My (B-cup) roommate works as a promotional model and as a go-go dancer. She regularly competes for gigs against women with augmented breasts, and she often loses out. So she wears push-up bras and “chicken cutlets” (bra inserts that resemble pieces of raw chicken in appearance and feel). But she’s never taken the plunge, driven to the plastic surgeon’s office, and had her breasts sliced open and stuffed. In other words, she’s never known what it’s like to have large breasts. Until last week. Her breasts didn’t come from the plastic surgeon’s office; they came from BreastFormShop.com, a website that sells anatomically correct external silicon breasts. They range in size from 2-inch protrusion/2 pounds all the way up to 10-inch protrusion/22 pounds. (BreastFormShop calls the 22-pounders “Juggs,” and says that if you order them, “You will have to custom order a super large bra to hold these girls.”)

My roommate’s 3.5-inch protrusion/3.5-pound breasts arrived in a plain white box, which we loaded into the back seat of my mom’s SUV. Then we drove to Wal-Mart in search of a bra that would accommodate the new breasts and the old ones.

Walking into the store, the elderly Wal-Mart greeter noticed the white box in our basket.

“Are you two returning something?” she asked.

“This is ours,” I said. “We’re just keeping it in the cart here, if that’s okay.”

We continued walking, but the greeter wasn’t through with us: “Hold on. It depends. What’s in there?”

“Medical stuff,” I improvised, which sent my roommate into a giggling fit, which definitely undercut the legitimacy of my claim.

“What kind of medical stuff?” the greeter asked—less a question, more a challenge.

“It’s really embarrassing,” I pleaded. “And if you saw, you’d understand. Is there any way we can just shop today?”

The honest approach did the trick; “Go ahead,” the greeter said.

We found the women’s undergarments section and searched the racks for the largest bras in stock. My roommate walked into the dressing room holding a trio of 38DDs in her left hand and the boob box in her right. A 10-year-old girl in the waiting area saw her do this … and then, two minutes later, the same girl saw my same roommate emerge from the dressing room looking as if a horny wizard had gone to town on her chest. I assume this traumatized the girl for life—that she went home and cried, “Mommy, I don’t want to get boobs!”

I had a feeling men would react differently.

We got changed and drove to the Mirage. Before we got out of the car, we did a quick double-check for nipple symmetry. The breasts looked balanced, and real—meaning they looked like genuine implants.

We walked from the parking garage to the poker room. Most men had the same reaction: They looked to my roommate’s mammoth mammaries, and then they looked at me. Presumably they wanted to see what chump had somehow conned his way into this buxom goddess’s silicon-guarded heart.

Then they looked back to her chest.

But that wasn’t surprising. What surprised me was the way women reacted. Their stares were much more blatant, unapologetic. Perhaps that’s because they didn’t care about getting caught and had nothing to lose. Of course, the guys had nothing to lose either—it’s not like my roommate was going to pull one of them into the palm tree atrium for a quick shag—but many men train themselves to look away from women’s breasts because, the men realize, women are turned off by guys who do this.

“When these women look at me,” my roommate said, “I get the sense they’re judging me. Like they think I’m insecure. They think that I think something is wrong with me. I’m really not enjoying this.”

As we walked out of the casino and down the Boulevard, we discovered one group of people that paid my roommate no attention at all: the men and women who hand out pornographic escort cards.

“This is so weird,” my roommate observed. “It’s the first time they’re not trying to hand me those cards.”

Now, I’ve always respected escort-card distributors for their nondiscriminatory practices (i.e., they give cards to children, the elderly), but apparently they draw the line at women with breasts larger than those of the women on the cards. My roommate proposed a theory as to why:

“Maybe they figure it’s a lost cause; she’s already got a set of her own to keep her busy.”

As we walked in front of Rockhouse Bar, one of the club hawkers, a short Asian guy with a tall mohawk, left his post and weaved through the crowd of neon souvenir glass-holding tourists to get to my roommate. He tapped her on the shoulder, and asked her if she wanted to come inside and drink for free. I was standing about 10 feet behind at this point, so I saw the great lengths through which the guy went to reach her. But she had no idea. If she did, she surely would have smelled his desperation and turned down the offer accordingly. And the hawker knew that—that’s why he waited for her to pass by before beginning his frantic approach.

Moot point; she still turned the offer down.

Eventually my roommate grew tired of the stares and the points and the attention. So when we arrived at Peppermill, she removed the silicon globes from her oversized bra and plopped them on the table. Way too big to fit in her purse. Judging by the laughter—by its force and duration—the tabled boobs were the funniest things the girls sitting across from us had ever seen.

After our meal, we hailed a cab and headed back to the Mirage parking garage. My roommate asked the driver, “Want to feel my boobs?’ as if she were auditioning for Taxicab Confessions.

“Sure,” he said.

She reached forward with one of the silicone breasts in her hand. The driver looked at the breast and rolled his eyes. Then he rethought things and gave it a squeeze.

The slicon breasts were a bad fit for my roommate—figuratively, not literally (they looked great on her). But things were different from my friend Karen, who recently visited Vegas from the Midwest and took the breasts for a test run. Karen had the time of her life. She lapped up the newfound attention, and relished the sexual power she wielded over men. And now she’s thinking of getting implants.

Before I moved from the Midwest to Las Vegas, I assumed I wouldn’t enjoy going out with the girl who was the center of sexual attention. I assumed I’d get jealous, overprotective or embarrassed. I assumed other guys would be bitter and curt towards me.

Yeah, I was wrong on all counts.

In the book Survival of The Prettiest: The Science of Beauty, Harvard psychologist Nancy Etcoff, writes, “When people are shown pictures of a man with a very attractive woman who is described as his girlfriend, they say that he is more self-confident, intelligent and likable than when they are shown the same picture but told that the woman is a stranger.” Now, I’m not dating my roommate or my friend Karen, but the people we encountered probably assumed we were dating. And these people treated me better than usual. I got more smiles and more hellos. I got a free drink, and not one but two soul-brother handshakes.

So, yeah, I thought the breasts were great.

Rick Lax, the author of Lawyer Boy, is working on his second book. His Web site is RickLax.com.