You know what’s Crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy!™
Vegas Insanity Tour 2010. Now, that’s crazy!!
As I write this story my hands are shaking and my head is foggier than a London morning. My kidneys actually hurt as if I have been beaten with an oar. There are huge chunks of time that are simply missing, like I am Jason Bourne trying to remember who I am and how I became a rum & coke assassin for the CIA.
I have vague memories about elevator rides and screaming God Bless America at the top of my lungs. There are incredible gambling victories and descriptions of swimming pools so cloudy, they look like petri dishes of bacterium.
In the next few editions of THAT IS CRAZY, I will try and piece together a weekend that is all ready legendary in our own minds.
It all starts Friday evening. That’s when I fly into Vegas for the beginning of a military maneuver now dubbed VEGAS INSANITY TOUR 2010. That’s a fancy title for 11 guys, 2 penthouse suites, and 60 hours of debauchery that could be the premise for the Hangover II.
To commemorate the onslaught of brain cell loss and degenerative behavior, the That’s Crazy marketing department printed up t-shirts for this random band of pirates to wear.
Chaotically Incorrect available now for only $29.95
I’d love to show you a picture of the Crazy Crew in their T-shirts, but in true “What happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas” flavor, I forgot to pose the boys in their shirts. I forgot to even take a single picture.
Double-A, our senior Crazy Crew member, and the group’s unofficial “muscle” brought ten shirts to Vegas. You know what shirt he wore every day? His black Chaotically Incorrect DOUBLE XL. Talk about representing bitches!
Now that’s crazy!
To set up the next few stories, you will need to understand that this wasn’t a Vegas trip like your mom and dad use to take. This was a full scale assault on the strip that lasted all of 60 hours, but will be talked about my maids and random hotel guests for years to come.
Did we wake up with a Tiger in the room?
Not exactly, unless you count the little old Greek man who told his wife “I’m going to get a bucket of ice,” and then disappeared for hours in our Penthouse playing drinking games and mumbling something about boobies.
I arrive at the Palazzo Hotel at 5pm Vegas time. As my cab pulls up to the curb, I feel a surge of adrenaline that all athletes feel as they are about to walk onto the field of competition. This isn’t just a boy’s trip; this isn’t just some wind down and relax weekend. This is the superbowl of drinking and creating stories that bring both tears and joy to a man’s soul.
The motto of this weekend is: Last one standing might remember what happened, go ask him.
That’ll be $28.45 the cabbie says as he pops the trunk.
Suddenly I hear the door handle of the cab clanging. Who is opening my door? Wayne Newton? Mike Tyson? The Palazzo bell captain?
NOPE
The Godfather!
His salt and pepper hair is slicked back, puffing out wildly in the back like a madman’s pompadour. He looks like he washed his hair in Listerine then climbed aboard life’s motorcycle to blow dry a little crazy into those thick locks.
The Godfather likes to tell us that his children remind him, he has a hairstyle created by Albert Einstein.
The Godfather is a barrel chested wild man I have known for 30 years. He was there with me in Mexico and on a 1000 other crazy stories and he is leading the charge now. He is the unequivocal host and architect of the Vegas Insanity Tour.
Like Marlon Brando, whatever the Godfather says is law.
“I’ll make you an offer you can’t refuse.”
The Godfather rips open the cab door. “What’s up you crazy son-of-a-bitch,” He bellows with a smile that pierces through the salt and pepper scruff around his lips.
Before I can set a foot on the hotel property, Gonzo steps into the frame.
Gonzo is the Godfather’s brother in law. He is a verbose Mexican American who would just as soon read you a kippling novel as trim your hedges.
Gonzo is a wordsmith himself, but he decides to go ethnic as he says, “Drink up Vato.”
I climb out of the cab, realizing this is one small step for me but one giant leap for derelicts everywhere.
As I stand, the Godfather puts a full beer in my hand and tells me to chug it.
I try and say hello, maybe give someone a hug. Not gonna happen!
The Godfather will have none of it as he shouts CHUG CHUG CHUG!
Doormen and other patrons stare at us curiously.
So much for pacing myself, I think.
I begin chugging the luke warm Heineken. I haven’t eaten all day and I feel the beer sliding down my esophagus, entering a stomach that is nothing more than a storage tank for bile.
After a few difficult breaths, I finish the contents. I feel a gas ball blistering up my wind pipe. It explodes into the dry Vegas air with a brine like stench.
Before I have time to wipe the tears from my eyes, Gonzo is shoving a large red cup in my other hand.
“What’s this?
“Don’t worry about it. You got some catching up to do,” Gonzo says taking my 1980 era suit case.
He eyes it with disgust and calls me Dirk Diggler. A reference to the famous 70’s porn legend.
The appellation makes me smile, as it really does summarize my allegiance to the decade of Ronald Regan.
Gonzo fancies himself a new millennium man, full of hair gel and shaved private parts. My attraction and down right devotion to a decade that spawned WHAM infuriates this bilingual S.O.B.
“Let’s go F***Stick,” he says thrusting the dark colored liquor in my face. “You got some Catching up to do.”
Catching Up? These lunatics have only been here a few hours, and somehow the inequity of inebriation is being calculated and doled out in some sort of primeval penance mandated by the Godfather and his right hand executioner.
I drink as much of the Crown and coke as I can consume.
Suddenly I am being picked up off the ground by Double-A, a massive human, weighing in at 280 pounds and standing some 6 foot 4 inches tall. Double-A is 54 years old, but still stronger than Paul Bunyon’s blue Ox. Like a true Crazy Pirate, Double-A has a prosthetic leg which gives him a signature stride when he ambers through the ornate lobby. All he needs is a parrot and an eye patch and swear we could board another ship and pillage properly.
“How you doing?” Double-A shouts. His question is full of passion and excitement. His voice is filled with the enthusiasm of a little boy who gets to throw a ball with his dad after work.
He puts me down and we start exchanging stories in machine gun staccato that seem to have a beginning but we never finish. We are walking somewhere as we talk, a trek through the luxurious lobby composed of marble and money.
Most people check in when they show up at a hotel. Most people go to their room when they show up at a hotel. The Godfather leads us to a special section of the hotel where only high rollers go. A secret sanctuary of privilege and affluence where you act the part because YOU ARE THE PART.
“Let’s go to the V.I.P chamber,” he says like a sagacious wizard, fueled by magic and waves of CRAZY.
We pull the ornately decorated double doors that lead into a room filled with soft sofas and plush chairs. There are meticulously kept flowers and marble counter tops in a ceiling that is easily 50 feet high. The decorating theme is regal and aristocratic.
Inside we are joined by Big Pat, a white haired virtuoso in his early 50’s. When God made Big Pat, he sprinkled in one part Hell’s Angel, one part Fighting Irish Faithful, one part parish priest, and one part Clark Griswold.
Now break out your charts and graphs for this paragraph. Big Pat is Double-A’s brother in law. They married sisters. Those sisters happen to be the cousins of the women that Gonzo and the Godfather married, who are also brother in laws. That’s tougher than Chinese Math to understand.
Talk about a quartet of crazy!
Big Pat begins to regale me with stories of another recent boy’s trip to Texas where I found myself on the wrong end of a puke bucket.
His voice is booming and a group of Asian tourists in this high priced cathedral of gambling stop to stare.
The story begins, and then whimpers out as another crazy notion fills our thoughts.
And there you have it. For the next 6o hours, The Godfather, Gonzo, Double-A, and Big Pat, along with another host of infamous derelicts with nick names like McGruber, Young Buck, and
Ocho-Cinco, will plant their flag in the collective consciousness of Sin city.
We’ll retell stories that can only be pieced together by 11 hung over idiots, each of whom has one piece to an obfuscated puzzle.
I am going to try and capsulize some of the poignant moments of this non-stop 60-hour wheel-of-fortune gone-mad extravaganza.
Sadly, all this expose may reveal is the startling truth as to why the criminal justice system simply does not work.
stay tuned, but for right now, my hands are shaking so badly, I need to take two aspirin and go to bed.
Bed? I haven’t seen one of those for 60 hours
and that is crazy.