Anatomy of a Bachelorette
Fear and Self-Loathing in Las Vegas
One of the most amazing and oft-overlooked parts of growing older is coming to terms with being disliked. Not everyone will like you. In fact, some may actually detest you. And it’s important to understand that many of the people who find you distasteful will be not be vile and loathsome creatures, but perfectly pleasant and good people. They simply possess personalities diametrically opposite of yours. Your jokes fall flat, you struggle to find common ground, and your most lovable foibles melt into fundamental personality flaws that tear on them like a cheese grater.
Who knows what made them so unlike you. Perhaps they were born under a conflicting star sign: they ruled by cold and conservative Saturn, while you were born of that great, dazzling star. Or perhaps some imbalance of the humors. Excess black bile made them melancholic and prone to overthinking, while your bile runs yellow and hot, choleric through and through.
As you grow older, the time you’re required to spend with these people dwindles. No more group projects, forced roommate situations, or seemingly mandatory social events. Eventually you’ll find yourself in a perfectly curated friend group. And at the end of the long day, you’ll be able to sit down with them, unzip yourself completely, and be the ghoul that lurks beneath without fear of reproach.
Until one day you receive an email in your inbox with the headline “bachelorette” in the title. The CC line will be full of email addresses you don’t recognize, and you’ll find yourself asking “who are these strange women I’ve never met before, and will they like me?” like you’re eight years old again.
A few nights with some strangers. How hard could it be?
The Bride: The bride was a loner. Or so I thought. I was surprised when she announced she had five women willing to travel to Las Vegas for her bachelorette party. I hadn’t met any of them. Our circles were separate except for one mutual friend who had been invited but was unable to attend.
I met the Bride during our first semester of law school over a decade ago. She sat in the back of all my classes and spoke not a word to anyone unless they spoke to her first. Her responses always terse, delivered with a smirk, and colored by the faintest Staten Island accent.
She vaporized into thin air as soon as class ended. I never saw her at a locker, in the cafeteria, or in the ladies’ room. When I finally did finally spot her in the wild, it was outside in the dead of November. She was leaning against the concrete university wall, smoking a cigarette. She smoked like my mother. It wasn’t the chic, leisurely smoking of the NYFW models that loitered in the neighborhood. It was the hungry, habitual smoking of a Japanese salaryman. Her clothes were curiously dated for a young city girl. They were like the granny clothes hawked on QVC. But the way she leaned against the wall dragging on her cigarette in the freezing cold—I wanted to know her so badly. And so I did.
Jeopardy: Jeopardy is a two-time champion on the gameshow “Jeopardy.” The Bride’s friend from their ivy league undergraduate university, Jeopardy is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. Unfortunately, like many high IQ people the trade-offs are palpable: she’s incredibly difficult to maintain a conversation with unless it’s about geopolitics or rollercoasters, neither of which is my forte.
Cornfed: Cornfed, a soft-spoken girl from Iowa, is the bride’s sister-in-law. There was a distinctly midwestern Stepford wife look about her; she had some of the whitest teeth I’ve ever seen. I realized I had perhaps judged her too harshly when I watched those teeth them sink into a Jimmy John’s “absolute porker” sub the morning before we left.
PackingCubes: PackingCubes earned her namesake by virtue of the contents of her luggage, which had been meticulously organized through a color-coded set of packing cubes. Charitably, I would say PackingCubes is a conscientious lady who likely writes formal thank you cards for the most minor occurrences. Critically, I would say that when she q-tips her ears she’s not satisfied they’re clean until she sees a little bit of blood.
The Maid of Honor: the MoH is a cool bay area chick who, I would assume, is down to do a little molly now and again. She doesn’t shave or remove any of her body hair. I thought that was pretty cool until she showed up at the pool looking like the Patterson-Gimlin bigfoot footage, which made me realize I’m not nearly as enlightened as I pretend to be sometimes.
Father_Karine: What can be said about your reliable narrator? An old friend once remarked that a night out with me was like “Mr. Bones’ Wild Ride” on the classic Rollercoaster Tycoon computer game: a experience that takes 70 minutes of real-world time to complete, over 4 full years in Rollercoaster Tycoon time.
We arrived in Vegas at 11 p.m. (ET) on a July Friday, an objectively awful time to arrive in Vegas if you’re in your 30s. Room assignments were doled out by the MoH in advance: I’d be bunking with Jeopardy and PackingCubes, while the Bride would shack with MoH and Cornfed. An unappetizing room assignment is par for the course, so I swallowed it and moved on.
When we arrived to our room, the conversation immediately turned to who would use the bathroom first. I didn’t care. Like the litter runt waiting for the teat, I sat patiently for my turn. I watched PackingCubes meticulously unzip things, check pouches, unscrew lids, unfold and refold clothes, and move anxiously between the bathroom and her luggage.
It was late by the time they were done. I unzipped my suitcase to stare at the contents: piles of poorly folded clothes and some hygiene items loosely strewn about. I dug through it like a truffle pig. When PackingCubes walked by, I hunched over my pile to block her from getting a glimpse of how I live. Only my closest friends are entitled to see my shame.
But I made a mistake. I forgot toothpaste.
“Any chance I could borrow some of yours? I’ll buy a new one in the morning.” I said. This question would have been met an instant “yeah, sure” from my actual friends. But here it was met with hesitation.
“I only brought enough for myself,” said Jeopardy, averting her eyes. I turned to PackingCubes.
“Um, yeah, okay…let me get it for you,” she said.
The reluctance in her voice annoyed me. I could tell the thought of a stranger using her things bothered her in a way that only neurotic, OCD people get bothered, which in turn bothered me back.
I was raised in a family that disabused me of these tendencies at a young age. Neurosis was not to be indulged in my household, my father had denounced it as “for the Jews.” It was to be ridiculed into submission. Any time I expressed some petty worry, fear, or obsessive thought, my father would tell me some mildly disturbing story about his service in Vietnam. It was poor parenting but it did condition me to bully myself out of not only of vocalizing those thoughts, but thinking them in the first place. While that probably sounds horrible, I view it as the greatest gift I received from my parents—more valuable than anything I genetically inherited from them by far.
I thanked her two times too many, brushed my teeth, and headed to bed without a thought in my head other than how I was going to utterly smash a boozy brunch buffet the next morning.
Both of the women were up at the crack of dawn. My efforts to sleep as late as I could were interrupted by PackingCubes.
“Uh, hey…where is the toothpaste cap?” she called from the bathroom.
The question hit me hard. It wasn’t there? On the toothpaste? I rolled out of bed to investigate. I saw for myself. It was gone, and nowhere to be found.
Where could it be? I looked for this motherfucking cap for 15 minutes. That is 14 minutes and 30 seconds more than I would have ever spent looking for a cap if a second person that I had just met had not been involved. I could not find this thing anywhere. It didn’t look like it could fit down the drain, it wasn’t on the floor, behind the toilet, or in the toilet. No, it had disappeared to a completely different dimension: it was in the tesseract, in the Zona, in Brigadoon, in the hollow moon. When airline pilots report mysterious shapes whizzing past their aircraft at alarming speeds, it is without a doubt the toothpaste cap even though our government will swear that it’s nothing more than a rogue “Despicable Me” minion Mylar balloon.
I ended my search efforts, but PackingCubes continued to tear up the room. This was terribly awkward for me to watch as I lay on the bed playing with my phone. She just kept repeating things like “I just don’t know where it could have gone?” to which I would respond “haha, yeah. it’s sum real bermuda triangle shit” because who cares.
As she continued to look for it, I felt a burning sensation in my stomach, like a tiny version of my father’s head was going to shoot out of my mouth like the alien in “Alien.” Except instead of hissing at her it would just tell her some anecdote about pouring a packet of Tang into some swamp water to mask the taste of parasites & iodine tablets. A story to make her feel stupid for ever giving a shit about a tiny plastic hat worn by a tube of Colgate Optic White. I closed my eyes, listened to her shuffle about while I entertained bad thoughts. I suppressed the urge to just start claiming that the cap had never existed at all. To look her in the eye and, in my best Yung Thug voice, say: there was no cap, no cap (fr) (fr).
The next day, we had a few hours to kill before an early dinner and I desperately needed to get out of the room. The vibes had been off since the cap had gone to toothpaste cap heaven (RIP), and I felt a bit persona non grata.
“Poker?” I texted the Bride.
The thought of going to Las Vegas and not gambling is sacrilegious to me. In fact, gambling is one of the reasons I thought the Bride had picked Vegas—she and I had learned to play together, and I was disappointed when she hit my text back with a “nah” like I was chopped liver. Not only because I wanted company, but because it was starting to sink that this would not be the party I had hoped it to be.
It had taken me years of playing hold’em with friends and online to become casino ready. My first few live casino games were nothing short of disastrous: I was so nervous I broadcast my tells so plainly the other players might as well have had x-ray vision. All of that changed after I read an interview by a professional player who had casually mentioned he used beta-blockers to calm a hand tremor while playing. The statement was intriguing enough for me to put aside my disinclination toward pharmaceuticals and get a scrip.
It was a game-changer. Within an hour of popping a pill, the warble in my voice vanished, my hands steadied, my breathing became slow and measured—all the things Tito’s used to do but without the blow to my central nervous system.
I had been playing for a decade at this point. I was good, but not great. But certainly good enough to sit and make a little money at a 1/2 game, though how much I enjoyed it depended entirely on the composition of the table.
I wandered down to the poker room, withdrew a fairly substantial sum in chips, put my name in for a table, and waited. But even under the warm, velvety blanket of propranolol I was nervous at this part. 9/10 times, the players are all men. Some too friendly, too eager for a woman at the table. Some not friendly at all, women should be out shopping or at the penny slots. And of course some just didn’t care, money has no gender.
The wait was short, only around 10 minutes. As soon as I sat down, one of the men—a jovial older Italian-American man— yelled “Sunshine!” and outstretched his arms at me. It made me turn beet red.
“Finally some fuckin’ sunshine,” he said more quietly as I settled in.
I folded the few first few hands to get my bearings and get a feel for the table, and then started playing conservatively. After two hours, I had won a few big hands and was up, could push people around a bit. But then I got bored. And if I had wanted to be bored I would have stayed in the room. I wanted to play more. It is a game, after all.
Eventually I was dealt ace / queen suited (spades) as my hole cards. Beautiful cards. The flop was intoxicating: another ace, another queen, and a ten. I bet heavy, probably too heavy with the flush draw on the table. The folds came fast from everyone except from a lean old man at the end of the table.
He had to have been in his 80s. Maybe 70s. It was impossible to tell; his skin was tanned to moccasin leather. Old Las Vegas skin. He wore a blue track suit and hid behind mirrored sunglasses. He wasn’t sociable. He sat silently, eating mixed nuts and reading an unmarked hardcover while selectively playing hands. He threw folded cards on the table like they were old parking tickets. He was a shark, it was obvious. I knew it but I couldn’t get away from my pairs. A harmless deuce on the river. I checked, but he continued to raise. Every bone in my body screamed “he has the straight” but I was in the quicksand. He eventually went all-in with a sizeable stack, which was nothing short of a gift—it finally made me fold and eat my $300 loss.
He flipped his cards. Of course he had the nuts. He wasn’t required to show. This was just his final act of mercy to me. “Be careful” is what the act of showing said. “There are far better players here than you.”
I started playing tight again after the loss, my tail between my legs. Not long thereafter the Italian abruptly announced his exit and stopped over to gift me his remaining $100 in chips. I politely refused once, but then immediately acquiesced when I saw he wouldn’t take no for an answer. It was an embarrassing, public exchange. A young guy at the other end of the table rolled his eyes at us, as if the Italian and I had been in cahoots the entire time. The Italian’s vacant seat was eventually filled by a slightly drunk German. He was fresh out of a work conference, and was exactly what I needed after the bite from the shark.
Every bachelorette party will entail at least one compulsory group activity. It will always be a variation of the following:
Wine tasting
Drag show
Yoga
Arts and crafts
Spa day
Strip club / burlesque show
That’s it. There’s nothing else. Sometimes the yoga will be Pilates, sometimes the wine will be beer, and sometimes the drag brunch will be a drag dinner, but it’s 100% of the same shit 100% of the time.
For our activity, the MoH chose the basic option: $60 tickets to the Rupaul’s Drag Race show at the Flamingo. While I’m not particularly keen on drag shows, they are not my least favorite group activity for three reasons: you can drink during it, you don’t have to talk to anyone during it, and if you’re not feeling it, you can simply astral project your spirit to literally anywhere else, including, but not limited to, the Carrot Top show at the Luxor—a residency that will continue long after the sun has supernova’d.
I decided to spend my evening at the Flamingo by indulging in a little schadenfreude and reminiscing about one of my favorite bachelorette party horror stories. In 2019, one of my girlfriends spent 7 hours in a car to drive to Salem, Massachusetts where she was forced to participate in a “witches’ broom decorating session” at an establishment that I shall not publicly slander. The icing on the cake was that she had no ability to even keep the broom, as she lives abroad as was quoted $100 to ship it home and also lacked the witchy skill to simply ride it back over the Atlantic.
Even now it makes me grin ear to ear to think of her credit card being charged $89 dollars so she could handcraft a shitty little non-functional broom as a woman named Willow desperately tried to upsell her “extras” to express herself more: a sparrow skull, a piece of rose quartz, some chintzy little metal charms—each $3 trinket a mirror into the decorator’s very soul. “This is me. I am as unique as this decorative broom.”
There’s something beautifully American about what we’ve done to Salem, Massachusetts. A town made famous by a rather dark period in American history that claimed the lives of 14 innocent women reduced to a consumerist amusement park for Neil Gaiman superfans. If only the ghosts of our great, great grandmothers could see us weave a $5 peacock feather into some dyed purple sorghum before heading out for bang bang shrimp at “The Dire Wolf Tavern.” We are truly the daughters of the witches you couldn’t burn.
If you’re asking yourself why my friend didn’t just sit it out, the Broom Workshop website was clear about its anti-voyeurism policy:
No “watchers” please! I’m sure this rule was memorialized in writing because of one of two types of people: curmudgeons like myself who said “yeah I’m not fuckin doing that” but still went to show broom support <3, or some guy who walked in and started cranking his hog to a bunch of mid-30s women in Lularoe Halloween leggings as they tied together a bunch of crap someone literally picked off the goddamn ground. Also lol @ “If late, you may lose your spot!” Imagine bulldozing into the broom room like Kramer at 6:01 p.m. (ET) & being like “yeah dude I just got in off the waitlist, skin of my teeth!”
I may have had to watch drag queens half-ass their choreography as bunch of drunk straight women guffawed in the audience, but at least I didn’t have to pay a hundred dollars to make a useless broom and then take a picture with it like I was proud of what I had done.
If the bachelorette party occurs in a warm climate “together time” at the pool or beach will also be mandatory. Saturday was our leisure day for which we were instructed to arrive at the MGM Grand lazy river by exactly noon.
I was utterly unprepared for the vibe. Despite the unbearable, near triple-digit heat, the place was a fucking zoo. The lazy river itself was bumper to bumper floaties, people weren’t even moving. The already tight “traffic lane” was made even narrower by the floatie-less patrons loitering against the sides, packed ass-to-ass Requiem for a Dream style.
Instead of renting a $1200 cabana that seats eight, the MoH reserved a $500 daybed that comfortably sat four. This strategy ensured that the six of us would be locked in a hunger games-type competition for shade the entire duration of our 4-hour reservation
The daybed was like a lifeboat mobbed. The Bride squarely in the middle, protected on all sides. The Titanic Rose. The rest of us strewn about the perimeter, bits and pieces of our exposed limbs incinerated by the midday sun. Carl Orff’s “O Fortuna” playing in the background as all the bachelorettes waged a turf war for the scarce shade. With each inch of precious real estate I claimed as my own, the arm or leg of one my compatriots was scorched in equal measure.
The MoH solicited interest in floating down the lazy river, which entailed a $25 surcharge to purchase a small pink innertube. There was no rental option which ensured that by 5 p.m. (ET) the entire pool would be littered with cheap abandoned plastic.
“Definitely not.” I said as a portly little lad floated by, fully clothed, eating a basket of chicken tenders and fries cradled in his groin area. The sight of it made me recoil and momentarily catastrophize about the fall of Western civilization, a thought that immediately left my head when a frosty corona was placed into my hand by our attractive, young pool butler.
The whole place was disgusting. The pool bathroom reeked of piss, which I guess is good because it reassured me that at least some of these people weren’t just pissing directly into the pool. I sauntered onto the end the bathroom line. In front of me, a doughy middle-aged man braved the bathroom barefoot, not a care in the world. Behind me, an absolute dime of a young lady wearing the tiniest bikini I’ve ever seen, the kind that only women with very little pussy surface area can wear. I had to do a double-take.
“Oh, you can go ahead of me.” I told her, stepping to the side.
“Um, are you sure?” She asked, confused.
“Yeah,” I said coolly. “I’m waiting for someone.”
My answer made no sense, but it was enough to satisfy her. She said thanks and skipped ahead of me, which meant I got to spend the next seven minutes staring at her nearly bare Latina ass instead of some trucknuts guy’s red hotdog pack neck.
The bathroom line at the lazy river brought out the inner snob out in me. Could we not have chosen a hotel with a slightly better pool scene? Somewhere where the patrons were less lumpy and kool-aid colored? I wanted to whisk my new beautiful best friend away to the Encore pool where you’re not allowed to eat brisket in the water. The water is still 90% piss there like every pool in Vegas, but at least it flows out of bladders tucked inside of slightly more attractive people. Although shallow to admit, that does make me feel better about accidentally getting some of it in my mouth. Sorry.
The sun eventually broke, giving us all a much-needed reprieve from the desert heat. The Bride moved to one of the built-in loungers semi-submerged in the pool, and I followed like a dog. Her long, brown curls bobbed in the water, skimming on top the thin layer of oil and grime.
I asked how she felt about the wedding. It was all planned so quickly. Her mother had been fighting cancer for three years at this point. A few months after the Bride met her fiancé, her mother stopped chemotherapy and switched to palliative care. This decision had the unintended consequence of setting into motion a race against the clock for the Bride and her brother to achieve as many of their life milestones as quickly as possible.
I listened to her dissect her mild anxieties about having children, whether it would change her relationship with her fiancé, stall her career. I didn’t take any of it too seriously. I always thought her destined for motherhood. The woman exuded patience, warmth, and humor. Kids flocked to her like moths to a flame, and she loved them back. But she liked talking about the choice, enjoying the agency over her own life, even if she knew where all her roads would ultimately lead.
She looked as beautiful I’ve ever seen her there, lounging in that filthy water. She rambled softly about her mother micromanaging all of the wedding details: everything from the cut and color of the napkins, to the type of wine served, to the order of the speeches. It made me smile—the tone of her voice was infused with that signature mix of amusement, irritation, and compassion that the low-maintenance offspring of high-strung parents tend to have. The Bride didn’t care about any of these things. What a beautiful gift to her mother, I thought. The gift of distraction.
As I listened to her talk, I felt a sudden wave of sadness wash over me. The Bride had certainly done quite a bit for me over the years as well. This woman carried my semi-unconscious body out of Snake and Jake’s Christmas Club Lounge in the Bywater, held my hand on a rather terrifying white-water rafting excursion, cried with me in her car after we had both fucked up royally at our new, stressful jobs that we had worked so hard to get. I don’t remember why I was in her car or where we were going to, or coming from. I just remember being there with her parked outside somewhere, crying and laughing in alternating breaths, crushed together under the weight of our newfound adulthood.
It was all over. Not the friendship, of course. Just the core memory-making period of it. There was no more spontaneity, no more of that endless availability that attends youth. How easy it is to make memories when you’re single and childless, when your parents are still immortal, when your job is just another dumb job with a thousand others just like it. It’s a time when friends are everything because you have nothing else.
I thought of her smoking outside after class again, waiting for me. But just briefly. A few moments of drunken solipsism is all you’re permitted in a place like Vegas.
Regardless of each attendee’s economic status, you will be obligated to attend at least one “fancy dinner” at every bachelorette party. The objective of this dinner is to dissatisfy everyone in their unique way. Here, the MoH made a rather on-the-nose choice: a “dinner and a show” restaurant called Superfrico tucked away at the end of a dark corridor in the Cosmopolitan. The genre of cuisine was labelled “Psychedelic Italian,” a term I thought had been retired completely in the 1950s after Lasagna Day in the MKULTRA canteen at the Allen Memorial Institute.
As the hostess ushered us to our table, I spied a woman twerking on a ledge and throwing playing cards at some diners. That’s when I knew we were in for some real bullshit.
Once we sat down I immediately ordered two bottles of red wine for the table—a move that was met with some protest.
“I’m only going to have a glass!” said Jeopardy in what was clearly an attempt to discourage me from ordering what she viewed as too much starter wine.
“Yeah, I’m just doing a mocktail,” added PackingCubes.
“You do you.” I fired back. I needed the wine and the back-up wine. The thought of having an empty glass as I watched some half-naked Spiegelworld indentured servant blink in Morse code to a table of start-up devs sent chills down my spine.
After the drink order, we were violently coerced by the waiter into ordering the signature “tableside mozzarella” — an absolute steal at only $99 dollars. A waive of relief washed over me when this dish was ordered. For years I had searched in vain for an answer to the question of whether mozzarella cheese tastes better when it’s hand-pulled in front of you by a coked-up 27-year old magician’s apprentice. The answer is yes.
Everyone gushes about how food just tastes better when it’s made with love by some 90-year old nonna. But what about food made with something stronger than love? What about food made with American late-stage capitalist despair? The despair that forces our creatives—yes, even the talented ones—into grueling and sometimes humiliating service jobs, some of which pay more than the most lucrative writers on Substack earn in a year. When the handlebar mustache guy wheeled out the little cheese trolley and began his “here’s how cheese works” bit, I couldn’t help but think that even doing gay porn would be less debasing than this. Though perhaps not as lucrative.
Instead of adopting any cohesive ordering system, the MoH became overwhelmed and informed everyone that she would order a bunch of dishes for the table and that if anyone wanted anything else they should just order it. The process devolved into bedlam, a demented culinary version of “Whose Line is it Anyway?” as the women prattled off what seemed like every dish on the menu. I nearly fainted when one of the girls lobbed in an order of fried mozzarella followed by a margarita pizza, which I considered a near fatal proportion of one single type of cheese.
Over the next two hours a flood of $25 salads, $30 appetizers, and $40 pizzas began arriving at our table. Then, a couple of $50 fish picatas and one $90 tomahawk ordered by Jeopardy that, once served, caused me to say “wowee, we got a real DON DRAPER over here” in a stupid mid-Atlantic old-timey accent that amused no one and made me yearn for the hard curve of a vaudevillian hook around my neck.
Entertainers came and went over the course of the meal, each with their own mediocre gimmick. The food was good, but worth nowhere near the cost or service. Plates were not cleared in any timely fashion so we were all forced to confront the hellish bacchanal we had created while a burlesque dancer gyrated in the background. The excess food left on the table alone would have made Caligula himself condemn the wastefulness of it all.
Just when it couldn’t get any worse, I watched a mime lurk out of the backroom where the entertainers were presumably all fucking each other before being booted out into the dining room by their handlers. I wanted to scream “Get back in there!” when he started awkwardly miming about, ebbing closer to our table, to me. What the fuck even was this? I hated it and wanted it to be over.
But it wasn’t over. One of the women had ordered the “Dessert Parade.” I’m too angry to elaborate on what that is, but rest assured, it is stupid. I took my revenge by ordering two $20 glasses of sambuca, which caused the teetotalers to glare at me like I was some sot.
Of course, all our petty grievances vanished when the $1500 bill came. We were all in pari delicto, each of us a disgusting little piggy who deserved to die. To die and go straight to little piggy hell.
At the conclusion of every bachelorette party, participants are asked to vote on whether the “big night out” was the best night of their lives. If any single participant votes “no, it was not,” a leather-gloved finger in a control room presses a red button that incinerates all the bachelorettes and the Bride too. The immolation is swift thanks to the highly flammable crepe paper “bachelorette” sashes and custom embroidered “#she said yes!” t-shirts lovingly crafted by child-laborers in a Guangdong factory—shirts that smell faintly of kerosene for reasons my brain won’t let me explore in a Substack that consistently ranks #127 in “Humor (Free)”.
While this actually doesn’t happen, that’s what the pressure to have a fun “night out” at most bachelorette parties actually feels like to me. Especially in a place like Vegas. The superficial Superfrico dinner left me fiending for a real good time. Something authentic. I actually quite like Las Vegas once you get away from the pumped-in oxygen, the chlorinated fountains, the buffets, the stagnant pee pools, the blackout curtains, and all the other artifice intended to make you forget that you’re in a wasteland.
“Strip sucks, I know a better place.” I said it like an asshole, but I couldn’t risk making a limp-dick suggestion. If you want to avoid push-back, just be resolute. It works every time, unless, of course, someone in the group is more powerful than you.
I took them to Frankie’s Tiki, a reliable spot that’s guaranteed to be dank, smoky, and fun. But the crowd was strange that night: a sea of rather nerdy looking men, many of them wearing lanyards. Sensing my confusion, a woman leaned over and informed me that it was something called “DEF CON,” apparently the largest hacking and security conference in the world.
I loved this for us. I scanned the room: the autism levels were off the charts. These guys looked like they spent their childhoods dribbling a basketball made out of thermometer mercury. The whole bar stunk of reddit, pineapple juice, and despair.
It was hilarious how quickly the Hackercon guys divided our bachelorette squad into two factions: repulsed and intrigued. PackingCubes, Jeopardy, and Cornfed wanted nothing to do with them. But not I, nor the Bride, nor the MoH. No, we would embrace them with open arms. Give us your autistic, your dorks, your balding masses yearning to breathe free.
At some point, I became very aware that the other three bachelorettes wanted nothing more than for these socially inept men to leave the entire group alone, which only fueled my desire to drag them into our conversations. I sic’d them on the girls like they were flying monkeys. I had to endure CapGate, the drag show, and the cheese trolley. Why should Father_Karine be the only one to suffer?
I woke up feeling like absolute hell. The tannins mixed with Tiki sugar gave me a splitting headache, which was compounded by the fact that my blood-mozzarella level was still a .12—well over the legal limit in every state except New Jersey.
We ordered an uber to the airport. A woman picked us up in quite possibly the shittiest little car I’ve ever seen. When I tried to get in the back, I saw 5 unopened dominos “hot and ready” pizzas on the seat.
“Just throw em in the back,” she said. I collected the pizzas and placed them in the trunk area, which was full of carbage. As soon as she accelerated, the pizzas slid and flopped on their sides.
Our flights home were delayed by several hours due to a bomb threat made by a man who had missed his flight home. I stared at the people mindlessly pulling the levers on the airport slots outside the gate and thought “I get it.” The thought of staying in Las Vegas a minute too long was enough to make anyone snap.
I expect most people leave a destination bachelorette feeling the same way: broke, exhausted, self-conscious, depleted in more ways than one. Even as an extrovert my battery was low. Why did we do this again? Could we not have stayed closer to home? If the point of a bachelorette party is to make new memories, perhaps a multi-day, meticulously planned trip somewhere exciting—with all its highs and lows—is the most fertile memory-making ground. But at what point does it bleed into more hollow consumerism: an endless, fiery inferno of monogrammed Esty junk, Nikki beach pop-ups, included gratuities, drag queens, cabanas, and mimosa flights? When is it just too much?
Perhaps the worst thing about an expensive, annoying destination bachelorette party is that you can never, ever complain to the Bride about it. All you can do is simply internalize it and bide your time—in my case five long years—until it’s your turn to get revenge. I couldn’t go back in time and re-do my own affair, but this past year I was put in charge of planning our mutual friend’s hen party. It was my time to shine and be the emotional terrorist I was born to be.
I had devised a trip designed to really put everyone out, full four days in Prague—a location that was convenient to the London-based Fiancé only. My plans, however, were somewhat foiled when the Bride announced that she was pregnant and due just four days after the prospective return date. Whether she purposefully got pregnant to avoid a multi-day Eastern European bachelorette party with me at the helm, one can only speculate.
The Prague trip went swimmingly. On the last night, however, I sat alone with the Fiancé at an unremarkable bar. It was late; the other bachelorettes had gone to bed. The Fiancé mentioned getting one final round, and I was immediately struck by that same sadness I felt five years ago in that dirty Las Vegas pool. A melancholy that’s only able to seep into my body when it’s been compromised by alcohol and surrounded by its dearest friends. It’s the shadow of a skeleton with glowing red eyes that whispers in the ear things like “Is this it? Is this the last time the two of you take a trip? Is this the last time you share an adventure? Is this the last memory you make together before it all turns to an endless sea of routine text check-ins and double dinner dates that end at 9 p.m.?’” And the shadow wears me down until I can’t tell whether it wants me to mourn the natural evolution of a friendship or just my own waning youth.
“Let’s go dancing,” I urged her. “I know where we should go.”
She fought hard, all the typical excuses: too drunk already, this place is fine, it’s already late, early flight home. Each excuse was met with a carefully crafted rebuttal designed to make her feel guilty about spending her last night in Prague sipping a beer at a quiet cafe-bar and chatting about the wedding.
She eventually relented. Fine, let’s go. This one’s always been bad at saying no to me, a trait that I love so dearly about her and have always taken advantage of without a modicum of guilt or remorse whatsoever. A loyal sidekick so pliable it’s as if she was made of clay.
She allowed me to drag her out to one of those giant industrial warehouse clubs where I proceeded to puppeteer her limp, 37-year old body around for two straight hours. She has zero recollection of her time there, but I had fun which is the most important thing. While I dislike EDM as music, I do enjoy it as a sensory experience. The unrelenting strobing, the slightly sweet glycerin smell of the man-made haze, the low beat pulsating in your bone marrow. There’s no artistry about it, but it’s all delightfully disorienting. Even moreso when combined with a substance or two.
At 4 a.m., I had my fill, abruptly declared the night over and stuffed her into a cab. When we got back to the room, I made the mistake leaving her unattended while I brushed my teeth—my routine interrupted by a terrible, terrible noise. I ran to the bedroom only to find the Fiancé totally unconscious on the floor next to an overturned side table and on top of a very large—and now very broken—lamp.
I panicked and hoisted her body off the shards of broken ceramic, scanning for spilt blood and open wounds. Not a scratch! A real unbreakable Bruce Willis bitch. I tried to heave her body onto the bed but didn’t get enough momentum—she hit the sideboard and slumped back to the floor. I tried a slower approach and managed to roll her up onto the bed, still fully clothed. I knew from prior experience that getting her into pajamas was impossible. Best I could do was remove her boots and whip them across the room. If we hadn’t already received a noise complaint at the “voted #1 most romantic hotel in Prague” we certainly wouldn’t get one now.
The morning came fast and hard, as it always does after a night like this.
When she awoke and saw the damage, I explained what happened, taking pains to really twist the knife by vividly describing her unconscious body on top of the broken lamp shards. For the next ten minutes I watched her obsess over the broken lamp, pacing the room and muttering half-baked interrogatives like “Whaa…?” and “But how…?,” the ancient city spires peaking through the windows in the background. Millions of items had been broken here since the first settlements in the 9th century A.D.—bodies, too, split open on cobblestone, in beds, on Petřín Hill. And, because I can’t identify any one such broken item or person with specificity, none of it must have been that important.
I lay there semi-naked and akimbo on the bed, snickering at her suffering. If she had turned to look at me, which she refused to do, she would have undoubtedly have been met with the Father_Karine version of devil John Candy from Planes, Trains, and Automobiles.
“Do you think they’re gonna charge us for it?” She asked.
“Oh yeah,” I said without a beat.
“How much do you think it’s going to cost?” She asked.
“I dunno.” I said. “Looked antique. Six, maybe seven hundred euros. At least.”
“Are you fucking for real?” She wheezed.
I laughed hard. I had no idea what the lamp would cost and frankly didn’t care. But her inner turmoil over this broken lighting fixture was priceless to me. I knew it wasn’t about the lamp, but rather her indignity for being so out of control at such an age. It was disgraceful, really.
Just as she let loose a pained groan into the pillow, my phone rang. When I answered, an agent from KLM Royal Dutch Airlines informed me that my flight was oversold, I had been booted off and rebooked on a new one, and my 90 minute layover was now a six hour layover. I would be sent a $300 voucher for my trouble and was further informed, in very polite terms, that if I didn’t like it I could shove it up my ass. God couldn’t come down and strangle me personally but he could certainly send the Dutch to do his dirty work like a coward.
During check-out the desk agent asked if we had anything from the minibar the night prior, an opportunity I used to volunteer that we had consumed one table lamp in addition to the sour cream and onion pringles. She frowned and escorted us into a back room where we were detained while management conducted a full room inspection and checked the price list so they could bill us. I personally thought it was overkill, but I’m sure the policy has its roots in a more severe drunken incident that absolutely devastated some room at this lovers’ hotel.
We sat silently in Czech naughty girl hotel jail for what seemed like an eternity when suddenly my phone vibrated. It was a text from the Bride: a picture of her daughter, born only hours earlier. She was as pink as the blanket in which she was swaddled. All pink, except for a rather curious outgrowth of hair on her tiny head that was fire-engine red. It was something else. If only the Bride’s mother could have seen it.
We passed the time in that back room by looking at her sweet little face and speculating about this tiny new human that looked so much like our friend—that is, except for that hair. We both noted the time of birth in the announcement: 11:05 p.m. (ET) on April Fool’s Day 2025, within the hour this stupid ugly lamp had shattered into what seemed like a million pieces on the old wooden floor.
“Are you guys home yet?” The Bride texted.
“Not yet, the hotel won’t let us check-out because we broke an irreplaceable table lamp.” I responded.
“LOL. You fucking idiots. Sad I missed it, we have a lot to catch up on,” said the Bride.
I could hear her laugh, see her grin through the words on the screen. And in that moment the previous night shadow had disappeared so completely I wondered what I had been fussing about it all. Everything was, and always will be, as good as it ever was.
The manager came back to give us the bill. The look on his face was dire, but it was too late. The Fiancé had already joined me in not caring one bit.
Not that I'm planning to get married soon or like ever but you have inspired me to plot whatever the opposite of this is for my own bachelorette. Sweat lodge? 4 day fast in the wilderness? DMT? (Either way, I'll consider keeping the mime). My friends will rue the nights I spent drinking pink whitney and wearing a dress specifically engineered to clash with my skin tone on their behalf. Love em, but damn does the wedding/bachelorette industry corrupt HARD.
Thanks for the laughs, they were very cathartic!
I'm a 20 year old man so I know nobody who is getting married but I imagine a bachelor party is like this but messier and smells worse