Lucky Me

It sounded like the start of a letter to Penthouse Forum. My girlfriend Jenni’s 18-year-old twin sisters were coming to Vegas for the weekend. Eighteen isn’t old enough to drink or gamble, so I had to find something for them to do. Adam Ant was running through my head but instead I got them Ricky Martin tickets. For Jenni and her roommate I got VIP seats to the opening of the new Palms theater with Gwen Stefani. Me, I’d rather smoke a Cohiba out on the North Show Terrace at the Wynn or get in between the 400-thread-count Egyptian sheets with Jenni and watch Rounders for the 37^th time. Or just watch Jenni. But the girls weren’t in town yet so I went over to Caesars Palace to play a little video poker.

I had been asking the bosses at Caesars to put in one or two of my favorite machines: $100 video poker where you only needed to bet $300 to get the maximum payout on the Royal Flush rather than the usual $500. I strolled into the high-limit room and saw them right in the front, where a trio of Red, White, and Blue slot machines used to be. I drew a marker and had them set the machine for credit play, so it wouldn’t stop every time I hit a payout of $1200 or more. Instead a watcher would watch me and write down all the information to report to the IRS.

The marker lasted about as long as a lap dance from a 20-year-old stripper, and a second marker vanished just as quick. I texted Jenni to meet the limo driver when she arrived at McCarran, then stuck the Nokia back in the cell-phone pocket of my Lucky Brands. Jeans have had that pocket as long as I can recall, back even before cell phones were invented let alone small enough to fit there. What the hell was it originally for? I took out another marker.

It was one of those gambling sessions you always remember, and not in a good way. I got stuck fast. Then I dug the hole deeper and deeper. I wanted to get unstuck before Jenni arrived. But by the time her plane landed all I had to show for my gambling was a stack of markers big enough to plug up the toilet if you tried to flush them. I licked my wounds and took Jenni over to the Wynn where we ate at the only gourmet restaurant that was still open, Corsa. She had an eggplant parmesan that would make Julia Child swear off red meat. During dinner and after, we remembered all the things we enjoyed about each other.

I came back in the morning and played the same machine some more. I couldn’t hit anything so I went over to the Palms to play in the Ultimate Blackjack Tour tournament. I advanced all the way to the semifinals, where I got seated at top pro Anthony Curtis’s left. I decided my strategy would be to get one chip ahead of him and then copy him. Of course, we both busted.

I went back and played some more and kept losing. I thought I had to bottom out eventually but I finally gave up stuck a whopping $150k. I took Jenni to Okada for some Divine Droplets. Good sake drowns all sorrows.

The next day my parachute finally opened. I played and played on the same money and then held the queen and ten of clubs and in popped a royal flush for $240,000. Unstuck! I had been hammering on these $100 machines all over town for a couple years now and this was my first royal flush. I snapped a pic with my Nokia and sent it to Jenni. Then I hit the ducks, twice, for $60k a pop. It was the kind of day that makes you feel like you can walk on water in your black Bruno Maglis. The girls all went off to their concerts and we went for a smoke afterwards overlooking the Lake of Dreams.

I came back Sunday morning and started feeding the ducks again. At first, I wanted to get unstuck and stubbornly played the same machine till it hit. Now I was on a roll and wanted to play it while it was hot. There was something vaguely wrong with that logic but I couldn’t quite figure out what. I was stuck about $60k on the morning when it dealt me the ten through ace of diamonds.

A dealt royal flush, my first ever, and it was another $240k. Now I was playing on the house’s money, big time, and I decided to just keep riding my streak. I had clubs and diamonds; now I was going for hearts and spades. Royal for the cycle, yeah.

I had to wrap up at eight because the girls had spent the afternoon shopping for me at Nordstrom and wanted me to do a fashion show for them before they went home that night. They were the kind of clothes that would make Paris Hilton drop her cell phone. The girls went home and I had dinner at the Country Club with my friend Barry and the 2004 Justin Isosceles.

Monday morning I got up but my machine was being played by one of the local high-limit players. Bastard. He told me he’d be wrapping up around 9:30 if I wanted to play it then. Oh yeah, I did. I got coffee and came back around 9:30 and started playing. Around ten, a supervisor approached and asked me if the technicians could check something. I wasn’t surprised. When machines pay out like that they always check to make sure the chips are sealed and so on. I cashed out and watched as they opened up the machine. To my great surprise, though, they found something they didn’t like and told me they were going to have to shut it down and change the chip. Apparently it had been set looser than they had intended. They were going to tighten it up, which would take them about an hour. Since I was scheduled to fly out to Reno in the afternoon that seemed like a good place to stop for the weekend with a very, very nice win. The kind that dreams are made of.

Lucky me.

Interview with a vampire

He wasn’t sporting a three-day growth of beard because it was trendy, even for thirty-something guys in Reno. He just hadn’t shaved.

He was sitting at the video-poker machine at the end of the row at the Grand Sierra Resort in Reno, formerly the Reno Hilton, formerly the MGM Grand. He was waiting to be paid for a jackpot when I hit one myself. His face fell. He looked at the five figures flashing on my screen like the captain of the high-school chess team looks at the head cheerleader: it was something he wanted but something he would never get. “You come here a lot?” he asked. Sometimes, I said. I asked his name and, casting his eyes quickly around the room like a kid about to steal a Snickers bar from the candy rack at the drug store, he hesitated and told me.

I asked him if he lived in Reno. “Near here,” he said. “How about you?” I told him Seattle. “My girlfriend – wife, actually – is from Oregon,” he said. “You must get a lot of tax forms playing that big.” I told him yeah, I did. He said, “I do this for a living. I keep all my money in silver. I haven’t filed a tax return for 10 years. You don’t have to file a return. As long as you don’t, they can’t do anything to you.” I said I expected they could throw you in prison. He looked like I’d just dinged the door on his newly restored 1960 Chevy. “No, the income tax is unconstitutional. The Supreme Court ruled that.”

I nodded. “Good luck to you, sir,” I said. Then I asked him if he showed an ID when they gave him one of these tax forms. He said yes. “Does it have your address on it?” It’s a mailbox, he said. “Then the mailbox company has your real address,” I said. “Well, they did at one time,” he said. He had moved around a lot. “Aren’t you worried they’ll show up at your mailbox one day and cart you off to prison?”

“What are they gonna do?” he said. “Stake it out for two weeks?

“Maybe,” I said. “If they want you bad enough.” They came with the money and the tax form, which I signed hurriedly like you signed your monthly rent check. He asked if I was married. “Used to be,” I said.

“I have an 18-year-old wife,” he said. “Well, it’s not a legal marriage.”

“Eighteen,” I said. “How old are you?”

“Thirty-five.”

I told him I was going to have to put this in my seamy underblog but given the circumstances I wouldn’t use his real name. “I’ll call you Marty,” I said.

“Why Marty?” I shrugged. “Can you call me Scooter? I’ve always wanted to be called Scooter. Wait, on second thought you’d better not. Everybody knows I want to be called Scooter.”

“I’ll call you Marty.” I started playing again and he showed no signs of leaving. “So how’d you meet this 18-year-old, Marty? On the Internet?” He said yeah. “Chat room? ‘Middle-aged guys seek teenage girls who like daddy types’?” His eyes widened like I’d given him a good lead he hadn’t thought of.

“It was actually on a site called VampireFreaks.com,” Marty said. I whipped out my notepad and started scribbling. I wanted to remember this nightmare when I woke up.

“Is that a good place to meet 18-year-old girls?” I asked. He shrugged.

“She was 16 when we met. We chatted online for a couple weeks and then met in person. On her 18^th birthday I drove to Oregon to pick her up and get married.”

“Eugene, Oregon?” I asked.

Marty’s eyes narrowed. “How’d you know?”

I shrugged. “Eugene is where girls like that live,” I said. I looked at him. “Did you consider the possibility that when you got to Eugene you’d find an FBI agent waiting for you?”

“Yeah,” said Marty. I played a few hands of video poker but he was quiet like anything he said could be used against him.

“Why marry an 18-year-old?” I asked.

“We have a lot in common,” Marty said. “We like food, and wine. And sex.”

“Wine?” I said. “But she’s not old enough to drink.”

“Oh, anyone can drink wine,” Marty said. “It’s a religious exemption. The Supreme Court ruled.”

I blinked, but decided not to pursue it. “So what does she do all day when you’re out gambling?”

“Hangs out at home,” he said. “She’s not old enough to come into the casino.” He brightened. “Pretty soon I’m going to buy a sailboat and sail to Hawaii.”

“There’s no gambling in Hawaii,” I said. “What are you going to do for a living?” He shrugged.

“Say,” said Marty, “How’d you like to meet my wife? We could have dinner!” I was in too far to stop now so I said I’d love to. I told him to meet me at the steakhouse at seven. I cashed out and went up to the suite to start writing.

At seven I came down to the steakhouse. I half-assumed they wouldn’t show but Marty was right on time. The vampire girl I expected to be all decked out in Goth but she surprised me by showing up in Gap instead. She was cute with shoulder-length blonde hair and a pink sweater that covered the kind of territory Lewis and Clark would have abandoned their expedition to explore. I’ll call her Natasha. I sat opposite her with Marty in the middle. I ordered 2002 B.V. George Latour. Natasha didn’t get carded although, to be fair, she was almost 19 and looked it.

I told Natasha I expected her to be all Goth and she said she didn’t do that any more. She didn’t like being around all the negative attitudes. She just had the one piercing now, on her belly button. Did I want to see? Of course I did. She lifted her top to show a cute teenage navel with a stickpin through it. I don’t remember much about the stickpin.

“So, do you like vampires?” I asked.

“I am a vampire,” said Natasha.

“I thought you had to kill someone and suck their blood to be a vampire,” I said.

She scrunched her face. “No,” she said sweetly, “you just have to have a fantasy of sucking blood – or wanting your blood to be sucked.” She glanced knowingly at Marty.

“So you had ads posted on VampireFreaks that you wanted to suck each other’s blood?”

“Actually,” said Natasha, “he wanted to deflower a virgin and I wanted to be deflowered.” I ordered a bunch of appetizers to share and, true to Marty’s word, they both enjoyed the food and wine. “I still have my lesbian virginity,” she said. “I keep trying to meet someone online but the ones who want to meet me always turn out to be guys.” I nodded sympathetically.

Natasha suggested we go up to my suite after dinner so Marty could sober up. I figured the worst that could happen was they would kill me, suck my blood, and steal my PIN number, so I led them up. Marty asked for some water and I pointed to the $6 liter of Voss on the counter. He poured himself a glass. Natasha asked for one and he poured one for her too.

We sat on the sofa awhile. Marty was pretty quiet, probably thinking about his sailboat. Natasha took off her shoes and put her bare feet up on the coffee table. With the toenails painted red, I figured if she dangled those feet out a car window they were good for six or seven blocks of gridlock. I snapped a photo and her cheeks turned red to match her toenails but she didn’t move.

Natasha said it was close to her 19^th birthday. Marty piped up. “Yeah, you’re gonna be too old for me.”

“You keep saying that,” said Natasha.

“It’s just a joke,” Marty said.

Natasha turned to me. “There ought to be some limit on how many times you can say something and have it still be a joke.” Marty was silent. I figured she still had a good six and a half years till she was half my age.

Marty excused himself to the T-room and I asked Natasha if she had career plans. “I want to be a wildlife photographer,” she said. “I’m worried about going to Hawaii. There’s not much of the kind of wildlife I want to photograph there.” I didn’t get the whole Hawaii thing. No gambling, no wildlife. It seemed like a pipe dream to me but maybe a pipe dream was better than the reality of this hell-hole called Reno. “He said he was going to get me a camera for my birthday,” she said, “but I think he changed his mind.”

Marty returned and drank the last of the Voss water. At about the same time we all decided it was time to call it a night.

Before they left, Natasha gave me her Myspace address. I gave it 10-1 it wasn’t fake. “You know,” whispered Natasha, pausing at the door, “I don’t let just anyone take pictures of my feet.”

Harrah’s Reno Blues

She was a dancer, a redhead. She went by Veronica, but last month it was Victoria. Who knows what it will be next month.

Gabe is my man in Reno. He’s an executive host at Harrah’s, where if you look me up in the computer tiny showgirls wearing pink feathers pop out of the USB ports and do fan dances on the monitor. In Vegas I’m a big player but in Reno, I’m a true whale. When I walk into a casino they quake with fear and drool with greed. This time they got the best of me, to the tune of a year or two’s Ivy League tuition. But Gabe was my man. He made sure I loved coming back to this dilapidated town, the alcoholism capital of the universe, Reno Nevada, the biggest shitty little city in the world. We caught up in the steakhouse over two bottles of 1997 Stag’s Leap SLV Cabernet. The big news was about the redhead. She was getting married.

I remembered very well the night last month we all went to the Keystone Cue and Cushion to shoot some pool and hang out with Kenny, the dying bartender. Kenny was best friends with Brian, the male dancer, who was dating Veronica, whom we kept calling Victoria but never got corrected. Veronica was very friendly and pleasant as I beat her at pool and when I called it a night, leaving the rest of the crew at the bar, she walked me to the door and lingered. I looked her up and down and then looked back inside at Brian and Kyle’s curious eyes. She had the kind of body that made you want to buy a trapeze just to see if you still had any acrobatics left in you. But redheads are bad luck, I thought, and decided to give it a pass as I turned and walked out the door alone. Besides, as tired as I was and as much as I had to drink, it would have taken an hour or more for the Cialis to kick in.

When I had woken the next morning, Kyle heard me making coffee and tiptoed out of his bedroom wrapped in a white towel. “Shh,” he said with a bashful grin. “Victoria’s still here.” Redheads are bad luck, I thought to myself. Kyle told me when I had left it got tense and awkward at the bar. Veronica wanted to play charades to break the tension. Something had to break, because she ended up in my suite with the kid.

I roused myself from my reverie and blinked at Gabe. “She’s getting married?” I said. “To Brian?”

“No,” said Gabe, “to Kenny.” The redhead had dumped Brian and was marrying his dying best friend. That made less sense to me than most nonsense in this crazy town. Why would a dame dump a guy and then marry his dying best friend two weeks later? I texted Kyle with the news but my subconscious was working overtime. Penn Jillette, of Penn & Teller, had told me it only took seven seconds from the moment of the Challenger disaster to the time the first sick joke was posted on the Internet. I felt horrible but it jumped into my throat like a rabid bullfrog and banged on my vocal chords from the inside until I choked it out. “Gabe—” I slapped my hand over my mouth, trying not to say it, but Satan grabbed my arm with his clammy claw and pulled my hand away.

“I married a man in Reno, just…to…watch…him…die…”

Gabe recoiled in horror. I recoiled in horror. I blamed Jenni. She was a comedy writer and had warped my brain.

Gabe and I finished off the SLV and called it an early night.

I forgot all about the redhead the next night when Gabe and I went back to the FQ Men’s Club and partied with a hot 38-year-old Ukrainian named Elena who chain-sipped $10 Pinot Noirs while saying over and over again, “I am bad girl.” Gabe and I drank $7 waters and sat back and enjoyed the show while I smoked a Macanudo. “She’s getting married tomorrow,” Gabe said. “Veronica.” I took a deep puff on the Macanudo and let it out slowly.

The next evening I was ready to see the redhead. Gabe had told me the early, non-topless show “Let the Good Times Roll” was way better than the topless show (if only by virtue of not having a puppet) so we got a comp and went in. The house manager gave me a warm greeting but then sat us way in the back, at a booth where we had to look through people’s heads to see the stage. Gabe went to talk to him and we got moved to the front. I wasn’t sure if Veronica would be there but sure enough she came out smiling and dancing, a real pro. I texted back and forth with Kyle, who still wasn’t sure if I was making the whole thing up. You can’t make this stuff up.

The show was hot – hot enough to make a fat man drop a plate of nachos piled high with guacamole and jack. The girls, including the redhead, changed clothes on stage until you thought the lace on their white underwear would wear off. They started in pajamas, then stripped down to basics, then modeled a wardrobe that would have been on the cover of the catalog if Victoria’s Secret made cheerleading outfits.

Halfway through the show the manager came down and leaned into me. The points on his lapels were sharp enough to spear a boiled shrimp and dip it in cocktail sauce. “Have you been taking pictures?” he yelled through “I can cook too” from Leonard Bernstein’s On the Town. “One of the dancers saw you taking pictures with your cell phone,” he yelled. I had finished texting with the kid and had put my cell phone back in my pocket so I just showed him my empty palms, thinking that would end the kafuffle. It didn’t. The guy persisted, now yelling at another big player we were sharing the table with. That guy was on the verge of tears. He wasn’t a small guy.

The manager turned to Gabe and yelled, “Make sure all photos are deleted.” We were all very confused. My cell-phone camera barely had the horsepower to snap Jimmy Durante’s nose from six inches and I was pretty sure the other guy didn’t even have a camera. They sure were afraid of someone taking grainy pictures of the kind of show you usually see for free on a cruise ship. It didn’t add up, but then not much did in this batty burg.

After the show the redhead didn’t make an appearance in the lobby with the other performers. I guess she was in a hurry to get to her wedding night. Gabe and I had dinner at the Italian restaurant. We tried the 1999 B.V. George Latour. I thought about taking a picture of the label but who knows, they might have called the cops. I thought I could hear the whistle blowing…

As nutty as all this seemed to me, Kyle, stuck back in Georgia going to classes, must have been even more confused. He had called Victoria/Veronica a few times after that magic night a month ago but lately the redhead hadn’t been answering his calls. I was back in my room writing when Kyle messaged me that she was on the phone with him. The hotel wanted her to fill out a security statement about the photo incident and she wanted to know if I had sent him any photos. He told her no and waited for her to bring up her marriage but she didn’t. Finally he asked about it but he didn’t get much of an answer. I guess that was to be expected.

I figure it all came down to the boyfriend, Brian. He was close to the redhead. Maybe even in love with her, who knows. And when you lose the one you love, you look for someone to blame. You can’t blame your best friend, dying of cancer. Maybe you blame the guy with glasses in the front row, the guy enjoying your performance and texting his buddy in Georgia to share the fun.

Or maybe you just hang your head and cry.

The Ballad of Billy G.

I’d met Billy G., a rumpled, weathered, fiftyish gambler, up at Lake Tahoe last year. He was playing video poker next to me and bragging about the three porn actresses he had been lounging by the pool with all last week in Vegas. “What business are you in?” I had asked Billy.

“Porn,” he said. He had one of those gravelly, whispery voices that made it seem like everything he was saying was at the very least confidential and quite possibly a state secret.

Billy owned a bunch of web sites where people paid to watch videos of porn actresses. He explained the business to me: “There are about 15,000 porn actresses,” Billy said. “There are another 15,000 wannabes. But there are only 15 bona fide porn stars.” One of these, who went by the name Memphis Monroe, was Billy’s crown jewel. She was one of the top girls at Hustler and Billy had some kind of ancillary rights deal with her that seemed to keep him in gambling money.

Billy wore a Caesars Palace baseball cap, jeans, and a denim jacket with a small sewn-on patch of an eagle that wasn’t quite the Post Office bird or the one on the dollar bill. “What’s that eagle?” I asked. “It’s designer,” he said. “It’s from Guess.”

Billy had flown in from New Orleans, where a friend of his had just been murdered, possibly by the psycho woman he had been shacking up with. Billy went down to the precinct to give them the lead but the detective, Billy said, wanted $5000 to move the case up towards the top of the list. “We got a lot of homicides here,” he said, “and only a few detectives.”

I told Billy I had just been playing at the Rio with no luck and I was taking the evening off from gambling. “I don’t play at the Rio any more,” Billy said. “I got robbed there.” He had a half-empty Corona sitting in front of him but he hadn’t taken a sip the whole time and he didn’t now.

“In your room?” I asked.

Yeah, said Billy. “I had tickets to the big fight. I was driving my daughter back to college in Kansas. Damn car broke down and by the time I got her back and got to the airport I missed my flight. Took the next flight, got into Vegas, cabbed over to Thomas and Mack and got to my seat just in time to see them lift the winner up on their shoulders. I didn’t see one punch.” He looked at me for sympathy, which I gave him.

“So I took a cab to the Rio, where I was staying, checked in, and had one drink at the bar.” He repeated, “One drink! Then I went to the men’s room. I left my drink on the bar.” He shook his head. “Well, you know how these pimps and hos work. They wait back there by the bar where you can’t see them. Then when you go to the bathroom they slip something in your drink. They wait 10 minutes, then they come up to you.” He lightly grabbed my left arm. “ ‘Come with me,’ they say. Richard, I don’t remember one thing. Not one single thing.”

“I slept for a full day. When I woke up, they had taken $4000 in cash and about $8000 in jewelry. But Richard, this drug—” Billy closed his eyes and opened them again. “When I woke up I saw a piece of paper on the floor with four numbers written on it. This drug—” He smiled and shook his head like you do when you wake up and find the team you had that hunch on won in a blowout but you never put down your bet.

“Of course, it was my PIN number. This drug makes you tell them anything and you don’t remember one thing. Not one thing.”

I tried to think of something to say but not one thing came.

Billy leaned back and smiled. “Anyway,” he said. “That’s why I don’t play at the Rio. Hey, give me your cell number so we can hang out when we’re in town.”

I thought quick. “So did they charge anything before you canceled your cards?”

He smiled and nodded slowly. “Gas,” said Billy. “The fuckers charged eight tanks of gas, one right after the other, at the same gas station. Here, give me your phone, I’ll call mine and then we’ll both have each other’s numbers.” I didn’t see any way out of it.

“So,” I said, “Tell me again about those porn stars you lie out with by the pool.” He consummated the mating of our cell phones.

“Not porn stars,” he corrected. “Porn actresses. There are only about 15 porn stars.” He smiled and winked. “And one of them is my girl.”

“A geek girl who came to Chiang Mai…”

She wasn’t an uberbabe. Oh, she was hot all right. But she was a bad girl. She liked to break the rules.

My brother Mike wasn’t feeling well so he went home to get some rest while I hit the cigar store and walked around the Night Bazaar smoking a Romeo y Julieta. I was on a small street with beer bars when a very cute American girl came up to me and asked if I knew where she could get a cigar. She had long strawberry blonde hair and wore a white peasant skirt and a black tank top with a few beads of sweat on her bare shoulders. “I’ll take you,” I said.

She told me her name was Kitty and she was from California. She had come to Thailand, she said, to try to cure her addictions to smoking, drinking, and sex.

"How old are you?" I asked. "Twenty-three," she said. “Well,” I said, “you’ve definitely come to the right place.” The cigar store didn’t have her brand so she asked if I knew anyplace else. I said my hotel had a cigar bar. She didn’t say anything so I said, “Follow me.”

At the hotel the lobby was full of uniformed guards and a long red carpet was laid out to the porte-cochere. I told Kitty the guards were probably there in preparation for the princess checking in. She was very excited about the princess and wanted to see her so even though the cigar bar didn’t have her brand, she ordered a pack of cigarettes and a glass of Champagne and tipped the bartender 100 baht to tell her when the princess arrived. I wanted a clear head to remember this story. I just drank water.

Kitty, she told me, was working as a computer technician in Silicon Valley until they caught her and a coworker naked in the network operation center. After that, she said, she decided she liked having sex with strangers so much she might as well get paid for it so she hung out a shingle on the Internet and had been whoring for about a year. And here I thought if you wanted to find skanky geek girls you had to go to Reno. “I was porting a Unix app to a milspec-secure system,” Kitty said. I told her I used to be a computer programmer. “What language did you program in?” I told her C. “Good,” she said. “If you had said Java I would have no respect for you. Although I barely qualified for Mensa myself.”

At this point I was frantically making mental notes. I didn’t want to forget anything. I was making up limericks in my head and grinning uncontrollably, which she probably misconstrued:

A geek girl who came to Chiang Mai
Must be nuts to compete with the Thai.
“Well, I like to get laid,”
She said, “and to get paid--
“And you never do know till you try.”

Just then the bartender bowed in: “Scuse me! Princess coming!” Kitty leapt up and I followed her to the railing where we saw several people enter the hotel and turn toward the elevators. She wanted a better look so we ran down the stairs but by the time we got there they were rolling up the red carpet. There were several other farangs loitering about the lobby princess-watching so Kitty chatted them up and verified she was part of that initial group. She asked one of the hotel staff, who said the princess had arrived but had gone to the fitness center. “She’s in her 50s, right?” Kitty said. “I bet she’s had a lot of work done.” Then she realized you can get locked in a dungeon for speaking ill of the royal family, and quickly added, “I mean she works out a lot, right? In the fitness center.” I sidled away from her until I was sure the soldiers showed no interest.

We went back to the bar and she chain-smoked L&Ms while downing three glasses of Champagne I figured I was going to get stuck for, but it was worth the story. “Are you hungry?” she asked, and ordered several tapas. Then she noticed I wasn’t drinking alcohol and said I was being ungentlemanly so I ordered a glass of Bordeaux. Finally the bar closed. I signed the bill and watched as they put the bottles away, one by one. She showed no signs of leaving. “Well,” I said, “it looks like they’re closing the bar down.” She didn’t move.

“I was drinking and smoking with a guy three days ago,” she said. “But I was still being celibate.”

“How’s that working for you?” I said.

“I haven’t decided,” she said. “But it was what I wanted three days ago. I’m not sure what I want today.”

“Why did you come to Thailand?” I asked.

“I was too into the orgy scene in LA and it was getting hairy,” she said. “And California is tough when you don’t drive. I can’t get a driver’s license. I have blackouts.” I stared. “But I’d love to take flying lessons.” She looked at me with big brown eyes. “Maybe you could help me out with flying lessons.”

“How can you fly if you have blackouts?” I asked.

“Oh, I’d always have an instructor with me,” she said. One of the bartenders had left. The other, a Thai girl about Kitty’s age, stood waiting. “I lost my virginity when I was 13,” Kitty said. “A friend of my brother’s gave me a back rub while we were watching TV. He asked me if I wanted to try having sex. I said OK.”

“How old was he?” I asked.

“Twenty. I liked it so much he couldn’t believe it was my first time.”

“Did the guy go to prison?” I asked.

“Oh no,” she said. “I didn’t turn him in. I could have, but I didn’t want to.” She finished her Champagne and then held the empty glass out in the direction of my remaining Bordeaux. I poured half of what I had left into her glass. I signed the bill for 4400 baht ($125). We drained the last of the wine. “I really get off on guys who have moral issues with me,” she said. “It was a lot easier to find them when I was underage.” She looked down at her empty glass. “Is there somewhere else we can keep drinking?”

Oh, dear reader. I want you to know that it is only for your sake – the sake of the story -- that I swallowed hard and suggested we go back to my room to partake of my complimentary minibar, sadly underutilized except for a few glasses of Ballantine 12 year Scotch by my brother. Without a word, she rose and followed me.

Kitty headed right for the outdoor daybed and lit up an L&M. “Do you have a laptop?” she asked? “I’ll show you some pictures.” Now this was 21^st-Century geek girl ho marketing. She showed me some legit modeling she had done and then a tasteful nude spread. The idea of this pretty Jewish California girl plying her trade in Chiang Mai was jaw-droppingly fascinating to me. She came from a place where men gladly pay $500 for an hour of her time to a land where guys pay $30 to mate with a girl who wouldn’t give them a dirty look in the USA.

“My feet are cold,” she said. “Do you have an extra pair of socks?” I went inside, taking my laptop with me so the Mensa nymphomaniac couldn’t surreptitiously install a Trojan on it while I wasn’t looking, and returned with a pair of black Jhane Barnes dress socks. I expected never to see them again. Maybe she collected men’s socks like some guys collect women’s panties. Maybe she nailed them up on her wall.

Kitty put on the socks. “Thank you,” she said. “That’s very gentlemanly of you.” She sipped Semillon Blanc. I lit her second-to-last L&M for her and gazed out over the pool, the reflecting lights, and the Ping river. I refilled her glass. She opened her purse and took out a roll-on of citronella mosquito repellent, applying it to herself and then offering it to me. “No thanks,” I said, “I’m taken care of.” She nodded and was quiet awhile. I lit her last L&M for her.

“I really like anal sex,” she said. “Do you?”

Somehow I managed to get her down to the porte-cochere. I planned to call a taxi for her but she said she wanted a tuk-tuk instead, essentially a motorized tricycle with a back seat and canopy. The doorman was aghast but she insisted. “That way I can smoke in the back,” she said. She climbed into the tuk-tuk, still wearing my Jhane Barnes black socks, and looked back hopefully at me as the driver pulled out. I waved at her to stop but the driver pulled away. She kept looking and I waved again. She told the driver to come back. I sprinted down the driveway.

“How much is the fare?” I asked. 300 baht. I pulled it out and gave it to her. It was worth $8.

“That’s very gentlemanly of you,” said Kitty as the tuk-tuk pulled away, “very gentlemanly.” Her wide eyes looked back at me till she was out of sight.

Sexy Poom Pui

In the morning I took the elevator down to the lobby to meet Mike and discovered the place packed full of checking-out guests. A Thai pianist was playing Carpenters songs badly. Mike came in and we breakfasted on the included buffet, same as I remember it from five years ago.

The weather was perfect throughout my visit. Thailand has three seasons: hot, rainy, and cold, and the cold season is the only reasonable time to come. In Chiang Mai, in the north of Thailand, evenings actually got a bit cool sometimes and it was rarely too hot during the day. Mike played the five-star tour guide, taking me to an out-of-the-way Issan restaurant for dinner. At my request we tried the local fish – chon and thap tim -- which were wonderful. Thailand is full of inexplicable cross-cultural elements and when I asked Mike why this restaurant had sketches of American Indians mounted on pillars, or why there was a set of deer antlers hanging over the kitchen, he just smiled.

We went to buy me a cheap cell phone to use in Thailand and ended up in a mall that had at least 20 cell-phone stores, some selling new phones and some used. I got a $50 Nokia and 250 baht worth of service which, at one baht per call during the daytime under their promotion, would last well beyond the week. In most countries other than the US, incoming calls are free, so I had no worries about running out of minutes.

Chiang Mai is more of a livable city than a destination for foreign tourists but like Bangkok and Phuket it has lots of bars. The gogo bars are much like men’s clubs in America except the girls don’t really dance and they don’t even go topless; they just sway around in bikinis or underwear. There are no lap dances and no rip-off VIP room. Of course 100% of them are hookers whereas in America it’s closer to 50%. In addition to gogo bars, the streets are lined with beer bars, much more casual venues but still with hookers. One of them was called “Sexy Poom Pui” (pot belly), clearly designed to attract a certain class of clientele. Mike took me on a tour but after five trips to Thailand these all blended together in a chorus of “hello! how you?”

Mike took me back to the Sheraton but there was a partial power failure and they weren’t letting anyone up the elevators. After 15 minutes or so the problem cleared up and I ascended the tower. They still had the sign pictorially prohibiting the smelly durian fruit in the elevator. Mike’s condo was being renovated so we decided to stay in Chiang Mai the entire visit. Astonishingly, though, almost all the hotels were fully booked, including the Sheraton. We’d have to address this situation tomorrow.

You want seamy?

With the imminent implosion of the Stardust, the Las Vegas landmark where I gambled through the night the weekend I turned 21, it gets harder and harder to find in Sin City the dirty, gritty experience loyal readers demand of my seamy underblog. So with a scant few days on the calendar until my big Circle Pacific trip, I pinged Kyle and asked if he wanted to hit Reno for the weekend. He made a courtesy call to his financial backers and then booked a flight.

Kyle got into Reno a couple hours earlier than I did so at my suggestion he took the shuttle to the Grand Sierra (formerly Reno Hilton) and played some poker. When I landed I rented a Ford Explorer from Hertz and picked up a grinning Kyle in front of the Sierra. He was up just a little in the ultra-loose 3/6 Hold ‘Em game but it amused him no end to see people call a river bet and turn over Jack high in a six-way pot.

It was a quick hop to Harrah’s, where my buddies and hosts John and Gabe had put us in the Ambassador Suite. We did a walking tour of downtown Reno before dinner. You want seamy? Virginia Street has been torn up for years, cyclone fences and detour signs routing cars and pedestrians in serpentine patterns. Buildings are boarded up. Soot stains drip from windows of burned-out edifices. The “O” is dark atop city hall, which proudly proclaims “REN.” Casinos, bars, and strip clubs populate downtown in the Biggest Little City in the World. We looked out the window of the Ambassador suite and drank it all in.

Gabe and John took us to the steakhouse, where the food and service excelled as usual. We started with an Amarone while the 2002 Phelps Insignia decanted. I’d been a good workout hound so I decided to indulge in the escargot and filet mignon, with a table-prepared Caesar salad in the interregnum. After dinner it wasn’t hard to drag the boys to the FQ Men’s Club, scene of my recent geek-girl encounter, but my hopes of a repeat night of fantasy turned out to be chimerical. Once again the place was filled with hotties but most of the ones we talked to quickly lost interest when we declined the “VIP room” treatment, where you get to pay $250 for a half-hour of lap dances. “And we also accept tips,” one hustler said.

The exception was a sweet 21-year-old with a sunny smile named Summer. She just plonked herself down next to Kyle and hung out with us, ordering sushi for herself while I smoked a cigar. Yes, that’s right. Strip clubs and brothels are now the only place in Nevada where you can smoke and eat at the same time. Summer sat with us until it was time for her act, which we watched appreciatively.

My second visit to FQ confirms it sports much hotter strippers than most men’s clubs I’ve been to. Without that magical geek connection, though, we left the club at a decent hour and returned to the Ambassador Suite to find Kahlua nips waiting for us in our respective bedrooms, along with a bountiful gift basket in the living room and a cornucopia of undrinkable Pepsi products in the refrigerator. I really hope the new owners of Harrah’s sell the company to Coca-Cola.

Saturday we had lunch from the coffee shop menu in the Italian restaurant because the coffee shop was closed for renovation. Unlike Vegas, where most of the resorts have some healthy choices on the menu, Harrah’s Reno had all-carb all-fat all the time. I had a greasy sandwich and then went to the gym to work out. Kyle and I played a little 3/6 Hold ‘Em at the El Dorado and watched the Seahawks stumble to victory before Gabe took us for dinner to Ichiban, the excellent Japanese restaurant in the hotel. There we had a bottle of Mikune “Root of Innocence” sake. It was good but no Divine Droplets. We had the teppanyaki, done well in standard style, and then Gabe invited the two lesbians sitting next to him to join us at the topless show “Rock My Ride.” They happily assented and we all huggled into a VIP booth to watch the show. It was a standard topless revue with the exception of a very long and tedious puppet act. The dancing girls were beautiful and only one had implants.

After the show Gabe suggested we hit the trendy new nightclub in town, 210 North. For the hottest club in town on a Saturday night, it was pretty dead. I spent a fair amount of time trying to order Scotch from a ditzy blonde bartender who didn’t know what “neat” meant but I ended up with a yummy Bowmore 17. We split that popsicle stand in short order but on the way out a young man exclaimed, “You’re that poker guy!” He emoted as if I was his long-lost brother for the better part of a minute and I left him with a smile and well wishes.

We returned to Harrah’s and the lounge there, Sapphire, where two of the dancers from Rock My Ride were relaxing and two young nurses from California were exuberantly dancing. The nurses grabbed me for a dance but Gabe was waving me over to the show dancers’ table so I extricated myself and left Kyle to take care of the nurses. Victoria, the redheaded dancer from the topless show, introduced herself and said she bet I didn’t recognize her because she was wearing a wig in the act. I bet her I could think of a way to recognize her and she said, “I’m not showing you my boobs!” “Seen ‘em,” I said.

We closed down Sapphire and then all went to a gritty, seamy local hangout called Keystone Cue and Cushion, a combination nightclub, diner, and pool hall. “The strippers come here after work,” Gabe said. We went to the bar, where smoking was no longer allowed although management didn’t care if you did – at this point any potential enforcement is simply a $100 fine for the smoker. They did, however, have to remove the ashtrays so you needed a glass of water if you wanted to safely park your ashes. Gabe and the dancers all knew the bartender, Kenny. Victoria filled me in: Kenny had been diagnosed long ago with terminal cancer but had long since outlived his expiration date so he was just taking each day as if it were his last.

We played a little eight ball while Gabe sipped a drink and waxed philosophical to Kyle and Kenny. Then came the news that Kenny needed a ride to the hospital because he was suffering blackouts, but he would wait until his relief came. Apparently this was not an uncommon occurrence. Everyone seemed cool with it so we returned to our pool game. No one was keeping track but I went undefeated.

We had flights the next morning so I reluctantly returned to the Ambassador suite while the 21-year-old Kyle stayed up all night flirting with the dancers and listening to Gabe’s progressively existential philosophizing. For some, a weekend in Reno may be too long. For others, it leaves you wanting more. Either way, you want seamy? You got it.

Hookers to the left of me, lawyers to the right of me

Despite, or perhaps because of, its status as the world’s top vacation destination, Las Vegas is one of the best places in the world to have a great meal by yourself. Many of the best restaurants in Las Vegas have full-service bars where you can dine solo, and with the smoking ban about to take effect, eating in the bar becomes an even better option.

I spent Christmas evening at the bar at N9ne steakhouse, where they were still allowing smoking until Jan. 2. The bartenders were worried about business but I told them not to – this has happened before in many other cities and the bars do just fine. There are more drinkers who will forego indoor smoking than non-smokers who will put up with smoke just to have a drink.

Two attractive girls sitting to my left chatted me up over a dozen Kumamoto oysters. After a few minutes I ascertained that they were professionals, in the sense of the oldest profession. I asked the one next to me if she had a web site or myspace but apparently she hadn't gone high-tech yet. Soon they tired of my deviation from their sales script and migrated to a table full of twenty-something boys.

On my right were three more attractive women. The lithe brunette next to me referred to the other two as her "crew" and tried to sell me on the blonde farthest from me, an attorney who was 35 and never been married. Hookers to the left of me; lawyers to the right of me. I wondered which occupation was considered more reprehensible.

Meanwhile, I ordered and enjoyed the lemon chicken special. They were serving the 2003 Palm Terrace Cabernet by the glass. I have been justifiably avoiding the vintage but this was an exception, lush and full of berries. I finished dinner and went up to the party suite, where apparently the people above had overflowed the tub because there was a nice-sized waterfall coming down from the light fixture over the wet bar. I called maintenance and they put a barrel under it then went off to investigate.

Next I tried the bar at Okada, one of my favorite restaurants in Las Vegas and not just because of Sabrina the teenage sommelier. Now that I’m a workout hound I’m craving more fish than steak and Okada fills the bill admirably. I ordered a couple of chef Masa’s specials, now available a la carte instead of as a tasting menu. I started with a tai snapper consommé. Thin soups like this are an opportunity to serve up flavor with almost no calories and this one did that to perfection. Other than a few julienned vegetables floating around, it was pure flavor. Sabrina came around and let me try some 1986 Ch. Margaux that had been opened the day before. Without vacuum sealing, the wine reminded me of seeing an elderly Lauren Bacall do those TV commercials. When she was 19 and filming To Have and Have Not she may have been the most desirable woman in the world. Drinking the day-old wine, I could tell it was once beautiful. Most of the structure was gone but like listening to jazz, even when they aren’t playing the melody I can still hear it. I ordered the next special, a tasty roast duck breast, to go with the red, then finished the meal by sipping some Divine Droplets sake.

Happy new year to my loyal readers!

Lac d’Argent

Most people don’t realize the big payoff of going to a wine-tasting event. There are many small payoffs, actually, which is why you’ll find small and large groups tasting wines most everywhere. In my case, a local uberbabe invited me to a monthly gathering of the Seattle Wine Society. It used to be called the Seattle Enological society until there was a violent dispute about the spelling of “Oenological” and they changed it to “Wine.”

While most wine tastings are intimate affairs, and some attempt to combine trendy spirituality with veiled alcoholism, the Seattle Wine Society gathering is more like a high-school bake sale. $45 a couple gets you 10 tickets apiece, each good for a small pour of one of the dozens of wines set out. They have food stations with hors d’oeuvres, which each require their own special ticket, and desserts, which are there for the taking but which as a rule I don’t eat.

Two kinds of people attend affairs like this. The first is the wine taster. The taster brings his own wine glasses, wears tweed and perhaps an ascot, and takes a mere sip of each offering before dumping the rest into the provided receptacles. He rinses his glass with water between tastes and perhaps finds some bread to cleanse the palate as well. He nods, wrinkles his nose, raises his eyebrows, and takes notes.

The second is the wine drinker. To the drinker, the point of the affair is to drink a healthy amount of the best wine possible. Uber and I were drinkers. On a tip we were directed to a table with wines from a vintner that makes custom-label wines for restaurants and corporate parties. These wines did not require tickets. Unfortunately they were pouring sparkling wine this month in recognition of the holiday season and we both prefer reds so we didn’t guzzle the free stuff.

Of course local Northwest wines dominated the tasting and I discovered some new blood. The 2003 Silver Lake Winery Cabernet, rated Best Buy-outstanding by Wine Press Northwest, was just that. By the end of the evening, having used four or five tickets on the Silver Lake, we were on a first name basis with the volunteer pouring it and began ordering in French: “Lac d’Argent, s.v.p.” Alas, there were more than a few genuine oenophiles present and competition for the Silver Lake became fierce. As we set up a human wall around the Cab table, we joined forces with two uberhot winebabes who turned out to be sisters. When the last bottle of Lac d’Argent was gone, the diaspora began in earnest and soon we were on our way. We had learned about one nice inexpensive wine, but that was not the big payoff of the event.

No, like Thomas Edison, quoted for saying he had invented 10,000 ways not to make a light bulb, we had learned a dozen or so wines not to order. And that was the big payoff.

Kyle and Tyler’s Excellent Adventure

Every young man, on his first trip to Vegas as an adult, has one great misconception about the town. It’s not about gambling. No, people don’t really expect to win. It’s not about getting a bargain. No, people really expect to be ripped off. No, there’s a greater misconception and it's universal among men. What is it? Read on.

My online poker buddy Kyle and his best friend Tyler had been looking forward to their first post-21 trip to Vegas, planned for right after finals, and I made sure I was in town to properly show them the sin in Sin City. Naturally the first stop was the Caesars Palace Seven Stars Lounge and uberbabe Elisabeth. We got there just before closing but she made a mean martini and launched us to the poker room, where we tried in vain to start up a game of HORSE. We played some 3/6 Hold ‘Em into the wee hours.

The boys had booked an economical package including a room at Harrah’s that was virtually free. I decided to pull a few strings and get a penthouse suite at the Palms, which I handed them the keys to. You shouldn’t have to stay at Harrah’s your first night in Vegas. Kyle liked the steam room but Tyler was all over the five-head shower with light show.

As loyal readers know, my favorite Vegas sin is gluttony. I exposed the boys to some fine victuals – Little Buddha and Nove at the Palms, with a brief stop at the Playboy Club, and Vic and Anthony’s and Grotto at the Golden Nugget. At Vic and Anthony’s, one of the best old-school steakhouses in town, we uncorked some fine vino: 1999 Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin Rosé to start, followed by the 2002 Stag’s Leap Fay Cabernet. I remembered to ask them to leave the butter off the steak and we thoroughly enjoyed the meal. Grotto was unimpressive but they had a nice inexpensive Italian wine list and we were accompanied by an uberhot pokerbabe geek girl we ran into at Caesars who I had previously met at Binion’s.

The next two nights we got a great 4/8 HORSE game going at Caesars. The boys kept asking about going to a strip club but we ended up playing low-stakes poker every night instead. You see, that’s the great misconception about Las Vegas, that it has phenomenal, earth-shattering strip clubs. In reality, the sex industry in Vegas is overpriced and underdelivers. Like many facets of this money-machine town, it’s a sucker game.

But I told the boys to take a detour next time they’re near Tampa.

December in Vegas

Recent racy posts in my seamy underblog are drawing concerned mail from the erudite Oxford researchers who read me patiently, hoping one day I will say something about memes, so today I’ll slip back into the usual chronicling of my effete lifestyle rather than focus on cautionary tales involving bankrolls and body parts.

Two local uberbabes who had been wanting to treat me to dinner took me to SW Steakhouse at the Wynn. They were a little miffed because, although they were good customers of the casino and had reservations, management had treated them to a healthy serving of the new cruelty until I showed up, at which point the staff jumped to attention, rearranged the seating chart, put us in the best table in the house, and asked if there was anything else I needed Mr. Gladstone. I tried to get the ubers to sit facing the Lake of Dreams show but they preferred to let me have the view so they could people-watch. The frog was broken anyway. We went with cocktails as the ubers were not big drinkers and I was fighting off a cold and didn’t need the histamines.

I still had some hated shopping to do at the Wynn so I just went into the company store and bought the same kind of mattress and bedding they had in the rooms to replace the bed in my guest room that my ex-wife took when she moved out. Later I thought it might be a mistake to have the guest bed be that comfortable. It could encourage long stays by relatives.

Harrah’s, known by some as the “evil empire” because of the mathematical precision with which they extract the maximum value from gamblers while returning the minimum in comps, agreed to be bought out yesterday. The deal should take a year to consummate. Gamblers are hoping the acquiring firms will split up Harrah’s to increase competition among casinos and, like the French response to the post-WWII plan to divide Germany in two, hope they will consider the idea of many smaller pieces. Whatever they do, I hope I still get to use the new Qua baths and spa at Caesars Palace. I’m becoming addicted to the tea sommelier.

The Adventures of Captain Penis

Ah, Las Vegas. There were still 400,000 homes without power in greater Seattle but Las Vegas Boulevard had all the neon lights anyone could wish for. I checked into Caesars Palace, spelled with no apostrophe despite the typo on the new street sign on Flamingo, and caught up on world affairs. Iggy posted a link to the longest thread in the history of the Two-Plus-Two poker discussion board, posted by ex-stripper Brandi Hawbaker, a recent debutante on the tournament circuit. Brandi accuses “Captain” Tom Franklin of offering to mentor her in poker, conning her out of $12,000 and:

The next night, he crawled into bed with me naked. His penis on my back, frighten me, and woke me in the middle of the night. I freaked out and spent the rest of the night in the bathroom. I crawled to sleep on the floor and used the towels as blankets. I was traumatized…Every day he started having talks with me at breakfast/lunch.. how he was doing so much for me and that I needed to do something for him. He said at that time that I could not have my money back and that I had to "huggle" with him…When I got to Foxwoods, everything had changed. He had a young 22 year old girl with him, named Amanda. We were all supposed to meet at the airport but his flight was delayed, so we shared a cab. My friend was still with me at the time, and she confronted Amanda. Amanda came out and said that she met him two years ago when she was with her mom and that for two years Tom has promised her a job in his company ~ which was still yet to happen, as Tom does not have a company. She talked about how he makes her skin crawl and that she has turned into an alcoholic and that she dropped out of school and is now taking care of her mom and dad with the little money that Tom is giving her to have sex with him.

You can’t make this stuff up. I hope everyone now sees why I always ask girls if they are strippers first, before it escalates to the huggle.

I played in the Ultimate Poker Challenge $340 event on Sunday, going busto 25th of 95 starters when my Jacks couldn’t hold up against Ace-Jack. Before I busted I witnessed one of the worst plays I’d ever seen. With several limpers, a good player raised in the big blind and got two callers. The flop came King-Nine-Eight rainbow. The good player, with about 10,000 left, bet 2300, about the size of the pot and 25 less than the third player to act had in front of him. The second player, who had about 15,000, called, as did the short stack. The turn was a blank. It checked to the short stack, who put in his last quarter and both called. The river was a Queen. The good player thought a bit and then checked. The second player moved in and the first player folded. The second player showed Seven-Six. The all-in player showed Ten-Seven and won the pot with Ten high. If you’re not sure why that was the worst play ever, you should probably give up poker and try gardening.

A prior UPC event was the last time I chose to engage Captain Tom in conversation. He had tried to skip his big blind by claiming the button hadn’t been moved before the break and, when caught, accused me of being a cheater. So Brandi’s story is far from the first attack on the character of Captain Tom.

Now let us turn to Brandi. An innocent babe taken in by wolves? Probably not. Online pro Mark “Newhizzle” Newhouse posted a long story of his own involving Brandi and how she blew about $30k in one of his online accounts:

the next day when i got up, i tried to get onto stars, and my password was changed, i asked her wtf is going on, and she said she wanted it to be a surprise how much she was up, i was basically like, [censored] that, get me on my account, and she told me she busted it, i obviously got pissed, but she has a way of making me feel so bad for her that i couldnt stay mad for that long(yes, im a [censored] idiot) she called a few people to try to get money back for me, but she couldnt get anything, she told me straight up to keep quiet while she was on the phone with them because the only way that she could get money from guys is if they think that she wants to [censored] them, that pretty much changed my perspective of her, now i realzed that she was a scandalous bitch anyway, she got all depressed and locked herself in the bathroom that nigth, and i heard a glass break while she was in there(she has cuts on her arms from cutting herself, she gets extreamly depressed) i got really worried about her and knocked on the door and asked if everything was ok and if i could come in, she said she was taking a bath and to leave her alone, i shouldnt be listening outside the door, i was in a complete frenzy hoping that she wasnt going to kill herself and my friend called me and told me that mr. foo(90% VPIP full ring and quite possibly the best poker player ever, he was up easily 200k in like 3 days of destroying all the pros) was downstairs, so i went to go play poker and get the [censored] away from the room when i got back up, she was passed out in the bath, using towels as blankets and on the bathroom wall, written in blood, it said, "i will fly one day" so now im freaking out and i wake her up, she had made a pretty deep cut in her leg

But wait! Here’s the best part:

in the car ride back to vegas, brandi told me that she got her ex to put her in a satellite on the condition that she let him [censored] her in the ass, then she said, id rather let you do it, you want to? i pretty much lost all respect for her after she told me that i ended up putting her in a satellite because i felt so bad for her

No, you can’t make this stuff up. Just more role modeling from the only sport you can play while drinking beer.

Yours is a very bad DSL company

The next morning I went down to the gym at Wynn to work out and found the perfect blonde from Toronto dutifully toning every muscle in her youthful body with ostensible husband David standing nearby in workout gear. “Nice supervising,” I told him. I guess you don’t let that one out of your sight for a minute.

This time of year plans never work. With airports and highways filled with amateur travelers, vacationing employees replaced by inexperienced substitutes, and hostile weather over most of the northern hemisphere, it’s no surprise when even the most ossified traveler cracks. I finished up the shopping the next morning and then headed to the airport. Headwinds made the flight a half-hour late and my seat opponent was a large infrequent traveler who wanted to chat me up to mitigate his fear of flying.

On the parking shuttle in Seattle, a doddering old man took my bag when he got off. When I discovered the only remaining bags weren’t mine, the driver radioed the gate to ask everyone to double-check their luggage. I drove up in the rain behind a line of three cars being held up. The doddering old guy got out, opened his trunk, looked at a corner of my bag, said, “Yup, it’s mine,” and closed his trunk. I stood in the rain and, gritting my teeth and smiling, restraining my strangling hands a la Dr. Strangelove, asked him to check again. He reopened the trunk, looked at the same corner of my bag, and said, “That’s mine.” I reached in and lifted my luggage tag into view, then wordlessly removed the bag from his trunk, walked back through the rain to my trunk, and loaded the bag.

When I got home, Verizon had turned off my Internet, leaving only a browser screen saying to call them. I called them but they were closed from 6 p.m. to 8 a.m. so I watched a couple episodes of West Wing season seven and finally got to sleep. When I woke I saw it was just after eight. I immediately called Verizon and spoke to six different individuals, none of whom could explain why my service was cut off, but all of whom were very clear it would take up to 48 hours to restore. I asked to speak to the vice president of customer service, but apparently they don’t have one, so I settled for a one-month credit, although I had no confidence this same screw-up wouldn’t happen again next month.

The service actually resumed in only a little over an hour. I got a little work done and then the lights flickered in the strong winds. Now my Internet was down again. Steve was on his way over to meet me for dinner but I called Verizon tech support and got someone in India who, after making me do a list of ridiculous things, decided my modem was fried. She said I would have to call Verizon sales to get another one. “And let me guess…they’re not open?” “Oh my goodness no. It is well after 6:30!”

Fortunately I realized I could just drive to the CompUSA a mile a way and pick up a new DSL modem, so Steve and I drove over there, got one, left it in the house, and headed to Yarrow Bay Grill for a nice meal. Just as we were leaving the parking garage after dinner, the lights flickered and went out. “Ha! We sure timed that one right!” I said, not realizing that the flicker was the result of Puget Sound Energy throwing the switch on 700,000 homes, including both of ours, due to widespread wind damage

I spent the night in the dark but by morning the thermometer had dropped to near freezing and the power showed no signs of going back on. I booked a room in downtown Seattle and called a local uberbabe to join me downtown for dinner. In the hotel room I fired up OpenTable and saw a name I hadn’t seen before, Qube. It was close to the hotel so I booked a table. It turned out to be the first night they were open! We shared two of the four tasting menus, the surf and the turf. The surf was absolutely fabulous, beginning with salmon prepared three ways and moving on to prawns three ways (hence the “qube”). The turf was good as well, especially the game duck. They had my favorite sake, Divine Droplets, making the meal a complete score. When you lose power – make PowerAde!

It looked like power might be out for days. Fortunately, tomorrow I was flying to Vegas.

Fish from soup to nuts

With most of my friends leaving Las Vegas by Monday night I still had one more day of shopping to take care of, the nadir of which was a ballroom hallway filled with smokers at Caesars Palace getting their two-week reprieve from being forced to be considerate. I spoke to a lady who said she had asked a security guard what they were doing about the smoking ban. “Nothing,” the guard said, “because we don’t have to.”

The apex of the day was dinner at Okada with gambling buddy Alan. Sabrina the teenage sommelier picked out a fabulous 1990 Chassagne-Montrachet Maison Leroy. I rarely drink older Pinot Noirs because I don’t know how to avoid the ones that have become weak and watery but this one was in top form, lush and winy. Sabrina rarely lets me down. As usual we invited her to hang out with us after work and as always she politely declined. Because she is as beautiful as she is talented Sabrina has developed an elaborate fable about being engaged to a guy in another State to fend off all but the most persistent admirers. My usual opening lines (“Hello, I’m incredibly wealthy” and “Are you a stripper?”) seemed inadequate to the task.

Alan and I ate very healthy, mostly sashimi, though I added a delicious miso-glazed black cod. While the meal was fish from soup to nuts, the table talk was an olla podrida of topics. To call Alan an excellent conversationalist is an unfair underselling of his talents. I frequently tell him he could be one of the top talk-show hosts in the world. He not only has a wealth of knowledge and strong opinions on practically everything, but he also can rattle off a ten-minute extemporaneous monologue replete with dramatic structure, suspense, and a punch line before opening the floor to questions. Tonight he explained to me why the movie Running on Empty, with Judd Hirsch, was perhaps the most perfect movie ever made and he couldn’t understand why Hirsch wasn’t acclaimed as one of the world’s greatest actors. He also chided me for misstating in a prior blog entry that he showed me pictures of cats on his cell phone. It was actually on his iPod Nano.

After dinner we made a smooth segue to the heated terrace over the Lake of Dreams to smoke a pair of Cohibas and sip some Johnnie Walker Green Label. In walked a young Jewish-looking guy, who turned out to be named David, with three beautiful women, who all turned out to be from Toronto. The question, of course, was how does one guy end up with three girls? What’s their relationship? I hoped to gather material for what is becoming my seamy underblog. I sent Alan over to chat them up and ask them if they were strippers. David claimed to be married to the most attractive of the group, a perfect young blonde barely out of her teens. The two brunettes made up some cockamamie story about accidentally meeting up in Vegas on separate vacations. We pressed further but they sensed we were getting close to the truth and beat a hasty retreat while Alan gave a monologue about what happens with women once you are comfortably in a relationship with them. I don’t remember the whole thing, but it ended, “Women have a plan for the relationship and want you to follow it. They always have a plan. It just never works.”

Shopping

As the last page on the calendar hangs on by a thread of spirit gum, the shops in Las Vegas flood with customers and casinos shower their favorite gamblers with holiday shopping sprees (by the way, email me if you want a great deal on a new high-end watch). As a fish preferred customer, I always get invited to these shopping sprees, which tend to stress me out since I don’t love shopping. It’s like the old Wheel of Fortune where you had to spend the money you won on fabulous prizes you didn’t want. “I’ll just take the cash, Pat.” Bzzt.

There is one time I love shopping: when I go with Jeffrey. Not only does he get perverse pleasure out of torturing the salespeople with his world-class genius in sales and customer service, but his origins in the schmata biz combined with his good taste also make him a prized personal shopper. Years ago he turned me onto Jhane Barnes; today his sartorial approbation goes to James Perse.

Because of all the casino shopping sprees I only had about 15 minutes to go shopping with Jeffrey and Victoria before I drove her to the airport (thanks to the helpful advice of a certain blogging inkhorn I decided not to ask her if she was an ecdysiast). Fortunately I got to have dinner with Jeffrey at SW, where we shared a very nice bottle of a Gangloff Côte Rôtie, made primarily from Syrah, and singing with notes of tobacco, coffee, and eucalyptus. Jeffrey’s girlfriend and his youngest daughter, both about the same age, were supposed to join us and drag us to Pure afterwards but enervated from the weekend seminar they crashed in their rooms.

Descent of bloggers

The bloggers have descended on Las Vegas and despite my busy schedule this weekend I dropped by to lunch with 20 or so of my colleagues at the fabulous Wynn buffet. I snagged a seat next to uberbabe Amy Calistri and soaked in the atmosphere of pure brainpower mixed with alcohol fumes so characteristic of a blogger gathering. Michael Craig and I had dinner with Joanne Lutynec at Okada so she could win her bet, then with Carmen at Country Club the next night so that – well, basically just because she’s hot.

Yesterday was supposed to be the first day of the smoking ban in Nevada and although a judge delayed enforcement by a couple weeks most of the restaurants have already complied. Dinner in the front room at Country Club was a delight now that there was no smoke drifting over from the bar. Surprisingly, hallways in the convention centers both at Wynn and Rio still had ashtrays all over but I’m sure that will change.

Today I went over to the Rio and spoke at Jeffrey Gitomer’s success weekend. Jeffrey knows some of the best people, including my old friend Kevin Hogan, who I actually introduced to Jeffrey. Jeffrey is my hero because he always surrounds himself with uberbabes who are not only beautiful but also smart and competent. One of the guest speakers he had lined up was Victoria Labalme, a quick-witted speaker with the looks of a model who uses theatrical performance to make her points. I found her very interesting.

All the bloggers are whoring themselves out for paid reviews now so I’m keeping one step ahead of them with this:

[Advertisement] Two of the hottest topics in online poker these days are which sites have Macintosh software and which sites are still open to US players. The folks at Compatible Poker have organized the answers to both those questions in a way they hope will make them a ton of money in affiliate revenues, and frankly I think they will succeed if they are smart enough to realize, like most smart advertisers, that Lion Tales readers are the pathway to success for them. Anyway, the Mac Poker page on Compatible Poker has a nice list of sites people can play on if they use a Macintosh, and the US accepted poker site page tracks which sites remain open to US players so that if your favorite site shut its doors you’ll have somewhere to shuffle up and deal. Another option would be to move to Canada, although it looks as if they may be moving toward poker prohibition themselves. And Mac users will definitely want to check out the list of compatible sites. In fact, even if you have a PC you should check out the list of Mac sites; remember, your opponents there will be people who have not figured out in 22 years that Microsoft technology is superior in every way.

I’ll leave you with proof that I am in fact the world’s leading authority on dining in Las Vegas. Bon appétit!

Supergirl

I flew down to Vegas for the annual poker blogger’s convention. My seat opponent, an engineer, noticed me tapping away on my Toshiba, glanced at the full overhead bin, and said, “Looks like we have dueling laptop scenarios.” He asked me if they were going to let me keep my laptop on top of my lap during takeoff and I said I didn’t think so. Apparently he was concerned about the distance he would have to travel once they announced device turn-off to safely pack away his computer in his luggage and decided to read a book instead. Meanwhile, the captain got on the PA and implored us to set aside reading materials and listed to the safety briefing which, in his words, “is primarily for your safety.

I tried to think about what the secondary purpose of the briefing might be but was distracted by the presence of two of the most uberhot flight attendants I had seen in a long time, Kara and Michelle, both short blondes. When Kara came to take drink orders I exclaimed, “You’re named after Supergirl!” Now I usually refrain from making jopkes about people’s names because they’ve heard them all before but she was completely oblivious to the fact that the one girl lucky enough to be rescued from the impending doom of the domed city of Argo, itself cast away whole when the planet Krypton exploded, was named Kara. She did say, “But I am Supergirl,” and smiled until the corners of her cute little mouth threatened to puncture the fuselage.

Meanwhile I heard a voice behind me say, “He flopped a flush.” I kneeled on my seat, peered over the back, and saw a nice Jewish guy around 30 with a stunning brunette with a dress that let you see all the way to Cleveland. I chatted him up about poker and when he said he was just starting out I invited him to come play mixed games with the bloggers at the MGM Friday night. On the way out I wished good luck in Vegas to him and his daughter. I make that lame jopke a lot but this time I got a really good reaction out of her. I think they must have been from some place like Pocatello, Idaho, and never run into a smartass before.

I signed up for this web site that pays me to write reviews of other web sites. It’s a marketplace, actually, and they simply list my blog along with its readership ratings and cost to the advertiser. The advertiser purchases the prospective review, I write 200 words and post it, and oh, baby, the money flows in. So here’s my first paid review:

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I’ll leave you with a link to the famous radio interview with Jamie Gold after he won the main event. I finally got around to listening to it. Apparently he’s a natural-born tournament player, possibly the best of all time. Yum yum.

Bunnies galore

Everybody’s been after me to write a review of the new Playboy Club at the Palms so I’ll do that a bit later in this uber-ish post. First I have to report that the ebonizzle angel who sat with me at the N9ne bar yesterday actually gave me a real Myspace page and a real email addy. She promised to accept me as a friend next time she logged in so those of you who see my life as some kind of irresistible train wreck can browse though my 200+ Myspace friends and try to figure out who she is.

I had been in Vegas two days longer than my original plans called for. The forecast in Seattle was rainy and warmer so I planned to return tomorrow per my revised itinerary. Meanwhile I took advantage of the extra days in Vegas to hang out with one of my favorite people in the poker world, Chad Layne. I wanted to treat him to one of the great restaurants at the Palms but he insisted on taking me to Hank’s at the Green Valley Ranch. Hank’s is a virtual clone of T Bone’s at Red Rock so I was hoping they still had my favorite side dish, pureed cauliflower and horseradish. They did, and Chad and I shared a chateaubriand plus the creamed corn and grilled tomatoes. Chad and I usually do Grey Goose rather than wine but I snuck a glass of the 2002 B.R. Cohn Cabernet with the steak.

Apparently my having written about eating for the last 10 or so years qualifies me as some kind of expert. Real writers are calling me for quotes on fine dining in Vegas. When I started coming here 25 years ago it was all about $1.99 prime rib and all-you-can-eat buffets. Every hotel had the steakhouse, the Italian restaurant, and the Chinese restaurant. The emphasis was on cheap, not gourmet. Today you can hardly find a celebrity chef who doesn't have a place in a Strip resort. In the middle of the desert, the freshest exotic seafood in the world is trucked and flown in daily. The tip for two at Guy Savoy is more than most families of four spend on dinner. It's a paradise for the gourmet and the expense-account owner, but the day of the bargain is gone.

After dinner I played a little online with some of the many uber-hot pokerbabes who comprise my fan club on Full Tilt. They all use the two hottest avatars, the one that looks like Shana Hiatt and the one that looks like David Grey’s wife Taylor. Railbirds, who used to ask who I was, have now seen me on TV more than they care to, so now they ask who are these people I’m playing with. “Uber-hot pokerbabes,” I answered. “What’s that mean?” one of the babes asked. “Uber,” I said. It’s blogger for “very.” A fellow player corrected me: “It’s actually German for ‘super.’” Yeah, if you want to get all technical and shiznit. Babe und Überbabe! While all this idle badinage was going on, uberbabe karenr was beating me out of every pot in a heads-up HORSE, sending me on uber-tilt. I might have blown my whole bankroll $20 at a time but thankfully I couldn’t do a rematch because Jim had arrived to take me up to the Playboy Club high atop the Palms’ new Fantasy Tower.

The Playboy Club, at first glance, is a casino. It is, in fact, the first casino with a cover charge in the history of Nevada. The floor is filled with blackjack tables with booths and bars around the outside, all framed by picture windows framing the spectacular view of Las Vegas. Jim was a member, meaning we could sit at a table without getting uber-expensive bottle service, so we did and ordered drinks as he whipped out a pair of cigars with labels I didn’t recognize. “Pre-Castro Cubans,” he said. Wow. I thought it was pretty cool of him to share these ubercigars with someone he had just met. “How much money are you planning to ask me to lend you?” I asked. Fortunately he got my sense of humor and we had a great time talking about all things Vegas, poker, and online. Service at the table was superb: our server came by frequently to check on our drinks and a hautboy policed the ashtrays and empties, even stopping to replace the box of matches I had taken from across the table.

The one thing you think of when you hear Playboy Club, of course, is the bunny, and oh, there were bunnies galore. Our server sported black ears and a little white cottontail (they are now sewn on rather than velcroed – apparently people were grabbing them and selling them on eBay) and in fact even the blackjack dealers were bunnies. They were all nice looking but frankly the Palms had already done a spectacular job of hiring beautiful girls to serve drinks and none of these bunnies had anything on the earless bartenders downstairs at the Mint, who all had an attractive air of professional competence in addition to their pulchritude. Still, bunnies are bunnies and the experience was more than pleasant even though I neither asked for nor received Myspace addresses.

I insisted on paying for the drinks, given the magnitude of his tobacco magnanimity, and left Jim there to hold court with his next wave of friends. On the way down the elevator there was a guy wearing some kind of caveman outfit with an enormous bejeweled watch and a silver pendant with a script “A.” A girl asked him if the watch was a Breitling. “Yes, it is,” He said casually. “You’re somebody, aren’t you?” she asked. “Who are you?” “Bob,” he said. “Bob? What’s the ‘A’ stand for then?” “Uh…Andy. Bob Andy.” Now Bob Andy could be the world’s biggest TV star and I wouldn’t know it but maybe one of you can recognize the star sighting from my description. And speaking of seeing stars, if there’s anyone left on the Internet who hasn’t seen the photos of Britney Spears getting out of a sports car with no panties: do yourself a favor and don’t look.

Fantasy girls

The final Monday $660 UPC tourney at Binion’s didn’t go so well. The loose aggressive player on my left, Scott Carpenter, instacalled 90% of my opening raises and played back at me every hand. Finally, with Ace-King offsuit, I hit a flop of Ace-Seven-Trey and check-raised him. He had flopped a set of Sevens and I was out early.

That left me free to go back to the Luxor, where I planned to have dinner at the bar at Fusia until I walked past the steakhouse bar and saw three gorgeous creatures dressed in matching denim outfits. I thought they might be performing in the lounge there but it turned out they were Fantasy girls giving out tickets to the new early show on Tuesdays. I bought a bottle of the 2002 Duckhorn Estate Cab and shared it with the girls, then scored VIP tickets for that evening’s show. It’s the best topless show in town, especially when you’ve been partying with Delicia (second from the left) and Tracey (not shown, but the voice on the web site).

With Kirkland reporting 17 and snowy I decided to stay in town a few more days. I moved over to the Palms, largely because I like the gym there (oh yes, I’m a workout dog now). Dinner last night was at the bar at N9ne, one of my favorite places to dine solo. I wasn’t solo for long as a stunning black girl sat down next to me fiddling with her Blackberry and drinking fru-fru girlie drinks. She was waiting for her girlfriend to join her, then they were going to Pure around midnight. She invited me to join them but I’m not really into the club scene so I just asked if she had a web site. She didn’t but she gave me her email and Myspace address. Ha. Fool me once…

Savvy Guy

Benjie and twin brother Mark sprung for the hottest restaurant in town, Guy Savoy (It’s spelled “Guy Savoy,” but it’s pronounced “luxury yacht.) for dinner last night, along with their buddy Nick. I give it mixed reviews. The food itself was superb and the room comfortable. The service, however, was just plain old Vegas-inconsistent. Immediately on being seated, a farm-fresh blonde server offered us a variety of Champagnes by the glass. We decided to look at the menu first but waited several minutes before they were offered. When they came, no amount of preparation could eliminate the sticker shock. The appetizers started in the $40 range and the main courses were around $75 or more. I settled on a $68 bowl of soup made from artichokes and black truffles. It was truly sublime. For the main course I had a pan-roasted mix of three game birds. It was interesting but didn’t blow me away.

At the boys’ request, I ordered the wine, a nice Montrachet to start and then the 1989 Pichon-Longueville Comtesse, one of my favorite second-tier Bordeaux. The friendly sommelier, who remembered me from Craftsteak, decanted the Pichon and when I tasted it I put on my best poker face and said, “You guys wouldn’t like this.” Unfortunately my bluff got called and the wine was gone all too quickly.

During the appetizer a poised redhead planted herself at the tiny bar outside the restaurant and began chattering nonstop at the bartender, all the while glancing and smiling in our direction every minute or two. We were wondering what her deal was. I ventured, “She is probably no innocent to the pleasures of the flesh.” Nick, in his southern drawl, said, “You’re a pretty savvy guy.” So to satisfy my curiosity I got up and moseyed over to the bar, eyeing the racks full of empty Champagne glasses at the back and waiting for a break in her monologue. It never happened, so I returned to the table.

As a rule I don’t eat dessert but they had a cheese cart so I ordered a selection of sheep’s-milk cheeses, my favorite, along with a Jacobo Poli grappa. Nick asked, “Would I like that?” “No,” I said. “I’ll have one o’ them too,” Nick said, obviously giving me no respect after my comment on the Pichon. It was fun watching him screw up his face while drinking it, whooping it up and shouting, “It goes down real smooth, like paint thinner.” The couple at the next table, who were likely celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary with a $1500 meal, raised horrified eyebrows in our direction. “You’ll have to forgive my friend,” I said. “He’s just off the boat from Alamaba.” Then a debate ensued about whether it was physically possible to sail from Alamaba to Las Vegas, or at least to Lake Mead. I decided not to bet against it.

On the way out Nick, who has the skin of an elephant and balls the size of Alabama, successfully chatted up the redhead and got her name. “Did you get her web site?” I asked, about to warn him about the rash of phony Myspace addresses going around. “Nope,” he reported proudly, “But I gave her my number!” That never works for me. He must be a savvy guy.

Geek Girls

I was somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the radio began to lose hold of NPR. I felt a little lightheaded and then suddenly the radio spectrum was filled with country music and Christian stations like a sky full of giant bats. I put aside the fear and loathing and somehow made it back to Caesars Palace to have dinner with Matt Maroon at Bradley Ogden, where I planned to use my once-a-year $400 birthday food comp from Harrah’s. Unfortunately Matt had a plumbing emergency in Akron and had to change his flight, so I called Alan, who was happy to be pressed into service at the last minute to dine at one of his favorite restaurants.

While I waited for Alan to arrive I hung out in Caesars’ Seven Stars Lounge, the über-VIP room open only to those who gamble at least a million dollars a year with Harrah’s. While the room has plush chairs and sofas, original art, and complimentary food and drink, the real star of Seven Stars is Elisabeth, the 23-year-old farm-fresh blonde butler. In addition to being the friendliest person in Las Vegas and very good at what she does, Elisabeth (whose mother put the “s” in her name so she would never be called “Lizzie”) wants to be a scientist some day. Geek girls are my bag but I’d have to take a number with Elisabeth, who’s happily married with a baby, so I content myself with sipping 2002 Joseph Phelps Cabernet, munching on lamb chops, and engaging in geek chat every few minutes when she comes by.

Alan arrived and joined me for the Phelps, which unfortunately had moved to the inferior 2003 vintage, while showing me photographs of cats on his cell phone. It was time for our reservation so we tore ourselves away from the lounge and Elisabeth and segued to Bradley Ogden. We enjoyed squash soup and frogs legs to start, then Alan had the monkfish while I had the pork tenderloin. They had the 2002 Casa Dalla Valle so I introduced Alan to it. After dinner we had a few comp dollars left so we had a couple glasses of the Glen Goyne 17 year single-malt Scotch. The Maroon arrived and we caught up awhile before I retired in anticipation of an early flight to Reno in the morning.

I hate early flights but I wanted to get into Reno in time to get some gambling in and then hang out with my two buddies from New Orleans, John and Gabe, now hosts at Harrah’s Reno. I rented a Mazda 6 from Hertz and pulled it into Harrah’s, where they gave me the Imperial Suite on the key-access top floor. Now getting the Imperial Suite at Harrah’s Reno is a little like getting the Honeymoon Suite at the Days Inn but it was worth it for the reactions from the Chinese women every time I got in the elevator: “Ooh, you top floor! You have good room! You play lots!”

I played lots and then twisted John and Gabe’s arms into joining me for dinner at Harrah’s excellent steakhouse. The waiter suggested a seafood platter to begin and who were we to argue? We drank a nice 2002 California Pinot Noir to start, then went to the 2002 Ch. Pichon-Longueville Bordeaux. I ordered the buffalo topped with thin slices of foie gras and guzzled the Bordeaux to wash away visions of Indian massacres and force-fed geese.

Gabe had a friend who was opening a new restaurant that evening so we took a limo over and discovered the place was crawling with gorgeous young girls, apparently dancers from a nearby men’s club who had been invited to seed the crowd for the group of investors they were entertaining. Two of them glommed onto us right away, getting cozy and chatting us up briefly before inviting me to take them gambling, which basically sounded like inviting me to give them money for nothing, so I politely declined. They asked us to come by the club later and Gabe raved about it so we went over to the FQ Men’s Club right behind Harrah’s, where we had started.

I don’t go to many strip clubs but this was one of the nicest I’d been to. It was uncrowded and full of very pretty girls, some as young as 18 per local ordinance. One very cute, petite blonde around 19, Dawn, approached me and said she’d seen me at the restaurant but didn’t want to intrude. “Intrude away,” I said, and she chatted me up awhile. She had a perkilicious body despite the mandatory Chrysler logo all the strippers seem to have on their lower back. I discovered she was a geek girl and bought a couple lap dances from her at $20 a pop. She kept telling me how klutzy she was in the huge platform shoes she was wearing and proved it by tripping and falling into my lap a few times. I love geek girls.

I paid Dawn for two dances plus one more in advance and she asked for my card. I gave it to her and she wrote down her information on a second card. I guess they don’t give phone numbers any more, just email and Myspace. Gabe got rip-roaring drunk on Sapphire and tonic and when he entered his bellicose phase, unwisely bloviating and gesturing at a table of young Latinos, I ushered him out and implored him to take a cab home. I hung around a few more minutes waiting for Dawn to finish with the Latinos but a stunning mocha 18-year-old named Natasha came up to me and asked if she could dance for me. I heartily assented and even at 3 a.m. it was hard to ignore her charms. We didn’t connect on a geek level like Dawn, though, so I paid her for the one dance, waited a few more minutes in vain for Dawn, then left for the Imperial Suite solo.

I decided to look up Dawn’s Myspace profile to see if there was a note to text her if you wanted her to come over after work but the name she gave me did not exist. The phony phone number of the 20th century has given way, with the dawning of the new millennium, to the phony Myspace. I got to bed around four.