Head in the Sand ... and other unpopular positions (8 page)

A white stretch limousine arrived at the house
yesterday at two p.m. to take us the short distance to the wedding
chapel to renew our vows. Wayne was napping (okay,
snoring
)
till the limo arrived, so he spent most of the ceremony in a
confused daze—just like our original wedding. (Today he hopes it
was just a dream. I may let him continue to think that. It’s less
embarrassing for him.)

I’d never been in a stretch limo before. Inside were
a TV, VCR, champagne glasses and decanters (empty, though, in our
case, because I was too cheap to pay the extra fee), and plush
leather seats. We were met inside the door of the chapel by Elvis
himself. He was handsomely decked out in a fire-engine red,
sequined, bell-bottomed jumpsuit, and had jet-black sideburns and
swept-back hair. The phone rang, and the receptionist was busy with
our paperwork, so he nonchalantly answered the phone. Who knew
Elvis was so down-to-earth? So accessible to the common man. So . .
. secretarial.

We had to sign release forms for the live webcast.
Wayne balked a bit, asked how much he’d get paid for his
performance, but then finally signed. (I left him no choice.) I
heard him mumble something about a trip to Reno later, but
dismissed it as sleepiness.

We were then shown into the chapel and Elvis showed
us how to go through the motions smoothly. He pointed out the video
camera (for our personal videotape), and the Web camera. (We waved
a few times for anyone who was watching. People do log on there
randomly and watch, so we don’t know who saw it.) Sadly, we began
the ceremony about ten minutes before our prearranged time, so I
have no idea if people missed it because of that. Plus, there was
the whole RealPlayer fiasco. Don’t get me started.

The Hoss Challenge:

Today we got a request from Wayne. He decided that he
wanted to go back to Timber’s and try their Hoss Burger Challenge.
If you remember, that’s the 2½–3-pound burger as big as a dinner
plate, complete with tons of tomatoes, lettuce, cheese, sauce, etc.
The challenge was to eat two (yes, two) of these monsters in half
an hour (yes, half). He had to eat every bit, including the
condiments and bun. He had to sit at a separate table from anyone
else and be timed by the staff (synchronized down to the second).
The prize for this is $100, both burgers free, and your photo on
their Hall of Fame board.

He was allowed to do any cutting or arranging
beforehand, but couldn’t take any bites till he was told to. He cut
the burgers into quarters and got everything arranged.

GO!

He was right on schedule for the first half of the
first burger, which had to take no more than 7½ minutes. But, he
was at the 16-minute mark at the end of Burger 1, so we feared the
worst.

We didn’t know what to do. Should we cheer him on,
ignore him and talk in hushed tones behind his back, or go sit in
the car and pray that he not explode? We opted for sitting there
normally, but trying vainly to ignore him. He didn’t say much of
anything, didn’t even look at us till he hit the end of Burger 1 at
16 minutes.
Uh-oh.

Things kinda went downhill from there. Chaos ensued,
and all hell broke loose. My memory might be a bit off, but I
vaguely remember someone losing consciousness, a small tow-truck,
paramedics, the fire department, a crane, several two-ton girders,
and someone saying, “Don’t go toward the light, Wayne . . . don’t
go toward the light!”

Well, okay, maybe I’m exaggerating. But he did
realize that it wasn’t gonna happen, and he (thankfully) slowed the
pace and tried instead to save face and not get too sick for the
car ride back home. It probably didn’t help when we stopped at a
store in 85-degree desert sun, and everyone but him ran in “just
for a minute” to pick up some trashy novels and word puzzle books
for the flight back. We came back out to the car and found Wayne
with the seatback reclined fully, cooking there sunny-side up,
looking a little green around the gills.

To add insult to injury, the construction workers
here in the neighborhood laid new curb all around my parents’ block
today, and we had to “walk the plank” across a small board to get
from the wide wet cement into the driveway. Wayne (and the 1½
burgers he was carrying around with him) somehow made it across the
board safely.

Later that evening, Wayne and I braved sitting at a
blackjack table with a real Las Vegas dealer. We sat at the
“cheapskate” $5 bet tables with the other embarrassingly-low
bettors, and decided to take it all in as a once-in-a-lifetime
experience. I’m a people-watcher, and this is a unique city in
which to watch people from all over the world in various weird
places and situations.

Blackjack is an easier game to play because it
doesn’t force you to bet against other people, and there aren’t
nearly as many subtle nuances and body language as in a game like
poker. We sat at the same table and made a few minimum bets and
played well. We watched other people come and go from our table.
The people who sat down were as varied as I’ve ever seen. Most were
very friendly, and I found that the tables are often a place to
socialize with people while you’re playing (or watching other
people play).

I came away from this experience with an odd
fascination about how the tables work: the lengthy list of rules,
the plethora of “eye in the sky” cameras that watch everyone’s
moves all the time, and how very different each casino is in
atmosphere and type of person frequenting it.

The tables change dealers every hour or so, and every
time a dealer leaves your table or arrives, he/she has to show both
hands, palms up and then down, to the camera. I thought this was
just a neat little gesture of hello or goodbye until Wayne
explained that it was to show that the dealer wasn’t filching a
chip or two out of the tray. Dishonest people in Las Vegas? Who
knew? Once you place your bet, you’re not allowed to touch your
chips. At most casinos, you never touch the cards. You can tip a
dealer outright if you wish, or you can “ride” a tip with your bet
and the dealer can then end up doubling the tip (or the house gets
it if your hand loses).

It seems to be a nice gesture to tip a dealer if you
are dealt a blackjack or two, and tips are usually a $1 coin/token.
I don’t understand this gesture, since the casino insists that the
dealer isn’t cheating and isn’t handing you that blackjack on
purpose, and yet most people tip dealers for those blackjacks after
the fact. Superstition runs rampant in this town, even among
civilized, intelligent people. Sitting in an oddly lit casino, with
no windows and no clocks, for hours on end must change a person.
You do silly things like tip supposedly impartial dealers for
giving you cards they have no control over.

There were enough things to notice in these places to
keep me fascinated for ages. We met people from all over the
country, and the dealers are from all over the world. We saw
nametags such as:

“Hi, I’m Anna, from Russia.”

“Hi, I’m Joe, from Chicago.”

“Hi, I’m Wei, from China.”

“Hi, I’m Feng, from Taiwan.”

“Hi, I’m Amy, from Las Vegas.”

Hi, we’re Wayne and Linda, from Pittsburgh.
Didn’t have quite the same ring to it.

I have a strange feeling there are a few short
stories buried in this week’s experiences. It’s another world in
there, and seeing the Strip at night is something one never
forgets. (Fifteen thousand miles of neon tubing isn’t easily
missed.)

Well, Gracie just came in from using her grandpa’s
push broom to sweep the eternal desert dust off the driveway.
Apparently this type of ritualistic sweeping is done throughout the
house all the time. The kitchen can get swept up to three times a
day on breezier days, even with a good screen door.

We’re going to visit with my folks now. We’ll be
leaving for McCarran Airport in a little while. Did you know that a
jet dumps more suckers . . . I mean,
people
. . . into this
town every two-and-a-half minutes? The thought of all those
unsuspecting people descending on the Strip day and night, 24/7, is
sobering. We certainly don’t have people rushing into Pittsburgh
like that. (Hey, once we have two new stadiums, though, who
knows?)

We leave the west (and the nice weather and majestic
mountains) behind, and return to the end of autumn’s colors and
roads that actually curve and go uphill and down once in a while.
We will be happy to be home, but a little sad that the week has
gone by so quickly. As the wind whips through our tousled hair . .
.

Oh, wait—that’s from the trashy novel I bought to
read on the plane. Never mind.

It happens to every girl
at some point—some are younger, some older, but all of us succumb
to it eventually. Yes, of course, I’m talking about puberty. That
once-in-a-lifetime event that is exciting and glorious for about
six or seven minutes and then becomes a colossal hassle for the
next forty years.

In my particular case, I
was thirteen when I entered the wonderful world of womanhood (not
to be confused with the Wonderful World of Disney, which I also
entered when I was thirteen, but that was a family vacation to
Florida and not related to this in the slightest). After all the
hubbub created by my nursing-school-trained mother when I was ten
(complete with medical textbooks and graphs and charts and the
ensuing panic at the obvious grotesque
lies
she was telling me about where
babies come from), the actual event that summer day was
anticlimactic. Some pad company had recently come out with the
newfangled “mini-pad” (which my mother deemed “cute!” when she
first saw them), and we were already stocked up and prepared. And,
once I got her to stop brooding and clucking over me like a mother
hen, everything was fine—and even boring compared to the earlier
hype.

It was, though,
summertime, and at our house that meant daily treks to the local
community swimming pool from about noon till four
p.m.
Despite the recent
developments, I tagged along that day, not wanting to miss the
socializing, even if I would have to miss the swimming. I hadn’t
realized just how much of a typical pool day was taken up by actual
swimming, though, until we got there and within fifteen minutes I
was bored of hanging out near our towels on our spot on the
grass.

A little while later, I offered to trek up
the hill to the snack bar, and, laden with coinage, I broke out of
my towel-sitting boredom and made the voyage, expecting to return
laden with gifts of fried food and cold soda. The lines at the
snack bar were always long, so I figured this would kill a fair
amount of time. And boy, was I right.

As I inched up the line slowly, the July
heat began to beat down on me, even under the canopy roof over the
snack bar area. To this day, I don’t know if it was the heat, the
humidity, or the bodily events to which I was not yet accustomed,
but when I was finally going to be the next customer waited upon,
everything in my field of vision began to look strangely like a
photo negative. Colors were turned inside out, and if I hadn’t
known myself to be a naive, thirteen-year-old total goody-two-shoes
from suburbia, I’d have thought I was high on something
psychedelic.

Sadly, I would have been mistaken about
that, but it might have had a less embarrassing ending. Instead,
the person working the counter asked me what I wanted, and I do not
remember answering. I remember someone else asking me if I was all
right, while everyone swam in a sea of inverted color and sound
became muffled as if underwater. I vaguely remember falling
backwards and thinking about the concrete floor on which I was
standing at the time. You see, I had this way of ending up in the
hospital every single summer with stitches in my head. Would this
be the day for the summer of 1974?

Apparently not, as I next found myself
calmly and safely staring up at the canopy roof, lying flat on the
hard concrete, with no pain and with colors where they should be.
Someone behind me in the long line must have caught me as I fell
backwards. Someone else was telling everyone that I was coming
around, and I managed to sit up on my own. Kind of.

The next thing I remember was lying flat on
my back again, this time in a smaller, cooler room, on a small cot.
My mother was next to me—I could hear her voice. When I opened my
eyes fully and focused them, I gazed upon the gorgeous face of what
had to be Mark Spitz. He was tan, with sleek black hair, wearing
only a small bathing suit, and had a whistle around his neck, and
he was hovering just a few inches from my face, peering into my
eyes with curiosity and concern.

“
Are you all right?” he
breathed, taking my hand in his and expressing genuine care even
through his perfect eyebrows and thick black mustache. “I’m the
pool manager. You fainted.”

I sighed. Of course I fainted. And I felt as
if I might faint again! If this was what womanhood was like, no
wonder they kept giving us pamphlets about it in school to prepare
us. No one could have prepared me for this, not even my mother and
her medical charts. Especially not the medical charts.

I batted my eyelashes a
few times and let “Mark” help me sit up on the cot, my mother still
hovering nearby like a traffic helicopter at rush hour.
Mother, don’t you have a
fifteen-minute-adult-swim to get to?

And, just as I was about to breathe my
heartfelt thanks to Mark and bat my eyelashes some more, my
mother—helpful to a fault—blurted out behind him: “She’ll be fine.
She just got her first period today, and she must have felt a
little lightheaded.”