Vegas 98

-Vegas 98-

a first-time over-21 view, with cranky cynicism to boot

In celebration of a multiple madness of birthday fabulosity, Dead Baby took the group of a dirty dozen down to Vegas for gambling, gawking, and the inevitable being gawked at. Didn't wear colors, sadly and safely enough. Here we looked for sincerity from those who smiled expecting to get paid, and found all the smiles on the dealers and cocktail girls.

There was an awesome array of piles of steel, concrete, stucco, and palm. Steel was assembled into immensely repetetive boxes, then the concrete "impressively" overdone to cover it. Some of the sissier casinos have sculptures of cast concrete mocking that what was once marble. Just when you've thought you knew what concrete was, it turns out to be stucco. The veneer wears extremely thin. Metal sculpture is rare, and goes mostly unnoticed. There are big tanks full of tiny fish, literally and figuratively. There is one of a very few white tigers who stalks about his big white cage, and I wonder where he shits. Palm trees grow anywhere you feed them water. Rotting tin assemblages accentuate the sleaze.

Very few have dreadlocks. Very few have brightly colored hair. There are too myriad sources; constantly repeating audio advertisement, 100-foot contrast-enhanced television screens, and flourescent lighting for the normal visitor to notice anyone else. Most are attracted more to the entrancing sound of the nickel slots, what with their worse than midi music bass-tone song, the quarter slots to rub monkeys and pass bananas, and the dollar slots to drop with the most violent clinks money for your own personal giant overblown whatever. An excessively large mix of the tired with a broken dream.

This is Viki. An insistent gentleman forced her card on me.

Apparently for abouddahunnerd dollars girls will come to your room and dance naked. Apparently. Guides to such entertainment litter the streets in the windier sections of the strip. Many of the people who actually ride bicycles (besides the cops--full suspensions!--but ne'er more than say, 5-wide) carry saddlebaskets of such paperwork. It would be incredibly sweet to roll a chopper, unladen but for the wind in our hair. As a pack, oh boy. We would most likely be pasted en masse, but then you never know. Your life, however, seems a large thing to gamble with. In such a smoothly concrete-covered land it's upsetting that so few two-wheel.

There was very little to no eye contact, unless you were pushing money around, then it became at times excessive. If one-directional eye contact is possible it happens most in Vegas, going in the same way as your money. No longer is the vision in your eyes, there is an armada of little cameras. They steal your vision and make the image graven, as the carpets steal the stink of your armpits. Out of your pockets, onto the big, big pile, through the narrow lucite-guarded shiny hole. A strange world one where you pay to be watched.

When excessively drunken, and travelling pack-like pretty, at the wee hours of the chilly mornings, we were treated to excessive increases of suspiscion surpassing airport security 10-fold. Security in uniform, even the rent-a-coppiest, pack heat. Others wear red blazers and follow you around too much, and just might be packing heat. Bob was it? Yes, Bob.

I swear the floor shining machines have the same song as the nickel slots. And why does the water taste that way?

Assembly of the group for departure was haphazard, yet sucessful. One of our party was replaced by an imposter who looked nothing like him, who we almost forgot to take to the airport. He dutifully packed in a few hours notice and got carted to the pre-flight feasting. Rain was pelting down in massive drops.

Our Road Captain, living closest to the airport, hosted a butter-soaked crab boil and last-minute drunkification spot. Tom ran out to his ship in the sound and supplied an astounding quantity of Alaskan King Crab that he brought straight from Alaska. Mmmmm. Kat and Kelly piled us into their rigs and drove our drunken butts to SeaTac.

We stayed at the Stratosphere Hotel/Casino, on one end of the huge money-trap that is the strip. The roller-coaster on the roof was broken, so our fearless Bishop chose instead to ride the one at New York, New York. He reports that while not 900 feet in the air, that strapped in hanging by a metal pipe bippee a-dangling is satisfyingly terror-inducing at an only two- or three-hundred foot height. We all missed the show at the Strat, "Viva Las Vegas," although they probably didn't know the Dead Kennedys' version of the words. We all got to know those words quite well, thanks to cassette players at DJ's, in Kelly's car, and on the van from the Vegas airport to the hotel.

Looks a lot like our home-town Space Needle.

It was noticed that the arrows on the signs directing you inside of any casino will take you for most of a lap through the whole place before you can find your elevator. Crafty those Vegasians.

A merry swashbuckling time was had at Treasure Island, where a buncha us bet on Monday Night Football, sat in comfy chairs, and enjoyed prompt drink service for watching TV. We carried on loudly. We found the pirate theme appealingly appropriate to our group. The pirates who normally jump around on the ships in the moat outside were away for our stay, rumored to be in Penzance.

At Caesar's Palace we made quite a few Monty Python-esque references until the homo-eroticism became overwhelming. That funky cloud-covered ceiling is really cool though, I'll tell you that. It's all melty and wavy and changy, trippy.

Piles of greasy bacon, fatty lox, stale bagelettes, and desert grown red "delicious" apples add to the standard eggs, milk, and toast at the breakfast buffet. For $3.78 you could congeal the alcohol content of your stomach, sit on your ass away from the gambling, and just wind down. Well, except that all of the soft drinks contain caffiene in Las Vegas, 7-Up has been replaced by Storm, "lemon-lime soda with caffiene." It appears as though the Sahara has no website.

No one took in a show full of dancing girls. To my knowledge no one was married.