We were somewhere around Zzyzx Road when the drugs kicked in.
I remember my girl Luna saying something like, “Why is there mustard and mayonnaise smeared all over the goddamn highway?!”
“You mean the white and yellow lines?”
“Yeah!”
“Those are road surface markings.”
“Oh.”
That’s Luna all over—she’s a menace to sobriety. It was only supposed to be a one-night roadie to Vegas and she packed enough intoxicants to satiate a coterie of Hollywood socialites. She called it the “857 Special.” It was an 8 ball of puro, a 5th of Jäger, and a 7-Day Pill Box loaded with a full week of daily chemical cocktails.
By the time we got to Baker, we had already road-raged on a quarter of the vile, half the bottle, and the entire contents of MONDAY; and now I could feel my clammy grip tightening around the steering wheel as the ranfla screamed down the Mohave freeway like a bat out of hell.
“I shouldn’t be driving,” I said with great vocal difficulty.
“Just keep it between the condiments,” she slurred before swallowing the rest of TUESDAY in a succession of Jäger-chased gulps and gurgles. I was about to tell her to stop putting the Luna in lunatic but the speeding headlights washed over a familiar exit sign and instead I ended up blurting “Zzyzx!”
“Huh?” she asked with confusion, “You want another Xanax?!”
“Not Xanax! Zzyzx!” I bellowed before my voice registered the following in a weightier tone: “Soon we’ll see the electric fires of Gomorrah burning on the desert horizon like the blazes of Walpurgisnacht.”
“Yep, you definitely need another Zanny,” she said, popping the lid on the hump day reserves.
“Hold the meds,” I told her as I pulled the rumbling beast off the highway, “I gotta drain the main vein.”
I stood near the shoulder with my pickle aimed at a creosote bush, but my urge to make pickle juice was suddenly displaced by an overwhelming sense of the unknown. I felt the mysteries of the universe weighing heavily on my mind, specifically that age-old burning question that we all ask ourselves as we hurl through the passages of this crazy life: “What the fuck is a Zzyzx?!”
“A zyzzyx is a type of wasp,” said a faint voice in the darkness.
“That’s a zyzzyx,” I snapped, “I asked about a Zzyzx. Big difference!”
“I can’t talk to you when you’re like this.”
I looked around, visibly dumbfounded. “Who the hell is talking to me?”
“It’s your momma, mi’jo.”
That’s when I realized I had pocket-dialed my mother on speaker phone… while trying to piss under the influence… in the desert… somewhere around Zzyzx Road.
I jumped back in the car and when we finally landed in Sin City with the urge to gamble, it was clear that neither one of us was capable of driving. We hopped into a taxi with an Anglo cab driver who looked like Ignatius J. Reilly with bifocals on; a big sweaty mess of a man with a creepy persona and nothing to hide. After a few pleasantries, I asked him my usual “what’s the wildest thing you’ve ever seen in Vegas?” and I expected to hear the standard testimony about sex and drugs in the backseat, but this guy launched into a personal story like he had been waiting years to share it.
“I’m neither a married man, nor a handsome man, so I spend much of my free time at the downtown peep shows. I sit in a private booth and masturbate to a girl dancing on the other side of a glass wall,” he admitted while casually pushing his thick pedophile glasses up the bridge of his nose. “One time I went to this cheap location, not my usual place. It was jerrybuilt. Sheets of plywood had been quickly pieced together and dry walled in a makeshift manner, but I didn’t care. I just had to rub one out. I get into a shabby booth and this ugly girl comes out and starts dancing. No big deal. I start yanking my pud just the same and right in the middle of it, out of the corner of my eye, I see this black snake come slithering out of a hole in the wall, only it’s not a snake, see? It’s a big ol’ black dong pokin’ through a glory hole. I scream bloody murder and make a break for the exit with my pants around my ankles, but before I can hightail it out of there I hear this husky black man’s voice hollering “GIT BACK HEAH! GIT BACK HEAH!”
We laughed so hard we almost soiled our pants. Tears were streaming from our eyes when he dropped us off at the casino and I tipped him like forty bucks for providing me with the best time I’ve ever had in a cab without taking my pants off … and for supplying us with a punchline that would serve as our catchphrase for the remainder of the trip.
Every time we hit blackjack, we hollered “Git back heah! Git back heah!” Every time we made point in craps, it was “Git back heah! Git back heah!” Every time a big black dick came slithering out of a glory hole, I yelled “Git back heah! Git—” Oops, I broke the Vegas code.
After gambling for a couple of hours, we decided to hit a night club. We hailed a cab again and got another one of these drivers with absolutely no filter. This guy was an angry Russian.
“In former Soviet Union I am physicist. Here in U.S. I drive taxi cab,” he said. “It is yellow Crown Victoria made by idiots at Ford Motor Company. There is poor ventilation in cab. Passenger always complain of body odor, barbecued Shashlyk, and cigarette smoke.”
Me and Luna just looked at each other.
“Earlier tonight I get call for pick up on Strip. When I drive up it is some guy with beautiful woman who wears tiny skirt size of babushka. She look like Ukrainian prostitute. In Russia, we have saying for such woman.” He said something in his mother tongue that oozed with pure hatred and when I asked him what it meant he just kept on grousing.
“They get in back seat of cab and he say ‘hey you, drive to club so-and-so’ like big shot. Stupid American. He don’t understand physics and vector quantities like me, only selfish hedonistic lifestyle. I drive like maniac to make them shit pant. He tell me be careful and lower volume on my Bardic music. Pizda passenger! I could take him apart like Matryoshka doll. But last year my comrade Vladimir who was once physician in Russia assaulted passenger and now Vladi is homeless man. I cannot risk so I have to, how do you say … grin to bear it?”
“Grin and bear it,” I corrected as he continued.
“We get to club and to stupid club man I say, ‘Okeh, we are here’ and he pay the fare and give me twenty-dollar tip. Why big tip for small drive? I tell you: because dumb, spoiled Americans throw money out of tree like it grows on window.”
“Maybe he just liked your winning personality,” I told him, and then he yelled, “Hey, no drugs in cab!” He caught Luna ripping a line in his rear-view mirror but she didn’t stop. “Relax, comrade,” she told him. “It’s for my sinuses.”
He pulled over and ordered us out of the cab. I paid the fare and gave him a twenty-dollar tip and with a polite smile he said, “Enjoy your stay in Las Vergas!” Which was funny to me because “las vergas” means “the dicks” in Spanish. I started laughing and when he tore off, Luna yelled, “Git back heah! Git back heah!”
We didn’t have any luck hailing another cab and our phones were dead so we hitchhiked. By the time a car picked us up, we were out of our minds.
“Where to?” asked the driver.
“Can you take us home?” I slurred with heavy spittle.
“Sure,” he agreed. “Where do you live?”
“I meant your home.”
He laughed and then asked what the hell we were doing out there. “Out where?” I asked.
“Yeah,” added Luna. “Where the hell are we?”
“Somewhere around Zzyzx Road.”