Oh Snap

Going to Vegas with your sisters and cousins is probably a wee bit different than going with friends.  Probably.

One afternoon we wake up and around 1pm and decide to just amble down the strip to Mandalay Bay and visit the sharks, gambling a bit and drinking the whole way. 

Anyone who has wandered the Strip can tell you exactly how fucking awesomely preposterous it is - like the spoiled, overindulged offspring of Tony Montana, flaunting a wealth that means nothing, like bathing in champagne that costs $2 a bottle or surfing an ocean of pesos, building giant plasticine effigies of Roman civilization with none of the transcendence of time but thrice the august majesty (lookin' at you, Caesar's Palace, you grand crapbastard).

We know it's a facade, we feel the hollow insides and we celebrate the skin of it because it's something to celebrate, as if we as a society are so hyperly aware of our absence of depth that we just told ourselves, "Ah, fuck it. We will never build anything greater than our ego.  Put an Eiffel Tower on it."

And then, amidst all of that, are a bunch of card-snapping whore solicitors.

You know who I mean - those people standing on every single corner slapping business cards for hookers with balloon boobs and nipple stars, shoving them in your face as you pass by.  It's a Vegas tradition: hookers with business cards.

David and I pokemoned the fuck out of those cards.

We got them all.  Every single one of them.  We accept every card with grace, and if a solicitor does not offer one, we request one.  Our pockets are bulging, my purse is completely jammed with hooker business cards.  By the end of the round trip up and down we count 894 cards. 

Then we get drunk, lose a bunch of money playing craps (lame) and more playing blackjack (lamer) and decide to head back out to the Strip, but this time we pick a corner and start snapping cards at tourists.  They hate us. 

After about fifteen minutes (probably more like four minutes, who are we kidding?) a man struggles up to us.

"Yo.  Ya'll are on my corner."

David and I look at each other.

I don't know what to say.  "Uhhhhhmmmmm." 

"Well, we were just...well..." David begins, doing an awkward giggle scoff.  "We just...we have all these cards." 

"Yeah, see?"  I pull them out of my pockets. 

"Well.  Ya'll wanna traffic?  Here, feed that garbage can.  Go on.  Feed it.  Here.  Take these." He gives us his cards.  We get back to snapping.

This guy is awesome.  He buys us forties, tells us all about bein' a pimp.

"Is it hard out there for a pimp?" I ask.  "You got a whole bunch of bitches jumpin ship?"

"Girl what?"  He's never seen Hustle and Flow. 

I last only for about an hour.  Maybe it was twenty minutes.  Time in Vegas is different than everywhere else.  But either way, eventually I decide to tap out and go to bed.

"I got a suite up at Harrahs," he says when I say goodbye.  Wanna come over?  Party?"

Terrified of being sold into sexual slavery and waking up in Bangkok less a kidney and clitoris, I politely decline.  Besides, Bangkok is one of those places I never, ever want to visit because it's hot and there are 14 million fucking people walking around and I hate crowds.  Hate them.  If New York City made me claustrophobic, what would Bangkok do to me?

David, however, agrees to go.  I'm too tired to care.

"So," I said to David the next morning, over bloody mary breakfast, "What did you do last night?"

David's grin spreads over his face and he raises his eyebrows high.  "Not cocaine."