I'm at an age now where most of my friends are married, or at least have been married. So it was with gusto that, when one of my oldest friends (from childhood) said he wanted his bachelor party in Atlantic City, that I and a few others of our old group, leaped at the chance. Woo hoo! Party!! Well not quite. It seems somewhere along the way, as we all enter the end of our third decade, that we quieted down quite a bit.
Long story short, the bachelor party consisted of just 6 people, 5 of whom grew up within a block or two of each other in NYC. We're equally divided now between the Long Island and New Jersey suburbs and don't see each other often. The groom was given several options for his party: Foxwoods, Manhattan, Atlantic City or something else. As the groom likes to gamble, Atlantic City was chosen, so off we went for a night of debauchery.
Once we got through all the Saturday night traffic to get to Atlantic City, worse for the Long Island folk who had the joy of driving through Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island and all that traffic. I and my brother-in-law, who was coming from Long Island to my house, roughly the half way point from his home and Atlantic City, so we could carpool, were the last to arrive. Basically that meant we went to the groom's room and knocked out a case of beer (well, not quite, there were a lot of half empty beer bottles that got poured down the drain) before headed to the restaurant we had reservations for for dinner.
Unfortunately, due to a lack of proper planning, the hotel we were staying at was on one side of the boardwalk and the restaurant we were eating at was at the other hand. We thought we had plenty of time for a leisurely 35 min ute walk down the boardwalk for dinner. The walk turned into a trot as 1) we realized the restaurant was further than we realized and 2) we forgot what a wise man once said "you don't buy beer, you rent it."
We arrived for dinner a little late and quite famished after our trot. The restaurant we ate at was one of a small chain from Manhattan that we'd eaten in before, if not at Atlantic City than in Manhattan, so we knew what we wanted. While waiting for our food we noticed we were seated with several bachlorette parties and wondered how the restaurant knew we were a bachelor party - I mean just because we were 6 guys, 5 of whom were wearing wedding rings, shouldn't be an indication, should it? While waiting we made the usual ball and chain jokes married guys make with single guys, sighing because some of it was true, and joked about some married friends who weren't allowed to come and that the groom's father chose not to come as bachelor parties are only for young men. Oh if they only knew how tame our night was going to turn out to be.
The food was excellent and, with a little more liquid courage under our belts, but not a lot as we really can't drink like we used to, we headed to a bar in the hotel for the groom to sing karaoke. The bar was definitely for the younger set and, as we noticed the bouncers carefully looking at IDs, grumbled as we dug out our wallets and pulled out our IDs. As we entered the club and flashed our IDs to the the bouncers ... they just waved us in. Ouch.
It was in that bar that our night of debauchery hit it's peak. First we interacted with some completely drunk young 20 something who wanted us to sing with her friends. At least we think she did, she was a little too drunk to understand. Also in the bar was a private party room with large windows with the curtains down. There was a bachelorette party in there drinking and dancing to their own tune. At one point the curtains came down and we could see the young women. They were pretty trashed too and were dancing suggestively. Finally, as a joke, someone held a dollar up to the window. He probably got more action out of that dollar than if we had gone to a strip girl. One woman started dancing seductively at the window while another showed us, and anyone else looking her way, that she wasn't wearing underwear. Yeah, that's a bachelor party! Woo hoo, ready to party!!
Of course, since we're all married or engaged, and have been settled down quite a bit, we didn't do anything more than stare at the women, and thank them for the show as we went on our way for the next great thing: the $10 card table. Finding a $10 card table around midnight on a Saturday night in Atlantic City is about as easy as finding a seat on the NYC subway during rush hour, could happen, but not likely. I think we went into every casino on the boardwalk on our way back. No dice, at least for $10. At one point, we sat down at the nickel slots at one casino and started playing just so we could rest and get a drink. Long story short, I made $3 for killing a half hour and having a jack and coke. Woo hoo, I was winning!
It was around then we started noticing the way some of the ladies were dressed, or not dressed as the case was with one woman wearing a very, very short dress and nothing underneath we saw leaving a casino and walking down the street and stopping traffic. We weren't sure if she was a working girl or just someone dressed to impress (it seemed to be a tie at one point). I thought she might've had her underwear hiked up as I only saw a little of a rear body part I sometimes see at the pool, but I was assured from one of my friends, who saw her turn around, that she had definitely misplaced some underwear too. Little did we know was that that show marked the end of our debauchery.
Finally, at 2AM, we found the elusive $10 table. By then the groom and his brother, both of whom didn't even gamble, were already in bed and another two of us were ready for bed. My brother-in-law and I, who were sharing a room and were pretty beat, left the two gamblers and headed back to our hotel, which, at that point, was the next one anyway. It was as we walked back to the hotel we realized that we drove a long distance for basically dinner, a drink at a bar with some drunks and a walk on a lovely summer's evening -- something we could've done in Manhattan, a shorter distance and mass transit commutable to our own beds. Unlike other parties in the past, no one got crazy drunk, we saw no naked women dancing (aside from the drunk flasher) and we went to bed before 3 not because we were done partying but because we were too tired to continue. Woo hoo, party zzzzzzzzzz.
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