blurring_the_edges_52_the_wedding_party birdmad You survive the holidays and slouch your way into 1995. Doing your best to not get stuck in the middle of the brewing contention between Andrew and your sisters, you decide that if for no ther reason than for the sake of going and getting out of town at least for a little while, you will go to Vegas when DJ's mom and her boyfriend-slash-fiance decide to make the whole relationship official by having what ends up being a reasonably not-tacky (though you, from your journeys into snottier realms, would not go quite so far as to say genuinely tasteful) wedding. You convince the family that since this town is still meant more for families than for you and since you spent the first whole day going to places where it was safe to take DJ, that when the last full day of the long weekend comes up, you should be able to roam the streets all by your lonesome because this is Sin City, you are almost a thousand dollars ahead of where you were when you got to town and you have some serious sinning to do and do not wish to divulge any details on the matter. Your oldest sister, Delia [AUTHOR'S NOTE: - as i've been writing irregularly on this project, i cannot remember the names i've assigned to Alex's sisters, so if i fuck up, remember, i've been doing this when the whim strikes me and i haven't kept the most detailed notes] and your brother-in-law Frank have had the opposite luck and since your oldest neice is leaving them with the baby, and your mom never was a huge gambler and is a little bit tired from all the festivities, your mom takes DJ and Delia takes her new granddaughter. You make arrangements with the desk to send up some dessert to DJ and your mom timed around when they expec to be back from going out to dinner. DJ grouses about not being able to come along, but you persuade him to be cool about it. It stokes your ego to know that while you may arguably be the worst father figure the boy could possible have, you have managed to insulate him from the worst parts of who you are and at the same you've stll managed to make him just the tiniest bit more streetwise than you were at his age, and that's something that you believe will go a long way in his future. You spend a little time in the casino, playing a few hands of blackjack, only losing a total of about fifty bucks after all of the gains and losses are weighed against each other. The dealer is a fucking shark, lulling you into a sense of complacency with a few easy hands and then sucker punching you with a few more that are total shit. It's funny, you think, that if this dealer were sitting on the other side of the table, he'd have everyone from the house pit-bosses to the Nevada Gaming Commission crawling up his ass with a microscope, just to be sure whether or not he was cheating, but since he's on the working end of the table, any attempt to call him out on it is just going to be treated as sour grapes. Recognizing that you are in for a grade-A prime fucking if you don't cut your losses and book, you quit the table after the last hand puts you down another $50. You head for the roulette wheel and put $10 on a four-way chance and by the barest stroke of luck, one of them hits. Leaving the casino, you put a $20 chip on the tay of a cute waitress with short, brown-black hair before you convert the remainder of the $200 you set aside to gamble with back into cash. It is 8:00 PM and you head for The Shark Club just off of where the Strip becomes the older North Las Vegas Blvd. In your red silk shirt, black t-shirt and black jeans with bleached streaks in your spiky, otherwise black hair, you feel, strangely, both noticed and unnoticed. You hear an old track as you walk in, Apotheosis' "O Fortuna" just before it gives way to something that you haven't heard beforebut recognize as Orbital. You get the feeling as you eyeball the crown that if you were all set to a side-by-side line up, you'd probably the least attractive person in the crowd, but you assuage the feeling with a pair of super stiff double rum-and-cokes. You see a girl who strikes a familiar chord deep in the weird recesses of your memory and decide to tempt faste and see if she is who you think she is. Writing a name on a napkin, you walk up to the woman and show it to her. To your complete surprise, it turns out to actually be her. JennyLee, who when you last saw her at summer camp just after 8th grade was a skinny, gawky blonde with short hair and some pretty heavy duty braces has grown into a tall, slim redhead, but between her unmistakeable eyes and a smile that was just achingly cute even when she had braces on, there was no mistaking that it was her. "Now," you ask over the music, "can you guess who i am?" "Alex, from summer camp," she says, "i knew it was you as soon as you started walking this way." "So what's a farm girl from Laveen doing in a place like this? Not that i'm complaining or anything." "Drinking, dancing, getting what may be the world's quickest divorce...and you?" "Sort of the opposite," you tell her, "i'm up here for my sister's wedding?" "Dear god," she says, "just please tell me there was no Elvis involved." "None whatsoever," you reply. "Thank god... don't suppose i could buy you a drink?" "I was about to ask you if i could do the same?" "Hmm," she says, seemingly a little tipsy already, "since this is a gambling town, i'll make you a bet...you see that girl over there with the jet-black buzz-cut... i say she's not wearing panties...if she is, i'll buy the drinks, if she's not, you buy the drinks." "Umm, okay." Well, alex, you r luck at the tables this evening was shit, let's see if your luck elsewhere is a little better. (more later) 040801 ... birdmad Taking the cue from JennyLee's wager, you walk up to the girl with the short black hair and chat her up a bit. Glancing back at Jen for a moment, you get a wicked look on your face and go in for the kill "Settle a bet for me," you tell her "My friend over there says you're not wearing panties, and how she can know that at a glance is beyond me, so look over to the bar and nod or shake your head dpeding oo whather you are or not." With the same wicked smile as yours, the girl with the black buzz-cut looks over toward JennyLee at the bar and nods... and then slaps the taste right out of your mouth before winking at Jen and walking away toward the other cornerof the dance floor. Oddly enough, you find yourself at least a little bit turned on by this, but decide that it's probably in your best interest not to follow. Jen looks over, dumbfounded and then motions to the bartender who brings out a couple of beers. "Ooh," she says, "i didn't see THAT coming... you OK?" "Yeah... weird thingi is, i think i kinda liked it." "Hah!" You laugh about it with her and decide to catch up on where you've both been since the last time you've seen each other. You spend the rest of your time in the club with her drinking and dancing, until you are both, in addition to being quite hammered, possessed by the urge to leave. You head back to her hotel room all the way back down the Strip and off to the right at the Rio and, from the elevator to the doorway of her room, you make out in the clumsy and haphazard fashion that only two really drunk people can. You both fall into her bed and are on the verge of advancing from a clumsy drunken makeout session to clumsy, drunken sex when, as she's in the middle of trying to peel off her top, JennyLee, considerably drunker than you, passes out. Horny though you may be, you are not a date-rapist and even drunk as you are, you don't want it if she's not all there with you on this. Moving off of her, you fix her top and set the wastebasket next to her bed in case she wakes up sick, as your own experience has led you to believe she might. You kiss her on the forehead and leave a note with your home number on it in your purse and a cup of water on the night-table. Turning out the lights, you wlk back to the elevator and change your mind about leaving her alone like that, but you don't have the card key and you don't want to wake her, so you go back down the elevator and out to one of the dozen or so cabs coming in and out of the hotel driveway with an unpleasant ache creeping from your balls up to the bnbottom of your ribcage and in a straight line to your knees, it's a decidedly "blue" feeling, which is at least slightly mitigated in your head by having done some semblance of the right and considerate thing in a situation like this one. As the cab pulls up in front of your hotel, you grab one of the porn flyers full of ads for the various escort services, strip clubs and private dancers in the area from a slightly wired slightly scraggly looking guy who is probably being paid about twenty bucks for the night to had these things out. You get to your room at a little after 3 in the morning and head for the shower. Taking the flyer and laying ot open on the countertop to the most interesting picture in the lot, you jack off furtively in the sower until the blue-ball ache subsides to a point where you feel like you could manage sleep, but when you try to sleep you find that while your unfed lust is no longer preoccupying you, you are suddenly no longer sleepy In fact, you don't sleep again until a couple of hours after you get home on Monday night. 041005 what's it to you? who go blather from