blurring_the_edges_47_vegas_baby birdmad (note, I'll finish chapter 46 later, i think i need to pick this up and and trudge on through these last seven or eight chapters or so that i have left to play out, Now i just have to backtrack a tiny bit, so bear with please) 030928 ... confused old bird Do i have a chapter 46 or did i lose even more of this excuse for a mind than i realize? shit... 030928 ... pobodys nerfect ~you don't have a chapter 46 ~you,a close family member/friend,or a trained professional should really be the only ones who should judge whether or not you lost your mind ~two words: ginko biloba ;) 030928 ... old weird bird [ahh, found it it's a little bit isolated from the other chapters but i found it. "Nocturnes" ....anyway, here we go...] 030928 ... pobodys nerfect Whoops..guess I picked a good name for myself. I'll shut up now. *quietly sneaks away to get herself some ginko biloba* 030928 ... birdmad A slightly stormy July gives way to a very stormy August and Teri gets another wild hair to do some impulse traveling. On a goof, she somehow managed to win a free turnaround trip to Vegas and wants you to go with her. For you there is no debate, it's another trip with Teri, it's Vegas and it gets you out of the house again. What goes on to happen next is a series of events that border on low, surreal comedy. When Friday evening comes and you go to meet the charter bus that runs the turnarounds, you realize that you two are the youngest people in a group of about three dozen except for the driver and the lady with the tour company - who seems nice and whom you and Teri both agree is awfully cute, but comes across as unnaturally perky. Most of the other trippers are married couples in their mid to late forties and a few older couples and singles. You tolerate one member of the couple in the driver's side row right in front of you by the back, a middle-aged redneck who reminds you of the steroype wing-nut characters that the guy who played Mr Futterman in the movie "Gremlins" plays, only without the charming ditziness of the actor's portrayals. You listen to him make repeated homophobic remarks while telling bad jokes to other people who just either roll their eyes or try to ignore him as politely as possible. He assumes that since you are sitting behind him you and Teri must want to hear him too, so he turns around and starts in and you can see in his eyes that he has some issue with someone as dark as you sitting cozily with someone as comparatively pale as Teri and you can hear in his tone he wants to make something of it, but instead he just cracks a few more of his annoying jokes and commentary that he uses to justify the jokes. Yeah, this one's a real churchgoer. "Teri, can I smack him upside the head?" you whisper playfully into her ear after he turns back to chatting loudly with his wife "Oh hush," she whspers back, squeezing your hand, "don't make the six hours we're going to spend on this bus with him any worse than it has to be, ignore him" A little less than an hour later, a few more of his loud remarks changes her mind, but by this point in the trip you are already too far out of town to head back, almost halfway to Kingman. You whip out the headphone jack-splitter on your walkman and you and Teri plug in and do your best to tune him out and nap through a portion of the trip, managing to do a good job of ignoring him all the way up to Hoover Dam where thanks to some of the lights, you can see the rather enormous catfish that live around the dam. "You know, Teri, I hear there are catfish down there that even the police deep-search divers that have to come through here sometimes are afraid of, if i could just give him a good shove, it might put a damper on the trip, but hey, we wouldn't have to hear the guy anymore" "Hmm," she says, with a wicked grin, "you're terrible, you know, I think that's why i like you so much, darlin'." At one point while the bus is stopped in the parking lot so that everyone can take a bathroom break, you see him standing by the rail having a cigarette and you make a gesture behind him that looks like a subtle shove, to the approval of Teri and the fiftysomething black couple who were also apparently getting tired of sitting in front of him, who greet your little joke with a grin from the lady and a thumbs-up from the gentleman. Walking up to them with a clove in your mouth as the break continues, you say to them "I would, you know, but i don't think he's worth the jail time i'd be looking at if I did." "That's true," the lady says, "But the satisfaction would aaaaaalmost be worth it." "Oh good," Teri says, "I was starting to feel guilty, I thought it was just the two of us that wanted to chuck him over." (more later) 030928 ... birdmad Resisting the urge to throw the redneck over the side of the dam with so many witnesses, you and Teri cozy up again in the back of the bus, playing along with the silly trivia games that Lara, the cute, obnoxiously perky tour guide has led sporadically throughout the trip. When you get into Vegas, you are given hotel vouchers and taken to a small, dark, but neatly kept little hotel just off the Strip. You and Teri check in and prowl around in search of a meal, finding a steakhouse just a block away from the hotel offering a good price without being one of those ridiculously cheap buffets. You both order a big porterhouse, yours medium rare with a side of potato wedges and a salad, hers medium well with the baked potato and a nice assortment of steamed vegetables. Dinner turns out to be quite tasty and you have a good time in the corner booth with a slightly skewed view out onto part of the MGM Grand watching people go by, high-rollers and hookers, tourists with kids, low rollers, desperate, red-eyed casino rats frantically hoping that the next coin dropped or the next card played is going to be their ticket out of the holes they have dug themselves into, looking furtively about at the big LED boards that are now almost as graphically versatile as television screens hoping for some random number to appear. You walk back to the hotel, anxious for a shower and a little nap since you are used to staying up until eight in the morning most of the time now. Teri is tired and she takes a quick shower before crashing out, leaving you awake and eager to roam about the city. Refreshed by your own shower, you change clothes into one outfit from the trio you packed for the trip, dark red silk shirt, black dress pants, eyeliner black lipstick and your black patent shoes, looking unusual but barely drawing a glance from any but the most vanilla tourists as you walk the block and a half around the MGM to hit the strip, catching the CAT down to Caesar's Palace where you stop a pretty waitress and ask for a rum and coke, eyeing her unashamedly from top to bottom, you are mostly clean-shaven and dressed to kill, save for the perfect black triangle of beard from the point of your chin. Feeling almost feline, you move about, dropping two bucks on nickel slots and another ten on video poker before managing to get ahead by about fifty bucks at a low stakes blackjack table, deciding to call it quits at a hundred dollars ahead of where you started when the auburn haired waitress brings you your sixth rum-and-coke even though you never ordered beyond the second one. The dealer tries to wheedle you into staying and the waitress flirts and you realize this is how those forlorn critters roaming the areas around the lesser casinos, the red-eyed and frantic, got started down their slope. A moment of seduction. It's not lost on you that as you have gotten further ahead, your drinks have been getting stronger as they come, but they don't realize that you are working on a full stomach and that you are even more of an expert drinker than you are a blackjack player and could knock down two more well mixed highball glasses full of rum before you were far enough off your game to really blow it. You walk back to the hotel after cashing in your chips, tipping the waitress with a $20 chip even over and above the ten or so dollars you had already tipped her and walk off, a little light headed and ready to call it a night at four in the morning. Everyone on the tour is in the same hotel and you remember hearing something about a Nine A.M trek from the little hotel up to the place where the Strip becomes North Las Vegas, the old-school portion of town where Vegas World and Binion's Horseshoe reside. Dragging yourself up and getting clean enough to roll out again, you shake off the cobwebbed feeling in your head and eat a quick breakfast of blueberry muffins and orange juice since neither you nor Teri are in the mood to cope with the stampedes around any of the breakfast buffets that are about. Listening to the tour-guide, you realize how and why there were so many "winners" when you realize that this turnaround is sponsored by a group of smaller off-strip casinos who expect you to spend some fixed amount of time in their establishments gambling away. You are, in effect, prisoners of the casinos that you will be chauffeured to for blocks of time until six in the evening when the night is then your own again. You and Teri both look at each other with a puzzled, distressed look and audibly mutter "Oh Shit!" practically in unison. Veterans of these turnaround trips, everyone else - the half that won the trip like you and the half that paid rock-bottom prices for it - looks at the two of you like a couple of rubes, with a slightly bemused smirk The day succeeds in getting weirder as you go... (more later) 030929 what's it to you? who go blather from