Vegas, baby: how I got kicked out of Bellagio

I am not a Las Vegas person. There are people who enjoy gambling, my friend Dave particularly; I’m not so big on it. There are people who enjoy clubbing, my friend Richi particularly; I look at it mainly as a night where I go out to dance to terrible music, drink too much, and not pick up. To paraphrase Bill Hicks, at home “at least I can listen to music I like.”

However, some friends were going down to Vegas for a bachelor party, and I went. The bachelor didn’t, oddly enough, but we went anyhow. I’m still not sure how that worked out.

We stayed, six to a room, in the Stratosphere Hotel. Every hotel in Vegas has a theme; Mandalay Bay is Indian-themed, the Luxor is Egyptian, Caesar's Palace is Roman. And so on and so forth. The theme at Stratosphere is kind of high-concept; it's a reasonable representation of what would happen if Communists built a casino. Lots of concrete. And phallic symbols. But it was ghetto-cheap, and so are we, so it’s a good fit.

Saturday night: we got sold some cheap passes for a club called Light, in Bellagio, by a short, bald guy named Mark. The line got packed real fast, and after about an hour of the bouncers letting in nothing but women, it became clear that tonight was not a good night to be a group of six guys trying to get into that bar. (I’m not sure what all those women were doing up there without any guys to dance with. I like to think it was a giant lesbian orgy, but then again I like to think that about a lot of things.)

Now, at this point, we tried to unload these passes. We’d gotten a couple sold before security found us and kicked us out. They bought that we’d been taken by someone else and were trying to make our money back, but they still don’t look too kindly on people reselling complimentary passes. Now, I’m willing to admit here that the fact that we were all drunk as hell and shouting angrily at security may – MAY – have coloured their opinion of us negatively. But that could just be my impression.

One of my cardinal goals in Vegas was to not get my ass beat by casino security guards. Call me strange, but that’s really a turn-off for me. At this point, I was trying to convince my friends that maybe we should move along out of the doorway of the casino, particularly since those large men over there looked kinda menacing. It took a while, but eventually, we were politely but firmly booted into the street.

Coda: Fortunately, the fact that we never made it into the regular club meant that we were EARLY for the after-hours club. This is a positive thing, because apparently there’s like a two-hour wait if you get there at the wrong/right time. And, despite my general dislike for clubs, Drai’s was pretty goddamn fine. Great house music. And – this is key here – I can at least say I’ve been kicked out of a casino now. I’m a fucking rockstar now, man.