The Vegas Diaries: Romance, Rolling the Dice, and the Road to Reinvention (25 page)

Dorothy looked him over. Yes, he was shaggy, all right; but there was a twinkle in his eye that seemed pleasant.

—L. Frank Baum,
The Road to Oz

C
ougar?” I scrunched up my nose at the very idea.

“Yes,” Hannah confirmed, using her glossy onyx nails to flip through the pages of one of the gossip magazines littering my coffee table.

“But I’m only thirty-two,” I protested. “How can I be a cougar at thirty-two?”

“You’re going on a date with a guy who is eight years younger than you,” Hannah answered matter-of-factly.

“Mark was eight years younger!” I exclaimed.

Hannah looked up from her magazine for the first time to give me a quizzical look.

“You knew that,” I said, cutting her off before she even had time to respond. “I told you that!”

“I guess I forgot,” she replied, turning her attention back to the tab
loid in her hands. “He always seemed so mature. I thought he was, like, twenty-nine.”

She took a deep breath as if to say
c’est la vie
and continued: “Anyway, yes, you are a cougar . . . at least in this scenario.”

“I thought you had to be at least forty before being considered a cougar,” I complained, dropping myself into one of my antique side chairs covered in a soft plum velvet. “The word
cougar
just feels so old. Can’t I be something else? Like a tiger?”

Even Hannah had to smile at this. “Or a kitten,” she offered with a laugh.

Being called a cougar felt to me like being labeled as some sort of
predator
—a woman on the hunt for a younger piece of meat. Sure, a cougar is simply a liberated woman, one comfortable with her sexuality and age, who prefers the company of younger men. But it still made me feel old. I suppose when you spend your twenties as a Playboy bunny, a warped sense of what constitutes
old
for a woman becomes ingrained in you.

“Then don’t go out with him,” Hannah volunteered, tossing the magazine back on my white marble table. “If you don’t want to be a cougar, then don’t be one. It doesn’t even sound like you’re that into him.”

She was right. I wasn’t crushing particularly hard on Ray, but something about him seemed intriguing, nonetheless.

“I don’t know. I think it will be nice to have someone to talk to who is outside of the regular Vegas social circle.”

“Sick of us so soon?” Hannah asked, her eyes wide and playfully alarmed.

“You know what I mean.” I tossed a throw pillow at her. Eric Parkington dominated the Vegas social scene and seemed to be buddies with every eligible guy in town, so I was eager to step away from that particular clique.

The guy I was about to go on a date with, Ray, just sort of appeared out of nowhere. Dressed all in black with a shaggy nest of reddish-blond
hair on top of his head, he was lurking at the lobby bar at one of my favorite casinos.

Nancy and I noticed the cute but unusual-looking young man staring at me from the bar. He sat quietly for most of the night, looking out of place among the upscale crowd in his ratty clothes with his clunky giant turtle shell of a backpack defining his silhouette.

Who is that character?
I wondered.

Before Nancy and I parted ways, he asked for my number out of the blue and without saying more than ten words to me. He had an endearing stutter and a charming smile. There was something likable about this cute oddball at the bar.

I had to give him credit for having the balls. Most men didn’t approach me directly. Sure, people would come up and ask me for a picture or an autograph, but I hadn’t been asked for my number in person by a stranger in about ten years.

What the hell?
I decided. Ray shared that he was currently living in Orange County, but visited Vegas regularly. He was an up-and-coming painter making a name for himself in the art world. He was in his early twenties, with a quiet voice and mannerly deportment.

The next day, as I was making my way toward the
Peepshow
theater, he called. Not texted, not tweeted . . . actually called.

Nope,
I thought, hitting the decline button.
Who actually calls people anymore?

Look, I can’t be the only phone-a-phobe out there. Personally, I rarely see the need to actually speak to people on the phone.

I quickened my pace, and when I finally got backstage, I texted Nancy.

“Ray’s calling me!”

“Did you answer?” she texted back.

“No!” I replied instantly.

“That’s kinda fucked up. You should have answered. He seems like a nice guy.”

I’d heard that before
.

“Yeah, you’re right,” I responded. “I’ll let you know how it goes.”

“I’m coming out to Vegas next weekend!” Ray exclaimed when I finally returned his call.

“Oh, really? What’s the occasion?” I asked.

“To see you!” he shot back.

“Okay!” I acquiesced with forced enthusiasm. I had thought it might be fun to go out with Ray next time he happened to be in town, but if he was truly coming out just to see me . . . that felt like a little too much pressure. I wasn’t really feeling up to entertaining someone I barely knew for three days. What if we didn’t hit it off? I decided I would return to my suite at Planet Hollywood while he was in town. It was going to be a busy holiday weekend for me, with shows and nightclub hosting obligations, so it would be convenient for me to be on the Strip the whole time and not have to battle Memorial Day weekend traffic.

I
ALMOST IMMEDIATELY STARTED
regretting committing to seeing Ray. Over the next few days, I was bombarded with requests from him:
Can you pick me up at the airport? Can you take me to the best mall? I can stay at your place, right?
This weekend was going from busy to overbooked. On one hand, I felt sorry for him.
Maybe he just didn’t know how to communicate and was asking every question he could for the sake of conversation,
I thought. I could certainly relate to that.
Or maybe he really is too young for me,
I wondered. Was he incapable of renting a car, booking a room, googling his favorite stores? All this dependence was starting to make me feel like more of a mother figure than a date.

Nancy kindly offered to accompany Ray to my show and take him to dinner during my second performance, before heading over to XS, where I would meet them when I finished my meet-and-greet.

When I arrived at the club later that night, the VIP host, an impeccably dressed, olive-skinned young man with spiky black hair led me through the entrance to the Encore Tower Suites to take advantage of the
low-key, private entrance. He discreetly escorted me into the club, past the golden sculptures of the female form lining the entrance. We made our way to my usual spot, among a group of tables on an elevated platform next to the DJ booth.

Looking much more animated than the first time I met him, Ray was holding court at a roped-off VIP table of local nightlife veterans, all of whom I knew well enough, with Nancy at his side.

“How’s it going?” I shouted over the music before leaning down to pour myself a vodka soda. A server immediately appeared and politely took the glass to continue fixing me a drink, even throwing in my usual lemon wedge. She knew what I wanted without even asking.

Did she see what I was reaching for?
I wondered.
Or am I just that much of a regular?

Clubbing was starting to get old. I went out regularly after work and usually had a fantastic time. However, I was beginning to recognize, as my partying schedule started to outpace even my hardest-partying friends, that I was going out simply to avoid returning home to an empty house. Furthermore, I had become such a fixture on the nightclub scene that tabloid rumors were starting to pop up that I was dating a few of my buddies, nightclub hosts or managers. It was irritating to think that I couldn’t have a social life, or heterosexual male friends for that matter, without becoming romantically linked to them.
No one would assume that a man frequented his favorite nightspot because he was dating one of the female managers,
I thought grumpily. As a woman, it seemed, a man had to be the motivation behind everything I did.

Ray crept through the crowd, a huge grin peeking out from under his hat.

“You were amazing!” he exclaimed in my ear as he wrapped his arms tightly around my torso and twirled me around.

“Thanks,” I said, surprised at how gregarious he was. What happened to the shy little hipster I met at the lobby bar? Sure, I was happy that he enjoyed the show, and of course I appreciated that he took the time to see
it, but suddenly, I felt awkward. It hit me that I had just committed to spending an entire weekend with a virtual stranger.

He smacked a big kiss on my lips before setting me down and turning back to the person he had been talking to. Now that the crowd had parted, I could see who it was—none other than Mr. Eric J. Parkington.

What the fuck?
I wondered. I had been so grateful to Nancy for offering to entertain Ray, but I hadn’t realized she was taking him to hang out with Eric.

Suddenly a gorgeous blue-eyed brunette stepped in front of me.

“Hi, I’m Kate,” she said, offering me a hug. “I’m from L.A., too. I saw that you follow a few of my friends on Instagram.” She went on to talk about a DJ she used to date and listed a few of the people we knew in common, most of them friends of Eric’s.

“Cool!” I smiled. “It’s nice to meet you!”

“So, are you still seeing Eric?” she asked, a confused look on her face.

“No,” I responded, my guard immediately raised. She had to have seen Ray embrace me just a moment earlier, so it felt like a loaded question. “We stopped seeing each other a while ago.”

“Oh!” she said, seemingly surprised. “That’s too bad. My boyfriend and I stayed at his house last time we were here. He couldn’t stop talking about how much he liked you.”

Somehow, hearing that Eric had said that about me stopped me in my tracks. Despite how things had unfolded, my ego desperately wanted to believe that Eric once felt something for me. In retrospect, I’m pretty confident that gushing about his girlfriend was just a slightly more tactful way of letting Kate and her boyfriend know who he was banging, but there was still that part of me that wanted to believe it.

Before I could spiral too far into my own psyche, Ray plopped down next to me and threw his arm over my shoulder. He was busy talking to Nancy, who was sitting on his other side, when I felt someone tap my shoulder. I looked up and saw a group of girls dancing up next to the rope that divided our areas.

“How old are you, anyway?” she slurred, obviously drunk enough not to realize she had screwed up her face into an exaggerated, quizzical stare that made her resemble a Treasure Troll.

“Thirty-two,” I replied coldly, turning away from the ropes. Not that it mattered, but this lady didn’t look like a spring chicken herself! Why was she asking about my age so rudely? Was she implying I was too old for Ray?

Thankfully, just when I was starting to feel like this crowd was too much for me, Nancy suggested we migrate to a dive bar downtown. When we arrived, I walked in ahead of Ray and took a seat at one of the beat-up red pleather booths.

“Hols!” Ray shouted at me as he stumbled over people on his way toward me, resembling a bowling ball slowly meandering down an alley.

My insides suddenly froze. That was Mark’s nickname for me.
How could I have felt so at home with Mark,
I wondered,
but so awkwardly old with this guy?
They were the same age, but the difference in maturity was staggering.

“My buddy here,” he said, sloppily patting the shoulder of a nightclub promoter I vaguely knew and he most certainly had just met, “invited us out back for a smoke.”

“I’m okay,” I shouted, waving my hands to signal I wasn’t interested.

“Come on, babe,” he pleaded.

“I’ll go with you, but I’m not going to smoke,” I conceded.

Ray’s face lit up like a Christmas tree. He stood upright, pulled his shoulders back, and said to the promoter: “Lead the way, good sir.”

The promoter was flanked on either side by two women he had obviously recruited to help “entertain” this up-and-coming artist who had graced the bar with his presence. I smiled at the ladies and started to introduce myself, but one of them rolled her eyes and shot a smirk at the other before I even opened my mouth.

I followed them through the door and leaned against the concrete
wall of the cold, empty hallway, as the two girls plopped down onto two metal folding chairs, chattering away.

After fidgeting around—crossing and uncrossing her fishnet-stockinged legs a few times, the one nearest me squealed as she theatrically lurched away from me, rolling her eyes and shooting over-the-top exasperated looks to everyone in the circle, as if I had just done something wrong.

“Ew,” she snarled in an ear-splitting baby voice. “That’s cold!”

She was referring to the oversize metal-studded bag on my shoulder, which she had brushed up against while I had been standing still.

What am I doing here?
I asked myself. I’d been in snotty, immature “Mean Girl” situations like this before and no longer had any tolerance for them. I was getting too old for this.