Vegas

Vegas

He booked his last flight to Vegas. He’d spent his entire life going there for trade shows, conventions and sales meetings, first with his father, and later, as a salesman himself. He didn’t drink. He didn’t gamble. He hated strip clubs. Even the hotel sheets made him itch. Vegas represented everything wrong with his life, everything wrong with America, every compromise he had ever made, every chance he never took. This time was different. He landed in the late afternoon, rented a car at the airport, stopped at a liquor store on the edge of town, and then drove straight west out into the desert with the radio off. After about an hour he pulled over into the low sagebrush and parked, facing east. The sun was nearly gone now. He took off his shoes and stood there beside the car, lightly breathing in the muted desert heat. Then he stripped off his suit coat, his tie, his pants, his undershirt, his boxers, his socks and his watch. Naked, he climbed onto the hood holding nothing but a bottle of his father’s brand of scotch and sat with his bare ass on the warm car roof, legs dangling over the front windshield. He just sat there and drank… watching Vegas burn like a circus funeral pyre out in the distance.