My name is Joey. I’m twenty-four years old. I haven’t held a real job, or at least one of significance, in my entire life. I waited tables for a while. I was a telemarketer for a bit as well. I collected and shipped out inventory for this other job which consisted of taping boxes together, putting stuff in the boxes, slapping on a shipping label, and putting the box in a designated spot for the delivery man to come pick up. Basically, in all my years as a contributing member of society I haven’t held a job that a basic computer program wasn’t capable of completing.
I quit my most recent job so I am unemployed. My girlfriend broke up with me so I’m single and now I’m homeless. Sounds pleasant, right? I made the decision, spontaneous though it was, to embark on a journey of self-awakening, a quest for spiritual enlightenment. I decided to drive out to Los Angeles from Chicago with a friend. We don’t have jobs or prospects of finding them when we get there. We don’t have a place to live or even a general geographical area to settle besides the great city of Los Angeles, in fact, that hasn’t even been carved into stone, and we don’t really know anyone either.
So, you might ask yourself, why California? And I will retort with why not California. I’m not exactly counting on finding spiritual enlightenment out there, but it seems like a good spot to start looking at least. Great weather, beautiful people, beaches, sunshine, if one can’t experience a revelation out there then they are hopeless.
So, our journey began. My friend Benny, the friend who decided, like myself, to move to California hitched a ride from Vermont to Chicago. Until recently I called Chicago home. Now I call home my 2005 Suburu Impreza. Our first leg of the journey was going to take us through Boulder Colorado. It took us about fourteen hours to get from Chicago to Boulder. This was our half waypoint. Well this was my halfway point. I guess it was Benny’s three quarters. I used to go to school at the University of Colorado in Boulder and I still had some friends who lived out there so it wasn’t too difficult finding a place to crash. The first night back was so reminiscent of college that it was like I never left.
We stayed with my old roommate, CJ, who I lived with, until recently, for the last five years. Statistically speaking that’s five times longer than about fifty percent of married American couples. Anyway, we crashed with him and another friend of mine, Matty. The four of us started the night out drinking Jim Beam on the rocks. Then we went out to the bars, drank four pitchers, and indulged in a few purple shots that not one of us was really sure what exactly it contained and even if we did we would have forgotten because we were all dancing on the line between conscious and blacked out. We played some pool or attempted at least. The bars closed down and we went back to my buddy’s place. We killed the handle of Jim Beam, danced to reggae until 3ish, the cops came, we shut it down and tucked it in for the next morning.
Back when I was in college a night of that caliber would be shaken off with a bottle of Gatorade, some greasy food, and a good amount of couch time. Not the case anymore. I woke up the next morning on the floor, fully clothed, dripping sweat but frozen to the core. I crawled to the bathroom, thinking my insides were soon to be on the outside, spit up in the toilet for a good forty-five minutes, and fell asleep on the bathroom floor. I woke up and crawled to my buddy’s bed, climbed in, and slept another hour or two in fetal position at the foot of his bed. It was a hangover not to be messed with. Just turning my head came with a tremendous effort. We went out and grabbed some food. I ate about thirty percent of it, went back to my buddy’s and took a five-hour nap. I woke up around 5pm still with a moderate hangover. I really didn’t feel myself until around 10:30PM when I was three pints deep at the bar listening to a live band play some funky reggae. Boulder life is very cyclical, so, I guess it’s a bit redundant to recall every night we spent there. They were all very similar in theme. Wake up, drink, blackout, sleep… Rinse and repeat.
Boulder is a beautiful town, a town that claims 300 sunny days a year, beautiful weather and beautiful scenery. That didn’t matter to me because I was unable to leave the house everyday because of my ridiculously debilitating hangovers. So I would spend the nights out on the town laughing and drinking and blacking out and embarrassing myself and I would spend the beautiful days sweating and drinking water and napping and regretting. I spent four years living in Boulder so I was able to spread out my outrageously infantile behavior. But now, coming to visit for five nights, I had to maximize my potential. It turned out that maximizing my potential meant getting as drunk as humanly possible and still remaining alive.
Before I go any further I guess it would help to let everyone know who the friend I was traveling with. His name is Ben
We left Boulder on Sunday. We were supposed to stick around until Monday but the place kicked our ass and we decided to throw in the towel a day early. Plus, drinking with underage kids was starting to get a little old… and a bit creepy.
The plan for our next leg was to drive from Boulder to Las Vegas, spend the night in Vegas then drive the remaining four hours to Los Angeles the following day. So we headed out of Boulder defeated and hungover and a bit bitter that we couldn’t party like we used to. Our moods slowly began to shift when we realized that we were heading to the city of lights, the city that never sleeps, Las Vegas.
But then came Utah. Utah is a beautiful state, a beautiful state with weird ass people. I can’t vouch for all of Utah being as upside down and backwards as the places we stopped on our way through, but if that is the case then that state has got some shit to figure out. We stopped in this town in the middle of nowhere, couldn’t tell you the name of it for the life of me. It was a tiny little shantytown surrounded by dessert. We were hungry. We needed to eat. So, we pulled up to a gas station about two miles off the highway. The gas station was also a Burger King. We decided to eat there. This was our first mistake. We parked in the lot outside the gas station Burger King. There was only one other car in the parking lot and it was in the one handicapped parking spot. The car, we found out, did not belong to a handicapped man. Where I am from, if you are not a handicapped individual, and you park your vehicle is the handicapped spot, it is highly frowned upon. It is also illegal. So, if you do it, be ready to pay a fine and get snarky looks from people. Apparently, this was not the case in this middle of nowhere Utah town.
We walked in and looked up at the menu. This particular Burger King had a double whopper meal, a triple whopper meal, and a double whopper with bacon and barbeque sauce meal. I wasn’t looking to have triple bypass heart surgery in the Burger King so I stuck to the dollar menu. This was our second mistake. We should have just left the place and kept driving, found a town that was part of civilization and eaten there.
Four men entered the restaurant as we were sitting down to eat. The youngest of the bunch had to be in his mid forties and the oldest late sixties. They were all wearing the same bright orange trucker caps. We weren’t even going to try to figure out what the deal was with that. The two older guys in the group were attempting to have a conversation with each other. Except one of the participants in this completely one-sided conversation wasn’t wearing his hearing aid. “What did you order? Earl, what did you order? What did you order, Earl? Earl… Earl… Earl!” We needed to leave.
On the way out a new truck had taken its place in the handicapped spot. I guess being legally deaf is grounds for handicap parking.
It was onward to Las Vegas. We got to Vegas around midnight. We drove in, parked at the Flamingo Hotel, and hoofed it straight to the Bellaggio. We sat down at the roulette table. Benny and I both threw down hundred dollar bills and exchanged them for plastic chips. For the record, it’s a lot easier to watch plastic chips disappear then a hundred dollars. Rhonda was our dealer. Fuck you Rhonda, fuck, fuck you Rhonda… She took our hundreds and shoved them in a hole on the side of the table. That was the last we saw of our money. By 1AM we were chipless, broke, and angry with all the stupid Vegas lights... Sin city, more like shit city. A hundred dollars in the hole, each, it was time to leave. We got into the car and drove the remaining 4 hours to Los Angeles. We arrived around 5:30AM. We crashed at Benny’s college friend. We made it. Tomorrow’s going to be a great day.
