Atlantic City, NJ – “Like a Rockstar” – Sands Casino – January 29, 2001

It’s expensive to pretend to be a celebrity.

Stretch limos circle the glitzy hotels of Atlantic City like hungry sharks. Soucy and I have taken five of them just this weekend. The one that picked us up yesterday drove us only four blocks but, of course, expected a tip at arrival. Our new upgrade in gigs has come with a new expectation that we’ll tip… EVERYONE. Never once did I think to tip a desk clerk at our Motel 8 or Fairfield Inn. But with these fancier venues and accomodations, it’s three dollars to the doorman for smiling at us, five to the driver who opened our door, and a few bucks to each of the three bag-handlers who insisted I was incapable of rolling my own suitcase down the hallway (They should see me load in a drum kit).

When I asked where to check in, the chauffeur gestured toward the VIP line, pronouncing that “anyone arriving by limo is automatically a VIP.”
But the VIP check-in line had more people on it than the “I’m just a regular shmo” check-in so I opted for the line with the sweat pants and messy buns fitting in much more comfortably than with the diamond rings and cufflinks in the VIP queue.

Soundcheck at the Copa Lounge began around 5 p.m. The stage was adorned with backlit palm trees bathed in shimmering green lights. Clad in jeans, flannel, and a puffy vest, I felt absurdly out of place against the glowing opulence and theatrical ambiance. But the crew couldn’t have been kinder, the green room had complementary toothbrushes for us and the show was a total success.

We didn’t gamble though we were invited to join the staff after the show. We didn’t want to tempt the gods after our outstanding $27 dollar winnings at The Mohegan Sun the night before (hehe). Despite our protestations, Bob, the promoter, insisted we take another limo back to the city (NYC) in the morning so I could catch my flight back to Martha’s Vineyard to see my mama for a couple days between shows. We woke up early to catch some of the complimentary buffet offered in the hotel before heading home.

At the buffet counter stood a sandwich board that read “THE EPIC BUFFETT,” due mainly to the décor, I assume—think Gone with the Wind meets Jerry Springer. woman with a French twist and a black apron sat us and left us with an off-white thermos of staggeringly bad coffee which even three packets of Swiss-Miss cocoa couldn’t save. Exhausted, I looked around the restaurant while Soucy forced a stack of dry flapjacks down his gullet. A group of men sat laughing and pointing at the waitress’s backside. A couple of middle-aged ladies with fire-red hair and painted-on jeans, chewed gum while they ate their crayon-yellow scrambled eggs, parking the wads in their cheeks between bites (lotta practice goes into that folks).

Then Soucy spat out his toast: “Don’t look,” he said “but there’s a couple behind you and I’ve never seen anything more disgusting in my life.” I knew there was a couple behind me. They’d been talking with such hard-edged New York accents I could barely tell what language they were speaking, but man, were they loud and obnoxious and hard to phase out. How could I manage not looking after Soucy said he was seeing The Most Disgusting Thing he’d ever seen?!?! I mean I’ve lived in a van with this man for two years and we’ve seen some nasty stuff. It was practically an invitation to turn around, but I was hardly prepared for what I saw.

A woman in her early 30s was tearing off little pieces of her sausage, putting them in her mouth, then spitting them across the table, into her gold chain-wearing, hairy chest-bearing boyfriend’s mouth. That was our cue to exit THE EPIC BUFFETT.

Our seventh and final Stretch limo of the weekend was white. “Not so into the white limo. Kinda hoping for the black,” Soucy muttered, climbing into the spacious interior. “Getting kinda spoiled there eh Souc?” I laughed. “Why does it matter? You’re inside,” I teased. “Yeah,” he replied, “but other people can see.” I held my belly and laughed and sighed and eventually slept. Chris couldn’t stand that I was sitting on the comfy (front-facing) couch, and slid in beside me so as not to ‘miss out on all the luxury’ and so we ended up smooshed together on the back seat in the HUGE, complementary s t r e c h ride back to New York City.

I dropped Soucy at his parent’s house in Millington New Jersey on the way. His folks run The Raptor Trust dedicated to the rehabilitation of wild birds and when we pulled up, the staff gave Soucy endless grief for arriving in a limo, calling it “Moby’s rich white cousin” and laughing when it was too big to fit through the drive way.

Back on the highway, the chauffeur wanted to know if it was true that Carly Simon was my mom and when I said it was, he smiled into the rearview mirror, taking me all in before saying, “You’re the first celebrity I’ve ever had in my car,” then paused before adding “besides Kenny Rodgers.” And I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I’m not a celebrity—just an average joe like him so I let him kept his dream alive as we cruised over the long bridge to Manhattan and when we arrived at the airport, I tipped him like a rockstar.