333 Miles (20 page)

Highly satisfied with themselves, the group
left the room and took the elevator down to the main floor. Each
wore similar variations of modestly faded jeans with black shoes,
though Mike’s were half-boots while Alex donned pointy-toed
Salvatore Ferragamo loafers with no socks. Mike had on a white
button-up shirt with small red vertical stripes, successfully
completing the default outfit for all twenty-five- to
thirty-five-year-old males in Vegas in 2006. Gary donned a bright
red satin button-up shirt with large blue buttons and small blue
vertical stripes in the front. The back featured a large image of
Papa Smurf, who was giving a thumbs-up signal and had a big smile
under his white beard. Gary bought this particular shirt on Melrose
in Los Angeles a year before he met Blair. He had only worn it
three times, all in Vegas. Based on the earlier conversation in the
car, it provided a round of laughs when he emerged from the
bathroom wearing it. Alex had selected a patternless, canary-yellow
Prada cashmere sweater he purchased a few weeks ago at Saks while
visiting New York. The Elvis sunglasses were back on his face.
Roger wore a shiny black-collared short-sleeved shirt that he used
for most occasions requiring something more formal than a tee
shirt.

Inside the elevator, Sheryl Crow informed
them that love is a windy road. The walls in the elevator were
mirrored, giving the group a final chance to check their look
before heading out for the evening. They approved of themselves
wholly, though Alex slightly modified his hair. At the ground
floor, before the doors had fully parted, Roger slipped out and was
quickly two paces ahead of the group, heading directly toward the
$25 blackjack pit. Gary ran to catch up and subtly steered him away
from the tables, convincing him of the merits of waiting until they
got to the Hard Rock before gambling.

Alex, who rarely smoked outside of Vegas, lit
a Dunhill and then walked briskly to join the group. The four
headed toward the main exit of the casino side by side. Had anyone
been watching from the door they may have been reminded of a
softer, yuppie version of the walking scene from
Reservoir
Dogs
.

Outside, the air was considerably cooler than
in the casino, but just as smoky. Taxis and limousines, half of
them bright lime green with the Palms logo on the side, swarmed
around like bees outside a nest. High-heeled twenty-something girls
in miniskirts and small dresses walked speedily in every direction.
An even larger number of men, nearly all wearing jeans and light
colored button-up shirts, also milled about but somehow seemed more
stationary.

A mixture of people of all ages formed a taxi
line that snaked to the left for about eighty feet. Alex quickly
estimated it would take at least fifteen minutes to secure a cab in
this fashion. He found this to be an unacceptable solution. Without
saying a word to anyone, he dropped his cigarette, cut his way
through the line, and walked briskly away from it toward the
direction most cabs were approaching. Ninety seconds later, after
guaranteeing the driver a twenty-dollar tip to skip the normal taxi
line, Alex returned to the main entrance in the back of a yellow
cab, waving the others in.

Gary hopped into the front seat and Roger and
Mike joined Alex in the back, with Roger in the middle. The cab
reeked of cheap perfume. Roger, Mike and Gary simultaneously took a
few seconds to appraise their new driver. She was attractive, in
her early thirties with long dark hair featuring voluminous bangs
supported by a lot of hair spray. She was quite obviously Russian.
Gary confirmed this by checking her cab license which identified
her as Svetlana Federova. She looked much better in person than in
the picture. She became universally more attractive once she began
to speak. “Sooo, boyszz, veer do vee go on dis night?” she asked
slowly in a thick Russian accent, treating each word as if it were
its own entity.

“Anywhere you want,” Roger answered
stupidly.

“Hard Rock please,” Alex overruled.

“Has anyone ever told you that you look like
the cab driver from
Pulp Fiction
?” Mike asked
tentatively.

“Ahh, yez. Many times,” she purred slowly.
Continuing, she asked, “and, you, vat do you sink?”

“I think you are way hotter,” Mike said.

“Tank you, tank you veeery much,” she
offered.

Sadly, no one had any ideas on how to spur
additional conversation with their new friend. Instead, they sat in
silence and awkwardly fastened their seatbelts while she navigated
the taxi across Las Vegas Boulevard and into the entrance to the
Venetian. This led to a back exit with direct access to Koval which
quickly led to Paradise Drive. Ultimately, they began to discuss
amongst themselves the details of the arrangements for the night
and clarified who was covering which expenses. Alex instructed
everyone to make sure they were together and ready to go into the
club no later than midnight.

Two minutes before arrival at the Hard Rock,
their sexy escort began to speak again. “So, boyzz . . . do zou
know vaaht Teeeger Voods and Meeekel Jagzzon haaav in couwmmon?”
she asked, again nearly purring.

It took everyone a second to realize she
wanted to tell a joke. Gary, being in the front seat, felt obliged
to act as spokesman. He remembered this joke and recalled that the
punch line would be that they both liked to play with little white
balls. “No. What is it?” he asked anyway.

“Zey are both neeeegers,” she said even more
slowly, her accent deepening. She took a few seconds to let the
answer sink in, then coyly looked around the cab for a reaction. A
childish smile crept onto her mouth and into her eyes.

There was a moment of stunned silence
followed by a simultaneous eruption of laughter. “No fucking way,”
Alex said to no one in particular, though he turned his face toward
Roger, eyes wide, and began elbowing him lightly in the ribs.

One minute later, the cab came to a rest
immediately in front of the main entrance to the Hard Rock Hotel
and Casino. Alex, who had finished laughing but was still smiling
stupidly, handed the driver two twenties for the eighteen-dollar
fare. Three doors opened and the four exited the vehicle. Roger,
still chuckling lightly, was the last to get out of the cab.

Inside the hotel,
Fly Away
by Lenny
Kravitz was playing loudly, overshadowing the buzz of the crowd and
the incessant jingle of slot machines.

Interlude Fourteen

Alex (29)

The dance-floor at Jimmy Love’s in downtown
San Diego was packed. Alex was surprised to find himself on it for
two reasons. First, he really didn’t like dancing. He only did it
if he felt it would significantly increase his chances of hooking
up. Second, it was almost midnight on a Friday night and, much to
his surprise, he was completely sober.

Freddy Moyer, a college friend, had flown in
that night from Phoenix. Freddy’s flight was scheduled to arrive in
San Diego at 9:00 p.m. The plan was that Alex would pick him up at
the airport. Both would already be dressed and ready to go out.
Alex would park his car downtown (he drove a black Cadillac
Escalade at that time) and they would take a cab home so they could
both drink freely. The plan went off track immediately. Due to
thunder storms in Phoenix, Freddy’s flight did not arrive until
10:45 p.m. The pair rushed downtown and made it into Jimmy Love’s
by 11:15 p.m., early enough to salvage the night.

Almost immediately after paying fifteen
dollars each for cover charge and entering the bar, Freddy spotted
a girl he used to date in college. Three minutes later, he took her
downstairs to catch up and Alex found himself alone at the bar.

“Fucking perfect,” he mumbled to no one in
particular.

Now half an hour before midnight, Alex
decided it wasn’t worth having to pay for a cab and the overnight
parking fee just to drink alone for two hours until the bar closed.
Thus, this looked destined to become his first sober Friday in as
long as he could remember. Still, that didn’t mean he couldn’t have
a beer, so he ordered an Amstel Light.

The beer arrived and he grabbed it with his
right hand while scooping up his change (a ten and five ones) with
his left hand. He separated one dollar off of the pile with his
left thumb and let it fall to the bar. As he shoved the rest of the
money indiscriminately into the left pocket of his Seven for
Mankind jeans, he felt someone rub up behind him and try to elbow
their way up to the bar to his right. This caused annoyance until
he spun around and saw the offending party.

If Amber Jones was a bit aggressive in trying
to get to the bar, it was only because she was not used to getting
any resistance from males for anything she did. With long light
brown hair, big brown eyes and red lips, she could pass for a young
version of Cindy Crawford if she wished – minus the signature mole
of course.

“Excuse you,” Alex said to her in a
half-rude, half-flirtatious manner.

It had the desired effect.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Amber replied and smiled
while batting her eyelashes. While barely twenty-one, Amber knew
how to spot an opportunity for a free drink.

“Well, just this one time I will forgive
you,” Alex said, then added, “and not only do I forgive you, if you
apologize for being so clumsy, I’ll let you buy me a drink. What
are you having?”

Predictably, she wanted a cosmopolitan.
Predictably, she assumed correctly that Alex would actually be the
one paying. Alex gave her order to the same bartender who gave him
the Amstel Light. Instead of using the money crumpled into his
pocket, he set his beer down on the bar and pulled out his wallet.
When the beverage was prepared, he exchanged a crisp green hundred
dollar bill for one shiny red cosmopolitan. This time he left a two
dollar tip out of the ninety-two he got back. He shoved the other
ninety dollars into his pocket. He handed Amber her drink,
carefully holding the glass by its stem, and took a step back to
get a better look at her body. It was nice. She had a slim stomach
and even better tits than he first expected. They were nicely
displayed in a black half-shirt from Bebe covered by a thin white
jacket (also from Bebe). The jacket ended just above a pair of
tight, light-blue Guess jeans that curved around her hips
perfectly. Alex noted that she dressed well, at least for her age.
This meant she came from a family with some money, so he would be
better served trying to impress her with charm than wealth. Also,
it meant she would respond better to subtle insults than
flattery.

Within five minutes, Alex realized he had
developed a crush. Despite her looks, Amber was surprisingly smart
and interesting. If it turned out she could cook and liked to
clean, Alex thought jokingly to himself that he may have to revisit
his views on marriage. He had already overruled as frivolous his
previous idea that she was “too young for him.” Two minutes later,
however, she uttered the two words proving she was not perfect.

“Let’s dance,” she demanded with the same
level of confidence Alex projected on his side of the
conversation.

“Ah, of course,” Alex thought to himself.

Alex wrapped his hand around the side of her
stomach: “Dance? Maybe, but with who?”

Amber laughed: “Me, silly guy.”

Alex: “Well, in that case, okay. But next
time you should wear something sexy.”

Amber was confused at his comment but she
grabbed his hand and moved closer to him.

Alex had never fully fathomed the point of
dancing. Basically you moved your body around in unnatural jerky
motions, accomplishing nothing. Not only that, you couldn’t keep
score, or win, or have a conversation, or drink as much while you
were doing it.

His aversion to dancing began around
sophomore year in high school at the winter Sadies dance (Wizard of
Oz theme) which Leah Brandt took him to. Leah was a junior, a
cheerleader, hot and popular. Alex had hoped to make out during the
dance and maybe even ask her to “go out.” However, she ended up
dancing with her girlfriends the whole time while Alex, dressed as
a scarecrow, lamely shuffled his feet on the side of the gym with a
few of his buddies who faced a similar predicament. As high school
moved into college, dancing gained a whole new importance, perhaps
even more important than sports. Now, people danced at nearly every
party. While the ready availability of alcohol made this bearable,
it remained far from optimal. Alex’s brain extrapolated this
troublesome trend to assume that as life advanced, dancing would
become the central focus of being. This turned out to be sort of
true, especially in his early twenties at clubs and during his
mid-twenties when it felt like there was a wedding nearly every few
weeks. Luckily, by his late twenties the trend began to
reverse.

In any case, Alex never came to understood
people’s desire to dance. Still, he was a highly adaptable creature
and learned to make lemons into lemonade. As it turned out, if you
could get a girl to dance with you, it became much easier to get
her to go to bed with you. Meaningful physical contact is one of
the primary barriers to sex, and dancing allowed for significant
contact. Therefore, dancing was a useful tool and Alex came to
embrace it. He also learned that if you wanted to attract a girl in
a club, dancing with other male friends in as obnoxious a way as
possible was usually quite successful. His “Monkey Dance,” which
consisted solely of bending over to put one fist on the ground
while shaking his ass around and making “ooh-ooh-ahh-ahh” monkey
noises was particularly successful. On tamer nights, he stuck to
some decent robot moves that always got laughs.

Alex did not plan to do the monkey dance or
the robot for Amber, but led her by the hand to the center of the
dance floor, elbowing his way through the crowd. He always felt if
you are going to dance, you should take the girl to the middle of
the floor no matter how crowded it was. When they arrived,
Naughty Girl
by Beyonce was playing. Alex wrapped his arm
around Amber’s waist and held the small of her back with an open
hand while moving the rest of his body appropriately. After a
moment he backed off to see if she would reinitiate contact. Five
seconds later she danced her way over to him and pressed her body
into his, halfway wrapping her legs around one of his.