Swill Street Stories – Las Vegas Death Trip

The evening started out well enough – video poker, champagne, Captain Morgan, Jagermeister bombs…with such quantity of mirth and libation….who knew things were about to go terribly, terribly wrong?

Visiting friends in Las Vegas a couple of years ago, I found myself at a popular night spot living it up with my entourage plus a group of local MMA aspirants. At some point late in the evening my Friend and his Wife indicated they were ready to leave. Apparently once you hit your forties, anything past 9PM constitutes the next day. I’ll let you know if that’s true when I get there – if I get there. By and by, Wife came to the bar to collect me as I was in the midst of buying another round of shots for my brand new pugilistic pals. I unwisely responded that I was having too much fun to leave and that they both should go on ahead without me.

One of the fighters concurred, saying that he and his friends would be glad to drop me off after the evening’s festivities. That seemed only fair, since this was the third round of drinks I’d bought for all of them. Far be it from me to judge the motivations of others, but there’s no faster way to become a man’s best friend than to lend him money, or get him drunk – and the jury is out as to which is cheaper.

But this is all academic – I didn’t have a car and was already far too hammered to have driven one anyway. In fact, there’s a point where you have become so inebriated that it’s actually illegal for you to walk in public, let alone drive - and if you don’t believe me, stay tuned to this space for the evidence.

This night I was enjoying sitting at the bar, discussing Mixed Martial arts with a group of actual fighters who flattered me by saying that I looked like I could be one of them. Don’t bother wondering about that; I am no 98 pound weakling but I am also well aware that every word spoken in a bar after dark is largely bullshit. Yet I do enjoy being buttered up, particularly when I know that it isn’t true. And more important, my drunk friends promised to return me home safely. And when one drunk guy promises another drunk guy something such as “I will never repeat this to anyone” or “Let’s open a restaurant with your kids’ college fund” or “I’ll give you ten bucks to eat that whole jar of pickled eggs”, that is a sacred bond that cannot be broken.

I was as good as home, and I said to Wife just as much.

So Wife wrote down directions back to the house on a cocktail napkin, which definitely isn’t the sort of thing a drunk moron is likely to lose in a bar when he’s had more to drink than Lindsay Lohan on New Year’s Eve. Wife asked me if I was certain of my decision and I replied that yes, of course I was. There are after all, at least these two Universal Truths about being drunk:

1. You are always sure of everything, and there’s no such thing as a bad idea.
2. You’re not really drunk, and anybody who says otherwise is an asshole.

Armed with this ironclad logic and my cocktail napkin fail safe, I continued the evening’s festivities. Wife texted me a few hours later to check in, and the last recorded communication received from me was reportedly:

Dooing a a-ok

Sadly everything was far from a-ok, for in the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald, “First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.”

Truer words were never spoken, except perhaps by Dean martin: “You’re not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on.”

I am neither a great writer nor a great drunk but on this night I would set in motion a series of events that would allow me to come as close as I probably ever will to at least one of those things. As predicted, I promptly misplaced the cocktail napkin containing Wife’s directions. This ensured that when it was time for my roguish mates to drop me off, nobody had any idea where to take me. At the time I was about as familiar with getting around Las Vegas as I currently am with getting around Prague, Austria or Vladivostok, Russia. This ensured that if someone were to say, just deposit my unconscious hulk in the safest spot they could find that I’d never find my way home in a million years. But the next day, my unfamiliarity with the Las Vegas metropolitan area would be remedied over the course of many very brutal hours. I would soon become as intimately familiar with all 113 square miles of Sin City as I currently am with how to use a fork. After leaving my wallet at the bar and my cell phone lying just outside the front door I would wake up in a strange place, jarred to awareness by the piercing shriek of a terrified Mexican woman screaming bloody murder.

Somewhere on the internet Robert Downey, Jr. is chuckling as he reads this, saying to himself:

“Yeah, I’ve done that.”

Thus began my Las Vegas Death Trip. It was a 19 Hour Journey of Pain, Redemption and Blunt Force Trauma, during which I found little help and even less pity waiting for me at every stop. Without a cell phone I couldn’t call for help and without any form of identification, I might as well have been a visitor from the future. Nobody wanted shit to do with me, and by the time it was all over, I had learned the most valuable lesson of all regarding the human race:

Deep down inside we all despise one another – but most of us are either too comfortable or too tired to act on it. To this day, my right ankle still hurts whenever its cloudy.

Click here to see the interactive Google Map of the worst day of my life.

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