Ojo's Bachelor Party

***I started writing a bunch of posts and left them in draft status either because I was too distracted to make them right or because I was too busy to finish them.  I'm going to touch a few of them up and post them now, but they are way after the fact.***

I can't not post about my bachelor party, so here goes.

We went to Vegas.  Looking back on the entire weekend, there wasn't a whole lot that was notable.  In other words, this isn't going to make for one of my better stories.  That's sort of surprising given that the odds greatly favored a bunch of crazy shit happening.  Maybe this means I'm old.  I'll still write about what happened, though.

We decided to do Vegas because three of us in my close circle of friends were getting married within about a year of one another.  No one else in that circle is even close to getting married, so we figured that at least one of us needed to do the Vegas bachelor party while we still have all of our teeth and organs.

There have been two other bachelor parties, now; both pretty typical.  And by typical I mean there was lots of alcohol and strippers.  Unfortunately, we live in a time when being male is unfashionable.  So things like strippers and porn have gone the way of cigarettes - way uncool.  We also live in a time (unfortunately) when women are free to express their opinions and have them actually count for something.  What all of this means is that we all got in a shitload of trouble for having strippers at these bachelor parties.  The irony is that none of us are really into strippers.  Most strippers aren't even attractive.  What they are is naked and that tends to make up for a lot.  But more importantly than that, strippers are a very thin illusion.  The truth is that strippers and strip clubs are very depressing.  Most strippers are maladjusted or broken.  The ignorant perception is that they make a ton of money and get to hang out and drink and have fun all of the time; just a step below a movie star's lifestyle, really.  The reality is that the money isn't all that great and the only way most of them can even stand to rub themselves on the fat and disgusting scumbags who patronize the clubs is to get drunk or take pills.  Anyway, I digress.  The point is that I, we, see and understand all of this.  So we don't even like strippers or strip clubs.  But, traditions being what they are, strippers are part and parcel to certain occasions - like bachelor parties.  I'm going to get a lot of groans from the female readership for that last sentence, but it would be like having Christmas without Santa or Easter without the Easter Bunny.  Except in this case Santa and the Easter Bunny wear thongs and six inch heels and pay ten grand for their boobs and wear too much CK1 perfume.

Well, rather than deal with the arguments and heartaches the other bachelor parties caused (and there were lots of arguments and heartaches) I put a "No Strippers" tag on my bachelor party and I meant it.  At the time, I felt like Han Solo right after he got a dose of sass from Princess Leia:  "No reward is worth this."  Except in my case it was, "No titties are worth this."  I added a "No Hookers" tag also when it was decided we were going to Vegas.

We were all supposed to arrive in Vegas around 9pm local time after leaving from different cities where we live and go from there to the hotel.  My flight was supposed to leave around 7 Houston time.  Well, my plane had something wrong with it and was stuck in New Orleans and they were going to get us another, larger plane that had just come in from Paris, but they needed to clean it up to get it ready.  They kept pushing back the projected flight time and we didn't lift off until after ten.  That put me touching down in Vegas around 11.  My phone does this cool thing where, when it can't get a signal, it burns a shitload of battery power.  I don't understand that correlation at all.  If you can't get a signal for a certain period of time it should shut down and try again later or something.  Anyway, by the time I arrived my phone was dead (this is foreshadowing).  I had to rely on the other guys to figure out on their own what gate I was at or what luggage carousel was for my flight.  They're smart guys, even after several beers in the airport lounge waiting for me, so we found each other no problem.  They had hired a limo to take us to the hotel and the poor driver had waited there with them for two hours.  We piled into the limo and headed to the hotel.  We immediately fell into some pretty vile conversation.  Being a bachelor party and all, we felt obligated.  Either that, or we were trying to make the driver laugh.  I think we compared the "flesh tube" similarities of the vagina and the esophagus, if I remember right.

We were staying at a place called "Bill's Gamblin' Hall" on the strip.  It doesn't sound that great and it's not famous at all so no one has ever heard of it.  In truth, it's probably the best hotel value on the strip.  The rooms were large, clean and fairly nice.  There are a couple of mediocre restaurants and an average casino on the first floor.  The biggest benefit is that it's located on the strip within walking distance of just about anywhere you want to go.  Our plan was to get a late dinner and then gamble a little bit and get to bed at a reasonable hour to conserve ourselves for Saturday night.  We ate in one of the restaurants in Bill's and then walked down to Casino Royale, which had the lowest craps minimums and the highest odds on the strip.

I enjoy gambling.  It's fun.  Fortunately, I am able to see it for what it is and I don't get carried away with it.  Gambling is very much like the stripper thing - it's not at all what it appears.  The ignorant view is that you can win a bunch of money gambling and that it's glamorous.  That's not it at all.  Gambling is entertainment, pure and simple.  You will not win a bunch of money.  In fact, in the long run, you will lose very near to exactly what the odds say you will lose.  There is no skill involved and only minimal knowledge of the game is required.  All you can do is to make the best bet available to maximize your entertainment time before running out of money.

I had a gambling budget going in to the weekend and I intended to play with 1/5 of it on Friday night.  Two of us stepped up to the craps table and started playing.  I like craps because it was the first table game that I was taught - during our long drive to Nevada from Texas on the way to the gold mine in '97 (whole other story).  For those who don't know, the game is basically just the odds of rolling anything versus a seven.  I'm not going to give a complete rundown of all the rules or scenarios, but it is the game that has the most favorable odds in all of gambling (as long as you only make one type of bet).  We had a few drinks, only two of us were really gambling, and I lost $58 in a couple of hours of playing craps.  I actually got kind of bored with it.  I'd win a little, lose a little and mostly wait on the croupiers to exchange everyone's chips.  The table was crowded so it seemed to take forever between rolls.  Eventually we decided to head back to the hotel and turn in.

We got up mid-morning on Saturday and decided to get brunch at a restaurant in the Orleans hotel called "Courtyard Cafe."  Again, we'd researched it and found that brunch there was the best value on or near the strip.  We started off trying to walk there because the map I'd studied showed that it was only a couple of blocks down from our hotel.  Wrong.  We walked basically all the way to the south end of the strip, to New York, New York hotel before realizing that the Orleans was actually not on the strip at all and way more than a block off of it.  At least we'd taken a bit of a walk and seen some of the sites.  We walked a little through the Bellagio and saw the fountain area (it wasn't running during the day).  We saw a bunch of the other hotels and casinos on the strip and generally just got a feel of the place and the crowd.  We hailed a cab at New York, New York to go the rest of the way.

Brunch was good, nothing spectacular, but good.  Then we headed back to the hotel.  Snake and I wanted to lay some money down on the Michigan State/UConn basketball game (the Final Four was going on).  He had gotten the line sheet and we studied it and tried to figure out how everything worked.  I've never bet on sports before, so I was pretty ignorant.  The spread was 4-1/2 points in favor of UConn.  A straight line bet for Michigan State paid 170, meaning that you'd win $170 on a bet of $100 by picking Michigan State to win, no points.  I put $50 on it.  If Michigan State won, I'd get $135 - my original $50 plus $85 (half of $170).  Snake put $20 on UConn and another $20 on the over, meaning that if the total number of points scored in the game was over 135 he'd win $20.  We went up to the rooms to play Settlers of Catan and watch the game (we're nerds to play a board game in Vegas, I know).  Snake and I walked down the street to the most depressing convenient store/bar/casino in the world to buy some beer and soda.  We got back to the hotel and played the game and watched basketball.  I cheered my ass off for Michigan State.  They won by a wide margin so I got $135.  Snake lost half his bet, but won the other half so he came out even.  My friend James won the Settlers of Catan game by a wide margin, mostly because he was the only one not engrossed in the basketball game.  We had been drinking pretty steadily during the games, starting with beer and mixing in some good single malt over ice.  I don't think any of us were tanked, but we were definitely laughing pretty loudly at shitty jokes.

We had dinner reservations at a nice steakhouse on the outskirts of Vegas.  We all got cleaned up and dressed for the night and got a cab to take us out to the restaurant.  We did dinner right - cocktails, nice cuts of meat, good red wine, the whole deal.  We even did desserts and port wine.  Our bill was extravagant, but what the fuck, how many bachelor parties am I going to have?

By the time we left the restaurant I could have easily passed for drunk.  By this point I'd been drinking for several hours and the drunker I get my drinking pace tends to get faster (this is a bad trait).  I wasn't incapacitated or anything and it was still at the fun/not dangerous stage.  We got another cab to take us back into town.

We didn't have a good plan for where we wanted to gamble and spend most of our biggest night in Vegas.  We'd seen a bit of the strip already.  More importantly, though, is that we were looking for value.  We're not high rollers and there were some low rollers in our group, so we weren't interested in gambling at expensive places.  We started out going downtown instead of the strip.  In 1997, when I was last in Vegas, downtown was the location of the older casinos; less glamorous, more old school.  In 2009, that's all changed.  Many of the downtown casinos have been remodeled - I didn't even recognize the Horshshoe.  And they've built this video screen covering over an entire street for at least 200 yards.  There was a concert going on by some Nashville singer and the streets around the concert were packed with people.  We walked into a casino only to find throngs of shitty looking people and high minimums.  It was anything but relaxed and cheap - in essence what we were looking for.  So we decided to head back to the strip. 

We hailed another cab, which looked like a limo.  The driver was dressed in a suit and he was some type of foreigner.  Turned out he was from Eithiopia, though he wasn't black; at least not all the way.  We were in some pretty heavy traffic so the ride took a while.  The driver started asking us if we like strip clubs and if we'd prefer it if he took us to some place called Trophies or Treasures or some strip club sounding shit.  I said, "No" as at least one other person in the party said "Yes."  We were all drunk enough now to start going back on promises that we'd made to ourselves and the females in our lives, but I was still incredulous since this had been such a major issue and I'd been so firm and so clear about it going in.  Of course, the driver, who got some kind of kickback from the club for each carload of drunk dudes he was able to drop off at the club, seized upon our apparent indecision to start selling the attributes of Trophies, or whatever it was called.  He actually pulled out a binder that was filled with pictures of the strippers, complete with all of their stripper names - Kandi, Athena, Ebony, Trista.  This served factionalize our group.  There was me who was still firmly in the "No Strippers; Fuck No." category.  Then there was someone, who I won't out, who was in the "Yeah, strippers! Fuck yeah!" category.  The other guys were going to go along with whoever won out.  So of course, that starts this raging-ass debate about male independence and the tradition of the bachelor party and the bachelor's last stab at freedom (his points) versus how times are changing and male independence isn't lost in marriage (my points).  My now-wife would be proud because I never wavered, telling them - "You guys can go on ahead.  I made a promise and I'm not fucking going to a strip club."  Since it was my bachelor party I won and we kept heading toward the strip.  I did have to admit that I was a pussywhipped poltroon though.  The cabbie was pretty disappointed.

So we get to the Strip, still without any idea where we wanted to be.  We ended up at the same casino that we went to the night before - this low end place with the low minimums called Casino Royale.  A couple of us started playing craps and the others started playing roulette.  It was cool because the roulette table was right next to the craps table so we could high five and bullshit with each other even though we were playing different games.

Mind you, we're all pretty drunk and things were starting to get pretty boisterous.  I would hear my brother say "Give me my money!" in this weird loud voice every time he won on the roulette table.  It was pretty funny.  I was drinking rum and cokes one after the other after the other after the other.  Fortunately, they were pretty weak drinks.  But I must have drank a gallon of coke that night.  I ordered a new one every time the waitress came around.  And she came around every 15 minutes or so.  We were there for around four hours.  You do the math. 

The craps was pretty slow.  I didn't lose a lot, but I did lose and it was slow and getting boring.  We lost a couple of guys as it got later and later.  Eventually I joined my brother and cousin at the roulette table.  I won pretty big early and was able to play with house money for a long time.  The early win caused me to think, "Hey, I'm pretty good at this," which is the absolute WORST thought you can have while gambling in Vegas.  There's no such thing as being GOOD at gambling.

The roulette went on for a couple more hours and we were so drunk that we knew we were so drunk.  That's when it gets dangerous.  I ran out of cigarettes and told them to wait for me while I went to get some more.  Well, that turned out to be an epic fucking quest that took way longer than it should have.  By the time I got back, they were tired and ready to leave and annoyed with me for taking so long.  They had all of the chips that I'd just left at the table.  I cashed them out (I think - the memory is a little fuzzy here) and we headed back to our hotel.  When we got there we relaxed a little bit because we had made it back to home base.  At least if we passed out on the floor of the casino here they could cart us up to our room.  We decided that we wanted to gamble a little more so the three of us sat down at a roulette table.

I won big on one of the early spins again so I was playing with house money and thinking I was really, really good at roulette.  In my drunkenness I got pretty careless and spilled my full drink all over the felt of the table twice.  They even got me one of these metal drink holder things so it would happen again.

We were sitting next to these British kids who looked to be in their mid-20's.  We tried to be friendly and strike up a conversation but they blew us off.  I thought they were rude and conceited, but we were probably visibly fucking wasted, obnoxious and annoying.  After I spilled my drink on the table for the third time they decided to shut that table down, I think hoping that I'd go away.  Instead, we went to the last roulette table that was open.  I don't know how long we sat there, but I won enough to keep my stacks about the same or a little bigger.  I was still drinking at my ever increasing pace and by now I had lost most of my motor skills.  At some point, this old Japanese guy was at the table.  His hands shook pretty badly - looked like pre-Parkinson's or something.  Plus, he just looked grey.  I formulated a story in my mind about how he was single and lonely (I imagined him being divorced or a widower), who just learned he had less than a year to live and here he was in Las Vegas, trying to live it up, when in reality he was pissing away his money in a depressing casino.  This man's strategy was to blanket the entire roulette board with chips, which if you know anything about the game is a really, really stupid way to play.  I'm not sure if the guy was drunk or what, but at one point he started throwing chips at some poor schlep who was emptying out the trash cans at the nearby restaurant counter.  Predictably, the guy lost all of his fucking chips because he was playing so stupidly and literally throwing the rest of them away.  He left and then it was just my cousin and I.

The dealer during this entire time was this Ukranian guy.  I know he was Ukranian because I asked.  He spoke with what sounded like a Russian accent.  At one point he was speaking along with the voice coming over the loudspeaker every hour or so.  "Welcome to Bills!  The rootinest, tootinest casino in the West!  Here you'll find the best minimums and the best payouts on the strip.  And check out our Wild West package specials.  Ask your server for information..."  To say that was annoying would be putting it mildly.  He would also say "No more bets" in his accent and wave his hand over the wheel during every spin once the wheel started slowing down.

At one point I leaned over to my cousin and said, "I don't even know what's happening anymore."  That should have been the cue to leave, but we stayed for at least another half hour.  When we finally got up from the table, and I don't know how I could even walk, I looked toward the door to the street and saw daylight.  And not just daylight, but what looked to be burning fucking noonday sun.  "Fuck me" I thought.  Even in that state I knew that my flight was going to come sooner that I'd like and we had to check out of the hotel at a certain time and I was going to be hungover as fuck.  We went up the elevator and to our respective rooms.

When I opened the door to my room, the door hit my brother, who was asleep on the floor, fully clothed.  When I woke him up and asked him what the fuck he was doing, he said that he wanted to make sure I was okay so he wanted to know when I came in.  I thought that was pretty cool of him to look out for me like that.  Anyway, as I was getting ready to crawl into bed, I noticed that I didn't have my jacket with me.  Now this was a nice jacket that I really liked.  It's a staple of my wardrobe in fact.  Plus, it had my expensive ass phone in the pocket.  I figured I had left it at the last roulette table downstairs.

I know what you all are thinking:  "Don't do it, man.  Don't go back downstairs."  But I did.  Somehow, and I really don't know how I managed it, I made it down the elevator and to the roulette table where we'd been ten minutes before.  When the dealer saw me walk up her face fell.  I knew she'd been relieved when we had finally left and that nothing bad had happened, as drunk as we were.  But I somehow managed to say, "Did I leave my jacket here?"  She looked around and so did I, but it wasn't there.  I had a pretty good idea of my limitations at that point and there was really nothing more that I was physically able to do at that point, so I went up to my room and passed out.

The next thing that I remember is one of the guys waking me up telling me we had to fucking go.  Now.  I told him to call for a late check out.  He said, "I already did."  "Fuck me," I thought.  Just like I knew it was going to be.  It was like 1pm.  My flight wasn't until 6, but we still had to get out of the room.  I took a quick shower and still felt like a Holocaust victim.  I manged to pack my stuff without puking and hauled it downstairs and left it with the bellman.  Two of the guys had to split right then to catch their flights, so the remaining three of us set out looking for some type of hangover cure food.

We found a hamburger place, which was as good of an option as any, but it was the most depressing hamburger joint in the world.  It was wedged in between a couple of casinos, up a set of stairs.  It was weird.  It had outdated sports themed murals painted on the walls.  You know, the basketball players had short shorts on and they vaguely resembled Larry Bird.  The guy in the hockey scene resembled Gretzky.  The burger and fries reminded me a lot of the food the cafeteria at my elementary school served.  Soy "meat" patties and cold soggy uncooked fries.  Fucking yum.  Needless to say, it didn't do a lot for my hangover or my mood.

We went to the casino where we'd been the night before to see if my phone had been turned in to lost and found.  I was almost embarrassed by the futility of asking about it.  It goes without saying, but they didn't have it.  We went back to our hotel to sit in the bar area and watch sports to kill a couple of hours before we had to head to the airport.  As soon as we walked through the door of the casino and into the gambling area, Snake drew out the $35 worth of chips from the casino in his pocket that he wanted to get rid of and without missing a stride walked up to the roulette table, while the spin was already happening, quickly asked the dealer if he could still place a bet.  The dealer hesitated just a beat but said yes, Snake plunked the chips on black ten and the dealer called "No more bets."  The ball bounced around and landed on black ten!!!  Snake won $200 just like that.  Despite my mood and lack of energy I cheered.  It was awesome.  A Kenny Brown moment if there ever was one. 

We found a table while Snake cashed in his chips.  I had a bloody mary, which helped.  I asked to use my brother's phone to call my fiancee' to let her know what had happened and that everything was okay, sort of.

When I heard her voice on the other end of the phone I was so happy; uplifted.  It sounded like such a refuge from the thieves, liars and cutthroats everywhere in the Vegas scene.  It made me forget about the way I felt at that moment and that I'd lost my phone.  At that moment I just wanted to be home and to be close to the person who was connected to that voice.  If it hadn't happened before that point (it had), I was really, really certain at that moment that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her.

We talked for a while and then I went back in.  We sat around for another hour or so then got a cab to the airport. The bloody mary started wearing off and I started feeling like shit again.  I drank a bottle of water, but it wasn't helping.  Finally, it was time to board the plane.  I sat in my seat and immediately started getting cold sweats.  I felt fucking horrible.  I was thirsty.  Really thirsty.  The plane took off and it took FOREVER for the stewardesses to come around with the drink cart.  I had been lusting for a Sprite and I asked for the whole can.  I drank the whole thing before they even got to the next row.  But I still felt like I was going to hurl at any moment.  I also was freaking out a little bit - I felt claustrophobic and nervous.  I tried to relax, but to make matters worse the movie they were playing was Marley and Me, which is just about the most depressing movie ever.  And not because the dog dies in the end (sorry to spoil it if you haven't seen it).  No, it was depressing to me because Owen Wilson's character is this newspaper writer and the movie tracks his life and career ascension (or lack of), his marriage, the birth of his kids, and of course, his life with this dog.  His whole life unfolds in less than two hours and the most noteworthy thing this guy has done is write about his fucking dog.  Another layer of the movie that was depressing was that I'm sure Owen Wilson read the script and learned that it was based on the book by this writer who started out as a columnist for a newspaper and he knew what the movie was and he fucking took it anyway because that's what happens to you in Hollywood.  I figured it was shit like that that was why he tried to kill himself.

Anyway, I got another can of Sprite from the stewardess (I could tell I was not the first hungover guy she'd seen coming back on a flight from Vegas) and I started to feel a little better.  We landed and my fiancee' picked me up and I'm not sure I've ever been happier to see her.

So that's it; that's the bachelor party story.  Not as crazy as you would expect, right?  The phone thing only cost me $50 because I had insurance, but they sent me some refurb or second or something because it's a big piece of shit and a source of endless frustration.  Turns out I had my jacket on when I got back to the room, so it wasn't lost; just the phone.

Comments

[Ojo Rojo]

Testing

[Snake Diggity]

I had a good time, and it was only the 3rd tamest bachelor party I've been to (Little Chris' was 3 dudes who didn't know each other, a bottle of Crown, and a hotel room at the La Quinta on Navarro.) I'm sure I've consumed more alcohol in a night before, but I KNOW I've never drank that much coke before. I can't believe I haven't passed a kidney stone the size of a golfball. Easily over a gallon on Saturday night alone.

My favorite part (besides winning $200 on black 10 sunday morning) was the late night roullette; I was so drunk I couldn't speak english or stack my chips on top of each other. I was so drunkenly exhausted I couldn't do shit that I learned when I was 2. And I know I wasn't that much more drunk than you or Robo.

[Ojo Rojo]

I'm going to edit the story to include the "Black 10 Event." I can't believe I forgot to put that in.

I don't think you were drunker than us; maybe the other way around. We've got a few years on you though and those are drinking years. You just learn how to fake it better.

[desertboy]

Sorry I just got a chance to read this.

While I agree that Robo's party was farily typical (I still shudder at the thought of 'tainment), I think a little hurricane changed the course of mine. And yes, there did involve a strip club, but there were an equal number of gay as straight men (in fact, the gay men spent more money [and probably enjoyed themselves more]).

I dislike strip clubs. They are depressing. I had looked forward to a POC weekend free of such nonsense.

I received no such grief over either of the previous parties. I think it is a matter of understanding motive. That being said, I don't criticize the criticizers. I imagine if the situation were reversed, I'd be singing a different tune.

I think having Snakey around improves any party.