Loathing and Loathing in Vegas (days 2 & 3)

(Part 1 is here)

Day 2

I don't know how many of you have experienced a "hang-over," but let me assure you, it is not pleasant. The hangover I had on Saturday was…fairly epic. The three of us agreed that we should all go out and get breakfast of some kind…and about thirty paces from our room, we regretted the decision to leave the safe, darkened confines of our hotel room at the Tropicana.

So, and hour later, bellies filled with cheap Vegas food, we were all back in the room… napping fitfully. Koby and Chad wanted to lay some money on the UFC fight, and with much hemming and hawing (a nasty habit I picked up from somewhere), I decided that, hangover be damned, I was going go with them.

Dripping with malaise, we shuffled past the blinking lights, the musical chirping of the slot machines, and the afternoon-drunken masses. After visiting two hotel Sports Books, Koby and Chad finally found the "good odds," and they laid their money down on some very promising underdogs. Not being up to date since Dan Severn applied a textbook keylock to Dave Beneteau to win UFC 5 (they're up to 86 now) I was in no position to risk my depleted cash funds. But, after their surefire bets were laid, we moped over to the MGM Grand. Koby and Chad thought that "breathing oxygen" and getting their shoulders hooked up to an electrical circuit might help them get their heads correct. I thought that losing more money at blackjack would help me. Turns out the oxygen would have been cheaper, and more helpful. Oops.

We met up again, and sat on a bench, and waited for an hour in a glum, hung-over near-silence until the fight started.

The view from our hang-over hang out.

Finally, it was time for them to depart, leaving me to my own devices. So…taking full advantage of my newfound freedom, in a city full of sin and depravity, I went back to the room, and the full scope of the shittiness of my situation started to affect me. After hrrming and hmming in my room (because hemming is stupid), I decided…dammit…I was going to find myself a poker tournament. And I did just that…over at the Planet Hollywood Casino.


Me...having a shit-load of fun in Vegas.

Now, I just wrote a long, eight-paragraph long description of my game…but I decided that probably only about two people (looking at you Don and Matt) could really appreciate it…so I deleted it. C'est la vie. Anyhow, the long and the short is, from a tournament of 69 people, I finished 9^th place. Now, in the tournament I was in, only the top 8 players got money (8^th gets $123, 1^st gets $945), which meant that I was the last guy to get eliminated without winning any cash. It's called being on "The Bubble," and it really, really, really sucks to be knocked out when you're on "The Bubble." But luckily one of the players there had asked everyone seated at the final table to throw in $10 to "pay the bubble" when the final table was pared down to 9. Since that player was me, I left with a cool $90 (after my $60 buy-in). As one of the players put it, "Hey, it's better than a sharp poke in the eye with a stick." Yes, yes it was.

After that, I met up with Koby and Chad (whose surefire underdog bets had somehow, amazingly, failed to pay off), and we choked down a late dinner at an awful steak house. We walked around a little bit more, not really feeling like drinking or gambling...but too ashamed to admit defeat and call it a night. We wound up at the Hooters Casino (simply because it's next door to the Tropicana). We walked sullenly through the place (which looked suspiciously like any other casino in Vegas…except one of the blackjack dealers was wearing the Hooters outfit – the rest were sporting the standard Vegas dealer vest-and-black-pants combo), and wound up moping about in the bar…choking down a couple of Miller Lights and playing one of those bar-side video poker machines before retreating to the safe, darkened confines of our room at the Tropicana.

Video Poker. Pwned.

Day 3

So my amazing wife (don't know if you've seen her, but she's gorgeous too) had booked a flight home for me the previous day, and I was scheduled to leave early Sunday morning. I'd set my alarm for 9:00 AM, but right around 8:40 AM she called me…I'm assuming to make sure I didn't miss my flight. She apologized for waking me, and asked me how much I was expecting to get paid from my Sprite commercial. "Five hundred dollars…but…after the agent commission, probably about four hundred. Why's that?"

"The check came today."

"Yeah?"

"Yep. It's for two thousand sixty-seven dollars."

Stunned pause.

"Seriously?"

So…that was that. Of course Vegas wasn't going to pay me off – they were the bastards who got me into this mess. Nope, it was up to the good folks of Los Angeles to come through in the clutch, and pay for my automobile repair. Remarkable.

I figured I was on a roll…so after flying down to Phoenix for my connecting flight, the gentleman at the desk informed the group that they were over-booked on the flight, and asked for volunteers to give up their seats for a free flight anywhere in the US. Well…I was in no hurry, and karma demanded that I be paid for my misfortune, so I volunteered. Sure, I had to wait a long-ass time for my next flight, but the price was right.

Finally, after waiting around the awful Phoenix airport for an extra 5 hours, I made it home where my very attractive wife picked me up at the Burbank airport. Not exactly the return that I had planned, but an admittedly still-pleasant one.

Epilogue

Things didn't go too smoothly after that. The repair shop called on Tuesday, asking what time I needed the car. I told them that I was back home, and that I wouldn't be returning until Friday to get the car. "Good," they said, "The part will probably be arriving on Wednesday, so your car should be ready on Thursday."

Only, it wasn't. They called on Wednesday, and told me the car wouldn't be ready until the following Monday. At the earliest. I realized, too late, that I gave them an inch, and they took 6 days. Fine. Whatever. Luckily for me, there was no cost for me to reschedule my flight through United Airlines (a fine, fine corporation), so I did so.

Early Monday morning, a little queasy from drinking too much at Erika's birthday party the night before (family: I promise you I haven't become some creepy drunk since my move to L.A...this was just an unusually high time for booze), I boarded a United Airlines flight, made a connection in San Francisco, and cruised back into the evil city of depravity.

I got $100 out of the airport cash machine, and caught a cab across town driven by a man who (thankfully) spoke not a word the whole drive over. He pulled into the repair shop, and I saw that my car -- instead of being "fully repaired" was still sitting in the garage...being worked on. This...scared me. But it wasn't so bad -- they just needed to test-drive the car, the new transmission had already been dropped in.

The car was tested...and passed. I paid the man. Got in my car, and headed for the gas station down the street to fill up for what would (hopefully) be an uneventful trip back to Los Angeles.

As I was pulling in, I saw a Charles Manson look-a-like rummaging through a dumpster at one corner of the station. It was about 100 degrees that day, and he was wearing a t-shirt and jeans -- his presence made me a little nervous (as happens to me around most homeless people), but I pushed that aside and continued to the pump.

Now, I still had $40 in my wallet, so I decided to prepay with the entire $40 (reminiscing, as everyone does, on how I used to be able to fill up my tank for $10). After I'd prepaid the attendant, I went back to my car and started pumping...and I looked up and noticed that Mr. Manson was making his way over to my car. Dammit. I pretended to make a phone call so I wouldn't have to brush off a money request -- and to his credit, he didn't interrupt my pretend phone call, he just sat on the curb next to my pump. After I finished pumping gas -- still feigning a phone conversation -- I realized that the total was $32.00, and I would have to go inside to get change. Once I'd gotten my money from the attendant, I looked out and saw that, unfortunately, Charlie was still sitting right next to my car. There were plenty of other cars filling up at the other pumps around the station, but he'd staked out my crappy 1990 Prizm as a sure-fire money-maker. Dammit.

I headed out in the blistering heat, back to my ride, and suddenly got really mad at myself: "Listen up, asshole...what's wrong with you? Yes, this was the most trying time I'd had in a long time, but you're healthy...you've got good friends, a radical family, a great wife, a place to live, a semi-steady job, and a functional automobile. The guy sitting out by my car in the blazing heat just finished looking for lunch in a gas station dumpster. At no point was he rude or aggressive to you; he just looked exhausted and dirty, and as bad as your situation is...his was...well...you know."

I'm sure it wasn't that coherent...but you get the idea.

Anyways, I walked up to him, and before he even noticed I'd returned to my car I gave him all of my change. He was young -- probably about my age, if not a few years older. And when I handed him that eight bucks, he looked at me with a strange, confused look. For an instant I thought I was offending him by giving him the money -- maybe he wasn't actually homeless, he just wanted directions or something. But then his face lit up and he said:

"Hey, you knew I was going to ask, didn't you?"

"Don't worry about it. Take care."

"Thanks, man. Thanks."

Then I got in my car, turned south onto North Rancho Drive, and did the only logical thing I could think of -- cried my stinking eyes out. I don't really know why, I guess it just sorta' snuck up on me. It's not like I'm a terribly charitable dude who gets viscerally affected by seeing poverty and the like (I'd only given money to a homeless person one other time) so I'm pretty sure I wasn't crying because of Charlie's situation.

Part of me wanted to believe that I was crying because of the horrible week that I'd endured...but, again, as bad as it was, it wasn't really that bad. I still have plenty of money saved up, and I'm very hire-able should I decide to rejoin the work force at some point.

Maybe I'd just been penning up a lot of bad feelings, and I was a little pissed off that the world had swooped in and relieved me of a couple thousand dollars. So to do something that made me feel genuinely good inside opened a flood gate somewhere, filled with tears. But really, it was only eight bucks...and I knew that it wasn't really going to change the guy's life in any appreciable way...

Then again, maybe I was just crying because I needed to cry. I get like that occasionally. I don't like crying when other people are around, and even now I'm massively uncomfortable blogging about it...but it happened. And damned if I didn't feel a lot better about things once my sissy emotions started pouring down my cheeks.

Luckily, I managed to control myself by the time I merged onto Interstate 15 southbound. The ride back home was uneventful -- I would cringe at every little shudder, gear shift, or shimmy that the car made, but nothing untoward occurred. I pulled up to the apartment around 8:00 PM -- just in time for some "So You Think You Can Dance," and a Coke Zero.