Craps
I decided to just cut and paste this onto the end of “craps” because it’s really the same story. I just got interrupted by . . . something before I posted the last part, and I haven’t bothered to start typing again until I hit Chicago.
I’m still rolling my tongue over my teeth trying to get the excess salt from the garish interpretation of a turkey dinner I just had at a bar-cafeteria style restaurant in Union Station Chicago. Why didn’t I go into actual Chi-town, you ask? Well, I’ve hardly slept in the past three days, not showered for the last two, I’m lugging around a fresh duffle loaded with clothes and books in addition to my Lappy-case, and I have a train to catch in, oh, a couple more hours. Also, still sick.
I just don’t feel like moving around so much.
Anyway, as previously stated, Flamethrowers make things Awesome. Solid stunt work helps, too. But what really made the experience was where we were seated. Other people wound up cheering for Ireland, Russia, Spain and other actual countries; we were in the Dragon section. On the downside, our guys didn’t spend a lot of time onstage, and (spoiler alert) they lost in the end. On the upside, our knight beat the crap out of all of the good-guy knights at once, and we got to boo almost the entire cast! Jon went so far as to devise a Dragon equivalent of the tomahawk chop, and booed with such conviction that the knight from Denmark kept giving him looks that screamed “BLOODY PEASANT!”
After that, I was introduced to the fun of video poker. I found it to be slightly less of a mechanical means of money-loss than slot machines. Then again, some of the slot machines were pretty neat. I blew five bucks on a Monty Python slot machine on principle alone, and I actually broke even playing the Dark Side of the Star Wars slot machines.
Also important, to get to the Excalibur we walked the Strip. “Opulent” and “decadent” don’t really cover it. Add in “contrived” and “eclectic” and you get a little bit closer, but you lose some of the wonder of the place. I mean, sure, it’s a monument to greed and vice, but it’s an awesome monument, and it’s to Greed and Vice!
Getting back from Excalibur, we took the bus, colorfully termed the Deuce in Vegas. It was a double-decker bus with stops, apparently, every few hundred feet. You might imagine that this would make for a boring trip, but after a pair of mythically drunk girls sloshed down into the seats adjacent to ours we were serenaded by a selection of shitty, Top 20, half-songs, as performed by one of their cell phones. Accompanied by the tuneless wails of the drunker of the two. Boredom gave way to seething fury.
My second day in Vegas began with a quick dip in the most chlorinated pool I’ve ever submerged myself in. After a shower (my second of the day) and an Irish coffee I met up with my compatriots and we proceeded to the Rio for the buffet. The half-mile buffet spanning breakfast, Mexican, salad, Chinese, desert, American, and sandwiches. I forget how much it cost. I suspect that the massive desert/alcoholic beverage I consumed may have cost me that particular neural cluster. It was worth it, in any case. Even considering that I suspect that magnificent culinary assemblage is responsible for what happened later. And when I get to what happened later, you might understand why I treat it as a big deal.
But before what happened later happened, we once again boarded the Deuce, this time bound for the rather less overwhelming area that is downtown Las Vegas. We had, I think, two main goals on that trip: to see the world’s largest natural gold nugget, and what I believe they term the Fremont Street Experience. Also, we thought maybe the tables would be cheaper on that side of town; they weren’t.
The gold nugget was shiny and dense, the way I’ve more or less come to expect my metals to be. Clearly, it was a secondary draw to get people into the Golden Nugget casino. Well it worked. When Kellie wandered off to exploit her almost unnatural talent for video poker, Jon just sort of stood near the craps tables, looking wistful and trying to figure out how one plays. I joined him for a bit, had absolutely no luck deciphering the game, and then handed sixty bucks to the…what do you call the equivalent of a dealer in a dice game, diceman? And I started playing. The. . . casino employees were relatively helpful in informing me of the basics, and Jon felt compelled (or possibly excused) to play by peer pressure.
By the time we wandered back to Freemont Street, Jon and I had already won some money and developed distinct gambling personalities, in addition to both of us deciding craps is wicked fun. I tended to put money on random off-bets as well as the safer sixes and eights, and it seems like I’ll put money on the odds line for anything. Jon, on the other hand, sticks to his sixes and eights, and only occasionally bets the field. As a result, Jon usually seemed to win more money than I did every time the dice were rolling favorably (which felt like it happened a lot). I have one important gambling trait that he lacks, though: I tend to quit when I start losing. That’s probably why my net craps losses were about a third of his.
Anyway, the Freemont Street thing is the sort of excessive venture that really only seems to make sense in Vegas. It’s a screen, sort of. It’s composed of a very large number of tiny things that emit light of varying colors, spaced evenly and relatively close together (you can see the sky through the gaps in the daylight hours) over a street for the length of a city block. After around 8 O’clock, every hour on the hour, they show… a show up there. It’s not a very profound piece of work, but then it’s Vegas. Dancing girls, games of chance, booze and food, all shown two hundred feet high. I have to admit it was pretty neat.
After that, the plan was to go to the Stratosphere. A hotel with a tower that is clearly a knock off of Seattle’s Space Needle, only the Vegas version is twice the size and has rides on top. So we walked. It was a long walk, but better than risking another cell phone concert.
One of the two reasons we (meaning, in this case, Jon and I) wanted to go to the Stratosphere was to take in a show. A seedy, low-cost show called Bite with the compelling subtitle “An Erotic Vampire Story.” I’m not really a vampire guy (I prefer werewolves, if you must know) but I do like hickeys. Sadly we were about half an hour too late to do both that and the ride on top of the tower -which would be the other reason we were there. And since Kellie was never really into the whole “Bite” thing, we went to stand in line for the Big Shot.
We were in line for about an hour if memory serves, at one point crammed into an elevator with four guys I can only describe as drunken rednecks. But, to give you a sense of what we were doing, the Stratosphere tower is approximately a thousand feet high. The ride on top of it is one of those free-fall dealies that fires you straight up a hundred foot tower, bounces you up and down vertically a couple of times, and lowers you. So, Vegas a glittering galaxy of greed at the bottom of my vision when the guy working the ride told us “you have to go on the other side; we need to balance this thing.”
I was already giggling uncontrollably from the adrenaline rush as I tucked my battered glasses into my pocket and they lowered the mechanism that would keep me from becoming a tragic story on the news in Boston the next morning. As the machine hurled me skyward I screamed a giddy challenge at the heavens, and then looked down at the shimmering expanse of Sin City below me, and laughed.
I have no idea what I thought was so funny, but I couldn’t stop laughing for fifteen minutes after we got off the ride. Jon may have been being theatrical, but he was making little sob noises when we got off. All of us agreed that it was totally worth the twenty bucks.
After that we had dinner somewhere down inside Stratosphere. I don’t recall where exactly. But I remember that I ordered the salmon. Let that be a lesson: never order fish in the desert.
By the time dinner was over, my companions and I were pretty wiped out, so we just decided to retire to our hotels. There was some disagreement on how best to proceed back. I didn’t really want to walk anymore, but they didn’t want to pay for the bus and risk another encounter with people who can’t get enough of what Clearchannel feeds them. I recall that we actually decided to go our separate ways, but I wasn’t thinking too clearly, so I wound up walking with them.
It really started to hit me as we were approaching the strip: the grim, low churn of bowels flatly rejecting something. I don’t know whether it was the salmon or the buffet, but something had initiated an inner countdown and there was nothing I could do to stop it. With horrified concentration, I managed to stave it off, twice.
It was almost enough. I made it as far as the bushes on the strip in front of Circus Circus, then broke off, stumbled for cover, and made it into the “ready” position just before the countdown hit zero.
The concern and sympathy of my Seattle-born friends was touching, but I wouldn’t let them within ten feet of me. I just felt too gross. We went our separate ways, to be reunited in a couple of days back in the Pacific Northwest.
I felt fine later, after I took a third shower and threw out my shorts.
The next morning, I consumed nothing but sunlight, bottled water, and a chocolate chip cookie (which got me started on kind of a cookie thing). I won thirty bucks playing craps, forgot to tip my…crapsman, waited a long time for the shuttle to my plane, and left.
I’m back in Boston now, having continued to write this on the train, and finally posted it several days after hitting home. I think I’ll devote a later entry just to that train ride and the characters it contained. It has been an awesome trip, but I’m glad to be home.
I’m still rolling my tongue over my teeth trying to get the excess salt from the garish interpretation of a turkey dinner I just had at a bar-cafeteria style restaurant in Union Station Chicago. Why didn’t I go into actual Chi-town, you ask? Well, I’ve hardly slept in the past three days, not showered for the last two, I’m lugging around a fresh duffle loaded with clothes and books in addition to my Lappy-case, and I have a train to catch in, oh, a couple more hours. Also, still sick.
I just don’t feel like moving around so much.
Anyway, as previously stated, Flamethrowers make things Awesome. Solid stunt work helps, too. But what really made the experience was where we were seated. Other people wound up cheering for Ireland, Russia, Spain and other actual countries; we were in the Dragon section. On the downside, our guys didn’t spend a lot of time onstage, and (spoiler alert) they lost in the end. On the upside, our knight beat the crap out of all of the good-guy knights at once, and we got to boo almost the entire cast! Jon went so far as to devise a Dragon equivalent of the tomahawk chop, and booed with such conviction that the knight from Denmark kept giving him looks that screamed “BLOODY PEASANT!”
After that, I was introduced to the fun of video poker. I found it to be slightly less of a mechanical means of money-loss than slot machines. Then again, some of the slot machines were pretty neat. I blew five bucks on a Monty Python slot machine on principle alone, and I actually broke even playing the Dark Side of the Star Wars slot machines.
Also important, to get to the Excalibur we walked the Strip. “Opulent” and “decadent” don’t really cover it. Add in “contrived” and “eclectic” and you get a little bit closer, but you lose some of the wonder of the place. I mean, sure, it’s a monument to greed and vice, but it’s an awesome monument, and it’s to Greed and Vice!
Getting back from Excalibur, we took the bus, colorfully termed the Deuce in Vegas. It was a double-decker bus with stops, apparently, every few hundred feet. You might imagine that this would make for a boring trip, but after a pair of mythically drunk girls sloshed down into the seats adjacent to ours we were serenaded by a selection of shitty, Top 20, half-songs, as performed by one of their cell phones. Accompanied by the tuneless wails of the drunker of the two. Boredom gave way to seething fury.
My second day in Vegas began with a quick dip in the most chlorinated pool I’ve ever submerged myself in. After a shower (my second of the day) and an Irish coffee I met up with my compatriots and we proceeded to the Rio for the buffet. The half-mile buffet spanning breakfast, Mexican, salad, Chinese, desert, American, and sandwiches. I forget how much it cost. I suspect that the massive desert/alcoholic beverage I consumed may have cost me that particular neural cluster. It was worth it, in any case. Even considering that I suspect that magnificent culinary assemblage is responsible for what happened later. And when I get to what happened later, you might understand why I treat it as a big deal.
But before what happened later happened, we once again boarded the Deuce, this time bound for the rather less overwhelming area that is downtown Las Vegas. We had, I think, two main goals on that trip: to see the world’s largest natural gold nugget, and what I believe they term the Fremont Street Experience. Also, we thought maybe the tables would be cheaper on that side of town; they weren’t.
The gold nugget was shiny and dense, the way I’ve more or less come to expect my metals to be. Clearly, it was a secondary draw to get people into the Golden Nugget casino. Well it worked. When Kellie wandered off to exploit her almost unnatural talent for video poker, Jon just sort of stood near the craps tables, looking wistful and trying to figure out how one plays. I joined him for a bit, had absolutely no luck deciphering the game, and then handed sixty bucks to the…what do you call the equivalent of a dealer in a dice game, diceman? And I started playing. The. . . casino employees were relatively helpful in informing me of the basics, and Jon felt compelled (or possibly excused) to play by peer pressure.
By the time we wandered back to Freemont Street, Jon and I had already won some money and developed distinct gambling personalities, in addition to both of us deciding craps is wicked fun. I tended to put money on random off-bets as well as the safer sixes and eights, and it seems like I’ll put money on the odds line for anything. Jon, on the other hand, sticks to his sixes and eights, and only occasionally bets the field. As a result, Jon usually seemed to win more money than I did every time the dice were rolling favorably (which felt like it happened a lot). I have one important gambling trait that he lacks, though: I tend to quit when I start losing. That’s probably why my net craps losses were about a third of his.
Anyway, the Freemont Street thing is the sort of excessive venture that really only seems to make sense in Vegas. It’s a screen, sort of. It’s composed of a very large number of tiny things that emit light of varying colors, spaced evenly and relatively close together (you can see the sky through the gaps in the daylight hours) over a street for the length of a city block. After around 8 O’clock, every hour on the hour, they show… a show up there. It’s not a very profound piece of work, but then it’s Vegas. Dancing girls, games of chance, booze and food, all shown two hundred feet high. I have to admit it was pretty neat.
After that, the plan was to go to the Stratosphere. A hotel with a tower that is clearly a knock off of Seattle’s Space Needle, only the Vegas version is twice the size and has rides on top. So we walked. It was a long walk, but better than risking another cell phone concert.
One of the two reasons we (meaning, in this case, Jon and I) wanted to go to the Stratosphere was to take in a show. A seedy, low-cost show called Bite with the compelling subtitle “An Erotic Vampire Story.” I’m not really a vampire guy (I prefer werewolves, if you must know) but I do like hickeys. Sadly we were about half an hour too late to do both that and the ride on top of the tower -which would be the other reason we were there. And since Kellie was never really into the whole “Bite” thing, we went to stand in line for the Big Shot.
We were in line for about an hour if memory serves, at one point crammed into an elevator with four guys I can only describe as drunken rednecks. But, to give you a sense of what we were doing, the Stratosphere tower is approximately a thousand feet high. The ride on top of it is one of those free-fall dealies that fires you straight up a hundred foot tower, bounces you up and down vertically a couple of times, and lowers you. So, Vegas a glittering galaxy of greed at the bottom of my vision when the guy working the ride told us “you have to go on the other side; we need to balance this thing.”
I was already giggling uncontrollably from the adrenaline rush as I tucked my battered glasses into my pocket and they lowered the mechanism that would keep me from becoming a tragic story on the news in Boston the next morning. As the machine hurled me skyward I screamed a giddy challenge at the heavens, and then looked down at the shimmering expanse of Sin City below me, and laughed.
I have no idea what I thought was so funny, but I couldn’t stop laughing for fifteen minutes after we got off the ride. Jon may have been being theatrical, but he was making little sob noises when we got off. All of us agreed that it was totally worth the twenty bucks.
After that we had dinner somewhere down inside Stratosphere. I don’t recall where exactly. But I remember that I ordered the salmon. Let that be a lesson: never order fish in the desert.
By the time dinner was over, my companions and I were pretty wiped out, so we just decided to retire to our hotels. There was some disagreement on how best to proceed back. I didn’t really want to walk anymore, but they didn’t want to pay for the bus and risk another encounter with people who can’t get enough of what Clearchannel feeds them. I recall that we actually decided to go our separate ways, but I wasn’t thinking too clearly, so I wound up walking with them.
It really started to hit me as we were approaching the strip: the grim, low churn of bowels flatly rejecting something. I don’t know whether it was the salmon or the buffet, but something had initiated an inner countdown and there was nothing I could do to stop it. With horrified concentration, I managed to stave it off, twice.
It was almost enough. I made it as far as the bushes on the strip in front of Circus Circus, then broke off, stumbled for cover, and made it into the “ready” position just before the countdown hit zero.
The concern and sympathy of my Seattle-born friends was touching, but I wouldn’t let them within ten feet of me. I just felt too gross. We went our separate ways, to be reunited in a couple of days back in the Pacific Northwest.
I felt fine later, after I took a third shower and threw out my shorts.
The next morning, I consumed nothing but sunlight, bottled water, and a chocolate chip cookie (which got me started on kind of a cookie thing). I won thirty bucks playing craps, forgot to tip my…crapsman, waited a long time for the shuttle to my plane, and left.
I’m back in Boston now, having continued to write this on the train, and finally posted it several days after hitting home. I think I’ll devote a later entry just to that train ride and the characters it contained. It has been an awesome trip, but I’m glad to be home.