Fear and Loathing: Part 4

As I stood there looking out at the line I was supposed to be “zipping” down, contemplating my life to this point, I could feel my heart beat in my ears.  I was physically panicking.  But there were people in front of me.  And people behind me.  And no one seemed to be as concerned about their imminent death like I was… so I sucked it up and got hooked up to the death string.  I took a few deep breaths and pushed off the platform as hard as I could and flew through the fucking air.  You guys.  I flew through the AIR.  Like Superman!  I pretended to swim, I waved at the people below me and I made it all the way to the end without dying!  Huge success!

ABOUT TO FLY!!!!

After the let down from my death-defying flight, we decided to go to the pool and hang out for a little bit.  After drunkenly trading shirts with MiddleShirt, we all went up to our hotel room to get ready to go out on Fremont.

Mostly matching outfits! Yay!

Along with a handful of McNugget’s friends, we headed out to three or eight different bars where we drank beer, did shots, and put #SuckMyBush stickers on walls, tables and people.  At the first bar, MiddleShirt made me swing dance with him and flipped me in the air.  I’m far too trusting of people I’ve only just met/traded shirts with…  There was a dick measuring contest in the form of the punching bag game where the boys tried to top each others’ 900+ score.  Someone (I won’t point out who…MiddleShirt…) punched a 400something when I began to run my mouth and talk a lot of shit…which he made me back up by carrying me over to the machine and announcing to the bar that it was my turn.  I punched something over 500 – which was good enough for me – and we went to the next bar.

#SuckMyBush tagged

I can’t remember actually if this happened at the next bar, but at another bar we sat down and I randomly sat next to a stranger who had a really sweet tattoo sleeve.  I told him I thought it was cool, but then felt stupid just being like “nice sleeve…” so I decided to tell him about my sleeve.  It went something like this:

You probably can’t see it because it’s in that black light/invisible ink, but I have a sleeve, too.  Up here [pointing to front of my baby sized upper arm] is a hibiscus flower that fades of color as it goes toward my elbow.  Behind that, sort of offset, are two mountain peaks, kind of the shape of the Grand Tetons, but they’re covered in luscious green trees and grass.  Below that is a river that flows through a city-scape and meets up with the lava flow of a volcano that is here [point to the back of my forearm.]  It represents how so much of life requires both types of extremes in order to exist.  I like to think my life is like that.  Also, I made all of this up right now at this exact moment.

He laughed.  I laughed.  Then he got up and disappeared.  I had made my new friend uncomfortable and he wanted to get away from me post-haste.  Or so I thought, until we recognized him as the lead singer of the band that was now playing on stage.  Which resulted in a lot of doing stupid ridiculous shit and claiming it was okay because we know the band.

When we left this bar, we went to a strip club.  Because… well, Vegas.  We sat down at the bar, ordered two beers each (to satisfy the two drink minimum) and started enjoying/judging the people around us.  Here’s my feeling about strip clubs(and it’s an opinion, so I cannot be wrong:) There’s nothing wrong with exploiting the exploitation of the human body for money.  Exploiting Exploitation.  I dig it.  So I spent hours (and yes, I do mean HOURS) watching people watch dancers.  I also watched some of the dancers.  Some were quite good.  Some were quite bad.  Some were a bit more… um… seasoned? than the others.  We’ll skip over the part about who did or did not get a lap dance and go straight to the part where we lost MiddleShirt.

We had actually lost much of our group.  Our original group of 6: Karen, McNugget, Beefcake, MiddleShirt, Jack, Scott and Me had dissipated to 5.  Then we added 3 of McNugget’s friends.  By the time we got to the strip club we were down to 7.  At the strip club we gained 2 and then lost 5.  One of which was MiddleShirt.  Leaving me, McNugget, Karen and Beefcake.

It occurred to us that MiddleShirt might be gambling, and that it would behoove us to go find him.  We split up (sort of…) in search of our missing friend at three in the morning – when the HELL did it become 3am?!

McNugget and I gave up our search and headed back to our hotel room.  When we got off the elevator on our floor and took the turn down our hallway we saw this:

MiddleShirt was curled up inside his shirt like a turtle in its shell with two bottles of water next to his head.  Apparently he got back to the room before anyone else, his phone was dead, and he didn’t remember where we were, so he curled up and fell asleep hoping we would come back.  Someone in another room saw him and provided him with water (but no blanket…what dicks) while he shivered and hoped for our speedy return.

So we were all back in the room… well, except for Beefcake and Karen…  We texted them to let them know we had found MiddleShirt and that they should come back and order a cot at the front desk on their way up…

…and we waited…

…and that seems like as good a time as ever to pause the story.

So where did Beefcake and Karen end up?  Don’t you know nothing good happens after 2am???