Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Archives for January 2012

Circus Circus

by

I did not have many must-do items on our itinerary. Just one, really.

Circus Circus.

I am a huge fan of Hunter S. Thompson and Gonzo Journalism, and one of my favorite books is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Many of the locations from the book have since been demolished or converted into something new, yet two significant ones remained: The Flamingo and Circus Circus.

As luck would have it, we were staying at The Flamingo – the scene of Thompson’s freak-out trip and his attorney’s accosting of a hapless maid turned informer. I gleefully read these passages to E, who shook her head in a mixture of bemusement and disgust.

The other intact monument to the book is Circus Circus, a casino complete with its own trapeze act and merry-go-round bar. Since the casino is farther north on the strip, it wasn’t somewhere we would idly walk past. We had to plan a day around it.

We finally arrived on day four of five, fresh from our arial adventures atop the Stratosphere. Circus Circus looked exactly how I pictured it – a low dilapidated facade dominated by an eery neon clown.

Circus Circus is now a children’s amusement park.

I don’t know what else to say, really. The merry-go-round bar that Thompson mercilessly ejected his attorney from now serves pretzels and sorbet, and the acrobat show is a purely family-friendly affair with no rabid wolverines in sight.

I thought the Circus Circus revelation was pretty much the final nail in the coffin of this trip for me. It represents the ultimate disappointment of Las Vegas. Everything here is an illusion or a faded recollection. Everything needs the night air and a neon facade to brighten the corners of an otherwise dismal and callous place.

(Then my travel companions brought a bottle of champagne on a roller coaster and we had a major dance party to an 80s cover band, which helped reduce the Circus Circus disappointment to merely an amusing sidebar to the best day of our trip.)

(I still don’t like it here.)

 

A Taste of Vegas @ Mesa Grill

by

The food of Las Vegas is at once awful and awesome, sometimes within the same meal. It is an unhealthy mecca of artery-busting delights.

Yesterday I had the best bite of food I have ever bitten in my life. It was the Rough Cut Tuna Nachos at Bobby Flay’s Mesa Grill.

I don’t know if I can properly describe the experience to you. The rarest of rare tuna that almost melted on my tongue, dotted with capers and drizzled with reductions of chilis, avocados, and mangos, served on bite-sized puffed corn chips.

I thoughtlessly stuffed my first serving into my mouth and then halted, closing my eyes and sighing deeply as the flavor of it seeped into my tastebuds.

After that, my eating was much more measured. Each chip had to be perfectly arrayed with the correct blend of flavors, less I wind up with a sub-optimal bite of food. Each time I involuntarily closed my eyes once the taste hit my tongue. The experience was downright sensual.

The dish was $16, and included enough raw cubes of tuna for two. I would have gladly swiped my credit card for a $16 charge for every bite.

We will be going back to Mesa Grill.

PS: They also serve Cosmopolitan‘s #1 Must-Drink cocktail: The Cactus Pear Margarita, as pictured above. It was every bit as good of a bright pink drink as that distinction implies (and I don’t even like tequila).

PPS: Actually, we didn’t have a single thing that was less than amazing in the entire meal. Highly recommended.

girls at your door

by

The Las Vegas strip is a relative joy to walk, day or night. Both sides of the street are a wide promenade of adult playground lined with fake classical sculpture, walk-up bars, and slot machines as close to the sidewalk as legally allowed. The sidewalk is filled with milling drunks, bachelorettes, and people dressed as Mickey Mouse and Sponge Bob while double-fisting 40s.

(There is no open container law in Las Vegas. Or, rather, if there is a law, it is one that allows open containers. The next casino over sells drinks in massive containers shaped like miniature Eiffel Towers.)

(There is a strong possibility you will see a picture of me wielding one in the near future.)

Every ten feet of promenade there are hucksters. At first I assumed they must be trying to pull people into different casinos or parties. No. There are 100-foot-tall billboards of Celine Dion for that.

They are hucking girls. Girls delivered right to your room. That is the gist I have been able to discern without actually taking one of their flyers.

That doesn’t surprise or offend me in the least. The disturbing part is the manner of hucking. I do not think they can actually say anything about the girls or what the girls are legally allowed to do with you in the state of Nevada. As a result, the group of silent hucksters are uniformed in neon-colored shirts crammed with text explaining their service model.

Even more prominent, they whip their fistfuls of flyers to and fro, creating a viscerally disturbing smacking sound. Like some pornographic echolocation, they begin to aim the smacking at you from a distance of about ten feet, and if you make even the slightest visual acknowledgement of their existence they will know. Even a sidelong glance at the color of their neon shirt.

Then they are upon you.

The closest I have come to pumping money (or anything else) into their business model was when a particular copse of the silent, smacking hucksters was accompanied by a sole verbalizing huckster.

He was hucking their neon shirts in every possible color.

high hot pressure

by

The airplane was a pressure-cooker.

I felt like some sort of crock pot meal in my window seat, gradually stripping off layers of clothing and carry-ons and pressing my arms against the cool metal of the seat dividers. My window onto to the southern sun with was hot to the touch, even with the plastic shade snapped shut. The radiating heat made me feel as though I would brown beneath my v-neck t-shirt.

Our flight was absolutely full with an interesting cross-section of people. Golfers, gamblers, bachelorette parties. A cheerful murmur rose from the collective when we first boarded. Now it was much quieter. Everyone was wilting and dozing.

I hadn’t said anything to E, as she was deep in conversation about javascript with the web developer seated beside her. I let my head nod to one side, half exhausted, half in a meditative trance.

Eventually, E turned to me and said, “it is too warm in here.”

“Yes, I know,” I replied, roused. “Feel my window. It’s hot.”

“I’d rather not. I’m already quite warm.”

“You can have my blower, if you need it,” I said, gesturing up to the tiny air-expelling port in the ceiling above us. I could not feel the slightest drift of the breeze it was supposedly blowing onto my face.

“I already took it.”

“While I was asleep?” I exclaimed.

“Yes.” Well, that would explain why I could not feel the breeze.

“What if I needed that air?”

“Clearly you didn’t.”

We’ve been very aligned this entire time. In Philadelphia, plenty of disagreements – all trivial, mind you, but differences of opinion. Outside of it, we react to all things as one. Things that would fall below most people’s threshold of notice, like poorly phrased directional signage or a particularly cool piece of luggage in a crowd. It’s as if our minds are tethered together, having the same reactions at the same time. One massive game of Jinx! You Owe Me a Coke, except for we do not drink soda.

The last 45 minutes of the flight were a sheer test of endurance. I was so hot I thought I might explode in a seizure of thrashing and cursing. I decided I had to accept the heat rather than resist it. I cracked my plastic window frame an inch and pressed my eye up to the crevice, watching the mountains below us turn from black to brown to sandy foothills until my face couldn’t beat the warmth any longer.

We were relieved to step off of the plane, and were greeted with slot machines all of ten feet from our gate exit.

“Play a slot?” I asked E. “They’re pennies.”

“No.”

“Me neither.” I replied.