One Of Those Nights

Or, I'm gettin' too old for this shit...

I'm moving in ultra-slow motion today. Luckily the tv remote is on the nightstand and the commute from bed to the the computer is less than four feet. Too wrecked to walk to the kitchen, I'm drinking distilled water from the bottle under my desk that I keep on hand for my humidor.

I had one of those nights with my friends where the details are a little fuzzy until all of the usual suspects are rounded up, but once all the stories are told, the truth is found somewhere in the middle.

Once word got out that the six of us Original Gangsters from the Extra-Board had been promoted to full time, the Saturday night celebration was planned--all the swing shift dealers were planning on getting together this weekend for a night of buffoonery. Unfortunately, I was scheduled to work until 5 am, but everyone else was getting out of work between 2 am and 4 am. Luckily my cough was flaring back up again, so the manager in charge felt pity on me and let me go home an hour early (normally 5 o'clockers are not allowed to take early outs).

I made a quick stop for more cough drops and got to Chilly Palmer's just as the party was getting underway. Everybody was there--even a bunch of dealers who never go out with us on the weekends. Somebody kept buying shots for the group, my glass was never empty, and my money was no good in there. I'd even brought along one of my Partagas Black Labels as a victory cigar to light up and enjoy the moment.

I was having a great time just hanging there at the bar with all of my friends, until somebody decided that we needed to go to a strip club. I adamantly refused to go--I just don't have the money for that kind of activity, but the tidal wave of momentum swept me up when somebody offered to pay everyone's two-drink minimum. A few minutes later I piled into a car with a couple of gals and we were caravanning over to the west side of the Strip. We actually ended up at a place I'd never heard of before, called Seamless, directly across the street from the Orleans.

When we got there, I was immediately pissed because it wasn't really a strip club, it was an "Adult After-Hours Ultra Lounge". Yep, one of those pretentious overpriced clubs dotting the Vegas landscape that I absolutely hate. And of course I'm wearing my black Reeboks, stylish polyester dealer's pants, my 'I Support Single Moms' t-shirt, and an unbuttoned flannel shirt. Not exactly proper attire for hanging out at the velvet rope. And I absolutely did not wish to pay cover for a place that's gonna pop me for $12 a drink once I got inside, either. Since I didn't drive, there was no escape, so I silently fumed while standing in line. Oh yeah, we were outside in the 35-degree pre-dawn darkness standing in line, also. God I was pissed off.

It started looking up when the bouncer guy with the earpiece and black suit who was manning the door recognized me--we used to play poker together last summer during downtime at dealer's school. So he let us all in ahead of everyone else and we didn't have to pay cover. Didn't even have to tip the guy. Score!

Once inside, I said a quick hello to 2000 WSOP Champion Chris 'Jesus' Ferguson (he shakes hands like a girly-man, though. Kinda creepy) and found the rest of the girls from our group.

The club was your typical ultra-lounge; Chicks dancing on various stages in various stages of undress, lots of SoCal wannabe hipsters lurking around, $10 Bud Lites, but lots and lots of eye candy wandering about in effmee heels and bebe shirts.

I spent a few minutes 'getting my pimp on' out on the dance floor with four or five of the chicks I work with, but still fighting a bit of a fever I was sweating and needed a beer. Before I could get to the bar, an outrageously hot Asian chick grabbed my hands and drug me off into the corner. The music was loud and her English wasn't very good, so I couldn't understand a word she was saying, but it didn't matter because she was climbing my frame and making me feel better about my decision to be there.

We messed around for a few minutes and then I told her I needed a drink, so off to the bar we went. The interminably long wait for service was made much more enjoyable by her grinding on me while we stood at the bar. A Jaeger-bomb (for her) and a Corona cost me twenty-something bucks, and she then led me back to the VIP area. Nice. We sat down on a couch in back and had started enjoying our drinks when it finally hit me that this girl was actually 'working'. She asked me if I wanted some private dances for the bargain price of just $300. I about spit my drink out and said hell no, there was no way I was paying for any type of dances. Her counter offer shocked me though--

How about twenty bucks then?

I started laughing and apologized to her telling her that I'd misunderstood what type of place I was in and I wasn't interested. She was cool with that and even though I tried to leave she insisted that we hang out for a bit. No worries--she was hot as hell and I got a lot of free gropage out of the deal before I headed back to find all of my friends.

It turns out that Seamless is a strip club during the day, and an after-hours club at night (like Drai's at the Barbary Coast). But in addition to all the random regular hotties in the crowd, I guess they have undercover strippers working the club. Interesting concept, one that I would've never thought of, but hey--it's Vegas!

Shortly after that, the caravan headed back to Chilly's where we spent the next hour drinking bottled water and telling stories from all of our different perspectives, and mine wasn't even the most interesting. It was a fun night, but once was enough.

Exhausted, I crawled out of the bar into the blazing sunlight of a Sunday morning, pissed off that I'd left my sunglasses back home on my desk.

I should've known that I'd need them today.

Turns out that all the squinting on the way home wasn't a bad thing after all--it was that much less effort to close them all the way once I got home and hit the bed.

Mikey