Dateline - Dumbed down at a Daytona Beach Bar
What I'd like to know, and what i am incapable of asking, or rather i
should say that having taken a 360 view of everyone in this bar and
found no one who looked capable of or willing to answer my question, is
this: why are we all so shitty to one another? Why, after 9/11 and
3650 deaths and now this sniper in Washington, why, why have we yet
failed to bond together as a people, as a nation, or a nationality, or
a species, or taking it way down the scale, way down to the miniscule,
to the sixty or so people in this bar, why aren't we united?
Why do I feel that if I try to speak to the girl on the stool beside me
that I'm committing some sort of crime? For mostly, that is the
response I'll get. And then the barstaff are angry and treat us all
like animals, like low-life drunkscum and they're just waiting for an
excuse to boot our asses out. Why?
Why? Why? Why?
Do I ask why to much? I think I do. I think that's my problem. I
have whyidas. Whydaphobia. Whynelvision. Why.
So the question I wanted to ask the pretty blonde seated on the bar
stool outside just a few feet from the sand and the volleyball setup
and then, a little further on,the sea,the Atlantic Ocean, what I wanted
to ask her was this:
If you had a man with whom you'd had a torrid love affair, hot and
brief and then severed by separate agendas and different directions,
and now after a few weeks or a month away from this man you felt
suddenly a firm conviction that this man could be the real thing, the
shit, the ONE... would you, should you run to him across 2000 miles of
interstate, blindly now, after a month's haitus and him standing you up
at a predetermined meeting place that you traveled far afield to get
to, only to sit alone in a hotel room for the weekend. Would you?
I never got to ask.
And that was it for Daytona Beach. We peaked out that night after my
two dull days alone in Orlando sans the Cricket followed by three wild
nights and days on the 9th floor of the Treasure Island Resort Hotel,
Cousin Justin and I, during which time Justin did all he could and did
well to simulate the madness and silliness and general irresponsible
reckless fun of Thompson and his attorney thrashing hotel rooms in
Vegas some three decades ago. Yes, "In this, the foul year of our
Lord, 1971," I think I hear Johnny Depp saying in my film-addled brain.
Justin had spent the weekend working his ass off slinging pizza with
some carney concession outfit out of New Hampshire here in Daytona for
some big Harley thrown down Hog heaven pipe-roaring biker fest. While
I spent 13 days in a shitty hotel 3 miles from the gates of DisneyWorld
cursing my naivete for believing a woman would actually fly down here
to meet me and frolic in Tsunami Cove or whatever Mickey's waterpark is
called, Justin spent 13 hours a day slinging dough lightly smeared with
tomato paste and crap cheese and making, undoubtedly, crap money as is
ever only the case working for someone else, especially down at the
food service level.
But Justin had a goal. And I gotta love him for it. He wanted a
moment in the sun with a pocket fulla cash and all the "accoutrements"
from the trunk of Dr. Gonzo's red shark convertible.
Justin made out a list and I, armed with a softball-sized wad of bills from his weekend
tip money, filled that list, procuring everything but the "devil
ether," the extract of pineal gland, andthe 15-year-old runaway girl
with a head full of acid and an armload of Barbara Streisand portraits.
For those of you who don't know what the fuck I'm talking about, well,
you should. How anyone could appreciate any of my gibberish without
first having read.. or at least seen the movie adaptation of the book
"Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas" I cannot imagine. So get out there and
rent it today. Or better yet, read it, preferable under the influence
of dangerous and illegal narcotics (which, for you virgins, can be
purchased outside any grammar school these days by little people with
hands small enough to make a pinner joint look like a Bob Marley
special).
So Sunday afternoon I shopped, got us a royally sweet suite for peanuts
(what had been a $200 room the night before was now, with the bikers
checking out in herds, was now just $49 a night with AAA) and
"decorated" the room with all the goodies, the finest item of which was
perhaps the life-size blowup alligator. We were right on the beach.
Fantastic. And Justin was duly pleased. There were cocktails aplenty.
We swam at all hours ofthe night and day, often to the complete
abhorrence of the night security guy who just shook his head at and
walked off into the shadows.
Treasure Island. It appealed to my pirate sensibilities. It had two
jacuzzis, a crescent shaped pool, and it was so "rightonthebeach" that
I joked on the phone to friends from our 9th floor balconey that i
could toss the phone onto the sand, and with a little more effort, into
the surf.
An odd beach Daytona. I have grown up and spent most of my adult life
on or near a beach, but never have I been to a beach where they allow
one to drive right down onto the sand. Oddly, we never availed
ourselves of this priviledge. Part and parcel of the whole Fear &
Loathing routine was to keep a constant buzz the whole weekend, and me,
I've always been SUPER paranoid about drunk driving. And rightly so.
I've already killed a woman with a speeding locomotive over which I had
no control and, obviously, no ability to swerve to miss her. As
pathetically sensative as I am, I don't think I could live with myself
and a DWI-related death. Less out of a fear of jail than sheer
irreconcilable grief and remorse, I'd probably step out of my car and
walk headlong into oncoming traffic.
No. Then I'd be fucking up someone else's life/head, just as the woman
in blue on that fateful Amtrak trip did to me and the engineer. No. I
guess I'd just run off, steal a clothesline and find a good tree.
Jesus. Where did that morbid sidetrack come from?
I know exactly where it came from. It came from a week without 30mg of
mirtazapine/night and roughly a month of trimming my prescribed dosage
of Wellbutrin to stretch it out a little.
For you see, it isn't October 22nd as I write this last bit. It's
weeks later, and I'm committing the gonzo sin of recollective prose.
It can't be helped. When you load up a posh hotel room on the warm
gulf coast of Florida with booze and inflatable alligators and get
ready-set-go hellbent on having a good time of your brief
wad-of-cash-blowing 3-night hotel stay before reality crashes back in
on you, you don't write much. There just isn't time. Or the
inclination.
Thus it is that all you ever got in writing about my fantastic 4th of
July this year was a photo essay. Thus it has been that after SIX
"trips" to/at Burning Man, I still haven't written about it. I really
tried this year, harder than ever. But somehow, it just evades
description. I hope this years photos will suffice.
So I wrote little to nothing during our debaucherous adventures at the
hotel, a couple of saloons, and finally on the last night, a strip bar.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, I think strip bars are
stupid, stupid, stupid. But Justin and his friend Neil were pumped up
about it, so I drank copiously and got into the spirit. I even managed
a few photos with the digital, risking, mind you, my camera and my
face. It goes without saying that had they caught me snapping shots,
the bouncers would have stomped my $400 puported "eBay tool" camera and
probably beat the shit out of me, to boot. Oh what fun it is to ride
on a one-horse-power brain, yeh!
Well, as I'm writing this now on my palm pilot and shuttling it across
the satellite-spotted sky to my webmaster Rick who will henceforth post
it posthaste, I can include no photos as yet. But drop back by in a
few days. I got some good ones! Of the whole 3-day affair, not just
the strip club. In fact there are only four from the club, all very
trippy and tracerlike as I couldn't use a flash and the girls move very
fast. So have no fear, oh yee of high moral standards, of any blatant
snatches of.. snatch. Haha.
Our re-enactment of Depp and Del Toro's destructive demise to the level
of dumb beasts couldn't have ended more appropriately. We awoke hung
over as dogs after a feast of bad meat. Sick, estranged from one
another and the world. The stink of rotting clam shells, stale beer
and cigarettes filled the room. Stumbling out onto the balconey, I saw
the aligator abandoned in the pool and our other inflatable, a whale,
half-deflated and twirling dizzilly in the still-on jacuzzi. Neil's
cadillac was parked half on and half off the beach, and straddling a
yellow parking slot line, to boot: sure evidence that our return home
was anything but.. legal. Then I suddenly remembered the cops. Shit!
We'd been pulled over, late, after the strip joint closed and no one
else would have us. How the hell did Neil get us out of that one? I
guess we'll never know.
I apparantly had exercised some semblance of good sense and
boyscout-like planning and had packed and loaded most of my things into
the Chevy the night before.
It was definitely time to go. The management would be banging on our
door at any moment to demand damages, or worse. I took my toothbrush
and quietly made my escape. Why bother with goodbyes?
-RSM
