Gone to America

I’m back. I’m alive, unmarried, and still relatively solvent. Relatively. I arrived in the early afternoon on Friday, and checked into my room – plush, by my standards, even though it was one of the cheaper rooms in the Aladdin. I was offered the opportunity to share with another impecunious wedding guest, but I’m not nineteen any more, and I like a room to myself these days. Nice view, too – there’s a picture of it in the Vegas Gallery post.

I immediately launched into a nap – hey, I’d been up really early to catch the flight. I spoke briefly to Julian, who seemed kind of stressed for some reason. He suggested that I meet up with David, a friend of his who had flown in from Portugal the day before. I had met David briefly when he visited New York a few months ago. We hit the floor.

Not that we started gambling straight away – we wandered the strip a little. I wanted to see New York, New York, to see if it really was as odd as I thought it would be. It was. We played roulette there for a little while – my first Vegas gambling experience! David had played before, and had a system of sorts. I had not, and did not. I lost $85, but it was fun – friendly staff, free drinks and so forth.

After that, we crossed the street to the Excalibur. When I say “we crossed the street”, I really mean we were gently conveyed above the street on a moving walkway and softly carried through the doors accompanied by a rousing medieval-style fanfare. We played a few hands of Blackjack (breaking about even) and then continued wandering, through the Luxor and then on into Mandalay Bay, where we ate at the buffet. We did these last three without going outside – they’re all connected. They don’t really want you to go outside, apparently. You might figure out what time it is.

I didn’t really start getting the Vegas thing until after dinner. We went to meet up with various other guests for a drink back at the Aladdin, which was wedding central. Lisa was there, with her friend Liz, her sister Amy and Amy’s boyfriend Isaac. We were joined by my former roommate Andras, who’s currently living and working in Chicago, and very soon to be a father for the first time. His wife Cora didn’t make the trip, for obvious reasons.

We all meandered over to the Bally. It was around this time that I was introduced to the game of craps. It seems complicated at first, but once you actually start playing it’s pretty straightforward. And fun. It’s more fun than blackjack or roulette, because those games are slow. I don’t mean slow to play, but slow in the rate of change of your bankroll. You win a little, you lose a little… Roulette is a particularly excruciating way of watching your money slowly dwindle, come back, dwindle again – inexorably drawn into the house by sheer mathematics. Craps is fast. You go up, you go down – big swings. I broke fairly even that night, and I only left because I realised that I would probably never feel really tired, just fatigued. The light, the noise, the constant free drinks, the extra oxygen they pump in – you need never stop at all.

But I’m in New York now, and I am tired. I’ll pick this up again tomorrow, when I will describe the wedding, and what it’s like to lose $100 in fifteen minutes. And maybe I’ll come up with a more compelling narrative structure than just “and then, and then…”

Or maybe not.