The Bachelor Party Part 1

I've been writing this off and on for a little while. Parts 1 (The first night) and 2 (the second night involving the strip club) are finished. I'm still working on Part 3 (clubbing at Tao). Since the story is on the internet, I am making up relatively descriptive names for all parties involved. Also, It is not my finest piece of writing ever as I tend to jump tenses as I go, but hopefully it is an entertaining read. If for no other reason than to get some insight on what a possible Vegas bachelor party will look like when I throw one for whichever one of you guys gets married next....

Being a groomsman was more work (and more costly) than I could have ever imagined. The number of ancillary responsibilities that ended up landing on the shoulders of the groomsmen kept growing as the wedding approached. Fortunately, planning most of the Las Vegas based bachelor party was left up to the two best men, whom I’ll refer to here as The Russian (because, well, he’s Russian and a big bear of a guy) and The Robot (for his uncanny ability to express a total of zero emotions). They had to reserve restaurants, figure out the strip club situation, decide on hotels, and ultimately handle the club where we would be spending Saturday night. My only job, as usual, was to handle the alcohol. A job that I had the pleasure of handling with another groomsman, CHP.

I knew CHP from our racist basketball team, but I didn’t really start hanging out with him until we attended a bunch of wedding functions together and realized we each didn’t know anyone else besides the groomsmen, the groom, and the bride. Well it turns out that CHP is actually kind of crazy and can drink like a fish. The only problem is, he will drink to the point of inducing a functioning blackout, and despite the fact that he can walk, dance, talk, or whatever else, he won’t remember anything the next day. Anyways, he told me he would buy all the alcohol and my only job was to bring a bag big enough to fit it all into. Luckily for me, I have a Nike bag big enough to fit a petite woman inside (don’t ask how I know this). I should mention at this point that there was going to be a total of about 15 people at the bachelor party and all but three of them would be flying out there during the course of the weekend. Me and CHP were two of the three because we figured it would be almost impossible to bring the requisite amount of alcohol on the airplane without everything breaking. So, armed with my person sized duffel bag, Vegas appropriate clothes, a sizable bankroll, and a liver I had been training Rocky style for the previous couple of weeks, I was ready to tackle 4 days of whatever Vegas could throw at me. Or so I thought.

Thursday-

I left Irvine around 10AM and headed up the 405 to pick up the third of the three non-flyers, Lefty. I also know Lefty from my racist basketball team. He’s Chinese but we let him play anyways, because well, he’s better than all of us. I also went to school with Lefty so we are pretty decent friends but usually only hang out when there is a group of people and everyone is drinking. Otherwise, Lefty is a pretty funny but quiet guy. He only knows CHP through basketball and they never hang out off the court, so for this reason I had been a little apprehensive about the 4 hour ride up to Vegas. How would three guys who have never hung out together kill all of that time? My apprehension was gone as soon as we arrived at CHP’s place. Waiting for us was a giant bottle of Grey Goose, an even bigger bottle of a type of Russian vodka, a bottle of rum, and assorted other bottles to go along with soda, shot glasses and virtually anything else you might need in order to drink alcohol. On the way up, Lefty and I had picked up 50 bottles of beer, so we were armed and ready for the weekend. We managed to squeeze all of the alcohol into my person sized duffel bag and then CHP attempted to lift the bag into my trunk—and couldn’t. Well at least not without breaking something inside. CHP estimated that the bag weighed at least 100 pounds, but he and Lefty eventually managed, with some effort, to get it placed delicately into the trunk. With the most important luggage safely secured, I tossed my keys to CHP--a law enforcement officer who would not get a ticket no matter how fast he drove—and we were off.

As soon as we entered the freeway and hit our cruising speed of 100 mph, CHP proceeded to tell us a story about the planning of this bachelor party. Apparently, the Groom had been acting like a little bitch for the two days leading up to this shindig. Groom (as he shall now be referred to) wanted us to get a table at the club we were headed to on Saturday night, Tao (located at the Venetian). No one found this to be unreasonable. Considering the number of guys we had going (ten) it only made sense to get a table because a group of guys is not getting into a club like Tao without some female companionship or a table and bottle service. However, Groom didn’t just want a standard issue table (a $1200 charge); he wanted to be able to see the dance floor from wherever the table was (a much higher charge that we’ll get into later). Well The Russian had not planned on doing that. He figured asking for $120 per person for the club alone might be steep for some of the guys, so he didn’t want to ask for that much more. But Groom would not listen. He kept calling The Russian every hour begging for a better table. The Russian was holding firm even as Groom was losing his dignity. Lefty and I were incredulous during the story because we had never seen Groom throw what amounted to be a tantrum befitting a two year old child. But it got worse. According to CHP, Groom’s fiancée, Bride, felt the need to stick up for Groom by sending The Russian a text message that read something like this:

The Russian, Groom really wants a table where he can see the dance floor at the club. I know it’s more expensive, but it’s his dream. I am willing to even pay the difference in cost. I just want him to have his dream bachelor party. Please make his dreams come true.

Me and Lefty could not decide if this was the funniest thing we had ever heard, or the most pathetic. Who has their bride-to-be attempt to finance their bachelor party? And who complains that vehemently about a party that his best friends are throwing for him? Ultimately a compromise was reached between The Russian and Groom, and it was decided that we would look at the cheaper table first, and if it was not up to Groom’s standards we would get the more expensive one. Either way, that story broke the ice between me, CHP, and Lefty and with any sense of awkwardness now gone, the ride to Vegas seemed to fly by (well being able to go over 100 mph without concern also helped).

We got to The Venetian around 4 pm and decided to valet the car and get a bell hop to take our luggage up to our room, considering we didn’t want to carry around that monstrous bag of alcohol. Unfortunately for us, the bell hop took one look at our duffel bag and refused to put it on his luggage cart. Apparently, he was not allowed to carry alcohol to our room for us due to breakage concerns. We had to do it ourselves. Wonderful. Seeing as how Lefty and CHP are pretty strong dudes, and I am me, they each grabbed a handle on the duffle bag and shuffled towards the entrance. I did my best to clear a path for them, but it was no easy task. Our room was at the end of a long hallway, and by the time we got inside, Lefty and CHP both looked like they wanted to die. But the pain was nothing a little alcohol wouldn’t cure and considering nobodies’ flight got in for another two hours, we had plenty of time to drink. And drink we did.

CHP and I both suffer from the same problem in that we get red when we drink. Apparently we lack some type of enzyme—stupid Japanese heritage. Luckily, CHP figured out that by taking two Pepcid AC’s and a Zyrtec thirty minutes before drinking, there will be no redness. I was doubtful at first, but after drinking a glass of rum, I realized that I didn’t get red. Encouraged, I began to drink more. As I mentioned, CHP is a huge drinker so I couldn’t quite keep up with him, but I did keep up with Lefty who is hilarious when he drinks, but in a more understated way. After a little while we got a call from The Robot who had flown in with The Russian and Groom and they wanted us to come over to their room. Considering our level of intoxication, this should have posed a problem, but we were drunk and therefore undeterred. Right before we headed out, we grabbed the bottle of Grey Goose, some shot glasses and cups, refilled our own cups (“One for the road” according to CHP) and meandered our way to Groom’s room—which just so happened to be in a separate tower than ours. That meant we had to go down to the Casino floor over to a separate bank of elevators and ride them to the correct floor. Under normal circumstances the room wouldn’t be the easiest to find, in our circumstances…well, yeah. None of us could walk in a straight line, Lefty couldn’t stop laughing at anything, and CHP was pulling his best Johnny Bravo impression (“Hey Baby”) on any girl we came across. Me? I was just concentrating on not spilling my drink (gotta love Vegas and its lax open container laws).

We finally made it up to what we thought was Groom’s room but all of a sudden, no one could remember the exact room number. This didn’t bother CHP who started kicking the door before abruptly turning and running. Leaving me and Lefty hoping to God that it was the right room. Luckily, The Robot answered the door and we stumbled into a pretty awesome room. The Venetian is an all-suites hotel to begin with, but Groom’s room was a step up. We celebrated this by drinking. Groom was hesitant to start imbibing because he knew he would have to drink the whole weekend and wanted to put it off as long as possible. CHP and Groom go way back, so Groom’s hesitance resulted in CHP unleashing an epic tirade that culminated in a near molestation of Groom, until Groom finally acquiesced to the peer pressure and took a shot of Goose with each one of us (wait, how old are we again?).

Properly intoxicated, we decided to eat dinner at a Cheesecake Factory type restaurant at the hotel. I’m sure everyone noticed that we were drunk, but this being Vegas, no one really cared much. The meal was pretty uneventful with the exception of Groom leaving twice to go throw up (something he has trained himself to do on command) and CHP noticing a group of fairly attractive women sitting at the booth behind him. He pulled out his Johnny Bravo routine and made a couple of other comments while The Robot, The Russian, and I looked on in horror. See, we were sitting across from CHP, so we had a good look at the people in the booth behind him (or in front of us). What CHP thought was a group of hot women, was actually a couple of moms and their daughters. Their clearly, not legal, daughters. The Robot and The Russian kept trying to discreetly tell him to shut up, but CHP wasn’t listening. Lefty finally realized what was going on and desperately tried to flag someone to get us our check. So I finally said something, and I think the conversation went something like this:

Me (quietly): Dude, what are you doing? Those girls are way underage.

CHP (loudly): What are you talking about, they’re like 35.

Me: No, they really aren’t.

CHP (even louder): Look at them, they are at least 35!

Me: No, those are the moms. There are daughters there too.

CHP: Sweet!

Me: No, they are like 14.

CHP (Yelling): Well at least we’ll know what they look like when they get older.

Finally, Lefty grabbed our server, gets the bill, throws down some cash and we pull CHP out of there. I can’t bring myself to look at the table of moms and daughters, as we walk by their booth. I realize that we are the group of people that everyone hates, that I usually hate, in Vegas: You can be drunk, you can be loud, you can even be belligerent, but for fuck’s sake leave the families alone.

Sufficiently sobered up from dealing with CHP we decided to play a little blackjack. I was up like $50 at one point but ended up giving it back and getting up even. No one else fared as well. We end up outside the hotel debating what to do next. But its Vegas in August, so it’s hot even at night so we go back inside. The Venetian and Palazzo are connected so we make our way over to the Palazzo where we come across this sweet cigar shop. Lefty and I buy a couple of $20 cigars and the group heads over to Lavo, a lounge/nightclub type place. It was only 11pm so it hadn’t started picking up yet and we decided to get a table and bottle service which was relatively cheap ($150 total for the 6 of us). Lavo has a dance floor on one end that tapers into a fairly swanky (did I just used that word?) lounge with a bar in the center and velvet seats inset into the curved walls of the lounge. There is a table in front of every five or six seats, and it was to a section of these seats that we were escorted by a barely dressed woman. Lefty and I attempted to fire up our cigars and before we could even get our matches out, a hot blonde server(?) in skimpy clothing materialized out of seemingly nowhere to give us a light. Another hot server, this one Asian, brought out a bottle of Grey Goose, an assortment of mixers (Sprite, Coke, Red Bull) and proceeded to make us drinks.

For a while, this setup couldn’t have been better. The music was loud but not overbearing. We could smoke and drink and shoot the shit while hot girls waited on us hand and foot. But as the lounge area started to fill up, the music got louder, the service slowed down a bit, and conversation was near impossible. At the time, this was all okay for me since the combination of alcohol, caffeine from the Red Bull, and nicotine from the cigar had me buzzed beyond belief. CHP and Groom decide to go check out the dance floor but the rest of us don’t really dance so we just continued to drink (and in my case, smoke). The rest of the night plays out in my memory in a series of scattered flashbacks. I can’t really place their chronological order; I just know they all happened. Some of the highlights:

- At one point in time I am feeling the music enough to be bobbing my head and tapping a foot and it takes me about 5 minutes before I realize I am doing it to Latin music. For some reason this irritates me.

- CHP brings a girl back to the table and offers her alcohol; he attempts to pour some Grey Goose into her glass and pours it all over the table and on The Russian’s feet. The Russian is not amused and I am assigned the task of pouring the alcohol for the girl and CHP. Now I am not amused. I guess I was successful; all I remember is the girl was not cute. Where are the hot servers?

- Groom pretends to drink Goose with sprite but instead just hides his glass under the table and swaps it with one of only Red Bull. I am angered by this but too drunk to do anything about it, or even tell CHP.

- I still hear Latin music and wonder why there is so much Spanish coming over the speakers. My first thought, I shit you not: “Why is there Spanish? We are not in California.”

- CHP brings another girl back to the table and orders another bottle ($100). She is not cute either. I pour CHP a lot of alcohol so he hopefully won’t remember her in the morning.

- The hot server shows up and I am happy. I realize she has the bill and I am not happy. I send her to The Robot.

- TOO MUCH SPANISH!

- We have half of the second bottle left and CHP is trying to talk two girls into drinking with him. I think they think he spiked the alcohol or something. I know they don’t trust him. I have to pour them fresh drinks. Again I do not spill.

- CHP tells me that the first girl he brought back to the table can get him into the gym for free tomorrow. He seems genuinely excited about this. I am confused but pretend to be excited for him.

- The people sitting next to Lefty get up to leave and in the process forget two still sealed cigars. Groom decides he wants to smoke one but doesn’t have a cutter. Groom decides his teeth can cut meat so they can surely cut a cigar. Groom is wrong and now has a half chewed through cigar along with tobacco and cigar paper in his mouth.

- I am now irate due to all of the Spanish music being played. Someone tells me its Latin night tonight. This seems to satisfy me.

- We stagger out of there with CHP trying to bring our bottle of Goose. The bouncers stop him at the door. We drag him out before he tries to fight them.

- We meet up with the Robot’s roommate at a bar in the casino, but I am too trashed to remember how I got to the bar. I call Lefty to see where he is, but it turns out that he is right behind me.

- We magically appear at a blackjack table and I can’t recall walking over to it. I want to play but I wisely decide against it.

- Somehow, some way, we make it back to our rooms and crash.

My Rocky training paid off the first night. Remember, Rocky is not about knocking someone out early, but having the stamina to make it to the last round. I may have been out on my feet, but I knew a little break between rounds would get me energized and ready to go again.