Fear and Loathing in Atlantic City: Part II
We were somewhere around Newark on the edge of Central Jersey when my body locked up and started shutting down. I remember saying something like, “I need coffee, and nicotine, maybe we should pull over…” And suddenly there was this terrible roar all around us and I kept checking for cops as our dirty silver Mustang lunged forward towards Atlantic City and my greasy haired New York attorney switched lanes suddenly and unexpectedly, to pull into a rest stop at ninety miles an hour. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! I’m going to puke before we even make it to a parking space!”
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I got my coffee and as the silver bullet revved up to 4000 rpms, lurching forward, I managed to spill several drops on my scribbled tshirt bought online – the very same shirt I was to wear in public for the next 24 hours. Nevermind that, we has a journey, a purpose, and it was to celebrate the final month of lawless debauchery and wanton freedom allowed only a bachelor of our clan. The call went out and we were to receive it, but not only just to heed its siren lure, but to throttle it, ram it home, and limp back to our respective 9to5s with tales of close calls and herpes, if we were unlucky.
A few hours earlier, I was fighting off the creeping sunlight shedding light on my sins when I got a text: Leaving at 1pm now. Meet at First and 19th. As my alcohol damaged and sleep deprived brain struggled to form coherent thoughts I realized I was naked and not alone. She was putting on her clothes and asking subway directions. Smells snuck up through the covers, assaulting my nose with fowl odors reminiscent of BO, lady juice, semen, and unnatural rectal lubricant. This is what your early twenties smell like I reminded myself, shooing her out the door and heading to the bathroom. No hot water. Just my luck. I would have to piece together my life in time to meet an earlier deadline and prepare myself for the next thirty some hours where I would have to rebuild and destroy myself several times over. So it begins.
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Six hours later, we arrived at our first destination where the majority of our party had been gathered. The establishment, the birthchild of an entrepreneurial alum, was clean and cheery, a different environment than the prisonlike dormitory that I had been used to seeing as a backdrop to our activities, as I had survived undergrad with most of these gentlemen. It was such a scene that a remark was made on our numbers as though we represented a “preppy gang” and the worst we could do was “jump someone and pop their collar,” a true menace to the delicate fashion scene in such a place. My attorney and I were welcomed as latecomers – the last in a band of brothers on a march to Gomorrah. But the question remained; we were prepared for what lay ahead? Could anyone be?
These troubling questions stayed with me as I pursued the next leg of the journey securely in the passenger seat of our silver bullet, my wild eyed attorney spouting off legal defenses commonplace in my lifestyle across the counter of society. We were headed to Atlantic City, a place far beyond the bubble of college where our mutual destructive behaviors developed and thrived. But now we were in a weird place – not students, not adults. Can we handle the additional heavy responsibility that comes with a 401k and monthly rent collector, healthcare provider, and monthly salary? Or were we just the same kids, but with an arsenal of hardened livers, perverse sexual appetites, unsavory humor, deep disposable pockets, and a penchant for public violence? It’s safe to say there are more than a police record and a few unpaid speeding tickets amongst the lot of us collectively. Can we survive the task ahead or would we run into the ultimate ironic conundrum trying to post bail with a wallet full of IOUs? Either way we were headed into dangerous territory – this is the devil’s turf and there are no do overs when the pit boss breathes down your neck.
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We arrived and checked into the cheapest hotel on the strip and it’s safe to say that we weren’t the first gaggle of miscreants trying to stuff the room with double the legal number of numbers, but we might have been the least subtle. Once arrived I evacuated my bowels of the spicy loose beef I suffered at our first layover and was encourage to shower the shit off my dick only to step back into the same coffee stained clothes. Then I brought out the flask of whiskey I had brought with, anticipating trouble and figuring the only proper way was to face it head on and with a BAC to match your credit card interest.
And so we ambled our way towards the nearest casino, fourteen strong or so. Spirits were high and reunions were in the air as one by one we feed ourselves to the beast, passing through rooms of the beat and downtrodden, and their fiscal losses written on their faces. This was Showboat, a tribute to Katrina long before big name companies swooped in and preyed on the weak, overconfident, and stupid enough to stand your ground affront a line up of hurricanes and believing your government had your back. Like the levees, a high price would be placed on overconfidence and the belief that a little bit of intelligence and luck should double your money clip rather than leave your house of cards submerged and forever damp.
Those interested in poker found the poker room right away, like regular politicians at the local brothel settling for the familiar faces. Myself? I needed fast action and a supporting cast. I like to bet against the house, play against the dealer, and sway the dealer to secretly root for me because good business is always grounded in good relations and I like to think everyone wants everyone to win in Blackjack, the ultimate odds on math game where you can pretend you’re smarter than probability. So after a quick bet on black at the roulette table, I doubled up and sat down at the min. $15 blackjack table.
I played and won over my audience to the point where they figured to try the game themselves and eventually stepped away from the table up quite a bit. In a city of displaced thousands we were but a group of fourteen coming together and splitting up like atoms, bouncing off the colorful and noisy environment, but pinballs in a money making machine with no chance for a bonus ball should any one of us fall too far to pick themselves back up. In a scenario to repeat itself frequently for the next twelve hours, we’d walk around independently, inexplicably rejoin ourselves, then break apart again. This was the East Coast Vegas, manageable on a young professional’s bankroll, and as difficult to navigate as a city sidewalk, if that sidewalk was flashing numbers and dollar bills at every turn.
Gambling occured, and by natural odds there were more losers than winners. We collected ourselves at the casino bar where I traded two chips for two beers and a bitter glance from the cash ready bartender. Stories were traded and lives were brought up to date, but the night was eerily young and our wills were not beaten. This was a bachelor party and we wouldn’t leave without a unifying bonding experience to look back on, and our local native had just joined us from the poker room. There was stories of being beat on the flop, followed up with a group desire to grab a bite to eat, reaching a resolution in an every-man-for-himself scramble for boardwalk grub. A giant CareBear was won with a sweet carnival three pointer and given to the bachelor of the evening to humbly drag through the casino and dump on another greedy Asian bitch, much to the chagrin of her male companion. But eventually, the Man Who Knows Atlantic City stepped up.
“Follow me, I have a strip club for us,” might as well have been from the lips of William Wallace to his band of vagabonds, for we rose as one and charged the streets eager for a return on our money that we could rationalize. Twenty minutes later, in the chill of a windy November night, we were still walking. Even passing a windowed doorway containing the likes of approximately eighteen huddled Indian people, “looks like a fucking Holocaust boxcar,” we pressed on, placing the blame on the Statue of Liberty and her standing open invitation. Thirty minutes into the journey we were all mentally chastising ourselves for not inquiring further into the geographical details of the destination. Past outlets, strip malls, and casinos, the group finally turns down a lonely alley silhouetted by a pink neon sign, “Coconuts.”
When a man dressed in all black emerges from the strip club in question that’s a bad sign. Even worse when he talks the group representative into a deal where $10 gets each guy into the club and two free drinks is all it takes to sway the decision making leadership into a business deal garnering well over a hundred dollars for this sordid club. One by one we entered, paid our ten dollars, and were worked over by a metal detecting wand. And our journey came to an end at the saddest little strip club there ever was.
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Inside the “Coconuts” club we found ourselves anything but comfortable. Unlike any strip club I had frequented in the past, this enterprise could have easily been run out of my parents’ basement. There was a raised “stage” lined with tube Christmas lights and marked with one pole. There was a metal table considered a bar and a cart behind the bar with several bottles of alcohol manned by an ornery gentleman scurrying about to cash everyone’s drink coupons, “I work off tips you know.”
However all our “tips” were going to keep the working women away from us. Somehow this bar was an “all black” bar, specializing in “big black women.” The portly broad sandwiching the greasy pole on stage sported a pot belly and seemed to be strangely proud of it. Our group was the only patrons aside from one or two big black men that seemed far more comfortable in than environment than we. One companion made mention of the fact that in between the tits with which he’d been forced into, “smelled like fried chicken.” It took little less than a few shared awkward glances to know we had to get the fuck out of there. The current stage dancer’s belly protruded much further than her chest and yet she seemed to be anything but insecure about her appearance. If we didn’t get out of there soon I worried we’d be witness to a live birth and I had no singles with which to tip the performance so I guzzled my beer and whiskey and urged us all to leave. As we trickled out, I could only note that “I could have stayed home and seen all that on BET if I wanted.” It was time to leave.
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Our group had been split into two as upon leaving the club we came across another one. As promising as the last club had been for me, I was more interested in gambling away my money than paying for any more covers. I went onward, but many were seduced by a full-nude club with BYOB options. They entered the club and made up for the lost time at Coconuts. There was Coronas and girls aplenty. Two men of our group took to the women quite well and negotiated many lap dances – even back to back. When one of our guys was unresponsive physically to the siren’s seductive dance, she inquired as to why he was without “boner.” His response: “You’re doing it wrong.”
Another of our party was receiving a private lap dance when his money ran dry (it may have had to have done with dropping $200 on Blackjack in an hour and splitting sixes!) but he convinced the stripper that he had just lost $3000 that night at the casinos and would be back tomorrow if she could keep dancing for him. She did. And he didn’t.
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The rest of the group continued on, draw like moths to the glowing bright lights of the East Coast Sin City. And so they entered Caesars where the only bet placed, on a slot machine, yielded a $50 win. With that the group exited onto the boardwalk for the very long journey back towards the hotel and the nearest casino.
Somewhere along the treacherous return, trapped between the tall walls and the breaking sea, we came across an establishment named “Lucky Lou’s Tattoo Shop” and whilst discussing the possibilities of a 24 hr tattoo shop in Atlantic City, an bag lady came out from nowhere and proclaimed with a cockney accent, “Lucky Lou can freelance wit the best of ‘em!” As she continued on and on with such pearls of wisdom, I took to mocking her in the best accent I could manage, then we diverted down a side alley as I struck up the chorus to Les Miserables, a performance almost wasted on a non-paying audience of my peers. The night was in full swing and at that point I felt like a winner, not yet a loser.
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But the loser would come. We returned to the nearby casino, after dodging many a wire fence and indirect route, and muscled for room on the Blackjack table. After giving up my seat, I tried my hand at my own table only to go down in chips, and after some failed roulette bets, I was hemorrhaging money. At one point I left Blackjack to place a bet at roulette, and snuck my hand through the crowd to put my money down on red, only to then realize that the round had already been played and the dealer was paying out the bets. I froze up. Would they think that I had been attempting to cheat? Given my ‘late’ bet on red and the little white ball presently riding around the wheel in a red slot, it would appear that I had intended to cheat rather than just unknowingly come late to the game. But I stood by awkwardly and reached to gather my chips. Another gambler stopped my hand and as I contemplated just how ethical it would be for a fellow gambler to turn me in against the house, he mentioned that he was also betting red chips and that we would need to keep our bets separate. My watch read 3:45 a.m. and I nodded consent, grabbed my payout, and ran back to the Blackjack table taking advantage of the early morning alcohol induced confusion and avoiding the glances of the meandering pit bosses looking to put the squeeze on unlawful sneak gamblers as myself in these late hours.
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Back at the tables my party companions had built a repertoire with Irma the dealer. I came into a conversation to hear, “Hit me Irma. No, hit me Irma in the groin.” We indeed had debased ourselves to that level. “We have seen some terrible things tonight Irma. Things no one should see.” And, “That strip club was awful.” “It would have to be awful for these boys to say it was a bad strip club.” They were so right. Our once numerous crowd of loud obnoxious gamblers had degenerated into a scattered clan of frantic bettors loose throughout the city and its many clubs and casinos. Many had returned. I left two of our most promising gamblers at the table and returned with the bachelor of honor to our lowlife hotel. Others would be found unconscious through the establishment, one at the bottom of an abandoned staircase and helped to his room, and I was no different. I’d settle down with some late night ESPN and a bed only to answer a knock and be bounced from my bed position to the floor, awakened three hours later, cold and in sore shape on the floor in my jacket and stained shirt.
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Those two gamblers had yet to return to our room as check out loomed and I grew concerned as to how I’d return to New York. Eventually they would show up, full from a comped casino breakfast and swelling pockets; unlikely winners in a group of beaten turned out losers with stories, hangovers, and memories of strippers’ sweat and tears. We gathered ourselves, shared tales of highs and lows, and ambled our ways to the waiting cars below.
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Driving in disbelief, my nicotine leavened attorney at the wheel, I pleaded for a rest stop on our fast flight home to collect another coffee, stopping to piss on the side of the convenience store just before putting myself in the passenger seat. I would be out a few hundred dollars and brain cells, but puffed on a cigarette and reminisced an evening not to be soon forgotten. For we were each our own Horatio Alger story, pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps and double downs, lurching and veering on the highways home. And as the Mustang pulled ahead onto the NJ Parkway North, my coffee seeped pass the lid onto my already stained shirt, I realized everything was as it appeared twenty four hours earlier, my driver having not slept, and my day just beginning, I would need all the self medication I could get to make it to the wedding, another repeat without the strippers and dealers, just another month ahead.