We crossed the border at Nogales and were suddenly back in the USA. That put us in Arizona instead of California, but we just wanted to get away from cartelero turf as quick as possible. It had been a long, stressful journey, dragging slowly along in those big convoys, just waiting to be attacked day after day. It turned out to be safe enough: we never were attacked, but we always felt that it could happen any time. So we were relieved to be in our own country once again, although having learned that some unnamed American Senator had called a hit on Adam made us well aware that we could still be in danger. And the drug cartels worked both sides of the border, for sure. But still, it felt great to come up on the American Freeway and drive at 75mph after crawling along with convoys at 50. We heard that Arizona Cops don't give tickets under 85mph, but not with our big fat old bus, thanks. We had no reason to stop in Tuscon, so we kept going, on towards Phoenix. We had called my dad and Art & Elaine to report that we'd escaped Mexico semi-intact, so suddenly our cell phones were going crazy, as if nobody had dared to call us while we were in danger. Maybe worried that we'd be dead when we answered. We got a call from Si Bintzen: "Can you guys be in Las Vegas in two days?" "Uh, maybe... why?" "Four concerts at The Paragon Casino, Thursday thru Sunday evenings. They had a sudden cancellation and are desperate. Are you game?" "Oh, I dunno. This is pretty short notice, we haven't been rehearsing..." "Oh no, we just wanna go home..." "Las Vegas? Is that really us?" As you can maybe tell, we weren't too eager to do it, none of us felt that we were that kind of band. You know: big show, lots of glitter, plastic fantastic, etc. Except Mike, he'd played there several times before with Chrome Pie and said he'd had a blast. "Just don't get started on the slot machines," he warned us. But Si said we needed the PR, and the money, since the income from our one and only live album has been running dry all the while our expenses have been piling up, and here we are in the neighborhood anyway. We needed something soon and Fate had delivered, so it would be foolish not to grab this chance. Las Vegas it was. We’d considered stopping in Phoenix for the night, but decided we needed to get closer to Las Vegas before we took a break. We weren't really in the mood to be tourists in a big city anyway, since our squatches draw too much attention, but small towns might be fun. We ended up driving until dark and stopping at a mega-big truck stop just north of Phoenix anyway. That put us about an 8 hours drive from Las Vegas and we figured it was good enough. We ate in the diner there. Real trucker food: chile con carne, burgers, pizzas, all the usual. Lucky for our squatches there was also Chinese veggie stir-fry. Mike had to do without a taco for once-- well, tacos were available but he's a chicano and doesn't eat the Taco Bell variety. I went for a Big Fat Cheeseburger, being neither a squatch nor a chicana. The truckers were really interested in Addy; those big, burly men were amused to feel like little kids beside such a REAL BIG MAN. They challenged him to arm-wrestle, but when Addy put his elbow on the table his arm was too long for anyone to reach up to his hand. Just for fun five men tried to put Addy's wrist to the table but couldn't. It was all in fun, nobody was in his league except Magga. Some of them challenged Masnia, since she was more their size. She let them win sometimes. You noticed we haven't been writing so much about sex lately? Well, that trip back north through Mexico was way too stressful to really relax and just have non-stop fun. We were worried about being gun-stopped, and maybe none of us wanted that happening with our pants down, so to speak. But once we crossed into the States we were all feeling more relaxed and started making the rounds again. That night we parked our bus in the big truck stop we all ended up in the big bed together. It was very special, nothing frantic like a kha-rat, although many of the same things happened. Lazy loving, I guess. Ok, everyone got a turn getting frantic too, we made sure of that. Team effort, lots of fun.
Wednesday, November 19-- The next day we just drove. Highway 93, endless freeway, not quite flat, dry rolling hills, no forests. Cowboy towns: Wickenburg, Bagdad, Kingman, we flashed on by. At Hoover Dam we stopped and allowed ourselves to be tourists for a little while. Hoover is a HUGE dam in the Black Canyon of the Colorado River, built in the 1930's, with a quite fantastic arch bridge that offers a fantastic view of the whole thing as you pass by. But we didn't just pass by. Standing there with three squatches-- children of nature, etc --you'd think they would be a lot more impressed than we "gringos" were over "Man's Technological Achievements", but it seemed to go the other way. They felt it was kind of a shame to have blocked the river like that, while Liss and Maki and Mike and I were totally blown away by the size and scope of it all. Pokey, being a redskin, felt in-between-- as well he should. We were there for a couple of hours, hiking around the area for different views, then climbed back in the bus for the final 30 miles to Las Vegas. We arrived at sunset, which was definitely the most spectacular time to do so, the sky red in the West, all the bright city lights just coming on. Of course we had to drive through miles of the boring everyday-business part of town before we got to the ritzy-glitzy city center, but that was so flamboyantly preposterous that we laughed all the rest of the way into town: the famous "Welcome to fabulous LAS VEGAS Nevada" sign on Fremont Street was to be expected, but the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty jammed into a clump of New York's most famous skyscrapers (& Brooklyn Bridge), the giant guitar before the Hard Rock Café, the Pyramid (complete with Sphinx), the "Marriages-Divorces" parlors, it was all just-- well, wow! Not to mention a hundred zillion lights blinking and winking all around us, a million signs advertising "Bingo, Liquors, Cocktails", and all those saturated colors: primary reds and blues, yellows and greens, pastel golds and pinks, mauve; my eyes almost went into shock. Especially after the drabness of northern Mexico and Arizona. Our destination, The Paragon Casino, was right in the middle of "The Strip" in the part of town called Paradise, along with The Venetian Hotel, the MGM, the Sands, the Golden Nugget, the gigantic Las Vegas Casino, Caesar’s Palace, all the famous places you've seen in a hundred movies. The Paragon was not as big as most of the old established casinos, but it was newer, for what that's worth. Looked all right. Because we didn't know the name we'd been expecting a sleazy wannabe casino in the shabby end of town, but it was right in the middle of the action. We drove around to the rear parking lot and found a bus zone. Liss and I went into the building to tell them we'd arrived, just the two of us rather than cause a scene with a parade of squatches. It was a real casino and there were lots of people, slot machines busy, roulette wheels whirling. There was a restaurant, hotel upstairs, and a music stage, which was a little bigger than we needed but at least wasn't a coliseum. We began to feel it might be kind of fun to play here. I'd been told to meet up with their director of entertainment, a lady in her late 40's named Marge. She seemed nice, if maybe a little bit dizzy. We said we were with Squatch & Friends and she checked her schedule to confirm that, yes, we were to play for the next four evenings and everything seemed all set. Until she asked: "How many busses or trucks do you need parking places for?" "One bus," I said. "Only one bus?" she asked, "Where are the roadies, the lighting rigs, the pyrotechnics, the costumers?" "I don't know what you were expecting, but S&F is just a little acoustic band that plays our own songs, not a heavy-metal big-show stadium event extravaganza. Didn't Si tell you about us?" "Who's Si? Never mind, you don't do a show? Why would anyone want to see you?" She seemed really confounded, as if she couldn't use a nothing band like us. Liss spoke up, "We got three Bigfoots in the band." "What does that mean? Is wearing Bigfoot costumes your gimmick?" Marge seemed skeptical, as if she hadn't yet heard that Sasquatches actually existed, which had only been known worldwide for the last 20 years. She had no idea who we were, had never heard of Adam Leroy Forest, nor anything about the Nokhon Nation; we'd never met anyone so out of touch with our version of the universe. So we gave her a quick rundown of who S&F was on our way to the back lot so we could show her our one measly bus. And our squatches. Adam saw us coming and stepped out of the bus as we arrived, followed by Masnia and Magga. Marge was really astounded by their size, but refused to believe that they were Sasquatches. Actually, they were all wearing clothes and looking way too human to fit her picture of what a Bigfoot should look like-- being beautiful instead of ugly --and when Adam greeted her so charmingly and well-spoken that cinched it for her: no Bigfoots here, it had to be a cheesy gimmik. Marge liked us, and she really needed a band for the next 4 nights, but said she might have to find something else because no one was going to believe that we were really a "Bigfoot Band". Adam caught on quick and said, "Google us. Then check out I Like to Run on YouTube. We'll wait. Ok?" Marge seemed unconvinced, but nodded. "Ok, I'll check you guys out. Be back in a few." As she turned to go to her office Maki came out of the bus with an extra copy of our Live Concert DVD and handed it to Marge. Her eyebrows did go up when she studied it, like she'd maybe heard something about it once. Anyway, off she went. Marge came back half an hour later. She apologized for taking so long but had been sucked into a world she never knew existed and it was hard to stop surfing the web when everything she found blew her mind. Of course she wanted us to do the concerts, honored it would be in her casino, falling all over herself with enthusiasm and wonder. "Can I keep the DVD?" Our new biggest fan. We weren't supposed to play until the next evening, so we had time to wander around Las Vegas by night like all the other tourists. A funny thing about this town was that everyone took squatches in stride: the town was so unnatural and weird that no one reacted to a Bigfoot or two wandering around. We got more attention as Squatch & Friends by fans who recognized us, and that wasn't so bad, people were friendly and polite. They became really excited to hear that we'd be doing concerts, promised to tell all their friends and show up to see us. Which was good: as far as we knew there hadn't been any publicity yet. Mostly the town was flat, the buildings low one-story, everything spread far out. So except for the luxurious casinos clustered in the center it wasn't an especially lovely place. Fast food chains, 7-11s, all the regular stuff. There were lots of pawn shops with lots of people standing in lines, probably to scrape up enough money to get back home after gambling in Las Vegas, we joked. It seemed less funny when we saw how many there were. Also lots of wedding chapels. The name "Elvis" showed up a lot. But it wasn't all just crappy junk, some of the most fantastic architecture in USA was in this town. The shiny steel brain institute building that looked like it had been crumpled by a giant. A copy of the Hofbrauhaus. The Venetian Hotel complete with a copy of Venice, Italy. I mean, once again, wow. We ate dinner in one of the big casinos. It was amazingly cheap, since they were more interested in having people hanging around to gamble than any profit on food. We even went to a concert, just to check out the competition. Taylor Swift was sold out, but we had no problem getting in to see an "Elvis" show. We had to explain to Magga and Masnia the cultural context and that it wasn't really Elvis because he was dead. They thought it was pretty weird, but they got to dance so we all had fun anyway. Mike and Pokey disappeared into another casino to try some gambling, vaguely promising to set a $50 limit, but wouldn't tell us the results later. Adam absolutely refused to gamble-- seems my One True Love can be a bit of an old stodgy sometimes. Liss, Maki, Masnia and I gave the roulette wheel a few spins-- lost, lost, lost. Won't say how much either. So we had some drinks, got a little buzz on. It became a night on the town-- in a town that doesn't stop, where the casinos don't close and there's no difference between night and day. When we finally all met back at the bus, it had somehow suddenly become 3:30 in the morning.
Thursday, November 20-- We weren't scheduled to play until 8:00pm that evening, so we could have had the whole day to be tourists some more. But we got a late start, me finally waking up in a naked pile with Liss and Mike, then we had to mess around for awhile. Adam and his lovely squatchettes had gone for a run at sun-up, and when they got back all charged with healthy energy, so we all messed around some more as a group. Liss and I managed to stagger out of the bus just before noon. We figured, hey, this is Vegas: it's supposed to be like this. Si called, informing us that he had arranged a multi-media press conference set up for us at 3:00 in the lobby of the Paragon. He had also put ads in the local newspapers announcing our concerts, so there was a chance someone would even come to hear us play. We girls went into panic, only 3 hours to get ready! Luckily we could use the showers backstage in the Paragon Casino to spruce up before the interview, or it would have been pretty embarrassing to face a hundred cameras unwashed and sweaty after our long night of decadence and debauchery. As it was, we looked great: none of us had gotten really drunk-- pretty feeble for a rock band, I know. Maybe I'm almost as much an old stodgy as Addy. The press conference was a surprisingly big affair: maybe 50-60 journalists and media-folk. The two major Vegas newspapers were represented and several tabloid magazines. At least seven TV camera crews, spanning from the national networks down to local public-interest programming. We were wondering if word of our Mexican adventure with the drug cartels had leaked out; that might be more interesting than any concert we'd be playing, but no. It was just Squatch & Friends that was so fascinating. So we got into it. Addy was in perfect form for the interview; physically impressive and erudite as usual, but then we hot chicks got lots of attention too. Mike, or rather Miguel deSanto, was also being handsome and of interest: the press wanted to know if he was leaving Chrome Pie to join our band. We got plugs in for our concert and for the Nokhon Nation, etc. When we were asked about our next album we got away with saying that we were "working on it". The whole thing went pretty well, considering that Addy was dreading that they would ask him "How was your vacation in Mexico?" Since he can't lie he didn't want to have to say, "Well, I might have killed some Mexicans." We tried to do a half-assed rehearsal of our show, but there really wasn't time, it turned into a warm-up session, just to make sure we remembered how to play our instruments. We had to go to the Paragon and do sound checks and all that by 6:00, two hours before our show. We had time to do our little ceremony of getting the haka to flow, and when it was 8:00 we were all convinced that it was going to be a fiasco because we couldn't remember the order of the songs we were supposed to play. But Addy is expert at remembering stuff verbatim and it went perfectly. There was a good turnout, not sold out, but a pretty respectable crowd for a Thursday evening in a casino. Addy's magical memory took over and we followed him through a 2-hour routine nicely, all quite relaxed. No surprises, but no fiascos either.
Friday-Sunday, November 21 to 23 -- Four days in Las Vegas went by smoothly, although we were ready to go by Sunday evening after our last concert. The concerts were all well-received, Saturday was the best for us, the high-point of musical magic when we had the audience (and ourselves) almost in orgasm. We tried to top it Sunday-- in other words, all the way to orgasm -- but couldn't quite pull it off. Although the audience didn't complain; they heard the songs they wanted to hear, Mike's guitar solos were a new element for most of them (unless they'd been to our Rose Bowl concert), and the Spanish/Flamenco numbers Addy and Mike had worked out were a big hit. As were our daintily dancing squatchettes. In the days we walked around being tourists, but that got harder each day as fans began closing in on us, now that they knew where to strike, demanding autographs and selfies with us. That was okay at first, but got more intense each day until Sunday we just stayed in the Paragon's pool area, or our own bus. I took the time to finish reading "The Goldfinch" by Donna Tartt, a part of which takes place in Las Vegas, so it was just like being there... I mean, well, we were there. So we took off right after the last concert, got paid-- all in cash, that's how they do it in Vegas --next stop LA. But we were a little sad about going there: Mike had to go home. And so did we, but a different home. We were going to drop him off before we headed north to the Pacific Northwest and Monroe. So it was goodbye, for a while, at least. Of course we girls fucked him silly all the way to LA. It was the least we could do. He'd been a good traveling companion, a satisfyingly horny lover, and his inspired guitar belonged with our band. A loveable guy. I was going to miss him. But not forever, we'd keep in touch. We found a place just off Highway 15 where we could park for the night, along with other busses and trucks. We all fell together into the big bed. It was crowded, but nobody was being left out. Not even those who farted. It was very sexy, I guess, but we'd all burned ourselves out for the 4th concert and now driven until midnight, so we were tired. I may have had a bit of lazy sex with...well, someone, but fell asleep before I figured out who. But the next day we woke each other up, naked and horny all over again. It's those squatch pheromones and we had three of them contained in this bus. I remember how Addy's smell drove me crazy back when we were in high school. But Magga and Masnia smell nice too, so there's lots of motivation floating around us. The smell triggers your hormones. It's not as overwhelming as Shyøma but it does make you slightly horny. That's one of the reasons that we have all been so-- well, you know --free with each other. Another reason is that we all like each other; otherwise we'd circulate more air inside the bus and blow those nasty pheromones away. So we had a morning party. Coffee instead of alcohol, sex instead of food. It was easy-going so we took a couple of hours before finally getting on the road again. At 11:00am we started on our five-hour drive to Los Angeles.
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