Some things are a given, it seems, for any book written about Las Vegas these days. The fantastic growth rate of the past two decades must be mentioned. Also noted is the failure of past efforts to market Las Vegas as a family destination—inevitably the "what happens here stays here" advertisements are mentioned to prove the point. The oracle Steve Wynn must be consulted for insight. And, though Skin City: Uncovering the Las Vegas Sex Industry by Jack Sheehan and The Last Honest Place in America: Paradise and Perdition in the new Las Vegas by Marc Cooper are very different books, both authors once again cover this common ground.
There is also, of course, the mandatory interview with Oscar Goodman. Cooper has Michael Green commenting what every local knows, "that the 'most dangerous place to stand in Vegas is between Oscar and a TV camera.'" So, it is hard to be impressed when Jack Sheehan brags in his intro that he got the mayor for "an exclusive interview for this book." Wow.
Nonetheless, for a writer with a sociological bent, Las Vegas remains the ultimate Rorschach test. Hunter Thompson, as it were, brought the fear and loathing with him to the desert. In both of these books, too, the authors are upfront about what brought them and, unsurprisingly, both find in Las Vegas exactly what they were looking for.
Jack Sheehan's first glimpse of Vegas came in the form of a showgirl on the cover of a program brought back to his home in Spokane by his parents, who had come here for a dental convention. In 1976, 26-year-old Sheehan moved here, and he admits in the introduction to Skin City, "I'd be less than honest if I didn't admit that my own curiosity about sex and the people who make their living peddling it topped the short list of my reasons for coming here and settling in." Las Vegas did not disappoint Sheehan, and in Skin City he finds an abundance of adult stars, strippers, escorts and swingers to profile.
In the case of Ashlyn Gere, he didn't have to look far. It turned out the porn star was a former student in an English course Sheehan taught at UNLV:
"I never would have guessed that of the hundreds of students I taught in my five years in front of a classroom, she would be the one to pursue a porno career. She was just too bubbly and innocent." Both of these qualities, Sheehan learns after paying his former student a visit, helped make her a success in her chosen career. And Gere makes clear that it was her choice and that she has no regrets. "I don't have any horror stories about the adult business," she tells Sheehan. "My years in it fulfilled a certain need I had for attention. I love sex, and I learned to enjoy it thoroughly on camera. And I am going to retire soon from films with absolutely no regrets."
Gere is typical of the people Sheehan looks at in Skin City, in that she is successful, with a highly developed entrepreneurial streak and no moral qualms about her work. Similarly he finds happy hookers, fulfilled swingers and, as for the strippers, one notes, "I am going to dance as long as I possibly can. Where else can I make this kind of money and feel like a star?"
So entertaining and satisfied with their lot are the characters we meet in Skin City that the fact that these people are not typical but exceptional only comes through on occasion. In a chapter profiling Metro's vice unit, an officer reflects on crack whores and the reasons why pimps prefer 15-year-old girls. None of the adult entertainers Sheehan profiles apparently have drug problems or pimps. In fact, one high-end escort actually—without irony—supports a crackdown on street prostitution.
Sheehan is good at capturing little moments like this. At a swingers' convention, he finds a guy named Steve musing, "You just don't see homosexual men at these gatherings. It's considered too creepy." For the most part, though, Sheehan writes admiringly of his subjects, seeing in them brave people who, in the permissive atmosphere of Las Vegas, have taken advantage of a unique opportunity to live fulfilling and successful lives exploring areas most find taboo, and profitably engaging in behavior that even in Sin City sometimes falls on wrong side of the law.
Marc Cooper, on the other hand, sees more sinister and secretive forces at work in his vision of Las Vegas. Like Sheehan, Cooper, too, was introduced to Las Vegas by his parents, in his case during regular road trips during the '50s and '60s from California. Though he portrays this time in idyllic terms, at least one anecdote (in which Cooper's mom bluffs the Stardust into giving her a $5,000 marker she can't support) suggests these trips may not have been entirely stress-free vacations. Now a contributing editor to the left-wing magazine The Nation, Cooper returned for a series of visits over the past few years to examine Las Vegas in the post-September 11 world. But Cooper explains that more than professional interest drew him back: "This book attempts to understand the pull this city exercises over me, if not over the tens of other millions who increasingly stream into the casinos, clubs and resorts."
But trying to understand this perceived yet mysterious "pull" radically distorts how Cooper experiences Las Vegas. "One thing for sure," he writes early on, "the reporting of this book was accompanied by the low-level fever that Las Vegas induces, that resonant electrified hum that—after sufficient exposure—inevitably replaces your normal body rhythms." (Though I've lived here five years now, I think I still have the same body rhythms I brought from Philadelphia.)
Cooper's view of Las Vegas as the ultimate heartless-capitalist mecca is a cliché. In his view, "Vegas is ... the market ethic stripped completely bare." To prove this point, Cooper offers a set piece on the controversy involving the homeless in Las Vegas, visits a treatment program for addicted gamblers and writes of the problems plaguing Downtown.
In general, though, Cooper's quest in Las Vegas is too personal to let him dwell long on the great theme of capitalism and its discontents. But as with the enigmatic Vegas pull and his low-hum Vegas fever, Cooper's politics further unbalance and discredit and ultimately overwhelm his view of the city. So, for example, Cooper bizarrely wishes to see the growth of Las Vegas the past two decades as an indictment of Republican presidents:
"But most of those who are now crowding into Las Vegas were fleeing from an America where everyday life had become too much of a gamble. Where either the Reagan recession of '81, the Bush slump of 1990 or the bubble-burst of a decade later had left them devastated as a blackjack player who had bet it all, only to have his pair of 10s get trounced by the dealer's ace-king."
But then why didn't growth boom during the far worse recession of Carter's term? For that matter, did growth slow during the eight-year Clinton economic boom, when people presumably were less desperate? In fact, Cooper, without any sense that this contradicts his theory, notes that Las Vegas doubled its population in the '90s.
This is something of an obsession for Cooper, and his political points have increasingly little to do with Las Vegas as he gives way to it. He denounces the major casino executives as "pinhead little men who operate America's fattest gambling operations" in the same paragraph that he notes that they overwhelmingly contributed to the Bush campaign. Yet they probably gave to the Gore campaign, too, and though Cooper doesn't mention it, in both these actions they are no different than executives of large companies in any industry, in any city.
The low moment comes when he offers this interpretation of how Las Vegas responded to the war in Iraq with deadpan cynicism: "Vegas isn't big on wars—they tend to be a terribly distracting drag on profits." Actually, another reason might be that so many residents of Las Vegas have relatives serving in the military because of nearby bases. Besides, what sane community is big on war?
Over the course of the book, Cooper can't stay fully focused on either his personal quest or his political views. Instead, the book is padded out with too familiar workaday accounts of the Ted Binion murder, operation G-Sting and even some card-by-card explanations of Cooper's blackjack hands.
Interestingly, the main thread running through The Last Honest Place in America is a nostalgia for old Vegas, and that, more than anything, seems at the core of Cooper's loathing of the megasresorts and their newfangled video poker and slot clubs. He notes:
"Everything that made the DI and its muffled, spacious and dignified casino alluring to me is exactly what made it a guaranteed loser in the New Vegas."
It is a prejudice that, like his others, he never fully acknowledges, even when, in the book's oddest and most heartfelt pages, he writes of the demolition of the DI as if the building were a woman and Steven Wynn a killer: "But I confess my stomach knots as I see how the once exquisite Desert Inn has been disfigured and disembowled in preparation for her beheading," and, "She was the last surviving refuge, the final holdout of understated elegance and Old Vegas class and cool left on the Strip ..."
Here, then, is the truth behind Cooper's view of Las Vegas, and the tense change here is revealing:
"I go to Las Vegas—or at least I went to Las Vegas—because even though I knew everything that was sinister, calculating and evil about it, I loved Las Vegas. Only in Las Vegas could I dare to fantasize that I was a Friend of Frank."
Now that Frank is gone and the DI dust, all Cooper seems to see in the new Las Vegas are the things that are sinister, calculating and evil. Near his conclusion, Cooper moans:
"... every casino on the Strip, everything is designed to imprison me here: its labyrinth no-exit layout; the absence of any clocks, phones or windows; the cashier cage, which is inconspicuously hidden in the back; the ubiquitous ATMs that dispense nothing smaller than C-note denominations; an endless flow of free drinks (I'm on my fourth Wild Turkey); the loud clanging of coins in acoustically hyped trays; the disorienting flashing and flickering lights of the slots and video machines; the brightly colored chips themselves ..."
Of course, none of this is an actual prison, and it is a sign of his deterioration as an observer that Cooper confuses an aggressive marketing gimmick with coercion. He is not being restrained; the casino is passive. I, for one, love leaving rooms packed with irritating lights and clanging sounds, but then I haven't been oppressed by the Man feeding me four free glasses of Wild Turkey.
In the end, neither Sheehan nor Cooper has much revelatory to say about Las Vegas. But in Skin City, Sheehan at least allows us a glimpse of real people he has met here and how they live, whereas Cooper too often is just another tourist staring at Las Vegas and seeing his own reflection.