More Roger Moore Weekend

Part 3: More of Thursday

We also had an inappropriate discussion of Jimmy Moore, Roger's pet Rhesus monkey, and the pervert in the woods who tried to have sex with him when he was a wee small lad. Totally wrong to loudly talk about on a plane but we did anyway.

When we got to Atlanta, it was hottttt as 10 hells in the airport. I'm talking major sweats and severe suffocation. The airport has this train shuttle system which looked to be full of questionable miscreants (still loving that word, thanks to James May for popping it back into my vocab) so we just walked. Let me tell you, convicts on the shuttle aside, there were some fine-ass dudes up in Atlanta. Damn. Hot older gentlemen, hot young guys. Hot, hot men. Hotlanta, indeed. I saw some dude who I think is either an anchor on ESPN or the Weather Channel but since I wasn't sure who he was, I didn't want to approach him and look stupid. On the flight from Atlanta to NYC, my friend and I were stuck next to this man who was weird. Really weird. He was wearing the standard lumberjack outfit-- high-waisted jeans, flannel shirt and red thermal undershirt. He NEVER spoke to us. Never made any acknowledgment and just read the same page of the New York Times over and over again. Very odd. When the beverage cart came around, he asked for water and he had teeth like Nosferatu. We were creeped out.

We get to NYC an hour later than planned and hook up with the shuttle service we got. The driver was really nice although I didn't understand 95% of what he said. He looked like Ben Kingsley, which cracked me up. Some of the people we rode with on the shuttle were amusing. There was a nice grandmother who was excited about seeing her grandkids and she said she'd flown in from Rhode Island. She looked stunned when we told her we were there from Oklahoma. Another woman got on the bus who had nothing but complaints. Everywhere she'd been in the world was terrible and she was griping about everything you can imagine. Two airhead chicks got on also and talked LOUDLY on their cell phones about the W Hotel and how they had massages scheduled for the next day. Right before our stop at the hotel, the gripey woman goes, "Is it just me or does the driver seem to have major attitude?" No one answered. It was hilarious. When we got off the shuttle, he opened the door for us and helped us with our bags. It's called: you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar. We were glad to be out of there and at the hotel. We stayed at the Wellington, which is on 7th Avenue and is at a pretty good location either for walking or for using the subway system. We couldn't check in for another hour so we ate a feast at the Brooklyn Diner.

The room was small but it was clean and smelled pleasant. When we got in there, we discovered a bunch of things like the hotel directory and the room service menu were missing and there was one half-used roll of TP in the bathroom, which aggravated us a little bit. Some heroin addict had jacked the thermostat in the room up to 85 degrees, I shit you not. It was so fucking hot in there. Manhattan was hot and muggy anyway while we were there, which was odd and unexpected, so we were roasting to death. We realized that the windows in the room did not open and I luckily eyed the thermostat and jacked the AC down low so we wouldn't be dying of heat stroke in the room.

On Thursday night, we took a whirlwind tour of Manhattan. We walked to Trump Tower to pay homage to the man, Count Trumpula, we saw Rockefeller Center, the ice rink, Empire State, Times Square, Radio City Music Hall, Broadway, etc., etc. We also bought some of the typical tourist stuff. There are a lot of little shops in that area where you can get shirts for $2 or $3 and postcards for a dime a piece. We were very happy with this.

The TV watching at night was pretty consistently either VH1 or E. I think we watched fucking Celebrity Rehab, Real Chance of Love, Rock of Love Charm School, The Soup and Best Week Ever like 20 times but it was all good. We laughed our asses off and it became part of the vacation experience. More on that later. Because the TV will become somewhat relevant to the rest of the vay-cay.

I wanted a sandwich from Subway before bed since I knew it would be cheap and easy. When we went in there, I saw one of the very few assholes we encountered in NYC. This guy was wearing a business suit that he thought was way cool but was way broke and he was being a total jerk. He was talking to the clerks like they were sub-human. He went off on a rant because they were out of honey oat bread. Next he went on a rant because they weren't putting enough meat on the sandwich. After that, he was like, "Dude, be generous with the cheese. Bro, please, I need you to put more cheese on the sandwich." We could not get away from him fast enough.

Somewhere around 10pm, a random hobo came up and tried the door handle of our room. This scared the shit out of me. Here we are in an unfamiliar city and a dirty-ass hobo has gotten into the hotel and is trying the door. So I keep an eye on him, wishing I had a PPK, and thinking of things around the room I could use as a weapon if it came down to it. I had it figured that a hot iron in the head or breaking the footstool across his head would work in a pinch. After a couple of tense minutes, he went away. He went to the elevator and left. We had no idea what he was doing at the room-- whether he was at the wrong room by mistake or whether he had bad intentions. But that certainly kept us up for a little while worried. Luckily, nothing else like that happened during the stay.


Part 4: The Wee Small Hours of Friday

So my friend asked me what time we should get up on Friday and I was kinda like, "Early, dude, early. I don't want to get fucked out of seeing Roger because we overslept." And we did wake up around 5. I was worried I'd pop out of bed wired at 3am but I didn't. I drank a Diet Rockstar not noticing that the bottle said it was double strength. I usually do not drink energy drinks after having a bad experience with Red Bull blowing my BP out of the park. But I decided that for Roger Moore Weekend, it was permissible. I felt like a cokehead. That shit shot me way up. I was hot, sweaty, excited, pupils dialated, freaking out. I would have been hyper for the occasion anyway but the Diet Rockstar just lit it off good and proper. We tried the room service at the hotel and it was surprisingly good. And way fast. I had barely hung the phone up from ordering by the time the food was at the door. We ate a good breakfast since we didn't know how long this event was going to last and when it was time to go, I was all twitterpated and nervy.

More on the Moore event to come.

Sleep is coming on fast.