There used to be a great hotel casino called The Castaway.  The property dates back to the 1930s with many names but most notably The Castaway when it was purchased by Billionaire Howard Hughes.  That was about 1970 when Hughes bought a bunch of hotels.  Few know, but he started his spending spree as a guest at the Desert Inn Hotel and had the management call across the street to the Silver Slipper and tell them to turn off the lights on the huge mirror covered stilettoed heeled shoe that spun around in front of the Silver Slipper casino.  Management at the DI, who were fed up with Hughes refused to make the call, so the next day he bought the Desert Inn, and the day after bought the Silver Slipper and shut off the light.  Or so the story goes.

Anyway, the Castaway was bought by the visionary Steve Wynn who started developing “Golden Nugget on The Strip”.  Today we know that hotel as The Mirage.  This digression was necessary to set the stage for a memorable moment involving my good friends Butch and Debbie Stubinger.

The Mirage opened Thanksgiving weekend 1989.  I don’t know if Butch and Debbie were there opening weekend or not.  I do remember it was an event of events for Las Vegas.  Everyone talked about it for months.  One of the multitude of interesting stories about the opening include the Palm Tree Story.  Steve Wynn spent 7 million for about 50 huge 50 foot plus palm trees for the grand entrance drive to the Mirage.  The trucks bringing the trees in made the news due to traffic problems.  They were planted in September.  Well if you know anything about Las Vegas, winter enters the valley about a week either side of Halloween.  In 1989 is took the valley with force the week before Halloween and we had 4 days of sub 32 degree lows at night.  Dormant palm trees and frost don’t mix.  All 50 trees were goners by the second week of November.  Steve Wynn did what any other guy would do who spent 7 million on palm trees, who now carried about 1 billion in debt, several weeks before his grand opening.  He rented cherry pickers, you know those hydraulic baskets that hold utility guys who work on power cables, and had his tress painted green for the grand opening.  As a footnote, the Mirage did so well and most of the debt was settled with in one year and, oh yeah, Steve bought new trees.  

I had been involved in the project from early on as the company I worked for supplied more than a million dollars worth of electrical wire and cable on the project.  In fact, the last week before the grand opening, we got a call from Atlantadia Corp. which if I remember correctly was Wynn’s development company and they were looking for an unusual submersible high temperature high voltage cable.  We were informed that this was the cable that ignites the Pina Colada alcohol fire that erupts from the Volcano.  That’s right people were traveling from all over the world to see this volcano erupt and they could not find the cable needed to ignite the fire.  Obviously they were desperate.  Jeff Homeyer, our top salesman had the account and we had every salesman on the phone searching the country looking for this high spec cable.  I don’t remember if it was Jeff or I who recognized the cable equivalent in the shipboard industry.  We checked the specs and started calling many of the shipyards in San Francisco, Louisiana, and San Diego.  Violla we found it in New Orlean’s at Todd Shipyards. 

The cable was there and was about sixty cents a foot. The 70 foot length was about forty two bucks cost.  We determined it was going to cost about 300 dollars to have air freighted into Las Vegas.  Jeff and I agonized over what to charge for this seventy foot piece of copper.  We decided we wanted to make as much as the air freight company so we went in at $11.22 a foot.  When Jeff called and said we had found it, we got a purchase order and they never asked the price.  Being the gentlemen we were, we kept it at 11.22 a foot and took special pride in watching the Volcano erupt.  That was until The Mirage discovered when the wind blows above 27 miles an hour, the wind takes the alcohol based flames and spews it on the crowd causing mass hysteria.  That is why on many days the volcano is off.  But I digress.

As I said, I do not remember if the Stubingers were there for the opening.  I know they have attended many hotel openings in Las Vegas as they enjoy the whole casino obsessive compulsive atmosphere.  When you live there you either don’t like or die enjoying the drinking, gambling, and the like.  There is very little grey in Las Vegas.  Anyway, several weeks before the Stubingers came to town, I was out playing golf with another very good friend, Ben Matranga.  He was in Las Vegas for business and I suggested we hook up for a round of golf.

In 1987, the Vegas boom was just beginning and there were housing developments beginning to spring up out the Northwest corridor and the southeast corridor towards an area called Green Valley.  Except for some Summa (another Howard Hughes development), properties out in the Northwest area of town, new homes were a bit sparse.  A developer took a chance and built a nice Golf Course called Angel Park on the west side of town towards the North.  By today’s standards it is in town, but back then, it was quite the hike.  I suggested to Ben we play there and it was your typical winter dessert day, cool and very very windy, but we played on.

As we got to the back nine, a stretch of links now truly forgettable, I was feeling nauseous and getting an excruciating headache.  I was supposed to have dinner with Ben, but was forced to bow out as all I wanted to do was get in the fetal position and die.  My head was pounding and my stomach was turning as I hit the sack. 

I woke the next morning feeling not the worse for wear.  I actually thought maybe it was the one beer I had and have sworn off all Anheiser Busch products ever since.  Later in the week, I was part of a bowling team that I tricked my wife into joining by saying it was only six weeks long.  In actuality it was 40 weeks long.  She wanted to divorce me but since we had just reconciled after a 2 year divorce, that didn’t make a lot of sense so she rolled on.  Anyway I am there at the bowling alley and realize that there are not ten pins at the end of the alley, just one big one, a big blob of white.  I asked Devin what the big blob of white was and she said, “What are you talking about?”  Again, I pointed to the big blob of white and said, “That big blob of white at the end of the alley.”  Another friend, Mr. Gerry Tyska, came over and said, “Brian, what in Gods name are you talking about?”  I pointed to the big blob at the end of alley and said “Right there, at the end of the alley don’t you see it?”  Gerry looked down my arm where I was pointing and he said, “Those are the pins Brian.”  My eyesight had deteriorated so badly that ten pins melded into one. 

I then made the connection to staring down a fairway for two hours looking for a golf ball and getting a migraine because I was squinting.  I needed glasses.  I made my appointment and went off to see the eye doctor and confirmed that although I was legally blind in my right eye, from a distorted cornea since birth, I now needed help with my good eye for distance.  He ordered a script and I had to wait a few days for the glasses. 

It was in between the ordering of the glasses and the getting of the glasses that the Stubinger’s had come to town.  Again, I don’ think they were staying at the Mirage, but they wanted to see it and so did Devin and I.  We parked and entered through the areas where Siegfried and Roy kept the White Tigers.  Well it’s where they kept the white tiger they did not keep at there house in town.  Yeah they kept the tigers at their house in their bedroom and all over.  It was a cool habitat.  We then entered a room with slot machines and a there were cash cages all over and a great big wall that was dark except for a huge jumbotron type television.  On the dark wall were thousands of little green blinking lights.  They kind of blurred all over the dark wall.  It was a cool effect, but I didn’t really get it.  We stood in the middle of the sportsbook and was looking at the wall and I finally asked Devin, “What are the twinkling lights for?”, She said, “What twinkling lights?”  About this time, thinking back on it she must have been wondering why she married me a second time, but I kept on by saying “Those green twinkling lights all over the wall.”  She looked at me as if “you idiot”.  She said, “You can’t see those are numbers and letters in lights showing all the bet results and scores?”  I looked up and now with the power of suggestion could start to make out numbers and letters.  Placing my fingers on the corner of my eyes, the green lights focused a bit.

About this time, Butch and Debbie were standing there in amazement looking at me not believing that I could not determine that all those green twinkling lights actually spelled something.  Debbie, who wore glasses kindly said, “Brian, I use glasses for far away would like to look through mine?”  Well, I figured what the heck.  I put on Debbie’s glasses and each and everyone of those fuzzy little green points of lights struck my retina with such clarity, that it was miraculous.  I could not contain my emotions.  I began yelling at the top of my lungs, “It a miracle, I can see.”  As I dropped to my knees still screaming about my good fortune, I watched Debbie, Butch and Devin quickly separate themselves from me as the entire sportsbook was now looking at the raving idiot on his knees in the back of the book yelling, “Thank God almighty, it’s a miracle, I can see.” 

When I stopped a looked several hundred feet away and saw Butch almost in tears laughing, Debbie laughing with a bewildered look on her face and my lovely re-wife staring at me with that “You’re an idiot but I love you” look on her face.”