As sure as the west wind blows, you’ll find me and a pack of heathens in Las Vegas for Halloween. Halloween in Vegas rivals the internationally recognized elite annual celebrations: Carnivale, El Festival de San Fermin, Oktoberfest, Ibiza (all summer long), and La Tomatina de Bunol, to name a few (That’s an exaggeration, but nevertheless H-ween in Vegas rocks).
Our crew was motley once again this year. It consisted of several drunk and gregarious women, a friend with questionable moral standards, and Sal, our resident surgical drinker. Our hotel was mainly booked for storage purposes. Nobody actually expected to be there very often and that assumption fell suit.
We all prepared for the evening with a stomach wrenching anxiety. Well, ‘we’ minus Salomon. He was $800 down at the craps table and 8 drinks into his evening. When he arrived at the room ‘we’ were close to being ready to go. He was a train wreck by the strike of 9pm. We had all been drinking, but nobody else had feverishly swallowed 8 drinks in an hour and a half. Sal strongly resembles a cartoon character when he’s wasted. His face swells and turns shades of red not found in a crayon box.
He was to be Jesus that night. It was his destiny. He was nude beneath a full length tunic. He wore a caveman style wig and beard (they were out of the Jesus type at the costume store) and a rather sacreligious looking gold colored plastic cross around his neck. It was quite clear that he would have the capacity to walk on water if he continued his drinking binge.
As we walked down the hall, elevator bound, I turned his cross around onto his chest sensitive to revealing the branding ‘Made in Taiwan’ on the back of it. I then gave him a hearty pat on the back as if to say, ‘Don’t worry, you’ll survive tonight.’. He responded, “Eric, I never liked you, you smell like cabbage.” I laughed because he gets clever when he drinks.
We arrived at the club; melodic drum&bass with hypnotic high hats filled the air. Everyone was freaky and ready to ‘wang chung’ (please excuse my French). This years hot costume idea followed ‘group themes’. This was best expressed by a Fallopian Swim Team (5 men dressed as sperm with catchy name tags that invoked sexual conotaions).
I danced with several indiscriminate women, indiscriminately, as did my morally challenged accomplice. The gregarious women totally ate each other out and used vibrators on themselves…or something like that. In the melee, Jesus Sal was nowhere to be found. At first we thought nothing of it but as we left the club we wished his resurrection. It was Vegas, and we decided that there are much worse places to be lost, stranded, uncocnious, or making a life altering mistake. Rather than searching high and low, we went to an after hours ‘vampire’-style club and then returned to the hotel in the wee hours to gamble and drink ourselves to sleep. I vaguely remember insulting a woman about her moustache and knuckle hair somewhere betwixt 4:00am and 4:30 wherein I went to bed shortly after.
My cell phone rang at 8:00am. The glaring auditory sensation of sound pierced my sleep with, “Would you like to accept a collect call from….‘I just threw up on my tunic and I want to kill myself’”. I hung up. I knew it was Sal and I just assumed since he displayed vital signs over the phone, he was clearly alive, and I’m no linguist but it sounded to me like he had a great time that night.
the actual account of Sal’s evening are about as truth verified as ‘William Tell and the apple shooting’, or ‘Man’s Evolution’. But, for the record, hearing the shock and fright in his voice behind the collect call robotics is all the truth I need.
Sal was holding that pay phone near Henderson, Nevada, at 8am with pecker salt on his hands, puke on his tunic, wide-eyed. As the story was told by Sal which was then relayed to me by his roommates, after the big fella’ finally returned to society, is this:
He made a beeline to the bar and quickly took 3-5 shots. Roughly half an hour later he got the spins and left the club to hail a cab for the strip club. He grabbed the cab with a woman going in the same direction. She was friendly and they began to kiss. He felt firm symmetrical breasts, Jesus hiked up his tunic and she began to play with his boner. Jesus Sal then went for her goodies only to get a handful of male parts. The kind with short curly hair and wrinkled greasy skin. Sweaty testicles and penis were in his clutches. He squeezed them very tightly as if to rip of a mask revealing a truer identity. No such luck. Then, he opened the moving cab and barrel-rolled to safety.
One young mans innocence was lost that evening, not him. And, if you walk down the strip in the early hours of the morning, you might be able to hear his inner child, weeping pathetically and vomiting.
It took Salomon until never to get back to drinking surgically. He is stone cold sober for the rest of his life.
