blurring_the_edges_48_sin_city_suckerpunch birdmad To your horror, you and Teri discover that you are about to spend nearly the equivalent of a working day stuck in the some of the most banal and unglamourous parts of Vegas, and while you and Teri are here on a freebie, you discover that many of your fellow prisoners do this on a regular basis. Scarier still, they do it of their own volition, paying some ridiculous, dirt-cheap fare that includes off-The-Strip hotel accommodations. Apparently the cute tour-guide is also some sort of hall monitor, making sure that if you are not playing one of the machines, you are moving to another one or checking out the choices. You discover the secret to those ultra-cheap Turnaround trips to Vegas and Laughlin that are always appearing in the paper and mention the free hotel room. The little low-rent casinos spend the money to put people up and then obligate them to patronize their little network of facilities so that they can recoup their investment through what you gamble. The first place you go is not all that exciting, and worse, there are no card tables here just gaming machines. Slots, video poker and video blackjack. You, however, would rather take your chances with a live blackjack dealer and your acquaintance with the range of probabilites that exists within two decks of cards. Opting to minimize your potential losses, you advise Teri to follow your lead and stick to the nickel machines, as you are not encouraged by the dollar machines and the seemingly somewhat outdated movie-tie in licenses on them or by the overcrowding at the quarter machines. The plan turns out to be a good one, you spend less money in more time, and by hitting a fair number of machines, you have actually come out about twenty dollars ahead of the game between the two of you at the first stop. The next place you hit is the Polynesian themed Imperial Palace which, while off of The Strip, is actually a much nicer environment than the little dump you just spent the last three hours lingering around in. You find an open blackjack table here and start doing a little drinking. Between what you won last night and what you are working on here, you now stand to be somewhere just over a hundred and seventy five dollars up from where you started. Feeling less reserved from the drinks you had at the Blackjack table, you and Teri decide, on a really major whim to buy a pair of $20 tokens to the big multi-million dollar slot machine that sits conspicuously near the center of the casino surrounded by it's game show licensed accoutrements. Wheel of Fortune. How cutely apropos. You can tell by her sudden fit of the giggles that Teri has had a few drinks as well. You buy a trio of tokens instead of just two and drop them in, letting Teri do the honors of pulling the giant lever on the side You watch the five ersatz, video generated tumblers the screen as they "roll" to a stop. Of the three possible line ups that the tokens, none of the paylines hits anything, much less a jackpot, though one of the diagonals comes close with four reading "Big Money!" and the last being a Wheel logo. Teri lets out a loud "Awwww" and the two of you go back to playing nickel slots, barely staying any further ahead of where you were when you got to the Imperial Palce or hooking back to the sixties-kitsch, outer-space themed Vegas World. (more later) 031012 ... phil (entertaining to read) 031013 ... birdmad Hungry, the two of you skip the restaurant and opt for the Mexican fast-food set-up just off one of the concourses leading down into the pit of slots and other coin-ops. You feel fine before you eat, but something about the burrito you share doesn't taste right and you leave it unfinished, but more than Teri, you will come to realize that you shouldn't have eaten it at all. You head for the bar and ask for a double shot of vodka and a bottle of tabasco sauce, deciding that you'd rather deal with the pain of flaming ass later than deal with the creeping nausea that has managed to overtake you in the half hour since you ate the burrito. You stopped eating and spat out the bite when you arrived at a piece of chicken in the burrito that tasted bloody and undercooked and still had a sliver of bone sticking out of it, but you wonder how much of the rest of it was contaminated by the bacteria which had probably been incubating nicely in the warm, enclosed ecosystem of the burrito. You ask the bartender for a highball glass and pour your double shot into it and then dump almost a quarter of the bottle of tabasco on top of it, knocking it back so hard and fast that you are not the only one in the bar gasping over your incendiary cocktail. Hey, Alex... Does the phrase "ring of fire" mean anything to you. If not, it will soon enough. Regaining your composure and knocking down a pair of lime twist tonics (sans gin) to get back on something that feels like an even keel you tolerate the lingering discomfort creeping around in your guts and survive until it is time to be rounded up and taken back to your hotel to plan your own evening in Vegas accordingly. Once in the hotel, you break immediately for the men's room in the lobby where the urge to purge manifests itself first as a major technicolor yawn into the well-kept and immaculate bowl and the taste of undercooked chicken is right back in your palate again. Winded, but at least a little relieved, you are about to go wash your mouth out in the sink when you feel your intestines unraveling in your abdomen and hear a loud rumbling. In a move that would make a quick-change artist proud, you are parked and planted firmly upon the porcelain throne. You end up spending thity minutes in one place and when the worst is over, you are struck by the pinprick sensation in from your toes all the way up to your spine. Yes, Alex, your ass has fallen asleep and standing up and moving around to get off this toilet is going to be an adventure on par with digging yourself out of that hole in the ground a couple of years back. When you get to the room, you are greeted by Teri who looks similarly exhausted and, with hand on her belly, remarks that outside of how drunk she got on her 21st birthday, she doesn't remember ever feeling quite as sick as she was feeling right then. "I mean, da-aaamn, Alex, I almost feel like i'm waitin' for an alien to hatch or something." "Trust me, babe, I know exactly what you mean...where do you think i've been all this time? Anyway, I'm gonna grab a shower and then we'll see if we feel well enough to do anything else tonight." "I want to, but I don't know that i'll be up to it," she says, sounding a little disappointed. "No problem" She steps in to join you in the shower just before you turn it off and starts taking her own, pausing to lean her head against you for a moment and you kiss her on the forehead before shampooing her hair. You want her, but there's not a lot you can do about that. Stepping out of the shower and drying off, you crawl into bed. It is only 8:30 in the evening but you are tired. Teri comes out and curls up next to you and you both fall asleep by 9:15, both of you still feeling a little queasy. When you wake up inexplicably at 3:15 AM, you feel fine and sharp, but you are bored, but Teri is resting too peacefully to disturb. Finding that there is a blackjack game going on at the $20 dollar table down in the casino area of the little hotel you are in, you get in on the game and manage to turn your forty dollars that you took with and turn it up to another two hundred and twenty in thirty minutes. As you are walking away from the table, a guy who was watching when he got bored with futilely feeding a video poker machine notices your long, sharp fingernails and asks if you do coke. "No, sorry," you answer, nonchalantly, "don't have any on me, man." "Want any? Take a walk with me i got all sorts of shit, dude." You recognize the type and know by the nervous smell of sweat coming off of him and the unpracticed sleaziness about him that he's not a cop, but is afraid you might be. Walking around outside in the buffer between the casinos and residential Las Vegas, you manage to score a bag of mushrooms which you and Teri will share to get you through the next day and maybe even give new meaning to the trip home 031014 ... nonprofit The only way to go. 040212 what's it to you? who go blather from