Different shades of blue and grey
A lot of love found tonight roughly 200 miles from the California-Nevada border. It didn’t take long for about a third of it to wind up caved in and squashed up on the pavement somewhere. We were in the Arts District in Las Vegas, a new lick about 10 minutes from The Strip. But the point is not that love was lost, but that it was found. And some was even retained in such a city of high lights and lowlifes and all the little things in between.
The new Brewery Row in the Arts District is not a bad place to find yourself if you’re in Vegas suffering from the heat and sucking on wasted time and a bad lifelong case of ALD: Antisocial Longing Disorder, or, as WebMD describes it: when you wake up in the morning trying to figure out how you can exist that day interacting with the least amount of people as possible. You long to be lonely. Don’t bother looking that one up.
Some days are better than others and today was a doozy. The heat fried an egg of my brain and by the end of eight odd hours I was ready to soak what was left of my essence in some very radical substances.
Somehow Mike stumbled his way along with me. I was a “last resort” hang of sorts. No other familiar man of substance or at the very least proximity had yet made his way into the city of sin, and a guy like Mike needs someone to break his bread with on a sticky Wednesday night in Las Vegas. Or any night for that matter. For him, a moment spent not talking someone’s head off is a moment most extremely wasted. He’s far from his family and close to a whole bunch of magic here in Vegas, and he’d be damned not doing something. Anything at all. And although I’d be fine not doing a damn thing, the prospect of prospecting some new breweries sounded mighty fine. So there we were.
Mike is my boss, although I despise the word and reject its implications. We spend a whole hell of a lot of time together, rubbing on each others’ nerves but tonight we let alcohol and geographical circumstance put any hard feelings in a corner, not to rear their ugly heads until dawn.
Our cab driver told us he’d been driving Vegas for over 30 years and never heard of Brewery Row. Seldom had he been into the Arts District, and we didn’t look “the type that slithers out that way.”
We hopped off and were immediately greeted by a shirtless graffiti artist finishing up his latest bomb. Not sure if this was something sanctioned by the city or just sanctioned by the man himself. He also very clearly lived on this corner, as all of what appeared to be his belongings were tucked into a corner of a vacant building facade. I imagine he spends most of every day baking in the sun and painting. No one hassles him. I imagine him to be a beer man. In that moment, I felt he was freer than any human I ever knew.
Mike and I stumbled around the roughly block and a half of Brewery Row, sweating our way through the local breweries. The more beers we slang back, the more the conversations got realer, more open, honest, deeper, scratching at surfaces that would otherwise remain unearthed. Once we hit the barrel-aged chocolate cream ale at HUDL and knocked back a few each, inhibitions were at an all-time low, good will and brotherly love at an all-time high. I was soaked through my shirt but felt I could speak without a veil, without edits, without shaping or smoothing or rounding off the edges of my words. My companion felt the same.
I inquired without hesitation about the reason for our trip to the city of sin. We were here working on a show that we very clearly were not needed on. “Extra weight.” Hey, as long as we’re not dead weight. I’m not one to raise too many questions when someone tells me I’m getting a free trip to Vegas, but once the barrel-aged chocolate cream ales went to my head, the voir dire commenced. Mike confided in me that he actually agreed with my assertion, we weren’t needed on the show. His push for participation came purely out of being an old dog of habit. 14 years with the company, and every year they push him further out of the way. I often wonder why he fights so hard, for things that only want him when they need him. It feels a bit sad and tiring to me. The older I get, the less bite I have. I just shrug and keep it moving. Maybe it’s part of an older wisdom I have not yet attained, something I’ll look back on the other side of the mirror and say “oh yeah, I see what you mean.” Revelations that come and slap you upside the head. Or maybe it’s a personality quirk. Mike is Italian and pugnacious as hell. He spars his own reflection in the mirror. Being in his orbit, his energy is both inspiring and draining simultaneously. He is also living less regretfully, more passionately. He drinks more and lives more than me, and he seems happier without the fear or the self-loathing. So maybe he’s doing something right, or maybe he has perfected the mask.
We moved to the topic of relationships, their strengths and weaknesses. The sad fate that has befallen most of his friend group. While I’m of the friend group age where proposals happen weekly, marriages happen daily, and babies pop out quicker than Instagram posts, Mike and his cronies are truly in the middle ages. Caught between young family life and growing old, leaning further into the abyss. Mike confided in me that while he and his friends retain their handsome roguish looks, their wives become hags. The time quite literally appearing as wrinkles and sags in their skin, almost as if each wife bore the bearings of passing time for their husbands as well, allowing their men to abscond the scars of each new dawn. This is a fate I fear I am on a collision course with as well.
But hey, we’re in Vegas tonight. And for a few nights longer. The show is on Sunday and if anything, it will be mind-boggling. We’re in the beauty business, where shades of tan know no deep end and masks of great pronunciation are the de riguer. Everyone looks like Mugatu here. Big lights and loud explosions will distract us like blue tangs on to the next bright thing. The depths and complexities can wait until we’re back across the border, barreling through the desert towards some harsh reality.