A lobotomy wasn’t as effective as a weekend three hours of Red Bull away, where I wore the thinnest pinned stilettos, gambled like a sweaty degenerate mobster in black loafers, drank like Amy Winehouse and Charles Bukowski’s baby and snorted throat dripping lines of coke in a Hard Rock Hotel bathroom with four new best friends. I would giddily rub off any one of those with my thumb from the to-do list I wrote in eyeliner on my hotel bathroom mirror.
***
The
last time I was in Pure I was alone. One
of my oldest friends, Abbey, the most sophisticated gay guy I knew, lost me
after we ate steak cooked in front of us in a Japanese restaurant at the Hard
Rock. With two more shots of Don Julio
in hand, we migrated, (by migrate I mean
walk - will never do that again),
to Caesars and Pure. An hour later he
got tangled up in the net that was the mayhem in front of the club. I worried for ten minutes before I spent the
rest of the night and the next morning around a low to the ground polished
black table, drinking, laughing, dancing and smoking. At 1 a.m. my cocktail waitress, Apricot,
asked if five 40-something Canadian business men could sit with me.
“Of
course!” Laid to rest in my catacombs, the
reality I might have married one of them at the Viva Las Vegas wedding chapel
two blocks away.
***
Hecticity. We stood near a tall fake marbled column,
surrounded by 5000 square-feet of hedonists ready to occupy the next five hours
with concepts so alien to their Monday through Friday lives, anarchy was
guaranteed. Frat boys, Latinos, Hollywood
types (businessmen and wannabes), celebrities, old men fish out of water and
women masquerading as hookers, most holding yards of frozen, substandard margaritas. Some had their arms up, rocking out in the
front row at an Aerosmith concert, mouths opened, eyebrows up trying to get his
attention. ‘His’ being the doorman/list guy,
barricaded by five apocalyptically burly UFC types.
“You
talk to him.” Back on his
Blackberry.
I
texted the Pure manager a half hour earlier.
“Done.”
Cress
handed me a hundred.
***
“Drinks first.” The bar reminded me of the bar in the Whiskey
on Sunset. Dark, set back, riant to be a
first stop and obligatory to people who weren’t pre-table service drinking. Men passed back red, pink, brown, green, blue
and clear drinks to ladies and their already broke guy friends, as if to say,
Take one and pass the rest back, two minutes before a pop quiz in
high school.
Lips
mouthed Kanye and went wide as they took their first sips.
Pure
consisted of levels and those levels had colors. Black, red, silverfish grey, electric blues,
and white, illuminated with Hollywood cerise.
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