Recently, I had occasion to go to Circus Circus. This, in itself, in 2005, is an odd enough thing for a local who does not work at Circus Circus, and I suppose I should just stop there, having written a setup that is its own punch line.
My occasion was the picking up of a check, and picking up the check made it necessary for me to go not to the hotel itself, but to the human resources department of the hotel, which is not, by any normal definition of the word "in," in the hotel. It is, however, "at" the hotel, beyond two small kidney-shaped pools, across a parking lot and past the several low-slung trapezoidal buildings that make up the hotel's very own motel, Circus Circus Manor. That is to say, the human resources department—which is, in the end, to be found beyond an orange dumpster, in the property's far parking garage—is not in the hotel, but on the hotel's grounds.
There was a time in Las Vegas when there was no reason to italicize the word grounds, as if I'd cribbed it from a French phrase book. Las Vegas hotels, after all, have for 60 years been not simply hotels, but resorts, and resorts, of course, are supposed to have grounds. It's the grounds that make it a resort. In the 1970s and '80s, the greatest of all Las Vegas resorts was Caesars Palace, in part because its grounds went on and on and on. There was the tennis shop and the tennis courts and the tennis stadium where the Alan King Tennis Classic was once played and where a little thick-browed boy with a Prince Valiant haircut and a killer forehand and the initials A.A. once knocked the ball back and forth with Jimmy Connors. There was the parking lot, the sprawling, endless parking lot, where my mother once crumpled the grille of her Cadillac Seville, and where Sugar Ray Leonard and Thomas Hearns, in the greatest temporary stadium ever built, once crumpled one another's grilles. All over the place grew Italian cypress that could have come from any back yard in greater Las Vegas.
The grounds at Caesars also included (and, miraculously, they still do) the grandiose fountains out front, over which Gary Wells once tried to jump with a motorcycle, and before which innumerable newlyweds, my brother among them, have smiled and said "cheese." But for the most part, in those days, grounds were not about spectacle so much as they were about simple R&R. Today, resorts want you to be dazzled within an inch of your life—even the swimming pools are supposed to speed your pulse; back then, though, the quaint idea was that you should, during the moments when you stray from the casino, either relax or (as the elder George Bush once put it) recreate. The grounds were a vast horizontal space—as one would expect from the word "grounds"—in which took place the portion of a resort's business that was not strictly business. You could wander on the grounds. You didn't, most of the time, need a key or a guest pass; you didn't need to penetrate a high-rise fortress to get there. You just drove to the big, flat parking lot at the back of the hotel and walked onto the big, flat grounds. You wandered the nooks and crannies; if you were a kid, maybe you tried to get from the recreational areas to the strange and forbidden places where electricity was routed or water was pumped or uniformed personnel did things that only uniformed personnel were supposed to do; you did this for no other reason than that you could. You did it not knowing that there would come a day when you couldn't.
The new generation of Las Vegas hotels still, technically, have grounds. But the grounds are hidden behind high walls and Y-design towers; they are no longer the sprawling hinterlands of the resort but a kind of internal courtyard. Moreover, land has become simply too valuable to waste on roomy, underutilized grounds. Three hundred and sixty-five days a year of Jimmy Connors on center court couldn't begin to compete with the revenue generated by the Forum Shops. Las Vegas was once attractive in part for its vibe of spaciousness; take a look at pictures of the old Flamingo: It's a place where you can hold out your arms and twirl; a broad, sun-baked surface, pocked only by pools, to which people came with precisely the dream that they might bake in the sun. Now it's all window and wall, with the rumor of penguins tucked somewhere beyond the battlements.
Which brings me back to Circus Circus, where, upon land worth countless millions, stands a little pink-and-white circus-tent replica with a KOA gift shop inside. The shop sells silver Indian pendants, and turquoise, and a few things that look like nothing so much as my sister's old macramé projects. It sells generic "Las Vegas" T-shirts, of course, but it also sells twin-packs of Pop-Tarts. It sells pins for each of the 50 states. It puts me in mind of a pleasant mini-mart 20 miles north of Barstow. Just beyond the store's wares is a game room. It is not an arcade or a fun zone or a digital park; it is a game room. There are two billiards tables and, I think, six video games. A man sits at one of the billiards tables, typing on a laptop computer. Outside: a tiny square pool, two sets of swings, a rocket ship-shaped jungle gym.
The KOA Kampground is, of course, a trailer park. In the 1970s, when Circus Circus was reinventing the Las Vegas casino for the American middle class, the idea was breathtakingly smart: It was possible to bring the country to your casino without even building extra rooms. Today, though, when discussions of the city invoke the word "Manhattan" every six minutes, a trailer park seems impossibly anachronistic. Yet there are people here, and one must assume, because we are, after all, Las Vegas, that they are enjoying themselves. As I leave the KOA store, a white pickup rumbles by me, Texas plates, a whole family in the cab. The matriarch gives me a strange look through little oval glasses. Most likely, I earned this look by wandering out into the street, lost in thought, and nearly getting myself run over. At the moment, though, I think of her glance as a reproach for my assessment of the park. Who am I to say what's appropriate for 2005 and what is not? Across the street, the towers of Turnberry reach for the clouds. A block away, Big Dog's Brewery will give way to a high-rise that styles itself New York deco and calls itself the Liberty something or other. Let these places create Manhattan-by-the-Mojave, by all means. But let KOA keep its circus tent, and let the trailers keep their park and let Circus Circus keep its crumbling grounds.
Of course, it won't happen. Someday soon it will all disappear, and the absurdly remote human resources office, with its touching, inexplicable, wood-framed Yosemite poster behind the counter, will disappear with it. But today, I'm glad it's still here. I got my check, for one thing. For another, I caught a glance—a final glance?—of a world that in itself will not be lamented, but whose vibe will be quietly missed. In any case, there are worse things to be than an anachronism. I walk back towards the hotel, beneath the track of its little rhomboid Jetsons trolley, beyond the border of the property, where there is a little attraction called A.J. Hackett Bungee. "Why live on the edge," asks the sign, "when you can jump off?" Just beyond Hackett's, there is a dilapidated Travelodge, with its exterior hallways and bent green awning. It's a world away from the cheerful little KOA store. The grounds of Circus Circus were once a sort of budget wonderland. From here, they still are.