Three years ago, Mandi Keller moved to Las Vegas to find a better life after death.
She packed a rental van and drove west from Waterloo, Iowa. She listened to Gloria Estefan and Toni Braxton and Sheryl Crow the whole way, driving only at night. Sleeping each day in the back of the van. Sleeping under the dirty futon mattress that was her only furniture.
About the stained, white-cotton futon, Keller says, "You can smell the cow s—t in that dirt. That's pure Iowa. That's dirt from my grave."
With legs that never get tired. Feet that never swell after all night in high heels. Her hair bleached to a platinum blond that will never grow out. Keller found a job as a Keno girl, her first night on the Strip.
Now she's got a studio apartment, the windows lined with aluminum foil. She's driving a Nissan Sentra, and she's saving her tips toward a breast enhancement surgery.
"Technically," Keller says, "I could do it, myself. Seeing as how I'm all dead tissue, but I don't want to chance too much scarring."
For the biggest resort hotels in town, Mandi Keller is the dream employee. She always looks good, with clear flawless skin. She never calls in sick. She doesn't need a medical or dental plan.
It hardly seems to matter that Amanda Keller is dead.
And—more and more, every winter—Las Vegas is becoming a City of the Dead.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, an estimated 600 people will move to Clark County this year, all of them just like Keller. Most of them during the winter months, when days are short and nights, long.
"I don't have that blood enzyme disorder … porphyria," Keller insists. "It's not protoporphyria or coproporphyria. My upper canine incisors are not this sharp because I have hypohidrotic ectodermal dysplasia."
Taking a break between shifts, still wearing her black uniform, the skirt so short she has to stand, Keller says, "To my way of thinking, if African Americans can use the term 'n----r.' And homosexuals can call themselves 'queer.' Then, why can't I just be honest and forthcoming. I'm a vampire. Vegas is full of us. We're here."
According to the CDC, the average vampire living in Las Vegas is 25 years old. He or she moved here looking for late-night service industry work and good wages. Chances are most likely they have at least two years of college, prior to beginning a vampire lifestyle. And, they will be here, forever.
"What I love about Las Vegas," Keller says, "is you can get around, do things, and not get any sun. In a place where the weather's great 300-something days every year, you can still go shopping … hit the gym … pick up your dry cleaning, all at night."
Most important, for vampires who've been forced to drop out of college, you can still work and earn a decent wage. So, for a permanent 25-year-old with nothing but a high school education, who can only work nights, it looks like Amanda Keller is in Las Vegas to stay and pay taxes, work her job, sleep days behind her tin foil-covered windows, and someday pick up her social security checks, forever and ever.
In this three-part series, we'll look at the life of a typical immigrant. The history and politics behind making America's Playground a refuge for her lifestyle. And the famous people already in residence, some of them the biggest names in entertainment who plan to perform forever in the city that never sleeps.
It's a trend all started by one man. One dead man.
Keller lights a cigarette and says, "God bless Howie. We all say that."
Clark County has been growing as a vampire magnet since the mid-1960s, when Howard Hughes first holed up in the penthouse of the Desert Inn. Hughes, who broke almost every bone in his body when he crash-landed an experimental airplane in Beverly Hills in 1946, had been expected to die. In what seemed like a miracle, he survived. Or at least seemed to survive. Blaming his behavior on addiction to painkillers, Hughes became a recluse following the plane crash, seldom seen, and running his empire through a team of front men. He kept staff on-call, 24-hours-a day: drivers, barbers, girlfriends, occasionally calling to request their appearance at one or two in the morning. Even negotiating his business deals in now-infamous midnight meetings in city dumps.
By 1966, his late-night lifestyle had led Hughes to the penthouse of the Desert Inn, which he bought in 1967 for $13.25 million dollars—only when the previous owners threatened to evict him. With $546 million dollars from the sale of his Transworld Airlines stock, Hughes bought the Sands Hotel for $14.6 million. He bought the Silver Slipper and Castaways and The Frontier Hotel. To control the movies shown on local late-night television, Hughes bought CBS affiliate KLAS-TV.
He bought the Landmark Hotel for $17.3 million. He never bathed, instead swabbing himself with rubbing alcohol. He hoarded what he claimed to be his urine and hair and fingernail clippings, displaying them in jars, as desperate proof he was still mortal.
By 1971, Hughes had spent $300 million to develop Las Vegas as a world-class resort town—even fighting to end nearby underground nuclear testing by the federal government. By 1972, he'd left town, moving to the Bahamas.
In his wake, legions of blue-collar, working-class vampires have flocked to Clark County. To the 24-hour world he nurtured. And to the constant influx of tourists, millions of tourists, that provide the area's primary source of income and food.
Today's vampire is more likely to be a Keno girl at the Riviera. Or a prep cook at the Aladdin. Or work in the cashier's cage at the Golden Nugget. Graveyard-shift jobs or daytime jobs in the windowless, permanent twilight of the Forum Shops or a casino floor.
"Me, personally," Keller says, "any blood I do is totally consensual. Listen, there are plenty of guys in town for a couple days who'll let you suck them."
Most vampires will tell you this. That their blood comes through ads placed on the Internet, people who'll trade a pint of blood for the erotic thrill. Tourists or conventioneers here from around the world, looking for something beyond the standard sex acts for sale.
Another fallback food source is the population of undocumented Mexican laborers. Or the escort workers in the city's burgeoning sex industry.
"This isn't me," Keller says, "but my friends call those girls 'fast food.' Because it's like sending out for a pizza or something. Thirty minutes, and they're at your door."
Keller shrugs, saying, "You get used to it. This is no worse than the Atkins Diet." She insists, "We don't kill anybody. And we turn very few people onto the lifestyle. I mean, who needs the competition?"
Still, the competition is on its way. More and more, it's not just the working stiffs who come to Clark County to find their place out of the sun. Celebrity entertainers of a certain age are foregoing the ordeal of plastic surgery and yoga and becoming vampires to preserve their looks and careers.
Keller says, "I know we're not supposed to talk about Siegfried or Celine or those big-name people because …" and she curls two long, red fingernails in the air to make invisible quotation marks, "… because they're not out as vampires. But we all come for the same reasons."
In the next installment of this series, we'll focus on the local entertainers, the politicians and the gaming executives who work to keep Las Vegas humming. And who know that cash money isn't the city's most-important blood.
In the next moment, Amanda Keller stubs out her cigarette. With her long legs and platinum hair, she's back at work, walking the casino floor in her high heels and short skirt, saying to strangers from Kansas City and Madison, "Keno?" Waving her printed cards and saying, "Keno?" Trying to get some tourist to bite …