I was in Vegas with a few girlfriends in September '02. After our five-hour jaunt out of LA and through the desert, and some greasy fast food along the way, I was pretty excited to be approaching the Strip as I could feel the burger and shake begin to rumble in my stomach. With my courtesy car loaded to the hilt with travel bags, snack food and three girls giddy from multiple Cokes and gummy bears, I pulled off the 5 at about two that afternoon and turned towards the Luxor Hotel, anxious to check in and christen the pristine bowl in my room.
We found parking in the top level of the Luxor's parking structure, which put us directly in the hot, 110-degree sun, with no car shade or tinting of any kind. Each of us girls grabbed our travel bags and flat soda cups and headed towards the back entrance. The walk from the parking lot to the front desks was going to be a long one, so we trudged through in the extreme dry heat and chatted along the way through the lot.
There were a group of boys just ahead of us, seemingly barely legal, and they were walking lazily and pushing each other in that sort of teenage-boy kind of way, like old friends do. We were now walking near the front row of cars, coming up to the entrance, right where the short concrete pylons stopped the parked cars from going over the edge.
I barely spotted it before it happened: a Wendy's cup -- the Biggie size, I believe -- perched carefully atop one of the pylons, bright yellow in the stark white of the parking lot. And right then, as quickly as I spotted it, one of the boys ran up to it and kicked it; and, in slow motion, it went spiraling backwards through the air, lid flying off, spraying a brown liquid that I had assumed was a Wendy's Frosty...
...until the smell hit us.
Physics had played a cruel joke on this young man. It was a Wendy's wax paper cup, lid on, full of shit, probably from a partyer who simply could not contain his bowels long enough to get into the hotel. The 110-degree sun had done several things to the cup: a) melting the wax on the cup, which compromised the integrity of its liquid-holding ability; ensuring that b) the lid would fly right off when disturbed; and c) heating the shit contained inside to near-boiling point, removing any chance of their being a solid chunk in there at all.
The look on the guy's face was unforgettable. This poor young bastard, thinking he was being funny, was instead covered in a sprayed-on line of hot liquid shit, starting from the initial splash at the bottom of his t-shirt and working its way up his face in a fading splatter of poop. His friends looked at him for a brief moment, taking in the complete picture, before bursting into gales of almost-drunken laughter. And we girls, partly horrified by the shit-covered spectacle and partly amused, stifled our giggles as we walked past him and his friends, clutching our bags tightly and half running to the entrance door just so we could explode in laughter before the door even had the chance to close.
That's it. The story needs a moral (as if you couldn't figure it out), but I'm not nearly witty enough to come up with a good one; so I leave it to you. Seriously, I wish I had my camera handy. It would have been a priceless shot.
-- Latrina
