While Las Vegas Sleeps…

I spent Saturday afternoon out in Pahrump, Nevada, at the Sin City Chamber of Commerce’s annual picnic, chili cook-off, and hoe-down (it’s at the Chicken Ranch, so, har-har!) and I was very, very tired when I made it home to Vegas Saturday night. I took a shower to wash off the day, ate some spring rolls and some pho tai nam (which is like my favorite comfort food,) and was asleep just as the sun was setting. It was great for me, actually, because I’ve been experiencing some pretty serious, ass-kicking insomnia. So I woke up on Sunday morning at like 6am, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and wanting to get out, enjoy the day, and have some breakfast…

There isn’t one on my end of town, but I definitely do enjoy going to Omelet House, here in Las Vegas, for a nice breakfast (if you go, go to the one on West Charleston - the quality is better, in my experience, even though the strip center it is in looks pretty old and rundown.) I usually get the Bugsy Siegel, which is as beefy and kickass as you’d expect from an omelet with this name, but lately I’ve been getting a Country Club, add avocado, please.

So after driving up the 15 and exiting west on Charleston, my cohorts and myself pulled up to the stop light in front of Frankie’s, right near UMC Hospital. Across the intersection and in the middle of the street I saw a guy being chased by two other men. It was initially a little alarming until I got a second to pay attention to exactly what I was looking at. The men doing the chasing were in solid blue and solid green. The man running away from them - in a rather scattered, clumsy way - was in all white. You guessed it! A hospital patient escaped from treatment and two orderlies were chasing after him trying to get him to return to the hospital! This poor guy had on nothing but a hospital gown! The reason he was running so clumsily was because the blacktop road was probably stinging the hell out of his bare feet, slowing his jailbreak. What a sight! I wonder if I will ever need to make a sudden, daring escape from University Medical Center? I can promise you that if I do I will definitely have sneakers right under my bed. This poor guy was completely unprepared for this kind of adventure. Fortune favors the prepared.

After our morning’s entertainment we had a great little breakfast. I was up so early I had all sorts of things accomplished before lunch. We had so much time, in fact, that I should have taken Nick for a haircut.

Tags: breakfast, daring escapes, hospital, Omelet House, omelets, patients, UMC, University Medical Center

Outside of my taxi there’s a man screaming obscenities at his friends… or at least the ease with which he insults them implies a long and deep friendship with the group of assholes that just won’t get into the cab fast enough. When they finally get to the taxi it is immediately apparent that this is the most unusual group of people that I’ve ever driven around: the original yelling man looks kind of like Kyle McLachlan …if he was on a diet consisting entirely of cheese. The woman that he lets into the front seat between us looks exactly like Mama Fratelli from the Goonies, and the beefy, high-school football player-looking guy that gets into the back, is apparently her son. He is sitting on one side of a very cute girl with a broken leg and on the other side of her is the biker from Erin Brockovich. None of them can decide on a destination as I drive around aimlessly, but eventually, the extremely drunk “Kyle” convinces them to all go to his house and I modify my destination.

I’m barely five minutes into the journey when Mama Fratelli starts bad mouthing Kyle and telling him to stop what he’s doing. This is where things get strange because as far as I can tell Kyle is not doing anything. I can see him in my peripheral vision and he’s holding a beer in one hand and has the other one resting on the edge of the window. Mama Fratelli barks “Stop it!” in his direction one more time and he makes some comment along the lines of “maybe you’d like it better if I shoved my tongue down your throat?” - something that seems unrelated to anything that has come before. They are all so drunk that I rule out psychedelics even though things between them seem to be taking place on a level of reality that I have no way to access.

A couple more completely mysterious and confusing comments bounce back and forth between them, and a few more things float up from the back seat, and then, all of a sudden, I’m being directed to pull over at the next bar to let these people out. The vibe has completely changed during the drive and I’m more than happy to comply. It turns out that the cute girl and Kyle will be continuing the cab ride and all of the others will remain at the random location to fend for themselves.

As Mama Fratelli is sliding out of the seat she says something rude to Kyle who then wastes no time calling her a cunt. In the two seconds that follow this declaration the son somehow exits the taxi on my side and travels completely around the cab to sucker-punch Kyle in the side of the face. Then, reacting on what seems like instinct, Kyle lashes out with the beer bottle that he is still holding. The bottle breaks on the son’s head and I watch the beer pour out. The whole incident seems way more surreal than any comparable scene from a movie… I mean, he wasn’t even holding the bottle backwards like you’re supposed to when you get into a street fight.

The biker guys manages to break things up and then Kyle is back in the front seat and the doors have been locked. “Just get out of here” seems to be the unanimous verdict and I am once again on my way with a few less passengers than when I started. The entire bar detour lasted probably three minutes and we all seemed unable to process things at first, but after a block or two Kyle starts thinking that he should contact the police. The cute girl says “Forget about it… It’s over. Let’s just go home,” but Kyle can’t let it go. He decides to gather a posse of friends in order to extract some street justice because the call to the police doesn’t go exactly how he planned. The destination changes for what seems like the fifth or sixth time and it turns out that I’m taking them back within a block of where I originally picked them up. Unfortunately for Kyle, he can’t seem to handle the stress of the last stop light and he exits the cab without warning and wanders across the street leaving the cute broken-leg girl with the fare.

Unfortunately for her, she has no cash and has to get her friends to pay when I drop her off. I’m sure there’s a lesson to be learned somewhere in this tale, but the only thing that stands out to me is “Try not to look like characters from movies.”

Tags: Las Vegas, Las Vegas fights, Las Vegas stories, Las Vegas taxis, taxicab confessions, The Goonies

Well it’s high season for the conventions and bachelor parties, that is for sure! I do admit, though, I am more of a fan of the convention-goers than the bachelor parties. Parties are pretty predictable to the point that I could break it down into three types of guys that are almost always present at one of these gatherings. Kind of humorous, too, for sure!

1) The Cool Guy – This is the guy who thinks his ducks are all in a row by organizing the girls to come over (usually the best man, but surprisingly a lot of best men completely drop the ball) and has explained to his fellow friends that he knows how the whole thing is going down. Unfortunately he usually gives the wrong impression to the guys about what the girl on the phone said to him about how things really go for parties (like he thinks that we work for one-dollar bills and that this must be a cheaper route than the club when, in fact, it’s like an ultimate VIP room party, but on location to their hotel!)

2) The Guy Who Is Never Happy – This guy usually happens to double as being the most broke guy in the room. as well. He had 40 bucks to spend and wanted to make sure it spent like it was $1000. He also doesn’t care about the bachelor (the person who the party is actually for,) but more concerned about what he is getting for the money spent. His attitude a lot of times kills the party’s mood and brings the other guys down before they can ever get down!

3) The Crazy Guy – This is the carefree spirit of the party who doesn’t care what it takes to have fun and will do whatever he can to entertain his buddies. When asked for tips to play stripper games of stuffing the bachelor’s boxers with dollars he actually will shove the dollar bills in himself. He sometimes will feel the need to show off his dancing skills to the ladies and never forgets to ask if we need a drink… twenty times. Also, he is usually the most generous tipper of the bunch and realizes his other friends are pretty lame when it comes to having a good time.

Unfortunately the three main characters at typical bachelor parties sometimes combine themselves into the same person! Just yesterday The Cool Guy turned into the Never Happy Guy within ten minutes… That’s just never a pretty sight for a girl standing there in a g-string!

Tags: Las Vegas bachelor parties, Las Vegas stories, Las Vegas strippers

There is probably a slicker, less eyebrow-raising name for what is going on between Nevada and a few other states, including, but probably not limited to, Utah. I was raised in an era and in a country that seems to be a different place in many respects, nowadays. There was a time when, for instance, if you had a ticket from some three horse town in another part of your own state, it was up to you and that jurisdiction to work out the payment. It was not going to affect you where you lived unless the ticket happened to have been state police. That was to protect citizens from small towns using speed traps as a way to raise local money at the expense of people traveling on roads that went through their town. In the past, the worst thing that could happen in that situation is that it might potentially affect your credit… eventually.

It wasn’t just the idea of police jurisdictions being separated. Taxes were recognized as being separated by interstate commerce laws - federal laws. Unless you lived in an metropolitan transit authority region, you paid sales tax for things in your county based on the local tax rate plus the state tax. If it was income taxes you paid federal and state (if there are state income taxes where you live) and if you lived in California it was California’s business to collect California’s state income taxes.. LA County was responsible for collecting it’s sales taxes, not Orange County’s, et cetera. Texas doesn’t threaten to revoke some sort of privilege for a citizen having not paid California’s income tax. There might be repercussions but it would be with that jurisdiction involved in the specific situation. Regions and jurisdictions exist for a reason. Lots of them, really. The advent of the Internet and online databases and interconnectivity, though, has made some police organizations get some bright ideas on how to collect their regressive taxes on silly traffic or paperwork sorts of fines. Nevada and Utah, and probably some other states nearby, are now sharing traffic ticket data, and your home state - in their technological gestapo pact - is agreeing to look into other states’ business (unpaid tickets) and arbitrarily penalizing you in a completely different governmental jurisdiction by suspending your driver’s license! (and quickly, too.)

I went on a ski trip to Colorado a little earlier in the Winter this year. Naturally, the most direct route to Colorado from Las Vegas is to drive through Utah. I made it eighty percent of the way through Mormon Country and was moving along pretty fast because the weather was great, it was daytime, and there was no one on the interstate with me. You know the rest of the story right off - a Utah state police cop was hiding in the bushes in Bumblefuck, Utah, waiting to catch a little discretionary tax revenue for his town, courtesy of my check book. He wrote me two tickets, including one for not having the current liability insurance card in my car (the old one had just been mailed out and I thought I’d already put it in the glove box before the trip - people make mistakes.) Long story short, I missed the court date trying to get the paperwork together, as I actually misplaced the insurance card altogether and I’ve been busy - I know, poor excuse, but I mean, I was getting around to it, and I did have insurance.

So I just got this thing in the mail. It actually arrived a couple of weeks ago at my post office box but I’ve been out of pocket and haven’t had a chance to check the mail. It’s a notice from the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles informing me that I did not appear in a court in another state on the date specified and my license is going to be suspended on April 6th if I don’t contact that state, pay the ticket, and then get proof of payment and send it to the Nevada DMV. That’s just bullshit on so many different levels I don’t know where to begin. I am going to get this all squared away in the next couple of days, no problem, but that isn’t the fucking point. This isn’t Nevada’s business. It’s with Utah. Where I grew up, which I think represents the U.S. in general pretty well, if you get a suspended license, you really had to have screwed up. Big time. Like at least a DUI or something like that which I’ve never had. Suspended licenses have always and should always continue to be a big deal. They have gotten to where they are passing them out like candy lately, out here. It’s ridiculous. And now a suspension of a Nevada license based on something that allegedly happened in an entirely different legal and political jurisdiction??

Police are not meant to be given the authority to enact these sorts of new “programs” on their own. It’s just outrageous to me that people don’t get more indignant about the way things are going. If anything, Nevada should be acting first and foremost to protect the interests of its citizens, not helping another state line its coffers with some extra cash. Nevada taxpayers are paying for this service. The labor costs, the materials, the extra infrastructure… All to assist Utah in what amounts to bill collection.