July 13 (cont.) Nineteen In The Whole    • Vegas is not really much of a "walking" city, for obvious reasons. But I'm not the kind of person who grasps onto even obvious signs, and I'm not the kind of person who likes to pay for taxi cabs when I have two operational legs. After all, I once walked from my West Campus dorm room to the New England Aquarium just because I felt like it ... a 4.5 mile walk when the T would have gotten me there for a dollar.    Of course, that was just me that day, and the weather was well above mere "picturesque." Make it 110 degrees, and add Charlie to the mix ... you wouldn't think we'd attempt the walk from near Treasure Island and the Fashion Show Mall to the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino. -- It's not so much a mall as a UFO landing site.    In my defense, I did ask Charlie about halfway through the mile-and-a-half stroll if he wanted to stop and get a cab. He refused, saying something to the effect of "Oh, it doesn't look to be that much farther."    This was no consolation when we sat down for dinner at Mr. Lucky's, after attempting a full upper-body washdown with the only-hot water in the men's room, and Charlie's face was the color of borscht. Borscht being beet soup. Beet soup being the color of beets. Hard Rock Money Lost on Premises: A Good Deal    Hard Rock Cafes populate almost every major city in the world ... and Niagara, N.Y. They are loud, brash, overstated and often annoying ... basically everything rock and roll music has been, become and will continue to morph into. They're overly commercialized, overpriced, and essentially everything you would expect out of your average Vegas business.    Which is why it's so shocking that the casino is so small.    The Hard Rock complex is sprawling, but the actual casino floor is probably no bigger than the Porte Cochere at the MGM Grand. Maybe not quite that small, but the fact that it could fit in the lobby of where we were staying made for quite the comparison.    The room was a big circle, with a large circular bar in the center, the gaming below that, but sunken lower than the outside, which contained shops, the slot club, a restaurant, etc. There's probably some grand deal of irony that I lost about a third of my week's cash at one of the smallest casinos I attended, but those are the kinds of observations that get your face slapped.    Given we were with Shawn and his wife and Chris and his fiancee, we played craps. The first ones to take to the table we were, we built up a pretty good repore with the staff. It was pretty much the story of the week for me ... I was doing well enough to keep on playing, but not well enough to actually be making any money. Leaving the table with roughly a quarter of what I'd started with, Shawn left to bring Chris and his fiancee to the airport while Charlie wandered around watching and playing a little more. It was at this point we wandered over to the roulette tables and, looking for a place to play, found our way to one with just one person playing on it.    I'm not sure what I saw first ... the sign on the table that said "Reserved" or the fact that the man, dressed in just a shirt and shorts, was playing ONE HUNDRED DOLLAR chips the way most people play dollar ones. Either way, the next thing I saw was the security guard's hand pushing me the other way, with the quiet whisper of "This is a private game, gentlemen. Move along." helping us on our road.    Not long after this -- but after I saw a 40-something, sparkly-shirted gentlemen whose eye were clearly bloodshot with the taste of coke-aye-een -- Charlie and I stood back above the gaming floor to observe. This is among the cheapest forms of entertainment in Las Vegas, and allows me to tell you that if you're a punky, pointy-haired kid whose entire modus operandi seems to be to subvert Corporate America, the rest of your convention-goers are staying at the Hard Rock right now. They won't be hard to find ... if not for the look, they seem to say "fuck" a lot.    Anyway, at some point in our standing around, Charlie noted the roulette tote boards, and observed that the number 19 hadn't come up on any of them for as long as play had been going on the four tables below. Having $25 in my pocket that I really felt the need to spend ...    Let's just skip ahead to the part where I bet the $25 all on black, a red 19 comes up, and then I go away thinking how much nicer it'd be to have $900 instead of $0, shall we?    I did, however, get a free deck of casino-used playing cards for joining the Hard Rock's "Back Stage Pass" player's club. The cards, however, did not help me pay for my ice cream once we got back to the MGM.    The last $5 of the money I'd taken out in Agawam before the trip did that. Next ... Last Day? Powered Flay! [ Hit. ] [ July 10 ] [ July 11 ] [+] [ July 12 ] [ July 13 ] [+] [ July 14 ] [ Etc. ] Intro! THURSDAY FRIDAY SATURDAY SUNDAY MONDAY EXTRAS

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