EPISODE 28

The meet and greet at the Monte Carlo was scheduled to run later on in the day from 5 to 7, leaving me with plenty of time to kick around the Strip.  I ended up at The Pub at the Monte Carlo, where SlipNot had leased one of the upstairs bars for our event.  I took a spot at the main bar, ordered a sandwich and a beer.  By 1:30, the place was beginning to fill up and folks were talking about the Yankees v. Red Sox game, which was due to start in 4 hours.  I was somewhat unhappy that I was going to miss so much of it, but work came first.  I had just ordered a second beer when Les slipped onto the barstool next to me.

“Mikey!  When did you get in?”

I recounted the escapades of the previous day and when I told him about the suite at the MGM, his eyebrows started wiggling.

“Jesus!  We could have a hell of party there, couldn’t we?  I mean, why let a place like that go to waste?”

It was a good point.  The thought had crossed my mind a couple of times while I had wandered around the Bellagio earlier in the day.  But I’d let the idea drift away as I looked at the paintings at the museum and I hadn’t given it any other consideration until it became clear that I had an eager coconspirator parked on my right.  Les was scheming furiously as he grabbed his beer and took a long pull off of it.  He stared at me for a few seconds and then began to speak very rapidly.  The plot was hatching.

“Mikey, I bet I could get Keith to spring for it.  We could tell him that we’re inviting some of the clients and rest our crew over to watch the Yankees and the Sox.”

“But the game starts right when we’re doing our meet and greet,” I reminded him.

“I know.  It’s perfect!  We’ll talk it up during our little event upstairs.  There are 2 TVs at the bar there and we’ll just make sure that they’re tuned in to the game.  It’s the best advertising in the world!”

“I don’t want a zoo at my place though.”

“I know, of course,” Les replied, dismissing my fears.  “Most of the clients are going to want to go to dinner and a show.  We’ll only get the die-hard fans, which’ll be fun!”

I had to admit, Les was beginning to make sense.  We talked over what we’d need by way of supplies and Les took off to find Keith.  He returned 20 minutes later with a huge smile on his face.

“He authorized two grand!”

“You’re shitting me,” I whispered.  Keith rarely okayed budgets for rogue parties.  In fact, this might have been a first for him.  But who was I to question The Great Man and His Money.  Les and I paid the bill and went to find the car he’d rented.

By 4 o’clock, we’d decked out my suite with a modestly obscene spread.  In addition to the boiled shrimp, cheese platters and other edibles, we’d bought a sufficient quantity of Marker’s Mark, Glenlivet, Mount Gay, Grey Goose, wine and beer to inflict a fair amount of damage on our little group.  We’d tipped a guy at the front desk $40 to lend us a couple of hand trucks and then tossed him a bottle of wine for helping us schlep everything upstairs from the car.  With the whole lot safely in place, Les and I walked across the Strip to the Monte Carlo to meet our clients.

Keith and Bosco handed out free drink tickets to anyone and everyone in sight while Les, Allan and I worked the clients as they arrived.  As Les had figured, the TV screens in the upstairs bar that SlipNot had leased were both tuned into Fox, where Jeanne Zelasko and Kevin Kennedy were mouthing out the pre-game broadcast.  The sound was off, which I prefer.  It forces you to pay closer attention to a game if there’s no one telling what you’re supposed to have already seen.  Besides, during the playoffs, TV networks go crazy with slow motion replays anyway.  You simply don’t need stuff like Joe Buck offering up his absurd observation that Aaron Boone’s 11th inning home run against the Sox in the previous year’s ALCS had “predetermined a rematch” with the Yankees in ’04.  But all that our clients saw was a bar that had been laid open for them.  They crowded around the bartender, tossing drink tickets at him and then showering the man with tips every time he served up another round.  Sometime around eight o’clock, I slipped away to the suite at the MGM, to wait for the first of our guests and to watch an inning or two of the game undisturbed.

The next installment will be posted on March 17.

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