My 1987 spring break road trip to Tahoe will forever haunt my memories -- and my ability to patronize the casinos of South Lake Tahoe.

It all began innocently enough. I was a junior at UC Davis and many of my friends from Davis and Cal planned on starting our spring break with a quick road trip up to Tahoe. Most of us had just turned twenty-one, and it would be our first legal trip to the casinos.

Like all college road trips, the journey began with ample intake of alcohol and, if we ate, cheap food. Conveniently located off I-50 in Sac was a gas station/Taco Bell/7-11 all located adjacent to each other. We topped off with gas, a couple cases of beer and bottles of booze, and a half-dozen bags, stuffed to the brim, of Taco Hell. As the miles to South Lake diminished, so too did our Taco Bell delectables and our alcohol (not to mention the quarter-ounce of Humbolt green and an eight-ball of toot). We arrived in South Lake at 9:00 PM, quickly secured our dive motel rooms, freshened up our buzzes, and walked to the casinos.

A couple of buddies and I ended up at Harrah's first, where we actually managed to win some money playing twenty-one and get further tanked on free casino hooch. At this point I felt the first pangs of the nightmare to come. Taco Hell and beer hops (plus the baby laxative known those days to have been used as a cutting agent in coke) were slowly but surely wearing down on my lower intestine. Hand after hand, I felt gaseous pressure mounting on my unsuspecting starfish.

Like most everyone in their youth, I thought myself immortal and in total control of my bodily functions. As such, I felt I could relieve a little pressure and wait until a more opportune time to download the road's excesses -- after all, I was on a winning streak. I slightly raised my left butt cheek off the stool as the dealer was dealing, and eased out an innocent little fart.

The moment I tapped the pressure relief valve, I knew I had made a bad mistake. Perhaps twenty ccs of liquid dirt snake escaped into my once-tightie whities.

I was in uncharted waters. Never before had I gambled and lost. The concept of shitting my pants, no matter how small the amount of fecal matter just unleashed into my virgin drawers, primed me for the panic that was to immediately follow.

I knew that I had to find a bathroom ASAP, lest I have a full-on fiery liquid shit volcanic eruption in my barely-scathed pants. I quickly gathered up my chips and began the search for Dump Station Zebra.

As I began my urgent quest, I somehow ended up on Stateline Street, the road that marks the border between Nevada and California. For whatever drunken reason, I crossed the busy street to Harvey's Casino, and continued my desperate mission there.

The place was packed, noisy and chaotic. I asked some change dude where the johns were and he vaguely pointed over towards a bank of elevators. I bumped and shoved my way in that direction, knowing very well that *IT* was imminent. I got to the elevators, but saw no bathrooms.

At that very moment, Providence elected to open an empty elevator right in front of me.

I decided to do the fateful gamble of my life. I thought if I could get in by myself, close the doors and hit the button for the top floor, I could do a quick blast and possibly escape detection at some mid-level floor. It made drunken logical sense -- at that hour, everyone appeared to be headed down to the Casino from their rooms, rather that vice-versa.

The elevator doors closed and my pants were barely down to my knees when I grabbed the elevator railing and unleashed projectile liqui-shit against the opposing wall. I thought I had at least another twenty or thirty seconds to somehow tear off my previously soiled underpants to do a cursory clean up. But no. The friggin' elevator stopped at the next floor and an unsuspecting couple entered -- and witnessed the horror. I quickly cinched up my battered, splattered pants and ran down the hallway to the stairs. I didn't stop running until I got to my motel room several block away.

In the room, I took a big swig of JD to calm my nerves and then made an evaluation of my pants... destroyed. Both inner pants legs were caked with an irremovable tarry black substance. The jockeys and cargo pants were a total loss. Fortunately, one of the guys with whom I was sharing the room was the same size as me; I borrowed a pair of pants and put them on after a cleansing shower.

Feeling much better at this point, I went back to Harrah's to find my comrades. I walked around for an hour and didn't find them. I assumed they made their way across the street to Harveys. I quickly found them all at a craps table (if only they could have known at the time), and they were making a rowdy scene. I threw some money down on come, and won and lost evenly the next ten throws.

Then all hell broke loose. I was grabbed from behind by the casino cops and goose-stepped to the casino jail. Apparently the elevator had a hidden camera that captured my moment of distress -- and the couple turned out to be executives in the hotel.

I thought they were going to take me out back, apply some cement galoshes, and make me go for a midnight swim in the lake. Fortunately for me, they only busted my balls for an hour, and then told me that I permanently banned from all South Lake casinos, and that my case would be made known to all other casinos in Nevada.

It took me ten years before I ventured into another Nevada casino... in bumfuck Jackpot, Nevada, on the Idaho boarder. Even then, I felt all the eyes in the sky were on me for past crimes of my sphincter.

-- Grand Master Caca