NASCAR and Toegate

Well gee, this past week or so has been nothing but a whirlwind of fun. But even a FUN whirlwind is a whirlwind…and it can be exhausting. Many’s the night I just wanted to STAY HOME and blog or read or just be mellow….but I kept getting invited out to all this awesome stuff, and I couldn’t say no. I blame my insomnia on this fortune I got back in 2010, inside a cookie from TAO: “Those who say YES have more fun.” Ever since then, I’ve said “YES” to just about all takers….and it’s wearing me the fuck out!!! If I wasn’t having dinner with a puppeteer friend, I was cruising around Lake Mead with another friend, ambling around Bonnie Springs Ranch with my tranny friend, or hanging out at a comedy club with a circus friend who moved here to start a trapeze school! FUCK!

I tried to put on the brakes last Monday, and went to a meditation class at a local Buddhist center. One of the lamas lives on my street — a cool-ass Tibetan dude with a long silver ponytail, who doesn’t speak any English but wanders around town in a robe and a ski parka, with this bespectacled bald hipster dude as his translator. I saw them at the 99cent store once, and it was awesome — a Tibetan buying up cheap Chinese junk. Anyhoo, the meditation class was OK, but it was really aimed at substance abusers, and focused on overcoming addiction…which was kind of a bummer when I went home afterward and wanted a glass of wine :-/

Since I wasn’t able to commit to Buddhism, I went to the NASCAR finals instead. Normally, I just WORK the races as one of the promo babes, but this year, a friend took me as a spectator….and it was AWESOME! Let me give you a little background on NASCAR weekend in Vegas.

NASCAR weekend is the most magical weekend of the year, when somewhere around 300,000 toothless, redneck speed freaks (ahem) descend upon the valley to watch their favorite drivers careen around the Speedway and hopefully crash and burn to death in a blaze of red-blooded, all-American glory. Every year the big race is on a Sunday, but the entire weekend leading up to it is one big tailgate party out in the vast, sun-baked moonscape of the Speedway parking lot way north of town. Vendors fry up corn dogs and spamburgers, and corporate sponsors set up booths and hire all manner of bimbos to pass out freebies to the hordes of unwashed race fans who save their Wal-Mart wages all year long so they can drive their RVs out, camp in the infield, and then get up at 6am to come amble around the “fan zone.” Much like the county faires of medieval Europe, the Fan Zone is a place where chubby, pasty young maidens with stretch-marked ass-antler tattoos come to mingle, flirt and mate with the pimply, buck-toothed future liberators of Eye-rack. Meanwhile, last year’s crop of fertile maids have become brood sows in their own right, with their own piglets either suckling at the teat or being dragged along by their sticky, grubby hands. MEANWHILE, the eagle-eyed crones and toothless matrons of the previous generation weave through the crowds, ever on the lookout for a proffered freebie of any sort, toward which they snake out a tobacco-stained claw while disingenuously asking the bimbo handing out the item, “How much dez it cawst?” When told, as they always are, “It’s free — compliments of Billy Bob’s Toe Jam Thinner!” they seize the item, no matter how insignificant or useless, and slip it into their bag of holding, much like a greedy child shoves his Halloween candy into his pillowcase, to be spread out on the living room floor and counted later on that night — only in this case, to be spread out on the trailer floor and pieced out in piles for Granny Johnson back in Arkansas, Uncle Clem over in Anbar Province and Cousin Buford down at the State Pen.

Anyhoo, I worked this fantastic event one year for a certain well-known deodorant/ shaving cream company that sponsors one of the major drivers, and it was a real hoot and a half!!! They had about 20 models in red short-shorts and track jackets, and our job was to hand out samples and apply rub-on logo tattoos. Normally, when working an event like a convention or trade show, no one really wants your shitty give-a-ways — tchotchkes like stress balls and pens with corporate logos. But at NASCAR, they’ll take ANYTHING! We handed out sorely-needed stuff like mini deodorant sticks and cologne samples, but even when we burned through all that (after about 30 seconds) and got down to the cheesy bikini pinup posters, even those went like hotcakes! The rub-on tattoos were even more fun — I applied tattoos to all manner of fat, freckled shoulders, arms, décolletages and sweaty, red necks. I remember one man asked me if the tattoo would stick to any arm, even one as hairy as his. “Sure!” I said, “They’ll stick to anything!” “Even THIS?” he bellowed jovially, pulling up his t-shirt to reveal a thickly matted, hairy chest. “Uh, I don’t see why not!” I then proceeded to apply the tattoo to his fur, pressing a damp towel over it and applying pressure for 10 looooong seconds. When I lifted the backing paper, the tattoo was floating perfectly atop his mat of hair — a full inch from his chest wall! Jesu!

Another year, I worked for a certain search engine that was trying to lure in the race demographic. They had hired about 20 models to wear racing suits and approach race fans as they meandered around the track and Fan Zone. We were supposed to hand out more godawful tchotchkes, only this time it was a super pain in the ass because the company had actually shelled out quite a bit of coin on the giveaways — USB zip drives in the form of mini race cars. They cost $4 a pop to manufacture, which is very expensive for a freebie, so the marketing firm we were working for was very insistent that we not just hand ’em out like candy to the grabbing paws of the hillbillies. We had to sit there and explain the whole concept of a search engine, and what made our search engine better than “other” search engines, and how the zip drive could be used to install a customized NASCAR toolbar on one’s browser, which conveniently contained a search box for our search engine so that next time you needed to find out Jimmy John Toejam’s best time in the Daytona 500, you could look it up using us!

All that is much easier said than done. Half the people out there didn’t even know what a computer was, let alone a “browser,” “search engine” or “zip drive.” But that didn’t stop them from standing there, anxiously shifting from one foot to the other, flinty eyes darting nervously from my earnestly jabbering lips to the mini race car that would hopefully soon be theirs if only they somehow made it through this interminable spiel of incomprehensible technical gobbledygook! You could smell the relief mingled with the body odor and stale beer when I finally did finish my spiel and hand them the precious tchotchke. It was excruciating, but kinda fun. I enjoy making greedy rednecks squirm! Sometimes I would drag my spiel out exxxxxxxtra long, throwing in all kinds of needless extraneous information about search engine algorhythms and internet advertisers, just see how long I could make ‘em wait… but they always waited, no matter how long I prattled on. Their eyes were on the prize!

Aaaaaaaaaanyhoo, that was all in the past. These days, I don’t do many shittily-paying promotional gigs anymore, so I went as a guest of my friend, who is a NASCAR bigwig, and who has this super-special credential called a Hard Card that allows him basically all-access to the pits and whatnot. He took me to a truck race once back in 2010, and I was unceremoniously KICKED OUT of the pits for violating the dress code. Violating the NASCAR dress code!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Now that’s saying something!!! I had on jeans, boots and a little blousey-thing with cap sleeves….well, apparently the sleeves weren’t long enough, and I was kicked out of the pit!!! Meanwhile, there were pit lizards (what they call race groupies) standing around in little more than toenail polish and frosted lipstick…and no one messed with them…probably ’cause they were sucking Jimbo Jones Junior’s johnson or something. Arrgh!

Well, after Tweeting extensively about that debacle — and having a tweet show up on nascar.com — they loosened up the dress code considerably. Still, I was taking no chances: I suited up in my tightest jeggings (stretchy leggings printed to look like jeans) and teased my hair to EPIC proportions, just to make sure I’d be OK. For good measure, I also covered up my “Obama 2012” tattoo. And it worked!!!

The friend who took me to the race doesn’t fuck around — he knew that with 300,000 people out there, traffic was gonna be a nightmare. So he hired a helicopter to take us! LOL!!! It was awesome — what is normally (even in optimal traffic conditions) a 45-minute drive (which stretches to 2 hours, post-race) was now a sweet ten-minute jaunt. NICE! I’ve only ever flown in a chopper once, to the Grand Canyon…but this was even better. It was really cool to fly so low over Vegas, just barely missing the Stratosphere. Fun!!!

My friend had money on Dale Earnhardt, Jr. (or “Junior,” as they call him in fan parlance) and also on Kyle Busch, who was driving the #18 M&Ms car (my friend’s flight had landed at Gate 18, and he had seat #18, so he figured it was destiny). Alas, neither one o’them hillbillies amounted to a hill of beans at that race…so he lost all his money 🙁 But there was still an INORDINATE amount of fabulous pageantry to enjoy!

The rumor was that Todd and Sarah Palin were around somewhere, but they were probably hobnobbing with the bigwigs up in the suites somewhere. Meanwhile, my friend and I hung out down on Pit Road, where the cars come racing in for their pit stops — it was really something to watch them changing the tires and stuff in 30 seconds flat. One of the pit crew guys asked me if I was on TV, LOL — but it was probably just based on the assumption that any non-fatassed person at a NASCAR race is a celebrity of some sort! Interestingly, I noted that the vast majority of women at the track were lard-assed heifers — except down in the pits, where the drivers’ wives and girlfriends and the pit lizards hang out, cruising for race cock. So apparently, you have to have money to be thin nowadays. Crazy! It used to be just the opposite. Imagine that……….and me being a broke-ass hack!

I have never been a NASCAR fan, so I didn’t know much about what was going on. But I DID notice one thing — how teeny-tiny those drivers are! They’re like jockeys — TINY! I guess it makes them more aerodynamic. This one driver, Kasey Kahne (god I love their names), came strutting along like a li’l banty rooster…and all the chicks swooned! (He’s the ladies’ favorite these days, I guess….blechh.) Then the guy who won, Tony Stewart, came out….and he wasn’t much bigger. Crazy!!!

My friend and I had a few drinks, and then I passed out in the bleachers for awhile towards the end…but rallied for the final few laps, when Tony Stewart won and everyone went apeshit. Then we got the hell out of Dodge, heading straight for the heliport and our chopper back to the Strip. It was like the evacuation of the Americans from Saigon…we ran, screaming, as the chopper lifted us from the fray. Back to civilization at last!

That night I had NASCAR on the brain, and started thinking about these godawful NASCAR-themed Harlequin romances I used to read. You know those cheesy Harlequin paperbacks — where the guy is always a hot cowboy, Viking, rancher or cop, and the chick is a kindergarten teacher or some other innocuous, virginal shit. Well, now they have a whole series where the guy is a NASCAR driver! LOL! I tried to look them up online, but instead I found something even better….. NASCAR FANFIC!!!!!!!!!!!!

For those who don’t know, fanfic is short for “fan fiction” — i.e., amateur stories about famous characters, written by fans who just can’t get enough of their favorite literary heroes. It’s usually about shit like Harry Potter, Star Wars, Twilight and the like…anything with obsessive fans, basically. These stories almost invariably serve as shittily-written setups to LONG, PORNOGRAPHICALLY DETAILED SEX SCENES — the sex is basically the reason these stories are written in the first place! The worst I’ve seen was gay Star Trek fanfic (Captain Kirk fucking Spock up the ass is an image I will never erase from my mind)…but now I’ve got a new contender for MOST OBSCENELY AWFUL FANFIC: NASCAR!!!

I found this one website with a whole bunch of fanfic stories written by lonely grannies in Alabama — one lady in particular was writing a fine literary masterpiece in installments. Each time she uploads a new chapter, she adds a little bit of commentary like, “Sorry this chapter is so late, my grandkids were staying with me and I was real busy.” LOL! Meanwhile, the paper-thin plot involved Dale Earnhardt Jr’s sister, unlucky in love, who ended up fucking Dale’s best friend, another driver named Keselowski. While they were going at it, Dale Jr. ended up getting his dick sucked by KESELOWSKI’s girlfriend! The old switcheroo! Anyhoo, the writing was terrible and the details were so shockingly graphic that I actually had to take several hits of my medicine via water pipe to get through them. Seriously — I actually got embarrassed! More for the poor quality of the writing, but also from the sheer tawdriness. I wonder if these good Christian drivers know what the fuck is being written by their nice, Christian granny fans!!!!! If you’re curious, here’s the link to the site (WARNING! Very obscene material ahead!!): http://www.fanficnation.net/

<– P.S. I did take away one fantastic souvenir from the race: one of Dale Jr’s nuts!!!! It’s pink…shore is purty, huh?!

After the excitement of the NASCAR race, my friend and I decided to do an old-Vegas night, and went downtown to the newly opened Mob Museum. I’m here to tell you, that place is BAD-ASSSSSSS! It’s in the old Federal building downtown, which was the actual location of the Kefauver anti-racketeering hearings back in the day, so it was extra-authentic. The top floor is all about old Vegas history and the beginnings of gambling, Prohibition and prostitution. The 2nd floor is more about Rat Pack-era Vegas and the Goodfellas/Casino days, and then the bottom floor is all modern stuff like the Sopranos and John Gotti. FASCINATING! And HIGHLY recommended….check it out!

After the museum, we went down the street to the new-ish Oscar’s Beef, Booze and Broads, which is the steakhouse they just opened at the fabulous Plaza Hotel, in that fantastic glass dome looking down over Fremont Street. They filmed one of the scenes in “Casino” there, and my friend and I were lucky enough to have the very booth where Robert DeNiro and Sharon Stone sat in that scene — fantastic! The restaurant is all mob-shtick: the owner is ex-mayor and ex-mob attorney Oscar Goodman, the waiters all wear cheeseball gangster costumes, and there is supposedly a bevy of “Broads” that walk around and sit and talk to you about Vegas history and whatnot. I had heard that you could “hire” them to sit with you, so I was really curious to see what it was all about…in case I need a new job one of these days! Alas, however, there was only one lonely Broad on duty that night, a faded blonde in a crappy Marilyn Monroe costume who sort of swished by once or twice but wouldn’t stay to chat very long. Boo! Still, overall I give the place a good review — it’s fun! A little pricey considering it’s NOT a gourmet room…and the decor is kinda shitty, like a 1988 Howard Johnson restaurant…but still. Give it a chance, guys!

After dinner, my friend and I walked down to the Golden Nugget where we happened upon a lounge where an Elvis impersonator was rocking out — and then, inexplicably, a Rod Stewart impersonator got up and sang a Buck Owens song! I think the only reason the Elvis impersonator let the Rod Stewart impersonator take the stage is, he wanted to horn in on the two Spring Break co-eds Rod had been chatting up at the bar!! But the second Rod Stewart finished his song, he made a beeline back to the bar, elbowing Elvis aside so he could get back to what he apparently does best: schmoozing drunken ladies! And THAT’s why I love Vegas!!!!! Git ’em, Rod!!

Anyhoo, that was a great weekend, but it was over all too soon and it was back to work for me. The headliner in the showroom where I normally work (the legendary Quebecoise, Sally Dingdong) has bronchitis or a vocal chord infection or something, so I haven’t been taking souvenir photos lately — but I’ve been super busy modeling and doing other random gigs. A photographer friend from Atlanta came to town, and wanted me to come over and discuss a new business venture he’s thinking of launching: an escort agency for LEGIT escorts — i.e., nice, clean college-type girls who do not have sex with clients, only go to dinner with them.

My first reaction was, yeah, right — no one’s gonna pay for that!!! But he had met some young chippy at a strip club who supposedly does exactly that, and he wanted me to meet her as a potential business partner: “She’s really smart, she reminds me of you.” Needless to say, I was extremely skeptical! But I went over to meet with them, and lo and behold, this chick was actually super cool!

I won’t give toooo many details, because I don’t want to blow her cover, but she’s basically a beautiful young blonde Mormon farmer’s daughter who got pregnant and was basically cast out of her town. Hell-bent on making it without help from her parents, she at first lived in a basement apartment in a nameless Western cowtown, going to school and working at a Sizzler to make ends meet, until some pervert tried to break into her apartment, which freaked her out and sent her packing to the Big City, where a girlfriend turned her on to stripping. I’m here to tell you, this chick is BEAUTIFUL — no tattoos, no fake tits, no weird skankiness, just 100% USDA Prime Cut All-American Wholesomeness. Before long, she had a few regulars who would take her on trips to Mexico and Miami and shit — and pay her a wage for the honor! She said she makes it perfectly clear up front that there is to be NO hanky-panky, and the guys are OK with that. One shy young hedge-fund manager even bought her a $100,000 Porsche for Valentine’s Day! Holy crap — I saw the car, so I know it’s true!

Meanwhile, she also happens to be a SUPER-NICE, super-well-spoken, intelligent chick…so I liked her right away, although I don’t think I could do what she does. We had a fun day hanging out by the pool with the photographer, and the next day we all drove out to the desert for some amazingly cool photos by this old abandoned horse corral. It was so nice to feel the sun on my skin after that long, cold, shitty, miserable winter…..I felt like a flower, slowly blossoming in the warmth of spring. Then I saw the photos — and realized I was more like a fishbelly-white fat-ass, covered in bruises. Yikes — time to hit the gym!!!

The only thing I DIDN’T like about that chick, and the photographer as well, for that matter, is that they gave me some bogus advice. A week or so ago, a reader of this blog had emailed me, saying he was going to be in town for his bachelor party, and that he had a huge foot fetish and wanted to hire me for a one-hour foot-worship session. He assured me he was young, classy, attractive and respectful, and just wanted to lick, suck and sniff my feet while we exchanged some witty banter (he especially mentioned he liked my sarcastic style). Also, his fiancee was the one putting him up to this, and she wanted to watch via Skype — so how much would I charge??

I thought about it, and asked several of my friends what they thought. My personal opinion was, I would do it for around $200 — after all, it’s ONE HOUR of sitting in a chair having your toes sucked. Big fuckin’ deal! I’ve done similar things before, and that’s about the amount of money I made. But all my friends were in an uproar: “Charge him $5k!! Tell him you’ll only do it if you can bring a bodyguard!” etc. Some advised me not to do it at all — “Too creepy!”

One chick I know told me she actually used to do sessions like that fairly regularly, and she generally charged $200-$300…and she assured me not to worry, that LOTS of people have a foot fetish, and they are by and large harmless. That made me feel a lot better, so I was just getting ready to answer the guy and tell him $300…when I made the mistake of asking this Atlanta photographer and the blonde chick their advice.

They both told me I was being STUPID, and I should charge him AT LEAST $750. They went on and on as to why I deserved that amount of money, and Blondie went on about how she would never do it for less, blah blah blah. So I felt stupid, and compromised: I emailed the guy back asking for $500.

Well, when he finally answered me, he said he was sorry but $500 was WAAAAAY more than he could pay — he had been thinking more like $150!!! D’oh — if I had gone with my first instinct, and asked for $200-300, I probably would have closed the deal. But because I listened to all these greedy fucking Vegas gougers, I lost the whole deal. D’OH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This got me thinking about my ethos in general: I live in Vegas, where we supposedly make our living off tourism, but at the same time GOUGE THEM MERCILESSLY the entire time they’re here. $10 for a beer, $6 for a cup of coffee, $45 for a photo, $60 for a steak. Cab drivers take you the long way to get extra fare, strippers scam you, prostitutes rob you…it makes me sick, and ashamed to live here.

At my photo job, I’ve had countless opportunities to scam people over the years, and have worked with girls who had zero compunction about doing just that: add in a tip after the fact, overcharge people, tip hustle (“Did you need your change??”), etc. I am proud to say that I have NEVER engaged in that sort of shittiness, and I never will. To me, it feels like begging — and my mama raised me better than that (stop laughing)!!!!!!!!!!!

So, I may be broker than some, and carry a cheap purse, and drive a beat-up old truck……but guess what? I earn my money the honest way. Nevermind that I get it from toe-suckers and perverts and assorted other fringe-dwellers — I work hard, and I only ask for what I honestly think I’m worth. HONESTLY, what is so god-damn holy about my fucking toes that they’re too good to let some poor sap suck on ’em for $150 an hour???? Meanwhile, there are people in China making less than that a MONTH, making iPods and shit in Dickensian conditions! Am I really that fucking special? NO!

Uh-oh…..now my inbox is gonna be flooded with requests from bargain-hunting toe-suckers! YIKES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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