It happens every year at Christmas, when I travel to St. Louis to visit various generations of my kin: Their eyes plead, their lips purse, their glares turn to glowers and out comes the question: "How much longer do you see yourself in that city?" It's followed cigarette puffs, stiff cocktails and familiar comments, uttered in a profound manner as though they're truly brilliant insights, about the dirty-scandalous-corrupt nature of—sniff—Sin City.
This year's even more special because this confusion as to why I'm still here started with the parents at Thanksgiving, and then continued through e-mail. This is the latest from my mother: "I think Vegas is a hub for all that is non-wholesome," she wrote—from Texas, home to Enron (and now Ken Lay's wife's secondhand store), George Bush, the best little whorehouse, oil-slicked streets, immigrant killers/smugglers and, well, you name it. She ends the e-mail excitedly telling me how she and my father spent last weekend gambling (successfully!) in New Orleans—and she's not being ironic. Of course, it doesn't matter, anyway, because in places like New Orleans or Houston or even Toad Suck, Arkansas, you don't need a prepared response as to why you would live in such a place. Not so with Las Vegas.
I find that with every year passing year, what I lack in nostalgia I make up for in amazement that I'm still here. Even more surprising is the growing possessiveness I feel for this city, actually wanting to defend it from outsiders and my mother. Not that I'm Miss Gung-Ho Vegas. I can look down my nose at the pitfalls of this city with the best of them, but the point is, we shouldn't have to rationalize the reasons we remain to anyone—except maybe ourselves.
When I first arrived here, I was guilty, too, snobbishly curious about the creatures who grew grass in the desert, imagining a corrupt city ruled by casino-sponsored officials and where every time you stroll in the desert you risk walking into a man-filled hole. I wasn't far off, of course, but to think that "sins" and corruption and greed are any worse here is to glaze over the repression and denial of other places. We're just a little more obvious in how we go about things.
In the past, the comments of my relatives have just rolled off, but this year, anticipating the fourth year of the questioning, I'm irritated at the thought of it. Because it doesn't matter what I say—that I like my job, my friends, the life I've established, the never-ending freak shows that make life interesting, the tolerance I've developed for scorpions—they only have minds for grit. As much as this place can get you down, it's always an interesting cultural study, where Mormons and strippers are neighbors in Spanish Trails. Where hitmen mingle with business men. Where Celine Dion could actually run into a transsexual Celine Dion impersonator at Wild Oats. It's those kinds of revelations that make Las Vegas so endearing/repulsive/repulsively endearing. And it's those kinds of explanations that make my family even more uncomfortable.