I wrote an essay for the Los Angeles Times a while ago about my experiences with the minibar at the Wynn resort in Las Vegas.
It’s a pretty clever minibar — well, any machine that manages to charge you $6 for a Diet Coke is clever — but this one has a twist. It charges you when you remove the item, automatically.
No more disruptive knocks on the door from some grim hotel operative with a clipboard and the ability to look into your soul and see that you ate the Jumbo Fun Size Snickers ($8) in 93 seconds or the entire festively decorated glass jar of cashews ($11) while scrolling through the adult movie offerings without ever pressing “order.” Or that there’s only one glass next to the empty bottle of Trefethen cabernet ($36) and your eyes seem a little red and glazed and it’s 10:30 in the morning.
So I wrote the piece describing the unforgiving nature of the automatic minibar. I had removed a can of ginger ale and replaced it within 5 seconds, but nevertheless, I found the charge on my bill. The hotel cheerfully removed it when I pointed out that the can was still in the minibar, unopened, but complaining about it made me feel like a small-timer. It felt like the wrong Vegas attitude to quibble over a few bucks.
Nevertheless, it was a complimentary article. I liked the Wynn a lot and admired its then-proprietor, Steve Wynn.
So, stage set: I write a piece about Steve Wynn, it appears in the morning paper, and a few hours later, my agent calls me. Wynn, apparently, had called his office looking for me.
“Really?” I said, suddenly rereading my article in my mind, sifting through it for possible remarks that taken out of context might possibly lead to some possible misunderstanding with a powerful casino operator.
Suddenly, I felt as if I was in one of those early Woody Allen movies, tugging at my collar and chattering away in nervous cowardice: “No, you see, it wasn’t, that was not my meaning, you’re misconstruing, it was an expression of my total complete admiration to Mr. Wynn and his…fellas, what’s with the bats? I would never say such things about — Hey! That hurt! Fellas! That’s my pinkie! I need that for pinkie-related activities and such and OW!”
But wait, I thought. Maybe he liked the article. Maybe he wants to be friends.
Maybe he wants to call me to say, “Great article, amigo. Please, come here to the Wynn and live here as my guest for as long as you shall desire.”
Because in Hollywood, when someone calls you, it’s almost always good news. If it was bad news, they just wouldn’t call you. In Hollywood, bad news is lazy. It just waits for you to figure it out by yourself.
So I called him back.
A gruff voice answered. I assume it was his “guy.” (Casino moguls always have A Guy, it seems to me.)
I play it cool. “Just, you know, giving Mr. Wynn a shout back.” And I leave him my number and wait for his call — which doesn’t come.
So the next day, driven crazy with curiosity, I call the number again and pretend like, you know, I’m so crazy busy that I can’t remember who owes who a call. Is it me? Is it Mr. Wynn? What, you know, no big deal, whatever, whatever.
The same guy, same gruff voice: He has your number. He wants to speak to you. He will call you.
That was sometime in 2010.
Many things have happened to me in the past decade. My life has been full of highs and lows and joys and sorrows. But one thing has remained a constant: I will never not wonder what the hell that was all about.
Telling this story recently to a friend of mine who travels in deluxe circles, he told me what probably happened.
“He didn’t want to talk to you,” my friend said. “Why would anyone want to talk to you? He just wanted to know where you were and how quickly he could get ahold of you if he needed to. Guys like him are smart and prepared businessmen. They don’t think about the next move. They think about the moves after the next moves — unlike you, who loses sleep over a tiny minibar charge.”
I prefer to think that some complicated technological problem kept us apart — maybe his voicemail never got recorded, maybe he mistakenly transposed some digits when dialing — and that in a parallel universe, he and I spent the past decade becoming fast friends and that somewhere I am now a person who chooses freely from the minibar without a second thought.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
