Daddy-moon In Vegas

It has been so long since I lived with my alcoholic father, Big King, that I forgot how wonderful it was to spend time with him.

When I was fifteen, my parents got divorced and I was forced to move away from Daddy and ten years passed before I spent more than a daytime with him. Of course, I remember spending entire nights on the phone with him trying to convince him not to kill himself, not to kill my mother, and, more recently, not to come and kill one of my roommates.

Daddy has never divulged his real age. I guess he’s in his seventies. He can hardly breathe anymore and has to constantly be attached to oxygen. He’s also constantly attached to McDonald's senior coffees and high grade prescription narcotics. I figure that Daddy does not have much time left on this wonderful planet and, per his request, I decided to accompany him to a city that I believe fits us both very well: Las Vegas.

Las Vegas has of course changed many times over since it was built by the mob then overtaken by Howard Hughes, eventually evolving into the corporate family degenerate hellhole that it is today. I have not been alive for most of these changes, but my dad has, and it just seemed to be the most fitting place for us to go. Of course, no one took us for a father/daughter combination. Even two time zones away, I can't shake the hooker vibe, and I was consistently mistaken for a younger paid companion for my dad.

Except for Daddy’s occasional outbursts of frustration over being old and not being able to breathe or smoke or drink (his favorite pastimes), everything seemed to work out well. My dad had half his ulcerous stomach removed before he was forty because of drinking two gallons of vodka a day. He’s lucky to be alive, but he can't drink or smoke, or else he will die.

Daddy made quite a few statements in Vegas I will remember for the rest of my life. For instance, we were watching a free show at the Westward Ho casino and he told me he’d just seen a man about ten years his senior try to piss in the men’s room urinal, but he missed and soaked himself. Daddy said, “That's when I want you to put the gun to my head, Princess.”

Much of our week was spent walking about ten feet and having to sit down to rest and then getting up and repeating until we reached a McDonald’s, where Daddy would order another fifty-cent senior coffee, go to the bathroom, and take a shitload of pills. I got used to the old man's routine. I liked helping him with his oxygen, and even though he told me all these stories over and over again, I was glad to bond with him again. It was much different than when I was young.

My dad wants a woman. He wants me to find him one. I have no idea where to find him one. He is a nice man. I don’t know if his plumbing still works and really don't want to know, but things must be hard when you're that old (no pun intended). He has bottles of Viagra everywhere mixed up with various other thousands of pills, so I figure he must be using them for something.

Daddy actually did meet a woman in Vegas. She was from Guam, and they were at the same $3 blackjack table, and she stopped playing and started to massage his shoulders. I couldn't tell if she was just being nice or if she really wanted my dad. He got tired though and had to go back to the room. I took him back and then, upon returning, told the lady that my dad liked her.

She was pretty, in her forties or early fifties, and seemed to like my dad as well but was waiting to meet her daughter. She told my dad where to find her, though, if he ever went to Guam. Apparently Guam is only like thirty-five miles across and there is only one hospital there and she works as the only X-ray technician in the hospital. So I told Daddy that. He seemed to have hope. He figured out where Guam was and how long the flight was and he doubts that he could make it there on the plane. There's always hope though.

I thought about inviting this woman up to the room. But how fucking awkward would that be? Me making love connections for my dad and leaving the room while he was supposedly fucking this woman from Guam . . . No, thank you.

My dad and I have a weird relationship that sometimes borders on being slightly incestuous and weird, but that crossed a line even for me. Still, I would have liked to help the old man out.

As for me, I had no problem finding prospects to bring up to the room. That town is wonderful, and I can totally understand how people end up married without remembering it there. I talk about the disgusting scumbags in Chicago, and Las Vegas is just a whole other world. There are scrubs around every corner there and you barely have to make eye contact with them before they slime over to you and buy you a drink. That's the part I liked though. They buy you drinks a lot more there. And you don't even have to sit and smell their rat breath for ten minutes and pretend to be interested like I feel obliged to do back home.

Vegas freaks have interesting stories to tell, too. I mean if you like hearing about people's ruined lives and tragedies. About how they lost all their money, their car, their child, their spouse etc. etc. etc. ad nauseam. I would have brought a few of them back up to the room, but like I said, even though my relationship with my father is borderline inappropriate, I don't think I could fuck a guy while he was in the room. And I didn't trust any of these broken-down pee sacks to lead me to their roach dens to get a piece of me.

Overall the trip was a wonderful bonding experience. I have such a better understanding of what hell it is to get old and how much I want to put a gun to my head even sooner than I expected. People say, well you can just live healthier and then maybe you won't be that sick when you're old. If it's not one thing, though, it's another.

I wonder what'll get me in the end. My dad wants me to go pick out caskets with him next week. I can't understand why. It's not like you're going to give a shit what you're buried in once you're dead . . . the gold-trim casket with the Last Supper engraved in it, or a fucking pine box. But I think before I die I want to take as many trips to Las Vegas as possible. And if I do happen to get rich one day, and my dad is still alive, I'd like to fund a trip for him to Guam.