The End Specialist. Drew Magary

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ

      “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 they 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 that scene from that one Indiana Jones movie where Indy walks into the grail room and sees all these shiny, golden chalices. Only the real Holy Grail was some 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. All the ones here were like the fakes the bad Nazi guy 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 what 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 a fake gold inlay. Oxo made a couple of stainless steel ones with comfortable rubber grips—the practical grail, if you will. They also had Goth ones, including a grail that had a curled-up dragon for a stem. 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 a 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 can design your own. They had thick stylebooks you could flip through, like choosing wedding invites. 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 in the other. The kind where 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 onto something with this trend. Drinks taste way better when you’re drinking them out of a grail.

      Date Modified: 11/7/2029, 8:51PM

      Field Trip: The Fountain Of Youth

      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 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 on the plane had DX3490s; I’m relieved I didn’t spring for one). I swear the jet spray shooting up from the center of the oval 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, the estimate now feels low. I assume that when they first turned the fountain on, the guy throwing the switch thrust his hips for maximum effect.

      Upon deplaning, we circumvented the cabstand (the line stretched so far they had to move up 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 of 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 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 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 specifically 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 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 these 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 СКАЧАТЬ