Kennedy and Heidi: Vicarious Patricide as Tony’s Decompensation

At the risk of needless redundancy, I think it’s helpful to summarize Tony’s state of mind going into the episode Kennedy and Heidi. His consciousness is teeming with ancient but recently-agitated memories showcasing his father’s violence and toxic influence, like Johnny shooting a hole through Livia’s hairdo and baptizing him in the act of murder. He’s unable to shake stories of parental neglect leading to tragic outcomes for children. He’s painfully aware of Christopher’s hatred of him and desire for murderous revenge, feelings ultimately rooted in the fact that Tony guided him into the same corrupt existence into which he himself had been led by Johnny, Junior, and company, suggesting a reciprocal, if unconscious, rage by Tony towards those men. His subconscious mind is under constant assault from hats and movie posters and coffee mugs bearing the image of a bloody meat cleaver, an emblem of his own lost childhood innocence and inculcation by his father into his brutal, ugly vocation. He is racked with acute but intense guilt over the role he thinks his life’s example has played in shaping his son’s values and poor sense of self-worth. And he is still repressing a mountain of hurt over the fact that his uncle and second father tried not once but twice to kill him, a repression Melfi warned would someday result in a total collapse of his defense mechanisms, that is, a collapse of his paternal hero-worship and related quest for the macho validation that has prevented him from critically examining his father, uncle, and the men upon whom he modeled his life.
Now consider the circumstances immediately before the crash. Tony and Chris are on a routine drive back from business in Christopher’s new black Cadillac SUV (the first Cadillac Chris has ever owned, incidentally.) The conversation turns to life priorities. Chris, conspicuously clad in a Cleaver hat, specifically mentions how Kaitlyn has changed his priorities, and Tony mentions the “shit with Junior”. So the context is immediately pregnant with the fact that Junior shot and nearly killed Tony within the past year and with the fact that Chris is in a new place of responsibility, a position where he is, for the first time, truly the custodian and trustee for another life.
In a perfectly-timed illustration of just how ill-equipped Chris is to live up to those responsibilities, he nervously and repeatedly fiddles with the car stereo, fidgets, and widens his eyes, telegraphing to Tony that he is high as a kite on drugs. “Comfortably Numb” swells on the sound system as Tony stares at him, the lyrics underscoring that, in that moment, he does not see Chris as a youngster, as the “adorable kid” he once road around in the basket of his bicycle, but as a grown man:
When I was a child I caught a fleeting glimpse Out of the corner of my eye I turned to look but it was gone I cannot put my finger on it now The child is grown, the dream is gone
Chris swerves, and the crash happens seconds later.

Tony as the Child in the Carseat

It’s critical to note that Tony initially manifests every intention of helping Chris, even as he’s fighting his own injuries. “I’m comin’,” he says as Chris asks for help. His expression and demeanor only change when he realizes what Chris means by “help”. “I’ll never pass a drug test,” Chris moans. “What?” Tony asks incredulously as Chris is inhaling his own blood. Almost simultaneously, Tony turns towards the back and sees that a tree limb has penetrated the passenger compartment, lodging in Kaitlyn’s car seat like a spear. While Tony would somewhat exaggerate the size of the branch in later narrations of the event, there’s no question that it was large enough to have impaled or seriously injured an infant.
Even after this warning shot over the bow, Tony apparently intends to help Chris, coming over to the driver’s side and breaking the window when he couldn’t get the door open. He draws his cell phone to call for help but stops when Chris again mentions being doped up, which suggests that Chris is more concerned about the legal consequences of his intoxication than about the fact that he is drowning in his own blood, completely belying his claim to a life newly ordered around the lofty priority of fatherhood.
That’s the moment when Tony forms a genuine murderous intent, an intent that has little to do with Christopher’s animosity towards him or the danger that he might flip. Those are conscious, background motives that help Tony rationalize and make sense of his actions later. But the factor impelling him to end Christopher’s life is his own, fundamental identification with the child who might just as easily have been killed or seriously harmed in that carseat.
To objectify this point, there is a slow pan of the limb sticking through the seat as Tony performs the suffocation, clearly not a shot representing Tony’s vision or gaze at that moment but objectively corroborating the earlier angle when Tony glances back and we see the seat from his point of view. The juxtaposition of these shots – subjective and objective – tells me the carseat is not just a convenient excuse for Tony. This is what he’s really feeling. In this moment, he is the phantom child in that carseat, a child whose safety and well-being come second to his father’s corrupt values and reckless self-indulgence, a child whose soul and humanity are metaphorically impaled by riding in and being taught to drive his father’s black Cadillac.
The exclamation point on the symbolism is provided by Christopher’s hat. Incredibly, it remains on his head throughout the crash and suffocation, its bloody cleaver logo pointing towards Tony when the car comes to rest. As Tony acts consciously on behalf of an innocent child, the symbol of his own lost childhood innocence is directly before him. And, for good measure, the cap and logo stare back at him in the hospital from the gurney laden with Christopher’s bloody clothing and the black bag containing his dead body. (The logo antagonizes Tony a final time from his coffee mug the next morning before he angrily tosses the mug into his backyard woods.)
Several points about the suffocation itself are remarkable. First was the look of absolute depravity on Tony’s face as he watched Christopher struggle to breathe. This look was unlike any ever seen on Tony’s face at any other moment in the series. Even when committing other personal and deadly acts of violence, his face and demeanor had always betrayed a commensurate level of animus, an active, passionate intent. In contrast, he reached through the window and pinched Christopher’s nose – and maintained that hold – with remarkable calm. His face and eyes throughout the suffocation were paradoxically both incredibly intense and completely devoid of human emotion, a look far more disturbing than any look of mere rage he’d ever worn before.
Second, although this act was, in my judgment, clearly about the release of Tony’s pent up rage towards his father figures, the method of killing evokes Livia. Besides her conspiracy with Junior to kill Tony (which she rationalized was for his own good) and general obsession with stories of child deaths, she had once threatened to “smother [her children] with a pillow” to save them from a fate she deemed even worse. Tony grabbed a pillow intending to smother her in the season one finale before nursing home personnel intervened. In Members Only, Tony spoke of being smothered with a pillow as a suitable form of euthanasia. Its functional equivalent at the scene of the crash had a definite vibe of putting Chris out of his own – and everyone’s – misery. So, in killing his “father”, Tony was also paradoxically suffocating his “son”, thereby channeling Livia’s filicidal urges and concept of mercy killing.
The most spine-tingling resonance with the scene comes from two season four episodes where Tony’s deep identification with “innocents” – be they children or animals – once again comes to the fore, as does his appreciation for the consequences of Chris continuing to use drugs. In Whoever Did This, Tony warns Christopher that he “can’t be high on heroine and raise kids.” And in The Strong, Silent Type, after learning that a doped-up Chris accidentally smothered and suffocated Adriana’s dog, Tony ominously snaps, “You suffocated little Cossette? I oughta suffocate you, you prick!” It’s such perfect foreshadowing that the earlier episodes seem to have been written with the outcome of Kennedy and Heidi in mind.

Righteous Retribution as the Explanation for Tony’s Lack of Sorrow

As previously noted, the most troubling aspect of the episode from the standpoint of character consistency and plausibility was not the fact that Tony murdered Chris. It was his vacuous expression during the killing and the fact that he never betrayed a moment’s genuine sorrow or regret afterwards. He remained, in fact, defiantly happy and unconflicted about it, especially to Melfi, and was sincerely troubled that neither she nor anyone else could see how Christopher’s death rescued Kaitlyn from a lifetime of risks and harm that she would naturally suffer as the daughter of a drug addict (and mob captain).
In his therapy scenes with Melfi, real and dream, Tony even makes the very contrast I raise, noting that he’s never felt this way after murdering any other person close to him. He alludes to his sorrow over Pussy and specifically allows that murdering Tony B left him “prostate [sic] with grief.” In effect, Tony himself is revealing that this killing feels righteous and justified to him on an instinctive level and is therefore not one about which he can feel guilt or sorrow.
That sentiment makes no sense if his dominant motives were those he talked about in therapy: Christopher’s animosity and resentment towards him after the Adriana hit and his drug-use and consequent risk to flip. Whatever weight those factors carry in justifying murder in the corrupt “ethics” of the mob (which, in any case, is less than the weight of the transgressions by Pussy and Tony B), they carry absolutely no legitimate moral weight outside it and could not sustain in Tony the sense of just triumph that he felt in response to Christopher’s death. What could inspire that sense of triumph is the perceived liberation of a child from a dangerous and toxic father, experienced subconsciously as vicarious retribution for the abuse and harm he himself suffered at the hands of his own father and uncle.

Significance of the Names “Kennedy” and “Heidi”

“Kennedy” and “Heidi” are the names of the young passenger and driver, respectively, in the car that sideswipes Christopher’s SUV before the fateful crash. The girls are barely onscreen a few seconds, just long enough to (somewhat artificially) learn their names in the following exchange:
Kennedy: Maybe we should go back, Heidi! Heidi: Kennedy, I’m on my learner’s permit after dark!
Much forum debate after the first airing of the episode centered around the significance, if any, of these names. I propose a related but even more basic question: why are the girls present in the scene at all?
Tony’s windfall opportunity to murder Chris and pass it off as death from accidental injury was entirely dependent upon being unobserved by others after the crash. Given Christopher’s intoxicated state and inattention to the curvy road while he fiddled with radio controls, a mere swerve and over-correction or swerve to avoid an animal (Tony’s crash with Adriana, anyone?) would have easily sufficed to trigger the accident but without the problematic involvement of another car, the driver of which would have to be made to flee the scene illegally and in contravention of the ethics and instincts of at least 95% of the motorists on the road. So the very fact that another car is involved, complicating both the story and the filming, suggests some symbolic or subtextual design to the involvement related specifically to the momentous event occurring right after the crash.
One aspect of that design is revealed and amplified when a grieving Kelly shows up at Christopher’s wake with dark hair framing her face and large, dark sunglasses covering her eyes. A member of the crew remarks, “Look at her. Like a movie star.” An odd look immediately crosses Tony’s face as he spontaneously responds, “Jackie Kennedy”, noting Kelly’s resemblance to the widow of John F. Kennedy.
In my mind, this striking moment in the episode can have only one purpose, and that’s to evoke Johnny Boy in relation to Christopher via a kind of symbolic math. If Kelly = Jackie Kennedy, then Chris = JFK = Johnny Boy since JFK was the explicit parallel figure for Johnny in In Camelot, the first episode of the series depicting cracks in the foundation of Tony’s paternal hero worship. When that foundation completely crumbles inside Tony’s subconscious a season and a half later, it’s entirely fitting that the JFK/Johnny parallel is renewed.
As for the name “Heidi”, most folks around these parts felt it was meant to evoke the idea of “orphan” because of the famous Swiss orphan tale of the same name and because Kaitlyn (and Paulie) both lost parents in the episode. That’s an entirely plausible analysis that requires no expansion, although I’m inclined to think there’s more to it than that, starting with the analogy of Tony himself to “Heidi”. No, Tony was never technically orphaned, though he arguably suffered more as the son of Johnny and Livia than if he had been. He was certainly deprived of real parental love and guidance, on both sides, and that roughly equates to the definition of “orphan”.
Before discussing this episode for the first time, I never knew that Heidi was the story of an orphan, only that it was some kind of tale for children. And I knew that only because of the epic 1968 football game between Joe Namath’s Jets and the Oakland Raiders, the climactic ending of which (an improbable comeback by the Raiders) was cut off abruptly for television viewers at the end of its scheduled broadcast slot so that a movie version of Heidi could begin airing on time. I was only four at the time of this debacle but recall my parents talking about it – and the considerable chaos it caused at NBC and at telephone switchboards around the country – for years afterwards. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heidi_Game
It wouldn’t become clear until the end of Made In America, but there’s an obvious parallel to the Heidi phenomenon in the wind-up of The Sopranos. Consider that, like the Heidi Game broadcast, Made in America featured an abrupt, unexpected termination of excruciatingly tense action at a penultimate moment, pre-empting audience experience of what appeared to be an imminent and momentous climax. The Sopranos ending may not have disabled an entire telephone network, but it certainly generated an enormous amount of controversy that, for better or worse, persists to this day.
Beyond that, there were enough other football references in the final Sopranos episodes, and especially Jets references, to warrant further consideration of this football connotation for “Heidi”. In Remember When, Tony’s betting losses on Jets football games prompt his call to Hesh for a bridge loan. Later that same episode, Paulie annoys Tony and company with yet another old tale, this one relating how, after witnessing Joe Namath stagger drunk into a bar the night before a game, he bet a load of cash the following day on the Jets’ opponent. In Chasing It, Tony gets inside information on a Jets football game and is irate when Carmela refuses to bet money on it. The episode features a closeup of a large newspaper headline, “Jets Bomb Chargers”.
In Blue Comet, then-current coach of the Jets, Eric Mangini, makes a cameo appearance in Vesuvio, with Artie informing a suitably-impressed Tony so the two can go over and shake hands. News articles at the time clarified that the cameo wasn’t Mangini’s idea but the idea of Sopranos producers, who contacted him months in advance and made accommodations in the shooting schedule around his availability. So this seemed more than a casual desire to have some generic celebrity show up.
That especially seems true considering Mangini was given no dialog and that his meeting with Tony and Artie was only depicted in the silent background of a conversation between Charmaine and Carmela. Mangini’s only purpose on set was apparently to show his face briefly and to have the fact of his identity (Tony has to tell a bewildered Carm that Mangini is the head coach of the Jets) permeate the minds of the audience and the subtext of the scene, which is ultimately about chickens coming home to roost on Tony and Carmela because of the lives they chose.
As alter egos for Tony and Carmela throughout the series, folks who took the proverbial “other path” in life, Artie and (especially) Charmaine engage in subtle gloating in the scene. Football coaching was firmly established as Tony’s “road not taken” in Test Dream, so having an actual football coach present in the episode where the unsavory and downright deadly consequences of his chosen vocation are crashing in all around him provides dramatic ballast. All the better to have the coach in the scene be the coach of the team involved in the Heidi game in view of the ending planned for the following episode.
And speaking again of that ending, the wall behind Tony in Holsten’s is consumed with four large murals specifically brought in by the production crew for the shoot. The largest and most centered depicts a huge, light-colored building with lots of windows, somewhat reminiscent of the Inn at the Oaks in Tony’s coma dream. It’s apparently a high school, however, as it is flanked on either side by images of football players in full uniform with what appear to be names and year of graduation engraved at the bottom. To the side and extreme left is a mural of a tiger and the caption “Class of 1973” at the bottom. The tiger is presumably the mascot for the team and school represented in the other murals. So there is a strong symbolic presence of “football” in the last scene of the series, particularly of high school football from roughly the era when Tony would have entered high school.
Finally, though it may be completely insignificant, when Tony tells Carm about the accident from his hospital stretcher in Kennedy and Heidi, he mentions that he re-injured his knee, “the one from high school.” That certainly sounds like a reference to an old high school football injury.
If these loose strands from multiple episodes are indeed intended to connote football in relation to the name “Heidi”, what does that actually mean in the context of the episode Kennedy and Heidi? What does football have to do with Tony killing Chris or, more precisely, with him killing his father in the guise of Chris?
The linchpin in that symbolism, it seems to me, is Tony’s old high school football coach, the guy who would have been his coach when he originally injured his knee, the guy Tony dreamt repeatedly of trying to silence or kill, the guy whose puzzling duality in Test Dream suddenly makes sense when he’s viewed as a classic, Freudian composite of opposites, specifically a composite of Tony’s opposing father figures with Johnny dressed in the physiognomy of Coach Molinaro by Tony’s subconscious in order to render acceptable imagery of his latent, patricidal feelings.
If you further allow, as I do, that the Johnny look-alike shooting at Tony with a scoped rifle (ala Oswald/”Kennedy”) in that same dream is yet another Freudian “reversal into the opposite” by Tony’s subconscious to disguise his repressed paternal rage, then the Kennedy/Heidi connection is pretty clear. The names are presented proximate to the crash to connote that, in killing Chris, Tony has finally acted out the Test Dream imagery that haunted him for years: he has (symbolically) killed his father, the “Kennedy” and “Heidi” of his dream.

“He’s Dead”

In my judgment, this explains Tony’s otherwise puzzling, peyote-induced insight when he proclaims, “He’s dead,” after winning at roulette on 3 successive spins, prompting him to fall to the floor in spectacular and uncontrollable laughter. What other, real death could have inspired such a euphoric and epiphanic reaction? What real death could Tony only have appreciated while in a drug-induced, altered state of consciousness?
Many felt the line referred to Christopher because he’d just died, obviously, and because Tony’s gambling luck suddenly changed afterward. That analysis never made sense to me.
First, Tony plays roulette at the casino while sober when he first arrives in Vegas and loses every round. Chris was already dead at that time, as Tony well knew and accepted. Indeed, Tony was never in any state of denial about Christopher’s death (or about having killed him.) He embraced it, both consciously and in his dream therapy session with Melfi after the crash.
The “he’s dead” insight occurs only after Tony takes peyote and notices a sudden and complete about-face in gambling luck. Why would he need psychedelic drugs to suddenly realize what he already knew and accepted about Chris? And why would Christopher’s death be tied in his mind to his own gambling luck anyway? No prior connection between those two things had ever been suggested.
On the other hand, Tony’s sudden escalation in gambling, which coincided with the agitation and intensification of his latent rage towards his father(s), could easily be seen as a subconscious rebellion against the stern, anti-gambling lecture Johnny imparted the night Tony witnessed the cleaver incident. To the extent that the rebellion results in huge financial losses and self destruction, it obviously fails. His father retains ultimate power and authority. To the extent the rebellion results in huge winnings, it succeeds, and Tony vanquishes his father.
That conquest was the ineffable and elusive “high” that Tony was subconsciously pursuing in Chasing It but which he could not articulate to Melfi. Thus the sudden change in gambling fortune on his Vegas trip is easily tied in Tony’s drug-altered psyche to a euphoric realization that he has conquered or symbolically killed his father, none of which Tony could appreciate without a vastly altered state of consciousness.
And that leads to why he went to Vegas in the first place. He asks that question out loud to the Vegas prostitute, Sonia, immediately before admitting that Christopher once mentioned taking peyote with her. Tony then confesses to having always wanted to try the drug.
Clearly, then, he didn’t just happen to pick Vegas and didn’t just happen to make contact with this girl. His subconscious was pushing him to that venue because he craved the enlightenment of a peyote experience. So while Tony’s real motives for the murder, and for his otherwise inexplicable jubilance afterward, were completely closed off to his conscious mind, somehow he sensed their existence and yearned to unlock and understand them. However his peyote revelations didn’t stop with simply understanding why he killed Chris.

“I Get It. I Get It!”

Tony’s desert epiphany is a bookend to his near-death coma experience and, I believe, can only be fully understood in relation to it. Yet exploring that relationship is a journey all unto itself, calling not only for consideration of the coma episodes and Kennedy and Heidi but the meaning of the cut to black that ends the series. While exploring the religious and spiritual underpinnings of those episodes is of even more weight and interest to me personally than the issue of Tony’s motives in killing Christopher, it deserves and demands its own, dedicated discussion. For now, I’d simply like to posit what I strongly believe Tony’s epiphany to have been with only minimal argumentation as to why I hold that belief.
The epiphany is presaged when Tony enters the casino on his peyote trip and notes that the roulette wheel is built on the same principle as the solar system. The ball spins round and round the center or “sun” of the wheel because of two delicately-balanced but largely opposing phenomena: the momentum of the ball (which, without the wheel, would carry the ball away in a straight line) and the centripetal force of the wheel (applied by the rim, which continuously pulls the ball towards the center even as the ball’s momentum continuously pulls it on a path perpendicular to the centripetal force.) The antagonism (or cooperation, if you prefer) of the forces gives rise to a unified system: an orbit.
If this sounds a bit like the Bell Labs scientist’s explanation of how two tornadoes are in fact just facets of one, unified system of wind, it’s likely no mere coincidence. As Hal Holbrook’s character argued, separateness is a mirage. The universe, and everything in it, is one big soup of molecules interacting in cause/effect fashion according to laws, making it one whole, not a bunch of discrete parts. “Everything is everything,” as the black rapper reduced it.
That was the philosophy that really made an impression on Tony in the days and weeks following his coma. The principles of quantum physics articulated by Holbrook’s character are likely as close as you can get to a scientific codification of Bhuddism and therefore reinforced much of what the Bhuddist monks conveyed to Tony in his coma. The monks laughed when Tony claimed he wasn’t Finnerty and explained that there really is no “you” and “me, that death would bring an obliteration of individuality. Separate consciousness – and the consciousness of separateness – is an illusion of the living.
So all this laid the philosophical groundwork for Tony’s Las Vegas trip. In that trip, Tony seeks out a girl with whom Chris had slept, then sleeps with her himself. He mentions having refrained from a longstanding desire to try peyote because he always felt the weight of his responsibilities, an implied contrast to Christopher, who always indulged in drugs despite his responsibilities. The idea that Tony was seeking to almost live life in Christopher’s skin in the Las Vegas portion of the episode was something several posters mentioned in first discussions after Kennedy and Heidi aired. Even the girl, Sonia, remarks how similar Tony and Chris are, a somewhat dubious observation that somehow offends Tony but which also helps define his impending epiphany.
That epiphany is spurred when the rising sun flares at him over the desert mountain vista. This recalls Tony’s earlier comparison of the roulette wheel to the solar system. It also resonates completely with the fact that Kevin Finnerty was a solar heating salesman from Kingman, Arizona, a town which, not coincidentally, lies 95 miles southeast of Las Vegas and shares the same desert landscape. Also not coincidental, IMO, is the fact that in the prior episode, Christopher spoke of the perks of joining witness protection and of “living large” in Arizona.
So I believe that, in that desert sunrise on the cusp of Arizona, in fulfillment of his identity as Kevin Finnerty, solar heating salesman, Tony saw his “son” – Christopher – “rise” and realized that, in murdering him days before, he (Tony) was really “rising” as a “son” against Johnny Boy. And in that linkage, he suddenly realized that “everything is [indeed] everything.” He is both Chris and Johnny Boy, both abused and misguided son and abusing, misguiding father. He is murdering uncle and would-be murdered nephew. He is both the mother that sees suffocation as mercy killing and the son who is suffocated. Christopher is both his son and his father. Johnny Boy is Coach Molinaro. “Kennedy” is “Heidi”. Opposites are really two sides of the same coin. In that fleeting moment of insight, Tony was truly feeling “one” with the universe.

The Second Coming

The episode following Kennedy and Heidi is titled The Second Coming after the Yeats poem that grips AJ in the English lit class he’s auditing. While the poem speaks to the bleakness of his depression and outlook on life at that particular time, there’s little doubt that – like everything of substantial weight in the Sopranos universe – it ultimately relates, first and foremost, to Tony. First referenced in the Cold Cuts therapy session dealing with pent-up rage where Tony’s deep shame from the cleaver incident is finally revealed, the poem seems the veritable inspiration for the storyline (as interpreted in this article) that culminates in Christopher’s murder:
The Second Coming By William Butler Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight; somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
The widening gyre, the orbit that breaks down when the center can no longer hold, is clearly a parallel to the decompensation of which Melfi warned, the point at which Tony’s defenses after Junior’s second murder attempt could no longer hold and the underlying pathological rage at his fathers would take over. True to the poem, a “blood-dimmed tide was loosed”, inspired by a perverse compassion for the “innocent”. While “the best” all mourned Christopher and thought his death a tragedy, Tony, “the worst”, was full of passionate intensity and could not understand why no one else saw the greater good in Christopher’s death.
The “revelation” occurs in a “waste of desert sand”, imagery easily compatible with Tony’s “I get it” moment in the Nevada/Arizona desert. The uniquely depraved look on his face as he suffocated Christopher is evoked by the line describing a “gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun”. “Twenty years of stony sleep” refers to the decades of denial Tony maintained, the defense mechanisms that kept him all his life from confronting and admitting that, in some very real ways, he hated his father. It’s a figurative sleep that was suggested literally in the noted fact that so many episodes in season 6B started with Tony in a deep sleep. Somnolence was suggested even in the choice of the song “Comfortably Numb” as soundtrack in the moments immediately preceding the crash, the moments right before the hour of the “rough beast” finally arrived. Even the incidentals are perfect allusions, as with the image of “stony sleep” being turned into a nightmare by a “rocking cradle”, or, in this case, by a car seat with a branch sticking through it.
I’m intrigued by the line describing the emerging beast as having “lion body”. It may mean absolutely nothing. But among the story points worth considering in relation to it are the tiger on the wall in Holsten’s and the enigmatic cat in Made In America.
More obscure is the fact that in Remember When, the single episode most explicitly dealing with the violent release of stifled paternal rage, Carter Chong described his grandfather as a “lion” and noted that his father owned “Grumman” stock. (Grumman manufactured a number of high-profile fighter military aircraft, most of them named for some kind of cat, e.g., Panther, Jaguar, Tomcat, Tigercat.) Carter was reviewing these facts to himself in the scene immediately preceding his vicious attack on Junior, suggesting that, in acting out on his stifled paternal hatred, he was adopting the predatory, aggressive characteristics of a wild cat. Notably, when Junior, the paternal surrogate who modeled this kind of aggressive behavior to Carter, was seen at the end of that episode bruised and literally defanged, his sunken mouth void of false teeth, he was stroking a harmless little housecat on his lap. Once a lion, the former mob boss was a lion no more.

Asbestos Dumping as a Metaphor for Tony’s Toxic Spill of Rage

Kennedy and Heidi opens with a controversy between Tony and Phil Leotardo over asbestos disposal. One of Tony’s contractors was removing asbestos from old buildings, while following none of the strict (and expensive) asbestos-handling laws regulating worker and public safety, and was seeking to dump completely uncontained truck-fulls at waste stations controlled by Phil. Phil’s guys were denying the trucks the right to dump. As a consequence, huge, openly-smoking asbestos mounds were building up at job sites.
After Christopher’s death, Tony was doing little to find a solution, skipping town to gamble, get laid, and get high and leaving the contractor high and dry. Finally, near the very end of the episode, the contractor dumps heaps of asbestos at dawn in an open marsh area resembling the New Jersey Meadowlands.
Asbestos is a naturally occurring mineral that gained widespread use in the 19th and 20th centuries as an ingredient in various building industry materials – including wall compounds, insulation, and roofing materials – primarily because of its extreme insulative properties and resistance to heat and fire. In the last 40 years, it’s become better-known for its cancer-causing and toxic effects on those mining and working with it in manufacturing, demolition/remodeling, or other “raw” environments.
Both the heat resistance and toxicity of asbestos make the shoddy removal/dumping storyline a compelling metaphor for Tony’s equally shoddy “dumping” in Kennedy and Heidi. The smoldering heat and flames from his hatred towards his father and uncle were contained beneath his consciousness by an insulating firewall of denial and repression. In essence, this denial and repression was Tony’s psychological asbestos, and it (more or less) contained the heat and fire within him for 47 years.
But it finally broke down, allowing the flames to rage and do damage and necessitating a messy disposal. Unfortunately the breakdown didn’t happen where it should have, in his therapist’s office as the result of honest introspection and dialog about little things like his uncle trying to kill him twice and his father indoctrinating him to murder at 22. That would have been the equivalent of careful, legally-compliant asbestos removal. Instead the breakdown occurred in a roadside ravine and the resulting “waste [in the] desert sand” was every bit as toxic as the smoking piles illegally dumped in the Meadowlands immediately before the desert epiphany and which we saw reprised in the very first shot of the following episode.
Think about that for a moment. Tony’s “I get it” moment was literally sandwiched between shots of noxious mounds of asbestos blowing in the New Jersey wind, a significant clue that some other kind of perversely cathartic disposal was in the middle of that sandwich.

The Orbit of the ‘Blue Comet’: Long Journey to Nowhere

It’s fair to ask: if the broad strokes of my interpretation are valid, what impact did the epiphany have on Tony going forward? After the drugs wore off, did he actually retain any specific understanding of his subconscious motives for killing Chris? Was he left only with the impression that he had enjoyed a very brief moment of enlightenment but without intellectual distillation of the enlightenment itself?
Because the insight was founded upon the secret that he had murdered Chris, even if Tony had retained it, he couldn’t overtly share it with anyone. Still, I lean toward the interpretation that the specifics (at least the ones I proffered) were lost to him when the altered state of consciousness ceased. When he tried to describe the magic of what he experienced in the desert to his crew, he could only come up with the most mundane, inadequate words: “The sun . . . came up.” They all looked at him like he was half retarded.
He was slightly more specific with Melfi, offering that he saw “for pretty certain” that this reality is not all there is. He couldn’t define the alternative but was still convinced there was “something else”.
He did speak in therapy of appreciating a balance and unity in opposites that he hadn’t appreciated before, a “ying” [sic] and “yang”. And he offered that “mothers are like buses . . . the vehicle that gets us here,” but that, once here, we are all on our own, individual journeys (mothers included.) So, to the extent his epiphany comported with what he revealed in therapy, it seems to have had little to do with fathers and with Christopher’s murder and more to do with letting go (finally) of some of his issues with his mother.
But perhaps the best clue to his residual state of understanding came when he indicated that some of what he thought he had grasped in the desert now eluded him. “You think you know, you think you learn something . . . like when I got shot,” he begins. Then, speaking specifically about the peyote experience, he reports that the insight gained is “kinda hard to describe. . . . You know, you have these thoughts, and you almost grab it . . . and then . . . ftt.” He flicks his fingers away from his chin as if to indicate “nothing”. So, to paraphrase Edna St. Vincent Millay, a fragment of what he knew remains, but, apparently, the best is lost.
It wouldn’t take long for all of it to be lost. By the time Tony sits with AJ’s female therapist in Made In America, “going about in pity” for himself because of who his mother was, he has come full circle, essentially back to where he was to start the series. Like a “blue comet”, his orbit was highly elliptical, if not erratic, and carried with it the potential of veering off into deep space or crashing into the sun. But despite killing his own nephew, having a near-death experience himself, and saving his son from an act of suicide, the orbit held. The sober breakthrough never came. The repudiation of his father and of his way of life never took hold in his consciousness. And so, by series’ end, we, like Tony, were exhausted from a long journey that ultimately took us nowhere.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

I'm an American. I lived in NZ for 6 months in 2010 on the Working Holiday Visa. I'm applying for a Skilled Worker Visa so that I can move back permanently. Here's a more informed opinion on what I, an American, think of NZ.

I’m an American.
Hello, NZ Herald! I'm sure you want to know all about me.
...annnyway,
In 2010, I came to NZ on a working holiday visa, but (for various reasons including homesickness), I decided to return to the states.
In 2018, I’ve decided to send in my Expression of Interest letter for the Skilled Worker Visa, with the intent to permanently emigrate.
So, if you want to know what an American really thinks of New Zealand, and has thought about New Zealand long enough to write a (sold-single-digits) book on it’s political structure, here’s what I come back with.

I’ve met everyone on your political spectrum from sandwich-wearing conspiracy theorists to Prime Ministers (Geoffrey Palmer, Jenny Shipley, Jim Bolger, and then-shadow-deputy PM Bill English). They were willing to give me the time of day. It was easier and more accessible for a complete foreigner to get in touch with the highest echelons of power, just by asking, than it is for an American to get in touch with their own state representative.
I disagree with the right wing on general principles in New Zealand — but they make reasonable points and logical assumptions. In other words, I can have a discussion with a National supporter and disagree but know that they’re coming from a place of information (though we may make different mental models of how the economic system works.) The fact that a National MP who made the big “big gay rainbow” speech would never happen in America. In fact, Republicans and Democrats do not talk to each other, nor do they have anything to say to each other as the common ground - the very reality itself, is different. In short, I don’t have to hate political opposition in order to disagree with them.
Winston Peters is the Donald Trump of New Zealand.
Proportional Representation has done more, I think for New Zealand than most Kiwis realize, as it has changed the game theory so that corruption is rooted out quickly by the parties themselves. Cabinet Sackings have occurred more often since MMP was adopted, in addition, you have more diversity in your Parliament, and your voters aren’t locked into a situation where they feel they MUST “vote for the right lizard so that the wrong lizard doesn’t get in.”
There are some foods I missed from the U.S.: Root Beer a.k.a. Sasparilla, is nowhere to be found. Neither is Grape Jelly/Jam (which Americans serve with peanut butter - a favorite from our childhood.). There was also no Taco Bell, but I missed that a bit less.
Similarly, there are foods from my days in NZ that I miss here. Coffee is not as good. Nor do Americans have pies the same way that NZers do.
Wellington in winter can be so gray that you want to slit your wrists open just so that you can see some color. But it’s also true: You can’t beat Wellington on a good day.
I found it horrifying when a Maori friend said “What up my N-words!”. I guess you’re less sensitive to that because you don’t have the years of slavery, etc. Then again, I think nothing about strapping on a “fanny pack”.
You’re more friendly than New Yorkers, less friendly than Texans from Austin.
Kiwis are more racist as a group than they think they are, but they’re still less racist than Americans or Australians.
Kiwis think Kiwis as a group are more racist than Americans or Australians think Americans or Australians are as a group.
Chocolate Milk.
They call it Rotovegas, but I couldn’t find a single casino. And yes, it does smell.
Internet is slower, but not unreasonably so. Long story short: throughput is okay, latency is a bitch.
This is a big one - you don’t have a homeless “problem.” Or you do, but the problem is not having enough affordable housing. That is not to say that you don’t have homeless. I’m saying that the homeless in America can’t afford to see a doctor or dentist, so they can develop some really chronic problems which can mark them for life. There are ways to bring yourself up out of poverty or homelessness in NZ - in the U.S., once you become homeless, it can be a trap you can’t get out of. When one conjures images of the homeless problem in the U.S., you picture tent cities of people deformed by disease, stuck in addictions, often with mental problems which either caused their homelessness or were caused BY their homelessness. In fact, Roy Morgan conflates “house prices” with “homelessness” in their poll of Kiwi issues. In the U.S., those are seen as - are - two separate problems.
Stores close way too early. Banks are closed on weekends. It’s a pain in the butt.
I will never take the ozone layer for granted. And when I move back I will slip-slap-slop. The sun is a harsh mistress….
Nor will I take home insulation and central heating/central cooling for granted. Though an oil heater does an okay job.
Love or hate his policies, Peter Dunne is a mensch.
Pharmaceutical ads are exactly like they are in the States. NZ and the U.S. are the only countries that allow TV pharmaceutical ads.
You guys are way more aware of wealth inequality than Americans are. Subsequently, compared to America, NZ is an egalitarian paradise. Not to say that you don’t have a problem, or that it’s not getting worse, but your inequality graph doesn’t look like a hockey stick.
Your people are better educated, mostly because of zero-interest student loans that you only have to pay off the minimum each month. In America, students are saddled with tens of thousands of dollars - at the minimum - in debt before they even start their careers. But your secondary education is a little more rigorous too.
If I had kids, I wouldn’t have waited one second before deciding to go to New Zealand.
I find myself wanting to eat healthier (and I’m a typical fat American gourmand.) Your vegetables don’t taste like crap because of racism.. You also don’t put corn in everything.
When I move back, I’m planning on spending extra to get a flat in or near the CBD so that I don’t have to buy a car so that it’ll force me to walk more. Your public transportation isn’t as good as the one in Sydney, but it beats ANY public transportation system in America save New York, SF, and Chicago.
Tall poppy syndrome is an overall negative, in my opinion. Don’t get me wrong, New Zealanders take care of the least of their own, and are a much better society, but there’s a positive for America in that, yes, you can reach for the stars here, and you’re encouraged to go for it. Our kids grow up wanting to be astronauts, run Fortune 500 companies, be a world-famous singer or dancer or anything… and that’s not a bad thing. Sometimes those kids make it. In short, America says "Some people are going to be superstars, some people are going to starve to death." NZ says: "Nobody starves to death here, but set your goals realistically."
Americans and Kiwis are equally friendly when formally introduced through a third party, but Americans are more willing to be friendly to complete strangers.. You can become fast friends on the subway, at the bar, on the plane, etc. And it’s genuine friendship. That’s true, but on the flip side, that means that we spend less time going to formal social groups.. That might be one of the reasons our democracy has frayed so badly, as fewer and fewer of us find that the League of Women Voters, or the United Way, or the Shriners, or the monthly bridge club, or even a Sunday picnic with friends fits the way we have come to live. Americans have a “social capital deficit” and New Zealand, I think, less so.
That said, Kiwis are more informal than most Americans when interacting with strangers. Kiwis do a bit of "good natured ribbing" with one another that you'd reserve for close friends in America.
Kiwis are less rushed and more willing to help out strangers even if it takes out time from their day. That's... not necessarily untrue of Americans from my home city, Austin, but NY, Chicago, or SF, that's not likely.
Salaries in the U.S. are much higher in my field, software engineering. But let's be honest, once you make enough, you can't buy the improved quality of life a more equal society provides.
Mt. Manganui’s beaches are as good or better than any beach in the Continental 48 states. Hawaii, however, edges you out, but I’ve never been…
Dick Smiths is like Radio Shack, only with useful stuff.
I don't need a gun to feel safe in New Zealand, probably because there aren't tons of people around me who feel that they need a gun to feel safe.
Your politicians are surprisingly chill. That one guy on John Oliver took a flying dildo to the face, and took it in stride, joking about it. The protester who threw the dildo wasn't even charged with anything, (despite it being, if one wished to call it, assault and battery with a large floppy phallus.) Compared to the inauguration protestors in the U.S., who faced riot charges.
I also have more faith in the justice system of New Zealand. Rongomai Bailey was charged with terrorism, got out on bail, and had the charges dismissed considering that they didn't really have any evidence, and the review said the police were responsible. In the U.S., police literally get away with murder.. This is why, if I'm ever robbed, I don't even bother calling the police in the U.S. - they can do nothing to help you, they can only hurt you.
I will never get used to calling it "EnZed" rather than "EnZee." It will mark me for life.
I still get stuck on some aspects of NZ English, like, for example, putting punctuation outside the quotation marks.

"Hello," he said. "Hello", he said.

Child of Sparrows

Hello mama, it’s June Bug.
I got no real idea how this might come to you, but by post or freight or law man’s hand, you should know it’s me this time. I read in the paper that folks been writin’ you on occasion saying they’re me and apologizing for all the mischief I got up to. I ain’t written to you but once since I left home and that’s right now. That reminds me of the sign up at Busser’s, one that hanged over the stationary? “If you’re going to write, write right!” Were they selling Bics, or what? I can’t remember.
Busser’s is where this all started but of course you know that. In fact, I presume you might know a whole lot more of this than when I left back in spring. Delilah is like to have told you how I met Todd — Mr. Lightnin’ T Daniels of national infamy — when he drove that fine Cadillac up to Busser’s for some ice cream. Maybe you’ve talked to the others, and they’ll have lied if they said I didn’t want to go with him.
I guess that’s all true, but what they didn’t tell you, couldn’t tell you, is that I saw Todd for the first time a week earlier. He was working up at the Targrady pits when we went up there on a field trip so the boys could see how they were going to make their money one day and the girls would know how hard their men were going to be worked. He smiled at Carla Weathers, not me, when we walked past him in a group, even tossed her a lump of furnace coal and told here there was more where that came from. She blushed, but so did I. I wanted a man like that to look at me.
Since I left Arson County, I’ve found that there are a lot of men like Todd, especially in the big cities. But just six long months ago I thought there couldn’t be a second man like him on earth. He was tall, bristling with muscle and sweaty charm, and polished smooth and clean looking despite the grime on his coveralls. He didn’t look like the fat, broken coal miners or their simple, soon-to-be-broken sons. He didn’t look either like the bloated, soft-handed bankers or turned-out souses that came up from the railyard for church some Sundays.
No, he was a man of his own making. He was smoking that first time, cloistered in a little taped-off area and leaning against a broken rail cart. He’d tied his coverall shoulders around his waist and his grimy undershirt clung to his torso like cellophane. Maybe every girl saw him. Maybe it was only me. I committed him to memory the way I had started doing with certain men, certain I’d never see him again. I was wrong, of course.
He came up to Busser’s a week later in a casual sort of hurry. Nonchalant but rushed, sauntering into the place and ordering an ice cream milkshake with a cherry on top. Mr. Pushkin gave him a mean look, but started smiling all the same when he dropped cash on the counter. Real hard currency, big bills like I’d never seen a man his age carrying before. He rested his back on the bar to drink and look around, his legs splayed out before him.
He had thick heels on the black leather boots that left dark scuffs on the floor. His jeans were tight, very tight for a man, and ended in a broad black belt at his hips. He had a white t-shirt on above that, also tight, and black leather jacket. He looked like an absolute criminal, and when he ran his hands through his hair, my God mother. I just didn’t know what to do with myself.
He doesn’t look like that now, as you might guess. By the time you get this letter, I suppose what beauty Todd had known on this earth will have all but fled him. But at that moment he looked like an angel. One of the kind that wasn’t afraid to tell God what he thought then and again, and I wanted him to fall into my arms.
He finished his drink and I followed him outside. The other girls, Delilah, Ethel, Mary, they squealed and urged me to come sit back down. None of them would have ever had the courage to follow him out that door, none of them did. They’ll live long lives, I suppose, telling their children about me as a cautionary tale. But I didn’t care what they had to say then and I certainly don’t now.
We talked by his car. I fixed my blue eyes on him they way I’d been practicing in the mirror, trying my best to look like one of them girls in the cigarette ads. It must have worked, cause he stopped telling me to get lost and got lost himself, running his hand through that hair and leaning against the car. I told him he had bad posture, and asked him real slow that if that car wasn’t there, what else would he like to lean against? You should have seen the look on his face.
Todd likes to try looking like a wolf. He licks his teeth, is the most noticeable thing, and I’d never seen a wolf before he took me to the zoo. That’s where I first made that connection. He could almost bristle that big jacket of his like a pelt, and he made himself stand on his toes, like he might spring at any minute. But he was a puppy on the worst of days. You and me, mama, we know about real wolves, don’t we?
He told me he liked the way I talked to him and I asked what he meant. He told me I shouldn’t play with fire and I told him I didn’t play with fire, but that my daddy let me use matches sometimes. He laughed and asked me what it was I was after and I told him he had a nice car. He asked if I wanted a ride. I said yes.
We drove out by the high school and he tried to put the moves on me. I said no and we drove some more. Up north into Carbones County, up past Gun Cotton and to the highway, then back down through roads I’d never seen before. Past little hamlets and nowhere towns full of staring black or white faces and the occasional house set into hillside where nobody could possibly get to it. He got quiet as we drove.
I asked him if he was mad I turned him down and he laughed and said that wasn’t it. He told me he wasn’t from West Virginia and had to be leaving soon. Real soon. I asked him how soon and he said tomorrow. Then he told me I might not want to be around Busser’s around noon and I asked why, though it’s obvious to anybody now what he meant by that. Then he dropped me off.
You were awful mad at me when I got home. Slapped me on the face as I recall, and hard too. I cried for you the way you like and ran in to daddy. He shushed me and patted me on the head. How is he now? Are you done with him? Is it time to move on again or are your wings too old to catch the wind? I’ll never know the answers to those questions, but I have my suspicions and they help me sleep nights.
I went to sleep and you woke me up in the middle of the night. I remember what you told me, though I won’t commit that hatefulness to paper. And you squeezed me where it hurts, twisted and pinched the way you do and told me not to ruin things the way I always did. You reminded me of what daddy had to lose for us to live there, what my life meant to the people around me.
And the second you left that room I packed what I thought I’d need in my backpack. I hid my school things under the bed, where I’m sure you eventually found them. I ate breakfast full knowing I was about to leave Blunt, West Virginia for the last time. To leave you for good. We had eggs. I told you they were delicious.
You rode me to school that day. I thought you’d figured me out, having done that same shuffle and ride a dozen or more times just in my lifetime. But you didn’t suspect a thing, not from your dear little June Bug. You sat there in the Packard, gripping the steering wheel with your prim white driving gloves, hair up underneath one of those silk headwraps you started wearing in Cincinnati.
You could have told me you loved me, any number of nice motherly things I see women say to their children in the movies Todd eventually took me to. But you just gave me your typical sermon, the one I always got after one of your late night visits. And you told me I was old now, old enough to be a threat if I didn’t watch myself. You reminded me I could be replaced. You warned me I better behave myself.
I watched you drive off down the dirt road that led to that dismal one-room learning shack they called a school and that was the last I ever saw of you. In person at least. I saw you in the news a few weeks later, crying on the front page of the Charleston Independent-Star and asking me to come home. Then a couple months after that on the New York Times, crying and telling me you better never see me again. That headline read, “Mother mourns recalcitrant daughter.” It made me smile.
I didn’t even go inside the school. Some of the other girls would eventually tell the police they saw me walking “with determination” toward some other destination. I actually stopped and talked with Debby Marks, and asked her to cover for me until the afternoon, just in case. I’ve never seen that detail in any newspapers so I guess she kept that little tidbit to herself. Smart girl.
I sat alone in Busser’s until noon, and he showed like clockwork. The shiny red Cadillac pulled up at the far end of the corner lot and he sat there alone, his eyes blocked by square black sunglasses. The armored truck pulled up a second later and I figured out the score right then and there.
The truck had the big Walther Hi-Sec Transportation Inc. logo down the side. Any kid in the valley could tell you that was the payroll wagon, here to bring cash down to the pit bank for payday. You take into account all the money they needed to pay the workers and make purchases, and there was maybe $20,000 in there. At least that’s what Todd thought.
A paunchy old man came in wearing a Walther Security uniform and Todd came in behind him. Now, things have been changed up a bit in the papers. Those newspapermen like to make a lot of interesting additions to the stories about us, particularly this one, painting Todd as some smooth Lothario who just talked people out of their money. Once we were famous, sure, that actually happened a couple times. But this time he was nervous. Scared even.
He smiled under those beetle-shell glasses and put the gun against the security man’s head. Told him to open up the back of the truck. And you know what that security man did? He said no! Honestly and truthfully, that old man, with his moustache and bent back, told big Lightnin’ T Daniels no and went back to his coffee. Todd might have just turned and walked out if not for me.
I screamed and ran to him, getting the attention of the few old men sitting around taking their coffee. Even Mr. Pushkin dropped his skillet in the kitchen and ran out. I wasn’t letting anybody ruin this for me. I jumped between Todd and the old man, pressing against the big automatic pistol with my chest so my breasts showed full and large to either side of it. He swallowed. I felt his insecurity.
I begged him not to hurt the old man, I’d do anything, just drop the gun and walk away. He recognized me and asked under his breath what I thought I was doing, and I yelled for him to take me instead at the top of his lungs. He grinned and pulled me close to him. I twirled into his arms like a dancer, relishing the warmth of his forearm against my cheek even as he pressed the automatic to my temple.
That display made short work of the Busser’s patrons. They begged Todd not to hurt me and I worked up some tears and hollered about how he was just confused. The old security guard looked at the other patrons like they’d lost their minds. I suppose they had. They almost tore the man’s clothes off trying to get at his keys so the big, bad man in the leather jacket wouldn’t hurt the pretty blonde.
It was like a dream how fast we went from the inside of that diner to driving down I-64 at nearly twice the speed limit, laughing like crazy. He didn’t even want to let me in the car with him at first, but I convinced him the locals were all heavily armed and would shoot him to pieces the second I left him. By the time we reached Charleston he didn’t even care. We counted the money from the heist in a filthy motel on the edge of town. Then we had sex.
It wasn’t wonderful, but I loved it all the same. The ecstasy of my escape from Blunt clouded over the meager pain of his entrance. I loved the smell of him, his sweat covering my chest and stomach. The way his arms crushed my body against his. It ended almost as quickly as it had began, and I let him finish where I shouldn’t have, but I didn’t care. I was free.
I slept in his arms on a pile of ill-gotten money. More cash than I’d seen in my whole life, $10,500. That was the first night of honest sleep I’d had in maybe my whole life, and the first time I hadn’t dreamed of little Trixie since that night by the old woodshed last fall. Little Trixie not-my-sister, as you might say.
Of course I don’t have to remind you of that, you were there. Or do I? I certainly haven’t seen you mention it all those wonderful little stories you’re in. I cut each one I find out of whatever paper and keep them in a small card box Todd bought me in Arizona. It has a turquoise June bug on the lid, which he thought was adorable. He’d bought himself one just like it that holds a bent, blackened spoon, some rubber tubing, and an oversized eye-dropper with a needle tied to the end.
My big, beautiful man had a bad habit. I was surprised how fast we could go through all that money, money you could live off for a year gone in just a few weeks. But he spent it on me too, buying me books and clothes and nice dinners at places where people spent big cash on little plates. He made new friends and lost them every week, even tried to lose me a couple times, but after a while he knew that I was his and, more importantly, that he was mine.
We traveled across the states, pulling that exact same heist we’d thrown together on the spot a Busser’s at every stop. I change my hair color after the papers started reporting on me, going from blonde to red and finally to black. I tried brown for a second but it reminded Todd of his mother and he wouldn’t touch me until I changed it. He talked about her, his mother, quite often.
I lied about you. I said you were great, real decent. I convinced him on that first sweaty night in Charleston that he’d left those nasty bruises on my nipples. I was just a fragile thing. He was too big and too rough. I also convinced him I wasn’t a virgin, because I couldn’t tell him that you’d broken me when I was twelve, kicking me between the legs because I wouldn’t stop crying. Because Brian not-my-brother and Pauline not-my-sister had kept calling my name as the car slipped beneath the waves at Glass Shard.
I never told him about any of that. About Kevin, or Julienne, or Matthew, or Ronald, or Victor, or Samuel, or Michelle, or Rebekah. The not-my-sisters and not-my-brothers I wasn’t allowed to mourn, and the parade of daddies who were only ever to be called daddy and not Mr. Kelso, or Mr. Valentine, or father, or papa, or dad. When we traveled through Cincinnati, Gary, Decatur, Chicago, and Pierre, I told him I’d never been to any of those places. All the while I glanced out the windows of our stolen cars, looking for that riverbank, that ash pile, that abandoned lot. I never told him how those road trips made me feel like my mother, a sparrow on the wing, looking for a new nest. And I never told him about Trixie.
Our heists worked the way we’d been doing them until we reached a little bank on the outskirts of Fresno. I’d always gone inside first, scouting the place out on the pretense of opening a checking account. Then I’d be the hostage when Todd stormed in and demanded the money. But this time someone was waiting for us.
The counter girl acted strangely when she saw me, and I didn’t notice anything off about the way she looked down at her lap. Now I know she was looking at my picture. She must have pressed a button or something, because a man swept up behind me and whispered in my ear that I better behave. He told me I needed to tell Mr. Daniels to surrender as soon as he walked in the door. I started crying real loud.
Customers walked over and started asking the man what he was doing, then he cuffed me on the back of the head and told me to shut up. Some Dudley Do Right took that chance to run up and deck him one, knocked the big man out cold. I thanked him and ran off in hysterics.
I found Todd in the same alley where we’d parked. There was a man at the head of the alley where Todd couldn’t see, facing away from me with a gun sticking out of his sport coat. Clean and simple, I walked up, slipped his gun out of its holster, and shot that man to death. Then I put his gun in my purse and walked into the alley, where Todd was standing with his own gun out. We hopped in the car and I explained things as we drove like mad out of California and across the Rockies.
That was at the height of summer, though I’m sure you know all about that. “Dragnet: Federal agent shot dead by Lightning T Daniels and the June Bug.” That’s what the papers started calling us around that time. The first time I ever saw those names was in the Des Moines Register. I clipped the article out and put it in the box with the little turquoise June bug on the lid. The fame and the pressure got to Todd and he started getting rough in bed, doing all those awful things to me that you used to do, the poking and prodding and twisting. But it felt so good when he did it.
He would get sullen afterward sometimes and tell me I was too beautiful for things like that. He said he was debasing me, that I was a flower and if he plucked me I’d wilt. I told him I was his June Bug and the only thing he had to do was keep me from flying away. He liked that.
And he was a good man, despite how we made our living. He didn’t yell or cheat or hit me, with a single exception on each account. The cheating I wouldn’t even call cheating. You see, pickings got slim after the botched job in Fresno. Cops were looking for us like never before, and we couldn’t stay in the same place long, much less cause a stink with a big heist. So we did little things, robbing underground casinos and junk dealers.
I carried a gun then. The agent’s mean little .38 special, in fact. I don’t know what such a big man had needed with such a tiny gun, but it fit my tiny hands perfectly. I killed three men with that gun, the agent, another, and one I’ll tell you about right here. His name was Buggy and he was something of a hot shot, for South Dakota.
Buggy knew Todd from a stint in a Minnesota prison Todd didn’t talk about much, and apparently they owed each other a host of favors. Buggy had everything Todd needed that wasn’t me, most of which came folded up in little paper squares and dollar bills. Todd started doing small jobs for Buggy, enforcing, running packages, and he’d leave me cooped up in a dingy motel for days at a time. I got sick of that real fast. It reminded me of Blunt, and all the little cages you kept me in before Blunt.
I went out on the streets and found Buggy’s place by dropping his name here and there. By the time I found the dive he operated out of, a converted speakeasy with big steel shutters over the door, Buggy knew I was coming. Buggy was a nasty guy, as his name suggests, and he had a bad habit of spectacle. He was the biggest show, the only show, in town and he made sure people knew he was important. He dressed like a mobster and let on that he knew a few made guys, though he never quite had the courage to call any by name. His suits were new and as nicely tailored as you could get out there in the sticks, but they did nothing to shape up the nasty little man. He had a sloppy gut and breasts that disturbed the spread of his lapels, along with a stringy black comb-over and a thick, warty nose.
He intercepted me just inside the door and told me where to find Todd. I had figured he wanted to keep Todd around in town, to fold him into the crew for the respect Lightning T Daniels’ name would bring. But I hated South Dakota, and that nasty little town and I wanted to leave. When I left, Todd would go with me, but only if we were still together. Buggy didn’t want that to happen.
He led me to the main room, where Todd lay back on a couch almost completely off his mind from the stuff. A pretty girl, red-haired and about my age, was on her knees in front of him, her mouth where you’d expect. I sighed as Buggy started on some rant about men these days and how he never expected he’d walk in on something this shocking. Todd’s eyes took a few seconds to focus on me, and he started trying to push the girl off him.
I think Buggy expected me to start crying and run out of that grungy hole in the ground, or maybe to just fall apart right then and there. The only thing I’m sure of is that the greasy little pusher man had a low opinion of woman. I saw his point and made him a counter-argument.
The girl, undoubtedly in on the whole thing, looked up at me with smirk on her face, almost daring me to do something. I went over to Todd, still so beautiful in his sweating delirium, and pulled his switchblade out of the interior pocket of his leather jacket. Dull recognition dawned on the redheaded girl’s face just a second too late, as I grabbed a fistful of that hair and sprang the blade open. I cut her just twice, long strokes that made an X on her pretty young face.
They didn’t bleed until I pushed her away, then they wouldn’t stop bleeding. She blindly ran from the room, screaming for somebody to help her. Buggy jumped to his feet and started toward me, cursing. I pulled the federal agent’s snug little .38 out of my purse and shot him through his ugly nose. The bullet pulled off the back part of his skull and everything inside spilled out when he hit the ground.
I remembered Trixie right then, her skull coming apart in the dark of the woodshed. Her beautiful face, so like a tiny angel’s, ghastly and malformed in the smoky light of your kerosene lantern. Dirt on my hands. Blood underneath my nails. Dogs in the woods and your harsh whisper telling me they couldn’t smell her, they wouldn’t smell her. Keep digging June. Keep digging.
I’m still digging that hole now, gonna’ keep digging until I hit bottom. Until I get down low enough to pull the sides in over me like a blanket. There may be blood and heat at the end, I know, the smell of pistol smoke and burning flesh. But before I go to hell I’ll smell that rich West Virginia earth, and I’ll feel splintered wood in my hands as I work, work, work that shovel.
She called me Sissy, God damn you. She called me Sissy.
The security man from the front came down with a pump action shotgun in his hand. I didn’t kill him, just asked him if he’d ever been shot before, and pointed at what was left of Buggy. I told him neither of us were going to miss at this distance and he agreed, dropping the shotgun. I promised not to shoot him or anybody else if they filled a tablecloth with money and drugs and didn’t try anything funny. Nobody did, so I kept my promise.
Todd never apologized for the way I found him down there. He refused to even talk to me even until we were in St. Louis. He had another friend down there, Luther, who was a much better friend than Buggy. Luther took half of what we had off our hands in exchange for the keys to a room in a northside tenement. Todd got drunk the first night and slapped me when I wasn’t expecting it.
I fell on the ground and started crying in earnest. I’d never been hit by anybody I cared about before. And it hurt so much worse than when you hit me.
He told me I was crazy and who did I think I was? He told me he didn’t know who I was anymore and asked what right I had to be involving myself in his personal matters. He told me that just because we slept together — he used a different phrase — that didn’t mean I had any right to pry into his affairs. I told him I was pregnant and he took a seat on the edge of the bed. His fine dark hair was in disarray. He apologized to me and told me he’d do whatever he could, but his heart wasn’t in it. He sounded tired, wrung out. I knew then he was probably going to leave me, and started concocting ways to keep him. Then I thought of you, and all my daddies across this great, God-fearing nation and I stopped. I really was, still am, pregnant. Rest assured, you’ll never see the child.
Todd got himself shot a couple weeks later. He burned through all the rest of our money and the drugs we’d stolen from Buggy in the days after I told him I was carrying his child. Luther set him up with a crew knocking over drug dealers in town. None of them knew he was the famous Lightnin’ T Daniels from the paper, and none of them would have cared if they did.
I don’t know the specifics of how he got hurt. I do know he showed up to the job almost too high to stand on his own. I know they relied on him to do something and he failed to do it. And I know it took some special intervention from Luther to keep the crew from putting a bullet in Todd’s head right then and there.
He was shot by a small caliber handgun. The bullet went in his thigh and bounced around inside his pelvis, leaving a half a dozen tiny tunnels. The insides of his hips now looked just like the insides of the bituminous coal mine where I first saw him, lean and pretty and leaning up against that ruined old mine cart. I had him take his pants off to show me. Blood trickled from the tiny entry wound, but everything from the bottom of his thighs to the top of his stomach was swollen and purple.
He told me he needed to go to a doctor and begged for me to get him some stuff, anything to take the edge off. I told him that wasn’t possible, we were near out of money and he’d be arrested if I took him to a hospital. He told me to do anything I could, he didn’t care what, he just needed another hit. It hurt too bad. It was killing him. Then he looked at me and told me I was killing him.
I pawned the turquoise boxes he’d bought us, most of our clothes, and the two pistols he’d acquired since we left West Virginia. Blunt felt so far away then, sitting in the dark with him dying beside me in the stale autumn heat. I spent all the money on drugs, a bit of food, and a straight razor so I could shave him, which I did. Luther stopped by about a week after Todd had been shot.
He stood in the door, repulsed by some smell I hadn’t noticed. He asked me what I was going to do, what I expected to happen. I told him I didn’t know. Todd wasn’t going to get better, and if he did he’d just leave me anyway. In the depths of his eyes, behind the drugs and the pain, I saw fear when he looked at me. No hint of love or longing, no apology for how he’d treated me, just fear, and a dull sort of hate.
Luther reached out and took my hand then, and I knew what options I had. I knew Luther wanted me, my body, terribly. I was still young and beautiful, and my pregnancy was little more than a slight bump that any dress could hide. Would he accept a child as part of my being there? I knew he would. I knew I could make him want that child as much as me, that I could sell him the Golden Gate Bridge with that hot piece of hellfire between my legs.
And I thought of you. I thought of you and a long line of daddies, stretching out across the Midwest and back into my history to the first one, the real daddy who put me on you like a curse. I thought of raising a pretty little version of myself with Todd’s hair and big blue eyes, and all the daddies I could give her. All the not-her-sisters and not-her-brothers who’d have to make way once we entered the nest. Luther kept talking while I thought of that line of violence and tainted love that had brought me to Blunt, that had shot me out of West Virginia like a cannon. That had torn my heart and soul to blackened pieces before I ever became a woman. And I thought of Trixie, who’d told me how much she’d wanted a sister. Who read so well despite how young she was, and who trusted you when you took her to play hide and seek in the woods around midnight. Who cried and called me Sissy when you told me to take that ax and “earn your keep you ungrateful little bitch.”
Luther told me he’d treat me right and ran his hand over my cheek. I looked up at him like I’d looked at Todd all those many months ago, and I asked him, yeah? Would he. And I kissed him. And he told me the cops already knew where we were, that he’d tipped them off to get a friend of his out of a bind over the trouble Todd had caused. That I really didn’t have a choice anyway.
I told him that was fine by me, because Todd was weak and a junkie to boot, and he didn’t know how to treat a lady. And I asked Luther did he? Did he know how to treat a lady? Could he show me? He asked if Todd was still there and I said yeah, he was, but he was junked out and wouldn’t wake up for hours. I told him we had a little space atop the table just inside the door, that I didn’t care about being comfortable ‘cause it’d been so long since I had a real man.
Luther smiled at me and shut the door behind him. I pulled him over to the table and sat and wrapped my legs around him, pulling him close. Our tongues met in my mouth and then his. He didn’t notice me slide the federal agent’s tiny little pistol out of my purse and put it behind his ear. He squeezed my breast and then bit my lip so hard it bled when I shot him, tearing away a thin piece of skin when he fell away.
My ears rang. Todd lay in a daze on the mattress. I went over to him anyway and lay down beside him. I told him I loved him and I meant it. And I told him he was the best thing that’d ever happened to me, and that was true too. I curled up beside him and slept one last time, never smelling the rot setting into the wounds on his stomach or the filth he was leaving behind in the bed.
I woke and started writing this. I started this morning and now it’s almost midnight. The moon is up outside and the windows are open. The breeze feels nice. Warm, despite the brown and gold leaves on the trees outside. There aren’t many of them in this neighborhood, but the ones I can see are so very beautiful.
There are men down on the street, and I know they aren’t from the neighborhood because they’re mostly white and have good posture and comfortable shoes. If they arrested me, I bet I could talk my way out of a life sentence. The papers have blamed everything on Todd, because he’s a man and nobody believes women can do evil things, not really. That if they do evil things, they’re trite and pointless. Crimes of passion, neglect, or stupidity.
Understand that everybody that has died on our sojourn across America is dead because I was sick of getting ice cream at Busser’s. Because I wanted more than the quiet security the men you preyed on provided. Because I couldn’t handle the guilt of what I did to Trixie, or face the consequences like an honest human being.
I could have ended this thing whenever I wanted to, and I didn’t.
I hate you, mama. I hate you like you wouldn’t believe. Or maybe you do. You never mention your mama and I can only imagine she was just like us, or at least bad enough you turned out the way you did. I’m not writing you to say goodbye, I’m writing you so that you know I did this all on my own. I did it for me, because I’m my own bad person, not because you corrupted me or because Todd drove me crazy. I did this. All of this. And I did it for me.
And if anybody else happens to read this, you should understand that Todd was the innocent bystander. Tell his mama or papa or whoever is still around that he got wrapped up with a bad woman who twisted him around her finger like a piece of taffy. That he could have walked away from that armored car or me or this life at any time if I’d have let him. And he wanted to. But I didn’t.
And, if anybody else happens to read this, Trixie Macintosh is buried in a busted old woodshed off Rural Route 5 outside of Blunt, West Virginia. She was the most wonderful little girl and I killed her with an ax because I’m a coward.
I’m going to finish this letter now, and leave it up here on this table. Then I’m going to take Todd down off the bed and bring him by the window. The breeze is nice and I want him to feel that before I take that straight razor I bought and send us both to hell. And God I hope there is a hell, ‘cause if there is then there is a heaven. And if there is, that Trixie will be up there with her mama, living some sort of happiness.
And that when you die, you’ll be down here with me.
-June Bug
westsidefairytales.com

"Out-of-towners" Guide: Other Attractions/Gameday

First off, if you haven't seen the original post yet, check it out here. This will detail the project, as well as explain why this will be useful.
So, I need help with the following portions of the guide:

Other Area Attractions
Gameday

Topics that fall under gameday are ones such as: ticketing/security/finding your seats, seat advice, food in the stadium, etc. This is the largest part of the guide, and I can't write this alone because I have never been to UoP Stadium myself.
Also, this is what I have so far, let me know what you think and if I should make any edits:
If you’re reading, you’re probably traveling to Phoenix (actually Glendale) to watch your team play the Cardinals. Well, i’ve got bad news for you: sold out. Not really, but use this guide to help you plan your trip and get the most out of your trip to the desert.
So, how do I get to the city in the middle of the desert that somebody named Phoenix?
There are a variety of ways to get into Phoenix:

Phoenix-Sky Harbor International Airport- Phoenix International provides flights to most major US cities, as well as Canada and the Carribean.
Phoenix-Sky Harbor International Airport Taxi Service
AMTRAK to Phoenix (Maricopa Station)- Train station approximately 1 hr. Away from stadium, lines are Sunset Limited and Texas Eagle.
Drive to Phoenix- Basic information about roads below:

Major Highways: I-10, I-17, US-60
Las Vegas to Stadium: 4 Hours, 22 Minutes
Los Angeles to Stadium: 5 Hours, 25 Minutes
Flagstaff to Stadium: 2 Hours, 5 Minutes
Albuquerque to Stadium: 6 Hours, 45 Minutes
San Diego to Stadium- 5 Hours, 8 Minutes
Where should I stay during my visit?
Renaissance Phoenix Glendale Hotel & Spa
Staybridge Suites Phoenix-Glendale
Holiday Inn Express & Suites Phoenix-Glendale
Hampton Inn & Suites Phoenix Glendale-Westgate
Springhill Suites Phoenix Glendale Sports & Entertainment District
For those of you on a tight budget, you have options as well:
Motel 6 Glendale
Days Inn Peoria Glendale Area
What is there to eat around the Glendale area?
I’ll turn this one over to u/Deets327:

Food near the stadium: Westgate Entertainment District is just north of University of Phoenix Stadium (easy walking distance), and holds several restaurants and places to have a drink.
The good: Yard House. A touch on the pricey side, but great above-average quality pub food and classier entrees. Huge selection of beer. Tough to get a table on gameday.
Whiskey Rose. Sports bar atmosphere with slightly country aesthetic. Not much in the way of beer choices, but good gameday specials and solid appetizers. Really cute waitresses.
Saddle Ranch. Lots of soccer moms cutting loose on the weekends. Decent food, okay beers and highly-country atmosphere. Decent enough if you can ignore the music.
Hell's Half Acre. Good selection of beer, waitresses dance on poles, good gameday specials on shots and beers. Busy on gameday. Country/Metal atmosphere.
Bar Louie. Pretty standard fare. Decent back-up if the wait for Yard House is too long.
Mama Gina's. Decent pizza and Italian fare. A little too heavy for gameday in my opinion, but a decent enough, family-friendly atmosphere if you're bringing the kids.
Salt Taco y Tequila. More upper-class than Calico Jacks (see below), with solid margarita selection. Less a place to grab a quick bite and more of a sit-down atmosphere. Good food.
The bad: Calico Jacks. Shitty beer selection, rushed wait staff and average-at-best Mexican food. Avoid it on the weekends, as it turns into a loud, crowded dance club.
McFadden's. Faux-Irish "pub" that also turns into a dance club on the weekends. Okay beer selection, but overpriced. Caters very strongly to away fans on gameday.

u/smashingpimp01 also strongly recommended Carolina's

I'm just going to add, last year I flew to Arizona and asked in this subbreddit what places to check out. Someone recommended Carolinas for Mexican food. It was life changing. Me and my cousin still talk about it. So much so that we actually added an extra day to this years trip just to go there since they are closed on Sunday.

Also, according to u/cardinals1996, McFadden's has been known to steal their customer's credit card information.
Alright, I know how to get there, where to stay, and where to eat. So, where can I buy my tickets?
Hint: Buy them in advance.
Stadium Website
Seating Chart
StubHub
TicketMaster
SeatGeek
Make sure to buy your tickets well in advance of the season so you can have them ready, and use caution when buying from a separate dealer and/or an individual. People may be trying to scam you.
Well, the logistics of my trip are set, but I have a few extra days in the area set aside to explore. What should I do?
u/cwdBeebs had some ideas:

It kind of depends on how long you are staying for and how you are getting here. If you are making a road trip out, a lot of people love Sedona. It's between here and Flagstaff. I'm on mobile and can't link but just do an image search on it. If you like outdoors stuff, you'll probably live it. The Indian Casinos are pretty nice too. A few of them are quite a bit more than just a casino. Talking Stick Resort and Wildhorse Resort are my favorites. Talking Stick also has a pretty good golf course. I've lived in Arizona my whole life so if anyone has any questions or wants travel tips, feel free to PM me or ask here.

Gameday! How to I get to the stadium so I can watch my team get demolished by the clearly better team, and leave disappointed?
IMPORTANT

For anyone that hasn't been to a game before, please PLEASE know that they will not allow any purses inside the stadium. The only ones they allow are clear ones. My girlfriend basically uses what I call a big wallet when we go. Anyway, you will have to walk back to your car (odds are that'll be a long ass walk btw) and leave it there.

-u/cwdBeebs
If you are traveling to the stadium, make sure to read this guide to get some basic rules/tips/etiquette for your visit to the stadium.
Some important parts of the guide include:

Aisle Policy- Policy that states fans returning from food area, restrooms, etc., should wait for on-field play to end before returning to their seats to maximize the enjoyment for all fans. this policy is also referred to as "Wait For The Whistle."
No Pets- Only service/guide/signal animals will be allowed to enter the stadium
Bag Policy (READ THIS): In accordance with the NFL’s Public Safety Policy, fans can bring one of the following approved bags inside University of Phoenix Stadium: 12” x 6” x 12” clear plastic bag, or; 1-Gallon Plastic Freezer Bag, or; Small Clutch bad no larger than 4.5” x 6.5” in size. Fans should be prepared to open their bags for inspection and may be asked by security staff to shift and possibly remove the contents. Non-approved bags will be denied entry into the stadium and fans will be asked to return the bag to their vehicle or dispose of it. There are no lockers outside of the stadium to store items nor can any items be held by staff members.
Restrooms- There are 50 restrooms in the stadium, and most are clearly marked
Smoking- In accordance with the Smoke-Free Arizona Act, University of Phoenix Stadium is a non-smoking facility. There are three designated smoking locations on the main concourse located beyond the Gate 2 exterior gate and outside the exit doors at Sections 102 and 137. Fans on the Club level, Loft corridor and terrace level can proceed to the designated smoking locations on the north ramp. Please remember to the keep the north ramp walk aisles clear for other fans and smoke only in the designated areas. Fans outside the stadium are reminded that they must be at least 20 feet away from any stadium entrance to smoke. E-cigarettes are not permitted inside University of Phoenix Stadium. Fans that do not comply with the smoking policy inside the stadium are subject to ejection.

Make sure to read the guide for more information on basic rules for the stadium.
Where do I tailgate before the game?
The Great Lawn is a great place to tailgate pre-game.
Also, if you have more questions, post a thread in this subreddit and i'm sure people will be more than happy to assist you wih your trip.

"Out of Towners" Guide: Completed guide

First off, if you haven't seen the original post yet, check it out here. This will detail the project, as well as explain why this will be useful.
So, i've created the whole guide, along with input from you all, and the guide is finished and copied in below. Please alert me to any misinformation, grammar errors, formatting issues, or information that could be added.
If you’re reading, you’re probably traveling to Phoenix (actually Glendale) to watch your team play the Cardinals. Well, i’ve got bad news for you: sold out. Not really, but use this guide to help you plan your trip and get the most out of your trip to the desert.
So, how do I get to the city in the middle of the desert that somebody named Phoenix?
There are a variety of ways to get into Phoenix:

Phoenix-Sky Harbor International Airport- Phoenix International provides flights to most major US cities, as well as Canada and the Carribean.
Phoenix-Sky Harbor International Airport Taxi Service
AMTRAK to Phoenix (Maricopa Station)- Train station approximately 1 hr. Away from stadium, lines are Sunset Limited and Texas Eagle.
Drive to Phoenix- Basic information about roads below:

Food near the stadium: Westgate Entertainment District is just north of University of Phoenix Stadium (easy walking distance), and holds several restaurants and places to have a drink.
The good: Yard House. A touch on the pricey side, but great above-average quality pub food and classier entrees. Huge selection of beer. Tough to get a table on gameday.
Whiskey Rose. Sports bar atmosphere with slightly country aesthetic. Not much in the way of beer choices, but good gameday specials and solid appetizers. Really cute waitresses.
Saddle Ranch. Lots of soccer moms cutting loose on the weekends. Decent food, okay beers and highly-country atmosphere. Decent enough if you can ignore the music.
Hell's Half Acre. Good selection of beer, waitresses dance on poles, good gameday specials on shots and beers. Busy on gameday. Country/Metal atmosphere.
Bar Louie. Pretty standard fare. Decent back-up if the wait for Yard House is too long.
Mama Gina's. Decent pizza and Italian fare. A little too heavy for gameday in my opinion, but a decent enough, family-friendly atmosphere if you're bringing the kids.
Salt Taco y Tequila. More upper-class than Calico Jacks (see below), with solid margarita selection. Less a place to grab a quick bite and more of a sit-down atmosphere. Good food.
The bad: Calico Jacks. Shitty beer selection, rushed wait staff and average-at-best Mexican food. Avoid it on the weekends, as it turns into a loud, crowded dance club.
McFadden's. Faux-Irish "pub" that also turns into a dance club on the weekends. Okay beer selection, but overpriced. Caters very strongly to away fans on gameday.

u/smashingpimp01 also strongly recommended Carolina's

I'm just going to add, last year I flew to Arizona and asked in this subbreddit what places to check out. Someone recommended Carolinas for Mexican food. It was life changing. Me and my cousin still talk about it. So much so that we actually added an extra day to this years trip just to go there since they are closed on Sunday.

It kind of depends on how long you are staying for and how you are getting here. If you are making a road trip out, a lot of people love Sedona. It's between here and Flagstaff. I'm on mobile and can't link but just do an image search on it. If you like outdoors stuff, you'll probably live it. The Indian Casinos are pretty nice too. A few of them are quite a bit more than just a casino. Talking Stick Resort and Wildhorse Resort are my favorites. Talking Stick also has a pretty good golf course. I've lived in Arizona my whole life so if anyone has any questions or wants travel tips, feel free to PM me or ask here.

Gameday! How do I get to the stadium so I can watch my team get demolished by the clearly better team, and leave disappointed?
IMPORTANT

For anyone that hasn't been to a game before, please PLEASE know that they will not allow any purses inside the stadium. The only ones they allow are clear ones. My girlfriend basically uses what I call a big wallet when we go. Anyway, you will have to walk back to your car (odds are that'll be a long ass walk btw) and leave it there.

-u/cwdBeebs
If you are traveling to the stadium, make sure to read this guide to get some basic rules/tips/etiquette for your visit to the stadium.
Some important parts of the guide include:

Aisle Policy- Policy that states fans returning from food area, restrooms, etc., should wait for on-field play to end before returning to their seats to maximize the enjoyment for all fans. this policy is also referred to as "Wait For The Whistle."
No Pets- Only service/guide/signal animals will be allowed to enter the stadium
Bag Policy (READ THIS): In accordance with the NFL’s Public Safety Policy, fans can bring one of the following approved bags inside University of Phoenix Stadium: 12” x 6” x 12” clear plastic bag, or; 1-Gallon Plastic Freezer Bag, or; Small Clutch bad no larger than 4.5” x 6.5” in size. Fans should be prepared to open their bags for inspection and may be asked by security staff to shift and possibly remove the contents. Non-approved bags will be denied entry into the stadium and fans will be asked to return the bag to their vehicle or dispose of it. There are no lockers outside of the stadium to store items nor can any items be held by staff members.
Restrooms- There are 50 restrooms in the stadium, and most are clearly marked
Smoking- In accordance with the Smoke-Free Arizona Act, University of Phoenix Stadium is a non-smoking facility. There are three designated smoking locations on the main concourse located beyond the Gate 2 exterior gate and outside the exit doors at Sections 102 and 137. Fans on the Club level, Loft corridor and terrace level can proceed to the designated smoking locations on the north ramp. Please remember to the keep the north ramp walk aisles clear for other fans and smoke only in the designated areas. Fans outside the stadium are reminded that they must be at least 20 feet away from any stadium entrance to smoke. E-cigarettes are not permitted inside University of Phoenix Stadium. Fans that do not comply with the smoking policy inside the stadium are subject to ejection.

[Table] IamA Professional Designated Driver AMA!

Verified? (This bot cannot verify AMAs just yet)
Date: 2014-01-20
Link to submission (Has self-text)

Questions	Answers
So you are basically a taxi driver that hangs around bars?	No sir, We are Licensed Chauffeurs. a team of drivers will be dispatched to your location and drive you home in your own car. We do no let people in our vehicles.
I assume your company has a couple people who drive the dd's to jobs?	You would be correct (we call them "Runs")
Man, I'd hate to have a job where I got the runs all the time.	I knew I should not have used that term here. I asked for it.
So they're Designated Designated Driver Drivers?	That sounds weird when you put it like that.
Ahh, that's usually what I call "Two Dollar Taco Night" at the local Mexican restaurant.	Nice!
You mentioned that you saw a lot of crazy things, including fights, naked woman, drug deals, sex, etc... Did that happen while you were driving the car? Tell us a little more about those odd situations!	People frequently get busy in the back of the car... alcohol makes things interesting. I've been in the middle of drug deals that i had no clue were happening till they were over (hey can we stop at "XYZ" I need to stop and see a friend really quick to drop something off.) fights that have happened between friends in the car while driving because someone is being stupid drunk. Guys taking strippers home from the clubs. Girls just taking their clothes off for no reason for each other and for me. I've been invited inside on more than one occasion, but i am a married man... im sure some of the single guys have fun with the job. I've carried women into their homes and put them on the couch, Ive left guys in their car in the driveway cause they dont want to go inside and deal with their wives... Ive seen a lot.
I guess you could say... You've seen some shit.	Tru Dat.
Where I live there's a similar service, but they ride little foldable scooters that they put in the customer's car. That way you don't need a chase car. Have you thought about doing it like that so you don't have to split the income across two people?	We have, but the distances we cover and the time it would take to get from A to B would be too great. plus putting a scooter in a clients vette or Porsche really doesn't sound appealing.
plus putting a scooter in a clients vette or Porsche. It would fit. These things fold down to the size of a large gym bag. The only issue I would see in some places - they would be a bitch to ride in snow/ice conditions.	Oh yeah.
winter.	That too.
People have porsches in Detroit?	Yeah, plenty. Oakland county is one of the richest county's in the US.
Old school money.	Yes it is.
But it trickles down!	Yes it does.
Are the people usually totally bombed, or just smart enough to know that they'd likely be over the limit if they got pulled over?	Bingo, on the second. People make a choice to use our service. most of them set it up ahead of time and have everything to lose if they get a DUI/
You get to drive nice cars AND mess around in them? Where do I sign up?	Upon occasion, I definitely dont make it a habit, Safety First! (Im pretty good at driving cars that move fast)
Of course safety is important, but if I find a stretch of road in my 95 Camaro I'm gonna floor it.	Careful, you cant replace that beauty.
Does using your service work out cheaper of more expensive than taking a taxi to the party and a taxi back?	It will 9 times out of ten be cheaper than going both ways in a cab, but what you have to understand is that cabs in the Detroit area are unreliable to the point where sometimes they never show up. we work on a schedule that our clients pick. we are always on time and the benefit of having your car in your drive way in the morning sells the service alone.. again this is Detroit, People love to drive there cars. Plus everything is so spread out here it is not uncommon for people to drive 30-40 minute to got to an event or the bar.
Cabs not showing or being late up is pretty common. Drives me crazy. I've almost been late to a few flights because if this.	Its the worst.
What's the worst experience you've had while driving a client? Best?	Worst... Lets go for sad. Had a guy call his wife and say he was going to be spending the night at the buddies house who was in the car with him, but when we got to that buddies house he said he was just going to have me take him home. I start heading towards his house and he says "were not going to my house, were going to the casino. (3am at this point) as were pulling into the parking garage at the casino hes peeling off the sticker on a new credit card and calling in to activate it. IDK why, but that really made me feel horrible. probably one of the worst rides ever, just on principle.
Depressing.	Yeah, it really stuck with me.
You were almost killey twice on road? Any details?	I was once hit by a Drunk driver on the way to pick some one up. she fled the scene and was picked up a few miles down the road. the other I was a split second from being hit head on by a car driving the wrong way on the freeway (just like you see in the freakin movies). it took me a few seconds to process what had happened, it just didn't make sense see a car coming right at you on a divided highway.
The first story is ironic.	Just a little, but considering the times that we operate and the locations we service... it was only a matter of time.
I've been almost hit by an oncoming driver on the interstate as well. I had about a second to react cause I didn't know what was going on at first. The driver made a van, semi, and truck(me) get out of the way. So much adrenaline...	Its like it doesnt register correctly in your brain for a second.
Did you still make it to the pickup on time?	It was the last Run of the night and another driver was free
What's your weirdest story?	I posted a odd one earlier. here's another: I've been driving this same dancer home every Friday for almost the past 6 months and its still the same thing every time. Shes coked out of her mind, still introduces herself to me like we've just met, passes out half way through only to awake and ask where she is. she also looks for her keys when we are close and i keep telling her they are in the ignition. Like freaking Groundhog Day. lol.
Do you ever feel pity for people like this? Try to help them? Advice etc?	Yes, but everyone has there demons... Im helping her by getting her home in one piece and helping everyone by keeping her off the road. I try not to interfere in peoples lives.
Funny, super sad, but funny.	Yuppers.
Any unusual 'tips' from customers?	I got a huge can of peanuts last week, lol odd.
I would say thats nuts...	Link to www.99980.net
That was a risky click.	Sorry.
Have you drove any famous/important people?	I have driven many local Celebrities home (sports, radio, tv). we keep that stuff pretty confidential (part of the service).
What is the typical economic situation of the people that you drive? I wouldn't imagine you just drive every ordinary Joe home.	The demographic varies from the very affluent executives to the average sales person who cant risk getting a DUI. It really covers everyone. but most of them are 30 and up.
Any chance you've driven one of the Red Wings players at some point?	I'd say there is a really good chance of that :)
While I understand the need for confidentiality, if I found out a celeb had gotten drunk and then called your service, it would raise my opinion of them instead of the other way around. Nothing wrong with having a good time once in a while, and I am glad they don't think they are above the law.	Understandable.
I bet you drove Eminem to Chin Tiki at least once.	That man has people who do that for him.
On a scale of 1 to 55: how Kronwalled was he?	:)
How did you get into designated driving?	It just started as a way to make some money for Christmas one year and then i was going to quit... I loved it so much I never did and its been a great 7yrs. I've made great friends, business connections and flat out just met a lot of cool people.
What advice would you give to the people starting out?	Advice... hmmm... be reliable and focus on your clients needs. also depending on your state get good insurance and be properly licensed. other than that have fun, know the right things to say to clients and when to say them. Being able to read a room goes a long way.
I'll need to work on my social skills ^{^{^since}} ^{^ⁱ} ^{^{^don't}} ^{^{^have}} ^{^{^any.}}	I'm not normally a very social person, but I'm in my element when I do this job.
What happens after you drive them home?	We have a chase car that follows me and they pick me up and we go to our next pick up.. we work in two man teams.
Wait so the single men that "make the most of the service" just tell the chase car to just wait?	Im not following your question.
You said you've had invitations to come inside with women, but you're married so you don't. If you were single and did decide to go inside, the chase car would just have to wait for you?	Yeah they probably would :)
If the driver goes in to bone the customer does the chase car driver just wait or is it a 2 for 1 special?	I'm hoping this does not take place... and I have never heard of it happening.
Is there a lot of vomit in your job?	Sometimes, thank god its in there own car and i don't have to deal with it... but the smell, lets just say i can tell what they drank all night.
I really hate to do this but here it goes: their*	Yeah I know I'm all over the map tonight, rapid firing answers out as quick as they come. trying to keep good with my there, They're and Theirs. sorry
What is your craziest story as a designated driver?	Had two guys and a girl get to the car, the one guy handed me the keys and said "be careful its my wifes car" not even five minutes later they got this girl in "Finger Cuffs" Link to www.urbandictionary.com
If I come over to a hockey game, will you drive me back to windsor?	Some of our drivers have their enhanced licenses and are able to do that. I'm sure something could be arranged.
What was the weirdest experience you've had when driving someone home?	Weirdest... Thats hard... I had a wedding I picked up from and a girl got in the car with this long dress as we took off I heard her scream in pain really loud. I stopped immediately but no one else in the car with her could understand what she started screaming about. She was doubled over in pain and not talking for like two or three minutes. she finally relaxes and catches her breath and she explained that the belt from her dress was gone. Well what had happened is it was so long that it came untied and it got closed in the car door when she got in and got caught under the tire while we drove away and ripped it right off of her. Shes lucky it came untied or she would have gotten really messed up.
Very lucky. Link to en.wikipedia.org.	Wow, apparently.
Paper or plastic?	Paper for sure...
Do you have any funny stories about really drunk people?	Most are funny. the funny drunks always want to know who's following us and where there car is even though we are in it.
Drunk to the point where they're trying to prove they're not drunk because they're not going to forget where the car is!	Ohhh. they forget where they park all the time.
How much money do you make a year from this?	We are a for profit company... It pays well enough. and it is a great supplemental income for those who are looking for a part time job on the weekends. This is a service based industry so tips really help.
Do you split your tip with the chase guy?	Great question. Yes. that is why we pretty much hire husband and wives, brothers, or people who live in the same household... it kind of helps get rid of the bullshit.
But did you split the can of peanuts?	Nope. the peanuts are mine.
How many times have you had a gun pulled on you?	Never. we are not a cab service. We secure every run with a credit card and our clientele are most of the time pretty well off. (I do carry a FNS-9)
Wow, never, Detroit must be getting better than I remember it.	We service all of greater Detroit. basically most of South Eastern Michigan. Yes Detroit has recovered greatly in the past 6 years... We have Dan Gilbert and others to thank for that. Link to en.wikipedia.org)
How does the company feel about the FN?	I feel fine about it. I'm the only Driver that has a CPL.
Dan Gilbert? Huh. That letter he foolishly wrote when Lebron left totally made me lose any respect for the guy. Good to know he's doing good work somewhere.	The guy will save Detroit.
What's the ratio of automatic/manual transmissions? You can probably deliver a better answer than most. Also, what are you driving yourself?	98% automatics these days, even the sports cars. most of the Manuals tend to be VW's. for the business we drive a Honda Civic. as for toys... well look at my username and i think you can figure it out. :)
87 buick regal? :3 mmm.	Turbo Regal.
What's the longest distance you've had to drive someone home? Like, Detroit to Ann Arbor? Ever have to go into Windsor?	Grand Rapids back to Detroit. we've also done a few ann arbor to the East side of town to. We will go where ever our clients need us. Very seldom into Windsor.
What do you think of the the British company that drives to you in a collapsable scooter and drives you home in your own car? I saw it on Top Gear UK and wondered why the heck we don't have something so cool and so downright sensible here in America.	There are companies that do that here in the US. We looked into it, but with the weather and the average distances we cover it just would not work for us.
How often do people have you stop for food or smokes and such?	All the Time. Taco Bell is our #1 request. most people want to stop and get booze too, but never realize you cant buy after 2am.
Your chase car should carry booze $$	No... It shouldn't, lol.
Whats the Hardest car you've had to drive?	I have a client that has a Maserati.., its an aromatic, but drives like a stick... it was very odd driving it. drive wouldn't engage with out being at a certain rpm.
That stinks.	Im told it was based on a formula 1 race car.
That's like how my Focus drives right now!	Really? by design?
You were driving a maserati with a F1 gearbox my buddy has one and yes they are very tricky to drive for an "automatic" car.	It was the oddest thing backing out of the parking lot... I looked down three times to see if i was in gear and then once to see if there was a clutch.
Want to go have a drink?	Lol, I do still drink, just not on the days I work. Gin and Tonic please.
Have you ever caused an accident or even scratched a client's car? Who pays for that?	Hit a Deer Once... it was a non issue. I forget what its called, but it has something to do with "no fault"
Also he'd be a dick for suing you for it. Deer damage, maybe a grand. Deer damage AND A DUI a lot more than a grand.	Deer is covered like an act of god, it is not preventable.
How often do you have people run off without paying and do you chase them if that happens?	Never. we take a credit card before pick ups.
I imagine there is really no point in running off, since it's their own car.	True.
About what percentage of your clients (that you know of) have had a previous DUI?	I would guess about 20%
How many drivers do you have? How much are you guys making a year?	Number of drivers varies by the season. normally from 5-10 a night. They make enough to keep doing it. (its a good Supplemental income)
I seen the response about taking the guy to the casino instead of home. Has there every been a time you have refused to take a client where they wanted to go, and instead taken them straight home? (assuming you know where they live since you have their credit card details)	In seven years I have only bailed on one client. It was a woman and she was horrible. Insulting, loud, belligerent and just a bad drunk. I stopped at a gas station apologized, took the keys out of the ignition and took them inside to the gas station attendant and told him that she was drunk and should not drive and told her to call someone to come drive her and if she attempted to drive home I would call the police. (it was that bad, I can deal with a lot, but this woman got to me.)
Man, did you at least give the gas station clerk a tip or something? That'd suck having a random belligerent drunk dropped on you in the middle of your shitty minimum wage graveyard job.	Yeah, no... I could have handled that better looking back on it... I just wanted out of that car and away from that woman.
I did not know this was a service that existed! That's really cool. Definitely sounds like a unique job. I've never been paid to DD but I've done it for my friends out of the goodness of my heart...always interesting. Do you ever get repeat clients?	We have a huge repeat client base. many of the people we service have standing appointments on the weekends. (bar owners, dancers, bartenders)
How annoying do you find drunk people?	People always ask me that... I dont find them annoying at all. Probably why i can do this.
If you don't mind me asking, how much do you get paid?	It really varies, from week to week and the tips that are made. Its worth it. (about the best I can say without saying, sorry)
Has anyone ever given you the wrong address? Not deliberately, but forgot where they lived?	Yes... it gets interesting out there sometimes.
How does it work if you or one of your driver gets pulled over and the cops find illegal drugs in the car you are driving? Has that ever happened to one of your drivers? If so, what were the outcomes?	Open booze is on us, drugs are a possession thing.
Do you ever get harrassed by the drunks?	Very seldom, most people get why im there even when they are drunk slobs.
What were the situations where you almost got killed?	I was hit by a drunk driver and totaled my car, the other I was almost hit head on by a car going the wrong way on a divided freeway.
So do you have a scooter to take you on site that you can pack in their trunk? Like they did on that show top gear I think it was...	No, we use real cars as chase vehicles. drivers work in teams of two.
Are you Mormon, or Muslim? (both forbid drinking)	Neither and I do drink, just not when I work.
Ranjeet?	Huh?
Dang, in college I would drive people to the Mexican restaurant to get hammered on margaritas and in Exchange they'd buy my dinner. Now I feel like I was selling myself short.	You were indeed padawan.
Whats the nicest car you've driven while working.	I honestly get to drive a lot of nice cars. My very favorite just from a driving experience has to be The Audi A8. I also have clients that have Porsche Panamera's, Bently's, Astom Martins, Maserati's
A lot of men now envy you good sir, I am one of those men. IreallywantthisjobsoIcandrivetheaudi	Got another client who has an A7 and he insists I mash on it at a light. Love that guy.
For 2 years I worked for a company in Arizona called DD 24/7. I had a guy who owned an e63 amg. He insisted that I race my co driver in his sti on the freeways. That was my best client and always gave us %100 gratuity!	I hear you.
He was a strange dude. From what I remember he used his own service most nights. The fact that he skipped town doesn't surprise me. I seemed to always get his "friends" as clients who never paid or tipped, and Jonathan would never follow through on reimbursing me.	Bingo.
I work roadside assistance in Detroit and have many interesting stories also. Just last night I went to change a tire at the Manoogian mansion. Stay safe out there man!	Thanks man. tell the Mayor i said Hi.
There is a bar right down the road from my house. They are a big place that caters a lot to the college aged kids, lots of live music and cheap drinks. They have one of the schools old "short" bus. They will take you home with-in a 25 mile radius, for FREE!!!	They're doing the right thing, good for them... you cant drink in their bar again if your locked up or dead... Their protecting their customer base. Smart.
You sir have the perfect story for the sequel to Drive.	Yes, but I dont plan on killing anyone :)
Ah, but the story! Or anti-hero can't escape the drive so he's found a little more suitable life style taxiing legitimate and 'law abiding' patrons. Only deals in cash. It's got some potential.	We can work on it.
Tell us the crazy drunk girl story we all know you have!	Picture a lot of Boobs.

Last updated: 2014-01-24 11:07 UTC
This post was generated by a robot! Send all complaints to epsy.

[Table] IAma Las Vegas Nightclub Promoter. Ill clear up any misconceptions or reservations you have about this BEAST that's known as "The Strip". AMA

Verified? (This bot cannot verify AMAs just yet)
Date: 2014-02-27
Link to submission (Has self-text)

Questions	Answers
What's the best way to go about getting a table/bottle service without completely breaking the bank? It's Vegas so of course it's not gonna be cheap by any stretch but do you have any tips to get the most bang for your buck?	Stay away from clubs that have a Major Dj/ Act on that night. Fridays and Saturdays are the worst. They'll price you according to how many people you have. For example at Encore beach club, if you have 6 in your group they'll price you at $1k-1500 to start with. Night clubs usually start at 4/bottle. If you have women with you get them inside through a guest list. They'll get in free. Example, its 4 guys and 4 girls they'll want to get you on a two bottle minimum. Instead have the guys walk in for the one bottle minimum and let the girls know what table number youre at. TA-DA! Youll also get just enough seating for 4-6 but fuck it, youre in a club so get up and have fun!
	Its all about real estate. If you just want to have a table to enjoy your own space and not have to worry about waiting at the bar then get a table situated off the side. Also give hosts a hard time, don't just say YES to the first offer. Maybe see if they can throw in a bottle of champ or something. Or a buy two get one free.
Whats the craziest thing you've seen in vegas?	Craziest? uhm sex inside clubs. Sex in cabs. Sex out in the open. A girl once was sooo fucked up that she was walking around The Aria with only a bikini bottom and a fishnet top. That's it. Fishnets used to catch Whales so a whole tit, and she had very nice sized tits, pretty much was hanging out. You could see a wave of jaws drop and conversations stop as she walked by with her drunk friend and their two guy friends. Ahh memories. But all in all, drugs, sex, and money being spent on the craziest things. Hobos fighting with themselves. Brides-to-be doing the walk of shame. Craziness.
Walk of shame? How do you mean?	Still in the clothes that they wore the last night. Usually because they spent the prior night with someone that they shouldn't have. But its Vegas, spend your night with whoever you can!!! Yaaay!
Hobos fighting themselves? Like, Tyler Durden style?	I saw a hobo talking to himself. He then got mad at himself and started punching himself in the gut. I didn't know who to put my money on.
Helix or dome fossil?	Helix.
What is the biggest scam on the strip?	Id say paying for club passes that are to be had for free. Biggest scam is paying for these wrist bands that promise you no line, no cover, and open bar all night. And its on a night when Tiesto or Zedd is playing. Yeah right, youre showing up to the club and they'll laugh at you. And after you tell them that you gave $30 to someone that seemed honest and even gave you his/her number. I once met a group of 26 girls from a sorority from AZ that each paid $25. After I told them that it was fake two out of the seven girls started tearing. I got them on guest lists to access the clubs for free with one offering an open bar. Was happy to alleviate some of the pain.
	Oh shit, I forgot! The guys that bring out their tables on the strip and do the whole follow the ball thing. The people winning work with them. Watch them, they'll win and make sure they let out a WHOOO really loud and make sure people are looking. They lure in others and make it look really easy to win. I once saw a guy lose $1700 and a thick heavy as fuck gold chain in less than 3 minutes. he got on his knees and asked for some of it back . The guy gave him $200 because the idiot said it was the last of his money and was with his wife and three kids. Greed I tell ya.
It's always hard for me to believe that in 2014, people actually still fall for that shit... I mean, it's completely unmodified, it's literally a movie cliche scam.	Exactly. I'm like really. Really people? I once saw a guy paying out $300 to 3 ladies and 2 dudes for helping. Imagine what he kept.
"A fool and his money are soon parted". Sounds like vegas exemplifies this adage?	I pondered how to answer this question for too long. Short and simple... yes. Perfectly.
What's the best way for a middle-aged couple to do clubs? We love the music but feel ridiculous (which kills the fun) queuing up with beautiful twenty-somethings.	First off, you wouldn't be the only middle aged couple. I see them all the time. Some just kick back and drink and then some are dancing all night and don't give a shit what anyone else thinks. Let me know what days you are here and I'll put you on some guest lists so you don't pay cover.
Where can I find those hot dogs?	At the Casino Royal, next to the Venetian. All the way in the back. Michelobs for $1 at the bar at the entrance.
What about the shots?	Bally's Casino. Taco joint in the back.
Sunglasses inside a nightclub. Fucking douche-bags or clever way to hide pupil dilation?	Fucking get the fuck out of here. I cannot say "fuck" enough when I see those idiots in the club. I hope they slip on spilled beer, fall on sticky residue and get up right when the confetti is shot out.
Did someone stab you with sunglasses or something?	No, they stabbed me with audacity... audacity to wear them inside a club. I guess its because I'm a form follows function type of guy. Sunglasses inside would only be ok when you're covering up a black eye from a beat down or your bloodshot red eyes would give away that you've been on a drug binge.
This is a long shot, but my friends and I are going to be in vegas for EDC, we plan to stay a week, is there anyway you could hook us up when EDC is over?	Sure. Text me before you're here and ill let you know what I can do. Worst case ill be able to do a reduced cover. 7736200454.
You are now in my phone as Vegas promoter. I do Vegas about 6 times a year. So expect a text soon and if your down I'll buy you a few beers.	You had me at "Beers".
Hey DisasterBUSE, got a question for you. I'm not really a club guy but I do like to go to bars. What are some of the better bars in the casinos that are good for someone who just likes to have a few drinks in between gambling. Also are there any good rock clubs in Vegas? If so, what are the called and where are they?	The Wynn and Encore are very lively at night. If you want to gamble and drink with a great view, that's the place. Venetian, Palazzo, Bellagio, Aria, and last but not least The Cosmopolitan ate great places with great energy. The clubs SurrendeEncore Beach Club and XS have gambling tables in case you'd like to soak a little of the scene in while playing a few hands.
How's papa Giorgio?	Not sure but I think he might look something like this nowadays.
Going to vegas for a cousins bachelor party from May 14 to 18. I am a student got any tips for me to be money wise? as the people I am going with are all older professionals with money. Any hook ups? thanks!	Do most of your drinking at slots, tables. Ill put in $10 in a slot, and sometimes not even gamble at all. Cocktail servers come around and ask if I want drinks..."two vodka/tonics please" and tip her $4. If youre doing any pool parties and not doing bottle service you might want to get tickets before hand since theyre cheaper than paying at the door. Flasks flasks flasks! Let me know if I missed anything that concerned you.
In all seriousness, I'll be in Vegas for the opening weekend of the NCAA tournament. Know of any awesome places (besides the casino sports books) to catch the games?	Bars off the strip are always great. No pressure and decent pricing on booze. unless youre willing to pony up and do Lagasses place at Venetian or something.
What's the most common misconception about clubbing and how do you correct people about it?	That theyre impossible to get in, theyre not fun, expensive to get in, girls are hard to meet/ leave the club with. The club I work for 75% of the times im able to get couples in free provided that they show up early. On slower nights Im able to get uneven ratios in (more guys than girls) or give tickets that grant free entrance. And the ladies. To me they all look the same BUT its hard to get over it. Ive seen guys pick up ladies super quick and they only had a beer in their hand, you don't need a massive table with free drinks galore. Theres a lot of girls in the clubs that have awesome personalities but have their guards of because theyre just not comfortable with being groped. Approach them in a non creepy way and youre golden. I see this every week. What surprises me is how many people come to vacation here and are just total Debbie downers. The most amazing thing about this place is that people come here to have fun and dance theyre asses off, even when they have no clue what theyre doing. Walk in to a club through a guest list and get in free, have a drink and enjoy an amazing sound system. Even if its for 30 min, I feel its large part of the Vegas experience.
Good answer man! I'd love to have your job	Theres a lot of bad that come with the jobs. A significant other will not be happy with your phone blowing up until the early morning. A lof of girls are absolute bitches and think the whole world owes them something for having their tits out. Its a hustle and with every "NO!", "EWW", and "I HAVE A BOYFRIEND CREEP" you have to keep on and hope the next says yes. And please note, I always approach with something non creepy like "Hey ladies sorry to interrupt, have you been invited to see Macklemore & Ryan Lewis tonight on a guest list"?
I've always wondered you guys must get paid pretty good money right? (There was one particular promoter I always stuck with until he recently moved) but this guy had an assistant and took nice trips I kinda just always wondered how that system works. And do Diplo and Dillion Francis put on good shows? I wanna see either one sometime soon	Great question. First off Diplo is at my workplace tomorrow night so best believe Ill be instagramming tons of Videos. All of Maddecent are awesome. Dillon Francis and Diplo are both awesome. Tons of ass shaking tomorrow for sure!
	So everyone pays differently. I only work at SurrendeEncore Beach and have a day job so my time is limited. So Ill breakdown promotions as much as I can. First off there are different types of Promoters. You have the ones that work at a club like yours truly. Since I only work at SurrendeEncore Beach club, which is run by Las vegas Nightlife Group. I only get paid for people that come to my club. XS and Tryst are owned by the same people and we are all located at the Wynn/Encore. You then have Tao Group, Angel Management Group (AMG), and Light Group. Tao clearly has Tao, Tao beach, Marquee and Marquee Dayclub. AMG has (or had, Hakkasan just bought the group out). Hakkasan, Wet Republic, Pure, LAX, Chateau, Venus, Coyote Ugly, Saville Row. LG runs Light, Daylight, Haze, 1Oak, The Bank and a few lounges/restaurants. Tao group promoters can have guest lists at all their venues so if they leave a group with a great impression and they check in on their guest list at all joints then the person just made $ times the number of venues they checked in. Light Group usually confines their employees to one club, unless they need help filling out another (which they usually do) and allow them to be paid (I waited 8 months to get paid by them, I don't like the way they manage their places). AMG varies as well, I heard some are only focusing on Wet and Hak but heard that before they had to have a certain amount check in at other properties. With all this said, if youre a good promoter, hardoworking, and have a good network, 1k a week is a cakewalk. Even 2k can be done for the greater part of the summer. I know of a guy that can make 4-8k/wk and its all through his phone. Money can be real good IF you work hard and hit high numbers. Ill elaborate a little more later on tonight if anyone wants me to. I need to head home.
If you feel like elaborating, what's the difference between the 1k a week promoter and the promoter making 4-8k?	Well if you don't bring any people and ate not being paid hourly then you might not get a check at all. Those that are successful in this biz network hard, are usually seasoned, and are good enough to the point that clients want to go back to them and refer them to others. Ive heard of hosts being flown to exotic places, gifts being custom made as gifts, and so on. Its really like any other sales job, many do it, some are good, few are great. There are also many ways to make money. You can book hotel rooms, sell packages, etc. where you receive a kick back. When done right its a win/win/win.
What's are your experiences like with the Vegas drain dwellers? Any good stories?	Theyre all over the place. Usually just getting drunk and laying out on the sidewalk. I pay no attention to them. Some have demanded money and when I tell them I have no cash or simply say "sorry, cant help ya" at times can get very aggressive. Then they fall on their ass or something. Comical most of the times. Look at them too long though it becomes depressing. The sad thing is I see a lot that are soo young. There was this young girl with a sign that read "pregnant with 2nd child and cannot afford anything. please help". I sat down next to her and asked her why she was out there. I asked if she sought help. I was baffled that such a young person could be so out of luck. She proceeded with a story about her losing her Social Security Income when she moved to Arizona or something. When she moved back they denied her or something along those lines. In the end it seemed like she lost hope and possible gave up too quickly. She said she didn't have family to turn to. Those are the moments when I realize that I am lucky to have a great family that would take me in if I ever went near that route.
Whats a good tip to you afer helpi. Some people out?	I don't ever expect to get tipped. I get paid by the club. There are always people who value what I do and slip me a $20,$40. The most I've ever been tipped was $160. It was for setting up someone with table service at a few clubs. Tips humble me, just buy me a shot and we're good!
Show up at club with a big line. What amount should you slip the bouncer to let you in and a date? What would you say? I'm always afraid i'll hand over a hundred bucks and he'll make me wait in line anyway.	Depends on the club. If its just you and a date Id say start at $40. Order of difficulty to skip the line from hardest to easiest: All guys> More guys than girls>even ratio mixed group>all girls. That being said if its just a guy and a girl then Id start out at $40, they might come back with $60-$80. If you feel like pulling their bluff thank them for the help but youll just wait in line. Sometimes they'll see $40 better than nothing. Imagine if he does that 10 times a night? Not bad...
	Another thing you might want to think about is say you just left at a restaurant that's in the casino. Id probably use the whole "My buddy So-and-so, manager at ___, told me to come check it out. I forgot the name of who Im supposed to ask though (maybe guess a name). Can we go in and check it out"? Worst case scenario is they say no, next is they let you pass and you pay cover, best thing is you walk in no line and no cover. Ive met people who have succeeded.
I read your comment about tipping and whatnot and how its not really necessary. i went last august with a group of 12 for my buddy's bachelor party and we got tables at light on a friday and lavo on a sunday. we tipped on both occassions, as i was under the impression that it was proper etiquette. for light we gave the guy a little over 200, and he was able to move us from a table on the 2nd floor in the corner to one that was pretty close to the main floor for the same bottle minimum (we had planned on giving him that much anyway before he moved us). at lavo we hooked the guy up with 100. were we too generous? or is that pretty standard?	A 20% gratuity is always on the bill plus 8.1% tax. Now, with the $200+ you gave the host you then bettered your real estate setting in the club. While you don't really have to tip your host its customary to throw them a bone. You can get your table and have everyone leave you be except your busseserver. Start tipping security and they will make sure the crowd stays clear of your area. Tip your host and they seat you at a better table. Tip a "girl-guy" and they will bring you hot ladies. Now with that last one be very careful, ladies that table hop are very thirsty and the only way for them to stay alive is to have a constant source of alcohol. Party too hard and your 2k table has turned into 8k. Or your 7k has turned into 22k. Ive seen this happen at many clubs. If you just hit it big at the tables or hit a progressive at the slots then fuck it, LIVE IT UP! (Im kidding, save a small town from hunger).
Do promoters make a huge difference in cutting the line, hooks, and discounts, and saving money? Rather than just walking into the club blind?	A good promoter wants your experience to be soo awesome that they contact you on their next visit or mention their name when a friend has Vegas plans. That said, our guest lists offer no cover or reduced entry. Express entry is only done when their at the ropes and have an incentive to get you inside faster. If youre a dude youll probably have to tip someone off to skip the line. When I come across a couple I always offer to set them up somewhere else the following night. Its simply good business and I believe in paying it forward. Before I moved to Vegas I made a trip with my SO and I know how hard the city can be without a hookup. I put myself in their shoes and do what I can for them. I always provide pics of my club and explain the whole line/open bar situation. I don't lie to them just for them to get in, it comes back to bite you in your ass.
So what's the best way for an international tourist to get some good coke? I've heard it's best to hire a limo and ask the driver. What do you think?	Be very careful. Vice (undercover cops) are all over and look the role they are playing. I once was walking in front of the Bellagio fountains and within a matter of seconds a couple of men, tattoos on their necks and all, went from talking to a guy one second to quickly pulling out their badges and handcuffing the man. All I heard was "under arrest for possession and intent to..".
I'm a you get guy and I like older women, what are the best spots to meet them? Just to let you know im23 so older form me is 30+	Check out the pools, casinos. There a ton of HOT older ladies. A difference between them and younger chicks: Mature woman have no problem having a drink, laying out, or just walking by themselves. You'll find these that are here for a convention and have nothing planned for the night. Whenever I get them on my guest list theres a 90% chance they'll show up. Two weeks ago I had a large group of 9 woman show up. Every. Single. One. Was. Hot!
What is the incentive for someone under 21 to visit Vegas?	To make it to 21 and join the fun! Now you have a goal. youre welcome.
	I kid, kind of. I approach many under 21 and they all look like theyre having fun. I don't even think theres a curfew so you can at least people watch while sipping on whatever. The city never sleeps. Jump on the roller coaster at NYNY or head to Strasphere and have some fun. Lots of walking and selfie opportunities.
Are there ways to get a table at a club for free?	If you have a group of great looking girls or have a local ID then yes, its possible. Youll only have to pay tip. $70-some odd bucks per bottle instead of $600 and change? not bad.
Does a promoter like yourself just walk up to us and say "hey, want a free table?"	It depends. For a group of all ladies and if theyre cute I can get them a table with champagne bottles for free. The clubs want pretty ladies in so some places offer then a free dinner and a free table. Every club is different. But if theyre hot my first questions is "so how many girls/guys with you" and when its all girls then its a go. Some clubs require a picture of all girls, it then has to be sent to a manager to approve the group.
Is that the real Caesars Palace? Did Caesar live there?	It was faxed it over bit by bit starting in the 60's. Yes Caesar lived there. Ordered tons of room service.
How often do people offer you drugs/money/sex in order to get into clubs?	Those younger than 21 are willing to give me their first born just to get in. I get offered tons of things, Im not surprised anymore.
Has anybody ever told you that you look like Ami James? Like if you tattooed your neck and stuff I swear you could pass as a double.	No but I see a resemblance. I always get Vin Diesel or Willie Nelson. Ok maybe not Willie.
What suggestions do you give for a small college restaurant/bar in terms of bringing people inside? Also what do you NOT suggest doing?	Suggestions like what works to get them inside your place?
Any place really! I've seen just about everything in my city but most bars here are dead(50-100k population being students alone!)	Its really location specific. Im from Chicago and Vegas is a whole different ball game. We deal with people that are here for a short amount of time. In the end though all places want bodies inside their place. Motion created commotion so if youre in a place that's packed and fun people want to stay and consume more. Most important, get bodies inside the club/bar early. Before 11 is key. That way any propect walking by sees that its busy and wants to be part of the fun. Does this make sense?
What would you recommend as far as afterhours edm parties go?	You might like Artisan. The times that Ive been there its been nothing but deep house and some edm. Really weird décor too, worth seeing. Body English and Drais usually mix it up.
What's the craft beer scene like? I've always been a fan of travel, and love checking out the local craft breweries/brewpubs in an area.	Sin City brewery at a few casinos, Big Dog Brewery, Banger Brewery in Downtown, Chicago Brewery to name a few. Yard House carries a few local brew I believe.
Chicago Brewing, at Rampart and Ft Apache was my stomping ground for the two years that I lived in Summerlin. I loved that place. Decent food and beer, and the upstairs bar area was perfect for baseball viewing. Good memories, thanks for reminding me of it.	I remember watching my first Bears game there. I got Goosebumps seeing all the people with their jerseys on. Refreshing in this transient city.
Hey, thanks for the AMA. What's the deal with dress codes at various clubs? Does it depend on night/weekend? Heading out to Vegas with a bachelor party in June, curious to get your thoughts on this and strategy for a group of 15 drunk idiot single guys.	You know, even I don't know. I mean if you're put together in a presentable manner than you shouldn't have a problem. If you stick to collared shirts and nice shoes then you're good. No athletic wear, no hats. Sometimes chucks slide but id rather you be safe than sorry. Clearly the day clubs are lenient on dress code, still no athletic wear. If you have a club in mind text me and ill make sure to find out what it is they are/are not tolerating.
You got me with the the VIP pass?	Hit me up and if I have tickets I don't see why not.
Whats the best nightclub on the strip?	Define Best and Ill tell you which one.
Surprise me.	My favorite is XS. Hakkasan is the latest and greatest. It cost $100m and was named Nightclub&Bars best top club for 2014. Light inside the Mandalay Bay is awesome. I like Surrender because its an outdoor club with a dancefloor inside (I don't like being shoved every two seconds). Tryst is also cool with a 90ft waterfall. Marquee has always done well and is a must visit (it also gets too crowded for me though). It really depends if you like dancing in the middle of the dancefloor, what kind of music you like, outdoor vs indoor. Then you have your older clubs that still have a following like Pure, Tao. Maybe its because they've been around FOREVER.
I fly around a decent amount, if I wanted to make Vegas a frequent destination how could I get in contact with you?	Buy calling/texting! 7736200454. Christopher Landeroz. Texting is way better, I can reply whenever.
Too bad doubles are 25$ there lol.	Yes, a simple sprite sets you back $7. $10 at Hakkasan! That's why I tell people to load up at a slot so you only need 1-2 more when you're inside the club. But the place is awesome. Awesome can be expensive =/
Do those mexican guys on the Strip throwing phamplets at anyone actually manage to get people to call those escort lines?	I talk to a few on a regular basis. Super nice people sweating their asses off and getting paid very little. According to one of them theyre just there to pass them out for a company. They almost never see a bonus for it. If the people they work for still have them up and down the strip passing them out then people must be calling. I don't know too much about the escorts you get from calling those numbers. I do know escorts that work for themselves though. Some of those chicks make tons of dough.
Do you know my cousin Tiffany?	Does she own jewelry stores all over the place? Make pretty lamps with stained glass? Kidding.
	Should I know her? Does she work there?
She used to work at surrender now she works at light.	Server? Promoter?
I'll be in Vegas for edc weekend. Any chance you might be able to hook it up with guest list? :)	Sure. I'm pretty sure we'll have some major talent that week. Message me sooner than later.
What are y'all gonna do when the water runs out?	I should be back home in Chicago by then. Maybe swap out water for Vodka or something.
Promoter.	Tae?
Yea, tay.	Didn't talk to her much but yes, I remember her.
Leaving for Vegas tomorrow for Spring Break/My Bachelor Party! Any way to to get a sweet deal on your club for Saturday night?	Madeon will be there Saturday night! Text me 7736200454.
My fiancee is bringing me to LV for my birthday in April. Any tips on birthday hook ups or perks I can get out there? We're staying at The Wynn.	Your hook up is right here! Text me or message me.
I'll be there next week, any chance you could hook me up? :) EDIT: It'll also be my 21st Birthday!	Of course! message me.
Wanna hook me up VIP style for my 21st in July?	Why not! Message me!
I'll be there with my best friend in two weeks for her birthday. Any way you can help us out?	Yup! Message me!
I highly recommend the show Absinthe in Las Vegas. I was there about two weeks ago and the show was AMAZING. Although, the humor in the show can be a bit vulgar so if you're offended very easily then I wouldn't recommend it.	This. Ive heard nothing but good things about Absinthe.
I am going EBC when it opens March 29th for my birthday. Can I contact you for bottles !!	Yes. Text me! Number is on my instagram profile or message me!
I'll have to check it out from Australia sometime :)	Aussie Aussie Aussie!!! Aussies have to be some of the best people that come out. Super friendly, party hard, and uhh party hard!
Headed to Vegas the weekend of April 11th for my cousins bachelor party. Staying at Hard Rock. Need some direction on clubs!	Message me, and Ill let you know whats hot. It usually boils down to hip hop or house (and don't get me started on todays "hiphop, Im oldschool but whatev), outdoor or indoor, daytime or night? Ill point you the way. you cant go wrong with the clubs at the Wynn/Encore though. Don't pay for anything online, sometimes they can be had cheaper here. Example: strip club packages for a bachelorette/bachelor party online charge $30-50 when I can get you the same thing for $7-45. A group of girls from back home (Chicago) were referred to me. For some odd reason one of them decided to buy a package for 9 girls. Turns out they overpaid by $135. Its the internet, they know that people like to preplan so they get you like that. Knowing what I know now Id book a room in advance (but would probably willing to try the last minute hotel sites, Ive heard great things about them) and tickets for clubs if it was all males.
So i'm going to vegas for the first time starting the 12th of march for my 21st birthday/ mountain west tournament trip what do you think the best clubs and pool parties are to go to to get the whole first time vegas trip experience	Are you the one who text me already? If not then here it goes: (shameless plug) Surrender its an indoooutdoor club. We book talent ranging from hip hop, trap to EDC, Dubstep. While there check out XS and Tryst. Hakkasan at MGM is new and pretty big. Light at Mandalay Bay is new as well. Great lighting and "powered by Cirque du Soleil", meaning performers hang from the ceiling and behind their LED screen. Marquee at the cosmo has always held their weight. Both indoooutdoor. You then have Hyde, Pure, Tao, Moon, Ghost bar and many others. During the day I'm pretty Sure Ghost bar dayclub (GBDC) and Lavo Brunch will be going on during the day on Saturday. Basically they're clubs open during the day. Encore Beach Club might be open and a few others. Those dates are right on the cusp of pools opening so its TBD as of now. Message me and ill see what I can do for you.
You mean you're a mexican immigrant who flips cards at people? Or you're a strip bar "concierge" who wanders the strip getting bachelor parties to go to Treasures? And those cheap beers and tequila shots are available at the Taco place in Ballys... duh!	Yes, glad I made myself clear. And not everyone knows their way around Vegas, just trying to help. Thanks for your contribution to the cause.

Last updated: 2014-03-04 02:08 UTC | Next update: 2014-03-04 08:08 UTC
This post was generated by a robot! Send all complaints to epsy.

casino arizona talking stick closed video

Scottsdale’s 2019-2020 #1 ranked TripAdvisor outdoor activity. Our rigorous Sunset Desert Jeep Tour is a bumpy off-road sightseeing tour through the scenic trails of the Tonto National Forest, connected to Scottsdale, Arizona. <br><br>Experience a world-famous Arizona sunset as our professional tour guides teach you about the Sonoran desert flora, fauna, and Native American history. Casino Arizona and Talking Stick Resort, both just off Loop 101 near Scottsdale, will remain closed through May 31 due to the COVID-19 crisis. Casino officials say employees will continue to be Casino Arizona and Talking Stick Casino, which are both operated by the Salt River Pima–Maricopa Indian Community, reopened with some of the strictest safety measures as cases in Arizona were The Salt River's Talking Stick Resort and Casino Arizona will open at noon on Monday, June 1 with some slot machines and table games open, as well as physical distancing measures in place. Specialties: Talking Stick Resort is a luxurious Four-Diamond Scottsdale resort, where fun is limited only by your imagination. Play in style on our 240,000 square foot casino, one of the largest in Arizona. Savor the flavors and take in… Talking Stick Resort and Casino and Casino Arizona near Scottsdale previously announced they would remain closed through May. They said the owner and operator was fully compensating staff during After initially saying it would remain open, Casino Arizona and Talking Stick Resort reversed course early Wednesday and decided to close both of their casinos at 4 a.m. on Wednesday, according to... Talking Stick Entertainment District. The hottest destination for shopping, dining and nightlife. On Stage. Three amazing venues in one exciting destination. Golf. Experience Arizona’s premier golfing facilities. Resort Pools. Beat the heat at our hotel’s sparkling pools. Cabana & Canopy Daybeds. The ultimate in poolside luxury comfort Talking Stick Resort opened back up on Monday after being closed for months, but the casino looks a whole lot different than it did before. Arizona’s Family got a look inside with all the Casino Arizona and Talking Stick Resort: Cliff Castle: The Camp Verde-based casino remains closed until further notice. A notice on the website says leadership is "monitoring the situation day

casino arizona talking stick closed top

Talking Stick Resort and Casino set to reopen - YouTube

A tour of the buffet at Casino Arizona - Salt River Talking Stick location. We played side by side. She put max credit and hit jack pot. Awesome! Casino Arizona is the Phoenix and Scottsdale, Arizona area's favorite gaming and entertainment destination. Whether you're stopping by for your favorite casi... This was our room and review of the executive king room at casino Arizonas Talking Stick Resort.. great view and great room!! It is various angles of the fight uploaded by people on social media platforms. I don't at all know what led up or who was right or wrong. A nasty monsoon storm caused Talking Stick Resort and Casino to close for a month and a half. We get a preview of the casino and resort before it is set to r... Talking Stick Resort Security Guards harass Impaired Casino Hoodlum, Scottsdale, AZ, 4 December 2016 GP012381, Beverage Supervisor cuts Drunk off and calls P... ️ Next Video: ️ Previous Video: I ONLY played TRIPLE FORTUNE DRAGON UNLEASHED on this casino trip and THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS! 😱 https://youtu.be/rBmpITWb6a8 ... Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube. This is our review of our room we had at talking stick resort in Scottsdale. This is our review of our room we had at talking stick resort in Scottsdale.

Want to gamble? Talking Stick Resort back open, with

casino arizona talking stick closed

casino arizona talking stick closed - win

Big list of venues, shows, events and other happenings still on or not

Schools

Restaurants

Sports

Concerts

Festivals are all postponed unless otherwise noted.

Misc. Government and Utility Updates

Part 6: Amazing In Depth Essay About Sopranos Symbolism and Subtext (credit: FlyOnMelfisWall source: thechaselounge.net)