The Postmortal (10 page)

“You’ve had the cure, right?” he asked me.

“Yep.”

“Do you have a grail?”

“No. That’s idiotic.”

“You have to get one. We’re all gonna buy grails and bring them. You have to do it. Prerequisite.”

“Oh, come on. Really? I have to buy one of those stupid things?”

“We’re staying at the Fountain of Youth. We have to go all the way with this. I’ll even pay for yours. I can’t have a half-assed cure party.”

“Can’t I buy it when we’re out there?”

“No, because we’re gonna drink out of them on the plane. Hell, I’m looking forward to the plane ride more than any other part of the trip.”

So I had to get a grail. Derrick’s Grail Shop is located on Christopher Street between a gay sex shop and a head shop. Derrick’s is also a head shop, but it seems to do such good business selling grails right now that the bongs have been pushed to a small section on the side. I wondered when the head-shop owner next door would wise up to that fact.

I walked in and took a look. They had thousands of the things. I remember a scene in one of the Indiana Jones movies where Indy walks into the grail room and sees all these shiny, golden chalices. But the real Holy Grail was a crudely made cup sitting meekly on the lowest shelf. All the nice-looking grails in the movie killed you instantly. Well, Derrick’s had no crude grails—no
real
grails. They were all like the fakes the bad Nazi guys drank from, designed to tempt you and then suck all the life right out of you.

That said, they were all quite pretty. Some were knockoff versions of the kind you can get in the Diamond District, with the fake gold and the giant phony gemstones lining the rims. But there were some cool ones too. I saw one made of stitched leather with fake gold inlay. Oxo made a couple of stainless-steel ones with comfortable rubber grips—the practical grail, if you will. There were also Goth ones, including a grail that had a curled-up dragon for a stern. If I had a van, I would definitely paint that grail on the side of my van. They had grails made of elaborately carved oak, for the environmentally friendly postmortal. None of them looked all that Jesus-appropriate. But, hey, they were still nice grails.

I saw one in a Lucite box. It was made of crystal, with an engraved pattern of infinity symbols. I looked at the clerk behind the glass counter and pointed to the box.

“What’s that one?”

“That’s the DX3490,” he said. “Designed by the Swift himself. It’s the same one he drinks from on tour. You can even send away to have him sign it.” He pointed to a poster on the wall. Sure enough, there was the Swift, wearing a white suit and drinking purple drank out of the very same grail. Spiffy.

“Do you think I could pull off rocking the same grail as the Swift?”

“Truthfully? No.”

He also showed me a room in the back where you could design your own. They had thick stylebooks you could flip through, like choosing wedding invitations. You could pick the pattern, the font, everything. They even had suggested sayings you could have embossed on your grail. You could paint your own clay grail and then have them fire it in a kiln. I saw a couple up on the shelf waiting to be picked up. One said BETTY’S GRAIL. I have no clue why that made me laugh, but I nearly soiled myself when I saw it. They had matching grail-and-bong sets, which I found highly tempting, though God help you if you ever confuse the two at five in the morning.

In the end I chose a simple gold one. I wanted a grail that made me feel like a knight who had just finished a long day’s pillaging. The kind you hold in one hand while you eat a turkey drumstick with the other. The kind that makes you feel compelled to talk like a town crier while holding it. That’s the kind of grail I wanted, and that’s the kind I ended up getting. Twenty bucks. Not bad for the cup of Christ.

I brought it home, mixed a rum and Coke in it, and gave my usual cheers to Katy. I have to say, the Swift was on to something with this trend. Drinks taste way better when you’re drinking them out of a grail.

I hadn’t flown to Las Vegas since they opened Fountain of Youth Resort and Casino last year. I already knew it was the biggest hotel on earth, but I wasn’t prepared for the view from the airplane. There are familiar sights you see as you approach McCarran at night: the Luxor’s pyramid, New York–New York’s skyline, the Shanghai, etc. But the Fountain now dwarfs all of them. An old lady on the right side of the plane was the first to spot it. She screamed out in joy when she saw it edging into view through her little porthole.

Everyone spontaneously broke into applause and chugged the contents of their respective grails (three steakheads from Long Island had DX3490s; I’m relieved I didn’t spring for one). I swear the jet spray shooting up from the center of the oval fountain could have tickled our landing gear if we were flying directly above it. I read that the fountain continually pumps four million gallons of water a minute. Seeing it in person, that estimate now feels low. I assume when they first turned on the fountain, the guy throwing the switch thrust his hips for maximum effect.

After deplaning we circumvented the cabstand (the line stretched so far they had to move the security checkpoints for the entire airport) and took the shuttle bus down to the Strip. The last time I was in Vegas, the ride took twenty minutes. This time it took so much longer that I asked the driver if there were multiple conventions going on. There were not.

He dropped us off at the main entrance, and we walked into chaos. The hotel has over twelve thousand rooms, and this evening it appeared all its occupants had decided to hang out in the lobby. We stood in the check-in line in shifts; half of us waited while the other half went to get drinks, and then we switched. When it was my turn to help fetch alcohol, I walked out into the main atrium and stared at the fountain, a gigantic edifice of water that defies all reason. It’s as if the hotel is trying to put out a fire on the surface of the moon. Colored lights illuminate the mighty geyser in a painstakingly choreographed arrangement. Surrounding the base of the fountain are the cure stations: small platforms with a doctor and a single chair that each soon-to-be postmortal sits in to get their shots. Like in Dr. X’s apartment, each chair has straps and belts to hold you down while you are injected. Unlike in Dr. X’s apartment, each chair is a specially designed throne. You get to choose the theme for your chair. There’s your basic emperor’s chair (made of gold; it matched my grail!). There’s also the Poseidon: Lord of the Sea chair, which is actually a large, chair-shaped fish tank, with miniature sharks and all kinds of other imported marine life swimming under your backside. There’s a Space chair, which is shaped like a giant egg and has two hot girls with big fake tits dressed as green aliens on either side of it. And there’s a Viking chair, which features a giant serpent erupting out from between your legs when you sit in it. Those are the four I remember off the top of my head. There were hundreds of the things, no two alike.

I was in awe. I turned to my friend Scott.

“I almost want to get my shots again.”

“You can do that here,” he said. “They’ll throw you a cure party even if you’ve had it done already. They just shoot you up with something besides the vector.”

“What do they shoot you up with?”

“I don’t know. Gin?”

They’ve perfected the process at the Fountain. You get your blood drawn when you check in (separate, even longer line for that), and they have the vector ready for you three days later. In between, you presumably lose all your money, and then spend the next thousand years trying to make it back. It’s incredible. After getting their shots, all new postmortals jump from the platform into the pool at the base of the fountain. Fully clothed, of course. I looked out at the pool and saw a horde of people frolicking in the water, all in soaking-wet dresses, suits, and tuxedoes, all drunk beyond comprehension. Baptized into the sweet life.

On the way back to the check-in line, I noticed a small exhibit called
Ponce de León and the Fountain of Youth
. It looked like a pointless waste of time, which intrigued me.

“Hey, let’s go in that.”

Scott wasn’t as enthused. “That? That’s for kiddies.”

“We go in there, we finish our drinks, we get another round, and then we head back to the line without anyone noticing. That line isn’t moving at all.”

“Oh, all right.”

So we went into the exhibit, which was sparsely crowded due to the late hour and the fact that it was stupid. We walked through a dark corridor for about twenty yards, then found ourselves in front of an enormous scrolling diorama. A life-sized puppet of Ponce de León was sitting in an exact replica of King Ferdinand of Spain’s royal court. A voice-over narrated as we watched the puppet hop onto a ship and sail across a miniaturized version of the Atlantic Ocean (with real wind and water!):

At this point, three pirate puppets popped up from the water and dueled with the Ponce de León puppet, who then cut off their heads. I drank to his victory. The Ponce de León puppet made landfall as we kept walking.

One of Ponce de León’s puppet crew then started making out with a buxom female Indian puppet. I should have been offended, but I was too busy being turned on. The Ponce de León puppet soon came upon a giant fountain, which disappeared down into the ground.

The Ponce de León puppet then shouted out, “Nooooo!” and keeled over.

 

But now Ponce de León’s dream has finally been realized!

 

The Ponce de León puppet’s corpse was airlifted by his strings across a fake U.S. landscape to a miniature model of the hotel we were standing in.

The Ponce de León puppet then sat up, looked at us, and said, “Sí.” We walked out.

“I don’t think that presentation was historically accurate,” Scott said.

“Well, sometimes you have to take dramatic license.”

The rest of the weekend was spent in a drunken fog, each hour as pointlessly hazy as the last. For his cure ceremony, our friend chose the Velvet Dream chair, a throne nine feet high and made of a purple fabric that purported to be velvet but was almost certainly some kind of space-age, sweat-wicking microfiber polymer. It was a practical choice. If you’re going to be stabbed by three giant fire pokers, you’re gonna want to feel as relaxed as humanly possible. Afterward, we visited the Spearmint Rhino IV club. Every girl inside had a long, lucrative career in front of her. I’m not terribly comfortable in these places, which I find reassuring in a way.

Next to the casino floor at the Fountain of Youth is a stadiumsized mall that houses nothing but shops selling cure-related merchandise. You can get your pick of commemorative T-shirts (I’M HOT . . . AND I’M STAYING THAT WAY is a popular choice), steel cookware with a lifetime warranty, go-tox clinics for older postmortals, safes, laser vision correction, and thirty-year tattoos. There are no wedding parlors, and I didn’t see a single bachelor party the entire weekend. Just one cure party after another.

On our last day, there was a bomb threat in our section of the hotel. They evacuated our rooms and made us wait outside, on the Strip. It was the only time during our trip that I was reminded of 7/3/19, and it unnerved me. The manager assured us that they deal with these threats all the time, which only served to worry me more. As we waited on the Strip, I saw a group of men pass by on the opposite side of the street. They stopped, looked at the hotel, whispered some things to one another, and then kept walking. As they did, I saw one of them wave to the building, as if to say goodbye. I ran to alert a nearby officer, who seemed unconcerned. The men turned the corner. One of them saw me talking to the cop and smirked. He held up his hands and gave me the death symbol: a cupped left hand pressed against his straight right hand, forming a crude
D
.

After that, I didn’t relax until we were on the plane heading back to LaGuardia. The flight was delayed for three hours due to traffic on the runway.

 

After my experience outside the Fountain of Youth, I came across this anonymous blog posting by someone who claimed to work at the resort.