The lights, the innuendo, the stripping, the fantasy, the invigoration, the BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!, the poker machines, the cleavage, the spectacle, the passing through: Las Vegas is unlike any other town in this world.
It is a destination for all sorts of strange pilgrims, and the latest batch arrive on planes from various cities around the world on this random Friday night, at 8 o'clock. Older ladies walk with alacrity in summer dresses; the younger ones, in spaghetti straps; and men, by and large, in button-down shirts. And they all have on their countenances the look of a prizefighter, who by now knows what he's in for, having experienced the stage beneath the lights before, yet appears anxious, for he never knows what's going to occur by the time he exits the ring.
Four short bachelors with unmistakable Brooklyn tongues speak without reservation about the fun they intend to have this weekend, even if it kills them. While waiting in a Python line for a taxi, the shortest guy, admirable for the dignity with which he carries his premature baldness, tries his luck with a solitary buxom bird just ahead in line. She eludes him with a polite pretext, and he returns to his friends more anxious than ever:
"Ah, fuck it: Let's go to OG's right away."
She first appears in the back of Olympic Garden, her Siren's silhouette hovering about the darkened strip club. Then—like an instantaneous and supernatural fantasy, like a genie—she's up close, and the scar under her ribs, on her right side, looks like a desert snake. She is an unconquerable spinster from Hawaii, 5-foot-8 and 140 pounds, with a splash of freckles across her nose and cheeks, and the laugh of a virago, and she has fake tits with perfect silver-dollar nipples. Her name is Octavia, she says, and in her six months of stripping she has danced across a spectrum of clientele: the rich, the poor; old perverts, college girls; locals, foreigners; unfaithful husbands, dubious politicians; a thousand pharisees and many more authentic Christians.
But it's not until she reveals her born name—Arden Hirano—that you realize you cannot in fact pass your hand straight through her, and that the scar beneath her ribs, on her right side, looks more like an olive branch than anything else. She's 33 years old, and she is a palpable confirmation that the most beautiful thing in nature is a beautiful woman.
The drive to PT's Pub on Charleston and Decatur boulevards at 11 p.m. is delightful, for the Las Vegas air at that hour, warm and splendid, carries with it a sense of liberation, as it passes through a car's open windows. And it makes the traffic on Charleston, viscous on account of the incessant road construction, bearable.
Janet, a waitress at PT's and the mother of a schoolgirl, hangs around after her shift comes to an end, floating between regulars at the bar like a busty hummingbird, for now is her only time to "go out," she says. She is flirtatious and voluble, and over cigarettes and beer she shares stories of the unbelievable loons she waited on earlier today, and even the one at home, who gave Janet her child.
Like all of the ghettoes in the Las Vegas Valley, the desolate blocks north of the Strip—Owens and D Streets, Martin Luther King Boulevard and Bonanza Road, Ogden Avenue and Ninth Street, to name a few—lie under many nautical leagues of darkness. And so at night, the streets with broken glass, the yards with irascible pit bulls, the windows with steel bars, the men with dark faces sitting on their porches, the women in dark clothes walking the streets, all become even darker. So dark, in fact, that now, after several decades submerged under that contaminating sea, those poor neighborhoods and its people seem to suffer a reality worse than being invisible: They are forgotten.
On Saturday morning the Southern Nevada sun establishes its dominance early, shining white-hot and with less than 10 percent humidity on both Anthem and North Las Vegas alike.
White kids flood the Extreme Thing festival at Desert Breeze Park, where pale people working on their desert tans watch skateboard and BMX contests, and listen to bands play emo rock, the popular music of the day. The young springtime birds—their feathers shed and their adolescent breasts pushed up and out as far as possible—flock about the park in clothes that would have scandalized their grandmothers; but the boys hardly seem to notice, not because most have long hair covering their eyes, but because living in this city has made them somewhat numb to innuendo. It is, in fact, their fathers who stare most.
In the back of the park, families and friends picnic under canopies and trees. While the children, wearing bathing suits and running and laughing with untamable joy, intermingle with stranger children, the grown-ups keep to their own clans.
As the sun's last flames burn out behind the Spring Mountains, another sentimental twilight settles in, pasting a mauve sky and solitary stars across the 7 o'clock hour, and allowing the initial illuminations of the Strip to shine—an iridescent spectacle in not just geometry but also man's creative accomplishments.
At the tail end of a caterpillar line in front of the registration desk at the Tropicana Hotel and Casino, which nowadays is just a chimney of cigar smoke and long-faded flames, an old couple waits, holding hands and wearing around their hearts the thorny crown of nostalgia. It shows in their watery eyes. Above all in those of the woman, who makes a slow revolution to take it all in, revealing her tiny stature and austere attire, adorned with neither jewelry nor makeup, but only an archaic cross around her neck, and utters something drawn out and inaudible.
On the heightened walkway between the Tropicana and the MGM, three Metro police officers in shorts and yellow polo shirts approach a man sitting on the ground. Misfortune is smeared all across his face, and a hopeless cigarette butt hangs like sorrow from his lips. The officers, stolid and impassable, order him to move along, but the man doesn't budge. The four men argue, they raise their voices, and in an irritable undertone one of the officers, pulling out his tab of tickets, says: 'C'mon man, give us a break."
"Ha!" says the misfortunate one, now erecting in capitulation. "Give you guys a break! Good one."
Then, before moving along into the night made phosphorescent by the MGM, he yells: "I'm just passing through this place, officers, that's all."
The MGM.
From out that manmade wilderness and its nicotine haze, its blond-streaked lionesses, and its unflagging hunters, protrudes a man of sheer masculine beauty. He has ambiguous eyes, a brilliant jaw line and hair cropped, dark and infallible, and he walks with a mythical stride. So that just as soon as he appears, he disappears, vanished forever into Las Vegas' Amazon jungle, with only his image—like an apparition of an ancient Aztec prince—persisting in the memory of passersby.
Everyone at Pure seems to be rafting down a river of genuine joy at midnight, when even the interminable line to get into the nightclub becomes a minor party itself. Amongst the $19 shots of Patron (with a chaser), the forgettable conversations, the constipated sexiness, the drunken decisions, and the BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! of the manufactured ambience, a universal physical invigoration overtakes both the patrons and employees, for music is the opium of the masses.
But then, in the midst of that vibrant den of happy sinners, where celebrities come to play and players to do their business, a group of four girls at a table are approached by four guys. Two minutes later there is only one remaining at the table, and she, neglected by the guys and abandoned by her girls, sits with her shoulders slumped and her lips stuck to the straw of her drink. She is not corpulent, nor even obese, but just a bit husky, and by the utter dejection weighing heavily upon her it looks as if she has never, ever, felt so unpretty in all her life.
Under a toenail moon, the parking lot at Wal-Mart, at 2:30 in the morning, is lively. Inside the supercenter there are three lines, each four persons deep, waiting to be checked out. One of which is comprised of a woman with an addict's jitteriness, a man with cutoff sleeves, a cocktail waitress still in suit, buying women's razors, diapers in mass, and an air-hockey table, and another individual with prepackaged sushi in one hand and four rolls of Charmin Ultra toilet paper in the other.
Ruffa, an effeminate young man with a caffeinated smile whose hair has an awkward hue under the florescent lights, checks them all out, and he will continue to check customers out until his shift is over, at 7 a.m.
Under the foreboding sun, and while the rest of our wild and insatiable city is making love, sparse day laborers at 8 a.m. soak in their own sweat along Eastern Avenue, just north of the 215. They're hoping for work on the Sabbath.
Just as the Dumpster divers throughout the shadowed sections of town hope to find even the smallest nugget of value during their morning duties, digging with unrepentant persistence in one trash bin after another.
The first thing the man with the pink tank top and devastating body odor does when he takes his seat in the middle of the CAT bus, the 204, running west on Sahara at 3 o'clock, is turn up the volume on his Walkman. He has an unshaven face. He has hair crawling out of every opening in his pink tank top. And he has an invisible disability that permits him a reduced monthly bus pass. Furthermore, he never seems to blink, which makes it very difficult to grab his attention.
But he indeed proves to be talkative, and his favorite subject is himself.
"I'm headed to work," he says. "At the Eureka. Been workin' there, bartendin', since I came to Vegas. 1981, that was. (Reagan was president then, you know, and we were listenin' to AC/DC.) Make good money there too. Four, five hundred a night. That's why I got me a nice house in Summerlin. Have some wild parties there too."
The only problem for the man who boarded the bus at Sahara and Valley View is that everyone knows nobody makes much at the Eureka—that decrepit casino which didn't open until 16 years ago.
Outlaw winds have been well known to terrorize all 271 square miles of the Las Vegas Valley from time to time, and at 5:30 on Sunday evening they besiege without warning. The sky loses its color, and rain threatens.
Inside Putter's Bar & Grill, a taciturn joint on Flamingo Road and Durango Drive, where locals sit in a U around Kahana, the bartender, and feed the video-poker machines consecutive $20 bills, an old man with a vanquished face who smells of sundry ointments and stale urine grumbles at his pitiless machine. His wife drinks Merlot and doesn't look at her husband's screen at all. She only watches him, and holds his cane. Across the way, Jeffrey S., a waiter in Las Vegas who, without a formal education, once made 80 grand in one year with nothing left over to show for it, evinces no emotion. Behind the gold rims of his glasses his eyes are ineffable, win or lose, for he has been through all the ups and downs before. He says he moved here when he was 20, and now that he is a few months shy of turning 30, he still does not know what he wants to do when he grows up.
The weekend in Las Vegas doesn't end until 5:30 on Monday morning, when the wild ones, staggering out of Drai's or Spearmint Rhino, are struck by a prophet's light. Thirty minutes later our city grabs coffee at any one of the corner Starbucks and recharges for another week of coping with pestilential politics, arduous jobs, and struggling schools.
The misfortune, the beauty, the forgotten poor, the genuine joy, the arduous jobs, and the vanquished faces: In the end, Las Vegas—though no doubt a destination for strange pilgrims, its 39 million yearly visitors and 1 million residents alike—is not too different from any other place in the world.