Each man in his time plays many roles, as Shakespeare observed. Lee Barnes has enjoyed enough incarnations for all of Shakespeare's seven ages of man. Growing up as an Army brat, he was drafted during the Vietnam War, winding up in the Green Berets (because they didn't do K.P.). His experiences inspired Gunning for Ho, the anthology of Vietnam-themed fiction that gave him his breakout success as a writer, at age 55.
After Vietnam, Barnes—a prize-winning martial artist—was a Las Vegas cop, a narcotics agent, private eye and, eventually, a casino dealer. That last job provided fodder for the "creative nonfiction" of Dummy Up and Deal. When not teaching creative writing at CCSN, Barnes continues to tell stories, such as 2003's The Lucky (a roman a clef about Benny Binion) and this year's story collection, Talk to Me, James Dean. He talked to Las Vegas Weekly about his next project—and what lights his creative fire.
To what degree is your writing influenced by contemporary events?
Oh, very much so. Right now, I'm writing a nonfiction book about the shootout at the Laughlin River Run between the Hell's Angels and the Mongols. What interested me is the influence of an image in pop culture: the lack of rites of passage. One of the flip sides of the rise of feminism is this devaluation of the male experience.
Traditionally, almost all societies had rites of passage for their males. If you see the rise of extreme sports, the ones who engage in that are seeking a male identity involving risk, skill—the same kind of stuff that was prized in the late primitive subcultures. Today, other than athletics, we don't see those same kinds of opportunities.
Something else about the shootings struck you as peculiar.
Gangsters, when they have a shootout, they want to get by with it. They don't want it to be a public thing. But here, all of a sudden, we have men ranging from their early 20s probably up to 60 engaged in a rivalry that takes place in a casino with all of these bystanders around. There has to be some relation to why and how has this culture—not just here but Western Europe—embraced the Hell's Angels culture. In the '60s, they were the heroes of the counterculture; and I don't think the counterculture ever fully understood them and where it was going. Even Hunter S. Thompson kind of missed it until they beat him up. Then he got the hint.
So that incident down there is a very telling incident about the outlaw mentality. We live in a society where this kind of violence has gotten worse as armaments have gotten better. It's going to continue to grow. There's something going on out there that people are overlooking.
The River Run trial seems to have crept in under the radar while we focus on the Binion retrial, maybe because the latter is an easier narrative to break down for a mass audience.
Absolutely, if you take the Binion trial or Scott Peterson, people want the attractive female victim or suspect. They want an absolute motive that they can understand. Everybody likes to speculate about that motive. Binion? "Oh, she killed him because she was in love with Tabish and they were both greedy. Tabish was behind it." So now you've got all that kind of television drama.
[River Run] is utterly lacking in soap opera. It's also difficult to understand that kind of motivation. It's not about greed, it's not about love, and it's not about lust. There were no bystanders killed. The people who were victims were also participants, which is different. What are the odds of that happening?
But it will end up getting a lot of attention. You've got 42 defendants and there's 42 attorneys representing them, and the judge is not going to separate them at trial. Now, what's that going to be like? To me, that's far more fascinating than an attractive woman who's got an attractive boyfriend and they kill a millionaire heroin addict.
Your most recent book begins with a story of how a purse snatching turns almost into a lynch mob.
Yes, in Talk to Me, James Dean there's a huge indifference to a violent act. Part of the reason is that we're conditioned to it by television. My generation was the first one to go to war and just shoot like madmen. Yet the soldiers in World War II were trained much the same way and, statistically, far, far fewer of them ever fired their weapon at the enemy. There must have been some kind of moral barrier involved that's been shed.
You refer to Death of a Salesman in the acknowledgements. It sounds like you had Willy Loman for a stepfather.
My stepfather was an Army officer. Later, he got out and was a radio-television announcer. He was always moving from town to town: The next job was going to be the last job, the job. He ended up in Las Vegas and that's eventually how, after Vietnam, I ended up here.
Unlike Willy Loman, my stepfather did take the risk of at least moving on. I guess he achieved some modicum of success in his field later, but he never hit one of the top markets.
Do you think that Las Vegas is a better place to find stories?
It's a better place to find a different kind of story. There's a kind of richness by virtue of the fact that this is a city strictly built on migration. How many people were born in Las Vegas compared to those who have moved here?
Suddenly, the Southwest became the theme for the 21st century. The shift is we've got a huge yuppie culture that built these shopping centers around town. It's sort of like Malibu in the desert. That's what it's going to come to.
Vegas itself is always a story, but don't forget that there are all these other little stories that are the composition of Las Vegas. The outside writers, they could probably do the same thing in New York with the same characters. CSI obviously can be set anywhere. You're not getting to the core of a Vegas story, and there are thousands of them.
I am not just a Vietnam writer, a Las Vegas writer; I'm a writer. If it doesn't interest me, I probably won't read about it, won't write about it. Britney Spears doesn't interest me. Do I care what movie star's getting laid? Do I care which one's in town? Nah, I don't. The stories I'm concerned with are about people who aren't going to have the flashbulbs around them.