Saunas, Spliffs, and Tuna Fish

There once was a planet called Earth. Earth had many different species inhabiting it but it was mostly dominated by humans. Humans as a whole were vastly different from one another but they all carried some basic similarities. These animals called humans mostly tried to survive, but there were some who didn’t. This is a story about someone who didn’t.

Out of all the weird, interesting, sometimes grotesque places that Robert woke up in, this particular morning was the weirdest, most interesting, and maybe not the most grotesque but certainly in his top three, which is a rather impressive statement for someone who once woke up naked in the ball pit of a Chuck E Cheese, which is a restaurant catered to children, at three in the morning, the store closed and dark. Robert was sure he had finally died.

He didn’t.

Roberts continuing to remain alive had brought him here, in a sauna of a Las Vegas hotel, dressed head to toe in a classy black and white tuxedo, still tucked in but his clothes were more stuck to him like a bathing suit to your leg after leaving the pool, almost painted on, than he was actually wearing it.

A sauna is a room which humans made that got very hot and forced the humans to perspire, which would help improve their health by ridding themselves of the toxins in their bodies. Usually humans come in naked with a towel around their waist to hide their genitalia, which made other people uncomfortable sometimes but sometimes it didn’t.

A tuxedo is a formal outfit that humans wore to classy events like weddings or award shows, but generally not in saunas.

For someone like me or you, and I happened to be in the sauna when this all happened, waking up in a sauna wearing a tuxedo would be more than alarming, would bring upon some kind of mini shock to our system, and it’s safe to say that we wouldn’t remain calm. Or in the sauna.

Robert did both.

I’m not a small man and the sound of my body sitting down in the sauna startled Robert, but he didn’t fully wake. It took him a few seconds as he went for a deep breath until he started with a coughing fit like I’ve never seen before, filled with dry heaves, bulging eyes, and some insane looking face contortions.

I asked Robert if he was okay and he told me he was fine. His cough, he said, was brought about by his incessant smoking of marijuana cigarettes, mixed with tobacco. This is a method of taking two different types of leaves, one proven to bring upon a vicious disease called cancer, while the other is used to to numb the pain of that disease, cancer, into a paper rolled tube, lighting one end on fire and inhaling the smoke from the other end deep into your lungs. Generally the people of Earth inhaled oxygen into their lungs to help them continue to live. Some people however liked to inhale this smoke instead. Robert was one of those people. He wasn’t interested in surviving.

Robert reached into the inside of his tuxedo jacket and pulled out a cigarette, lit one end and inhaled from the other. The cigarette was soggier than any cigarette than I’ve seen before, making it look droopy and sad. Additionally, if you’ve never been to Earth or maybe just not the sauna of a hotel, it’s against all social etiquette to light a cigarette in a sauna, being that a sauna is a place to get healthy, and marijuana cigarettes mixed with tobacco leaves are some of the things that cause people to go to the sauna to get healthy.

I didn’t mind.

I was curious to see how long Robert can smoke in a sauna and not pass out. This was the equivalent of his lungs putting on ankle weights and trying to run on the bottom of the ocean. As excruciating as it was, his incomprehensible display of not passing out was even more impressive. It was almost as if this weren’t his first time doing this.

The silence was as palpable as the smoke and heat filled air. Robert made a circle with his lips and blew big rings of smoke in my general direction, waiting to see if this juvenile behavior offended me.

It didn’t.

I occasionally made smoke rings as well. Just not in a Las Vegas hotel sauna.

I asked Robert if he were from around here, from Las Vegas, and he said “I wasn’t born or nothin’ here, but I may as well have been.”

I’m not the best judge of body language but my gut was telling me Robert was not in the mood for conversation. I closed my eyes and felt the beads of sweat rolling down my bare chest.

The moment I started to nod off Robert shrugged off the silence and asked me what day it was. I felt to a certain degree that Robert specifically waited for that exact moment, to disturb my just achieved slumber.

“Saturday” I told him, and Robert nodded thoughtfully like I just gave him the piece of the puzzle which explains why he woke up in a Tuxedo in a Las Vegas hotel sauna.

Robert went back into the inside of his tuxedo pocket and pulled out a cell phone. It was a junky looking one I thought. People nowadays had much fancier ones, which could pretty much do anything from anywhere, making it one of the most powerful tools on Earth. Humans however, used it mostly for crushing candies and following the lives of celebrities.

Roberts clunky looking cell phone was sweating as bad as we were, and the screen was flickering different colors, which might look neat but it made the phone difficult to use. Robert had 19 missed calls. I know this because he told me “I have nineteen missed calls.”

Even though Robert appeared to be having a conversation with me, I felt like he might have uttered the same words out loud even if I wasn’t there, if he was by himself, in full tuxedo with his shirt tucked in, sitting in a Las Vegas hotel sauna saying out loud “I have nineteen missed calls.”

That being said, I wasn’t sure if Robert anticipated me inquiring further into his nineteen missed calls or not. I did anyway. You could say I’m adventurous like that, though my wife might not agree. She couldn’t.

She’s dead.

We buried her dead body in the ground after a man came into the grocery store she was in and shot her down with a gun.

A gun is an instrument humans made to permanently displace of other people or animals.

The shooters name was Billy Fresden. Billy was seventeen years old and got fired from his job at a local fast food restaurant. A fast food restaurant is an establishment which produces unhealthy foods at a furious pace, at little cost. These “restaurants” were usually run and frequented by poorer people, who found it harder to make their own company, and instead worked for someone else for not a lot of money, so that that person can have too much of it.

Billy’s parents came to America from Russia having been swept by the fever of “The American Dream”, which was supposed to mean being able to own your own business and live however you’d like, but ended up being flipping a hybrid meat and other chemical hamburger so someone one else could live their own dream.

Billy was desperate for food, which he and his family needed to keep on living, and he couldn’t afford any more since he made so little money flipping quasi chemical hamburgers so that one guy can live his dream. Billy took a gun, shot some people, and grabbed some eggs. Later that night he and his family died from food poisoning.

Robert however was still alive, and in front of me, though I suspected he wished a little bit that he wasn’t either of those things. I know this because he told it to me later on when he said “I’m fuckin’ pissed off that I’m still fuckin’ beatin’, and worse of it is that I’m sittin’ in front of your wrinkly fuckin’ balls.”

Robert was alluding to my genitals, which have sunk with age and lost whatever aesthetic appeal they never possessed. I was sitting naked, without a towel, which although is not customary in most Las Vegas hotel sauna’s, I didn’t expect Robert to care, and I didn’t expect anyone else to come in there at such a weird hour.

I asked Robert about the nineteen missed calls and he told me that sixteen of them were from his wife, one was from a video store, which he suspected was calling him because he owed them fees in overages for renting a movie called “Moving Out: The History of Billy Joel’s Moving Day to his New Hampton’s Home”, and the last call was from his lawyer, but he wasn’t sure and didn’t seem to care too much. Robert didn’t seem to care too much about anything, like the fact that he only accounted for eighteen of the nineteen missed calls, although maybe he was simply hiding something from me.

I asked Robert if he was worried that his wife called him sixteen times, that maybe something serious happened (I know, how adventurous of me to continue to the conversation), to which he replied “Well….I got married last night.”

I congratulated him calmly, almost nonchalantly, because I sensed that this marriage wasn’t something that Robert was too excited about. I know this because he told me.

“Thanks…..I guess. I’m honestly not too excited about this marriage, I’m sure my wife’s not either.”

I was about to inquire further but Robert must have assumed that I was about to ask a question so he continued to elaborate. I know this because he told it to me.

He told me that he came to Las Vegas for a trade expo and left his wife at home, in Tampa Bay, Florida. While here, he indulged himself with some wild gambling and whoring around. He won a million dollar jackpot from a slot machine and married a whore, which explained why he was in a tuxedo.

A whore was a person who had sex with some one for money. In Las Vegas this was a legal business, elsewhere it was not. Humans could not agree on what should be law and what should not be.

The whore that Robert chose was a blonde woman named Candy, who had an obvious eye for someone who just won a million dollar slot machine jackpot. After Robert won the money, Candy performed fellatio on Robert in a bathroom and did not charge him a single cent. Robert was honored.

Candy did this a few more times, and mixed in a narcotic called Ecstasy in his beverage.

Ecstasy is a chemical which tells your brain to flood itself with the chemical that makes you feel good. A brain is the mix of goup and chemicals in a humans head which helps them eat, breathe, and do pretty much anything they need to do. A brain is necessary for survival.

The chemicals in the brain, called neurotransmitters, were supposed to link smart, survival behavior with feeling good, like reproduction or eating, which both felt good and were both vitally important in terms of survival and keeping the human race alive.

Ecstasy is a chemical which told your brain to make you feel really really good for no reason other than you ate a pill that is telling your brain to do so. Some scientists believed that it can help cure depression, which is when someone who’s chemicals in their brains are telling them to be sad when they shouldn’t be, while others argued that taking a pill to feel really really good makes it harder to feel good at other appropriate times afterwards. Additionally, Ecstasy also has the effect of eating away at the mass of your brain.

A brain is necessary for survival yet people like Candy and Robert liked to take Ecstasy and eat away at their brain even though they knew their brain is what helps them survive. Robert didn’t care about surviving. Candy did, but only slightly more.

I stopped asking questions because Robert seemed to be the type of person who liked to hear himself tell a good story, uninterrupted.

“I took the mil in hard cash, paid the taxes up front, came out with like, I dunno, six hundred thou or something like that”.

Robert took out another cigarette from his tuxedo pocket and lit one end with the burning end of his still lit cigarette, then put both in his mouth and inhaled. What would have likely blacked me out was acting like an asthma inhaler to Robert, which was something humans used to help their lungs breath when they were having trouble doing it on their own.

Some humans had asthma from doing damage to their lungs and some had it because their parents did, or their grandparents did, which didn’t seem very fair.

“Pretty sure the cun’ is still up in the room. We partied a bit too hard if ya know what I’m sayin’ old man” Robert said yawning. The marijuana was starting to get to his head, making him tired and slurring his speech. Although he may always have slurred his speech, I’m not quite sure.

Robert motioned his arm towards me, asking me if I wanted to inhale from his marijuana and tobacco filled cigarette. I took it from him, inhaled, and blew smoke rings back in Roberts face. He smirked.

“Old man’s got a few tricks up his sleeve, huh?” Robert said, taking the cigarette back from me.

Usually when you pass a marijuana cigarette, the humans of Earth usually lend it over for two inhales, but Robert was annoyed with my mocking rings of smoke, and ignored that social etiquette, like he had many others in our time together.

Robert took a quick inhale from his cigarette when his face suddenly twinged.

“Something don’t fuckin’ taste right with this one…what the fuck did you do old man?”

I didn’t answer Robert and I didn’t I didn’t have to, because he died.

You see Robert was deathly allergic to fish. That means if he came in contact with fish his skin would start growing with rashes and his throat would close up, not letting his lungs get air, which is something he needed to do to survive.

I knew Robert was allergic to fish from two different sources. The first was his bracelet which had a medallion which said he was allergic to fish, gave his symptoms, and had an indication to call the hospital in case he was suffering from an allergy attack.

The second reason I knew Robert was deathly allergic to fish is because he told that to Candy at their wedding buffet the night before, and Candy works for me.

You see, I’m a pimp.

A pimp is someone who is in charge of whores, and takes the majority of the money that they make from having sex with people. I provide them protection, and they provide me with money. They are helping me live my American Dream. My parents would be proud. Billy Fresden’s too.

I kept a piece of tuna fish stuck on the inside of my mouth from earlier in the night and placed it deftly on the cigarette with my tongue when Robert passed it to me. He died moments later.

I undressed Robert and put on his tuxedo, sopping wet shirt pants and socks. It was not pleasant.

There was over two hundred thousand dollars in Roberts pockets, four more marijuana and tobacco filled cigarettes, and two pills of Ecstasy. This was now all mine. On Earth the humans have a rule of “Finders Keepers, Losers Weepers”, which essentially meant that whatever you find is yours and everyone else is supposed to cry.

I turned to Robert’s lifeless corpse and said “Like Billy Fresden, last one out’s a rotten egg”.