Jackpo(u)t!

One of my favorite places in the world is Las Vegas. Cheesy, I know, but it’s always just so, so fun. I’ve been there on four separate occasions, the first three with my friend Jan. The last time I went, however, I went with a girl I was only friendly with and her BFF. But before I go any further, here’s some advice: Vegas can be truly awesome, but only if you go with the right people. If you don’t, you’re pretty much going to wish you were dead.

Before my most recent trip, I had always had a great few days. Jan and I were excellent at making Vegas friends and Vegas boyfriends, and each time returned home with an abundance of new Facebook buddies. One of these newfound pals was a boy named Tom with whom Jan had a twelve hour love affair and who somehow also ended up becoming one of my Real Life good friends. On Tom’s twenty-fourth birthday, I met him at his office in New York City, which I’d visited several times before, and partook in the party his bosses and co-workers were throwing for him. We were sitting in the board room peeling the paper off cupcakes when someone asked how far away Tom and I lived from each other “back home.” We looked at each other confused, and when we asked what they meant, discovered that everyone thought I was a childhood friend of Tom’s. We set the record straight and told them we met one night at three in the morning in Las Vegas. His boss thought that was either the greatest thing he’d ever heard, or the weirdest.

But moving on: two years ago I was desperate to go to Vegas again, and Jan, who had acquired a real, non-Vegas boyfriend was wholly uninterested. But I was determined to go and determined to have a good time, no matter who I had to drag with me. I managed to convince this girl I knew, Jessie, to come along on the adventure. She weighed about, oh, sixty pounds sopping wet and had been super fun the few times we’d hung out. The problem was, I didn’t really know her. At all. But I figured, how bad could it be? Last minute she told me her “best friend in the whole wide world!” was going to come along with us, a girl who, incidentally, also weighed about sixty pound sopping wet. Again I thought, how bad could it be?

The answer? That bad. 

On our first night, it took them literally two hours of hair and makep-up to be ready to roll. We tried a few clubs and bars, but soon ended up right back at the bar at our own hotel. Now, let the record show I am more than aware that I have the uncanny alcohol tolerance of a fraternity boy, but by the time we ended up at our hotel, the other girls had only had maybe two drinks. Maybe. For some reason we took a quick trip up to our room, and they both literally fell down in the elevator, clinging to each other in hysterics, rolling around like alcoholic puppies, drunk as Charlie Sheen on a Wednesday afternoon. I was absolutely mortified. How would they survive a weekend in Vegas if they couldn’t even survive two Cosmopolitans?

Soon we were at the bar, and found ourselves in the midst of a “stag party” of about fifteen British men, all in their early forties, and all totally gross. And that isn’t me just being my usual judgy self: They. Were. Gross. Balding, awful teeth, besweatered in argyle, you get the idea. Jessie and the BFF, however, literally threw themselves at these guys, could not stop giggling, and begged for free drink after free drink, running their hands over lumpy, bald heads. Now, neither of these girls were bad looking, but somehow they thought every guy in the city of Las Vegas wanted to father their children, which, they deduced, must have made them so desirable. Clearly they were unaware that all you have to do is be able to breath if you want to get hit on in Vegas, and even that is sometimes optional. I spent the remainder of the evening sulking at the bar staring into some obscene drink I’d been handed, while my two so-called sidekicks yukked it up with the men. Once in a while the girls would grab me and say, “Ohmygod, Sasi, like, isn’t this, like, so fun! This is, like, the greatest!!” or “Sasi! Come have fun with us! Why aren’t you having fun? You need to have fun!” No thanks, Ladies. Eventually they both disappeared upstairs with two of the guys. I pretended to be asleep when they came roaring into our room several hours later, their shirts on inside out, one complaining her weave was out of whack.

The rest of the weekend continued in the same sort of fashion. The next day it took the girls until four in the afternoon to motivate themselves to get out of bed (this was after literally five plus hours of them checking Facebook on their phones and whining and gossiping about literally every human being on earth they’d ever come in contact with). Once ready, they decided we just had to go to Denny’s. I’m sorry, but there’s no excuse for Denny’s for dinner ever, let alone in Vegas: it reminded me of the time my friend ditched me in NYC because she wanted to go to the Olive Garden. Seriously? The Olive Garden? After Denny’s, we did a little shopping, which involved going into all the cheap-o but admittedly fun stores, like H&M and Forever21, and them taking touristy pictures outside of Balenciaga, Valentino, and Loro Piana, as if I couldn’t be humiliated any further.e I gripped my non-pleather handbag in shame; even my margarita by the yard couldn’t cheer me up.

That night we went to a club where the girls immediately affixed themselves to a group of Jersey Shore-esque bros with too-tight acid washed jeans and greasy everything. I immediately got left by the bar to buy my own fourteen dollar Bud Lights and sit on a speaker while they did their best Pretty Woman impersonations. When Jessie and her buddy finally decided to leave, they demanded they go up to these guys’ alleged “penthouse suite.” Although I wouldn’t have even minded if they got raped and pillaged that night, I figured I should make sure they didn’t die immediately. Ten minutes later, I left them there as they took pictures in the oversized bathtub with empty bottles of Veuve, making that obscene Duck Face for the camera. 

And then, finally, the best part of the trip began: I took a cab back to our hotel all alone, enjoying the absence of someone screeching in my ears about Facebook or how hot they were. I had a lovely chat about country music with my cab driver, and then won a whopping $5.67 on a slot machine. I was happy only until they burst into the room several hours later, each holding their panties, singing Britney Spears, and rapidly Tweeting.

Lesson. Learned.

In the "Penthouse Suite." My face says it all.