Las Vegas is strange for so many reasons, not least of which is the very fact that it exists where it does. Its name, which means “The Meadows,” could not be more misleading. Outside the city limits, the desert makes it very clear that it was not designed to support life—much less creatures as particular as humans. It implies a life cycle that consists of relatively little between dust and dust. Certainly there is wildlife hidden in the arid basin, hard and spiny as the yucca and desert scrub itself, or else hidden away in the hills until nightfall cools the valley for warm-blooded species to roam. The creatures that thrive there, though, are the cold-blooded ones.
When people think of Las Vegas, the image that leaps to mind is that of the Strip—that Rhapsody in Neon otherwise known as Las Vegas Boulevard, which in 2000 the U.S. Department of Transportation enshrined as an “All-American Road,” an exclusive subcategory of its National Scenic Byways program. By designating certain roads as such (there are 99 National Scenic Byways and 27 All-American Roads) the DOT hoped to “recognize and enhance the best of America’s national transportation corridors”—ways that are “often ‘off the beaten path’ and provide a taste of real Americana.” Inevitably, press releases evoked the language of the famous Frost poem, and so begged the question: How does one expect to preserve the Road Less Traveled by diverting traffic to it? The bureaucrats, it appeared, had appropriated only Frost’s romanticism and not his sense of irony.
Unlike most of its peers on the All-American Roads list, of course, the Vegas Strip was not awarded the distinction in hopes of drawing in crowds and the services to support them, but rather because of the garishness of those that already existed. Indeed, of all All-American Roads, Las Vegas Boulevard stands to suffer the least from that designation, because the value of its “intrinsic character” owes not to the absence of human invention but to the gluttonous conceit of it. Although it is unlikely that a significant proportion of tourists seek out Vegas on a tip from the Federal Highway Administration, any added attention would only accelerate the cultural ferment that makes Vegas such a darling.
As it stands, Las Vegas garners just about all the attention it can handle. For all its ostentation, the Strip was difficult to spot amid the sprawl, which spread across the basin like mold in a Petrie dish. It had the aggressive character of the sprawl that orbited Houston, the swagger that comes with being located on an essential access road of a famous metropolis. But rather than catering to mundane needs, Vegas sprawl seemed largely directed toward indulgent appetites: Fewer home furnishings outlets and pharmacies, more high-end sports car dealerships and strip bars. The marketplace has little use for practical commerce; here, fortunes change hands quickly and capriciously, instilling consumers with the fear that if large sums were not spent at once, they might vaporize without warning. This was extremely intimidating to our carful of penny-pinching travelers, and we rolled into Vegas to the tune of Gram Parsons singing “Vegas ain’t no place for a poor boy like me.”
We were staying at a hotel called the Sahara, located on the far north end of the Strip. The room had cost $45 a night after tax through Hotels.com, which was cheaper than most walk-in motels we had seen in towns where the night life was confined to swilling Red Bull in a pickup flatbed outside the 24-hour Exxon station; the assumption being that any money you “saved” on the room would eventually find its way into the hotel’s many slot machines. These were in no short supply. While most conventional hotels dedicate an ample part of the ground floor to the lobby, the Sahara, to maximize the square footage of its casino, had squeezed the lobby into a narrow corridor, making it resemble the check-in station at a poorly run airport, both in appearance and inefficiency. But with each shuffle of weary travelers shin-shoving their luggage through the queue I saw the desire for a cocktail and the cathartic yank of a slot box rise incrementally, leading me to believe the lobby design was not a product of incompetence, but of genius.
While Ben and Rachel waited in the line, I took a walk in the late-afternoon heat. The sun was still high above the spire of the Stratosphere, a hotel made to resemble Seattle’s Space Needle. In addition to the chance to enjoy the world’s three tallest thrill rides, the Stratosphere’s novel altitude provides guests a convenient place to commit suicide; five people have leaped to their deaths from the observation deck since the hotel opened in 1996. Craning my neck, I could see a green bow of track loop and hear the screams of riders as the roller coaster simulated this experience by whipping them momentarily over the edge the observation deck. The ride is called the Insanity. In April 2005, the Insanity shut down automatically due to high winds, leaving 18-year-old Erica McKinnon and her 11-year-old cousin Gabriella dangling 900 feet above the Strip in a 60 mph breeze for nearly an hour and half. The hotel compensated the girls with year-long passes to the ride, somehow managing to do so with a straight face. Up on the spire itself, a ride called the Big Shot rifles guests repeatedly up and down the spire in a manner traditionally associated with self-gratification.
Apropos, when I uncraned my neck I was looking at porn. I vaguely recalled the call girl catalogs from my only previous Vegas experience, when my dad brought the family along on a business trip. He had been sternly rebuked by an official for letting me and James into the slot pit. Once it became clear that there were precious few areas of the hotel we were actually allowed to be in, we took to the streets, where the lecherous flyers were strewn about the sidewalks, prompting our mother to drag us along at an uncomfortably brisk pace. Unchained, I was able to study them more carefully. The breadth of the selection was truly impressive—“college girls,” “mature” women (40+), very “mature” women (60+), blondes, brunettes, Asian girls, fetish, “alternative,” whatever that could mean. No vendor passed on the temptation to offer a “$69 Special.”
As arresting as it is by night, Las Vegas is extraordinarily ugly by day. At night, the stained concrete walls and sun-faded facades disappear into the shadows, overwhelmed by neon blooms whose colors never pale. During the day they fester in the heat like plastic furniture in a sandbox. In the void of the night, the uncanny architecture of the Strip seems to make sense in the same way the logical inconsistencies of a dream sequence flow easily in the moment: Now you are in the Roman Forum, surrounded by moving white-marble tableaus, designer clothing outlets, and women in form-fitting bunny costumes dancing in cages; suddenly, here you are staring up at the Statue of Liberty and a condensed, pinkened New York City skyline behind it; and say, is that Elvis Presley drinking something out of a green plastic vase with a crazy straw? Didn’t you see him earlier posing with Japanese tourists outside a giant obsidian pyramid? Oops, now you’re in Paris! Then dawn peels back the curtain, spilling sunlight into the darkness. “What the hell was that?” the traveler mutters, sitting up with a start. He puts a hand to his brow and squints out at the day-brightened fantasyland. “And what the hell is all this stuff doing in the desert?”
I walked about a half mile south on Las Vegas Boulevard before giving up and turning around. The streams of sweat that trickled down my temples had successfully navigated through my beard and now pooled at the crux of my clavicle, wrinkling the front of my collar. Plumes of dampness had also spread outward from my chest, armpits, and back. “You look hot,” remarked a full-length mirror advertising a local bus company. “Why, thank you!” I replied, blushing through my sunburn. It was not until later that I realized I was being mocked.
Ben called and told me they had managed to bypass the two-hour check-in line by lodging a loud complaint at the customer service desk. I offered to pick up some beer on my way up. The air-conditioning of the minimart was a welcome relief. I grabbed a six-pack of Fat Tire and two bottles of the cheapest Champagne they had. On a two-foot ceiling beam that divided the liquor store from the general store, I noticed a series of admonitions: “Keep using my name in vain, I’ll make rush hour longer –God,” said one. “You think it’s hot here? –God,” warned another; vestiges of the piety that was the basis of Las Vegas’s initial settlement as a Mormon outpost in 1855, when Brigham Young sent missionaries to convert the local Paiute Indians. They abandoned the project after two years. The task lying before the city’s modern evangelists is even more daunting, which is probably why their goals are more modest: “Hey you, stumbling drunk out of a wedding chapel with the hooker you bought with what was left of your kids’ college trust after seven hours at the craps tables—clean up that language, will you?”
Eight years before he dispatched the Latter-Day Saints on that unfruitful quest to sanctify Las Vegas, Young had sent an expedition of 238 members of his flock to California under the direction of an ambitious 28-year-old saint named Samuel Brannan. Brannan eventually broke with the Mormon Church after Young refused to lead the rest of his followers to California, and began embezzling church funds and filling his small general store with mining supplies. He then purchased a vial of gold dust and marched through the streets of San Francisco, shouting, “Gold! Gold! Gold from the Americas River!” Fevered prospectors flooded the Sacramento Valley, where Brannan’s store waited to outfit them with the necessary gear. Only a fraction found significant amounts of gold; most found tedium and toil and returned home broken men. Brannan, on the other hand, became California’s first millionaire without ever shouldering a pickaxe.
I hadn’t intended to gamble. It did not seem like a terribly good idea, seeing as how my gaming competence grew hazy beyond “Go Fish” and I had just been had by a bus advertisement. But in a place where the alternatives were watching TV in the room or shelling out $47 for nosebleed seats to watch Roseanne Barr ruminate on the travails of menopause, gaming actually seemed like the least wasteful use of my time. I pocketed $20 and went downstairs.
I was apprehensive about gambling in front of real live people, but I didn’t want to play slots. Slot machines are for the people in the casino who want their gambling experience to be both joyless and interminable. The appealing aspect of the slot machines was that they require no smarts or experience—just the sufficient motor skill to pull a lever and the endurance to do so over and over. The downside being that it is impossible to hone any expertise that might tip the odds in your favor. Every once in a while, the mathematics would churn out a big winner, and the casino would take that person’s photograph and post it on the wall along with the sum of their prize money. Waves of new prospectors would then flood the slot banks, where they would sit hunched for hours with reflections of the titles (“Money Storm,” “Days Off,” “Ducks in a Row”) dancing in their glassy eyes—hopeless portraits of profound hope.
I chose video blackjack. The virtual dealer was a blonde woman wearing a snug leather bustle who smiled at me as I settled on to a stool alongside two other gamblers, a man with a goatee and a sleeveless shirt and a white-haired woman sporting a matching cotton shirt-and-pants combination so near to the color of her skin as to provoke a frightful double-take. The minimum bet was nice and small, $3, and I spent the first few hands wading in cautiously while orienting myself to the buttons on the console. Once my body had adjusted to the temperature of the game, I plunged in with a capricious $10 bet—and won. All of a sudden, I was up $15. Adrenaline surged unexpectedly through my veins. I punched the quit button and quickly cashed out my voucher. The bills from the machine were extra-crisp; a twenty, a ten, and a five. I folded them around my finger, unfolded them, wagged them bag and forth, then pinned them between my thumb and palm and splayed them in a rigid fan. Five minutes of work and I had paid for my share of the night’s lodging—what a racket!
Not knowing what exactly to do, I marched aimlessly through the casino for several minutes. If I go back to the room now, I thought, I can rest easy—$15 isn’t much, but it is more than I came in with and therefore more than I expected to leave with. My economics professor in college had taught us that the smart traders aren’t the ones who sell stock at its highest point. Calculating exactly when a stock will peak is an impossible science, and the ones who do so are either lucky or cheating. The smart traders—a distinct minority—are the those who can distinguish anomalies from trends and cash out their stock while it is still rising. Another video blackjack dealer made eyes and me, her lips sliding back into a disarming smile as she cocked her head and gestured toward a stool. A smart trader never sells too late in the climb, I reminded myself, but he also never sells too early. I sat down.
This time I bet big right away and lost all but $5 of my winnings. My adrenaline retreated, and I almost cashed out right then and there. But I was able to steady my nerves by reminding myself that the difference between $0 and $5 is pretty much negligible; losing the bulk of my winnings had simply relieved pressure, leaving me to “have fun” with the last of it. I won a cheap hand, then bet big on the next one and made blackjack. Just like that, I was up $28. My heart began to pound again, but I resisted the temptation to cash out immediately. I played two more hands and lost $8 before finally withdrawing my voucher. The two $20 bills I got for it were crisp, but they felt lonely. I fell asleep that night under the starchy sheets of my free hotel bed, a light tingling running up and down my legs, wondering what $56 would have felt like folded against the skin of my palm.
The next day we bought a full-day monorail pass for $12 and headed downtown to the Wynn, a hotel and casino just west of the strip that looked like an enormous shred of gold leaf bent in a slight crescent. The monorail car was covered in a black-and-green mural advertising a caffeinated energy drink. “Unleash the Beast,” it said. Indeed.
The Wynn was sleek and new. Unlike at the Sahara, which was built in 1952, the smell of cigarettes, air conditioning, and stale sweat had not yet taken root, and the casino smelled like new carpets. The waitresses had better skin and nicer legs. The slots, encased in fake wood paneling, looked less like pinball machines and more like jukeboxes. The gaming floor had the refined elegance of an upscale restaurant, and I felt decidedly more out-of-place there than at the cacophonic arcade that was the Sahara. We were there to meet a pair of friends from high school, Russell and Zack—practiced gamblers who made the pilgrimage to Las Vegas regularly and happened to be in town. By the time we arrived they were deeply involved in a poker tournament, which gave us about three hours to kill in the casino. Inevitably, we ended up at a blackjack table. I was severely out of my element. There were no video machines here, no virtual temptresses with reassuring smiles and to take me into their care; just a businesslike woman in a black tunic named Kimberly demanding a $10 minimum bet. We sat. There was no talking. The hands progressed with astonishing speed, I could barely add quickly enough to keep up. I won the first hand, putting me up $30. Then one loss, another, then a bust, and I was back to scratch. So much for the free hotel room. The crash took about three minutes.
The adrenaline of loss ran dark and deep. I wanted more than anything to keep gambling. I managed to resist by gaming vicariously through Ben, who went on a roulette run that evening. Up $260, he turned to us with fire in his eyes and declared, “I could bite through someone’s neck right now!”
At around midnight, we took a break from casino-hopping to watch the fountain show in front of the Bellagio. We pushed through the crowd to the railing. As Tina Turner wailed the Star-Spangled Banner over a public address system, cannons shot 70-gallon geysers against a background of billion-dollar resorts illuminated by hundreds of billions of watts of energy. We were deep in a dream, a fantasy where castles of impossible decadence rose out of the desert; an empire built on blind optimism. And in the shadows between the gulfs of light and movement, silhouettes of future casinos loomed.
Muffled explosions kicked the water columns to their tallest height yet, and Turner hit her high note. Standing at the edge of a lake in the middle of a desert, a block south of the Roman Forum and a block north of a pyramid, and staring up at the Eiffel Tower, I wondered if we had found America.
Posted from 7th Avenue, San Francisco, California.
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