My first foray into the Vegas club scene did not start well. In fact, it hit a snag before I left the house.
"Those pants are too short," said my wife from the vantage of her pillow pile, peering over the mystery novel propped on her chest. It was after 9 p.m. and she had already prepared herself for the warm embrace of Morpheus.
I was dressing, however inappropriately, to go clubbing. My Oedipal complex, I realized sourly, is largely sartorial; I must have married because my mother wasn't around to dress me any more. "Corduroy," my wife intoned bluntly, no longer looking. "It shrinks."
Sure enough, the olive wales grazed my ankles. This would not do. I pictured myself gliding among smartly dressed, cocktail-clutching clubbers, each glancing for a second at the passing rube's socks. I pulled on a finer weave of silk-blend slacks, donned a sport coat and slipped away just as Morpheus arrived. Some part of me envied my wife. I would gladly have made it a threesome.
But something stronger pulled me out the door. It was Saturday night. I live in Las Vegas, the club capital, party central. Damnit, man, live! Live!
Things did not immediately improve, however. I had already determined that I would not be able to park at or near the Icehouse. (Does advance concern about parking render someone, regardless of age, un-club?) For some reason, I had decided to park at the Fremont Street garage and hike, evidently forgetting the vast swath that comprises "Downtown" in Las Vegas. So I rued the choice on every new-shoes step along the urban badland of Main Street. My path took me past the largely empty Icehouse parking lot. The club itself was correspondingly deserted, its crisp, industrial/high-tech decor mocking a scene that could have been lifted from a wood-paneled saloon on some smokestack city's truly industrial, low-tech edge: scattered patrons hunched over drinks while the TV played a movie above the bar.
Surely, though, Sandusky Moe would not be flipping bottles onto his forearm and sluicing flavored martinis into slender stemware like this bartender, a slim dude shy of 30.
"Kinda quiet tonight, isn't it?" I ventured as he presented me an elegant cone of Harp.
And quiet it is most Saturday nights at the Icehouse, I learned. The place was looking into starting a regular Saturday night affair, the barkeep told me, but this Saturday night, the upstairs club was closed. An after-party for some concert had been canceled.
This surprised a couple to my right who had arrived, and who awaited others, for precisely that party. Cells flipped open instantly. I nursed my beer and watched the soundless travails of Wesley Snipes, slinging his sword in a hyper-tech vampires' den.
Less than half an hour had passed when I resumed my nocturnal trek. This time, my thoughts were of effortless slumber, uncomplicated by my ridiculous ineptitude. As I crossed the intersection where normally I would have turned, I felt home's centripetal tug—for the humdrum middle-aged man, the siren's lure of quiet, cookies and comforter. But I set my course for MGM Grand.
I'm not sure why, exactly, I felt impelled to sample the city's club life. The easiest explanation would be middle age itself, to which I have in some ways responded as others might with a new spouse or Jag. At 48, I have no children, and thus lack the token of age they offer most of my cohorts. The intervening years present no landmarks with which to judge the distance to that jolly pub-crawler of a quarter-century ago. It seems an easy jaunt, as had my walk to the Icehouse. I suppose that metaphorical march would lead me to the equivalent of Moe's Tavern.
But maybe I had missed something back when. Ever the self-important snob, I had sneered at the disco scene. I spent my early adulthood in groups that partied in apartments with booze and dope and records of the 1960s, preferring wit to pick-up lines and dance moves. Whenever I visited my hometown on breaks, buddies from high school would take me to discos, where the ethos was clearly "meat market." We were there "to pick up chicks" and las chicas were there to sort through our offers. The insistent beat and desperate bleat of the canned music provided aural backdrop to myriad negotiations on or around a raised, sub-lighted dance floor. Dancing, I supposed, was phase two of a two-step interview process. I don't know, though; I never completed an application. I drank beer and watched with detachment. And I'm left now to wonder if my dismissive attitude was genuine or if I was simply too scared to approach a corn-fed, Farrah-haired and bell-bottomed girl.
Also, some part of me today feels I've arrived in Las Vegas twice too late—way too tardy for its Rat Pack heyday and well past my prime for its current youth revival. Again, I have to assume children would make a difference: I would be too preoccupied with tempering their absorption of Sin City's temptations to think much of indulging in them myself.
Perhaps it was simple curiosity that carried the day, however. Every day I read about celebrities spotted in VIP booths, every week I scan the ads touting this DJ or that; every year I feel it all getting a little more distant. I had to check it out.
Worming my way into the MGM Grand garage, I began to rue my earlier bravado and wish I'd made that homeward turn. A concert had just let out, probably the one whose after-party was not at the Icehouse, and progress through the structure was glacial. I was thinking of leaving when a car started to back out of a space just too late for the driver in front of me to claim it. Some Benevolent Force, apparently, wanted me to go forward with this.
But it had more trials in store for me. Before setting out on my adventures, I was told to expect a line almost anywhere I went, especially at Studio 54. I found a line that stretched back along a side wall and turned a U at a doorway and reached halfway up along the other wall. I found the end and settled behind a female threesome in their mid-20s with beers and cigarettes in hand. Across the way I spotted a man in a zoot suit, accompanied by a man in a '70s-era Elvis costume.
Otherwise, the ragged queue comprised knots of men and knots of women, as I'd expected, but quite a few couples, too. This was Valentine's Day, and it occurred to me that for some of the couples, this would be a Big Night Out, perhaps to suffice a year or better. This I inferred from spotting a number of women tugging at components of dress-up outfits, what I presume is "club wear," off-the-rack and into-the-closet, possibly purchased when the wearer was an inch or two slimmer, intended for this and all similar situations. In my mind's ear I heard one of these women declaring, a week ago, to her mate: "We are getting a baby-sitter and you are taking me to Studio 54 for Valentine's Day!"
The three ladies in front of me I took for another type entirely. Probably tourists but possibly locals, they've been friends since high school, when they found refuge in their cafeteria anti-clique, the girls who would not accept that they were not popular because they were not attractive. And eight or 10 years on, they still track the styles, the That Girl curl, the hip-hugger slacks, the assertive décolletage. And this was a Big Night Out for them, too, whether Sunday found them in Summerlin or Sumter, South Carolina.
I was just about curious enough to ask, but a half-hour or so later, when we've made it to roughly the same point on the other side of the "U," a man of roughly the same age, with spiky hair, puffy face and untucked shirt, approached them. Something told me he did not know them, but possibly had chatted with them earlier. After some discussion, one left with him, then returned in a minute and all three booked. Either, I reflected, he has VIP entrée and he and his confreres have chosen to confer blessings upon these lucky ladies, or their bodies will be found a year from now outside Pioche.
With all this speculation about others in the line, I wondered how I struck them—this gray-bearded fellow by himself, his houndstooth sport coat ineffectively masking his slumped, beer-bellied frame. Isn't he about as sad as they come, chick-hunting at his age? And what's up with the little tape recorder he talks into now and then? But most others had distractions—friends and mates; cell phones, either clamped to cheeks or chin-high to check e-mail or play games; trips to the bar, to the slots, to the head. Even still, when I felt a yawn coming on, I stifled it.
After 50 minutes or so of this, I reached the line's destination, sharing a laugh with a burly attendant as he checked my driver's license. I paid my $10, got my hand stamped and suddenly—I was in.
The analogy with the wait at an amusement park attraction hit me. It was as if I had left the sunny afternoon to enter the spooky fun house—only an extremely loud and crowded one. The dance floor was packed, and single-file streams of people slithered through the dense periphery, some with drinks and purses held aloft. I fitted myself into one of these rivulets, to a less closely teemed area and took in the scene. Ah yes, a mirror ball. On two raised platforms flanking the dance floor, go-go dancers, in red leather bikini tops and miniskirts, oscillated meaningfully to an assertive but congenial beat with something like a melody spiraling around it. Below them, people had no room to be nearly as expressive; they just seemed to shuffle purposefully, although here and there couples shimmied together, face to face or back to back.
But what struck me most is how many people were simply standing around. Grouped around railings or backs to the wall, drinking, watching. And my mind floated back to the days of the original Studio 54, which I never saw but whose inferior simulations I visited with my high-school honchos: Get in, get a beer, get a place to stand. Maybe the alpha and beta among us would explore—in the larger world, they were gammas and omicrons—and maybe once or twice they would return with news of an equal-numbered colony of females and urge the critical necessity of balance. But on the whole we drank beer and watched, just like many of the men, and women, here.
After a while I roamed, but without intention. About every 10th person I passed was checking a lighted cell phone. I noticed here and there photos of celebrity habitués of the New York club: Joe Namath, Leonard Bernstein and of course Andy Warhol. I worked my way upstairs and around the system of catwalks and platforms, watched from various vantages. Below, I spotted a couple roughly my age dancing, his gray hair pulled into a ponytail. Good for you, I thought. At one point, I was about level with two women on swings above the dance floor, who ended their routine by tossing confetti. I briefly gawked for celebrities but of course did not want to appear too interested.
Downstairs again, I walked behind the dance floor, where the crowd was thinnest and where some seemed to go for a breather. On its fringes I spotted Zoot Suit and Elvis, looking at loose ends. At some tables sprawled a wedding party, both begowned bride and tuxedoed groom looking exceedingly tired; I imagine they were simply partied out, but somehow they seemed out of place, as did a pair of workers with brooms and dustpans.
Continuing to roam, I found a spot along the wall near the entrance, just below one of the go-go dancers. The shift had just changed and she and her elevated counterpart at the other end of the dance floor geared up quickly. The other beamed and mouthed along with the lyrical stream. She moved with emphatic enthusiasm. But the woman above me seemed more coldly deliberate, stepping forward or sidewise, rolling her hips, waving her arms in a manner both fluid and dispassionate. Every so often she raised her arms and twirled around smoothly, and I couldn't tell if some internal monitor gauged the music's rhapsodic pressure and regularly activated a venting mechanism, or if now and then she realized she had to step up her own energy. Either way, she worked with a kind of objective professionalism I found myself admiring.
And I found I liked the music, too—the work of resident DJ Frankie. For what it is and what it intends to do, it is far superior to most of the puerile love-and-dance crap that droned from speakers in the disco clubs I visited in the 1970s. It's still love-and-dance, I imagine, with a barely varying, driving beat, but it's a seamless aural web, artfully stitched together; energetic tunes joined by complex, sometimes climactic, codas. I don't know much about the DJ scene, but I like some of the music that emanates from the culture, by artists such as Lamb, Shpongle or DJ Shadow. For a few minutes, watching the dancer and letting the music cascade over me, I wished I were younger and more at home, not to pick up a chick but to experience that elementary physical surrender to rhythm that is at once private, shared with another and contingent on mass context.
On the other hand, I wanted to go home.
All sorts of things got in the way of a second maraud. One weekend we were out of town. Another we had guests. I got sick. Plus, and this must be said, it is no longer easy to rouse myself to action late in the evening. A couple of times I nursed the intention all week long, then Thursday, and Friday, and Saturday nights passed with me asleep at midnight, unable to muster the resolve. I'm sorry, I'm old.
On a recent Thursday, though, I found myself sufficiently chipper at 9 p.m. to clean myself and don something close to what the club ads call "fashionable attire."
I have to admit, I find something about this appearance proviso annoying. I like to play dress-up as well as anyone, and even in my younger, more strident days, I took care to assemble a studiously unassembled look. But the idea of a just-so dress code to enter a noisy, jammed space seems smarmy to me. It's not like we're still in the days of puttin' on a tux for Puttin' on the Ritz. And it's not like anyone has to be told, anyway.
The point, after all, is not decorum but sex. If the '70s disco scene was about negotiation, today it's about closing the deal. The marketing is Slinky Ladies 4 U, and it doesn't seem to matter how the men are dressed. My wife observed that a model probably could show up in a T-shirt and jeans; other women have to wear the racy fashions the models sell.
This became clear to me as I waited to enter Rain at the Palms. I had been told that Rain was a popular spot; cued to try Thursday, when the crush might be mildest; and warned to get in line early. I arrived sometime before 10 p.m. and found a line stretched across the casino and wrapped along the side of Garduno's, almost to the doorway to the parking garage. For some reason, I was reluctant to join, thinking it might move quickly once the doors open. So I wiled. I got a cup of coffee. Played some slots.
I settled at a nickel machine, a "5 Times Pay" model with five pay lines, playing a different number of coins each time. About halfway through my $5 stake, I played two coins and rolled two 7s and the 5-times wild card—on the third line. I calculated the unwagered third nickel cost me $500, and carried this soothing reflection with me to the queue, where I spent the next two hours marinating in regret and general misanthropy.
The line by this point, around the 11 p.m. opening, was part way up the opposite edge of the corridor, along the coffee shop, a definitely uncool corner of contrast. I stood behind a young man by himself, behind a group of four other young men. None was dressed lavishly. Mostly they sported khaki slacks and untucked buttoned shirts. I spotted a good deal of short, spiky hair, and here and there that studied, '70s-style high-school-junior moptop. No other men wore sport coats like me.
But the women were over the top. At Studio 54, they dressed for a big night out; at Rain they meant business. The low-cut, cropped top and ruffled Flamenco miniskirt ruled the evening. And my wife's observation rung true.
The group behind me, ever shifting for beer and slot runs, included a likely one-time Southern California hoops center and his former cheerleader girlfriend. She was conventionally attractive, a slim, flaxen blonde with a wholesome face, no doubt the wet dream of half her high school, and she sported a snug but relatively modest top and pants. Then they left, either with VIP clearance or simply giving up. A foursome of early-20s females stepped into the void, none especially unattractive but each a little chunky, two more so than the others. And the distance of each from the departed blonde on the American Conventionally Attractive Index registered in advancing degrees on the Slut-o-meter.
About an hour into the wait, near the rounded corner of Garduno's, I spotted another young couple approach the line and stop. Clearly they disputed whether or not to join, and clearly she wanted to and he did not. Neither did, but she stalked away without him.
Meanwhile, the wait was leavened somewhat with a hint of doings inside, psychedelic patterns on the screens over Garduno's bar and occasional shots of go-go dancers. The girls behind me took up the relative merits of hairless scrotums.
At two hours, we crossed the breach in the line by the Little Buddha entrance, and excitement visibly quickened around me. One of the trailing foursome struck up a chat with the single fellow in front of me. But apparently he wouldn't do, and suddenly I found her addressing me.
She and her friends were from New York and New Jersey, university seniors on spring break. They got a cheap midweek fare and so this was their Saturday night. I explained a little of my mission to her, drawing the interest of her friends. All four had beers and bloodshot eyes. And with a suavity I cannot perceive, all four insinuated themselves into the group of men in front of me. Abruptly they're earnestly blathering with the boys and I'm alone again and behind them.
At the head of the line, they and their new friends showed IDs and vamoosed. For formality's sake I flashed my DL, left a 10-spot and followed, into the mirror-tiled hall leading to the club.
Where Studio 54 seemed dim and close, Rain was open, arena-like and brighter, but the crowd was crushingly thick and the din palpable. Movement was almost always sideways. Slowly I made my way up to the top level and took a spot by the railing to observe the boiling scene below. The air had an urgency that made the atmosphere at Studio 54 seem like after-hours at a jazz club, circa 1962; from the plumes of fire and cloud that issued from the rocking arms on the truss over the dance floor to the raging pulse of DJ Ladytribe's exigent stylings. Up here, people mostly watched, although a few couples squirmed together.
A level below, the deep plush booths were mostly deserted, but in one a threesome comprising a man and two women, nearly supine, clutched and pawed each other. I worked my way down to the main floor again. The raised dance floor was packed, and activity around it foamed. Groups of unpaired men and women bobbed and wove to the music, but the couples all but coupled. On the bench around the dance floor, a woman sat on a man's lap and assiduously applied herself to raising a hickey. Another woman rubbed, lap-dance-style, on her partner's thigh.
After a bit, I spotted the girls who trailed me in the line. The girl who first spoke to me had claimed the alpha male of the party ahead of me, and they ground front-to-back. Another slithered with his friend. But the two larger girls are mate-less.
And again my mind flashed back. Plus ça change, I thought, but I reflected, too, that much has changed. The disco visit of the '70s, at least for unattached men, was about finding a date. The ultimate outcome, no doubt attained by some, but a vague, distant goal for most, was sex. A kiss and a phone number constituted a pretty good payday, at least among my buddies pursuing it. But sex seemed the given here. If couples were not actually doing it on the dance floor, it was the next item on the agenda. So finding a spot and soaking in the scene was out of the question. Neither sought nor found, neither scoring nor losing, I am useless here, an irrelevance. I finish my drink and leave.
So much for my probe of the club scene. I found I am indeed older but in some ways the same rigid scold I was 25 years ago. I suppose I haven't really missed anything, unless it was easy sex. Well, perhaps in the next life ...
I feel like I've seen enough to get the picture, and to see that I've always been outside the frame.
But I don't sneer at the clubs or the clubbers. They've elaborated a music and a milieu of their time that in some ways feels more honest than the one I shunned when I was the same age.
Curiously, I could see myself trying again, this time without a fact-finding mission, maybe checking out one of the clubs I had meant to visit but did not. Just to sip a beer and soak in the scene, without expectations of any sort.
A mid-afternoon nap might help. And VIP admission.