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January 17th, 2000
It was a Monday morning identical to any of the myriad of Monday mornings that had come before it.
Identical, that is, outside of the fact that instead of being at work, I was waking up hung over on the floor with the sound of the ocean in my ears and the taste of cigarettes and Tequiza sitting heavy on my teeth like thirty-two tiny, sweaty tube socks.
So basically it was more like a Sunday morning.
Saturday night my old Florida chum and misinformer.com's HTML guru Raymond S. Caster had flown in for a few days of L.A. sight-seeing, star-gawking, and general rabble-rousing, and by this point my rabble had been roused to near-lethal levels.
"Dude!" Caster yelled from behind the dim digital glow of his laptop's pale screen. "Dude! Holy crap! Get up! We're going to Vegas! Woooo!"
Now don't get me wrong, Caster is a good guy. I'd give him the shirt off my back, even though it is more stylish than something he'd typically wear. The thing is, the guy doesn't get out too often, so when he does, he starts to wig out a little. You feel like you should put down newspaper just in case he gets too excited and loses control of his bladder.
In short, good guy or not, you want no part of him when you're lying in a puddle of your own drool on a synthetic brown carpet full of Skittles and wet sand in a cheap motel somewhere near Long Beach.
"Because I am seized with an unearthly fear that the very act of opening my mouth will unleash an unstoppable halitosis demon upon the unsuspecting world, I will keep this brief," I moaned, "If you don't shut up and let me go back to..."
My labored monologue trailed off into silence, partially out of exhaustion, and partly out of the realization that I had already used more than forty words in my explanation of why I intended to be brief.
The sloshy cells of the memory centers of my brain squished into action. Star Trek: The Experience... Vegas...ruuuule... oh yeah...
If you're out of the geek loop, Star Trek: The Experience is an attraction built in the casino at the Las Vegas Hilton that promises to "immerse" visitors in a "futuristic world where they see, feel, and live the 24th century!"
"I just read online that Star Trek: The Experience is going to shut down in March!" Caster rattled impatiently, forcing down the clasps on his burgeoning suitcase. "Apparently there's been problems with the motion simulator, and they've been fined out the bunghole for having minors in the gaming areas. This may be my last chance ever to see it before it gets dismantled! Dude! I'm sure as hell not flying home before I go to the last frontier. Hells yeah! Vegas, baby!"
In retrospect, garnering a second opinion to the crackpot postulations of the attraction's imminent doom provided by "Ensign Ira's Seven of Nine Spank Shrine" probably would have been prudent, but at this point Caster was not to be turned back.
The plan was simple. A quick forty-five minute pop up the freeway to my apartment in Burbank so I could pick up some clean undies and a toothbrush, then across the desert into Vegas.
"We'll be there by five," Caster prattled. "Are you kidding? We'll be up five hunnie by five!"
At this point I finally had to lay down the law and warn him that any further Swingers references would be met with lethal force.
"We'll have dinner at Quarks!" he continued, "The first round of Arcturian Fizz is on me, then watch out Dabo girls!"
Before I could even begin to wonder what the hell that sentence meant, suddenly and without warning, three lanes away from the shoulder of the 405 freeway, the engine of my car suddenly and completely failed to function. And it wasn't a sputtering, "You're out of gas" kind of failure, or an explosive, "You're blown two cylinders" kind of failure. It was more of a "doomsday electrical device from Escape from L.A. that can target and disable a single taxicab in Tijuana" kind of failure. One minute we're flying down the freeway at seventy-five miles per hour, the next minute we're blowing through traffic on pure inertia in a desperate attempt to clear the road before rolling to a deadly stop.
Caster: Did we run out of gas?
Caster stayed with the car while I went to call AAA. I was almost proud to call them, as this would be the first time that they would have to come to my rescue as a result of automotive problems that weren't directly related to my own ineptitude.
AAA Operator: Name?
While we waited for AAA, a Department of Transportation rescue tow truck arrived on the scene.
DOT Driver: Did you run out of gas?
The DOT Driver was unable to tow us all the way to Burbank. His job is to get your wreck off the freeway quickly and efficiently so that other wrecks may occupy that precious space. He's not in it for the long haul... so to speak. Twenty minutes later a friendly AAA tow truck arrived on the scene.
AAA Driver: Did you run out of gas?
This driver, either unable or unwilling to go the distance to the media city, towed us off the freeway to precisely where the first tow driver would have left us if we hadn't foregone his services with the false pretense that we could get the car towed the thirteen remaining miles home with a single AAA truck. With the promise that yet another truck would be there to pick us up in an hour, he disappeared into the distance.
Okay. Minor set back. It was just going to be an hour. Then we'd be on our way to the land of sweet blackjack and topless revues. No problem.
At this point I'd like to remind you that I still hadn't brushed my teeth from my tobacco and alcohol binge of the previous evening, and the Coca-Cola and Red Vines from the nearby Shell, though they fought valiantly, did little to alleviate the hangover breath emanating from my head.
Finally a tow truck came for us. The driver was kind of a Chris Rock character with no sense of humor.
Chris Rock: Did you run out of gas?
And with that we were crammed into the truck. Frustrated, stinking of old booze and geeked up exhuberence, running four hours late, and with a deceased car.
But nothing worthwhile ever comes easy, right?
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One hour turned into two. At some point we realized that we were stranded in Bel Air, and Caster began rapping the theme to The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. It was funny for the first ten minutes. After that, I slammed his head in the car door.