Sometime in my second year of college, Cassandra and I were supposed to meet up with a friend of mine at the Tropicana in Atlantic City. The whole adventure started because I hadn’t been doing much that week except smoking weed and failing to go to most of my classes. I called up my friend Eagleman, a Philadelphia Eagles fan who had also gone on the road with the band Eagles for some time. I don’t know exactly what his real name is. Eagleman worked as a chef at Cuba Libre, a Cuban-theme restaurant within the Tropicana, and had given me an open invitation to stop by and have dinner on the house.After class, which Cassandra had finally started showing up to, we drove out to Atlantic City. At first, she didn’t want to go. She was usually afraid to do anything outside her room. Most people and places terrified her, thanks to her precognition. I told her that it was fine at first, but then tried guilting her into going. It didn’t work until I mentioned that I had bought her a gift; she immediately perked up and agreed to go.
On the way we smoked something around half a dozen joints. It wasn’t very good weed, so we made up for quality with quantity. It didn’t really matter; we were already stoned. Whenever Cassandra decided to come to class, she’d meet me outside the building to smoke a joint first. It was our compromise. “Puff to pass,” I called it. According to her, getting stoned was the only way to turn off her gift of prophecy. Just to be sure we always smoked excessively.
We parked in the Tropicana’s labyrinthine garage structure and headed through the casino floor. Cass didn’t like it, but it was the only way to get anywhere within the walls of the Tropicana. We arrived at the Red Corner, where Cuba Libre resided, and tried to claim our free meal.
“I’m sorry, but there’s nobody working here named Eagleman,” the hostess informed me.
“It’s not his real name.”
“Then what is his real name?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“And yet you know him well enough that he’d give you a free meal?”
“Couldn’t you just… I don’t know… ask around the back?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “There are over forty workers back there in a very noisy environment. I’m not going around asking if anyone goes by the name Birdman.”
“Eagleman.”
“Whatever. Please move aside,” the hostess asked. There was a line forming behind me.
Realizing the futility of my situation, I stepped back. Cass was waiting for me by the edge of a large fountain that was within view of the restaurant. I sat down with her. “You already know, don’t you?”
“What?” she asked, perking up. “That we can’t get in? I know. I was just thinking about how that hostess dies in a terrible bicycling accident in three years time.”
“Are you serious?” I asked. She nodded. “That’s fucking crazy!” I looked over at the hostess for a minute. When not telling me what I didn’t want to hear, I really had nothing against her. It was eerie to watch her do her job, dwelling on how this woman was inevitably going to die. “And there’s nothing we can do, is there? That’s fucked up.”
“Nobody listens to the damned.”
“Whoa,” I said. “That’s some dark shit there. Let's listen to Morrisey and write dark poetry about how unfair life is.”
She smiled. “Shut up.”
So we hung out there for several hours, hoping that Eagleman would peek out of the kitchen and see us. I texted him a few times, but I got no response. It actually wasn’t that bad. Cass and I rarely got to hang out for any length of time. We took frequent breaks to go smoke a joint in the car. There was enough going on in the Quarter, the Tropicana’s reconstruction of Havana circa Godfather part II, to keep two stoners like us occupied. In front of us were a massive statue of Lenin, a vintage 50's convertible painted like the Cuban flag and a giant terracotta horse.
As the time passed, the lighting in the Quarter dimmed, simulating nightfall. Cass and I were so wrapped up in talking about Cuba and communism that we didn’t notice that everyone else had left. I had to interrupt Cass during one of her anti-capitalist rants to point out that there was nobody else around.
We got up and searched the immediate vicinity. There was no one. The lights in the restaurants were on and the tables were set perfectly, but we couldn’t find anyone. I even checked the kitchen, failing to find a single soul. We both sat back down at the edge of the fountain.
“Soo… did you see this coming?” I asked her. She shook her head. As we sat there, I thought I heard some singing in the background. It sounded sort of like the Soviet National Anthem, like in The Hunt for the Red October. I pointed it out to Cass, but she didn’t hear it.
Just then, the statue of Lenin that had been towering over us the whole time started to move. At first its motions were labored and mechanical, but soon it seemed to be able to walk regularly. We watched in astonishment as the statue sat down next to us at the edge of the fountain.
“Hey man, you holding?” the statue of Lenin asked me.
So we smoked up with Lenin, right there in the middle of the Quarter. I checked around us. There was nobody to complain. Lenin passed the joint to me with his massive stone hands. The fact that the former communist leader could manipulate the joint between his fingers was almost as fantastic as his presence.
“This is good shit,” Lenin told me as he exhaled. I nodded. Cass just kept staring up at him in amazement. “Where’d you get it?”
“Some Jamaican dude,” I said.
“Sick."
“So what do you think of this place?” Cass asked him, never breaking her star.
“Hmmmm? Oh yeah, this place. It’s cool, I guess,” Lenin sputtered out. “I mean, it’s really a… uhh… symbol of the proletariat elite’s oppression of the workers.” Cass just nodded. “You know, greed is a product of societal excess; but the truth is that only political freedom with satisfy the masses.”
“You’re not really Lenin,” she said. He turned to her with wide stone eyes.
“No, I’m him,” he said, patting himself down. “Just look at me.”
“You quoted yourself wrong,” she told him. “And you mixed up proletariat and bourgeois.”
“Really?... fuck,” he said, scratching his head. “I'm always doing that. Alright, I’m gonna level with you bros…” Cass and I leaned closer. “…I’m not who you think I am.” Cass rolled her eyes. “No seriously guys, hear me out. I’m actually a grad-student from the year 10191 who’s doing his thesis on socialism.”
“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever fucking heard,” I said.
“I’m serious. I needed a project to get my masters, and I wagered that I could go back in time and implement socialism during the 1918 Russian revolution. I mean, the whole thing took a shit-ton of prep work… and I had to read that Marx dude’s book like over and over again… but you know, in the end I totally got a C+ for it.”
“You got a C+ for converting Russia to communism?” I asked.
“Yeah… well, I would have gotten an A, but my partner totally boned me on the grade.”
“Your partner?”
“Stalin. Big Joey S, as we called him on campus; total crack-up. I mean that dude was awesome. This one time, he set up this bitching kegger on the Dean’s lawn. That guy was fucking hilarious, man! This other time, he had the entire service staff at the University executed for an overcooked burrito. It was a fucking awesome! He’s all like, ‘line up!’ and they’re all…” he stopped and thought for a moment.
“…well anyway, he majorly fucking ganked the idea right out from under me and then took credit for the whole thing. He even got extra-credit for defeating Hitler… god, what a dick! It was my idea to beat Hitler. I said to him in the car, ‘Fuck, we gotta fucking kill that Hitler guy,’ and Joey was like: ‘yeah.’ He just used all my notes and shit. Fuck man!”
“I’m sorry—ganked?” I asked.
“No, shut up,” Cass said, putting her hand on my shoulder. “So it was all just your final project then… communism, the cold war, the gulags… all of it. You’re just some time traveling undergrad.”
“Graduate student… but yeah, pretty much.”
I turned to Cass, “I don’t know how you can focus on that and not how this statue just came to life, or where everyone went. It’s like Mannequin or something.”
“Umm, Night at the Museum?” Lenin interjected.
“Yeah,” Cass said, “Night at the Museum. It’s not like Mannequin at all. What are you talking about?”
“Okay, I’m sorry. I got my movies about weird shit coming alive all mixed up. In the future I’ll try to be more careful about mixing up those two,” I said, throwing my hands up.
Cass lapsed into deep thought for a moment. “No you won’t.”
“What a bitch,” I said. She punched me in the arm.
“So what made you think that you could introduce Marx’s vision onto early twentieth-century Russia, of all places?” Cass asked.
Lenin shrugged. “Can’t think of anywhere better.”
“Well Marx specifically said Russia was a poor candidate for socialism. There was no middle-class.”
“No middle-class,” I repeated, nodding.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure. We talk about it all the time,” Cass said, pointing to me.
“Two or three times a day,” I said, “at least. ‘No middle-class,’ we say. It’s kind of weird. I didn’t know what she was talking about for the longest time.”
“You know what?” Lenin asked, holding the joint between his massive stone fingers. We both perked up. “Fuck it,” he said, inhaling deeply. He burnt through most of the remains of the joint in a single hit. “I really don’t give a shit. I just joined the class to get with this chick. It’s totally just not worth it now, you know?”
I shrugged.
Suddenly, one of the sets of double doors into the Quarter burst open behind us with a terrific explosion. We ducked the initial blast by hiding behind the fountain. As soon as the smoke started to clear we emerged to see a large statue of a Roman leader walking in carrying a streetlamp as a spear. “Lenin!” he cried out.
“Caesar!” Lenin replied, rising to meet him. They charged at each other. Lenin brushed aside Caesar’s streetlamp with ease and tackled him to the ground. The two statues struggled on the floor of the Quarter, smashing everything in their way. Cass and I, keeping our heads down, made our way to the second floor where we appeared safe from the melee.
“Why would a statue of Lenin think that he’s a time-traveler?” I asked Cass. She just kept watching the fight. “That’s just weird. You’d think that the personality of the statue would be related to what the sculptor envisioned, not who the person really was. If you—”
“Shut up,” Cass ordered, grabbed my collar and kissed me briefly. She then went into my jacket pocket and pulled out a CD that had been gift-wrapped. She smiled and put it in her jacket.
On the first floor, Lenin had mounted the terracotta horse from P.F. Chang’s and charged into Caesar with the streetlamp, knocking him down. Lenin stood over the fallen Caesar statue and cried out like a wild beast. The cry startled me and Cass, and brought things back into focus. We decided that was time to leave as quickly as we could.
And that was the time that I smoked a joint with Lenin and then got cock-blocked by a fight between statues.
