He was in town for a friend’s bachelor party, and had felt shy and uncomfortable when the strippers showed up, so he went downstairs to play some cards. Eight free drinks later at the Pai Gow table and Mike was feeling altogether different.
He had returned to the room a bit late – the strippers had left, but only just. One of them was walking toward him down the hall. Mike found he was still in a betting mood, but because he wasn’t seated at the Pai Gow table anymore he had to make up his own kind of gamble: he bet himself that if he could convince this girl to sleep with him for no money down he would come back to Las Vegas once a year and repeat his actions. It might become his own, personal tradition.
Mike was a good-looking young man with a charming sparkle in his eye. He was also smart enough to treat the stripper unlike one. He took his time, wooed her with his sense of fun and mystery, and forgot all about his girlfriend, Mandy. Mandy was probably back in L.A. asleep in her bed, totally and blissfully unaware of Mike’s actions.
The stripper was charmed, but not that charmed – she would sleep with Mike, but only as a business transaction. Mike, uninterested, instead asked her where she recommended he might find someone who would sleep with him for his preferred rate. The stripper smiled, “Crash a wedding,” she said.
It was brilliant and common sense. Mike went to his room and ten minutes later emerged wearing his best clothes, doused with his best cologne. He headed to the chapel in the lobby of his hotel and waited. It wasn’t an hour before he had targeted a gaggle of intoxicated young girls in their early twenties. One of them was getting hitched to a man who looked entirely out of place with them. Mike got on the man’s good side and subsequently wooed one of the young woman’s friends back to his hotel room. After some very wild and dirty Vegas-inspired coitus, the girl admitted to Mike that she had a boyfriend back wherever she was from, asking him if he believed in the rule of Vegas. She looked so vulnerable in that moment. Mike responded with confidence, “Absolutely. What happens here, stays here.” She smiled and they took advantage of one another once more before she left his room the next morning.
What a wonderful place on earth this is, Mike thought as he gorged on his champagne buffet breakfast. Perhaps it was some kind of cracked, American logic but Mike felt he was onto something profound – sinning might just be okay so long as it’s kept in its right and proper place… this place. It had been carved out of the lifeless desert specifically for the purpose of compartmentalizing the worst of everything. Go back home and be a saint, and you could always come back here, do whatever crazy awful thing you wanted to do and still get into Heaven. That was the deal. And if you stuck to it you could find a way to live with your whole self, warts and all – 100% guilt free, just don’t forget to tip your waitress.
Mike might have become a preacher had he not discovered the City of Sin. He was a man of excessive conviction. When he found something he liked he committed to it fully. And he loved Las Vegas. He was truly in now, to let it ride.
Even though he didn’t bed down the stripper, Mike decided he would come back year after year anyway. From then on it was always by himself. He had broken up with Mandy six months after his return from that initial trip but it was for reasons completely unrelated to what had happened there in Vegas. Mandy never found out Mike’s secret and she never would. Nor would the next three girlfriends. Nor would his wife, Laura.
This year was the first time Mike had been to Vegas as a married man. He had vowed to himself that he would never cheat on Laura since marrying her. It was different inside the county lines of Las Vegas, though. Here was a no man’s land to Mike. It didn’t really exist.
He had told Laura he was going on a business trip. It was a convenient lie, as he was always going out of town on business anyway and this was just for the weekend. He didn’t even need to lie about where it was that he was going – his company had sent him to Vegas several times over the past few years since he had met Laura.
Mike crashed another fly-by-night wedding, as was by now his traditional routine. The girl was gorgeous. What’s more she was around for the whole weekend. Mike was feeling up for more than just one night with her, so it worked out perfectly.
Or so Mike believed.
Saturday afternoon, while enjoying a particularly lucrative game of Pai Gow, Mike was approached by two men dressed in suits. They asked Mike to come with. They were emotionless, which made it harder to argue with them as they dragged him away from his winning game. Mike found himself being led to a side hall, that led to a side elevator, that opened up to a very drab and less than enticing row of corporate offices.
Mike was brought to a room where he was seated in a chair facing a desk. Mike remembered thinking the only thing nice about the room was its wallpaper and only because it looked new. Unlike the rest of Las Vegas, this particular nook or crannie was not designed to please. The two men that had led him there left him alone and a couple minutes later another man entered. He looked slick. His combed back hair was probably fake and his skin was so tan it was scary.
Without a word, the man turned on a television bolted to the wall behind him. Mike found himself audience to a collage history. It was an assortment of video clips, all of Mike, having sex in various hotel rooms with the various women he had encountered over all those years.
It was astounding. How could anyone have collected all of these incidents? They didn’t even take place in the same hotel! What was this?!
Mike was too awed to be worried immediately. In fact, he was rather impressed – the situation was so improbable it was actually kind of funny to him. That was until the man explained the deal to Mike: These tapes would be mailed to Laura unless Mike came back, every year as he had been. He could sleep with whomever he wanted, the man didn’t care about that stuff. Mike just had to play Pai Gow – or any of the tables – until he was down at least $500 per visit. He had to come once a year, and lose a half grand every year or his new wife would find out just what Mike had left behind in Vegas to fester in his absence.
Mike was indeed surprised that anyone would go to such measures for only $500 per year. But then, he had always wondered how they were always throwing up such tall casinos in this town, and reasoned there must be enough other schmucks out there like him, following that by now familiar creed to make it worth the city’s while. Mike figured it wasn’t really that much trouble on their end, if one thought about it. They simply watched, took note, and made you play their game. That’s really how it all worked in Las Vegas. The house always won in the end if you were fool to stick around at the table for long enough.
Sitting in that chair, Mike felt that familiar feeling that Vegas was done with him – for now, at least. That Sunday morning feeling of dread and disgust. He felt the urge to get the hell out, get back to normalcy and forget all about Las Vegas until he had ignored it long enough that it seemed new and dazzling all over again. That was the other thing about the place, of course – like a card it always turned over, and you just couldn’t resist wondering what would turn up when it did. The first time, and every time.
-A. Daltas, April 6 2008: Las Vegas, NV
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