Famous People #47: Join or die
Kaitlyn: Tamar put on the Migos song “Gang Gang” four times in a row on the Jersey turnpike. The little meme of the weekend became saying “anyways, gang gang,” a way of queuing it up in our heads even though we were no longer in the car. This is the type of stuff that sounds obnoxious when you overhear it or write it down, and it definitely reminds me of the time I listened to a Vince Staples song to get myself amped up to tape a live episode of my technology podcast, then realized what I was doing and longed to apologize to him personally.
Anyways, gang gang!
Atlantic City is poised to be the next Instagram “museum.” It’s lurid and grimy and loud, typically in the Lana Del Ray music video sense. It’s a husk, full of ghosts, covered in Lydian font and littered with psychics. Its aesthetic sensibility is a neon sign shaped like the silhouette of a woman with boobs bigger than her hips. It smells like cigars and A1 sauce mixed with coconut oil and confectionary sugar. It isn’t any wonder why Bruce ate it all up, except it is a wonder that none of the shitty tourist shops sell t-shirts of him — only Billie Eilish. The Trump hotel on the boardwalk is still there, with the sign ripped down, and you can peer in to look at the remains of its overpriced restaurants and glass bricks. Our hotel used to have a casino on the ground floor, but it was taken out a long time ago, leaving only a piano and some confusing signage and the biggest uninterrupted expanse of red carpet the world has ever seen.
In short, there is nothing you won’t want a photograph of, except the elevators, though that did not stop us from taking pictures in them.
But the best thing about Atlantic City, if you ask me, is that nobody is really looking at you. Tamar took a video of my butt in vinyl pants that lasted at least a minute and a half. Katie and Stephanie stripped down to their underwear inside of a souvenir shop. Another little recurring bit was to whisper “I love it here,” in a husky kitten impression of Selena Gomez in Spring Breakers.
It’s so hard to say when this will all stop being funny! Lately I’ve been getting pretty uncomfortable with the fact that I’m done with the stage of my life where I was underpaid and under-appreciated — at least when everybody thought I was an idiot I could, justifiably, do whatever I wanted. I don’t feel old, just old enough for people to be mean to me without it counting as “punching down.”
For example, on Friday night we went to Caesar’s Palace because that’s the one in the Sex and the City episode: I sat down at a poker table and immediately lost $30. Tamar turned $20 into $10 and then back into $18.50, which is winning. We sat at the bar and ordered rum and Cokes, which I had honestly anticipated being free — to compel people to bet big and lose money — but were in fact just very strong — to compel me to allow a man with what we initially thought was a “Don’t Tread On Me” tattoo but was actually a “Join or Die” tattoo to buy my second one, and then to give him my phone number. Stephanie live-tweeted the incident, but she missed the part where he said he makes $160,000 a year. She also missed the part where I offered to reimburse him for my drink, a reaction to his insinuating that I had been too dumb to win at poker and buy my own.
Look, they don’t play real poker in a casino. Nobody bluffs or strategizes or thinks about the deck or stares at anyone else’s face, they just go around the circle putting down piles of chips and maybe not even looking at their hand. It’s like, just play the slot machines! I want to play a game! This is not a case of me exaggerating my talent. It’s simply true that nobody who goes to public school in rural America is bad at cards, and nobody who lived with my dad got out of watching 500 hours of poker tournaments on cable TV every summer.
I lost because I’m good. Shut up!
Join or die!
Anyway, on Saturday, after I’d “rallied” and taken half a dozen photos of a lizard whose tank had a little paper sign that said “A knock is like a gunshot, please do not knock” and struggled in silence to think of how to turn these images into a hangover joke, we went to a pool party in one of the fancy hotels we could not afford to stay at, and paid $30 to wiggle in a pool and sit on a sun deck and bop Tito’s-branded beach balls at each other’s heads. I spent four hours watching a man who was wearing a tank top that said “Two Seater,” accompanied by one arrow pointing up at his face and one arrow pointing down at his shorts. He was wearing a wedding ring!
It was a perfect weekend. We had naps. We had $8 foot-long Italian subs with arguably $20 worth of salami in them at a highly Instagrammable sandwich shop a mile off the boardwalk, which had photos on the wall of two-dozen Miss America winners, equally as many state politicians, plus Guy Fieri, Danny Devito, Ellen Degeneres, and Donald J. Trump. Someone had also acquired Frank Sinatra’s “neck towel” and mounted in the corner in a glass box. Our waitress was seemingly in high school, and when the teenage boys making the sandwiches started talking about their dicks she said “What?” and let them repeat themselves, then palmed a snack size bag of Lays Classic and told them “Say less.”
The forgotten luxury of every single place that isn’t New York is that you can just walk into any business and sit down.
We went to a karaoke bar inside the Tropicana and were shown up by a bachelorette party in which each bridesmaid was wearing a different pastel-colored wig. An incredibly normal-looking man in his late fifties held onto his incredibly normal-looking wife’s stomach while they sang, which made all of us swoon — although I don’t think I would like that gesture of affection for myself, specifically. Octogenarians kept coming in and bribing the owner to let them cut in line, then singing romantic songs to each other in a way that I felt was needlessly braggy. (Okay, we get it! You found someone to love you your whole life!) The best performance was, I believe, the group of young women in electric blue “Bride’s Drinking Team” t-shirts who changed their selection from “SICKO MODE” to “Partition” at the last moment and did their best with the French. Second-best was the man who did the genie’s song from Aladdin and, according to Stephanie, really knew how to work a stage.
I swayed at the bar, sober, looking at a $500 leather jacket with a portrait of James Dean and the words “TOO YOUNG” painted on it, thinking about how I’d initially opted to lie to everyone about seeing my ex-boyfriend, then feeling crippling shame that I’m still not old enough to be honest, that I want all the sympathy in the world but don’t want to be condescended to, and that I call friendship “co-dependency” only when things aren’t going my way, all of which showed on my face and made Tamar ask me “Are you okay?” over and over until I snapped at her. She gave me a minute, which is a skill of hers. Stephanie did the electric slide with a bachelor party from Long Island. Katie read aloud to us about Miley and Liam’s divorce. The women in wigs put their wigs on the men from Long Island.
We never got to sing “Genie in a Bottle” because at 12:30 AM I put my foot down — by which I mean I literally stomped my Steve Madden platforms like a brat and yelled “Time for bed!” In the morning, nobody even made me say sorry, and we listened to “Gang Gang” at least three more times.