Extreme Vegas . . . and me!

(704 words)

The kids’ goodbye hugs were extra precious and squeezy. Val called our insurance agent to check if my term policies were up to date. And the boys in the bar argued about exactly who gets the motherlode of my unused free beer poker chips.

I embarked yesterday on a trip that for five days would court nearly a dozen different types of death.

“Don’t kill yourself,” Val said as I left for the airport.

I wasn’t planning on killing myself. My fear was being killed by others.

Yes, I’m in Las Vegas.

Don’t take that as a reference to the high-profile slaying of a low-profile rapper about two blocks from where I’m staying on the 27th floor of the MGM Grand or a string of other violent crimes linked to the Strip.

No, the Las Vegas Convention & Visitor’s Association invited me and three other writers to what they’re calling “Extreme Vegas.” So over the next three days I’ll be bungee jumping off the Stratosphere, racing a Ferrari, choppering across the desert, zip lining down canyons and spending a day target shooting with assorted automatic weapons Joe Biden would rather I didn’t.

And, of course, to add to the fun I’ll be doing all this in various stages of inebriation.

Like an increasing number of the 40 million annual tourists, I don’t enjoy coming to Las Vegas to gamble. I figuring living my life as a freelance writer with a wife,  two kids and no real job is a big enough gamble. That, I guess, makes Val gutsy enough to be considered the Minnesota Fats of holy matrimony.

She just keeps letting it ride.

But I love Vegas for the food, the entertainment and for being a reliable cornucopia of human excess.

I wrote about various aspects of it nearly a dozen times from 2010-2012 when I was doing travel stories for msnbc.com before they slashed pay to levels too insulting for even me -- and some day when I’m feeling particularly bitter I’ll get around to telling that story.

But not today.

Today, I’m feeling great.

Our hosts threw us a lavish introductory dinner last night at Craftsteak here in the hotel, with 6,852 rooms the third largest in the world. As the theme for the week is “Extreme,” every meal will involve some sort of extreme consumption.

Last night it was steak and Scotch. Fact: Two of the men at our table drank Scotch that was older than they were. And we’re just getting started.

Today’s lunch will be at Gordon Ramsay’s BurGR at Planet Hollywood. The place boasts it is home to the world’s largest burger, a fallacy that will give me the opportunity to be extremely boring as I tell them about Denny’s Beer Barrel Pub in Clearfield, Pennsylvania, the true home of the world’s biggest burger.

It promises to be a wonderful weekend, a great time if living it up doesn’t kill us all dead.

One guy is going to swim with sharks at Mandalay Bay and fly vintage pilot combat. There’s so much of this adventure stuff out here.

For subversive reasons, I’m looking forward to our afternoon at Guns & Ammo Garage Shooting Experience. Most of you know I believe America is plagued with too many guns and too many bullets.

The itinerary says we’ll be there for 90 minutes. It is my intention to in that time fire every last bullet in America so that the next mass killer will have to use as his lethal weapon a blunt instrument.

And by blunt instrument, I’m talking tuba.

Of course, there’s a chance I’ll enjoy it so much, as so many others do, that I’ll renounce the more than 10,000 words I’ve written on behalf of sensible gun legislation and start using my blog to write poems of admiration for Wayne Lapierre.

Heck, anything to grow the readership.

So how I did I prepare for this testosterone fest? What did I do to ramp up my meager macho?

It wasn’t easy.

Yesterday, I spent five hours enduring one of the most soul-challenging ventures known to man.

Yes, I survived a non-stop Pittsburgh to Vegas commercial flight.

In the middle seat!

I’m extremely proud.

Related . . .

America’s Biggest Hamburger & America’s Biggest Ham

Bob Costas & truly innovative gun violence solutions

Cheers to designated drivers

I was remiss Friday in my telling of our Saturday mission to consume the world’s biggest burger. I glossed over the key element that made it all possible.

I barely mentioned the designated driver.

I fancy with the proper education and motivation I could do anything. I could dash into burning buildings to save singed poodles, I could fly risky spacewalk satellite repair missions and learn to say with dramatic fury, “Scalpel!” in an emergency operating room.

But I’ll never be the designated driver.

Certainly, not like the one we had Saturday. Our driver, Don, is a sober saint.

So Saturday was the perfect mix of the sacred and the profane. He was sacred.

We were profane as all hell.

Here’s how this works: We have a friend who has a friend with a big van. We pay him $20 each to drive us to our chosen debauchery, in this case to Denny’s Beer Barrel Pub in Clearfield, Pa., home of the world’s biggest burger.

There were six of us. So that’s $120 for gas and we pay for his meals. It was two hours each way and we were at the tavern for three hours.

Of course, staying sober for seven hours is easy. But staying sober around six drinkers seems, to me, impossible.

Heck, staying sane in those circumstances seems impossible.

Let me explain. We met at the tavern at 10 a.m. and were offered shots of breakfast liquor. But not just any liquor.

Moonshine! Yes, someone had brought two giant jugs of homemade hootch and we all had a taste while we iced down two coolers of beer.

It was entirely unnecessary. Things like moonshine are meant to help loosen the tongue.

Our tongues were already so loose it’s surprising we didn’t scatter them up and down State Route 119. I remember laughing nearly non-stop from before Punxsutawney to clear past DuBois.

Through it all, Don never cracked a smile or made a single comment, devoting his full concentration to the wet and winding road. It was like we were floating along in some giant happy pod, the six most handsome and funny men on the planet and that feeling persisted throughout the day.

Luckily, we were in a place that nurtured such grand self-delusion -- incidentally only about an hour from the birthplace of Newt Gingrich.

Denny’s isn’t just home to the world’s largest burger. It’s also home to the world’s friendliest patrons and staff. I was thrilled when owner Denny Liegey made a big deal out of us being there and how he regaled my friends with stories about how pivotal my 2002 Enquirer story was to his global success.

This kind of friendly adulation is not uncommon with former story subjects of mine and it remains an enduring mystery to me why I can’t turn any of it into an even meager paycheck.

The pre-ordered burger was, of course, a revelation. My one buddy said I should have ordered the 15-pounder, but I wanted our guys to get a look at the original, the Ye Olde 96er, the six-pounder that started it all.

I was right. We had trouble finishing just the pickles.

It was the first time any meal I’d eaten became a tourist attraction. Strangers kept coming up to our table to take a picture of the burger and the six grown men who kept telling the funny stories that kept the whole room in stitches.

At least I think they were taking pictures of the burger.

And through it all, Don remained the steady stoic. When one of us asked if he needed a drink, he declined. He said he’d already had two.

Two Diet Cokes.

He was never once judgmental or disparaging of our behavior. He simple drove us to and from our destination safely and without wisecracks or preachiness.

So here’s to Don and the other good-hearted designated drivers who facilitate all our fun. We raise a glass to those of you who, for the sake of our silliness, never do.

I don’t know how they do it. Being around six giggly guys like us would drive me to drink.

And I know if it did, Don would be there to see I made it home safe.

America's biggest hamburger & America's biggest ham

I suppose somewhere there is a group of stylish men who tomorrow will gather to discuss philosophy, the arts or maybe play some invigorating rails of squash.

But that ain’t my crowd.

So tomorrow I’ve accepted an invitation to roadtrip with my circle of friends to a more elemental pursuit where the only squashing being done will involve an industrial quad set of Monroe shock absorbers.

Tomorrow, me and six or so friends have hired a van and a sober driver to take us to Clearfield, Pennsylvania, and Denny’s Beer Barrel Pub, home of the world’s biggest burger, The Yee Olde 96er.

That means we’ll probably scratch about four of the seven deadly sins off the list by around noon.

Denny’s is often profiled on shows featuring consumptive missions impossible. The friendly tavern has been shown on David Letterman, The Food Network, The Travel Channel and dozens of other specials about competitive eaters.

It’s one of those bucket-list destinations that people are drawn to like the Grand Canyon.

Driving there about two hours from our home here in Latrobe is something my friends have discussed for years. This week they decided to go.

That meant I had to go.

Because I helped create the World’s Biggest Burger -- and by “create,” I mean I wrote a short story that helped publicize it around the world leading to mass exposure for a tiny central Pennsylvania tavern that has then on its own risen to global prominence.

But let’s not be picky.

It was in 2002 when I read a story in the Pittsburgh paper about the tavern with the six-pound hamburger -- and I wonder if that guy’s presumptuous enough to be walking around bragging that he helped “create” the phenomenon. Jerk.

It was among the last of more than 1,000 swashbuckling stories I ever wrote for National Enquirer.

Owners Denny and Jean Liegey started offering these meat monsters and challenging daring gluttons to eat the burger in 90 minutes. His quote from the original story:

“We’ve had 325 people order the 6-pounder and no one’s ever finished it,” Denny Liegey said. “We’ve had people come from Germany, England and Australia to try it. They all left with doggie bags.”

I was assigned to accept the challenge. If I finished it, I’d be rewarded with the twin totems of American motivation: a free meal and a T-shirt.

They told me I did better than 75 percent of the previous contestants. And that’s about how much of the burger I finished. It nearly killed me.

Later outside on the patio, I was recovering sprawled on the concrete, mustard and relish dripping off my face and onto my shirt. My blue jeans unbuckled and descending below my butt cheek equator long before it was fashionable.

My photographer said it looked like a mob hit.

The true hit was the story itself. It was just a little item with two pictures on the very last page of America’s most notorious tabloid.

But, boy, did it have an impact. It was in the days before competitive eating really took hold, and when the Enquirer had the market on offbeat news practically all to itself.

The Enquirer was where every producer from every TV and radio show in the world went to find and book offbeat stories.

The burger became an international media sensation. -- six pounds of meat (96 ounces), a three-pound bun, two tomatoes, two onions, a half-head of lettuce, 12 slices of American cheese, and rivers of pepper relish, mustard, ketchup and mayo.

In fact, the restaurant has added stunt burgers up to 123 pounds for $399.99, popular for charity events, graduation parties, etc. (Note: all the big burgers require at least 24-hour notice; consult the website).

Of course, none of us is foolhardy enough to try any of the beef beasts solo. We’ll split it up, sort of like a dainty bunch of ladies.

Our frolic won’t be philosophical, philanthropic or artistic, but in one slim regard -- and this will be the only thing slim about whole excursion -- it will be educational.

Next time anyone asks any of us, “Hey, buddy, where’s the beef?” we’ll all know the answer.