Honeymoon, pt. two

Traffic was pretty light on the drive to Las Vegas. Nicole and I listened to the abridged book-on-tape of Lolita read by James Mason. The desert was surprisingly green, I had told Nicole that it would look like Mars.

In the early evening we arrived at the brand new South Coast hotel and casino (it opened December 22, 2005). Outside it was almost night but the weather was like an oven! The South Coast is located on Las Vegas Boulevard about fifteen minutes south of The Strip. I wondered if I’d feel left out not staying in the heart of The Strip, but I definitely didn’t mind.

Nicole and I stayed at the South Coast for three nights. We almost never went outside the place. Nicole remarked that the casino/lobby (80,000 square feet) was noisy but not from people talking. The noise was just sounds of machines and the perpetual slot machine murmur of “whooooop, whooooop…!” We didn’t gamble a dime, one of the reasons being that we didn’t know how – even the slot machines accepted “cards” and, if you won, apparently paid in “tickets”. Yeah, okay.

Our room was colored orange and yellow-gold. The style said “neo-‘70s glamour” to me, down to the shape of the chair. It was the type of hotel room that characters on “Columbo” or “Hawaii Five-O” would have dreamed of staying at in 1973. Big and roomy with the all-important powerful air-conditioning. And there was a big plasma television stuck on the wall with sockets for Nicole’s DVD player.

I remember the hallway outside our room was very, very long. Nearby there was an ice machine. I couldn’t help filling our ice bucket with ice and then filling that up with Mountain Dew from a liter bottle I brought. I simply wanted it and I was on my honeymoon. Nicole took a couple pictures of this with her cell phone, but we haven’t the technology to download them from the camera.

A memorable aspect of every excursion outside of our room was that the South Coast was teeming with “little pretty girls”. The hotel was sponsoring a convention or competition for ice skater girls. At literally all hours of the night you couldn’t hardly sneeze without knocking down a clutch of pre-teen little girls in full make-up and black tights.

For this reason it seemed like the perfect environment for a child molester on his honeymoon -- he’s struggling to go straight, he’s made it through the wedding, and then *this* happens. I imagined that the infernal forces which had tried to stop my marriage with a bomb threat were now trying to ruin me with temptation. But they were thwarted by a clerical blunder in Hell. Somewhere there was a vacationing child molester surrounded by domineering Russian women.