Saturday was a fine spring morning. Sunny. Clear. Outside on the teeming, streaming Strip, the cleavage was in bloom. The porno leafleteers papered the sidewalks with the skanky residue of free speech. At least one man had awakened that morning and decreed: I shall wear leather pants at 9 a.m. And the curious crowds crawled toward the gleaming curved blade of Wynn Las Vegas, some of them pausing to test the grass of Mr. Wynn's new lawn—it looks real! no, fake!—as the purple-jacketed security looked impassively on.
Inside Wynn, mere minutes after my sidekick, the shadowy Mr. X, had declared, "I predict we'll see celebrities," junk-bond king Michael Milken wheeled out of a custom-eyewear place, right in front of our uncustomized eyes. Prophecy fulfilled! Milken had a furtive air and a heavy past; I had an empty notebook and a loose agenda: Steve Wynn had said that his 2-billion-dollar baby was a place where you could "reset your clocks, emotionally and physically." Taking him at his word, I had come to pinpoint the exact spot where that might happen. I had a professional interest, sure, but there was more to it. The last few weeks had laid a long, sharp sizzle on my nerves—too much work, too little sleep, a grandmother's death, heartburn, backache, headlock, Diet Coke binges and weltschmerz exceeding the recommended daily allowance—so I wanted to feel my emotional and physical clock parts clicking into place. I think the shadowy Mr. X had come along hoping to pounce on dropped casino chips.
So into the Wynn we went, past the crack squad of elite bellmen banked under the porte cochere, into the lobby, with its soothing profusion of trees, flowers and art-brut floor mosaics. The second hand on my overwound emotional clock might've actually ticked back a tick—I was too busy looking around to notice.
Wynn the building, like Wynn the baron, is vast and many-chambered. Curving off from the lobby is an esplanade of fine shops and restaurants. It's called the Esplanade. In the other direction lies the casino, and beyond that, more corridors of restaurants, bars, gaming areas and the sports book.
The shopping areas offered the most immediate opportunity for clock-resetting—in America, anything that intensifies your desire to own stuff you can't afford counts as a spiritual experience. All the gods were lined up: Louis Vitton, Manolo, de la Renta. I left a trail of drool through Gizmos, a high-end electronics boutique, and couldn't bear to enter the Ferrari dealership.
Still: my clocks, emotional and physical, remained stubbornly unreset.
I even left nose prints on several windows trying to get a glimpse of the pool area. But Wynn, in high-tease mode, has designed his resort to deny the riffraff a clean view of what only guests are afforded.
Speaking of water: "Steve Wynn always makes good toilets," boomed a guy who walked into the men's room right behind me. "From the first toilet at the Mirage to this." He was right, too. The whole place is marble-ized, with stalls that look like coat closets and workers who buzz through spritzing a no-stink mist into every urinal.
Clearly, I needed professional guidance. "Steve Wynn says this is a place where you can reset your physical and emotional clocks," I said to a greeter named John, stationed in a room overlooking the lake. "Where's the best place for that?"
"There are a lot of places," he replied genially, as if every guest asked that question. "Why don't you go down to the ice-cream shop; it's called Sugar and Ice, and you can have a pastry. It has a nice outdoor patio and you can sit next to a 100-foot waterfall, Angel Falls."
"The corridors by the ballroom," asserted another greeter. "You feel like you're in the hallway of a palace! It's wide, and there is great art on the walls, and giant mirrors. Pieces of custom furniture ..."
"The sports book," said a third. "It's pretty big, and you can watch all the games. I also like the B Bar."
We checked them out, or tried—the ballroom hallway was closed for a "private event." As for the sports book: I say it's smallish and doesn't have enough screens; ESPN announcer Brent Musburger, using a slow moment in that night's Spurs-Nuggets game to hype Wynn Las Vegas, deemed it a "great sports book." Believe who you will. As for B Bar, it is indeed an inviting eddy of white-upholstered hush just off the casino floor, and 32 straight hours there, wrapped around a bottomless mojito, might do my clocks some good.
The shadowy Mr. X and I wandered the premises for nearly two hours. All the while, I was nagged by the dot. You know, the dot: the period that follows the handwritten "Wynn" scrawled elegantly atop the building. There's something about that final poke of the pen that, writ so large, suggests the slightest edge of hubris, which Wynn doesn't exactly dispel with such modest quotes as this one: "[It's] the most complex, the most ambitious structure ever built in the world, including the pyramids of Egypt." You can't help wondering if there's a burial chamber in the basement.
In fact, thanks to a branding scheme that does everything it can to erase the distinction between the building and its owner, if you wander the hallways long enough, it can come to seem as though you're moving through Steve Wynn himself. Not just his vision given form, but ... on a metaphorical level, our dwellings symbolize our bodies ... and, well, you can see why I didn't drink the Wynn-brand water I picked up at the gift shop.
Thinking up that kind of crap can make a guy hungry. "I've heard there's genuine fast food somewhere in here," the shadowy Mr. X growled. I blinked uncomprehendingly at him. I figured we'd have a better chance of finding Wolfgang Puck in a sandwich shop than we did of finding fast food. So we made another circuit of the property. Turns out, I was right. Glancing into a little sandwich shop called The Cafe, we saw Puck at a small table. That did it, I thought. "That does it," I said. "Let's go in."
Twelve dollars and 90 cents later, I was sitting one table over from the great chef, looking down at my money's worth: a smoked-turkey sandwich—if by "sandwich" you mean "prewrapped nub of bread with a slice of meat and tomato"—and a 20-ounce Diet Coke. As the shadowy Mr. X pointed out, the main difference between that sandwich and one you'd get at AM-PM was $6. I could feel the hands on my financial and gastronomic clocks spinning. I decided not to ask the gentlemanly Puck what he'd had for lunch.
We did make it to Sugar and Ice, where we sat at a little red table on the patio and debated the color of the resort (shadowy Mr. X: "Chocolate." Me: "Kind of a purplish-bronze, in this light").
It was pleasant out there. Sunny. Clear. The murmuring of the waterfall and all that. And that's as close as I got to resetting my physical and emotional clocks. It was about then that I grasped the rather obvious flaw in my assignment: I was looking for a quick hit of what is actually a cumulative process. If this 15 minutes on the patio was part of an overall experience—and by "overall experience" I mean "a long weekend at the resort"—well, then we'd be getting somewhere. I could love this place then, right down to the last flower and fab toilet. But such experiences aren't for me. I belong with all the have-nots out front, trying to cram as much of the resort into their camera phones as they could.
On our way out, I posed my question to one last greeter.
"It's sort of like an inner vacation," she replied. Hey, now we're getting somewhere! "Notice how everything here is so peaceful and slow. Only two restaurants open onto the casino floor—you don't get the ding-ding-ding. So you come in here and it's like" ... and here she lowered her hands from shoulder level to waist level while wiggling her fingers, the universal sign for relaxation washing over you.
"Well, does it work?" I asked.
Outside in the spring afternoon, where a security guard had been assigned to guard the fake grass, the gawkers gawked and the porno-hawkers hawked and the crowds crowded toward the most ambitious structure ever built in the history of the world.
"Oh, every day!" she said brightly, with the assurance of someone whose internal clocks are tuned with fine Swiss precision. I smiled and left.