Or How to Run the New (and Improved!) Las Vegas Marathon on Mostly Legal Drugs.

e were somewhere strung out on the “Fremont Street Experience” when

the Celebrex finally kicked in. I remember saying to some dude running next to me, “Can you dig what I’m seein’ up there, man? Some chromium-numbskull, nickel-plated Republican obviously took tax dollars to erect a roof up there. A friggin’ roof hangin’ over a public city street… .”

And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us, the sounding of a big city’s worst nightmare, the screeching and blaring of 10,000 brakes and horns all going off at once. We were about six miles into some brand-new marathon, and this humongous malaise of four-wheeled, gas-guzzling, CO,-vomiting, 80-mile-an-hour traffic was stopped dead in its tracks. And people were pissed. Under that roof, it sounded like 10 trillion people were pissed—the noise was that deafening. And some idiot on the sidewalk was screaming: “Holy Jesus! It’s Mick Jogger!”

Then it got quiet again. My “disguise” only works in brief glimpses. It didn’t

ever take very long for the vast teeming throngs to realize that the lead singer of the Rolling Stones was not in fact running their marathon. Besides that, it was just before 7:00 A.M. on a December 4 Sunday in Las Vegas, Nevada. Anyone who’s ever been there will tell you that, no, there’s generally not a whole lot of street traffic off The Strip on a Sunday at 7 in the morning.

Although there certainly had been some action going on The Strip—how *bout on the lot of the “Run Through Chapel” near mile five—if you can actually imagine around five couples getting up that early in Vegas to get married. That sort of whacked-out activity is generally reserved for 2 o’clock in the morning following a delivery of the single best pickup line a showgirl ever heard. But here today it was happening presumably after a short night’s sleep. And no matter the abbreviated tuxes and bridal gowns, the inamorata were all wearing the same sort of shoes. Not only that, but the whole freaking spectacle was taking place live on the street. I just had to pause and take a picture… my attorney would never believe this.

The sun started clawing its way higher in the sky by the time we emerged from the megawatted cyclotron of Fremont Street. Then it literally dawned on me that my “Jagger disguise” was just so totally laughable as to teeter right off the impersonator charts. In other such high-traffic venues as big-city marathons, I could be mistaken for “The Mick” without any signage at all—because I wouldn’t have just gotten a freaking haircut. In fact, I know personally the race announcer of the Chicago Marathon, and every bleeping year since probably 1994 as I approach the finish, Mel broadcasts over the PA to the countless milling millions: “And here comes Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones crossing the line! Did you know he’s also a member of the Park Forest Running and Pancake Club?”

The guy has always asked me at club meetings afterward whether I give a hoot that he just relishes embarrassing me like that, and I always tell him, “No problem, Mel. But maybe next time you could have the jukebox tuned to the right music?”

Here in the shocking glare of bright desert sunlight, wearin’ a fuzz ball like some kind of federal agent and carrying a sign on my chest that boasts a misspelling—or a play on words—and no security force shadowing me like Oprah had when she ran her marathon, I probably resemble Mr. Jagger about as much as E-Caps seem like heroin. Still, in a town full of costumes where nobody but nobody is who they pretend to be, my marathon getup somehow fits right in. I could be totally strung out on Tylenol and high as a speed freak from all the Bengay fumes, and no one would notice.

We ran along some shutdown, whacked-off industrial district for the longest time, then turned a corner inhabited by red miniskirted, sleep-deprived, “volunteered” showgirls pretending to be Santa’s elves . . . and then passed a group of gospel singers standing on top of portable bleachers, no doubt praying to the “Lawd Gosh Ah-mightee” that most of us could resist the sinful lure of the showgirls. Whenever I find myself eight or nine miles deep into a gosh-darned marathud trudge, I am almost never tempted to, for example, ease on over toward a working showgirl and ask, “Hey, baby, would you like to see my split times?”

DAY OF THE LIVING DEAD… BUMPING INTO ELVIS… AND PEERING INTO THE GRINNING TEETH OF ZOMBIES

Of course, all of this was Beth’s idea. I had no more wanted to run another marathon in Las Vegas than Hunter S. Thompson wanted to cover that conference of the National District Attorneys’ Association there. Back in 1971, they were apparently convening for four days in the now-vanished Dunes Hotel to discuss narcotics and dangerous drugs. Uh-huh. Even he was thinking it was like sending in the hen to report on the fox house.

In my case, I was lucky enough to be wed to one whose “vacation destination of choice” always happens to be Las Vegas. . . . I’ve never had to bribe her yet to allow me to sign up and run there. At our very first foray, her claim to fame was making two rolls of nickels last the full four-hours-plus that I ran the ’93 ’thon. The host hotel at that time was called Vacation Village which, as all those surprised jogging out-of-towners discovered very early that morning . . . was one whale of a long walk south from the southernmost hotel on The Strip. But the good thing was that that’s exactly where you hopped your Ken Kesey bus ride 26.2 miles out into nature’s junkyard . . . and when you finally ran back to that point you were done. And, wouldn’t ya know, my spoose still had three nickels left from those rolls in the fanny pack on her caboose. In 2000, we caught buses in back of the MGM Grand, rode out, then ran back to Sunset Park. I was not looking forward to any more crotch-clutching, pee-holding, cross-legged desperation bus rides.

“Wouldn’t you like to do the first one that runs down The Strip?” she’d asked me.

“Think you can lose less than $3.85?” I shot back.

Yes to both questions and here we were . . . just yesterday walking totally indoors from our slant-walled room in the Luxor all the way south to that gigantic pseudo district attorneys’ convention in Mandalay Bay. To my way of thinking, only filthy rich lawyers, doctors, and prosecutors can afford the airfare and time off to hop/skip around the planet and do something as nuts as run/walk through marathons. But . . . there’s always an expo. It’s the grease that keeps the whole wholesale/retail running machine running.

We rounded a comer, and some idiot screamed, “Holy Jesus! It’s the Zombies!” Actually, I was the only one who could possibly have screamed that… my partner in crime would have had no clue.

I thought maybe it was those little plastic sampling cups of wine they always give you at expos causing me to see things. Here, by the way, isn’t the place to discuss the ethics of offering free wine hits to hyperconscious, middle-aged adult athletes, most of whom started running in the first place as a cure for alcoholism. After consulting with my actual hopped-up recovering Jamaican attorney, I’ll pitch that story idea to Crain’s Chicago Business. But no, I wasn’t peering through Napa Valley’s finest fog into the teeth of hungry corpses freshly risen from the dead. In actual fact, I was looking rather appreciatively at the smiling faces of Don “DC” Lundell and his gorgeous partner, Gillian Robinson.

There also, by the way, is material for another future magazine article: Why in the world would creatures suddenly resurrected from the dead be hungry? It can’t be that amidst all the cinematically depicted rotting flesh, their digestive systems are still functioning properly, can it?

Yes, in fact I was beginning to think I’d slugged down too many plastic cupfuls of desperately marketed Left Coast wine.

“Holy Jesus!” I hollered to DC. “What in the boneyard are you doing here?”

“We’re having a booth,” he explained. “What did you think?”

“You’re blowing my mind!”

“What are you doing here?”

“Research for a soon-to-be-released major motion picture starring Johnny Depp, based on an article I’m writing for Rolling Stone.”

“You’re kidding,” DC guessed.

“You’re right! Hey, Don and Gillian, this is my attorney, Beth.”

“Your attorney?”

“No, wife. It’s just that all my paperwork’s in her name. Good to see you two!”

After the fog lifted from my brain, we were able to complete the introductions … and express admiration for entrepreneurial derring-do, on the one hand, and exasperated amazement for willingness to run another marathon—especially at my age—on the other. We then swapped cameras for a few tourists-at-the-exposition fast photos, and they sold me this pretty cool pouch for carrying my camera the next day. Obviously, my attorney had forgotten to pack it.

We never did, before or since, discuss the rationale for naming their business (www.ZombieRunner.com) after postmortem monsters, most of whom are hungry in the horror movies and some of whom are premortem and want to run marathons.

One of the reasons why I must have married my attorney is her amazing ability to shop. So while I continued to swap running stories with DC and Gillian, my attorney went around the entire exposition and found Elvis . . . and also a showgirl . . . and both of those smiling imposters were later willing to be photographed—tight there in Lost Wages for free—with the likes of me.

Unfortunately, in this particular case, what happened in Vegas . . . did not stay there.

GINSENG JOURNALISM … WATERING THE CACTUS . . . AND PASSING MORE THAN GAS AT THE CLARK COUNTY COURTHOUSE

The thing about hiring a not-quite doctor of jogging journalism—call him a nurse instead—to carry a camera and cover a 15,000-member, first-annual, street convention of day-trippers and envelope-pushers who spend almost all Sunday moving fast on foot through hoods . . . is that someone must actually be imagining those enlightened readers who read such coverage might even believe he knows what the hell he’s writing about . . . but the truth is much worse than that. This particular nurse of gaga newsprint never did have any clue.

At roughly the halfway point, I found myself just slightly behind the wildly sashaying behind of some purple-costumed presumed showgirl who was somehow staying ahead of me without hardly moving her feet. We were bonking badly along some Vegas backstreet surrounded on the right side by nothing but desert… when suddenly, as if on cinematic cue, I had this overpowering need to pee.

Fortunately, just as in all previous incarnations of Las Vegas marathons, there is that desert that almost no one minds you having to relieve yourself in, or on . .. but unfortunately, unlike the Arizona desert, there isn’t even a big cactus to hide behind. That’s when I slowed to a walk and whipped out my . . . camera . .. because there, right there, was the flashing white behind of some squatting little chick behind some stupid little tumbleweed—and she was peeing! And so was the dude standing with her . . . and so I was fortunately able to take a picture. Unfortunately, when the package came back from the drugstore, those pee-ple were so far away in the photo that Walgreens made them what no cactus couldn’t—invisible.

Ah, screw it… I decided we doan need no steeenkeeeng cactoose, we’s gwine pee here eenyweigh. Maybe it was the Celebrex . . . or maybe all the GU and the two extra Advils “for insurance” or last night’s fistfuls of Vitamins C and E, Centrum Multis, calcium, Endurox, ginseng, echinacea, sulfasalazine, Succeed!, Extra Strength Icy Hot, XyliFresh, saw palmetto, Hammer Gel, Cytomax, Accelerade, AirAide, Oxylene, Optygen, whey protein, ma huang, glucosamine, Amino Vital, St. John’s wort, or of course Emergen-C Instant Raspberry High Potassium Fizzing Drink Mix—don’t laugh; half this mojo comes free in your prerace goody bag and the other half’s for sale at the expo—or maybe I’m just pulling your Gatorade-splashed leg here because sulfasalazine is a prescription drug I take and XyliFresh is chewing gum . . . but probably I was just pissingly high on all of it.

Anyway, all of that suddenly contributed to considerable fear and loathing at the prospect of my immediate arrest and next-day’s arraignment in that selfsame Clark County courthouse we’d just passed:

“Mister, uh, 3933 Jogger, you stand accused of standing yesterday during a publicly permitted spectacle upon an undeveloped tract of private property in the City of Las Vegas in the County of Clark and thereupon publicly urinating. How do you plead?”

“Not guilty, Your Honor.”

“On what grounds?”

“Sand, Your Honor, with a whole lotta rocks and stones, bits of trash, and shards of glass. Very little vegetation, Your Honor, and none repeat—none of those other 15,000 onlookers could care less . . . because alll repeat—all of them sooner or later during the course of six or more hours yesterday morning did it themselves.”

“Did anyone file a signed complaint?” he’ ll ask the arresting officer.

“No, Your Honor,” the arresting officer will say. “We couldn’t find anyone willing to stop long enough to sign one.”

“Case dis-missed.”

And so, of course, will be my flight home also.

WHAT’S WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE … “PURPLE HAZE”… AND ANOTHER FAMOUS SINATRA SONG JUST BEFORE TURNING ONTO FRANK SINATRA BOULEVARD

I gazed at the haze in the distance, and there above buildings loomed a billboard: “Need Help?” it asked.

Yes, I thought, as a matter of fact, I do. As do, no doubt, all the rest of these posthippified, death-escaping, second chancers who happen to comprise the fallout from Frank Shorter’s decades-old “running boom”—all these former potheads, Ginsberg readers, and overweight counterculturists who saw the dream die when Abbie Hoffman actually became corporate executive of something and when noninhaling (yeah, right) maryjane smokers were elected to the White House.

Into that freakazoid mix you now dump this new crop of Gen X-ers, Y-ers, and no doubt Z-ers, along with this wildly emerging new wave of punk, goth, emo, and alt revivalists of those horribly savage South Sea Island practices of permanently inking a// bare skin patches and poking spears, rings, and safety pins through any pierceable body part. Pretty soon what you’ve got literally taking over the main streets of America are just a whole bunch of wholesome skinny sprinting people who used to be damn near in jail.

Ihave always felt it’s a pissing shame to be trashing all those pleasurable and terrific drug-induced artificial highs in favor of all this athletic-type, superstrenuous, sweat-soaking hard work. What is the matter with these people anyway? Do they all actually swallow … that goofy new slogan of this wacky new marathon—“the most fun you can have with your shoes on”?

Then what in the world is that guy doing running with his shoes off?

In these latter-day stages of this late race, I suddenly found myself being passed . . . yes, totally and speedily, by some dude running the entire 26-point-2 miles—barefoot!

I watched him until I could not stand to see him anymore. His feet went slap slap slap along the black dirty asphalt of these mean streets. And the undersides of those feet were even blacker… and… flatter. ’’m sorry, Dr. Sheehan, but you’ll never convince me of the liberating and soul-freeing feelings of slogging stony lengths and broken breadths of most potholed cities—whilst wearing below your knees only your soles.

Bingo! I suddenly found myself gaining ground on the purple showgirl. I started, in my fazed daze of purple haze, to really concentrate. I became a pusher. I ever-so-gradually—so as not to become hooked—pushed my pace. Harder . . . harder . . . breathing a gasp heavier and heavier as I heaved my fat body along . .. boom! I passed her. Then, I pushed even harder until I could finally, exasperatingly, pull my stupid camera out of that damned zipped Zombie pouch .. . and yes, sir… | wheeled around and made like to snap her picture. She was all smiles. I clicked .. . and flicked my definitely plastic fantastic lover inside this trapezoid thermometer shutter as advertised on the TV program waste.

Not five miles later she passed my ass right back, like as if I was just part of the ass-fault and as if her sneakers were boots and like she was singin’ to herself all along—these boots are made for runnin’ and that’s just what they’ ll do; one of these miles these boots are gonna .. . run right over you.

Nah. She wasn’t hardly old enough to even remember such a, yes, Nancy Sinatra song.

GETTING HIGH AND PASSED—BY SOFT ROCK-A-BELLY GHOSTS… AND FINDING A ROOM AT THE END OF LONELY STREET—OR WAS IT RUSSELL AND SOUTH LAS VEGAS BLVD?

And speaking of Zombies, Elvis Presley came to mind . . . often. Vegas—thank yuh ver much—just won’t let the drug-induced, potbellied, jumpsuited and shrinkwrapped-like-a-sausage fat sucker die. First of all, there are major—and I repeat major—casino show-lounge tourist attractions showcasing one or more of these impersonating Elvi every single night of the year. You plunk down hard currency to watch and listen to various soft “Elvis the Pelvis” renditions of those rockabilly forerunners of latter-day, modern hard rock.

Teven used to know one. . . well, not exactly an Elvis impersonator but certainly a drummer in one of his bands. In fact, I’ll never forget him—Joe Somebody. He used to work in the same freaky newspaper office I used to work in. He gave me ’n’ my hardly rockin’ bride free tix one night to see his guy Jerome Somebody impersonate Elvis .. . and damn if Joe didn’t slap those skins like a pro. Later in the office he confided that none other than the great Trent Carlini was askin’ Joe if he wanted to move to Vegas and join his band. Joe said no… and I go, “WHAT? Have you got rocks in your head, boy? This is the opportunity of YOUR lifetime!”

Something . . . somethin’ about his wife not wanting him to go. He got a family—thank yah. Vegas is no place to raise a family… .

So at mile, I dunno (we’re The Fuggawwee?), I got passed first by one Elvis … who was runnin’—hunka hunka—with his chickie-poo by his side… who was no doubt plannin’ to start their little family—which would be OK to raise there

A Hunter S. Thompson wannabe and his attorney? No, it’s just the author and his wife, Beth, at the finish of the new Las Vegas Marathon. Inset: the author’s bib.

. .. especially in that posh little upper-crusty *hood we were all runnin’ through … and, just about one bump and grind later . . . I got passed by 50 Elvises . . . with one of ’em pushin’ a boombox in a baby jogger!

Warden threw a pahdee at th’ county jail… prison band wuz playin’ they began ta wail… numba fordy-seven said ta numba three, ‘Ah shor wud be dahlighted if ya’d dance wid me, let’s rock!’

You can say what you’d like about that. All I can say about that is this: They were all—I repeat, a//—rockin’ on down the road faster than I was.

Come lissun to mah story … Ah gotta lil’ tale ta tell… It’s down at th’ end of Lonely Street… called “Heartbreak Hotel” … Ah feel so lonely, behbeh. . . Ah feel so lonely . .. Ah feel so lonely Ah cud die.

. .. Which, less than four miles later, down at the end of Frank Sinatra Boulevard and turning left along Russell and then into the Mandalay Bay parking lot, in a totally lonely ’n’ heartbreakin’ . . . nonrockin’ time of slightly under five frickin’ hours .. . 1 did.

Then much much later, I took that last legal drug out of my New Las Vegas Marathon goody bag . . . and whipped it up just groovy in my far-out hippie kitchen here in the *hood . . . and swallowed it a//—-gettin’ high all the while concocting all this wacky jive, whilst makin’ steam and night-trippin’ for the time o’ my attorney’s life. And I saved the package so I could push this out-friggingstanding drug on you, too.

It’s this 1.75 oz (49.6g) free sample package of “Colombia Supremo” . . . Don Francisco’s Gourmet Coffee. In-a-godda-da-java, behbeh. Thank pl yuh, thank yuh ver much. 3