We’ve got everything, hon

Last night a little before seven I went down to one of the many bars at the Luxor and asked the most perfect blond I have ever seen, wearing a crushed black velvet toreador jacket and matching mini-skirt, for a draft beer. With great boredom she informed me they had no draft beer. “Only bottles, hon.”

“Okay, what do you have by the bottle?” I asked her.

She looked me straight in the eye and said, “Everything. We’ve got everything, hon.”

“Great,” I said. “Give me a Negra Modelo.”

Only slightly annoyed, she rolled her eyes and gave me a faux frown, like a little girl who is trying not to get upset that you keep asking her to pick her clothes up off the floor. “Hon,” she said, putting a hand on my shoulder, “we don’t have those kind of beers. Just like, you know, normal stuff. Nothing weird.”

She seemed so sweet and sincere that I decided right then and there that if I were not already married, I would ask her to be my fiancé. But figuring that might not be cool since we’d only just met, I instead asked her if they had Sam Adams. She giggled and threw one hand up in the air as if she were waving to fans from a float in the Rose Parade. “Of course, silly,” she said.

So off she sashayed, looking quite smart in her little crushed velvet toreador jacket, to get silly ol’ me a Sam Adams. While I was waiting for my fiancé to bring me my beer, I checked out the crowd. Mostly there were pods of business men and women, wearing suits and such, with name tags in plastic holders strung on pink shoe laces around their necks proclaiming them to be, in a very large typeface, MIKE or LINDA or JENELLE. They all seemed to be drinking either Budweiser (from the bottle, of course) or Coke.

To my right was a small group of bearded Germans wearing very bad plaid sportscoats and smoking cigarettes and laughing loudly. And across the room in the corner was a large group of Japanese men sitting very close to one another as if they were conferencing about something or other except none of them seemed to be talking. In the background to all this were the thousands of slot machines with their odd calliope noises. Like musical fish they swallowed quarters and dollars and burped high-pitched tunes that, I fear, will be part of my sleep for days on end.

Meanwhile, I was still waiting for my fiancé to bring me my beer. I looked around the room and saw her flirting with the hirsute Germans. What a naughty girl. When I flagged her over to see what the hell had happened to my Sam Adams, I realized it wasn’t my fiancé at all. It was someone with a name badge that said STACY who looked remarkably similar to my fiancé, crushed velvet toreador jacket and all. According to STACY my fiancé had left. Without so much as a good-bye. Or my drink.

“But I can bring you a beer, hon. What would you like?”

“What do you have on draft, Stacy?” I asked.