Vegas...baby

Vegas sucks when you go by yourself. I've been there over 20 times in the last two years thanks to my freelance work as a mixed martial arts journalist. And most of those times I went alone, worked the fights, and maybe gambled a bit before heading back to my hotel room. Alone, you're just a witness to all the debauchery and I prefer to be a participant. I want to be one of those midwestern twenty-somethings who's never been out of his small, stupid town and in Vegas lugs around a tall, plastic, fruity drink and pukes while strutting down the Strip. "I'm King of the World!" "Indiana! Represent!" Barf. That is my dream.

This week I went back to Vegas to watch my stepson Ethan graduate from high school. I'm no fan of graduations, which are boring and interminable, but i was happy to see my son graduate. He's accomplished a helluva a lot and I was excited and proud. My bullshit radar was activated when I heard that the school had named five valedictorians, which meant that we would have to sit through at least five speeches. I was distressed. I thought that you could only have one valedictorian. It's supposed to be a fucking singular honor, not something shared. It devalues the distinction, but seems totally in line with the American trend of awarding the many instead of the few. As George Carlin once said, if everyone is special then no one is special. Anyway, the fucking principal should have made the five valedictorians play rock, paper, scissors to determine a winner. On stage. In front of the hundreds of people in attendance. That would have been fun.

Having said that, the first girl was great. She was self-deprecating. She avoided the strictly abstract by recounting funny memories of high school. She had perspective. It went downhill from there. The four subsequent speeches - all from girls incidentally - were awful. As a professional writer (i write for a specialty magazine, i'm soooooo successful), I was offended. Each speaker used every cliche and platitude known to high school valedictorians for countless generations. We are the best class eva. We are going to change the world. Everybody in our class is a winner. The moment that changed my life forever.....I wanted to say so many things to them. Number one: Stop being so serious and earnest! It's annoying! A good speech should have levity. Number two: this is something that you'll find out on your own, but the world will affect you too. It will kick your ass. until you are a blubbering, neurotic mess and just a shade of your former youthful hopeful self. And lastly, very few of you will have a profound impact on the world. Most of you are mediocre and you'll have mediocre careers, so stop talking grandiosely about your future contributions. Get ready for mediocrity, kids!!!!

The experience reminded me of a line of dialogue from the gorgeous novel All the Pretty Horses. "he said that it was good God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all."

After graduation, as we took pictures in 90 degree desert heat, there was a tiny bit of drama involving the ex-wife. I hadn't seen her in three years and I would have liked to talk to her over lunch, which I thought was where we were all headed. I mean, our son just graduated from high school. It was something to celebrate together. But her Zohan-like, Israeli ex-military boyfriend had other ideas. He couldn't make it because of some commitment, and he didn't want her to go either. So they argued a bit. My question is this: what's the big fucking deal? Yo Zohan, we're divorced. You won the grand prize. You're going home with her and I'm going home to both my hands, which are admittedly very skillful and preferred to the ex-wife. So chill brotha. Why be intimidated by a short Asian man who is in very good shape???

That night, I went to a new bar just south of the Strip called The Blue Martini. My buddy J.P. had just started working there as a barback and since i had nothing else to do (i.e., too broke to gamble or patronize a strip club) I went there to have a drink. The bar was beautiful and shiny with an outdoor bar part and a nightclub inner part. The bartenders were stunning in their light blue bustiers that shoved into the air their large mounds of plastic flesh. The clientele was either good-looking (the women and a few of the men) or financially enhanced (the men). I very much felt like i was in Vegas. I ordered a ten-dollar Ketel One and tonic and did some people watching until my buddy J.P. finished work. We decided to stay and hang out. J.P. seemed to know everybody in the bar. He's a professional befriender. A player extraordinaire, though he is short and bald. He has great bone structure and good dress sense and he can charm a female komodo dragon. He gets more ass than anyone I know, and for the two years I've known him he's entertained me with tales of his romantic misadventures. Women. It's his favorite topic, but that night his stories just depressed me. He's stuck in this dating cycle. He's like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. He's destined to wake up every day and date the same twenty-something party girls who have lots of looks but little substance. He'll go on three or four dates a week and see a girl for a couple of weeks and then it will fall apart. Both sides will play games until one side takes ultimate offense and says goodbye, good riddance. Or the whole affair will fizzle out one text message at a time until there is nothing but silence and the memory of their coitus. He once dated a 19-year-old soft porn model (i got to meet her; very hot) who sidelined as a single mom. The night that we hung out, J.P. snuck us into a VH1 after-party (Ozzy Osbourne's!!!) at MGM Grand and we drank free booze for a couple of hours and then went disco dancing. A fine evening. But J.P. and the chick started fighting like high school sweethearts (I guess she was just a year out of high school; did she even graduate?). She was mad because he talked to some chick at the after-party that he worked with. All he did was talk to her. And they're co-workers! He's a social dude. It's his MO. But here she was telling him that she was "this close" to kicking the girl's ass. For a conversation!!! They've been dating three weeks and she's ready to act like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. But J.P. is no better. Instead of trying to mollify her, he barks back at her and this drama rolls on at 3am until my buddy Lincoln and I bail for the relative safety of our beds. Fast forward a month and J.P. calls me and tells me how the fling ended. The following key terms say it all. Surveillance. Teenage Baby Daddy. Near violence. Tears. Hate speech. Pleas to "come back to me!!!" I came to the conclusion that they were both nuts and the perfect embodiment of the human romantic predicament.

Anyway, that's J.P.'s lust life. I won't call it love. I don't know if love figures in the vocabulary of twenty- and thirty-somethings today. We're all too wrapped up in our own lives. Our limited universes. Our self-reflection and navel gazing. Too much has happened to us in a romantic sense. Too many bad break-ups and Vietnam moments of crisis. We're the walking wounded with our neuroses and needs. It's a wonder that any couples stick together. Without mother nature lending a helping hand, I don't know if men and women would get together at all. The gender war is very real, and I don't think that men are winning. Women are smart smart smart and they're making money and sleeping around and breaking hearts. Women are the new men. Men take cover.

I'm thinking all this while J.P. tells me of his latest entanglements. I want to tell him to grow up. He's nearly 40 and he works at a bar, a nightclub at the weekends, and at the Mandalay Bay pool during the day. He is Peter Pan without the green outfit and obvious gay subtext. He complains about all these girls. Meanwhile, he acts like a player. Change your life. Move away from Sin City. It's so easy to lose your sense of reality in such a place. Get a real job. If you're interested in finding the right girl, stop dating skanks. I'm so depressed at this point that I don't even look at all the totty in the place. I want to avoid this complicated shit forevermore. I want to be friends with girls. No benefits. Let's get back to that mental space in elementary school where you wanted to race a girl in the 100-yard dash, not fuck her brains out.

I was so glad to get back to the hotel. Away from all the vegas freaks (that night at the bar I met a showgirl, a professional bare knuckle brawler, and a musician in Elton John's band). In the morning, I kissed my kettlebell (you should have seen the bellhop's face when i asked him to take it up to the room) and did a workout of swings and double-unders. Then my mother and I got the fuck out of Dodge. As a degenerate gambler, my Korean mother felt compelled to accomany her son on this trip. She disappeared in the casino and emerged several hours later having lost 5 grand, which is small change compared to what she wins and loses on a regular basis. But she was in the red this time, so she was pissed and on the drive home she barked at me like any good Asian mother worth her salt would do. She said i was a no-good son. That other Korean moms bragged about their doctor and lawyer progeny who also paid their parents a hefty allowance with which to gamble. That my son Ethan was a no-good ex-grandson because he didn't call to thank her for the graduation money. To get back at her, I told her that I was never getting married again and that i would never have children of my own, thus robbing her of her buddha-given right to grandchildren.

Soon we were laughing like hell.