I try to.

I try to like Las Vegas.

Yet, every time I go, I end up feeling worse about humanity. There are lovely people in Vegas, undoubtedly. I’ve actually met some wonderful people on previous trips. And the class I taught this week was fantastic - I had a great time with them.

And yet.

Every trip to Vegas ends in a weird promenade of the worst of the worst. The saddest, the most lost, the ones where you wonder if this is the life that they wanted.

Sunday after I had settled into my airline row’s aisle seat and made the obligatory, “Oh goodness is this your buckle?” small talk with my neighbor, she leaned over to me and confided in a light tone, “I’m probably going to throw up at some point.”

“Oh?” I said, a bit surprised by the disclosure.

“Yeah, I get sick on planes. But only if there’s turbulence.”

I couldn’t decide if I was glad for the caveat. Did I want to know about her predilection? Maybe…I guess I could jerk my computer away if I could anticipate her chunky spray. Did I have a job? Was I supposed to be ready, like, Vomit Orange Alert?

Most of the flight she read a magazine or napped and I mostly worried about her vomiting on my legs. Once I caught the uneasy glance of the guy in the window seat and confirmed in his eyes that she had told him too. He was a little jittery. I had the barf bag ready and always made sure my left hand was relatively free and nearby the bag, ready to snatch it up.

As the plane descended into the Vegas airport, we bumped around a bit in the air. Minor turbulence. Not enough enough to upset me and a bit sensitive about turbulence myself.

Nevertheless, she made good on her promise and started barfing. I had snapped my bag open immediately. But she was ready herself for what must be a familiar ritual in her world. I tried to flip fresh air into her face with the magazines from the pouch in front of me and the window seat guy said calming things like, “You’re okay. You’re done now. We’re practically on the ground now.”

She ignored his comforting lies and kept at her chore until the plane was actually taxiing.

Welcome to Vegas.

I don’t gamble and unfortunately, I don’t get into much in the way of live shows. I should. And I have in the past, but all those options exhaust me. I am fairly introverted after a long day of teaching, so all the neon-blinking-screaming slot machines roaming freely throughout a cavernous network of Brazilian-themed bars, leaves me baffled. I need to be somewhere with white walls and quiet noises.

After the first day of teaching, I navigated the screaming slot machines and heavy drinkers and let my guard down when I got to my floor, the 11th floor, exhausted, satisfied. I hadn’t really formulated a plan, but ooo - room service! As I drifted slowly down the extended casino hallways (which always make me think of John Goodman in Barton Fink), I overheard a conversation.

I passed a gentleman in his late 70s wearing a thin rumpled jacket that hung off his shoulder blades. He looked a little rumpled all over, actually. I heard him say into his cell phone, “We’re not leaving until we get back up from down under. What’s that? Oh, I guess a couple thousand or so.”

Ugh.

Maybe he had millions to burn, but that wasn’t the impression I got. I felt like I was witnessing the last desperate phone call before someone loses everything. When I got down to my room but he was gone.

Later that night as I pondered the chance encounter before falling asleep, I wondered if perhaps it was a scam and I was the mark. After all, those two sentences told a whole story and it was awfully convenient I walked by to hear those remarks at that moment. Paranoid? Maybe. I don’t like thinking about the world that way, even if it sometimes happens.

I hope this part of me stays in Vegas.

The class I taught was fun and I got to see a few old work friends, which was fantastic. We had a goofy reception in one of the Irish/Brazilian themed bars and we laughed quite a bit, and celebrating getting to know each other. So there were some nice moments too.

Also while I was in Vegas, my Dad called me to explain that a cousin committed suicide. This is one of my father’s blood nephews, and while we certainly weren’t as close to my Dad’s family as my Mom’s side, this cousin was someone I admired when I was a kid because he was an adult relative and that was reason enough. He had achieved this thing, adulthood, and had figured everything out.

My father communicated the details quietly as if trying to be discrete, although it was just the two of us on the phone. Mom knew everything he did. I couldn’t quite gauge his reaction or read what he was feeling, so I didn’t even realize the extent to his sadness until we were getting off the phone.

“We love you.” he said. “We may not say that often enough, but we love you.”

My folks actually do a pretty great job at letting me know I am loved, so this surprised me a bit.

“Please don’t do anything…” he said.

“Dad, I’m not suicidal.” I assured him. “And I love you guys too. Tell Mom.”

“Okay.” he said and we made our goodbyes.

Granted, this wasn’t good news no matter which state am in, but being in Vegas and seeing the glittering spectacle of slot machines and lost dreams made the news harder to bear. What is it with this town? I mostly watched Law & Order in my hotel room both nights and thought about the relatives who I barely know.

The class ended with a group photo and delighted handshakes that almost turned into hugging.

At the airport yesterday, I bet a dollar in a slot machine because I felt obligated to gamble at least once while in town. I won $1.50 but was too lazy to go cash it out, so I kept pushing the Bet One Credit button until I had lost everything. I felt some empathy for the older man in the hotel hallway. (I have decided to believe it was not a scam.)

On the flight home, I remembered that my friend Chris had dropped off some molasses cookies. I discovered them when I left my house to hop in the cab, surprised to a Tupperware full of cookies sitting on the frozen cement. Chris called me while I was in Vegas to suggest I check my front porch. But I didn’t have time to eat them that morning - cab was waiting - so that meant waiting for me at home were homemade cookies!

This gesture of a friend seemed to affirm how great the twin cities are, the kind of people who would brace below zero weather to put fresh cookies on your doorstep as if it were June.

While musing on my delicious homecoming, I heard a familiar sound and looked up just in time to see the guy in the window seat across the aisle vomit with exuberance against the seat in front of him and then again into his own lap.

I snapped open a barf bag instantly and flung it to the woman across the aisle. She was still having her first reaction to the new stench.

“Here.” I said without much emotion. “Get this to him.”

She did immediately, and he finished his business in the bag. There was an hour’s worth of high altitude drama trying to clean up the seats and relocate his two row-mates. Everyone from nearby rows fretted for him and a nurse was paged to tend to the sick guy. It was quite dramatic, everyone nearby checking their foreheads and wondering if they were going to catch it too. The plane was packed full so my two seatmates eventually returned and reclaimed their seats next to the pale and sweaty sick guy.

Towards the end of the flight, the woman in her aisle and I started chatting. She and her husband had been making me the “What the fuck?” eyes for the previous ten minutes and grinning. Turns out the sick guy was just really, really hung over, which kinda took the empathy factor down a notch or two. They wanted to tell someone.

“You were really quick with that bag,” she whispers across the aisle and we giggled a bit because, really, it was kinda weird that I had responded so quickly, so Ninja-like with the barf bag.

I explained how I had recently acquired a few hours of experience being at Vomit Level Orange on the trip out to Las Vegas.

We marveled together how neither of us had ever sat next to someone sick on a plane in all our years of flying. And here I had encountered it twice in the same week.

“What’s wrong with you?” she teased me.

“It’s not me!” I protested as the landing gear came down, bringing me back home. “It’s Vegas!”

This entry was posted on Friday, January 30th, 2009 at 1:13 am and is filed under Warrior. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.