The good doctor would have been proud. Sure ["Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" author] Hunter S. Thompson is most likely beyond the capability of rational thought in his older years, especially after ravaging his system with countless chemical compounds, but even in his extended psychosis he would have respected the intense depravity and recklessness of this past Friday evening. I am of course writing about my second trip to Atlantic City, N.J. -- the city where no deity would dare set foot.
It is a land full of vices that flow out of the street drains and into the keno lounges and themed bars. If there was ever a place Virgil forgot to show Dante on the tour, it was that wretched level in the basement of the Inferno: Atlantic City.
We boarded our bus at about 4 p.m. Friday and rolled out of Grounds headed north. Filled with our greedylooking faces, each clutching the money we had just withdrawn from the ATM, the bus's only offer to us was a copy of "Road House" that we would watch three times in a row due to a lack of anything better to do. And what other film to show us gamblers than an 80s classic of Patrick Swayze and Sam Elliot getting in bar fights and killing people for 114 minutes straight?
Passing over the bridge, we could see the lights. A block of color covering the polluted horizon, our Hajj was ending; we had reached our Mecca, and we were ready to pray to whatever would let us win big and drink bigger. We were dropped off in Caesar's and left to our own ruin.
Filing out in a massive drunken horde, heading unbroken to the craps and roulette tables, the intense fear we evoked from the surrounding patrons was clear
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