LAS VEGAS—Shakespeare did not live in the age of malls, but The Bard would have recognized this city in any age, for what it is. Nick Tosches described Las Vegas as “a religion, a disease, a nightmare, a paradise for the misbegotten.”
This city of a thousand flashing lights racing on and off, bizarre and beautiful, meant to confuse that there is no time here, no night and day, no past or future. It is just like having arrived at a palace at the end of the world, its oversized antiquities and friezes, employees wearing costumes, seducing you inside with a game of roulette, crap or Keno—with the sound of money.
Behind the glitter and neon posts is an incredible array of colorful characters who enhance its mystique. The tales are taller, of their winnings and losses in life as well as on the tables, their extreme experiences, even greater.
The characters are both real and imagined, famous and obscure — whether a writer is looking for the classic kitschy Las Vegas of yester years, when it was known as the temple of the first American Dream (founded by Bugsy Siegal). There is a hidden world beyond its popular image ranging from the hilarious to the tragic, drawn to the city, for the inspiration provided by its spirit and character, for what it says about us and our society whether as a cesspool for the crass or a pleasant palace of the ordinary mortal. This phenomena and its denizens provide the spark to the writer’s imagination. From Howard Hughes, Frank, Dino, Elvis, Michael Jackson and the rest of the ensemble (gone, but not forgotten). Throw in the world’s best and worst gamblers, ladies’ room attendants, showgirls, conventioners, (doctors are the lowest tippers) to a haven of sin and vice, to its present incarnation as lower rollers gambling playground of today.
You start pondering about that cocktail waitress, bitter-etched, tallish woman, in her 40s or 50s with great bone structure and coiffed dyed hair looking like she was once a chorus line beauty, wise cracking with hard-tired eyes and smile that happen by reflex—because that is when you feel a waft of how it felt to write the Books of Revelation. You know, each one has a story, and that it is something these days to be a story. More and more people don’t, unless you’re the self-confessed paramours of Tiger Woods or Mel Gibson, and the whole ensemble.
I am intrigued by fat ladies in wheelchairs, like wretched, disfigured, supplicants in Lourdes, France—roll and heave in ghastly faith toward the cold gleaming maws of slot machines.
Even as we talked, I could hear the handle of slot machines. They pulled and pulled and pulled, making you wonder where the money comes from, even imagined the possibility of the machine incubating their own coins and giving birth to the money, money, money while lights flashed and bells rang!
For some reasons, though, I knew the money could never be mine or yours, even if we had a truckload of coins to spend and pull the same machines all night long, till kingdom come. It will be devoured again and again, the nickels, and the dimes, and the quarters it provides for the hungry slot machines, rather than extra cash for the Moonlighter and it seems to me that in some great sky, someone had chosen the lucky and the unlucky, the winner and loser. Luck wasn’t given because someone needed or deserved it, or I’ll be the luckiest one alive!
Vegas is the temptress that seduced and beguiled leading to wide doors, but these doors weren’t doors, they were great sucking machines of which money fell out of slot machines, into stocks of chips that grew taller or shorter on green felt tables for winners and losers—the ack-ack breasts—busts that boomed everywhere as less endowed women like me busted the boom!
It seduced idiot gamblers with the sound of money, visitors to wear outrageous clothes, and on the subject of glaring clothes people wore here, it gave one the possibility of (why not?) dyeing one’s hair champagne pink and gluing rhinestones on my forehead, wear clothes that when my grandchildren saw, they will need therapy for five years to recover—that I have indeed spawned their mothers.
In Vegas, you can do anything. Give in to that subsidiary thrill, that almost religious excitement before a game, to flashes of insanity and lunar influence. And even against all odds, you’ll get a great night and the greatest thing about that night, is that you’ve done nothing to deserve it.
Vegas is value-free.
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E-mail Mylah at [email protected]
