Moodswing - Vegas wedding

Christ, when did everything in Vegas get so goddam big? When I took the elevator to Michael’s room at Mandalay Bay — on the 25th floor, mind you — I got all the way up there and couldn’t find his room. So I had to ask a Russian maid, and she said, “Oh, you vant zee ozzer tower.”

The other tower? I had to go all the way down to the lobby, then out, then all the way across the casino floor to the other lobby and up the other tower. It was a trek so long, I should have packed provisions. It didn’t help that I had to go by the bank of blackjack tables, either, because it is hard for me to just walk on by a blackjack table.

Believe me. It’s a habit left over from the days my mother included me on her Vegas junkets with the other recreation-club members at the trailer park where she lived. The first time we came to Vegas, we stayed in an inexpensive, single-story motor lodge on the strip. Every day we walked next door to the Circus Circus casino, where my mother gambled and my sister and I marveled at the trapeze acts performed in the atrium above the bay of slot machines. Back then, they performed without a net, and over time I couldn’t watch because I kept envisioning the performers impaled on the spinning light posts protruding from the slot machines — the ones that chimed a siren when you hit a jackpot. I thought it was bad luck for me to think that, so I had to stop watching. As a teenager, I stood behind my mother as she played blackjack, and whenever the cocktail waitress came by for free-drink orders, my mother made sure I gave mine, and she didn’t even care if I asked for Bailey’s and coffee. As I got older, I sat beside her but rarely won.

“Kid, this is a losing table for you,” my mother insisted. “You gotta find yourself a winning table.” But I liked being there beside her, so I kept putting my chips on the table, and the dealer kept taking them away. Soon I’d run out of chips altogether. “Just watch me,” my mother would say, and at that I could relax, because my mother did not lose.

And today? Nobody is losing today. Michael and Kristen just got married in the same chapel my parents tied the knot in 50 years ago, the Little Church of the West. I never thought I’d been inside it before, but when I walked in yesterday, it all looked so familiar; the wood-paneled walls and pews, the tiny podium. Even Michael and Kristen, standing there with their family members around them, even that looked familiar. I must say I got all choked up in spite of my crusty-ass self.

I remember when Michael (who is a freakish 6-feet-8-inches) first introduced me to Kristen (who is not freakish in any way). I was determined not to get attached to her, because Michael had broken my heart by breaking up with his girlfriends too many times before. “Goddammit, you retard,” I shrieked at him after the last one. “I liked her. What the fuck is wrong with you?” I swear, Michael’s great taste in women was becoming a pure plague for me. He knows how to pick them, believe me, and we’re not talking the walking party balloons with fake nails and a French-cut thong. No, we’re talking really incredibly fabulous people, these girls. I would have married any one of them if I were him.

But Michael and I are different, even though he likes to flatter me by saying we have a lot in common. I mean, sure, we both come from California, and we both had the same realistic, recurring spaceship dream when we were kids, and we both consider breast implants to be self-mutilation. But even though all that is true, incredible as it may seem, we differ because Michael knows when to put his chips on the table and I don’t. In fact, I throw my chips around like flower petals at a ritzy wedding. I waste my chips.

But Michael likes me anyway, for some reason. He also remembers that same little motel next to Circus Circus. He’d stayed there with his parents when he was a kid, too. It’s a Mattress Factory now. In fact, almost all the single-story motor lodges along the strip are gone, even the famous shell-shaped one you see in movies all the time. I’m pretty sure it’s gone, anyway. I kept looking for it and couldn’t find it, even from the 25th floor of the Mandalay Bay tower. “Remember the Flamingo?” I ask Michael. “Remember the Stardust?” he asks me. Not that those hotels are gone. They’re still here, only now they’re dwarfed by the bigger-ness of everything around them.

But the Little Church of the West, it is no bigger or smaller than it ever was. It is still perfect and beautiful. Back when Michael first introduced me to Kristen, it took me maybe five entire minutes to get attached to her. I took Michael aside later and told him, essentially, “Goddammit, my chips are on the table again,” and he told me, essentially, “Mine, too,” adding, “just watch me.” And at that I could relax, because Michael does not lose.

hollis.Gillespie@creativeloafing.com

Join Creative Loafing at Hollis Gillespie’s Book Launch Party to celebrate the release of Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales From a Bad Neighborhood Thurs., March 4, at 7 p.m. Paris on Ponce, 716 Ponce de Leon Place. Gillespie will give a reading and sign copies of her book, which can be purchased on site from A Capella Books. Free admission.