. Everything was just so damn quaint.
The food was good but my stomach was having none of it. I finished off what I could and paid off the waitress. Going back to the hotel I did not take my time. My bowels were churning and ready to spit out fire. I looked up into the multipurpose-room bigness of the sky, saw many resplendent things giving their last shimmer of the day, and sprinted back to the Gold Spike.

CHAPTER 13

2009-01-22T19:23:00.002-08:00

Leroy was still all curled up sleeping. I left the lights out and quickly dove into the bathroom. The floor was soaked. He must’ve showered with the curtain open, or pissed all over the floor. I decided to believe the former. My shoes got all wet. Leroy snored from his bed, as I shit away in the dark.

I chose to let Leroy sleep off whatever it was that he’d been doing all morning. I mean, he hadn’t slept in two days. Freemont Street was calling me back, so I heeded its call and went back out into the early evening heat.

I ended up sitting at a bar in some casino where they had this hi-def television that was showing a dozen split-screens of baseball games. The bartender was busy making these tall, slushie, margarita-like drinks that give people horrible brain freeze. The drinks came in these plastic souvenir cups that looked liked thin vases for long-stemmed roses, and there were these turbine-like-things above the bar that were spinning the slush around. It was like getting a Slurpee at seven-eleven, except with a little tequila mixed in. I ordered a Budweiser as soon as I could and sat there watching all the baseball games. Some guy in pink shorts and sandals kept coming over for refills on his slushie drink. I tried to ignore him, and for once, finally, this strategy worked. He went away. The beer was cold and I drank it down and ordered another. Getting the bartender away from the slushie machine wasn’t easy. I started knocking on the bar top with my fist. This seemed to do the trick and some well-dressed guy came over and told me to, “Quit doing that.” I tried watching the baseball games but it was too much. As soon as I’d get set on watching one game my attention would be diverted by another, and as I was slowly getting a little drunk, it was hard to concentrate anyway. My eyes kept wandering from square to square on the big screen, and I started getting dizzy, and my beer started getting empty, but I liked sitting there trying to watch all the games at once, trying to keep track of the scores and balls and strikes. On one screen Ichiro got beaned by a pitch and some guy at the other end of the bar yelled out, “That’s for Pearl Harbor you fucking Jap bastard!” It was all too much. I ended up just getting myself really confused and I got up and left. It was time to wake up Leroy.

Leroy was sitting on his bed smoking a cigarette when I came flailing through the door. The air conditioner was rattling like a jalopy with mis-firing spark plugs.

“Leroy. You’re awake.”

“Yes. Yes awake I am. What a fucking morning I had. Or afternoon. Whatever it was. Before I slept.”

“Where?”

“The Glitter Gulch.”

“Where the strippers go to die.”

“Yes. Yes. Man, what the hell was I thinking? I couldn’t sleep and you were freaking out about the ceiling eating your head or something.”

“Yeah. I think I still have some cottage cheese in my hair.”

“So I went down to the bar and had a few beers and then I was like fuck it and I went out to Freemont and just started walking around. I was fucking crazy. I did some more coke in a bathroom somewhere, and I was walking around mumbling to myself and people were starting to stare at me, so I decided to duck into the dark and cozy confines of the Glitter Gulch for a while.”

“How was it?”

“It was a fucking freak show. All these old and worn out strippers kept coming up to me and bugging me, trying to get me to give them money to shove their old and wilted tits in my face. I kept trying to get them to go away. So I mostly just sat there at the stage throwing ones at the girls dancing. Some were kind of hot I guess. More wrinkles than curves though.”

“How long did you stay there?”

“I don’t know. I kept ordering beers and sitting there in the dark, and they kept playing Aerosmith and Whitesnake and shit like that. But, oh, and then this one stripper was actually pretty cool. Let’s see…so, I’m sitting at the stage smoking all of my cigarettes up and drinking beer after beer. I just wanted to see the show, and ever goddamn stripper in the place keeps coming up to me and asking me if I want a lap dance, and I keep telling them no that I just want to watch the show and to leave me alone. And finally this one really ugly stripper, who is more than a little on the heavy side, comes up, and she’s like 19 and looks like she’s been beaten with farm implements her whole life, and I tell her the same thing, you know, that I just want to watch the show. And so this really ugly and blubbery young stripper just sits down next to me and starts talking at me. I drink some beers and watch the show and at some point I turn to her, and for some reason, maybe just to get her to shut up, I ask her what there is to do in this town besides gambling and going to strip clubs, and she’s of course like really shocked, like what the fuck are you doing in Vegas if you don’t want to gamble and ogle naked women while getting drunk? So she tells me we should go to this bar called the Double Down to do our drinking tonight. I guess bands play there and the place doesn’t close. I trust her. She was pretty trashy and probably knows the seedier sides of things. After we got done talking she asked me if I still wanted a lap dance. I told her to get the hell away from me, that I just wanted to watch the show, and I wasn’t about to throw eighty bucks at her so she could wreck the shit out of my lap with her big ass. Maybe if she’d given me a walloping discount, maybe…but anyway, we should check out this Double Down bar.”

So we had plans for the night. That was good. I didn’t want to think anymore about what we were going to do. I just wanted to do it.

Night was settling in and we were going to need a little more cocaine to keep us going. Leroy cut up a few more lines, we sucked them up, finished off the rest of the Jameson, and went off to find some kind of adventures among the tintinnabulations of the casinos.

After a couple of really bad ham sandwiches at the Gold Spike Diner, and a few more Tecates as well, we decided to meet up with Chet and his brothers and explore the high-class excesses of The Strip.

Another taxi, another twenty five bucks, another mega resort hotel lobby and casino, capriciously strolling from one place to the next, not staying anywhere long, grabbing the handrails and putting our feet up us we sped along above the motorized grooved rubber surface of moving walkways, jumping on air-conditioned trams, shouting at things and people for no reason, flipping people off, cussing and getting yelled at to watch our language, drinking at odd fancy bars with tiny furniture and getting kicked out for throwing ice cubes at potted plants, Leroy flinching in wild hiccupping fits and screaming in terror every time he thinks he sees what he believes to be a yuppie, wandering some more, and finally losing more of my money at an Elvis slot machine just trying to make the damned thing play music, screaming, “I just want to make Elvis sing!” as Leroy and Chet drag me away. I remember being rushed into a taxi and the cabbie laughing at us in disbelief when we told him to take us to the Double Down. I seemed to still have a glass in my hand with some ice and a little tawny-colored liquid left in it. I quickly drank it down, rolled down the window, and threw the empty glass at the moon.

CHAPTER 14

2009-01-22T19:23:00.001-08:00

The Double Down is a dive bar somewhere in downtown Las Vegas right across the street from a liquor store and a cheap motel. Photocopied flyers for bands covered the fake brick wall of the front entrance. Two beefy door guys guarded that entrance and took five bucks from you before you were allowed to go in, giving you an odd black stamp on your hand of an eagle eating a dove to prove that you’d paid them. Outside there was a kind of porch where a bunch of juvenile types were standing around smoking and trying to look irreverently hip. It reminded me of a dirty coffee shop I used to frequent when I was a teenager. All kinds of young people were hanging out there when we entered and there was some kind of psuedo-neopunk band playing. The guitar player looked like he was about fifteen and the others weren’t much older. There was a square bar with an angry, thuggish bartender in the middle. He had a long goatee and many piercings on his prematurely weathered mug. Strange tattoos colored his arms like sleeves. We all found beers there and sat down in the corner on top of some fold-up table. A lot of the furniture was of the lawn-set-deck-chair-collapsible variety, and was mostly in its storable form, many card tables on their sides with their legs drawn in and chairs stacked on each other. It was like a meeting hall waiting for a meeting. I covered my ears and cringed thinking about how shitty live music had become for me. The band was fast and loud. The bass player was wearing blue wristbands and screaming into the microphone. I had to get away and went to the bathroom. Bad graffiti done with all kinds of Sharpies or Magic Markers, and even in pencil, covered the walls, and of course band stickers were all over the place, on the mirrors and stall door and the trashcan and so on. It all seemed kind of generic and dull, this attempt at rebellion nothing more than an imitated rage, a kind of aping of real emotion that had been being done for so long that it was only a simulacra repeating itself with no tie to anything real anymore. There wasn’t even a memory left of anything real ever having been there. It was all a dumb show played out with some kind of amped up impersonation of recalcitrance, signifying nothing. Sound repeating another sound that’s repeated the same sound over and over so many times it’s lost all sense of meaning. It made me want to vomit blood. My ears weren’t made for taking loud music, and I got some toilet paper and shoved it in my ears. That made me feel a little better and I finished pissing, washed my hands in the filthy sink, and went back out to watch the little runts grunt and scream their innocuous vitriol. Voices lost and screaming in a paper bag, guitars thrashing in a sea of spit hawked at nothing for no reason at all, like a cover band trying to appear angry at the world. I knew I would need more beer to make it through the set. I felt like I was at a high school pep rally. Somebody handed the singer a Corona, which he shook up with a lime and started downing like some dude on spring break. I yelled into Leroy’s ear, “He’s drinking a Corona! What the hell happened to punk rock?” Leroy just laughed and kept shaking back and forth, happy just to have the noise to move to. After retrieving some beers from the bar I spotted some seats at a table and motioned to Chet and Leroy to join me, which they did. We sat and drank and watched the band go through their motions. I tried to cover my ears as much as possible. The bass player with the wristbands started looking a little sick between songs. Some girl ran up with a plastic cup and kept trying to shove it in his face, and they guy kept pushing her away with his cheeks all puffed up, and he then turned and puked all over his amp. Now it seemed like things were starting to get good. Leroy and Chet were cheering madly and raising their beers in a lively toast to the guy. I wanted some more coke and I managed to mention this to Leroy between all the noise and activity. He had a little more left and we went outside to find a little more secluded place.

It turned out that place was the parking lot outside. I leaned up against a brick wall, and Leroy kept saying, “Just calm down. Not here. Shit. No. Not here. Fuck,” and things like that. I kept saying, “Come on. Just real quick. Right here. Nobody fucking cares,” and things like that. Eventually Leroy ended up shoving a coke-filled pen cap up my nose, cutting up my nares something nasty, as we stood and jabbered and looked all around the crappy parking lot outside the bar. The liquor store across the street seemed like a busy place. I kept expecting some underage kids to come up and ask us to buy them beer. We would have done it. Sadly, nobody asked. So we smoked a few cigarettes, our ears still ringing from the loudness of the band, and watched people come and go. The door guys or bouncers were big and burly, as all bouncers should be, and they interrogated everyone coming in, trying to get back in, or just standing around the entrance. I didn’t want to go near them just yet so Leroy and I kept our distance, pacing around between parked cars on the farthest edges of the lot.

“I should’ve been a painter,” I said rather somberly.

Leroy gave me a wistful smile. “You?”

“Yeah. I know some things about light and shape…and color too.” I looked at my tattered shoes. “Should’ve bought some paint, brushes, canvas, that kind of stuff. But I never did. And here I am stuck staring at all these things. And this moonlight all over everything…in a parking lot. And I can’t do a damn thing about it. Because I never learned how to paint. It’s a damn shame. It’s a misery I tell you.”

“What do you know about painting?”

“I know what chiaroscuro is.”

“Shit. Everybody thinks they can be an artist.” Leroy stiffened up for a moment and gave me a heavy and almost menacing look. “Things always seem so easy when you don’t have to actually attempt to do them.” He took a long thoughtful drag of his cigarette. He was shaking his head at me and I knew I was acting the fool again, letting things outside that should’ve been kept, malformed and defective as they were, inside, locked away where they’d never be found. “Keep dreaming. That way you’ll never have to fail at anything. You’ll never have to try and be disappointed when things don’t work out.”

He smiled at me, his mustache curling up with his mouth, seeming to stretch around his head. All kinds of things were going on in that expression. Not the least of which was a disenchanted but also steadfast optimistic belief in the reality of himself.

I said, “I want the experience that comes from doing things without ever actually having to do those things.”

Leroy reached into his pocket saying, “You’ve got problems.” He took out a plastic dime bag with a tiny amount of white powder in the bottom. “Not much left.” He dipped a key from his key ring into the bag. It came up with a little hillock of cocaine on it. He lifted it up and brought it close to my face. “Here. One last bump. It’s all yours.”

I hesitated. “That’s it? We’re all out after this?” Leroy shook his head up and down. “You don’t want it?”

He continued holding up right by my face. “Nope. Come on. Hurry up. I think you might need it the most right now.”

I stopped hesitating. He was right. I needed a little pick-me-up for my nose-diving spirits. Holding one nostril closed I leaned down and put the key up in my nose, inhaling the last of that soft white powder. Then I told Leroy I was glad he’d abandoned the pen-cap-in-the-nose method we’d been using earlier. He was busy rubbing the last remnants of the powder he’d gathered on his spit-wet fingers from the inside of the bag onto his gums.

I looked up and the stars were still there, not a lot a of them, but a few, and it felt good to be standing out there in this crappy parking lot, a little drunk already, the coke starting to kick in, and the sky still up there with a few shiny yellow boils on its bowling-ball black skin. Leroy was shimmying around, kind of like a moonstruck incarnation of Fred Astaire with two broken kneecaps and a head full of acid, jittering and scowling and laughing and talking in a rushed and lyrical daze. I was happy to be there leaning against the wall, away from all the noise inside, the desert heat not so bad this late at night, breathing cigarette smoke and staring at the moon. Reality seemed good, like a place I could maybe start doing some living in. Some of the clutter in my head was shifting around and leaving some space for me to move in, making me feel less insulated and a little more opened-up, free, and connected with the things going on around me. I started to agree with Oscar Wilde that all art was quite useless. After putting out my cigarette against the wall, I motioned to Leroy that we should head back in. I was ready for more of something, but of what I wasn’t so sure.

The door guys were actually rather pleasant letting us back in. We showed them our smeared hand stamps and they waived us in. I guess they were glad somebody actually over twenty-one was coming into that place. Thirty finally seemed old to me. It felt good to be old. When we got back to the table Chet was immediately upon us and talking. He had been in the bathroom when, “This guy comes in…and I’m pissing at the urinal…and it’s hard enough to piss in there, Jesus, all that mess, fucking scatological or whatever, and this guy comes in and looks at me and he’s like, ‘I’ve really got to fucking piss man,’ and so, well, what can you do? It fucking stinks in there too. And so I just keep trying to piss with my back to him and I keep thinking, ‘please whatever you do, do not piss in the sink,’ you know, the sink being right next to me there. And so I kind of look over and he’s unzipping and starts fucking pissing in the trashcan! I can hear the fucking piss hitting the bottom of the can. He’s laughing and going, ‘Sorry dude,’ the whole time. I just kind of ignore him and pretend it’s not happening. So, you know, he zips up when he’s done and he leaves and I’m like, ‘what the fuck is going on here?’ you know? So I keep pissing and then this girl kind of cracks the door and pokes her head in. Yeah, so I’m like fuck, what next, you know? So she says, ‘Sorry. I just need some paper towels. The girl’s bathroom is all out.’ And she reaches in the trashcan, the same trashcan the guy has just pissed in mind you, and grabs a few paper towels out of it and leaves. I wanted to say something but it was too late. She was gone. And what am I going to say anyway? ‘Um, maybe you shouldn’t use those because some dude just fucking pissed all over them.’?”

After the bands were done, I guess around one AM or so, the place started to empty out a little, and we played the jukebox and about a hundred pinball games, smoking and drinking and having one hell of a time really. There were a lot of young girls around. One of them came up to me and asked me if I had a cigarette. I said, “Are you 18?” She got kind of offended, but hell, I didn’t know. I gave her one anyhow. There was a mirror right there by the pinball game that Leroy was currently banging the shit out of. I looked into the mirror at this young girl standing next to me, who was now smoking my cigarette, and said to her, “Hey, that girl in the mirror there is really hot. Do you know her?” I’m not sure if I realized that I was looking into a mirror. I have a tendency to fuck around with people in these types of situations, and may have just been trying to be funny. Either way she got real pissed-off and called me an asshole and old man and a bunch of other things, but I stopped paying attention to her and she walked away with my cigarette.

Feeling rather jocular I made my way over to the jukebox, which was filled with a lot of old punk albums. I put in ten bucks and started excitedly pushing numbers and letters, grinding my teeth and hoping the buttons I was pushing were corresponding with the songs I wanted to hear, The Ramones, The Weirdos, The Vibrators, Stiff Little Fingers, 999, Generation X, and a bunch of other stuff like that. I was in a mood for nostalgia. After putting on many songs I went over to the angry bartender and ordered three shots of Jameson and a beer for myself. I brought the shots over to Leroy and Chet, who were now sitting at a table in the middle of the place. I joined them and we all drank down the whisky and went on talking and listening to all the old songs on the jukebox well past what would have been closing time in any other place but Vegas. They never stopped serving alcohol and we never stopped drinking it, making the pilgrimage back to the bar to refill our glasses with beer many times. After 3 a.m. or so we were about the only ones left in the place and at some point after that we decided to call a taxi, which took a very long time to come, and which Chet jumped into when it finally did arrive leaving Leroy and I standing in the now almost empty parking lot by ourselves. Leroy called another cab. When it came we somehow managed to tell the guy where we were going, probably just saying the words, “gold,” and, “spike,” at some point during the ride. We made it back and stumblebumbed our way merrily through the lobby and into our room.

I finally fell asleep around 6 a.m. or so. Leroy stayed up for a while at the bar downstairs, drinking tecate and looking through the myriad advertisements for prostitutes in free Las Vegas papers. He ended up not getting one.

CHAPTER 15

2009-01-22T19:22:00.000-08:00

I awoke sometime around eleven to a loud knocking on the door. A woman’s voice screeched, “Are you checking out? Maid service!”

Leroy ’s scratchy voice screamed back, “Ahh! What? Ahh…Get away!”

“Maid service,” the female voice chimed again. The knocking continued. “Check out time.”

We’d both read a sign downstairs declaring in very big, bold letters that check out time was noon. I couldn’t rouse myself from bed and my eyes were glued shut. I heard Leroy shuffling around and stumbling and knocking into things. I think he finally found a clock and he screamed again, “Check out time is noon. Get away from here! Leave us alone!”

I had a really bad sinking feeling about this whole situation. All I wanted was some sleep. I just wanted that damn voice to go away and leave us alone.

The knocking continued.

Once again Leroy screamed, “Go away!”

The voice said, “Check out time is eleven.”

Leroy made his way to the door muttering, “No it isn’t…what? We read that god damn big old sign downstairs.” He opened the door a crack.

With my eyes closed I tried to wish it all away but instead I heard this conversation.

“Sir. Check out time is eleven. You have ten minutes.”

“What? No. It said noon on that sign above the check-in desk downstairs. Don’t lie to me. I’m not in the mood. We need sleep.”

“No. Look on your table at the card. That sign is out of date sir. Just look at that card in there and you’ll see.”

“Umm. What? Let me see. Card? Oh. This thing? I can’t see. It looks like somebody’s crossed out noon with a pencil and written eleven in there. Not very good penmanship I may add.”

“Sorry sir. I’ll be back in ten minutes. You better not be here or you’ll be charged for another night.”

The door slammed and it was dark again for a minute and Leroy stumbled around picking things up off the floor or something. I was glad that lady was gone. I wanted her dead. Then Leroy hit the lights and started yelling and thrashing around telling me we had to get the fuck out of here now. I somehow got up and started throwing clothes and various sundry items into my suitcase with my eyes barely opened and my legs hardly supporting me enough to stand. I was damn dizzy. It was like some alien force had sent orders to all my limbs to do things, but I had no control over what they were doing. My arms picked up shirts and pants and put them in my suitcase as I watched helplessly. Somehow I got my clothes on and put my shoes on and also threw my toothbrush and deodorant into my bag. All the while Leroy was throwing things around the room and telling me to hurry up as I made my zombie-like way around in the lamplight. I couldn’t see very well so I ripped open the thick curtains and let the sun in. It blinded me and woke me a little more. Leroy showed me the card where some sneaky bastard had crossed out noon and written eleven in the slot where it said checkout time. The penmanship was deplorable.

Our bags somehow filled with all of our stuff. We slid out of our room at 10:58 and were on our murky way down in the elevator when I finally realized what was happening. I’d been dead asleep, dreamlessly sleeping the sleep of the dead, when this had all started, and now I was standing in the stuffy, hot, little elevator with Leroy and a small family. There were three little kids in that elevator and they were jumping all over the place. The dad was eying us and the mom looked scared. They tried to keep their kids as close as possible to them. When the door opened they got out really fast.

I let Leroy do the checking out. I just worked on trying to stand up. I tried to light a cigarette, but it got way too complicated and I decided to go back to just standing. After a brief argument of some sort with the check-out girl we made our way out into the heat, carrying our bags, lost, and feeling pretty damn miserable about things.

It wasn’t even noon, I hadn’t showered nor slept much, I was already sweating and hung-over, we had no place to stay, and in fact were supposed to be driving all the way back home this very same day, for I had to go back to work the next day, and now here we were trying to figure out our next move carrying our luggage and walking down the sidewalk blinded by the white-hot sunlight reflecting off the pavement. I was really thirsty. We tried hailing a cab. They just kept going by. We kept walking and trying to whistle and were throwing our free arms in the air and making all kinds of odd noises, complaining about how hard it was to catch a cab in this damn city. Finally we came to a place where there were all kinds of cabs lined up on the street. Leroy knocked on one guy’s window but he wouldn’t let us in. It made no sense. Were these guys all on a break or something? We got angry and kept moving down the line, knocking on windows and trying to pull locked doors open. Finally some misanthropic guy in a Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses, who was reading a newspaper and eating a foot-long sloppy meatball sandwich, begrudgingly let us into the back of his cab. I couldn’t make sense of anything and I was beginning to feel like I had heat stroke. The cabbie threw his newspaper down on the passenger seat, along with the remainder of his sandwich, and turned around to glare at us. His sunglasses were silver mirrors and we saw a fish-eyed version of our selves sitting there all bloated and distorted in the reflection. He laughed at us, snorting a little, and then turned around and started driving very fast.

We decided to take the taxi to the Tropicana to try to find Chet. The ride was very uneventful and very expensive for some reason. Neither of us was paying much attention. We were just glad to be sitting down in a nice cool place for a bit. I let Leroy pay. Getting money out of my wallet was beyond me. We plopped out of the taxi and into the Tropicana with our suitcases in tow. I was starting to shake a little. I hit the ATM and Leroy trudged over to the bar area, where they have a stage and tables to sit at while you watch whatever show happens to be going on. There was no show. But there were a lot of TVs to look at and there was a baseball game on. Baltimore was playing the White Sox. After grabbing as much as I could out of the ATM I joined Leroy at the table. We ordered two Bloody Marys and Leroy went off to find a bathroom. I sat there and drank my Bloody Mary and started to feel like a human again. The Orioles hit a homerun and I cheered inside my head. Everything started to feel a little better.

When Leroy came back I was starting to get a little surly for some reason, and I kept flagging down the waitress to tell her to bring more peanuts. She was starting not to like me. My arms seemed to be flailing around a lot at this point, and there may have been some spittle flying from my lips when I flapped them, which I was starting to do a lot. The waitress started finding me comical and calling me honey. I ordered another drink. I knocked over the bowl of peanuts and a man who looked quite soigné, and like he probably worked for the Tropicana, came over and stood by me. This made me nervous and I started quaking, squawking at him, saying things like, “Hey, man, you, keep standing there. You’re doing a hell of a job. Nice duds. Can I get a suit like that at the gift shop?” And finally, “Sorry, you just don’t do it for me. Can you do your standing somewhere else?”

The next thing I knew his arms were grabbing for my neck and pulling me up out of my seat. I started screaming of course, and, becoming apoplectic, knocked over a few chairs as he started to drag me a little bit. This was disconcerting. He kept at it though, pulling me along from under my armpits. Then I went limp and he began having a hard time of it. Luckily Leroy returned just in time. He took control of the situation saying to the well-heeled man, “This man suffers from delusions. He can’t control what he says when he’s having these episodes.” Leroy tried to pry me away from the guy’s iron grip. “What you are doing is highly opprobrious, attacking a sick man like this.”

“He’s not sick. He’s drunk,” the fancy dresser scoffed. His walkie-talkie was making all kinds of sounds in his jacket.

“This man needs help, not harassment. Unhand him or I will be forced to call the authorities. His psychiatrist will not be happy about this, let me tell you.”

Leroy kept pulling at me and finally was able to tear me away, dragging me back towards our table. The guy made a very odd, and kind of scared face, and then reached into his jacket pocket to take out the walkie-talkie. He said something into it as we walked off, pretending like he was being called away, something very urgent, some pressing Hotel Tropicana concern that out-weighed our picayune situation there in the bar. He looked back at us one last time from across the room as he was exiting. Leroy threw a whole glass of ice water in my face and I pretended to calm down. We both sat down in our chairs and started drinking our Bloody Marys as if nothing had happened. My shirt was soaked.

While Leroy was away he’d managed to get a hold of Chet, and soon he came down and joined us. He looked a bit haggard himself, unshaven and crapulous. His luggage joined ours under the table. We all sat there and commiserated as they played baseball on the television sets. The stage was empty. The bar was almost deserted. Chet was out of breath.

My Bloody Mary became empty as we sat there. Chet told us how he’d been rushed out of his room just before checkout time, as we had, and now was supposed to join his brothers for breakfast at the Rio. They had some famous buffet there. So we were all supposed to throw our stuff into the Mercedes, which was parked somewhere in the cavernous parking structure there at the Tropicana, and which Chet was going to pull around front as soon as he got another burst of energy, that is another drink, and Leroy and I were to wait where we were for his call. This sounded like a grand plan to us. I ordered two more beers from a waitress with a little more chutzpah than the previous one, whom I had now scared off with my wild antics and ravings. Leroy and I toasted to our newfound good fortune. Things were looking up. Chet was coming with the car, we could unload our stuff, and we were going to have breakfast.

Unfortunately things are rarely as simple and easy as you think they’re going to be. By the time we got Chet’s call we’d already had a few more beers, and had gone outside with our luggage, after downing the last of the beers really quick, almost finishing them in unison and slamming the bottles down with an authoritative plunk on the plastic-coated wood of the table top. Upon exiting the Tropicana we’d been, of course, blinded by the bright sun, and shielding our eyes, almost falling over many times, and even once I did go ahead and stumble and fall and turn my ankle, throwing my suitcase high in the air, to the chagrin of many tourists standing around waiting for taxis in their Bermuda shorts and sockless shoes, many of whom covered their heads or turned and ran to avoid being hit by my falling luggage, that was now coming down like a rocket bomb from the sky. Luckily it landed on the sidewalk and nobody was hurt. I scowled at a small child holding tight to his mother’s hand as I grabbed my fallen personal effects. My ankle was like rubber, very pliable and durable from so many turns and sprains skateboarding as a teenager, so I was walking alright, and I tried to make my way to the Mercedes where Leroy and Chet were loading up their stuff into the trunk, oblivious of my ill fortune on the sidewalk. The car was parked in some kind of loading zone. Things were very confused. Valets were running back and forth across the macadam and super-sized SUVs sped by almost knocking me over as I walked, swaying and tilting from side to side like a man on a small boat out on the stormy seas. It was hard to negotiate distances. The car would start to seem very close to me, and I would see Chet and Leroy there talking with the trunk open, and I would think, ‘Hey, that was quick. I made it.’ And I would start to hand them my bag, when all of a sudden I’d realize I was holding my bag out to some cantankerous old man, whose foot I was stepping on, and who was screaming at me to, “Get the hell off my foot you little bastard!” So I’d try to apologize and would go on walking and look up ahead only to see that the Mercedes was really far away, impossibly far over great distances of time and space and endless sweaty toil, and Chet and Leroy were just tiny ant-like figures in the shadowy mirage of distance out there somewhere in that wasteland which was the Tropicana loading zone. Things were going in and out of focus. I was aware of a man’s lips flapping in slow motion at me, seemingly asking me if I were okay, but I couldn’t make out the words very well. It was as if they were frozen in cartoon bubbles suspended in the air and gingerly floating by me, unpopable. I pushed my way by him and kept going. I knew I had to make it to that car, and time was moving very slowly, and Chet and Leroy were not paying any attention to my whereabouts. They might leave without me. I’d be screwed, left here by myself with all these spittle-lipped monsters, holding my suitcase out here on the hot concrete, whispering to myself like a crazy person, which was what I was starting to feel like anyway, waiting for something to happen, as they all ate a grand buffet breakfast at the Rio and laughed and indulged their appetites and then drove home in the Mercedes without me. Would they even notice I wasn’t in the car? Would I have to live the rest of my life in this stinking, rotting, money-sucking greenhouse of a city? No! I must trudge on. I must gather my courage and perambulate with great temerity towards the Mercedes. It was my only hope. Either that or, as Rensch once said of land snails, grow a thick shell over myself.

Again the Mercedes appeared. Unfortunately it made its appearance after I’d rammed my knee right into the back of it, sending a riveting jolt of pain right through my kneecap, which in turn sent me back peddling and back down on my ass. I could hear Chet and Leroy laughing, and their laughter got close, and they picked me up and put my luggage into the trunk. I was thankful and I felt relieved, looking forward to finally being able to sit down in a nice air-conditioned car. But, alas, this was not to occur. I looked in the backseat and saw Chet’s brothers and one of their girlfriends back there. The other girlfriend was up front. Chet went into explaining some plan he had, of which I comprehended nothing, and just shook my head and walked back to the sidewalk with Leroy.

Things were beginning to get difficult again. I’d had enough. The morning was getting to be too much. Little dust storms were starting to stir up with microscopic insects inside copulating by the thousands, dying and regenerating, multiplying right there before my eyes, as I waded into what were starting to seem like concrete waves of sidewalk melting and undulating in the sun. I stood there on the curb and waited, not knowing what I was waiting for. My head was really starting to spin and I could feel my heart throbbing in all of my limbs. I thought my fingers might explode and gush blood all over the street, and me standing there with my hair sticking up and my tongue hanging out, all kinds of unusual stains all over my pants, shoes filled with holes, my face melting, the alcohol starting to wear off, and my ride gone somewhere without me, standing here with no sense to make of anything, hoping that Leroy would lead me where I needed to go. On top of it all my stomach was starting to become a bit disagreeable, like someone had just shoved a can of motor oil and some Tabasco sauce up my ass. Leroy was talking but I couldn’t hear anything. I had this strange thought that I might faint, but I didn’t. Leroy kept talking and I followed him down the sidewalk and up to an intersection that was about the size of the Gulf of Mexico. There must have been eight lanes going each way from all four directions. It was like looking across a massive freeway where all things came together or rose to collision with all other things. Things were shining and flashing, sudden flares of sun streaks shooting off of metal covered surfaces and street signs and windows, sidewalks and sunglasses, cheap decals and rubberized souvenirs, all shooting like a firing squad’s bullets into my guts, and everything went whizzing past, all this automotive metallic bulk screaming, sparks seeming to flash everywhere as if a chainsaw were cutting through an imaginary layer of metal covering my head, and the sparks were shooting up and over everything like a cheap fireworks show, and everywhere there was this constant buzzing like the noise of a thousand June bugs banging into each other in a tiny, inescapable cage. I felt like curling up into a ball right there on the sidewalk and saying to hell with it. But I had to piss. And I kept walking and following Leroy, hoping he would lead me to cool air and a nice bathroom where I could relax and relieve myself and run cold water over my head and feel good again. We kept walking up dead escalators on the street corners and going over the streets on pedestrian bridges. I needed water. I couldn’t communicate. We came to a man with a water cooler filled with ice and bottled water at the end of a bridge. I made a motion to Leroy with my hands signaling my thirst and its need of slackening. He grunted and got out some money and exchanged it for a dripping ice-cold bottle of Aquafina. I grabbed the cold hard plastic thing and unscrewed the white top, tossing it over the bridge, and tilted the bottle back, letting the cold water spill unnecessarily all over me. It turned out Leroy had given the water vendor a twenty for the bottle. I’d noticed this but in my haste to drink had not thought to mention it, figuring he knew what he was doing. He didn’t. Another twenty bucks down the drain. Leroy was not happy. “God damn it! Why didn’t you tell me? Do you think if I go back he’ll…”

I stopped him. “No. It’s too late. Let’s keep moving.” And I then took another swig of the cool water. It was damn good.

“Hey. Give me that. If I’m going to spend twenty bucks on a bottle of fucking water I’m at least going to have some.” He took the bottle from me and gulped the rest of it down. “That’s some pretty good water. I’m not sure it’s twenty dollars good. But that’s some damn tasty water.”

“Hits the spot. By the way, where the hell are we going? Why do we keep wandering around in this hot fucking sun like a couple of idiots?”

“I told you. God, don’t you remember anything?”

I didn’t.

Leroy relayed most of the story to me as we rushed along down onto the sidewalk again. The roller coaster at New York New York thundered by above our heads. Chet was taking the car to drop off his brothers and his other passengers at the MGM Grand where they needed to checkout and maybe do other things that Leroy seemed kind of hazy on. The gist of it was that Chet would meet us at the MGM hotel lobby, which we were now supposed to be walking to, and we would drive over with him to the Rio to have a breakfast with everyone all together like one big happy family. I told Leroy I knew how to get to the Rio. Somehow in my diseased, feverish, and sun-damaged brain I had convinced myself that I knew how to get there. It seemed like I should have known. The Rio. I’d been there before. I thought that I had at least. It seemed likely that I had. Was that the hotel with all the lions in the cages? The rainforest? Um. I didn’t need a map. I’d be able to find it. What I really wanted was to get into that damn lobby at the MGM and meet up with Chet, after using the nice, plush restrooms of course. So we walked on and found the damn hotel and went inside and wandered around, used the bathroom, ran cold water over our respective heads in the sinks, cleaned up a little, and felt better about things for a swift moment there. That was before things got really bad.

People swarmed all around us like ants spilling out over a pool of molasses. Chet was nowhere to be found. We circled and circled. We waited patiently by slot machines. We smoked many cigarettes. Still no Chet. We tried calling him but the connection was bad, and then his phone went dead. Everything was coming unglued, including the contents of my stomach, which sent me sprinting back to the bathrooms. Everything shot out of me with considerable force. The bowl below me had never known such rapid-fire ruin, such projectile velocity, such splattering and muddy fire-hydrant-like sprayings, and my own bottom had never guessed at the existence of such an insatiable burning as this fire-charred, scabrous cragginess of my anal canal. Many warm baths and many suppositories later I might be okay again.

After slowly reemerging into the crowded lobby I spotted Leroy standing idly by a roulette table watching the red and black numbers come up on the electric board.

“Hey. Sorry. I had to see a few men about a couple dozen horses.”

“Whaa…? Hey. I’ve been watching this roulette game for a while here. You ever watch one of these things? It’s fascinating. The numbers keep coming up on this board here, you see, and you can see all the numbers that keep coming up. I think I’ve figured out a pattern.”

I hated to ruin his fun but I did anyway. “That’s why they put those damn things up there. That’s what everybody who’s ever looked at one of those things thinks. There is no pattern. It’s not like the wheel knows what numbers have come up lately. Every time the ball is set into motion, every time the wheel starts turning, every time that damn croupier guy or whatever he is wipes his hand over the table and tells everyone that there are no more bets, the slate is wiped clean. The odds are always the same of any one number coming up. It all starts over with every roll of that damn little metal ball.”

“No way. I’ve got a system. Just listen. So…”

“No. You don’t have any fucking system. Do you know why they put those boards up with all those numbers on them? Because it increased their profit. Because it made people think they could figure out a system and people started gambling more money and in turn started losing more money at the roulette tables. It’s all a fucking ploy to get you to lose more money.”

“But,”

“Shut up. No buts. Let’s find Chet and get the fuck out of this place. It’s making me feel like a swine among pearls.”

“You, my friend, are a damn birdbrain,” Leroy said and walked off towards the doors leading outside. I followed him.

Chet was supposedly circling the hotel and looking for us. We saw the Mercedes drive by at one point, but unfortunately Chet didn’t see us standing there screaming like damn fools. It turns out the MGM has many different lobbies, and we had obviously gone to the wrong one. Leroy explained all this to me as we walked along the sidewalk, out in that murderous sun again. After walking up and down the really long block a few times I decided to stop and take shelter somewhere, leaving Leroy to try to find out where the hell Chet had driven off too.

I ended up standing outside of an open-air shop on the street. They had turnstiles loaded up with mini Las Vegas license plates that had male and female names on them, and I kept looking for names of people I knew and turning the metal frames around and around. At the edge of the store, where I was standing, a cool mist was coming down from some kind of device installed in the ceiling, a machine that blew a constant stream of cool watery mist down on people passing by. Also a nice air-conditioned breeze was blowing at my back from inside the shop. It was marvelous. I was right on the dividing line between the onerous 110° heat and the comparably arctic world of the store’s insides. Standing there, feeling all that cold air at my back, the mist chilling my forehead and forming tiny droplets of water that ran down my face in icy rivulets, looking at various postcards of Mega Resort hot spots, and various other multifarious tchotchkes of Las Vegas delight, I felt completely at ease with the world. Everything would work itself out. Nothing there was real. Nothing mattered. I would just stand outside that little shop and let the cool air blow on me forever. I’d just stay there.

My reverie was interrupted by some guy blowing his car horn a bunch of times in a row. Assuming that it was just a car alarm going off on the street I tried to ignore it. But the horn started really going, making some extremely long and jarring honks, and even blowing out a few tunes, like “Shave and a haircut, two bits,” and all those other car horn songs. Looking in the general direction of all the hullabaloo I noticed a Mercedes just like the one we’d rented parked right out on the curb in front of me. Jesus, that sure was some vehicle. Chet and Leroy were inside. Leroy was hanging out of the window screaming, “Hey. Retard! Space cadet! Yeah, you. Would you please hurry the fuck up and get in the fucking car you twit!” My ride had finally arrived, and just when I was finally starting to enjoy myself.

CHAPTER 16

2009-01-22T19:21:00.000-08:00

I am in the back seat of this giant car that keeps making wrong turns and ending up stuck, cornered, boxed in, lost and peeling out in parking lots, with these shit-for-brains up front who can’t figure out where the hell to make a left turn, or any kind of turn that’ll take us in a direction that just maybe might bring us to our destination. I am in the back of this car shaking and watching traffic lights change.

There is some kind of nervousness building in me, some kind of psychotic energy pooling in the arid places where my reserves of energy used to reside. My head tilts forward and knocks against the leather seat in front of me. I don’t need an air bag. Something tense is straining me and filling my veins with paranoid blood. My consciousness is just kind of floating out there around me. My head is no longer my own.

Get a hold of yourself. Stop this querulous behavior. You must intrepidly lead this mission on to the Rio hotel. You must guide this misfit-filled vehicle like a golden chariot to its destination where there will be plentiful arrays of breakfast foods and all other types of Pan-Asian or Tex-Mex or Southwestern Style Mexican cuisine under heat lamps; salad bars replete with the likes of sushi, croutons, shrimp on ice, beef cutlets, and twelve types of salad dressing; bottomless cups of coffee and champagne; whopping heaps of undercooked bacon and sausage, all in plenum, all in a state of irrefutable grandeur, while sfumato tones of color, soft pale blues and ubiquitous shades of pink, cover Redwood-tall walls leading up to a ceiling higher than any possible sky. You must not crash. Do not heed these warning signs. Speak loud! Speak true! Give directions to these morons who steer this Mercedes in all directions like rats lost in a maze. Live free or die!

The Mercedes sped wildly into the Valet Parking Zone of the Rio hotel, almost knocking off the car door of an elderly couple’s luxury Sedan when they idiotically opened the door at the wrong time, i.e. with us coming up fast on their left. Lines of cars were pulling in to be parked under a concrete overhang-canopy-type-thing. It was kind of like a gas station, but much larger and with long slabs of raised cement between the lanes instead of gas pumps. Some people stood on the long cement slabs waiting for their cars to be returned to them by young valets in red coats who made mad, purposeful dashes all over the place, keys jangling off of the springs and loops of metal rings attached to their belts. Our valet was a young kid. Very cool, calm, and collected, and, we all thought, a bit high on something. It was hard to tell though. Everyone in Vegas seems as if they might be abusing some sort of mind-altering drug. Maybe it’s just the weather. Maybe it was just us.

Leroy got out of the car first and stretched his arms up in the air, yawning like a man waking from a long, deep slumber. The valet was writing something on a ticket. Leroy spoke first, “Hey. So, um, you old enough to drive?”

The valet smiled politely. “No. But I still can park it somewhere for you.”

“Okay,” Leroy chimed. “Make sure you are very careful with this car son. It’s worth more than any of us here, all combined, and we can’t have it be damaged or degraded by any hot-rod racing kid. This is an important and powerful machine. It must be parked in the shade. The sun will eat away the interior, see?” Leroy showed him the guts of the car, all covered with various articles of dirty clothing and junk food wrappers and water bottles and other unmentionable items of decadence.

“Sure thing sir,” the kid said and handed Leroy the ticket he’d written out for us.

Leroy squinted at the paper in his hands. “Ah. Well, yes. Everything seems to be in order here. This will do…you take care of this vehicle and we will also take care of you,” Leroy said winking in a very over exaggerated manner. “And by the way, how would one find his way to the food court?”

“Sorry sir?”

“Um, well, you see we need to masticate on something esculent…some edibles, some kind of breakfast buffet. The Rio…the Rio famous breakfast buffet. The champagne….orange juice…all you can eat like Sizzler or some such thing.”

“There are three breakfast buffets in the Rio.”

“Three! My God! What the hell kind of show is this…what kind of sick and demented kind of place serves three different buffets?”

The valet laughed nervously. “Just go through the lobby there and follow the signs. The one on the first floor is the most popular. You’ll see a big line of people.”

“Ah. How very egalitarian. That sounds like the place.”

Chet and I concurred.

The valet hopped in the car and drove off very fast. Leroy screamed, “Slow down you sumbitch! That is my lively hood you’re racing around in!”

We walked on into the lobby. The air-conditioning once again seemed like a Godsend. The sign led us to the Buffet where, just as the valet had said, a prodigious throng of people was waiting in line. The line snaked around the corner and doubled up on itself, fluffy red velvet ropes partitioning off the hungry denizens, barely keeping them from clawing each other for a closer spot in line. One of Chet’s brothers and his girlfriend were already in line. We joined them in the midst of all the rabble.

“This is quite a crowd,” I mentioned just to say something. “Is it even breakfast time still?”

Chet’s brother said, “Sure. It’s always breakfast time in Vegas.”

“It’s damn crowded in here. Look at all these people standing around. Where do they come from?” queried a miffed Chet.

Leroy started in, “The hoi polloi. The salt of the earth. The bored and disaffected. The huddled and hungry masses, expendable, botched and always burrowing in the ground. The mundane and ordinary. They all come and stand in line and wait to be fed like pigs at a trough.”

“They pay up the ass for it.” I said. “And they get champagne.”

I was starting to crash. The crowded line wasn’t helping. Claustrophobia was starting to set in and the shakes were coming back, only this time they were starting in the backs of my legs. Never a good sign. My throat was dry and my tongue felt like it was starting to blister. I rolled it around in my mouth and it felt like I was licking sandpaper. My palms were sweating profusely. Closing my eyes I tried to keep it together.

Chet’s other brother showed up with Snaggle. She looked like somebody’d put her in a washing machine during the spin cycle. We all made friendly eye contact. Her crooked tooth sticking out of her mouth and digging into her lip was all I could see. Everything else was kind of a blur. The line started moving a little and I found a post to lean up against. Unfortunately the post was not secured to the ground and I knocked it over bringing the thick, red, velvet dividing rope down with it. Leroy saved me from falling on my ass. People in line got a little surly but I apologized by waving my hand in repentance. The rope was re-secured and everybody was okay. I was really sweating by this point. The next time I leaned against something I made sure it was a wall. It seemed to hold steady

Snaggle was talking. “So this guy, this fucking Security like rent-a-cop guy is like standing there next to me now, and I’m just feeling really fucking nauseous, like, you know, when you just know that you’re going to vomit and there’s nothing you can do about it, and my face must’ve been like, you know, that look you get when you feel like, that probably like hopeless and defeated look? Well, so I’m like standing there by these slot machines and I kind of just try to move off by myself, you know, so I could be alone. You know, like when you feel like that and you just don’t want to be around anybody, like you don’t want anyone close by. So I just keep trying to move off by myself and this fucking security guy keeps getting closer. He looked at me, and my eyes must’ve been like fucking crazy, like, my head was like totally spinning and I just couldn’t communicate at all. And he goes like, ‘Hey, are you ok? Miss? Are you Ok?’ And he keeps getting real close to me. But I just want him to go away, and I can’t talk, you know, because I’m like totally going to throw-up. I can feel it in my throat. And I’m like holding my hand on my mouth, as people tend to do in these like situations, and I’m like signaling to the guy with my hands to get away from me. But he just keeps getting close and calling me miss and asking if I’m on drugs. When he said that I was like, fuck this, you know…I was like, what the fuck are you talking about you fucking asshole?…I’m going to fucking puke. I was like so fucking pissed. But I couldn’t do anything because I felt so sick. And he kept being like, ‘Are you on drugs miss?’ and he was really close, like all up in my face, and I moved against a wall finally and just stuck my hand out and then I vomited all over the carpet right there by the wall. And then he gets on his little walkie-talkie or whatever, and he’s maybe like calling a clean-up crew or something, but the little fucker finally went away and left me alone. God, it was so fucking humiliating. Are you on drugs? What the fuck. I felt so sick. And I went into the bathroom and puked some more. But, you know what’s fucking crazy? When I came out and went back to where my vomit was it was already cleaned up. Like it had never happened. Now that’s some like really fucking quick spill cleanup service, you know?”

The line had moved a little more and we were getting a little closer to the place where we supposed you paid for the buffet and were allowed to go in the eating area. Looking over at Leroy I noticed that he was holding a drink in a plastic cup with a lime and ice in it. It looked very refreshing. I asked him for a sip, thinking it would soothe my parched throat, but it tasted like a rotten sour tart and I almost spit it back up.

“What the hell kind of drink is that?”

Leroy smiled, “Campari…on ice.”

“It’s awful.”

“Suit yourself,” he said and went on talking with the group.

My conversational skills had completely left me. All I could do was stand there and sweat and shake. My head was starting to expand and blinking my eyes was becoming a chore. The pit of my stomach was gnawing at the lining, trying to eat its way out. The ice in Leroy ’s drink looked so good. I wanted it in my mouth but I couldn’t speak. I just reached over and dipped my fingers in his cup, trying desperately to grab an ice cube, and failing.

Leroy looked at me and shouted, “What the fuck are you doing man! Did you just put your fucking fingers in my drink? What the fuck!”

No words were coming to me. I was so vertiginous and faint that I felt like I was going to just slide down the wall. Small tremors started shooting through me, panic, nausea and then stomach pain and then a burning that went from my throat all the way down to my toes, and my eyes couldn’t focus on anything. From time to time I’d look up between tremors and smile and try to pretend everything was okay. But I knew it wasn’t. The periods between tremors were becoming shorter and shorter. My head was literally dripping with sweat. It rolled off my face and onto the ground in golf-ball sized plops, splashing there below my feet. I grabbed my head and nothing was alright. My breathing was getting very rapid. My heart felt like it would beat right out of my chest. I tried grabbing some ice out of Leroy ’s cup again but he just slapped my hand away cursing. I kept rubbing my hands through my hair and sticking out my lower jaw to blow cool air up onto my forehead. It was too hot…everything, everywhere…heat…all the air was stale, filled with suffocating heat…all of my limbs were loaded with sweat…my neck didn’t want to hold up my head anymore…I wanted out but there was nowhere to go…

For some reason I was holding my jacket. I held it up to Leroy and told him to hold it. He took it and looked at me in a very peculiar way. That was it. I couldn’t be in that line anymore. I had to leave. I had no choice. I got up some strength and ducked under the rope and left the line, my feet almost tripping me as I wavered on unsteadily. There was a bowling alley across the way. Giant glass windows were the walls and you could stand outside and watch people bowl. It looked very cold inside. At the entrance I was stopped by a very classy lady who inquired how many there were in my party. I told her I’d be right back, realizing then that my wallet was in my jacket, which I’d for some reason given to Leroy to hold. Going anywhere without my wallet scares me, so I headed back across the hall to the buffet line where Leroy was holding my jacket.

I yelled at Leroy from what seemed like a long ways away, “Hey. Give me that jacket back, you thief!”

Now he was looking at me very strangely. He held it up in the air giving me a look of, ‘Well then come and get it asshole.’

I kept signaling with my arms and making grunting noises that resembled words only to me. A lot of people in line started staring at me. Leroy held out my jacket. He started asking me why I’d given it to him in the first place, and I dove into the crowd and snagged it away from him. He just laughed at me as I walked off.

Back at the bowling alley entrance I met the Fancy Greeter Lady again.

“So, how many were in your party sir?”

I took a deep breath. “I just want to sit at the bar and drink really tall glasses of really cold ice water.” I measured out the size of the glass with my hands as I spoke.

She didn’t flinch, saying, “Right this way sir,” leading me to the long bar at the back. I sat down on a stool and rubbed my hands along the black, shiny Formica surface of the bar, which was very cool to the touch, and I rubbed my hands along it as if praying and giving thanks for all nice and cool things in the world.

The bar tender came along and asked me what I was having.

“I just want,” I said licking my chapped lips with my desiccated tongue, “a really cold and really tall glass filled with ice and really cold water.” It was as if I were uttering the last words ever to be spoken on the earth. I was at the limits of my language. Only symbols and gestures would work for me from now on. I was betting everything, going all in on this last phrase that I hoped would bring relief to my condition. There was nothing more left I could do. This was it. My last chance for salvation in this consumer-frenzied excuse-of-an-exhibition of a place, this pseudo-world of money and more money surrounded by all the things that money can buy, self-styled monuments to excess, to capital and gain and luck and the American dream and, after all, what more was this place than just a suped-up extension of our nation, of our lavishness and desires for decadence, of our disconnection from anything real, from anything that matters, from even mattering ourselves because our whole lives were really just endless vacations from our souls, with a few side trips to enjoy the view.

The waiter brought me a highball glass filled with water and ice. I drank it slowly and savored the feeling of the cold on my lips and the crisp and refreshing taste of the water. The simple joy of a glass of water when you’re thirsty, there’s nothing quite like it. Drinking it slowly I started to feel better. The cold sweats and heat flashes abated, and I was starting to twitch around a lot less. Sitting there slowly drinking my ice water I started getting more of my senses back, and started caring less about eating breakfast. I just wanted to sit there and drink that water forever. It was like being restored, like a wave of good, life-giving energy was slowly filling up my body again. Not too different from the way cocaine feels when it first starts swimming around in your veins. Only now it was a relaxed and thoughtful disposition that overcame me. I started thinking about this chapter in David Copperfield entitled, “My Dissipation,” and started saying it over and over again under my breath at the bar…my dissipation, my dissipation, my dissipation…I’m not sure why. I began to smile and feel good and I kept drinking that water and taking the ice cubes in my mouth and letting them melt there and the cold water would trickle down my throat and I just wanted to sit there and sit there, without anybody ever bothering me again.

The bar tender asked if I were okay and I shot him a thumbs up. He went back to the other end of the bar to do something else.

What a guy.

I sat there and drank my ice water and rubbed my hands on the cool Formica of the bar, listening to bowling balls thud and roar, and the sudden deafening splatter and crash of pins being knocked over, and the soft hum of people talking all together, all mixed-up in a cloud of voices that didn’t speak individual words but just made a steady, ineffable tumbling of sound.

Sitting there for what seemed like hours I made up a song that I kept singing to myself, sometimes only in my head, sometimes maybe out loud too. It went:

Together, is where I belong
Here,
Together, is where I am
What are you doing
Over there
Not together,
Where I belong
Where I am together
Yes
Together
Where….I…..Belong

I’m not a good singer but it was a pretty good tune and after a while I couldn’t get it out of my head. I started using a really high voice, almost a falsetto, for some parts, and started drawing out the word, “together,” making it last for a really long time like, “toooo…ge…th…” and then pausing on certain syllables and changing the tune around a little and using a really deep crooning voice over the one word phrases. Basically just acting like a nut. It kept me entertained for quite some time. When the water was gone I started sucking on the few remaining ice cubes. The tune carried me off into a world where my actions had no meaning, where not even the movements I made mattered, where everything was just a lost inescapable nothingness, a blank slate where nothing ever happened, and my little waves I made with the song were keeping me afloat above all the inchoate waters below. It felt good not to have to try. Everything just was. And that was all that mattered. Together, here, where I belong.

You can only sit at a bar by yourself drinking ice water and singing to yourself for so long. Eventually you have to get up and pretend you have somewhere you’d rather be. It just so happened that brunch was starting to sound like a better idea, and after my rejuvenation in the bowling alley I decided I could handle the crowd again and went back over to the buffet line. I was humming a song that went, “You are a stupid, stupid, idiot…” to the tune of The Shandels, ‘My Baby Does The Hanky-Panky,’ as I walked over. It made me feel better.

They’d moved up in line quite a ways. I clawed my way through a bunch of hapless jerks and joined them, the whole while still singing that idiot song. People tended to let me through without much of a fight. Some large, balding man with Ray-Ban sunglasses on was chewing Leroy ’s ear off when I arrived. The guy had on shorts and fancy sandals with socks, and his shirt was tucked in. I think people who tuck their shirts in should be taken out and shot. Leroy just kept nodding as the guy went on about real estate, about how and when to buy houses and all the idiosyncratic ways of deciding about renting or sitting on a property for so long before…well, some such kind of thing. I wasn’t paying that close of attention. The guy sure could talk. I just stood there and kind of looked around and tried to test my legs to see how fast they’d move if I had to run on them in some kind of emergency. For some reason I was expecting one. After trying to follow the balding man’s lecture on the ins and outs of the housing market, and failing, I decided to concentrate on finding out how to pay for this brunch we were getting ever so close to having.

Glittering, golden and ten-feet wide stood two rows of ATM-like machines, though much larger and taller, which took your debit card and gave you a receipt for $20.79. That was the price of the brunch with tax. It seemed odd to be getting this little ticket to be let inside this airplane-hangar sized dining area to run around and scoop as much food as you possibly could onto a plate, but this seemed to be the system. The machines took cash too, but the card seemed a much easier, stress-free alternative. People were forming two separate lines to use the machines and then seemed to be handing the receipts they received to a ticket-taker like man who would then, after waiting for some uncertain thing to happen for an unspecified and always changing length of time, unclasp the end of a velvet rope to let a new party in. There seemed to be no structure to this besides the Ticket Taker’s whim. If he felt like letting a whole gaggle of people in, he would. And if the little miser felt like holding up the line for a bit, while he stared off at something and chewed on a toothpick, then he’d hold the clasp closed and make everybody wait behind the rope. I was hoping we wouldn’t get on this guy’s bad side, as I was starting to get my appetite back, and didn’t want any further complications or hold-ups. Also, the large, bald, ray-banned man was really starting to flap his lips around and I didn’t want him to start jabbering at me. Leroy was trying to act like he was paying attention, but I knew he wasn’t. Because my powers of speech were still limited to just humming songs I couldn’t do much to help him out. So I wandered down narrow and littered dead-end alleyways in my mind, and Leroy stood helpless at the gates to hell, wondering about salvation in the form of a three-egg omelet and buttered toast. The line moved inches at a time. We moved with it as if caught in the churning thrash of a puissant, slow, and steady rip tide that was tugging us along to somewhere unknowable.

The unknowable place ended up being an empty table in the dining area of The Rio’s Grand Bunch Buffet. We all sat down reaching for silverware and plates. Finding none we got up to explore this gut-stuffing play land. Plates were hot and stacked in metal cylinders inside of carts. As soon as you pulled one off the stack another popped up. This was very convenient. I wandered around with my plate, still kind of dizzy and flashing in and out of general malaise and a sticky kind of wide-eyed wonder. We were surrounded with food. On all sides were loads of foods on carts covered with tilted glass windows with just enough space beneath the glass to stick an arm under and load up your plate…

…waffles, french toast, syrup and powdered sugar, blueberry muffins in a titanic tub, bacon of a hundred pigs all stuck together in a quivering greasy pile of underdone flesh, bright yellow mounds of supersaturated egg batter barely cooked and scrambled and dripping wet, an omelet bar with more fixings— including very odd ones like pecans and fish eggs—than could ever fit into an omelet, sushi rolls, burnt and battered lamb chops, rigid fruit and underdone potatoes in mass graves, beef brisket steaming under a heat lamp where some guy in a white hat stood and would chop off a rare thin strip for you, country fried steak covered in a murky turgid gravy, corn-on-the-cob, clam chowder, a salad bar of neon green lettuce, colossal vats of various dressings like drums of crude oil under the lights…

I scooped about a quart of the watery egg matter on to my plate where it jiggled like yellow jell-o, and grabbed about a dozen sticky pieces of under-cooked bacon. That was about all I could handle. Everything else seemed too complicated. I wandered around with my plate hot in my hands, looking everywhere for help, some kind of relief from this over stimulation, this weariness from having too many choices, too much and not enough, and I almost lost the plate a few times, but righted it just in time before the slippery eggs spilled all over the floor. People everywhere were walking around with their plates filled, looking like they knew exactly what they were doing, like they did this all the time and like they’d probably stay here all day slowly sampling all the wide ranging sundry items at all the food stations, shoveling it in with a unfettered gulosity until the cameras on the ceiling signaled the security to come remove these all-you-can-eaters from their booths, where they sat hunched and drooling over one last plateful of gelatinous steak and slithering masses of potatoes.

Thinking that I’d better sit down, as I was getting pretty dizzy at this point, I tried to find a familiar face to lead me back to where my party was supposed to be seated. Everybody looked like an alien. Their heads were like milk cartons. Jewelry was all over the walls. Bright lights were blinding me at every turn. I stared at signs but they were useless. Finally Chet walked by, almost knocking me over, and I followed him back to our table.

Snaggle and Chet’s brother sat across from Leroy and me. For some reason we didn’t have any napkins. This was really bothering Chet’s brother, who kept saying, “Where can we get some napkins up in this piece?” I didn’t like talk like that. I turned to Leroy, who had loaded up four plates with all kinds of dinner, lunch, brunch, linner, breakfast, or, I guess you could say dinchfast foods. After taking a few bites of something he would put the plate behind him on a ledge up above our heads and start in on anther plate. Needless to say, he’d been back and forth a few times to the food counters.

“Where the fuck do I put these plates when I’m done?” He’d scowl lifting a plate above his head. “There’s no room for all this.”

A waitress came and put little glasses of champagne all over the table. Leroy drank two of them right down.

Chet’s brother made some kind of signal to a waiter, a long-faced Eskimo, who darted over to us, overzealous and eager to please, holding a tray of empty glasses in one hand and a towel in the other. His eyes were darting about like trapped flies, and the guy had quick feet too, at least a quick first step. I could tell. He was built for speed. Before I could blink he was upon us, standing at the edge of the table nodding and smiling and saying, “Yes, yes…oh, yes, yes,” in these little staccato bursts.

“We need some napkins here,” said Chet’s brother, holding his silverware up and making motions that I assumed were supposed to mean that forks and knives were always to be wrapped up inside napkins, but it kind of looked like a onanistic gesture also, and I wasn’t sure what this slick Eskimo was thinking. He looked a bit confused.

After a few more nods the waiter said, “Oh. Yes, Ah ha! Aye EEE!” He screamed in some kind of unnamable high-pitched squeal. “I will bring to you!” And he was gone off running somewhere with his tray and towel.

Some time passed and Chet’s brother was really starting to make a mess of himself sitting over there across from us. He had grape jelly all over his face and his hands were dripping grease. There was a certain ire over taking him, and he got up and went back to this storage area behind the tables. He came back with an armload of silverware wrapped in napkins, throwing them all down on the table in a great crash. We all pulled the silverware out and started using the napkins. It was just then that the Eskimo came back. His arms were filled with forks and knives which he promptly set on the table with all the other forks and knives we’d just de-napkined. Chet’s brother held up a couple forks and said, “No! Not these damn you! We need napkins.”

The Eskimo looked at them steadily and said, “Yes. I bring. See?” And he held up a fork next to the ones that Chet’s brother was holding up.

“No. We don’t need any more damn forks. We needed napkins. See?” Chet’s brother held up a used and crumpled napkin.

“Ahh! Yee-Iihh!!Yes! YEEEE! Iye! I bring more!” The Eskimo yelled and jumped up again to go back to wherever it was all the napkins were stored in this place.

Chet’s brother just sat there shaking his head, waving the napkin like a white flag of surrender.

Leroy started telling me a story about this guy named Hoy that he used to work for in St. Louis. “The guy owned a video store and made me do all the shit work. I drove his shitty beat-up truck all over the place doing errands for him. He was a nut. This waiter reminds me of him. I had to like pick up the guy’s kids from soccer practice and shit like that. He spilt up with his wife, or she kicked him out or something, and he asked me if I could help him move. So I’m like, okay. I can do that. So I go on over to his place, which was this crap-filled trailer actually, and start helping him load all this stuff into the truck. And there are all these boxes filled with porn. All kinds of porn too. Magazines and videos and DVDs. Boxes and boxes of this stuff. And we’re all lugging them out to the truck, and these magazines keep falling out into the dust, and it’s really hot out, and we’re sweating a lot, and the wind’s blowing them all over the place. I keep running after them while Hoy’s yelling at me to hurry and pick them up before the wind blows them all away. The pages are all flapping around and dust is blowing everywhere, and it’s getting in my eyes and I can’t see what the hell is going on at all. It was so weird. All this porn blowing all over the place. That Hoy was such an odd guy. He had a really thick Chinese accent and called me a son of a bitch if I showed up to work late. He would say, ‘You Son Bitch! We open same time every day! We close same time every night! You Sonbitch!’ He said it like it was one word. It was great. Hoy. I loved that guy.”

At some point during the meal I got confused and started calling the Eskimo waiter Hoy. He was always darting around all over the place, speeding between tables and leaping over small children, and he was always caring a precariously balanced load of things in his arms or on trays. Leroy and I started laughing uncontrollably. We rolled on the benches and laughed. Chet’s brother asked us if we’d eaten any more pot cookies, which we hadn’t, but we couldn’t answer him and just kept laughing.

I had to shit. I had to find the bathroom. I knew I could rely on a sign to tell me where it was. I got up and walked around a little and saw a sign hanging way up high in the sky that, to my eyes, read, ‘MEN’S.’ It seemed like the sign was miles up above, and I kept straining my neck to look up at the thing, making sure it still said what I thought it said. It seemed to, so I kept walking. It seemed like the sign was floating up higher into the dizzying welkin of plastic sheeting above. It was like watching a balloon disappear, getting smaller and smaller as it drifted on away to unknown lands. But it still read, ‘Men’s’ with and arrow pointing and leading me on. Next thing I knew I was stopped by a glass door. In big red letters on the door it read, ‘EXIT.’ It was absurd. Backing up to take a look around I couldn’t see anything resembling a bathroom, just this exit door. And I’d followed that sign. Where was that damn thing? I looked up and saw the sign again, now not so high above me, and it read, very clearly, ‘EXIT.’ Some asshole must have changed the sign. I stared and stared but the sign stayed the way it was. I felt like the victim of some idiotic practical joke. My heart sank like a waterlogged piano, the ebony and ivory of the basswood keys all misaligned and bent out of shape, the cast iron frame all rusted where the hardwood has cracked and busted open, everything soggy and warped in strange ways, the lichenous felt hammers hitting the sodden steel strings one last time as it fell, dilapidated and ruined with mold, into what was left of my guts.

But I looked around and nobody was paying me any attention or laughing into their hands or anything. My own senses had failed me. I must have looked at that sign a dozen times, and every time I swear it read, ‘MEN’S.’ Something was wrong with me. But I had no time to contemplate such things. My sphincter could only contract for so long under these conditions. It was time to get moving. Running now, at a medium pace, I booked all over, dodging buffet patrons with their Dionysian plates of chow, and finally ended up asking a diminutive bald man wearing a child-sized tuxedo with a pink bow tie where the hell the shitter in this place was. He pointed me in the direction of a sign that read, ‘Restrooms’ and I ran and made it in just in time.

CHAPTER 17

2009-01-22T19:20:00.002-08:00

“Man, those bathrooms suck.” I said as I rejoined the group at the table. “They’re all small and cramped, and just beware…it kind of stinks in there right now.”

Chet’s brother, already impressed by my meticulous attention to the conditions of Las Vegas restrooms, suggested that I write a book entitled, “Where To Find the Best Bathrooms in Vegas,” or some such thing.

The Eskimo, whom I kept referring to as Hoy, had brought a few dozen napkins to us by this point, and there were knives and forks spread all over the table, glinting in the ocherous light of the Rio Buffet Dining Area. Leroy was playing the drums on the table with a couple of knives. Snaggle, who was sitting directly across from me, looked a bit piqued, and there was a certain kind of vermilion coming to her face. Her snaggle tooth was biting hard into her lip. I thought she might have a stomachache and offered her my water, but she just shook her head like a wounded animal. There was a terrified look in her eyes, some kind of preternatural fear that was hemming her in on all sides. I knew that look. And I also knew that there was no cure for it. She’d just have to wait it out.

My eggs were almost inedible by this point, but I shoveled them down anyways figuring I might need something in my stomach at some point today, and this would probably be my best shot at getting it. They were slimy and so was the tepid bacon, but it all went down the chute. I finished it all off and set my plate behind us with all of Leroy’s partly eaten dishes. I picked up a fork and started playing air guitar with it. Boston’s “More Then A Feeling,” was playing on the dining room’s sound system. Leroy and I were doing quite a good version of the song, using our utensils as instruments and singing the chorus when it came on. The others in our party were not amused, especially Snaggle, who was grimacing in horror and holding her stomach.

Leroy and I both realized that we had to get out of this disaster, and fast. Leroy screamed, “Don’t leave any tip for these bastards!” And we got up and left. It was time for us to go get some drinking done before we had to face the long drive home.

There was a fancy bar in the middle of the Rio lobby. We sat down in these plush and oversized armchairs, feeling a bit out of place, and watched a tall and elegantly beautiful cocktail waitress walk around in a very skimpy outfit, the material barely enough to cover her slender curves. The world buzzed on around us. We took no notice. It was as if we’d been put into a trance and all we could do was hang our mouths open and pretend to be alive. Chet joined us soon and began staring at the waitress also. I couldn’t handle it anymore and started looking at the bottles behind the bar. But they were less interesting and I went back to watching the waitress make her rounds. When she came up to us we were all still speechless and numb, but somehow we ordered drinks, I think I got a Mojito, and she went on away and left us to try out this thing called speaking once again.

There was a decision that needed to be made. None of us wanted to make the drive back. We talked it over. There was always the option of heading out in the Mercedes right then and just driving the damn beast as far as we could into the desert, and wherever it was that we may stop when our limbs or eyeballs gave out we’d just hunker down there and get a cheap motel room for the night, with me calling in sick to work the next morning. I liked that idea for some reason. Just the thought of this presumed freedom, this excess of time just languorously going by in some small desert town somewhere, the breaking up of the drive, and just the audacity of going for it and saying what the hell and driving on into the American night, maybe even reaching Barstow or some cheap shit motel off the I-5 where we could wander in exhausted and completely wrecked, and just sleep while the night spilled all over us like black tar, weighing us down with a benevolent somnolence, a small and downy comfort in the long long arms of America’s open road. Chet mentioned that his brother had gotten a room at the MGM for like eighty bucks. That seemed like a much easier way to go. I’d have to call in sick to work either way, and it would be nice to just take it easy, to not have to drive or go anywhere, to lie out by the pool drinking margaritas and sleep in a plush, well air-conditioned hotel room at the luxurious MGM Grand. At first I thought they were saying, “Sam Jam,” and I couldn’t figure out what that was. I kept asking what the hell, “Sam Jam,” was. Both Chet and Leroy were very confused by this. I gave up and just started saying, “Sam Jam!” every time anyone spoke to me. It made things easier. So while I sat there sipping on my Mojito and screaming, “Sam Jam!” at everything, Chet and Leroy made arrangements to stay at the MGM. It all seemed like a fine idea to me. One more night in Vegas and I could just sit here saying, “Sam Jam,” forever, watching the cocktail waitress bend over to pick up empty glasses and pretending that tomorrow didn’t exist. Chet went away to have a long phone conversation with somebody at the MGM. Leroy and I sat there in our plush armchairs drinking our drinks and not saying much.

CHAPTER 18

2009-01-22T19:20:00.001-08:00

Life is a dream that you keep dreaming up all the time. You lie there, maybe staring at the blades of a fan going around, trying to follow just one blade with your eyes, or trying to make the blades stand still by looking in one place for a really long time, but the blades keep doing what they’re doing. There’s nothing you can do about it. And the sky turns a muddled gray outside, steeping the stars and bathing the clouds in its inky swathe. Lights come on behind curtained windows. Everything happens on its own volition. Everything is real and it all is happening because it has to happen. There’s no other way for things to work. But you lie there, staring at the dust on the blades of a fan that has now stopped spinning, and you know that you are just dreaming, just making this all up, just telling yourself that the fan has stopped, that somewhere somebody has flipped a switch to make it do so, and at the same time you know that this is a lie that you keep telling yourself, because there are no fan blades covered in dust. In fact, there isn’t even a fan. There is no switch to turn anything on or off except the one in your head. And now you hear that click. You hear that certain specific type of click that creates everything, that makes all things happen, and you are dreaming the click too, you are dreaming everything, and it is all true and happening and there’s not a damn thing you can do about the whole mess. It’s all just going to occur. So you lie there. You wait. And soon the fan is spinning and the air blowing down from the fan is the air you are breathing, and it’s the only air in the world, and the dream doesn’t matter, the world doesn’t matter, the tiny insect crawling on your thigh, it does not matter. The only thing that is real and here and is now and that matters at all is this air going in and out of your lungs. This breath that you take that is forever. But of course that breath is just a dream too. There is a small comfort in knowing this.

CHAPTER 19

2009-01-22T19:19:00.002-08:00

“What the fuck are you doing?”
Leroy ’s face is furious and right next to mine. He’s so close I can smell his mustache. It’s not a good scent.
“Um. What? Nothing, I just...”
“You just got insurance on the dealer’s ace. That’s a sucker’s bet. You know that.”
We seem to be at a blackjack table.
“Oh. I did? Fuck. That was a major fuck up. Oh well.”
“Oh well? Fuck. Pay attention to what the hell’s going on or we’re going to have this whole table of dumbskulls beating the living shit out of us.”
“Dumbskulls? You mean numbskulls.”
“Don’t tell me my business, okay? Just play the fucking game without doing anything too extraordinarily stupid, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”

I play my hand and lose, busting before the dealer turns over his cards. I try to gather my remaining chips and leave the table. Leroy looks at me like I’m some kind of piscine thing flapping helplessly in the sea below him. I smile while trying to fill all of my jacket pockets with my ostensibly Brobdingnagian collection of chips, stumbling away as Leroy turns back to the table. How the hell did I get here? Where the hell am I? I must find out these things.

Endless acres of casino floor spread out in the distance, cigarette smoke rising from tables like small campfires bellowing up over a beach at night. The smoke doesn’t cloud here. The ventilators pump it right out, leaving just the cold air from the air conditioners to take its place. I am in the belly of an expansive casino. Is this the Rio? The MGM? Are we getting a hotel room? I must’ve been drugged! And why they hell was I playing blackjack? You can’t win at that game. It’s impossible. What kind of sick individual would give me an illicit substance that made me play an idiotic game like blackjack? And have no memory of it. Leroy must be trying to somehow steal all of my money. Maybe he slipped me a Mickey at the bar and they took all my money and dragged me to this table, holding me up and pretending that I was conscious, like Weekend At Bernie’s or something, and now Leroy was throwing away all of my money at the Black Jack table. He must be stopped! Where the hell was Chet? Why am I so god damn confused?

I sat down at a gaming machine, which was busy spinning and blaring and flashing, and grabbed my head. Bearings…that’s what I needed to get. Always doing the same things. Sometimes. Like when I was at home in my small apartment and I closed the blinds to shut out another night, to keep the streetlights out of my eyes when I slept, positioning my desk chair, soiled with innumerable stains and covered with old T-shirts which also became ratty and stain-filled over time, so as to block out the glare of the streetlight outside my window that still came through the closed blinds, beaming in like a spotlight and blinding me in my bed as I tried wearily, again and again, to sleep. Doing the same things every night, every morning…sleeping through another Mahler symphony as radio advertisements fill my dreams, coffee, bagel, shower, staring out the window at the sun spilling over rooftops, the buses going by humming on electric wires, the rattling trundle of the cable cars rushing down towards Union Square, sitting barefoot drinking coffee and wondering how I’ll ever make it through another day, already dreaming of the day’s first cocktail, the night’s first beer, the music coming from my open window late at night, maybe a baseball game on, maybe a bar that’ll stay open late for me…

People speak of being grounded. Metal objects always shock me when I touch them. The current just goes right through me like I’m some kind of superconductor. I’ve never felt grounded in my life.

Some guy and his elderly mother were sitting across from me in the casino. They were playing the nickel slots. The guy looked way too damn happy. A waitress in a silvery thong walked by and I tried to order a scotch, but somehow failed to get her attention, or speak any type of recognizable language. The guy’s mom kept telling him to, “Stop that gambling! Stop that.” He was smiling a big toothy smile and she was standing over him while he punched buttons and made the wheels of the raucous contraption spin. Then when he’d win she’d grab him on the shoulders with her claws and howl, “You won! Yes! Oh my goodness! We won!” and would go on like that until he punched the button again and lost and she berated him once again for throwing all his money away. It was a fucking nickel slot. What was he winning or losing? Twenty cents? The whole thing was giving me a headache. I got up and decided to do some reconnaissance work.

First I would cash in all these chips in my pocket. They were really weighing me down. I had enough things weighing me down. Time to unload some of this excess baggage. I scoped out the gaming room. This was the MGM Grand hotel. It said so on many signs. After following a sign that told me I was going towards, “The Rain Forest Café,” and finding neither café nor any sign of rain, I located a gold-barred booth where it seemed as if one could make some kind of cash transaction. An old lady sat behind the gold bars and didn’t do much smiling. I liked that. I went up to her and started unloading my pockets, throwing all the chips in to her through the little window. They made quite a pile and kind of blocked things up there at the little booth.

“Sir. What are you doing?” She rose from her chair incredulously. “You can’t do that here. Hey, stop that!” She screamed as a bunch of the loose chips tumbled onto the floor.

“Sorry. Just trying to lighten my load. Could I get large bills please? Hundreds preferably, but I’d understand if you don’t carry that kind of…”

“I don’t carry any kind of anything here. Sir, this is an information booth. I don’t have money. Would you please get all of those chips off of my counter?” She started shoving from her side and more chips went down on the carpet.

“Small bills are okay. Really, I just wanted to…”

My body was grabbed and dragged by some very strong hands across the floor for a while. I remained calm. It is always good to remain calm when being forcibly removed from a place. The hands set me down against a wall, where I seated myself firmly on the floor. A quite corpulent security guard waddled away and headed towards my chips.

I screamed, “Stop that man. He’s stealing all of my winnings!”

The Security guard turned around menacingly and told me to zip it. I took his advice.

My chips were gathered up by a few of these pot-bellied boys in midnight blue security duds and put into what looked like a potato sack. They brought them over and dropped the bag on the ground next to me, looking a little out of breath.

“Thanks boys. Very good of you. Really. Could I keep the sack? I’ve got a three-legged race this afternoon. I might need it.”

They were not amused. The biggest one piped up, “You know, that’s a lot of trouble to go through for quarter chips. Whadda ya got? Twenty three bucks in there.” They laughed at that. It was pretty damn funny.

For some reason they left me there with my bag. I think they had some other emergency, some other crook to apprehend. I got up, slung the bag over my shoulder like a hobo getting ready to hop a train, and began walking away.

Leroy saw me go by and started laughing. “What the fuck are you doing man? What’s in the bag?”

I just glared at him and kept walking. The son-of-a-bitch had drugged me and tried to take my money. He ran after me.

“Hey,” he said still laughing at me, “where the hell are you going? You just left me there at the table, and I was up big. I got fucked after you left. You were bringing me good luck.”

“I bet. How much of my money did you lose?”

“What? Are you okay? You look all fucked up. I mean, really fucked up. Not just the fucked up way you normally look. What’s that shit all over your tie?”

I looked down and saw that my tie was splattered with some kind of reddish-brown substance. “It must be soy sauce or something. Get away from me.”

Leroy kept walking next to me. I was moving at a pretty fast pace at this point.

“Come on man. What the hell? You were doing fine until you doubled down on two threes. And then you bought that insurance. What was that?”

“I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?” I switched the potato sack to my other shoulder and turned a corner quickly, trying to lose him. It didn’t work.

He hustled and sidled up beside me saying, “Something is very wrong with you. What happened?”

We were approaching the lobby now. Something sparked in my memory. I turned to Leroy. “What happened after we left the Rio? I mean, how did we get here?”

“Um. We drove in an automobile.” Leroy said sarcastically. “A Mercedes. You remember it. A big old silver shining thing with tires and a steering wheel.”

“It sounds familiar.”

It was starting to come back.

“You went off by yourself to shit or something, remember, after we left the bar with that hot cocktail waitress, and we all said farewell to Chet’s brothers and one of them told us that his girlfriend wanted to shove her tits up against us?”

“That’s right. She wanted a hug good-bye. That was a weird way to phrase it.”

“Yep. And so we went down there and hugged her and…”

My memory was sparked, “I ate that fucking truffle.”

“What?”

“She gave me a fucking truffle. It must have been laced with something or some…”

Leroy ’s eyes got really wide. “Oh shit. You ate that whole thing?”

“Where the hell did it come from? What was in that thing?”

“Man. No wonder you got all crazed there. Your short term’s all burned up too. I guess I should’ve warned you.”

“I went off to the bathroom and while I was sitting there taking a shit I got kind of a sweet tooth and I ate the damn thing. I didn’t know it was….what the fuck! What the hell was in that thing?” I threw my potato sack into the air. It landed in a fountain.

Now Leroy was really laughing. “I’m sorry man…” He went into a fit and ended up on his side on the ground, his mouth opening to laugh but no sound coming, and his legs extended while his head flew back, wrapping his arms around his chest the whole while. It was quite a production.

I went over to the fountain. My head was still kind of a mess, but things were becoming less crazed. The potato sack was soaked and so were my chips. I decided to leave them. It wasn’t worth the roughly twelve dollars or whatever was in there. I picked up the sack and let all the chips fall out. All those black rubber chips floating by in the fountain, being carried away by the current, circling and circling endlessly until some custodian came by and cleaned them out, and, I hoped, kept the generous tip for himself. I threw the wet sack on the floor and walked away. I’d had enough of these things.

The floor was very clean in the lobby. All of the tiles were shining and you could almost see tiny upside-down reflections in them. The light was hurting my eyes. I remembered Chet being at a desk at some point, checking in maybe.

Shit. That means we have a room…here at the MGM Grand. That’s wonderful. I need to lie down. I need to find Chet and get a room key from him. I tried asking somebody walking by if they knew what room I was in or if they knew where Chet was. They didn’t.

Leroy came bolting into the lobby headed right towards me. I tired to stand still, somehow hoping he wouldn’t see me. He came to an abrupt stop right next to me and started talking.

“I’m sorry. Man. You must be really out of your gourd.”

“Something like that. Stop laughing.”

“Sorry. I just…Well, there’s not much we can do about it now. Let’s go check out the pool.”

I kept staring off at something glowing the distance. It turned out to be the glass in the front doors opening and closing. “I don’t have a swim suit or a towel.”

Leroy was unfazed. “I don’t either. They give you a towel with your room key, and we can just buy suits at some store in here. This place is like a fucking shopping mall. They have everything.”

“Where’s my room key?”

“I don’t know, you moron. Check your pocket.”

The room key was a little credit card thing in my pants pocket. After finding it there I felt much better about things. “Alright. Let’s go swimming.”

We started following signs towards the pool area outside. The place was gigantic. Like ten malls all glued together and stacked on top of each other. We passed all kinds of shops and restaurants. One was a San Francisco themed restaurant called, “Nob Hill.” I lived in Nob Hill back in San Francisco and started looking at the menu. The letters didn’t make any sense. It was like trying to decipher a code or read Chinese. Some greeter person came up to me and asked how many were in my party. I just laughed and grunted and told him, “I live here,” while pointing at the name of the place, which was on the top of the over-sized menu on the wall. He made a confused gesture. I tried to explain to him that I actually lived in Nob Hill, in San Francisco, in California, but it didn’t help. I think he thought I meant that I lived in the restaurant. Either way Leroy grabbed me and apologized to the guy for his, “friend being a moron,” and we kept trying to find our way to the pool.

“Come on. We’ve got to find Chet. He’s out there by the pool sunbathing or something.”

“Sun…bathing?”

“Okay. Stop it. Don’t try to talk any more. You’re making no sense at all. That guy back there was ready to knock you out.”

That seemed like a good idea to me. I was tired of talking anyway. It didn’t do any good. All a bunch of rot.

We came to some escalators that went down for a really long time. It reminded me of these escalators they have in Washington D.C. that go down like that to the subway. The rubber on the moving steps seemed to be moving itself. Leroy didn’t seem to notice. It must have had something to do with the heat. But it was nice and cool in there. It didn’t make sense. All the rubber was melting and the stairs were liquefying, turning into this tar like substance that was sucking people under. I’d seen this before. The La Brea tar pits in LA. The animals would get stuck in the tar and it would pull them under, and there as no escape. We were going to drown in this fucking tar if I didn’t get us out of here. I tried to pull at Leroy and get him off of the melting moving stairway. He wouldn’t budge and just kept telling me to calm down and to, “Get the fuck off of me man. Shit.”

So I decided to make a run for it while I still could. I leapt over the moving handrail, which was also melting, and, barely avoiding getting my hands stuck in the muck, I made it onto the contiguous stairway, which was solid and not moving nor melting. Leroy was looking back at me and shaking his head laughing. People on the escalator were drowning. Why was Leroy staying on that death trap? I ran down to the bottom of the stairs and watched as people somehow emerged, all covered in the this molten tar-like substance, from this waterfall of an escalator. They seemed to be okay with it, like it was just part of the ride, part of the “Vegas Experience” or something, stepping up from this gooey muck and onto the sharp metal teeth of hungry comb plates. Leroy came down looking at me like I was crazy. I’d grown used to the look and didn’t mind it so much now. He was the one covered in tar anyway.

I tried to say something like, “I hope that stuff doesn’t contaminate the pool.”

He screamed, “AHH! Didn’t I tell you not to talk anymore?”

Things were getting heavy. Everything felt like it was weighing down on me. Even the air. Gravity was really working hard on me. Forming words was getting more difficult. He was right. I needed to clam up for a while. At least until this let up. It was kind of like being stuck way deep under the water with some kind of anchor tied to your foot that wouldn’t let you float back up to the surface where everything was light and sunny. I started singing Neil Diamond’s, “He’s Not Heavy, He’s My Brother,” in my head.

CHAPTER 20

2009-01-22T19:19:00.001-08:00

To get in the pool you needed to show your room key, and then some lady in a Hawaiian shirt let you by, and your body turned a turnstile and you were inside an outdoor store that sold all kinds of pool-themed things, including swimsuits with underwear lining sewn in. We bought swimsuits, mine were dark purple, and walked around trying to find somewhere to change into them. Leroy asked some 89 year-old Italian guy, who was smoking a pipe and limping along with a gold-tipped cane, where the nearest restroom was. The guy started pointing around wildly and going into great detail with his directions. I just stood on a bridge that went over some lagoon. People floated by on rafts below me, probably fleeing their village from some natural disaster. They looked calm though. What brave fools.

We walked by many different pools, some with all kinds of tiki torches and cabanas, some that were closed for some reason, some that were filled with people, and finally one that looked like it was reserved for movie stars, but was empty for now, and, luckily for us, the bathroom was open and empty. I went into a stall and changed into my trunks, balling up my pants and boxers in my arms.

*

I am standing here in flip-flops looking into a bathroom mirror. I do not own a pair of flip-flips or sandals of any kind. I like to wear socks. I am not doing so now. I have on swim trunks and a black t-shirt that reads, “Operation Desert Storm: Freedom and Justice For All,” in red, white, and blue lettering with some kind of fighter plane flying through it. I have thick black sunglasses on that for some reason remind me of Huey Lewis. I have a Chicago Cubs hat on that is too small for my head. I keep opening my mouth in the mirror to see if my teeth are still there. I am carrying a bundle of clothes in my arms.

“Where the hell did I get flip-flops from?” My voice echoes on the tiles of the bathroom walls.

Leroy ’s voice rings out from behind the closed stall door, “Hey! You’re speaking English again. Those are mine you ass hole! I was wondering where the hell those things went.”

*

I kicked off the flip-flops and, after taking a long time trying to set my bundle down somewhere dry, I put on my argyle socks and my converse. A grown man wearing argyle socks with shorts. It was something.

Leroy came out of the stall all dressed to go for a swim. He put on his flip-flops and we were off to waters of blue.

We decided to try and find Chet, who, according to Leroy, was at some pool that Leroy had forgotten the name of. He assured me he’d be able to find it. It was a very confusing walk. My mouth was on fire and it was still burning hot out. I needed water. I started thinking about Samuel Taylor Coleridge for some reason, something to do with my thirst and all the chlorinated pool water all over the place, and I reached out and grabbed Leroy by the arm and screamed, “There was a ship!” Leroy wrestled himself away from me and called me a few bad names. We passed many pools on many white walkways, crossed many bridges over calm waters. Leroy kept thinking he’d found the right pool, and then would say, “No! This isn’t it! What the hell is the matter with us? I see it. It’s right over there.” He said this many times at many different pools. Some of the pools were closing and they were ushering people out to other pools or areas I guess. We were standing around one of these pools, convinced that we’d spot Chet soon, when a beefy tanned guy came up to Leroy and told him that we’d better leave because the pool area was closing.

Leroy came over to me and said, “I don’t know why that guy’s whispering things to me. He says we’ve gotta go. The pool’s closed.”

“What? They can’t close this pool. Look at all the people in there on those rafts, all those kids swimming around in there. He’s lying. He just wants the whole pool to himself. Quite a little scam he’s got going. Was that a Corona in his hand?”

“Come on. Chet’s not here anyway.”

We went on. I decided the only thing that mattered was getting myself a bottle of water about the size of lake Huron. I told Leroy I’d find him later and went back to the store where I’d purchased my swim trunks. Turns out the store wasn’t allowed to sell beverages when the bar was closed. That made no sense to me, but I couldn’t do anything about it. The nice lady at the entrance told me I could buy water inside the casino. So back I went into the air conditioning, which was nice, carrying my pants and underwear in my arms, still wearing my swim trunks with my argyles pulled all the way up, and my too-small Cubs hat, and my 1981 sunglasses, and my Operation Desert Storm T-shirt. The escalators weren’t melting anymore. Not taking any chances, I took the stairs.

As I walked around this goliath mall-land I started singing another song that I’d made up. It went, “Restaurant…Restaurant…Please give me what I want…I don’t want somebody else’s order…” I sung it in a very deep, melodic voice. It was a great Operatic piece. I tried to look very serious and filled with deep emotion as I sang and walked along looking for a bottle of water.

A flamboyant and very helpful cashier helped me find a good bottle of water in some kind of annex shop that split the rent with a high-end clothing company. I thanked him and told him I’d be back for beer later. The water made things easy and good again. I drained the bottle as I walked back outside. Leroy and Chet were in the hot tub of the first pool I went by. I got in for a little, but it was really too damn hot in there. I got out and sat on the edge with just my feet in and started smoking one of Leroy ’s cigarettes. Whatever it was that had been in that truffle was starting to wear off. Things were clearer and my speech was getting better. Unfortunately, Chet was starting to freak out.

“Can’t we get some pool-side service? I mean don’t they have cocktail waitresses out here that can bring you drinks on a tray and charge them to your room?”

“Not today. The bar’s closed. It’s Sunday, you know?” I tried to talk sense.

Chet didn’t care. “So what? This is fucking Vegas. We can do whatever the hell we want.”

Leroy butted in, his head barely above the bubbling spa water. “We’ll just get beer on the way up to the room. Did you eat all of those cookies?”

“I don’t know. What the hell. This place it hot, this water is hot, I keep drooling. What the hell?” Chet had obviously eaten all of the pot cookies at some point earlier that morning and they were slowly taking hold. “Is that girl wearing a dress in the pool? Is that a raccoon? Watch out! Fuck, it’s eating that kid’s ears. It’s going to…”

Leroy dunked Chet’s head under the water before he could go on and start scaring the rest of the people in the hot tub. A few women in bikinis left. The men looked at us and away from us a few times, but kept smoking their cigars and leaning back in repose. Leroy dunked him a few more times.

Chet came up shaking his head like a wet dog and bellowing. Leroy and I grabbed him and went over to the sunbathing area where they’d thrown our towels and clothes over a few rubber chairs. We sat Chet down and he started talking very rapidly and low, almost a whisper. We let him ramble on, like he was talking to himself, which he kind of was, and we smoked cigarettes and lay in the sun. I almost fell asleep. After all, it was a Sunday afternoon. A few tattered clouds were briefly hiding the sun. Chet was keeping himself occupied with endless drivel. Leroy was lying peacefully on his towel and smoking. Everything was nice and still, and I felt drowsy, calm and ready for anything.

Then it just so happened that Chet had a complete freak-out, meltdown, delusional whirlwind. Leroy and I tried to calm him, but it was no use. He became excited and his voice was starting to raise again. He’d over done it on the cookies and now the evil cannabis Gods had taken his mind prisoner. I knew what that was like. Demons darting all over and fiddling with things, ordinary things becoming surreal and every motion a multimedia experience, and your mind rolling over and over the same thing and freezing on a single pitch or note and playing it over and over, a record skipping in your head. There was nothing we could do. He just had to wait it out. We decided to wait it out in our room upstairs, with beer and whiskey to fortify ourselves. We gathered our stuff and headed in while Chet went on and on about biped polar bears in trench coats walking around the pool with machetes, or some such thing. Fortune smiled on us again though and we made it back inside without incident. I decided we’d better take the stairs, avoiding another possible melting elevator experience, especially with Chet being in a bit of an altered state. Leroy took the stairs two and three at a time with loping tarantula strides. Chet grabbed the guardrail tight and hopped his way up. I walked.

Soon we came to the fountain where I’d foolishly dumped out all of my chips. They were no longer there, but there was a large wet plastic bag on the floor. I held it up. It seemed familiar.

Leroy said, “You left that there in your fit. Remember?”

“This? I thought it was a potato sack. Wasn’t it a potato sack?”

“What? No. Remember, you picked it up out of the fountain and dumped all of your chips out. I guess somebody stole your chips. Too bad. We could’ve used them to buy more beer.”

“This is what I was carrying around over my shoulder?”

“I thought that was strange but, you know, I didn’t question it. You were pretty messed up, you fucking goofball.”

I couldn’t believe it. No wonder those security guys hadn’t laughed at my joke about the three-legged race. I knew it had been funny.

Then it hit me. What the hell had been in that truffle?

I punched at Leroy ’s arm. “What the hell was in that truffle? What kind of sick concoction of drugs was soaked in that chocolate?”

“Drugs? Um, I think dark chocolate has some caffeine in it. Technically speaking I think sugar is a drug.”

“Remind me never to eat chocolate again.”

Leroy just laughed with his cigarette hanging out from under his mustache. I’m surprised he never lights that thing on fire with all the slow-burning cigarettes he dangles out under it. I grabbed the coffin nail out of his lips and stamped it out on the carpet. “Quit that fucking shit. I’m tired of you and all those damn cigarettes and all of your bullshit.”

He picked it up and looked at the dead butt in his fingers. He looked at it for so long I thought he was going to make a speech and start saying things like, “he was a man of infinite jest.” But he just stood there looking at the flattened thing in his fingers, looking rather amused. Now I began to realize what I was dealing with. Leroy had eaten some cookies too. Obviously they’d both had too many. Leroy started waving his arms around in slow motion and continued making long loping strides ahead of us. Chet was moving much slower and I kept having to push him to get him to keep up.

I looked at Chet and screamed, “You’re going to be a tomato!”

That was a bad idea. It sent Chet into a frenzy. He started shouting, “Ketchup! Ketchup!” Over and over as he bolted on up ahead somewhere. I tried to keep an eye on both of them but they were in their own little demonic worlds and it was too difficult. So I gave up trying and decided to go buy some booze at the little shop where the nice, flamboyant man had sold me the water earlier.

After buying four tall-boys of Budweiser—all with Oscar De La Hoya’s picture on them for some reason, which the nice man at the counter pointed out to me very lovingly, saying that I should keep them as souvenirs when I was done—and a fifth of Old Overholt Rye Whiskey, I followed the signs to the elevators. As soon as I got to the elevators I realized I had no idea what floor we were on, or what room we were in, or where the hell Leroy and Chet had wandered off to. This was not the best of situations to find myself in, still dressed like a dork, carrying my pants and underwear in a bundle under one arm, a paper bag filled with beer and whiskey in the other, and having no idea where the hell I was going. On top of it all I couldn’t see very well under my dark shades. Things were very murky to say the least.

Somebody screamed, “Hey! Look! It’s a Cubs fan!” It was Leroy, hiding behind a tall ashtray stand. I saw Chet laughing next to him. I ran over and kicked over the golden ashtray. Cigarette ash spilled all over the white carpet like a volcano’s aftermath on a snow-covered field.

“Where the hell did you fuckers go? You both owe me for beer by the way.”

They got out of their respective crouches and tried to grab beers from the bag. I couldn’t stop them so I grabbed one too and opened it.

“Look! It’s De La Hoya,” I pointed out. “These are collectors items. Be careful with them.”

They both ignored me. We all drank our tall boys with Oscar De La Hoya on them and waited for the elevator.

CHAPTER 21

2009-01-22T19:17:00.000-08:00

My eyes are very red. I can see all kinds of swirling red veins sprouting in them in the mirror. The mirror is gelatinous and it is moving, waves of motion, a steady current like a large boat makes in a lake as it motors by. I sing to a fire truck that isn’t there. I sing, “Don’t rescue me/ I don’t need any ladders up here/ Don’t rescue me/ just let me burn/ let me burn and burn away…” The shower water is ripping away at the basin behind the closed curtains. Water pressure is a wonderful thing. There is soap here. There is hot water. There are many little bottles of shampoo and conditioner and plenty of nice fluffy towels hanging on polished silver towel racks. I can see red spots floating in my eyes. I stare and stare at myself until my mind goes numb, until I don’t recognize myself, this thing with skin and hair and teeth, this face that grows stubble, and most of all these red eyes that will only open half way, and these drooping bags of sleep that I’ve packed up under them. I feel myself on the other side of the mirror, and soon there are no sides to the mirror. It is all one image, one being, without sense of sides or duality of any kind, any type of backwards world that is not here and is gone somewhere that is here at the same time. Lost. I look at my face and it is no longer a face. Just this chunk of hairy flesh with red holes staring out of it. I pull at it with my fingers. It is nothing. I am not here. In my red eyes is a reflection of more red eyes reflecting back ad infinitum. In my head somewhere is a brain. But none of this exists. I am just this solar-powered slab of flesh with opposable thumbs and no ability to fly or breathe under water. This has been happening over and over again for a very long time.

“What the hell are you doing in there? Did you shower yet?”

“Not yet. I’m just getting in.”

“Hurry the fuck up. This chlorine is melting my brain!”

I get in the shower and stop thinking about things. The hot water feels good on my face and I start to feel clean again. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt clean. The hotel soap is just a thin white bar, like a soda cracker, and I lather myself up. The word “saponaceous” spins around in my head, all the letters coming apart, falling with the shower water and washing down the drain. The steam envelops me and I am happy and all alone. Every little thing is good. I even use conditioner in my hair.

Leroy is next in line for a shower, after I emerge all fresh-as-a-daisy and wrapped in an imperially enormous towel from the steam-filled bathroom, Leroy saying that it’s like a fucking sauna in there, and I proceed to lie lazily on my King-sized bed, complete with all types of blankets and plump pillows and other types of bedding I may just have been unaware of, and break open the Old Overholt and start pouring myself an ice cold glass, having retrieved a glass, an actual glass that was wrapped in a light brown paper along with three others next to it, and ice, from an actual pre-filled ice bucket. I lie back against the big pillows and drink my drink, flick on the mammoth flat-screen TV with an actual remote control, and start flipping through the cable channels. Double Indemnity is on. I leave it there. Fred MacMurray is getting in an elevator and is all dinged up. I look over at Chet to see how his freak-out is going. He’s standing by the table and rifling through all these papers and is cussing and making grunting sounds. He seems very frustrated about something. I love the way Fred MacMurray talks down to the elevator operator. I like his hat, his long coat draped over his back, his shadow on the wall when he walks, the way the light on his desk shines on him when he sits down, and most of all, the way he smokes a cigarette, lighting it with a match all hunched over and suffering, real weltschmerz there in that motion, as he speaks into a Dictaphone and sweats, undoing his tie, the black and white enveloping him like a gray fog. Chet is throwing papers all over the room.

“What the hell is this? Why can’t I…Ahh! What the fuck, what the fuck! What is all of this? I can’t…I can’t get this…straight. I can’t keep…”

I keep watching the movie. Barbara Stanwyck is not fully covered. Nor am I for that matter. I decide to put some clothes on.

Chet keeps blowing his top over in the corner. Sun coming in through the blinds really does show all of the dust. That must’ve been Chandler on that one. Only he could write a line like that. I change into a fresh shirt and some pretty clean pants. Chet is stammering and throwing things around. Murder probably doesn’t smell like honeysuckle.

Chet kept at his paper shuffling, sputtering, “I can’t deal with…things anymore! Damn it! I can’t…”

“Chet! Just drop all of that shit. Get rid of it! You are freaking out and you need to get out of this room. It’s stifling all the you that was every in you. You must get out of here. It’s your only chance.” I really just wanted some peace and quiet and to watch the movie for a while.

Chet looked at me. He couldn’t smile. He said, “Okay. That’s it. That’s probably what…shit…that’s what I can do. I’ll go find my brother. He’s out there somewhere playing poker somewhere…I just can’t…okay, okay.”

He loaded up his pockets and went out.

“We’ll find you later. We’ll eat at the Rain Forest Café or something,” I yelled after him as he slammed the door.

So I lit a cigarette and lay there watching Fred MacMurray seduce some man’s wife, a very insane-looking Barbara Stanwyck, while he sat on her couch and smoked a cigarette and drank a scotch, calling her baby and dame, talking fast and tough. I fell asleep just as he said, “I watched it get dark outside and didn’t even turn on the light.”

CHAPTER 22

2009-01-22T19:12:00.002-08:00

When I woke up it was dark and the bed was all wet. Somebody had spilled a drink on it. That somebody was me. Luckily the spilled drink had put my cigarette out. It lay there next to me barely smoked, soaked through, and bent in half. Putting down my hand I felt little grains of tobacco in the pool of whiskey on the sheets. I picked up the now empty glass and turned on a light. Things were normal. Leroy was gone. I was alone in this room. One bed was made and the other, mine, was a mess of whiskey and wet cigarette ash with the covers and sheets all tangled up. The bare mattress was showing on a corner. I pulled open the thick rubber curtains and it was night outside. Lights were either spitting out neon or slobbering up a nacreous film that seemed to hang all over the place. It was a nice view up there, 20 floors above Las Vegas, all the hotels ruining the horizon with their monolithic towers and all of that cement and metal, and all that glass in all of those lighted windows in the distance, and all that traffic jammed up on Las Vegas Boulevard spurting towards heat and damnation and eventually a rather exorbitant tax even on their own deaths. It made me dizzy to look out of the window like that, so I stopped. The air temperature was very nice in the room. I looked at myself in the mirror and realized I needed to put some new clothes on. Unfortunately I’d under packed and was only left with a bright yellow button-up shirt that had a rather conspicuous coffee stain on the sleeve. After trying to straighten it out by whipping it in the air a few times very hard, I put it on. To try to class things up a little I wore a black and gold striped tie and my deep brown plaid suit jacket. My hair was standing straight up and my light brown pants were soiled with stains of all hues and shapes and sizes. Nothing could be done… shoes, socks, belt, brush your teeth, tie your shoes, again, look in the mirror, try to arrange your face in a way that makes sense, put the room key in your pocket…The bottle of whiskey was on the table and still was about a quarter full. I drained most of the rest of it while I stared out the window again, pouring myself glass after glass, neat, and starting to feel the blood flow through me again. The view really wasn’t that bad. Something charming about it all. Good old Vegas lying awake all night out there shimmering like a world of diamonds. Good old Vegas. I kept saying that over and over and then kind of singing it at the window. It wasn’t a bad way to pass time. I finished off my last drink and threw the glass at a wall. It didn’t break.

Before I went out the door to find my friends I glanced in the mirror again. Sometimes when I look in the mirror I see an uncle, or maybe a distant relative that looks familiar but whom I hardly know, maybe have only seen a few times when I was kid and don’t remember much, or sometimes it’s even an aunt who stares back at me. Sometimes the mirror shows me a flashbulb glimpse of old pictures I’ve seen of my grandfather when he was my age, or, in very horrible flashes, my father. His eyes or his forehead, the particular lift of an eyebrow or twist of the mouth, or even just a slightly pockmarked place on my cheek. Sometimes it only lasts a moment, but it’s a damn scary moment, and I immediately readjust my expression by tweaking my zygomatic muscles, or I just twist my mouth or lift my eyebrows in some other very different way to make it all disappear. When I looked in the mirror this time it just showed a tawdry wreck of a man with scraggly stubble sprouting here and there on his face, struggling to schlep towards the door again. At least my tie was clean.

The worst bartender in the world works at the MGM’s Studio Café. Maybe it was his first night. Maybe he was just filling in for the regular guy. Maybe I’m being too hard on the poor sap. I’m sure I’m not the best bar patron in the world. I don’t even remember his name. I think we tipped him. More on him later. First…

Following my hunches I went to a few bars trying to find the two screwballs. After having no luck, I sat down at an extremely long bar of computerized card games. It was hard to get the long, slender, silver-haired bartender’s attention. His cuff links looked like hood ornaments that needed a shine. The yellow crooked teeth behind his creepy grin were enough to send you running away, and his mustache was long and black, curving eerily around his mouth ends and dying in thin strands at his chin. I liked him immediately. Hard guy to get a drink from though. I put a damn fortune into that video poker machine. Finally, after losing much of my money, I started agitatedly swaying back and forth on my stool, almost capsizing a few times, and banging my hands around some. The silver-haired man behind the bar didn’t like that much. He came over to quell me, frowning in disapproval, saying rather arrogantly, “What’ll it be sonny?” I didn’t like him calling me sonny like that, but I decided to let it slide. What was I going to do? Challenge him to a duel? He said again, “Come on kid. You want a drink or you going to keep swinging all over the place and pounding the bar?” He was getting a little ornery now. “Want me to decide?”

“No,” I said, gathering myself and using many expressive hand gestures. “I will try that, what is that? That, um, I think it’s Old Potrero back there? In the fancy bottle.”

“The Rye?” He looked downright pleased. He went back and picked up the bottle, holding it delicately as if it were some kind of magic lamp he hadn’t touched in years. “This is the stuff you want?” He stood there shaking his head and holding the bottle.

“That’s the stuff. Pour it over ice for me, will you?”

“Make that two,” said a gravelly voice behind me. Leroy sat down on the stool to my right. He slipped a twenty into the video poker. “Where’d you go?”

The bar tender poured the whiskey over ice in crystal glasses.

“I just passed out on the bed. I didn’t go anywhere.”

“Oh, that’s right. You were sleeping when I left. Couldn’t wake you up. Thought you might of offed yourself or something.”

“Thanks for caring. Yeah. I was just sleeping off this morning I guess.”

The drinks arrived. We knocked our glasses together and drank.

“That’s damn good whiskey.”

The bar tender brought us a receipt for 26 bucks. “It better be good. Look what it cost us.”

“Cost you, my friend.” Leroy drank off some more. “This one is on you. Damn good stuff. Thanks.”

“No problem. Where’ve you been? Running up tabs, charging things to our room?”

I put down thirty bucks and the rangy bartender grabbed it up, whistling his thanks.

Leroy got three of a kind and the machine blipped a few times for him. “Just winning! Yes. And, you know, running around watching people lose money on Roulette. I still think my system will work. I’ve been watching and…”

“Stop it. Don’t talk to me about Roulette anymore. I don’t want to hear about it.”

Just then I felt a strong grip on my left arm. It held on for a good while. I turned and saw a very attractive older woman connected to the hand. Her sandy blond hair was cut in a lampshade style around her head. She had a nice neck. The black dress she had on looked very expensive. Her eyes were spinning and she had a look of awe and wonder on her face and seemed to be either going into or coming out of a trance. She kept a firm hold on my arm and whispered in my ear, “I just had to tell somebody. Look. Over here.” I looked at her poker screen. She had a royal flush sitting there and the thing was going wild counting out all the electric money.

“That’s a…a…royal flush! Holy shit!” I pointed at the screen and looked at her. Leroy stuck his head over there too. The woman was just smiling and holding my arm. I started to wonder if she were single. The bar tender came over, but he wasn’t very excited about anything. He said something about her husband having forgotten his cigarettes at the bar. I started to wonder if he was lying about the husband because of me. I don’t think the guy liked me much. I couldn’t think of anything to say so I said, “Congratulations. That’s really incredible. A royal flush.” She stopped holding my arm. That was disappointing. I think she ended up winning a grand on that one hand.

She was smiling there on her stool and she said, “I only played twenty bucks. I was just going to play until my twenty was gone and go up to my room.”

“I guess your twenty’s gone.” I said. This conversation wasn’t going anywhere. I turned back to my screen, on which I proceeded to lose five hands in a row. I drank some more whiskey. It was damn good stuff.

The lady printed out a receipt for her winnings and I told her congratulations again when she left, and she was nice and all, but I think she was a little nervous that we were going to follow her and take her ticket or something. The bar tender scowled at me and asked her if she wanted an escort.

“No. That’ll be fine. And you can keep my husband’s cigarettes. He won’t be needing them tonight.” She turned to us and said, “Bye boys. Have fun tonight.”

She was leaving a winner. That took some real self-control. She was probably some soccer mom from Laguna Beach out for the weekend, maybe having an affair with some insurance salesman she’d met online, having a wild time, smoking his cigarettes and spending his money, and now a thousand bucks to top it off. Not bad. She walked away swinging her hips. They were nice hips. I liked looking at her walk away like that, all dressed up and happy in her nice black dress. There was just something about her.

Leroy and I drank our drinks and lost our money in the video machines. We decided to go get some food. The MGM Studio Café was the first place we came to and we went in and sat down at the bar. It was made to look like Hollywood or somebody’s idea of a Hollywood studio, or some such thing. “We can order food here, right?” I asked the waitress, who looked like she should be serving food samples at a grocery store. She called me honey and told me we could and that she’d be back in a jiffy. I thought about peanut butter for a while and Leroy tried to get the big burly bar tender’s attention. The guy was wearing a tuxedo that was a few sizes too small for him. He had curly black hair and a shiny eggshell-white smile. Everything about him seemed awkward and hurky-jerky, like he’d knock something over with each movement of his large body, which stumbled by us a few times, imminently approaching us, but somehow always seeming to get distracted by something and walking away before we had a chance to yell out our drink orders. Leroy and I were the only ones sitting at the bar. Leroy began complaining. I was only thinking about food at this point. My appetite was back and I wanted to eat everything. I began wishing I were back in the buffet. The bar tender tripped by a few more times and Leroy finally got him to stop when he came stumbling by us, almost dropping a paring knife on my hand.

“Oh, jeez. Sorry about that, guy.” He clumsily picked up the knife. I didn’t like the way he called me guy.

I said, “How about a few drinks, gal.”

“Oh, sure. Sure.” He just stood there smiling his dumb smile and rubbing his hands with a dishtowel. “Um. Just a second here. There’s a menu somewhere here,” he went on idiotically. Leroy was just about to tell the guy that we didn’t need any damn menu for our drink orders when the guy whipped out two lengthy laminated sheets and set them in front of us. We stared at them for a while and the guy went off again to do something in his oafish way, knocking over some glasses at the other end of the bar in the process.

“This guy’s a nut,” I whispered conspiratorially to Leroy. “We better play this one close to the vest.”

“What does that mean!”

“I don’t know. We better be quick with our order. Don’t confuse the dumb bastard.” I said hurriedly as I saw the waitress serving people big hot plates of steaming food on the other side of the restaurant. “Man, I am really fucking hungry. I wish that old lady would prance her way over here again.” I saw the bar tender coming back and I said to him, “Where are the food menus? Can we get food menus here?” He seemed startled by me, like he hadn’t noticed me sitting there.

“Well, you are going to have to ask the waitress. I don’t do the food here, see. I just can get drinks.” He said in a rich and husky baritone.

Leroy jumped at the chance. “Yes. We will have drinks,” then as an aside to me, “order now, quick, come on. This is our chance.” I glanced at the menu and saw that they had Chimay. That sounded good. Something a bit high class to keep with the theme I’d started with the whiskey.

“I’ll have a Chimay please.” I said pointing to it on the menu for some reason. The bar tender leaned over to get a better look at what I was pointing at. He had a very confused look on his face. Leroy was trying to order a beer, any kind of beer I guess, but the guy just kept looking at the menu like he’d never seen it before in his life. Soon his finger joined mine on the menu.

“That is…um…ok. Did you say shimmy?” He barreled backwards into the back of the bar, and quickly turned around and pretended like he was getting something from off the shelf that was there.

Leroy screamed, “No you…” and stopping himself continued, “Chimay. It’s right there in the refrigerator, right next to you, in that blue bottle. See it? It’s right there.” We were both trying to help him out at this point as he opened up the glass door of the mini-fridge and looked through all of the bottles. He touched almost all of them in his search. Finally he brought out a bottle of Heineken and Leroy said, “Ok. I’ll take that.” The guy set it down and seemed very happy about that.

“Oh. I’ll get you a glass for that.” He said as he wandered off again. We both screamed at him to come back. Leroy told him he didn’t need a glass. For some reason this took a long time to sink in. I was almost ready to give up on my fancy beer. The dull-witted ogre just stared at us. I thought he was going to start drooling.

I tried to trigger his memory. “Chimay. That blue bottle right on top there in the fridge. Can I have it?”

“Oh. Yes. Sure.” He started the whole fridge exploration again. This time he was more successful and pulled out the bottle. He set it down on the table and looked at it strangely. It was one of those big bottles of Chimay that are like Champagne bottles and you have to uncork them and unscrew the little wire thing on top to get them open. I could tell this was going to be a challenge for our new friend. He picked up the bottle before I could tell him not to and he started trying to undo the wire trap on top of the cork.

Leroy was really enjoying the display. He’d opened his beer all by himself.

The guy started wrestling with the bottle and holding it under his arm, trying to pry the thing off with sheer force. It wasn’t working too well. His hips were knocking into all kinds of stuff and Leroy picked up his beer to keep it from getting spilled by this wild Buffalo of a bar tender. I was cringing just watching the guy shake the bottle up like that. Somehow he pried the thing off and started pulling at the cork with a dishtowel wrapped around his hand. I couldn’t watch anymore. I closed my eyes and hoped for the best. When I heard a pop I opened them again. The guy quickly slammed the overflowing bottle down on the bar in front of me. It started gushing all over the place.

“I’m sorry. Oh. Let me clean that up. Oh.” He started wiping up the mess with the dishtowel. My beer was about a quarter gone at this point.

I started saying, “That’s ok. That’s fine. It’s fine,” just to get him to go away, which he did. I said to Leroy, “Shit. I need a glass. Should I ask for a glass? It could be another catastrophe.”

“Yes. Damn it. You have to have a glass for that beer.” He started screaming down the bar, “Hey! Bar tender! We need a glass down here for the beer!”

He was right. I couldn’t drink Chimay from the bottle. A glass was absolutely necessary.

The guy came back in a few minutes, bungling up something else in the process I’m sure, looking like he’d just done about ten miles on a stationary bike. “You don’t have to yell. I was coming back. Now, what did you need?”
“A glass. We need a glass for his beer. And where’s the waitress? We’re hungry here. We haven’t eaten anything in almost an hour.”

The guy was lost again. The confusion was rising in his visage like water filling up his head.

I decided to keep it simple. “A tall glass for my beer.”

He smiled and went and got a highball glass from somewhere and put it down beside my beer and told us he hadn’t seen the waitress in some time but that he was sure she’d be back soon and we sat there and drank our beers and waited for her.

A couple came and sat down at the end of the bar. They seemed very young and kind of jaded, a bad combination. The girl was giving the guy a lot of flak about something. His face was maculated and his hair was slick and combed back. They both had on nice dress clothes. They might have been going to their high school prom, but they weren’t. They were here in the bar sitting by us and making all kinds of noise. I drank my Chimay, which wasn’t cold enough but was still good, and tried to ignore them. The guy just sat there and took the abuse. I didn’t like the girl, her rust-colored hair sprouting wildly from her pale over-sized melon, wearing black lipstick to match her long black dress, and looking like she’d bite the fingers off of anyone who dared come near her. She was a loud one. People at the top of the Stratosphere were probably covering their ears and trying to shush her. They weren’t having any luck.

The waitress finally showed up with menus. We were quick about ordering, scanning the menus pell-mell and telling her what we wanted before she had a chance to get away from us. I got a BLT, thinking that’d be hard to fuck up, and Leroy got some kind of meat and potatoes dish or something. We tried to order two shots of Fernet from the waitress, which was a big mistake, because she had no idea what the hell we were talking about. So the bar tender became involved again. Leroy and I cringed.

“Now what exactly is that, you say? Fur next?”

Leroy took control, grabbing the menu, pointing to what we wanted, and then pointing directly at the bottle right across from us, standing up on his seat to do so, exclaiming, “There! There! That one!” as the guy struggled from bottle to bottle. When he finally grabbed the right one Leroy let out a pealing roar and the guy actually looked rather proud of himself. The couple at the end of the table was looking very upset by this whole display. The girl looked truculent and ready to pounce. After smiling reassuringly at them, getting Leroy to stop hollering and sit back down in his seat, and explaining to the waitress about what exactly Fernet was, letting her smell the purple and pungent licorice liquid in my shot glass, we toasted to something or other and drank the Fernet down. There was a nice slow burn spreading in my gut, and then a stinging sensation, not at all unpleasant, in my mouth, as the wild herbs spread over my taste buds. The girl went back to berating her date, and I went back to my beer and my sandwich. The bacon was warm and the tomato was cold, the rye bread was crisp and the lettuce was, well, lettuce. I wolfed it down very fast and, after finishing off most of my large Chimay bottle, was starting to feel rather excellent again, if not a little drunk too. Leroy punched me in the side and when I looked over, not happy at having been disturbed in my newly found blissful state, saw two little white pills in his open hand. I took one immediately and tried to surreptitiously swallow it down. There are cameras everywhere in Vegas up in those glass balls on the ceiling, and one cannot be too careful when taking what may or may not be illegal drugs of some sort at a lunch counter. Leroy took one too and we toasted our beers to something.

“What kind of pill was that?” I finally asked him as we sat there listening to that impious girl at the end of the bar yell at her date about infidelities or miscegenation of some sort done by someone to something at sometime when he or she or it may not have been supposed to be doing whatever it was that she was, in her shrill way, accusing them of doing, and the guy just sat there with a look of dumb surrender on his face taking it all in and not saying much besides the occasional yeah or sure.

“That was one extended release high-octane super-powered pill of Adderall that you just sucked down my friend. Guaranteed to make you shimmy and shake all night long.”

“Great. Can I have another one?”

“Ok. But that’s it. Remember, to-morrow we must drive long distances.”

He handed me another pill while he simultaneously picked up some food with the fork in his other hand. It was some kind of decoy move I guess. It seemed unnecessary. Especially since I brazenly flipped the pill into the air and caught it on my tongue before swallowing it. It was a very nonchalant move. For some cockamamie reason I’d decided to throw caution to the wind. Leroy made a face like I’d just cut the head off of his favorite chicken.

“What the hell is the matter with you?” He grabbed my head and said into my ear, “You dimwit. You’ll have the narcs on us in minutes. Please, try to control yourself and keep all of this drug taking on the down low.”

I pulled away. “The down low? What the hell is that?” He just shook his head and went back to his food. I saw him take another pill with his next bite. It was very obvious. “This is Vegas. The city of sin. Right now some guy right up the street is bending over his roommate and fucking him up the ass.”

Leroy turned to me chewing still, “His roommate?”

“Yes! I’m not worried about our little dalliances here. There are much bigger fish to fry in this place. And we’re not even in the frying pan. There isn’t even a fire. Don’t worry. I am a Dadaist. I’m contradictory by nature.” I then let out a deep and booming eructation.

We both started laughing wildly, neither of us knowing what the hell I was talking about. I finished my Chimay and Leroy finished his meal and the girl at the end of the bar finally finished her scolding jeremiad and her date finally lifted his head and had a sip of his drink. Things were getting better now. I hoped this trend would continue.

Chet found us at the Studio Café. We saw him walking by and yelled out his name a bunch of times and sat there waving as if we were lost at sea and he were a member of a search party looking for us. Suffice it to say, we got his attention. He came over and sat down by us and started telling us about playing baccarat and shooting craps with his brother and Snaggle. It turns out Snaggle was quite a craps player. We started discussing plans for the evening.

“We could go to Coyote Ugly and New York New York. A lot of scantily clad girls dancing around to rock music,” Chet suggested.

I almost vomited blood at the idea but Leroy was all for it. “Shit, let’s do it. They’ll be all kinds of drunk girls there dancing and wanting to be fucked.”

I tried not to be a part of the rest of the conversation and suggested that we go do some gambling also. This seemed all well and good, but Chet had to rush off and say so-long to his brother and Snaggle, so he went off and left us there at the Studio Café. We tried to charge the bill for our meal to the room, but Leroy fucked up and said his last name instead of using Chet’s last name, which was the one that was connected with our room. So we paid cash.

The cocaine was gone. The Whiskey bottle was almost empty. We had no place to go for a while. I sat down and waited at a video slot machine while Leroy took a shit, thinking about all the cocaine Leroy had foolishly squandered on the trip here, and about when the fucking Adderall was going to kick in, and tried to relax and just watch people going by, lighting a cigarette and watching the smoke drift up into the casino’s ozone of conditioned air. I was right by a major walkway that was getting a lot of foot traffic. My mind drifted as I slumped there on the digital-eyed armless bandit, resting an elbow on its push-button torso, ashing my cigarette in a metal cup on its wide and sturdy shoulders. A certain sort of melancholy overcame me as I sat there and tried not to look people in the eyes. I hugged myself and started swaying, my cigarette sticking out like a finger pointing off somewhere from my side. I started wishing I were a street sign or a lamp post, maybe a fire hydrant or a tree on somebody’s lawn, a marble in a jar of a million marbles, a piece of lint in the vent of a dryer, or the clippings of an old man’s toenails that he cuts while lying on his back on the floor of his kitchen. Anything but this mortal coil of ugly mismatched parts and woe begotten ways of try and never try again, this diseased and rotting husk of flesh kept alive by the murmuring beats of a brittle heart, these long scars of moth-balled memories, this lack of ambition and purpose and the will to succeed in any ordinary kind of way, this undisciplined anxious bundle of nerves and twitches and wrong turns down one-way streets that all lead to this fusty insulated place where nothing matters, a replica of an intangible world that no longer needs me to exist. I sang to myself, “If only I were a pair of invisible eyes hovering over the ether of shouting skies.”

Things were starting to pick up in the gaming area around me. People were starting to fill in at the machines and I kept thinking somebody was going to come up and kick me out of my seat if I didn’t start gambling soon. So a fished around in my pockets for some money, found a dollar, and put it in a slot in the side of the machine. It gave me four credits. They looked very meager up there on the screen, just a red flashing number four for all my trouble. I punched the maximum bet key on the pad. The electric symbols whirled by, spinning cantaloupes and pineapples, turkeys flapping by with hummingbird wings, and lightning bolts and gold crowns going by in a blur, each square stopping its spin a moment before the next, setting up anticipation, a moment’s hush, the instant’s wonder of mercurial stakes, of chance set up and settling in, and the chancelessness of an unknowable future, sending my hope springing pretty fucking close to eternal. But, alas, there was no thing with feathers for me. After four quick dings of a heartless computerized bell, I was left with only a big red zero where my four credits had been a moment before.

Leroy came by and slapped me on the back of the head, kept walking for a ways, and then turned around with a big shit-eating grin on his face, for what reason I do not know, and I sat there, slowly putting my cigarette out in the metal cup on the slot machine, watching him look back at me. He started waving at me to get up and follow him. I did. I came up behind him fast, as if I were going to pass a baton to him in some kind of relay race or something, but then started walking next to him and we didn’t talk for a while.

We went up to the room, Leroy executing quite an impressive jump kick, with much aplomb, in the elevator, though the two other folks in the elevator with us were not too impressed and, in fact, did exit rather shortly after this display of agility and balance, as Leroy stood there on one leg, the other still stuck high in the air, like some benighted funambulist, grinning wider than a circus tent. I pushed him over when the bell dinged our floor and dashed out towards our room without him. He made it out just before the elevator doors closed.

All the lamps on the all walls were all burning their small electric pyres, all pseudo-garish charm and heatless warmth, and as I ran I saw them streaking by, prickling the wall, tracers scumbling the paint that seemed to be wet and dripping and motionless at the same time. I kept repeating our room number to myself as I ran. I started stopping at each door, checking the numbers, getting ready to lift my key from my pocket, and now really feeling the urgency of frenetic, if not downright splenetic, peristalsis kicking in. I needed a toilet and lickety-split too. Leroy flashed by me. A delusion? That spindly clown of a thing with papier-mâché arms waving and flapping around like a scarecrow struck by lightning, legs bounding up and down with the knobby knees like hooks coming way up high like a mechanized marching robot gone haywire, was that really something human? I didn’t have time to guess at such things. I booked down the hall, crashing into Leroy and knocking him even more off balance than he already was as I zipped by, now seeing the numbers following an order, and knowing, above all else, that our room number was coming up soon, that I would have my card-key ready, that I would insert it into the slot in the door signaling the door to open with a comforting buzz, like the sound of home when you’ve been away too long, or the hushed surd and hum of the tide going out, maybe even the slow and steady yawn of an old television set warming up when you click it on, or just the sound a slightly warped record makes between songs, a life affirming noise that is short-lived, steady, and complete, a noise that doesn’t have to exist outside of anything besides itself. I saw our door. I stopped moving. I put my plastic card into the door slot and went inside, hearing nothing. The bathroom was mine. I locked the door, pulled down my pants, sat down on the cold toilet lid and let it all out. Leroy came in, probably with much gusto and banging and crashing, and he probably pounded on the door and screamed all kinds of vitriol at me. But I didn’t hear him. I wasn’t listening.

CHAPTER 23

2009-01-22T19:12:00.001-08:00

I finally found out about the truffle. After ridding myself of what must have been the entire contents of my intestines, I sat down on the bed across from Leroy and poured myself a small drink with what was left of the whiskey. Leroy had one too.

“So, um, what exactly was in that truffle I ate this morning?”

Leroy smiled and sipped his drink. “That was a horse-sized fucking dose of what I believe to be many different types of wild mushrooms.” He looked like a katzenjammer, toy doll version of Groucho Marx, his countenance squashed so that it was all mustache and black glasses and eyebrows like bushy tildes, but alas, no cigar. “All types of psilocybin in that chocolate. How did it taste by they way?”

“Like chocolate. I don’t know? I was fucking out of my mind. Did I pass out?”

“Not that I saw. You did seem like you were in some kind of a trance. Do you remember anything?”

I looked around. Things were still kind of unsettling and kind of spinning around me. “I’m not sure if it’s completely worn off yet. But, no, I don’t think I really have much memory of those first couple hours there. Was I talking?”

“Kind of. In your own way. I don’t know. I was in a zone at that black jack table. You know, there may have been some peyote or Mimosa hostilis in there.”

“Some what?”

“DMT? That kind of thing. Or maybe just nutmeg.”

I’d had enough of this.

Leroy got up and went to his bag. “Oh shit! Look. I just remembered I had these. You want some?” He was holding out an opened tissue in his hand with a few capsules of some sort on top of it.

“Sure,” I said like a fool. “Why not? That tissue looks cleans.”

So we both swallowed one down. They might have been vitamins. They probably weren’t.

I finished off my whiskey.

We sat there waiting for our doors of perception to be cleansed, or at least wiped down a little. Chet came back, in a much more relaxed state than before, as he’d taken a few Xanax that his brother had given him.

“Why’d your brother give you Xanax?”

“He was getting a little worried. I kept talking non-stop about horses and assholes and lipstick on my dick and girl’s gagging on my…”

“Hey, whoa. That’s enough. That stuff gave you a damn sailor’s mouth.”

Leroy was doing little caprioles across the room and humming The Ride of The Valkyries. We both ignored him. Somebody knocked on the door. We all looked at each other. Leroy stopped his leaping. Chet got up to answer the door. Leroy and I hid, crouching behind the beds and holding our breath. Chet opened the door. A small voice said something about a cot for the room. Chet told the voice to come in. Leroy leapt up from behind the bed and scared the little man with the cot, making him stumble backwards and almost drop the whole contraption. Leroy helped him stabilize the thing saying, “Hello sir. Thank you for delivering this very important piece of furniture personally. As you can see, there are three of us and only two of these beds, and all of us very much do need our space when we sleep. And sleep we very much do need to do.”

The man kept looking at the floor and carrying the cot over past the beds and into the corner by the window. “There is three?” He asked an unidentifiable accent. “I see only two.” He leaned the thing against the wall and brushed himself off with his hands.

Leroy leapt over the bed and grabbed me. “Here he is. I knew this sumbitch was here somewhere.” He pulled me up and I waved to the man with the cot, a short pop-eyed guy with a thin mustache.

I stood there drowsily waving. “Hi there. Did we order that?”

“I asked for it when I got the room,” said Chet.

“Always thinking ahead.”

The man was now unfolding the cot into sleeping position. It made a piercing creak and then a thud and then it was done. The man looked at it as if he were very satisfied with a job well done. Leroy was sniffing the guy’s collar. I pulled Leroy away saying, “Sorry. This man is a bit feral right now. He’ll be more tame once he gets to know you.”

The guy looked a little freaked. He made his way out of the room rather quickly as Chet yelled, “Thanks for the cot. It’s very nice.” He slammed the door and we could here his very rapid footsteps tapping down the hall like a snare drum. Chet turned to us, “That cot is mine.” We both nodded our approval.

“So,” Chet said, lying back on his cot, “we’re off to Coyote Ugly tonight?”

I grimaced and let out a moan as I lay down on my bed and got under the covers.

Leroy ran across the room, knocked against the door with his shoulder, and then came rebounding back towards us, doing a Pete Rose dive across the bottom of my bed, narrowly avoiding me, launching himself over the space between the two beds, and crashing head first into the other bed, ending up curled up on the ground there screaming, “The Coyote will be ours!!”

Bedding was becoming a nuisance. It was thick and burdensome with all kinds of puerile and bland floral patterns on it. As I lay in the bed it became too restrictive, like a casket or a thick band of ropes holding me down, and I started pulling it all up out of the tucked-in corners of the bed and heaving it all on the ground, which seemed like a long ways down to me for some reason, like I was throwing them off of a tall mountain. I knew the carpet was there under the bed. It had to be. Now it was close again. Staring at it down there while standing on the bed I noticed it was a river. The river was taking away all the bedding downstream somewhere, and I saw rapids too down there, and as the bedding hit the rocks it got all caught up and I saw it there lying all wet on the rocks and it was not so far away suddenly and I went down on my knees and then bent over the edge of the bed to try to touch it down there, right there, close now, in my hands it wasn’t wet at all. I dropped it back down and it fell and fell for a really long time, and then it was right there again, right close by, on the carpet, dry, bunched-up, in my hands. Everything was smeared with dream. The sheets had to go too. It was more difficult to pull up the sheets. They were tucked-in really tight. But I pulled them all up and threw them down off of the bed. The river was gone and the carpet was there on the ground close by below the bed where it was supposed to be. The bed was bare. I threw the pillows down there with all the bedding. I lay there on the bare mattress watching the ceiling go up and down and in and out of focus. Little wens and creases and waves of plaster where bubbling and forming liquid shapes and then disappearing. Colors were becoming things that I could touch, that had a tangible quality to them, that had more than just formless substance. A white baseball went floating by, a thin white line tickling the windy blue mantle of the sky. I closed my eyes and they opened and I might have been asleep, but I was awake.

After lying on the bed and stretching out my lips with my fingers for what seemed like a fortnight, I got up and looked around. Leroy was sitting in a chair smoking a cigarette. He seemed to be looking very intently at the wispy strands of smoke arising from it. Chet was sleeping on the cot. I shook my head around, trying to get things straight. I must’ve dozed off. I tried to say something to Leroy but he didn’t seem to hear me. He seemed very far away so I yelled at him, “Leroy! What happened! Where are we?”

His eyes slowly spun around towards me. His mouth was a long reptilian smile. He shushed me saying, “Chet’s sleeping. Keep it down.”

I motioned for a beer from the twelve pack on the table. I had no idea where it had come from, but it was Budweiser so I figured Leroy had gone out for it while I was napping, if I had been asleep and not just hallucinating. He tossed me one as he kept to his business of watching the smoke from his cigarette slowly twirl and twist in the air. I caught it, cracked it open, and drank heartily. I leaned back against the headboard and watched him watch the smoke. It hung in the air like cobwebs strung across the room. The webs slowly started to come apart and then faded into cotton-puff halos forming a mushy double helix. He said, “So I finally figured out what was in that mushroom you ate this morning.” His eyes didn’t move from the smoke as he talked.

“That was this morning?”

“Yep. Chet told me there was a rather large dose of sage in that thing.”

“Sage? That was the odd aftertaste. Thanks for clearing that up. Any other spices that my taste buds might have missed? Maybe some nutmeg, fennel, a hint of vanilla?”

“You idiot. Don’t you know what sage is?”

“Something on my spice rack?”

“Okay. Well, let me enlighten you to the wonders of herbal medicine,” he said shifting a bit in his seat but still watching the hanging smoke rings. “A sage leaf, has something in it called thujone, which, by the way is the stuff in absinthe that gets you high, or would if you had enough of it, that is back in the days before they started limiting it, but that’s neither here nor there of course. But if you can get enough of these leaves together, and somehow extract the thujone from them, you can then like have a very potent mixture of this stuff, enough to probably get you really high and make you hallucinate and all that.”

“Who told you all this?”

“Chet did. I guess he knows a lot about it. I might be getting some of the facts wrong, but this is the thing. A really large dose of this stuff might cause a certain type of amnesia, which explains your little lapse in memory.”

“Really? That’s good to know.”

“Salvia. I think that’s what it’s called. The leaf.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Leroy went back to his silent smoking in the chair.

After waking up Chet we got ourselves together, the Adderall now starting to come on and get us all full of pep. The excitement in the air was palpable. I thanked Chet for the warning about the truffle, which only made him laugh at my stupidity, and we drank the rest of the beer and smoked all of Leroy ’s cigarettes. It was fun watching the smoke get all tangled up in itself and drift off and dissipate into the air. I started doing jumping jacks and singing old Stephen Foster songs. Chet was spinning in rondures and falling down and getting back up and spinning again. Leroy was tap dancing on the bathroom’s tile floor. Everybody was happy.

Soon we were out the door, marching down the hall, stopping to stare at pictures and lights and paint chips and little bugs we saw in the carpet. I mistook the falling ash from Chet’s cigarette for a bullet, and made everyone get down on the floor. We lay there until I stood up and shouted, “All Clear!” to the great dismay and confusion of a couple walking down the hall ahead of us. They picked up their pace. We stood up again and continued our very slow pace. It was like the molecules of air were too thick. We couldn’t move through them very well. Everything was too dense, like a milkshake of oxygen enclosing us.

When we got to the elevators I decided to speak for some reason, “We have to be careful. We’re crossing some Rubicund of the mind here, or we will be shortly. Be cheerful. It’ll happen fast, and you won’t notice all of it, maybe, but it’ll still happen and, you know…” I stopped talking as soon as I saw Leroy go into his jump kick. The last time, on our previous trip up to the room, he’d almost kicked the ceiling of the elevator. Now that we were out in the open I felt he might be better off being a little more circumspect in his behavior. Just before he left the ground a pair of shoes appeared at the end of the hallway. Leroy stopped his aerobatics in mid-kick and settled back down, kind of like some delirious ballet dancer wafting his foot in the air during an arabesque attempt. His feet seemed glued to the floor and his whole body was writhing in slow motion. He turned and gingerly walked back from where he’d wondered off to towards Chet and me on his toes, giggling, and taking as long of steps as his legs would allow.

“Gotta be careful. Never know whom those shoes might belong to. Might belong to a big police woman,” he said as he joined us.

“Yes. And Mordecai got exiled for jumping too high.”

“And he cleaned out the shitters and saved the Jews from Haman.”

“True. But still. Don’t fuck around anymore until we get back to New York New York or at least the Casino floor downstairs. These hallways are crawling with bugs and detestable humans.”

The elevator dinged and we got in hastily.

For some reason I blurted out, “Harry Houdini died on Halloween.” Nobody responded. Then I said, “And he didn’t do his own stunts in The Grim Game. 1926…yep.” Still only silence. Was I talking out loud? I tried again. “And Hans Christian Anderson hated children.” It was no use. Just like Luis Alvarez told his son, ‘It was meteor dust that killed them dinosaurs.’ We were in some heavy dust ourselves in that elevator, and, though Chet’s head was starting to look like a triceratops and Leroy seemed to be growing wings, I wasn’t about to start believing bogus hypothesis about mass extinction or suffocate like those Cretaceous creatures. I was going to live. So I covered my mouth with my hand and hunched in the corner of the elevator, watching closely for dust storms, fomites, or any malignant particles of air. Everything had gone sour in that elevator. Everything was turbid and fomenting death. The elevator buttons were lighting up all at once, going blank, flashing all kinds of colors, spelling out the names of kids I went to elementary school with, and then turning into a mouth that smiled and talked, I could read its lips, and it told me to be very quiet and to stay in the corner and be very still. I took its advice.

CHAPTER 24

2009-01-22T19:11:00.002-08:00

We are in line waiting to get into a club called, “Coyote Ugly” at the NYNY hotel and casino. I keep having to remind myself of this. The line is not moving very fast. A few girls in very skimpy outfits, whose faces look shiny, as do the rest of them, are selling some kind of slushee alcoholic drinks behind a counter, some kind of spiked slurpees that come in all kinds of flavors like watermelon, coffee mocha, raspberry, blueberry, and pina colada. They come in 20-ounce plastic cups and cost twelve bucks. You get a thick hybrid of a spoon and a straw to drink them with. The line is not moving and Chet and Leroy are standing around ogling girls and yabbering and smoking cigarettes. I am here in this strange world of plastic things that are not real. I say, somehow, “I want a drink,” and I move, thinking of thousands of popsicles melting on thousands of wooden sticks and dripping into a swimming-pool sized vat that spins slowly making a gelid ooze of sticky color, a pool of gestation covered by a gossamer sheen, a meek carapace for this mucilaginous high-fructose-corn-syrup-sticky pabulum mixing like cement in the spinning gears of my mind. I move and stand in another line. The menu is high up above filled with many indecipherable symbols and words that scramble and butt heads and fight internecine battles, sharp and sudden sparks of fulgurant scuffling dissipating into a miasma of confused spots. My eyes become scared and I close them for a moment, a moment that becomes a redwhitebluegreenyellow-then-all-spinning-colors-at-once sinistral bout of horripilation. I stand and squint at the letters on the menu. I make sure I know where my wallet is. I am ready to pay. I have money. Why does that man have two heads? The blue and red on the menu are both too loud. I need a softer, quieter color, one that I can hold in my hand and pet, one that won’t fly away and crash into a train and splatter all over my face like blood. The word “coffee” is there. I feel it. It is in my eyes and all over my skin. The brown of it is the way it sounds, mellifluous. It is in my veins, lulling me into a quiet comfort. I say it over and over, “kaaa….fffffff….eeeeeee…” and it is beautiful and wonderful and I can feel it soothing my whole mouth and it is blowing in my hair. I am a leaf falling from a tree made of feathers and cats and cotton balls. The ants have no business here. I am not a picnic. I am the hammer and the nail. The line moves and I go with it and there is a shiny woman in a bikini and her hair is jet black and she has monumental breasts and I look at her and I am holding my wallet in my hand and she is smiling way too big for the occasion and I say the word, “Coffee.” I hand her a twenty-dollar bill. A bell is ringing.

*

The cash register rang really loud when she opened it. Leroy had sidled up next to me, which was becoming much too common lately, and was doubling my order. Now we had two 20-ounce, coffee-flavored slushees that were supposedly doused with some amount of alcohol. There was really no way to tell. We took them over to the line, where Chet was still standing waiting to get into the club. I tried to suck some of the slushee up through the straw, but it was very difficult. Leroy and I were both having a lot of trouble drinking these things. And when I did get some of the icy brown liquid into me I started getting a horrible headache. Every time that I sucked down more of the stuff the same thing would happen, and I would curse myself and grab my head, yanking at my hair and screaming like a wild boar with an aneurysm. But then the headache would go away and I’d try to get some more down, figuring that I’d just paid like twenty bucks for the thing and better at least get the alcohol out of it. And each time, yes, another insanely painful headache. By the time we got to the front of the line I still had more than half of the thing left. Chet and the bouncer were having some kind of argument. It seems that Chet had forgotten his wallet and the guy wouldn’t let him in without ID. There was no way around it. Chet went back to the MGM to get his wallet and Leroy and I sat outside and drank our slushees, screaming out in pain every time we took a sip.

Plastic flowers were weary of time and dreaming of a plastic sun in the planter that I was leaning against while I drank that disgusting frozen coffee-flavored concoction that most certainly was not bringing me back home. Hebetude was flowing in my veins. Loss was stringing up constellations of sorrow in the backyard of my sky-blue head and every time I closed my eyes I saw shotguns pointed at me with their triggers cocked and a man laughing at me somewhere behind them, somewhere beyond the rusted Rube Goldberg machines and manifold cranking gears of my mind covered with this avaricious worn wisteria twisting its wending way through a make-shift iron trellis made of jelly beans and eyeballs. I tried to keep my eyes open. Leroy was smoking.

Kites flying in stormy weather.

The damn slushee was no good. I threw mine into the planter where it soaked all of the plastic flowers in brown ice. Leroy did the same. Chet came back with his ID and we where all set to go in. The guy at the door waived us through, apologizing effusively the whole time, and we joined the crowd inside. It was kind of steamy in there. A lot of bodies pressed up against each other. At one end of the place there was a long bar and that’s where I headed. The music was really loud and really bad. The bartending ladies were all wearing tiny shorts and Coyote Ugly tank tops that accentuated their busty figures. I tried to tell Chet a joke about the cops busting a brothel and it being a busty bust, but he couldn’t hear me. Then I tried one about a guy who got fired from the orange juice factory because he couldn’t concentrate. Chet wasn’t standing next to me by this point. So I went to the bar and ordered a Budweiser from the imitation lingerie model standing behind it. I stood around drinking my beer and watching what seemed like hundreds of people in their early twenties dancing around and holding clear plastic cups of mixed drinks with no ice. I kind of hung around the walls. There was a raised stage over next to the bar, and on it were dancing all kinds of odd women. It seems that there was some kind of selection process going on with the girls dancing up there. The leader was a black haired woman who was well over six-feet tall. She was wearing the requisite Coyote Ugly tank-top and shorts, and she was pointing into the crowd and mouthing what seemed to be, “You. Yes. You,” or some such thing. Then she would grab onto the lucky girl and bring her up on the stage with her to dance to the awful blaring music. They were really shaking their hips and asses up there. I watched and wandered around, staying close to the wall, not really wanting to go mingle in the crowd.

In the back of the place on the other side there was another bar. It wasn’t really a bar. It was just some extremely curvy girl behind a small table with a keg of Sam Adams under it. I watched her selling beer for a while back there. She was very easily confused. There was only one thing she could possibly do back there, and that was fill up plastic cups with beer from the keg and give it to people. It was five dollars a beer. Nothing even remotely complicated. Maybe sometimes a person might want two beers. That’s about as abstract as the whole thing could get. Every transaction was a nightmare of misunderstanding involving much mouth to ear shouting by both parties. Every time she poured a beer—always with a watermelon-slice of a smile on her face—and set it down on the bar, there was some confusion about how much change she should give. The beer was always five dollars. Yet almost every time the person buying the beer had to help figure out the change or the total. It was highly entertaining. I started enjoying myself at last. She just stood there with a vacant smile on her face, gyrating slightly to the music, every beer a new surprise, a new challenge that she’d never faced before. Take the nozzle from the keg, push on the lever to make the beer flow into the plastic cup, fill up the cup to the top letting the foam run off onto the ground, hand the beer to the person standing on the other side of the bar, tell them how much they owe you, take their money, try to remember how to use the cash register, push a bunch of buttons until it opens, do some addition or subtraction in your little head, try to pull out the correct amount of change for the person, try to remember how much the drink costs, how much the person gave you, look really confused and happy, keep smiling really big, hand them some bills and the beer and hope for the best. It was absolutely mind blowing.

At some point I went up and bought a beer from her. She went through her routine. When she set down the cup with the beer in it, all foamy and dripping, I handed her two fives, a ten, and three ones. She took all the money and spread it out in her hands like she was playing poker. She kept smiling. Then she went into the register, put my money in and then started pulling out all kinds of bills. I grabbed the beer and drank it down as fast as I could in two injudicious gulps while I breathed through my nose. I set down the empty cup as she came back. She handed me two ten-dollar bills and a one. I pointed down to the empty cup and said I’d have another. She couldn’t hear me over the music. So I screamed into an ear that she’d placed by my mouth. She was leaning over towards me and there was quite a bit of cleavage to be seen. She smiled and took the cup back to the keg. I tried to make it easy by giving her a five-dollar bill. I laid it down on the counter where it got really wet in all the spilled beer. After she brought the now beer-filled cup back I screamed thanks and walked away really fast. When I looked back to check on her she was still holding the bill in her hand and pulling ones out of the machine and then putting them back, gyrating her hips and smiling the whole while. Sweet salvation of oblivion and ignorance, such a beautiful thing.

I found Chet over by the stage where all the girls were dancing. Leroy was going affably berserk in the swarming, pulsating dance crowd. He kept pushing his way closer and closer to the stage. His arms were cracking like whips. His head was banging back and forth as his body seemed to disassemble and put itself all the way back together again as he danced like someone possessed by an evil spirit, or God. Chet and I were laughing and watching the spectacle, unsure of what might happen next.

What happened next was that Leroy came right up to the stage. His terpsichorean madness was intoxicating. Everyone around him was going nuts. The music was awful. The Amazonian woman with the long black hair, who was the Goddess of the stage, began taking an interest in him. She reached down with her massive arm and grabbed his checkered tie. She started pulling him around by it like it was a collar. He just went with it and started screaming in jubilation. All the girls dancing on stage started getting worked up. Chet and I were just standing there enjoying all of this sultry momentum. Then the black-haired Amazonian bent down on one knee and started untying Leroy ’s tie. She then pulled the tie off and started waving it around, driving the crowd into a saturnalian frenzy. Leroy was loving it. He was leaning back with a stupendous grin on his face, looking up at the giant woman who was waving his tie around like a lasso. She even whipped a few of the girls on stage in the butt with it. Leroy raised his arms up and let out a wild whomp. Between songs she motioned to Leroy to come closer. She bent down again and started wrapping the tie around his head, tying it in the back so it hung down like a braided queue. Leroy started screaming like somebody at a Van Halen concert. Everybody in the place was cheering and pumping their fists as the next song started. That’s when Leroy made a fatal mistake. He tried to get up on the stage. I guess, though nobody told any of us, it is verboten for guys to dance on the stage at Coyote Ugly. It’s a girls-only dance party up there. Leroy immediately started getting hissed and booed by the crowd. All the girls on stage looked really angry and disturbed. And Leroy ’s got his fucking tie wrapped around his head. The music stopped. Some corn-fed, muscle-bound bouncer came over and grabbed Leroy off the stage as the crowd continued to voice its disapproval of the whole thing. He went off calmly enough. The Amazonian grabbed a bullhorn and screamed into it, “What’s the first rule of Coyote Ugly?” And then, along with the whole teeming, seething crowd, yelled, “No guys on stage! Only girls dance on the stage!” Chet and I started to get worried about Leroy. Would the crowd tear him to pieces in a fit of rage? Would they mash and knead him and rend his garments and cook him at the stake over a fire pit like a pig roasting on a spit? We tried to follow him but the crowd, its rage surceased, was back to its dancing, and the bouncer seemed to have dragged him somewhere very quickly. I lost Chet at some point and went around looking for him everywhere. I even went outside the club and walked around for a while. Nothing. So I went back in, the door guy apparently remembering me for some reason and giving me a thumbs up, and saw Leroy talking to some tucked-in bro over by the bar. I got another five-dollar beer from the brainy, busty girl and watched him from afar. The guy was really giving him something to listen to. He put his arm around Leroy at some point and I went over to get a closer look. Chet was over there silently drinking his beer while Leroy and this guy went on and on. I don’t know how they could hear each other over the music. My good time was over, if it had ever started at this ridiculous place, and I wanted to exit soon. Chet wanted to stay and watch the girls dance. So I went over to Leroy, dragging him away from the yapper, and told him I was taking off.

“What? That fucking guy was trying to hook me up with his cousin.”

“This music sucks. I’m leaving.”

“Whatever. So this guy is like trying to show me his cousin, and I guess I picked the wrong girl to look at, because when I told him that I thought she was hot he got all pissed and said, ‘That’s not my cousin. That’s my wife!’ Shit. I can’t see anything anyway. My glasses are all fogged up.”

“And you’ve got a tie on your head. See you later.”

CHAPTER 25

2009-01-22T19:11:00.001-08:00

I walked through a tunnel and over a bridge and went back inside the MGM looking for some rest. Ideas of lying in my bed in the hotel room were starting to sound really good. Walking was an ordeal. My brains were all scrambled from the loud music and the drugs. I came to a place called the Sports Lounge, a cathedral of a place with hundreds of TV screens on the wall, which was as large as an Imax movie screen. It was quiet. A few people were scattered around in chairs facing the wall of TV screens, but for the most part it was empty. I bought a banana and a bottle of water and sat down in a chair facing all the screens in a very deserted part of the lounge. The chair was comfortable, the water was cold and good, the banana was ripe and tasted sweet without being too sweet, and not many people were walking by. Sporting events of all sorts were playing on the screens. Horse races from all over the country. Basketball games in Africa or New Jersey. Long distance running, lacrosse, baseball, football, sports that were out of season were somewhere being played by somebody, and you could bet on the results. I watched the screens and started to feel relaxed and rejuvenated. There was something comforting in the fact that all these people up there on the screens were still doing things, things were happening, and I could just sit here and watch it all happen without lifting my pinky. Things were all happening, as they should, as they always would be, no matter what I did with my little life here. The world would go on without me, as it always had been going on long before I was born. Doing absolutely nothing felt good. I ate my banana and drank my water and started to feel the amphetamines course through me. They were coming on really slow, but after a little bit of rest and hydration I was starting to get back to a more hearty and hale state. My eyes were burning less and a sense of well being came back to me, of everything being okay again, and I laughed and watched the TV screens, feeling good about myself, about drinking cold water and eating a banana. I started to not want to go back to the room. The shapes of things were starting to change. Images coming off of the TV screens were all blending together, coming at me like a in 3-D movie. Horses were racing basketball players on a football field. Long drives were sending baseballs into volleyball nets. Chris Berman’s head was inches from mine and he was screaming at me in Spanish. All kinds of numbers and letters were crashing into my eyes, ticking by my eyeballs like a teleprompt of supersonic Sanskrit. This was getting fun. All the screens turned blue, their plasma surface undulating like jelly. It was like watching the ocean from high above, the capillary waves rippling into the deep rich texture of the azure surface. Then the screens flashed back on all at once and all the multi-colored movement and noise was back. I reached in my pocket for a stray cigarette. Nothing. Damn. I decided to get up, leaving the circus of spinning colors to its own revolutions and leaps of legerdemain, and start a few circling ways and maybe some whirligigs of my own. Off to find my companions, I went exploring the MGMs chasmal kingdom halls.

Leroy and Chet were sitting at the video poker bar. Idiots. I knew there were no more royal flushes in those machines. I sat down next to them and ordered a beer. They looked haggard, older than when I’d known them earlier that night on the dance floor at Coyote Ugly, changed, enervated, depleted of their precious bodily fluids, worn out somehow. Chet had his head in his hands and was looking bleary-eyed at the video screen. Unlike them I was in fine fettle. I had a bounce in my step. I was in backslapping, high-fiving form. I drank my beer, lifting it high and draining it, wiping the excess from my lips with a gratuitous swipe of the back of my hand, yowling at them, “What’re you guys, asleep?” as I twirled in my chair and looked all around. “Come on. Show some sign of life.”

Leroy said, “You sure turned into one cheery asshole. What happened?” His head was lying right on the video poker screen. I could see all the light from it glowing on his face. It made his cheek a nice neon green and his teeth a shiny yellow. His glasses were askew, the thick lenses refracting the colored light from below into distorted realities, rhombuses contracting and expanding and going ovoid or flattening out or spinning in four or five directions at once, seeming to lift off of the glass surface and out into the air where they hung and broke apart like destroyed asteroids in an old Atari game.

I just hunched my shoulders and kept spinning, saying, “There is too much dust gathering in this corner of the universe.”

At some point Chet went back to the room.

CHAPTER 26

2009-01-22T19:10:00.001-08:00

Chapped, scab-hard blood, ruined-leather scratching that tastes of cigarette smoke and cheap vodka shoved down my throat and wiggling around in my mouth like a wounded eel. Is this kissing? Who started this? I can’t breathe. A woman is on my lap. I detach my mouth from hers. She is much older than I am. I must do something.

She says, “Hello, darling. I didn’t think you’d let me go.”

I say, “Hey there.” And try to untangle myself from her arms that are around my neck.

She says, “Come on baby. Just another kiss,” as she smokes her long cigarette and smiles lasciviously at me. “Come on. Just kiss me again like you were.” She comes in too close and I back away. Her hips move up on my lap and her hands start going up and down my back. Her hair is a nest for cockroaches and diseased beetles. I don’t like the smell of her, a sweet-sick smell like rotten pickles. For some reason I decide I should kiss her again. There is no reason for this, no rational behind it, except that I want the sensation of kissing for some reason, though I can’t think about why or how it should happen, nor even care much about it. It just seems like the thing that I will be doing now, and so I do it. It’s horrible of course, but I try to stick with it. Her hands are going into my pockets. I look down and see that she’s taken my pack of gum out, and I am very confused and grab the gum back and say, “Hey, that’s not for you.” She laughs and keeps trying to put her hand back into my pockets. The kissing has become unendurable at this point. Her hands are going into my suit jacket pockets and she’s whining, “Come on, baby Don’t you like me?”

“Like you? You keep trying to steal my gum.” I feel her poking around in my other pant pocket. “Hey! Stop that. There’s no gum in there.”

She comes in for another go around with the lips. I’ve had enough, “Ok. Stop that. You’re not getting any gum from me lady.” I stand up and she half-falls and slips herself up onto the top of the bar. It’s a better place to sit than my lap.

Down a few seats at the bar Leroy is laughing at me and shaking his head in disbelief. “What were you doing there man? The old wench was trying to steal your wallet. And you were fucking making out with her. That was not a pretty sight.”

“I don’t know? She kept taking my pack of gum out of my pocket.”

“Your pack of gum? You idiot. She was trying to lift your wallet. A regular Chicago May that one.”

I was disoriented and didn’t want to think about what had just happened. No time was left for us in this place. Space was closing in. Everything was getting smaller. Soon we would vanish into the abyss like waves of light unable to escape the event horizon of our own existence, lost in the void, shut out, less than an infinity of nothingness.

“Let’s go back to the room. I can’t be here anymore.”

Leroy’s eyes were jiggling around like little pot bellies made of fog and glass. He pulled his face down with his hand and sighed like an old man at the end of a very hard life. “Let’s get some breakfast.”

For some reason I agreed with him. “Ok, but let’s give them Chet’s name this time so we can get the bill charged to the room. I don’t have any more cash.”

We went back to the Studio Café. It was familiar, reliable, like an old dog that keeps biting your feet every time you take your shoes off. The breakfast was excellent and we charged it to the room. I could’ve kept sitting there and eating forever. Leroy handed me a few Xanax after the meal. I ordered a tequila sunrise to wash them down. After swallowing the pills and diligently draining the red and yellow liquid from my glass I started to feel drowsy and relaxed. A warm mellowing of my senses overcame me and I was calm. There was quiet inside of my head and some diluted sort of freedom was melting around the cockles of my heart, shutting my eyes and ordering multitudes of synapses to stop firing so damn much. I started half-muttering things like, “Xanax is alprazolam and did you know that the generic Ativan, um, which is called lorazepam has all of the same letters in it, but, that they are all like mixed up in there? Except the extra ‘e’ I guess? And maybe an ‘l’? Is that an anagram? What? Can I buy a vowel? I mean…” and other such nonsense. I was getting sleepy. It was a nice way to end things. Everything just winding down and down, slower and slower, until there is nothing left but the emptiness in the place where your brain used to be inside of your skull.

CHAPTER 27

2009-01-22T19:09:00.000-08:00

The next morning I woke up to an alarm that I’d somehow remembered to set for 8 a.m. so I could call in sick again to work. The guy who answered the phone told me I sounded horrible and to take it easy and get some rest. I think he thought I was malingering. But I really wasn’t. I felt horrible. There was no way I wasn’t really sick. I felt worse than sick. I lay back down for a while but couldn’t sleep. I kept seeing these man-sized, swollen and chapped lips trying to attack me. Eventually it became checkout time and we all got our stuff together and trudged down to get the car. Somehow we managed to get the car brought to us by a speedy valet and threw everything in the trunk and got in for the long ride home. Leroy took the wheel saying, “I’ll drive this thing as far as I can. I just need to get some coffee. We’ve got to stop for some coffee. Don’t worry. I’ll drive this thing until the wheels come off.” Unfortunately, that was what I was afraid of.

We stopped for coffee at a truck stop by State Line. The store there had a lot of room inside, like two 7-elevens squashed together, and all kinds of trinkets were for sale up by the registers. Three registers behind the long counter got banged on by three separate cashiers, one in the middle and one more at each end. It was a busy place. Some truckers were off gambling on a video machine in the corner. When I went in the back to use the bathroom I noticed that the place had showers and a locker room. Truckers must have need doing a lot of deadheading these days. After taking a piss I didn’t take a shower.

I was standing around doing a lot of staring at the trinkets. A plastic, gold colored bust of Mel Gibson was really occupying my attention. The more I stared at the thing the more I became convinced that it was made of Plaster of Paris. And his proud and defiant eyes seemed to be staring right back at me saying, “You want a piece of me Jew boy?” It was really making me nervous, but I couldn’t look away. Then something jarred me away from Mr. Gibson’s image. It may have been nothing but a fly landing on my head. I’m still not sure. But when I looked up I noticed Chet was staring, almost drooling with a jaw-dropping kind of awe, at some biker chick who was standing across the store on the other side of the counter. She wasn’t even that attractive, though she maybe did have some kind of oily flare, kind of like Cher in “Mask”. It wasn’t anything to go gaga over. Staring at her seemed a bad idea, as I looked next to her and saw a real grizzly, mutton-chopped, beefy biker guy with metal chains on his leather jacket and very intimidating tattoo work all over his arms taking notice of Chet’s steady, if maybe a little glassy, gaze. The guy had biceps bigger than my torso and he didn’t look happy. Leroy was obliviously paying for some coffee at the register next to me. There was a moment when I knew trouble was unavoidable, and that this was not going to turn out well.

Chet puts out his arm and extends the blade of a Bowie knife. No. Wait. That’s not a Bowie knife. That is a…pocketknife? With a cigarette lighter on it? What the hell? The biker guy looks as confused as I do. Chet is just standing there trying to look menacing with this tiny pocketknife/cigarette lighter thing in his hand. Leroy walks out with his coffee and I grab Chet and pull him outside too. We start running to the car, passing Leroy who is gingerly walking along sipping his coffee. I yell back, “Come on! Run you idiot! He’ll kill us all!” Leroy just stands there kind of not doing anything. The door to the store opens up behind him. I scream again as Chet and I get to the car and begin frantically trying to get the keys to unlock the thing. “Get your ass in here or we’re leaving you to die!” This gets Leroy moving, and without spilling a drop of coffee, holding the cup high like an Olympic torch, Leroy runs to the car. I throw the keys at him and jump in the passenger’s seat while Chet clamors into the back. Starting the car and throwing it into reverse, still holding his coffee level, Leroy hurls the Mercedes screeching backwards and out of the parking lot to the safety of the highway.

I didn’t look back, but I doubt that the burly biker was anywhere behind us. He probably hadn’t even noticed us leave the store.

Leroy almost killed us multiple times as he smoked and drove and talked away. When we got to Baker I convinced Leroy to get off the freeway so we could eat at Bun Boy. I had great memories of eating there as a child. Unfortunately Bun Boy was now Bob’s Big Boy, though it still looked exactly the same from the outside. It was like Bob’s Big Boy had just bought the place and moved in without changing anything but the sign. The same faded red booths were there crowded with over-sized travelers of route 15. They’d taken out the Bun Boy relics on the walls and put up their own, but they were very similar and could have fooled you at a glance into thinking they were still the same hokey mirrors and plaques and trophies that Bun Boy had had there for many years. I wasn’t sure if it really had happened, if this really wasn’t Bun Boy after all. I kept getting confused and thinking that maybe I’d been wrong all along, that this really had never been a Bun Boy. That it had always been a Bob’s Big Boy. Or maybe we were just in the wrong place. We’d gotten off at the wrong exit. But how the hell was that possible? Everything else was exactly the same as I remembered it. The World’s Largest Thermometer was right outside reading 104°. And the inside of the place was just the way it had always been in my mind. I started to get dizzy and followed my companions to a booth right in the midst of screaming vacationing families. I grabbed my head and pulled the menu close.

I’ve never cared for Bob’s Big Boy. When I was a small child my father had made my brothers and I dine-and-dash the one in our hometown after a horrible meal of cold meatloaf and solidified, salty mashed potatoes. At least that’s the way I remember it. Ever since then I’ve had occasional nightmares where that damn statue of the cherubic, Fatty-Arbuckle-like Bob in his red suspenders is chasing me around with a meat cleaver. I also try to leave an extra buck or two as a tip whenever I dine out as some kind of compensation or penance for my father’s malfeasance, and maybe some awful childish guilt over the whole contretemps of the thing. So I was none to thrilled to find myself sitting there, watching all these families acting like buffoons, feeding their kids this chicken-shit food, arguing and dribbling diet coke on their shirts, and making absolute asses of themselves in front of their spoiled, bratty, no-good kids. When the waiter came I got confused and ordered a salad.

“You fucked up.” Leroy was staring at me in red-eyed wonder.

“I can’t stomach anything right now. A salad sounds cool and refreshing. It’s what I want.”

“They can’t get fresh lettuce out here in the middle of the fucking desert. You think they grow tomatoes and carrots out here? You, my friend, are going to get a mealy, wilted, lukewarm dish of salted crap.”

I didn’t say anything more. There was no need. I drank my tap water and watched the families not get along all around us. There was one miserable table of nuclear Americans in particular who were really making me want to drive my sharper utensils into my eyes. They were sitting at a long table in the middle of the room. The father was yelling at the miserable kids to keep quiet, and the kids kept spitting their food all over the place and making a mess and whining and dropping their forks and spoons and spilling their milk and generally causing the father much distress. The mother would try to help them by babying them, and the Father would tell her to, “Stop mollycoddling them!” and push her hands away from where she was trying to help one of the sniveling little bastards hold his fork correctly. It was an embarrassing and highly revolting scene. I wondered if this was what my family would’ve looked like all those years ago, back when this place really was Bun Boy and I was just another snot-nosed kid sitting at a table crying and holding his fork like an inmate of an insane asylum. It didn’t make me feel good to watch these people. These drab useless things who did their worshipping at Wal-Mart and drove giant gas-guzzling machines off into the white and cozy confines of plastic suburban blandness. These were not my kind of people. I started to hate families in all of their incarnations. All these tubby people wrapped up in the rapid-fire, American-way, consumerism-of-the-moment so tightly that they didn’t even know or chance to dream that a world just might happen to exist outside of their tiny, simple minds and ways of being and buying, if there really were a difference between those two forms of existing for them. I was no different. Maybe that was what was making me so angry. I just hated in them what I hated in myself. I was just using them as an excuse to not correct what was wrong with me, or some bullshit like that. Anyway, I was way too tired to contemplate such things. My salad came and it was lukewarm and wilted. The tomatoes were almost rotten and the cucumber slices were like rubber. I poured on a bunch of Thousand Island dressing and scooped it all up into my mouth.

The last I saw of Bob’s Big Boy was the bathroom. Chet had just come out of there looking amazed and muttering something like, “I can’t believe what I just saw in there. I can’t begin to explain it…” and went mumbling on and racing out of the place. So I went in to take a piss and see what the hell he was going on about.

The bathroom was very small, two urinals and two stalls right next to each other, one a bit larger because it was a designated handicap stall, and a kind of half-sink to wash your hands in right next to one of the urinals. It was very hot and muggy in there, like a steam room, and there wasn’t much room to negotiate the space. One of the urinals had a white plastic garbage bag over it. A handwritten sign duct-taped to the bag read, “Out Of Orders,” in the scrawling cat-scratch of a four-year-old. There was a man with jet-black hair, slicked back with what seemed like a whole jar of pomade or oily shellac-type substance, who was working on fixing the other urinal, which I assumed was also, “Out Of Orders” for the time being. He was wearing blue overalls and sweat was pouring off of him. His face was covered in it. His mustache matched his hair color and it was long and drooping and wet with sweat too. He had a wrench in one hand and was trying to pry apart some contraption that must have been all gummed-up or something, and he was having a really rough time of it. He kept grunting and closing his eyes as he pulled at the wrench trying to turn whatever rusted thing he was trying to unscrew. I couldn’t piss in the trash-bag covered urinal, and I obviously couldn’t use the one the black-haired, sweaty, mustachioed man was working on, so I tried to push open the stall door. I had to walk really close to the urinal mechanic to do so, as there was not even six inches of space between him and the stall. Just as I pushed open the un-locked stall door this voice said, “Somebody’s in here.” I looked and saw work boots and dropped pants down there, but it didn’t register. I was very uncomfortable and nervous, as the sweaty man was very close to me and I really didn’t know what the hell to do. So I pushed open the door harder this time. It knocked against the guy’s knees really hard. He said in a very low voice, as I tried to push my way in the stall, “Somebody’s in here,” and then proceeded to make an obscene grunting noise and I heard a splash of water like a medium-sized rat doing a cannonball. It was very hot in there. I was starting to sweat a great deal. I turned around and almost knocked right into the guy wrenching at the urinal, who was sweating more than anybody I’d ever seen in my life. The back of his powder blue overalls was drenched. Somehow I regained my composure and pushed open the handicap stall door. Luckily nobody was in that one. We were all so close together in there, and it was so hot and humid, I felt like I was pissing in a closet with these two guys right on top of me. It started to smell really awful. I don’t know how the greaser fixing the urinal wasn’t suffocating in the stench, but he kept working away at the thing with his wrench. As I held my breath and tried to piss as fast as possible, I looked back and noticed that my stall door hadn’t closed, and I couldn’t reach it from where I was standing to shut it, and the sweaty greaser was right there smiling up at the roof and tugging like mad on his wrench, just completely covered in sweat. Looking away quickly I pushed out my piss as fast as I could and closed my eyes. The guy shitting in the stall next to me was making all kinds of noise and the smell was starting to make me queasy. I wanted to shout out, “How about a little courtesy flush there buddy,” but I didn’t. There was no time. After I finished I flushed with my foot and got out quick, not even stopping at the tiny sink to wash my hands. I looked back at that black-haired, sweat-soaked urinal repairman one last time just before the bathroom door closed. He was still tugging away with his wrench. Some kid came up to the door and I warned him, “Don’t go in there. It’s not good.” The kid looked real confused and went in anyway. I ran out to the Mercedes laughing uncontrollably.

CHAPTER 28

2009-01-22T19:08:00.000-08:00

Leroy drove the entire way home, white-knuckled and raving, swerving at absurd speeds all over the road, the white dots between lanes sometimes jarring the car for almost a whole minute before Leroy righted the wayward bulk of the Mercedes back into our own lane. Instead of heading back to the 5, sadly missing a chance to go through Wasco again, we took highway 99 home, all the way up through the Central Valley, California’s backyard. Not prime real estate country, but there were many burned out old signs along the road that were nice to look at. Chet was in the back seat, mostly sleeping or making obscene non-sequiturs as we headed intrepidly to an unmarked grave. Leroy rambled on telling various wanton tales from his sordid tippling past. His eyes didn’t stay on the road as much as they should have, but the stories kept me entertained as I sat in the passenger’s seat rubbing my red eyes and watching the telephone wires race each other.

“There was this girl I knew in Oakland. She was a big girl, and had a nasty temper too. She lived above this bar I used to go to all the time. I went through this period there when I’d just go wandering out alone all night. I wasn’t working and I was doing some painting, but mostly I was just sitting around in my boxers on the couch all day like some guy in a Raymond Carver story. So I’d go out at night and just get blasted. I’d start in on the whiskey at some point and pretty soon it’d be last call and I’d be shit-faced with nowhere to go. And all the bar tenders knew me. They’d let me slide sometimes, call me a cab or find me a place to go to, maybe just a corner or a closet somewhere to sleep it off. I wasn’t too picky. But like I said, there was this chubby girl who lived above this place, and she’d come down and drink with me sometimes. And I remember this one night she offered to let me come up to her place after the bar closed, and I was like, well, um, I’m not sure, you know? But then she tells me she’s got some pot to smoke, so I’m like, um, yeah, sure, I can do that. So we go up to her place and we smoke some weed, and then she starts getting all physical with me. And she’s a very large woman, which I never really thought about much until this point. I mean she’s like Nell Carter big. So she’s trying to climb on top of me, and, man, I’m like really getting scared at this point that I’m like going to suffocate or something. My only chance is to slide out from under her and get up on top, you know. I mean, this girl did smoke me out. I owed her something. I don’t know. I’m not too clear on all the details of that first encounter, but I was like, oh well, okay, let’s have a go at it, you know? And so we did. It wasn’t too memorable or anything. I remember really working away at her, really having a time of it, you know? And then it was over and we slept and I went home in the morning. So this other time, and now I’m in real dire straits, not much money, no place to go home to, and next thing I know I’m drunk and yep, it’s two in the morning and they’re kicking me out of the bar, and I’m getting all pissed off and kind of raising some hell in there. It was like a Tuesday night or something and nobody else was in the bar expect me. But I didn’t want to go, seeing as I had no place to go home to. My roommates had just kicked me out and all my stuff, or what was left of it after my many trips to the pawnshop, was out in the front yard getting soaked by sprinklers. I was in bad shape. I’d just been wandering around all day drinking Thunderbird out of a paper bag like some old wino or something. So I get kicked out of the bar, and I’m screaming and telling them all to go fuck themselves and all that, stomping around and pulling up flowers out of the tree wells and what not. And finally I try to get in a cab, but realize that I’ve got no money and the guy takes off without me. I don’t know where I was going to go anyway. So I’m standing there stranded, really drunk, and I just sit down on the curb and put my head in my hands. Then I hear this girl’s voice yelling down to me. It’s the portly bird who lives above the bar and she is calling down to me. I start screaming at her to shut the fuck up and leave me the fuck alone and to go back inside and bake some fucking cookies or something. But she keeps telling me to come on up, and finally I’m like, okay, what the fuck, it’s my only option left. So I suck it up and go on up there. And I ask her if she has any pot and she smokes me out again, and then, yep, it’s fish and whale time again. But I got a place to stay for the night.”

We stopped at a gas station in the middle of nowhere and Chet took out his pocketknife lighter and used it to light a cigarette. Afterwards he started waving it around, pretending he was cutting up the biker from State Line with it. It was very entertaining until the guy behind the counter came out and told us to shove off and get the hell away from his property or he was going to call the cops. The blade flashed in the sun as Chet put the thing away and we all jumped in the car and drove off.
Leroy continued with his stories, becoming downright prolix at times, spinning his rococo yarns like he was the damn reincarnation of Scheherazade or something.

“I never finished telling you about this girl Erilyn. She was very young and small, kind of bird-like, mousey I guess you’d say. We had sex a few times a week for a couple months, and you know, I thought that was that. But that was most certainly not that for her. She went nuts. Se kept coming over to my place, you know, showing up unannounced at like 3 in the morning or something, and I’d have to let her in. She always had some excuse like she was scared to walk around in the Mission at night. It was such bullshit. She lived on fucking Hyde and Leavenworth in the Tenderloin. Anyway, so she’s just not getting the message that I really don’t want her around anymore. She keeps calling me all the time, at all hours, and I just can’t get her to understand that there is really nothing between us. It’s just sex, you know? So finally one night I tell her. I just say, ‘I can’t do this right now. I’m going through a really rough time in my life and I just can’t have this kind of a serious relationship or whatever,’ and I tell her that she needs to stop calling me and to get out of my life and all that. Well, at abut ten in the morning one day I’m awoken out of a deep slumber by this loud thumping sound outside my window. I’m thinking, fuck, did somebody just crash their car into my house? What the fuck? I look out my window and I see her out there throwing a fucking brick at my house. It hits right by my window, and I don’t want to pay for a fucking broken window, and so I go outside, and I’m in my underwear still, and there she is throwing a fucking brick at my house. As soon as I get outside she picks the brick up and throws it at me. Now I don’t know if I dodged it like fucking Remo Williams, or maybe it just bounced off me because it was such a soft toss from this dainty little lady. I’m not sure. But anyway, she comes after me and starts kicking me, and she fucking punches me in the face. I’d just been woken out of a dead sleep, and I’m still all groggy, and I’m standing there in my goddamn underwear, and I see this car start to crawl by real slow and I’m just like, fuck, I’ve got to get this girl in off of the street, you know? So I throw her into my house and she dashes up the stairs, and I’m chasing after her, but she’s really fucking quick. I get up to the kitchen and she’s throwing my toaster across the room, and she’s screaming and pulling open all of the drawers and throwing utensils all over the place. Finally I grab her and start really screaming at her, you know, telling her to stop acting like a crazy person and to shut the fuck up, and I’m screaming so loud I swear I start to lose my voice. And she’s just going ape shit and is trying to punch at me. I got so fucking pissed off. I mean, come on, we hadn’t even really been dating. And she’s acting like this? She was just beyond any kind of reasoning. I asked her why she was doing this, and she just said, very calmly, ‘Revenge.’ What the fuck? Revenge? It wasn’t like we’d been married and I’d slept with her best friend or something. We’d hardly even spent much time together at all. She was like twenty years old and wanted to be a fashion designer in New York. That’s all I knew about her, and it was all trivial bullshit as far as I was concerned. So I pick her up off the ground, I’m really fucking angry at this point. I mean, she’s making a fucking mess of my place, being ridiculously loud, and it’s like 10:30 in the am. And I’m holding her there by the shoulders, and she’s like spitting at me and stuff, and I’m like, ‘Lady, you need to calm down.’ And she spits in my fucking face! So I take her and just fucking throw her across the room. It was like she was a little doll. I had to do it. There was no other way. The whole thing was insane. Eventually she calms down enough to start crying, and then she tells me to call her a cab. So I call her a cab and she goes on back to where she came from I guess. I don’t know. I haven’t heard from her since.”

I heard Chet say, “We almost just died.” I looked out my window. The shining metal surface of a tank truck was way closer to my window than it should have been. It veered away in a quick blur as Leroy jerked us back away from it. I watched as the giant silver cylinder moved away and fell behind us in the side mirror. A brush with death. Now our trip was complete. Everyone remained calm as we drove on, as if nothing had happened. Leaning my head back against my seat, I started counting the telephone polls going by. The clouds were forming in strips like ripped-up gauze pads and drifting shards of tails of things that looked like curlicues shifting shapes into ampersands and epaulettes of some unknown war, in some unknowable future, from which I’d forever be hiding, absconding in some kind of bored abeyance, a ridiculous inanition that would hold me a happy and content prisoner for however long I allowed it to, as I moped about in a tiny cell of lassitude, hibernating, chained and holding the key to my own chains, sheltered from the world of real events and things that happened.

I sank into the dank and sour leather of the seat, closing my eyes for a few minutes at a time only to have to reopen them again because they were stinging or the car was jerking around or Leroy was saying, "Holy shit! Look at that!" And I'd open up my eyes and look around outside, and there would be some nefarious or disharmonious imbalance in the scenery, a few letters still lit up on a mostly-dead neon sign scurrilously spelling out just, "HO," instead of, "HOTEL," or a bird carcass smashed up against a billboard, or the shredded remains of a movie screen at what was left of a Drive-In movie theatre—a silent windswept graveyard marked by barren wooden poles stripped of their speakers. Everything was just the long forgotten and slowly rotting remains of yesterday not yet replaced by the tidy, compact, expedient world of today, a lost world where time slowed down and became lazy enough to not let beauty just whistle by in the wind. This place was moving to its own eternal rhythms, keeping time to a beat that had sadly stopped pulsating a generation or so before, crawling along at its own pace and in its own world of katydids and night skies thick with stars; of old, gutted, rust-caked, husks of ancient cars with weed-choked engines set out in the middle of cornfields or rotting on the cracked slabs of cement in the remains of a parking lot; a world now ruled by the calculating and uncaring addiction of methamphetamine and low wages—another slit from a razor on the pock-marked and brutally scarred face of just-getting-by. Times were tough for the central valley.

We didn’t stop anywhere off the 99. Not even when I saw a bullet-ridden wooden sign reading, “Welcome to Chowchilla!” I remembered seeing some made-for-TV movie about the place when I was younger. Something about a bus driver being kidnapped or something. The sign said 11,127 people lived there. I didn’t believe it. Probably more like 127 people. That was about right.

We just kept driving, speeding by with the radio blasting, looking out at this umbrageous, subfusc, forlorn world so different from the purposeless insularity of the Ritzy and glamorous and expendably grand one we’d just left. Disease was tearing them both a part. In one it was a disease that was constantly feeding on itself, digesting its own substance and form as fast as it could just to regurgitate it and eat it all over again. A self sustaining death that never died, yet never really lived either, never went fallow or grew old or faded out, but also never had any type of meaningful or real existence other than the fact of its own consistent and speedy demise. But, in this other world, this place of ancient things slowly falling out of favor and going to pot in the shade of poplar trees, there was another more benign and slow-working disease, one that was just as deadly, yet one that happened in the natural course of human events, things with real meanings and consequences. And I was seeing its lasting imprints and indefatigable scars on the scenery. Something about it made me sad, and I decided to turn up the radio and not look outside so much anymore.

CHAPTER 29

2009-01-22T19:05:00.001-08:00

We got home after dark. I was lying in my bed that night trying to sleep, though I was too tired to sleep at that point. I kept screaming at myself, really making a racket.

“Who the fuck are you talking to?” I asked myself finally.

“You,” I responded. “Who else?”

I shouted back angrily, “Stop talking to me!” Then, “I’m trying to get a little sleep here.”

That’s when the phone rang. For some reason I picked it up. It was Leroy.

“Hey. How’re’ya doing?” He sang out.

“Wonderful.” I could hear a lot of noise on the other end. He wasn’t at home.

“So…I’m sitting here having a few beers at The Summer Palace. Some band’s supposed to play. I don’t know. Wanna come over and join me?” He was screaming over the ambient roaring of the place. I couldn’t hear him that well.

“Sorry Leroy. It’s too loud. I can’t hear a damn thing you’re saying.” I lied. “Go outside or something and call me back.” I hung up.

The phone rang a few more times but I didn’t answer it. I just lay there trying not to move. It wasn’t that hard of a thing to do.

Then I got up and went into the kitchen, grabbed a beer out of the fridge, and sat at my desk feverishly scribbling all of this down on hundreds of napkins. Now I’ve run out of napkins. Finally, I can sleep.