(Vegas Excerpt)

by

Todd Croak-Falen

To celebrate graduation, Jackie put together a trip to Vegas for our group of friends. Little did we know that it would separate us from each other rather than bond us together. For me, it was the final straw.

I volunteered to drive, seeing as how I had a car now. I wanted to exercise the rush of self-sufficiency that came with it. Jackie sat next to me in the front seat, forcing me to glance at her tan legs time and time again.

I checked the rearview mirror. Greg and Travis were in the back seat chatting. Rita and Patrick would be joining us later. Patrick didn’t seem capable of running by anyone’s schedule but his own, so we had left without him.

When we got to Vegas, Jackie checked us into the hotel and we headed up to floor eleven. Greg and Travis kicked back on the beds and watched TV while I kept Jackie company in the bathroom as she freshened up.

“Could you do me a favor, Lem?” she asked. “Can you call the front desk and find out what time the Bellagio fountain show is?”

“Sure.”

I headed out into the main room and picked up the phone. I was starting to feel a real camaraderie with Jackie, almost as if we were in our own little relationship separate from the rest of the group.

And then Patrick ruined everything.

When Patrick and Rita finally arrived with some of Rita’s friends, we all went downstairs and got dinner. Then we hit the casino and got some free drinks. All you had to do was sit at the slot machines long enough for a waitress to come take your complementary drink order. I started off with a white Russian.

After a few minutes we headed outside to scope the other casinos, taking our drinks with us. Stepping into the cool night air with an open alcoholic beverage in my hand made my heart float. It was an immense feeling of freedom; this was Disneyland for adults. The only thing I had to try and forget was the seedy underside of the city. I knew it was there, even if we couldn’t see it right now. The pit bosses and the security cameras. The crime and prostitution. The desperate gamblers who were way out of their league, and the heartless casinos that would take their money and maybe even their lives.

What I needed was another drink. I smiled at Jackie and we dragged the others into the nearest casino for the next round of beverages. The excitement in my veins kept me moving, and we bounced from casino to casino like energetic children. I couldn’t remember the last time I felt so carefree.

We made our way to the Bellagio. Standing next to Jackie in front of the fountain, I felt happy and relaxed, as if things were finally starting to move in the right direction.

“I wonder what’s up with Patrick and Rita,” whispered Jackie, leaning over to me.

“What do you mean?”

“They’ve been arguing for the last twenty minutes. Rita and her friends split off, and now Patrick’s gone, too.” She seemed awfully preoccupied with Patrick all of a sudden. I looked around. Sure enough, he was gone, and so was Rita. I hadn’t even noticed. I must be getting drunk, I thought.

We decided to head back to the hotel. Trying to find Patrick and Rita would be difficult. And even if we managed to, we would probably wish we hadn’t.

On the way back, Jackie decided that she had had enough alcohol to start taking an informal poll on which of us thought she was attractive. My first impulse was to take this opportunity to rain compliments down on her and seal the deal, but Greg took a different route.

“Are you kidding?” he sneered. “You’re disgusting!”

Travis and I started to laugh, but Jackie didn’t. Her low self-esteem kicked in and she began hounding Greg for reasons why.

“Do you really mean it?” she asked.

“I wouldn’t touch you with a ten-foot pole!” he answered.

Jackie was crushed.

“But why?” she asked.

“Because,” he said without further explanation. “Don’t you agree, Travis?”

“Oh, yeah!” laughed Travis, playing along.

“Lem?” asked Greg, attempting to drag me into the fray.

“I don’t know,” I said and quickly changed the subject; it didn’t work. All it did was exclude me from the group, and the two of them went right back to victimizing Jackie while I walked alongside in silence.

The shit really went down when we got back to our hotel room. Everyone had had too much to drink and was exhausted. Patrick arrived late, bragging about some random sluts he had met on the street and gone to a hotel room with. He said nothing to us about Rita, but kept checking his cell and trying to call her. Every single time, he would groan and hang up when she didn’t answer.

Greg and Jackie were still arguing, and the more sober I got, the uglier the situation looked to me. Every time the subject changed, Jackie brought it up again.

“Do you really think I’m ugly?” she would plead all of a sudden.

“No,” Greg would reassure her. Then, after a slight pause, “I think you’re disgusting.”

This never-ending routine had been going on for probably the better part of an hour, and it never failed to send Greg and Travis into hysterics--and Jackie into tears.

Patrick was busy lying on his back, yelling into his cell phone, having finally gotten a hold of Rita. I felt like a helpless bystander, too confused to know what to do, and too hung-over to figure it out.

Jackie just didn’t get the joke. She was so beautiful that it was absurd for her to ask a group of guys if they thought she was attractive. It annoyed Greg to hear anyone fish for compliments, so he was giving her an absurd answer. Either that, or he was trying to run a cocky-funny routine in hopes of getting laid. The problem was, he was taking it too far and actually hurting her, thereby losing any humor he might have had. And I didn’t know how to explain any of this to Jackie.

Jackie finally fled the hotel room, and I went after her.

“Hey,” I said, catching up to her in the hall. I put my arm around her. “They’re just messing with you.”

“I know,” she sobbed.

“Then why are you crying?”

“Because they’re so mean!”

“They’re only being mean because you’re encouraging them,” I explained. “You have to stand up for yourself. Otherwise it just makes them want to do it more.”

Jackie said nothing. I got the impression she didn’t know how to stand up for herself. No time for a crash course now. I took my hand off her back. To touch her now felt like I was taking advantage of her. She seemed too fragile.

“I want to be left alone,” she said finally, looking at the floor.

Had I not been so fragile myself, I probably would have pulled her in for a hug. Instead, I turned and walked away down the hall.

“What’s up?” asked Greg when he let me back into the hotel room.

I closed the door and stared him down.

“You guys are mean,” I said.

“We’re not mean!” Greg shot back.

“Jackie organized this whole trip, and I doubt she wanted to spend it crying in the hallway!” I was seething. All her pain seemed to have taken hold in me. My eyes felt watery.

“Hey, man!” he retorted. “Don’t even try to judge us, cause you haven’t even been around for most of the semester. You don’t know a lot about what’s going on.”

My heart broke in two. He considered me an outsider now. My last close friend. We stared at each other for a long time. I really didn’t know what to say. The only sound was Patrick arguing with Rita on his cell phone. That, and the TV.

Suddenly, there was a knock at the door. I opened it and there was Jackie, returning to the den of vipers for more.

“Fine!” Patrick was still yelling at Rita through his phone. “I’m just gonna fuck Jackie, then!” With that, he hung up on his girlfriend, turned off the phone, and grinned at Jackie.

I looked at her, too. She was smiling back at him, an odd sight with her tear-streaked mascara. She pushed past me, got on the bed, and straddled Patrick. I felt lonely all of a sudden, and my stomach began to churn.

“GET OUT!” Patrick laughed at the rest of us. “GET OUT!”

Reluctantly, we all filed out the door and let it close behind us.

“What do you want to do?” asked Greg in the hallway.

“What time is it?” Travis asked himself out loud as he looked at his watch. “Five-thirty? Let’s get some breakfast.”

We got in the glass elevator and descended toward the lobby. The garish lights of the city were just starting to lose their luster to the dawn breaking on the horizon. I pushed my forehead against the glass and pretended I was freefalling to my death. It was a comforting escape. This time there was no one I wanted to say goodbye to. I wondered how many other broken dreams were out there at this very moment in the city of sin. If the stereotypes were true, then there were too many to count. Hoping mine would get lost among the others, I kept staring out the window. There was plenty of amazing architecture to look at from our vantage point, but somehow it just made me feel sad. Even if I designed buildings this grand, I couldn’t control who went inside them, and I sure as hell didn’t want to house the personality types I was amongst now.

“Why so quiet, Lem?” asked Greg cautiously behind me.

Like he didn’t know, I thought. Without turning around, I spoke.

“Well, I obviously don’t understand anything that’s going on here tonight, so I’ve decided to keep my mouth shut.”

Travis, trying to be diplomatic, said, “I can respect that.”

My blood sugar was so low that by the time we made it to the restaurant and ordered, I was starting to get the shakes. I was hung-over and dead tired. Not to mention sad, lonely, unloved, and tormented. It was a miserable time to be alive.

Travis started leafing through a men’s magazine that was sitting at our table. Greg sat in silence, staring off into space. All I could think about was Jackie upstairs with Patrick. That, and the gaping hole in my pride, heart, and manhood left behind by Monica. I would never be the same.

“Who’s that?” Greg asked Travis suddenly, a photo spread in the magazine catching his eye.

“Lisa Dare,” said Travis.

“Let me see.”

Travis put the magazine on the table between them.

“It’s too bad she doesn’t do nude scenes,” drooled Greg.

I felt the sudden urge to argue with him.

“You wouldn’t be saying that if she was your girlfriend,” I told him.

“Yes, I would!” Greg looked up from the magazine with his you-can’t-tell-me-about-myself expression. But this was one area I had expertise in.

“You think you would, but you wouldn’t,” I said. “Believe me, I know.”

“There’s nothing wrong with being naked,” Travis chimed in. “Especially if it’s just in a movie.”

“That’s all well and good unless it’s someone you care about,” I explained. “You know how guys are. They’ll go to the movie just to see the nude scene and ogle her. Would you want them doing that to your girlfriend?” I went in for the kill. “Or your mom or your sister?”

“Oh, look at feminist Lem,” scoffed Greg.

“Fuck that,” I said. “You know I’m no feminist. I’m speaking from personal experience. This isn’t just some PC-driven psychobabble I dreamed up myself.”

“What personal experience are you speaking from?” asked Travis. The only person I had told was Quentin.

“Monica did a nude scene in a movie.”

“Monica did a nude scene?” asked Greg, leaning forward.

“See, this is what I mean,” I said, gesturing towards Greg. “I loved her. I wouldn’t want my friends and everyone else to see it.”

“Yeah, but even with the worst of guys, it’s not a big deal if they see your girlfriend naked in a movie,” insisted Travis. “They could have that dumb jock mentality of, ‘Hey, I heard she gets naked in this one. Let’s go check it out.’ But who cares?”

“I care!” I said, exasperated. Why was I always the only one who cared? No one else ever cared. It didn’t matter what we were talking about.

The waitress brought our food. Pancakes for Greg, waffles for Travis, French toast for me. We dug in.

“You know, you care too much, Lem,” said Greg as he sawed away at his pancakes, his cheeks bulging with food. “It’s holding you back.”

“I know,” I admitted.

“There’s no such thing as love,” he continued.

“Yes there is,” I frowned. “I’ve felt it. Billions of people throughout the ages have felt it. You haven’t. That doesn’t mean they’re wrong and you’re right.”

“It means I’m smarter than they are,” countered Greg.

“Right.”

“Seriously! I don’t have any attachments. I can do whatever I want.”

“You just keep telling yourself that.”

“I will. I’m never going to fall in love,” he declared. “Love is for the weak.”

Well, it was certainly making me weak, I thought. But it didn’t mean it would always be this way. There were times when it made me strong. Perhaps it was lack of love that made me weak.

“Avoiding love is for the weak,” I announced.

“But love ties you down,” said Greg.

“Actually, it lifts you up.”

“Let’s say you get married. How do you know you won’t meet someone better later on?”

“You don’t. You won’t. If you’re in love, no one else will look better to you.”

“Lem,” said Greg forcefully, and I could tell he was gearing up to try and prove me wrong once and for all. “Imagine you’ve settled down with the perfect woman,” he said. I decided to play along. I pictured Monica.

“Okay.”

“Now imagine her twenty years from now. No, not even that. Fifteen years.” I pictured her fat mom.

Oh, shit.

“Now picture yourself taking a trip to Vegas by yourself and meeting...Jackie.”

I frowned at him. Travis howled with laughter.

“Oh, please!” sneered Greg. “We all know you like her.”

“Whatever,” I said.

“The point is, what satisfies you today might not satisfy you tomorrow,” continued Greg. “Think about when you first got your driver’s license. If somebody would have offered you a mediocre old car for free, on the condition that you had to drive it for the rest of your life, you would have taken it because you couldn’t imagine anything better at the time. But five years later when the transmission’s shot, you’d be eyeing all the new cars on the market. But you had signed a contract saying you wouldn’t drive anything else for the rest of your life.”

I pondered this in silence for a while. He had me trapped.

“Or just don’t let it get in your way,” said Travis.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Well, even if I had a wife and kid, if I was traveling by myself and met another woman I liked more, I’d just stay there,” said Travis.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

“So you mean to say you would just abandon your family to run off with some other woman?” I sputtered.

“Why not?” shrugged Travis.

“Because it would devastate them!” I sputtered. “That’s why not! Do you have any idea how damaging it is to a child to feel like they mean absolutely nothing to their dad? You can’t do that to someone who loves and depends on you!” I felt like I was at a table with monsters. They were going to help shape the future of generations to come. Making things worse, one child at a time. It boggled the mind.

“I’ve always felt like I need to be my own person,” explained Travis. “I can’t be tied down to other people. I need my time alone.”

I stopped chewing and just stared at him for a second. There was so much arrogance floating around. People claiming to be so “deep” and important that they had to push away all the people competing to be a part of their lives. They were so “deep” that they needed to hurt people in order to figure themselves out.

I needed time alone to figure things out, but I didn’t have to push people away to get it. It came on its own.

“I hope your wife kills you,” I told Travis, and finished my breakfast with a lump in my throat. That lump, and my sudden lack of appetite, made it hard to swallow. I felt like killing Travis and Greg in a pre-emptive strike on behalf of society and the women they might someday marry. Might as well include Patrick, too. He was upstairs cheating on Rita just because she had pissed him off.

But killing people was wrong, even under such good intentions. This was how sociopaths got started, I thought. They believed they were doing something acceptable. Oh, well. Marriage was a long way off. Hopefully the boys would use that vast amount of time to change.

The thing was, I didn’t necessarily believe all their posturing. No human being was so heartless or so “strong” to be able to shut down and move on without remorse like that. At least I hoped not. What was wrong and what was right? I couldn’t even tell anymore. It all depended on who you talked to, and everyone had a license to lie. Just because the vast majority of my friends thought it was okay to use girls didn’t mean it was okay.

Meanwhile, my last statement wasn’t sitting too well with Travis--the one about his wife killing him. His jaw was working overtime to get his food swallowed, and when it did, he pointed his knife at me.

“You know what your problem is, Lem?” he said. “You need to man-up.”

I was stunned.

“You need to man-the-fuck-up,” he continued. “Women walk all over you, and you never get what you want.”

A wave of humiliation washed over me. I couldn’t really argue with him; he was right. But was this what my friends thought about me? I thought I was doing a better job of hiding it than that.

Everyone was getting older without me. Meaner, more cynical. I felt like I was just discovering that I didn’t like any of my friends. I had lost Monica the same way. What was going on?

I thought back to my stupid e-mail horoscope, suggesting I surround myself with honest, truthful people. Just as I had feared, no one in my life seemed to fit the bill. Maybe it was time to cut them all loose.

Once the sun came up, we found Patrick and Jackie out by the pool. Jackie looked good with beads of water glistening off her chest. She was sunbathing on one of the deck chairs. Patrick was in the water, playing with Rita. Rita seemed happy and oblivious. I wondered how Jackie felt. The night had ended and she’d had to give Patrick back to his girlfriend, and keep her mouth shut about it.

The three of us got the keycard from Jackie and went up to the hotel room. Greg and Travis quickly claimed the bed that hadn’t been “slept” in, so I stretched out on the floor and fell asleep thinking about people’s perception of me. They saw me differently than I saw myself. As defective, maybe. No, that was how I saw myself. Perhaps they saw me as weak and unsure of myself. The point was, I didn’t know. I couldn’t figure out how they saw me, so I couldn’t figure out how to change it.

Take Jackie, for example. I was the only one in the group who was nice to her and would have treated her with respect, yet she chose to fuck Patrick. All I got was, “I want to be left alone.”

Well, you know what they say. A whore fucks everybody. A bitch fucks everybody but you.

The car ride home was a sullen one, at least for me. Everyone else seemed fine; just tuckered out. That was all right. It kept conversation to a minimum and gave me time to think while I drove. Driving the car felt like the last ounce of control I had over my life. I had no idea where my life was headed anymore, and I was the kind of guy who needed to know.

Travis was off to Europe soon, and I was out of an apartment. I still had no roommate lined up, except for Patrick. Everyone else had paired off already in preparation for post-college life. I didn’t really want to room with Patrick, but he was my best bet.

I glanced over at Jackie, asleep in the seat beside me. She looked so peaceful. It was amazing to think how distraught she was in a waking state. It made me think, did I really like her? Or did I just think she was beautiful? If she was ugly, would I be able to look past all her psychoses? Probably not. I guess I was shallow, too. We all were. We were in our twenties, for god’s sake.

Praise for Catch Up To Myself.
Click here to view CATCH UP TO MYSELF on Amazon.com

Copyright 2007-2010 Todd Croak-Falen