I arrived at the Virgin Hotel the day before the AVN show officially detonated across Las Vegas like a glitter bomb filled with ambition and desperation.
This is Day Zero, the calm before the storm, when the predators circle the watering hole and mark their territory before the feeding frenzy begins. I'm Dugmor, a guy with three decades in this beautifully deranged industry, and I've learned that the real money gets made in the quiet hours before the spotlights ignite.
The lobby hummed with that peculiar frequency you only hear when a thousand hustlers, dreamers, and stone-cold professionals converge on neutral ground. Badge pickup lines snaked through the venue like some bureaucratic fever dream, exhibitor badges in one queue, talent badges in another, each line a little ecosystem of gossip, posturing, and frantic cell phone thumbing.
I carved through the chaos with surgical precision, mentally mapping the terrain: bathrooms here, emergency exits there, the Round Bar positioned like some crucial base camp where deals would be negotiated over overpriced whiskey and desperate handshakes.