Timothy O’Grady
Children of Las Vegas
In 2009, Timothy O’Grady relocated from Europe, where he had lived for most of his adult life, to Las Vegas, for a fellowship at the Black Mountain Institute. He stayed on for another year to teach at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. Stories from the people he met there, interspersed with his own reflections, make up his book Children of Las Vegas. Those reflections are excerpted below. —Editors
I lived in Las Vegas for two years. It was among the last places I expected to be at that stage of my life, but there I was. I was offered a fellowship, and then stayed on to teach. We bought an old gold Mazda that had been bleached and blistered by the sun and rented an apartment beside a golf course in Henderson. From the little balcony I watched the unceasing chain of planes bringing tourists to the Strip. “The jewel box,” a great-grand- mother once said to a small boy. You will meet them both later in these pages. At night you can see the Strip from anywhere in the valley if you are pointed in the right direction. It’s like a small galaxy throbbing on the desert floor. Las Vegas may like to take away your sense of time and space, but it will always remind you of what you are there for.
I once imagined that I would like to visit Las Vegas more than anywhere else on earth. It was the destination I chose when asked to write a school paper on what would be my favorite vacation. I was fourteen years old and had no idea of what I might do there. But its aura was enough. Perhaps I thought the choice would surprise, that I would gain some position over other boys who would write of the Super Bowl or fishing in Wisconsin or museums in Madrid. I would say that was my aim. It was still a little before the time when a sweaty Elvis was doing karate chops in his rhinestone spacesuits. It was still cool, at least by reputation. It was our version of the Côte d’Azur. The images came down the line to us on television. There were the long cars with the high fins, the winking doormen, the Sammy Davis Jr. suits. Vegas was louche and urban and knowing. People there walked on the edge and seemed at ease with it. They laughed at how extravagantly frivolous they could be with their money or their reputations. Even the women were rakish. You could see it glinting somewhere in their diamantine eyes as they sat around the roulette tables. As I later heard Simone de Beauvoir said of it: “No bourgeoisie, no bourgeois morality.”
It held no allure for me by the time I got there four decades later, but I watched it nevertheless. It asks you to, and it’s hard to refuse. I walked and drove and talked and sat on our little balcony trying to figure it out, not only the Strip, but the city itself that spread through the valley in low lines and pale colors out to the horizon. It’s a global star. It flashes in the eyes. Mention it anywhere and you will get a response—bedazzlement, envy, a raising of the brow, an avuncular warning. People you know want your report on it if you’re right there in the front row.
But I couldn’t catch it. Not after a month, not even after a year. It seemed always to be receding, like something slipping away in a tide. Houses are behind walls, their windows opaque. Drivers way above you are screened by tinted glass in SUVs the size of fire trucks. Almost no one walks. Buildings seem to take a step backwards behind gigantic parking lots or entrance halls just as you feel you are getting near them. If you open a door to a bar you meet perpetual night behind blackened windows. The faces looking up from the poker machines are like ramparts. There is no focal point, no main square or central business district with office workers walking around in shirtsleeves on their breaks, no Luxembourg Gardens or Central Park, just this glittering trinket that can be seen from space, its surface dazzle and electronic color leading you deeper and deeper into caverns that are only more surface. Who did it belong to? Not the people I saw in the supermarket. In the center the visitors are the aristocracy, the citizens their vassals.
We didn’t meet many visitors, or citizens. There were three pools and a hundred and something units in our development, but little stirred there. In two years we never saw our downstairs neighbors, but there was life there, we could see, for the blue-gray light of their television flickered against their permanently drawn blinds. You’d hear the hum of air conditioners, the killing of engines, see the shadow of someone coming home late thrown hugely onto a wall by a ground light. But faces were rare. The only one I saw with any regularity was a slender, middle-aged man I could see going to work from our bedroom window, his hair oiled, his white shirt gartered high on the sleeves for dealing cards, his expression sour. Around us, we supposed, were the homes, or former homes, of the retired, the repossessed, the winter sojourners, the cocktail shakers, towel haulers, and wheel spinners. We just couldn’t see them, and didn’t understand why. Where was everybody in what had been until recently America’s fastest growing city? Why did everything seem so far away?
Sometimes in the day’s last light we walked around the golf course, whose eleventh tee was just below our balcony. If you walk the streets you have for the most part walls for company. Here along the fairways it was all backyards—the backyards of houses small and large, the backyards of mansions built in the style of mausoleums. There wasn’t a thing in any of them that could tell you if anyone lived in them—no towel or toy or tennis racket. The windows were blank. They seemed screened with a kind of mesh that was the color of the desert. It was like walking into a room full of people with their eyes and mouths sewn shut. It was like a Twilight Zone episode without a plot.
Citizens
Steve Wynn opened the Mirage twenty years before we arrived. He raised $604 million dollars in New York, built the largest casino resort in the world, and installed luxury fittings throughout, a twenty-thousand gallon tank with pygmy sharks and stingrays in it, an ecologically precise rainforest on the casino floor, and a giant volcano in the forecourt that went off every fifteen minutes. Four thousand service workers were employed to run it.
It was a large bet and it paid out. Two hundred thousand people came to the opening. The city entered a new boom time. The resorts themselves, rather than the gambling halls and shows, were now the attraction. Old hotels, even the Desert Inn, were blown up, and vast new Disneyesque ones like Excalibur, Treasure Island, the MGM Grand, and others alluding to Venice, Paris, New York, and ancient Egypt were built. There was soon a higher hotel-room count on the corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Flamingo than in the whole of San Francisco. There were by then casinos in twen-ty-three states, but Las Vegas kept growing, for Americans were spending nearly the same cut of the gross national product on gambling as on groceries. Forty-one million people came every year, more than to Mecca. You could make $70,000 parking cars or dealing cards and in one step go from a trailer park to a middle-class home. A great new migration took place.
In our second year I began to teach. The boom was over by then. You could see halted construction projects all over the city, including some in the heart of the Strip. The university was considering deleting Philosophy, and a few other departments. A tent city on the edge of downtown had just been cleared. Las Vegas had become the hardest city of its size to find work in and also led in home foreclosures.
I’d already taught a little, in England, Poland, on the east coast of the United States. The students in Las Vegas were different. I asked a class of twenty-six how many worked and found that all but one did, full time, mostly in casinos. One occasionally missed class because of a conflict with his shift as a stripper. Some worked through the night, or did double shifts at weekends. All had full course loads. When did they read, or write essays? I found too that they carried debts, some up around $40,000, for being educated in a state university. They lived with their parents, they were legally considered dependents. But it seemed that economically they were on their own. Sometimes good students turned in flimsy work and if I asked them about it they said they knew, they were sorry, they’d do it again if I’d give them the chance. It was just that they were exhausted.
One day they showed up to my class with not a single one having read the story I’d assigned. They couldn’t afford the textbook, they said, and this particular story wasn’t anywhere online. It was a California story about how a mother’s expectations about her daughter drove both of them mad. I told them the plot and asked them what they thought.
“Our parents want us to get good grades so we’ll keep our scholarships and they won’t be asked to pay for anything,” said a young man with an unusual degree of bitterness, especially for him.
“They go through our pockets and steal our money,” said a young woman beside him.
I thought I’d misheard and asked her to repeat what she’d said.
“They’re still drunk when they wake up,” said another. “I have to get them to work and my brothers and sisters fed and to school.”
“My mom stole my sister’s wedding money,” said someone in the front row. We had an hour and a quarter and I let it run. It seemed to feed on its own momentum, like testimonials of revelation in a church. They spoke of routinely losing their homes, of raising themselves, of having their identities stolen in credit-card frauds committed by their parents. There were overdoses, desert shoot-outs, suicides. I’d never heard anything like that in a single room. Nearly everyone spoke. The pitch was at its highest when the class ended. It was as if a jail door had opened for a time.
Paradise
The Strip is not in Las Vegas, but rather in an unincorporated district called Paradise. Creating an enclave was a Mob idea, designed to avoid city taxes. I couldn’t find out who named it, though, or what they had in mind.
It is a city in which all adjectives are in the superlative—the biggest, the highest, the fastest, the most gallons, or roses, or megawatts. To use moderate language would be to somehow fail in a civic duty. On Las Vegas’s one hundredth birthday a cake was baked that consisted of one-hundred-and-thirty thousand eggs, thirty-six thousand cups of sugar, and twenty-four thousand pounds of flour. Mayor Oscar Goodman said, “People have been asking me, ‘Why such a big birthday cake?’ Well, you’re only a hundred years old once, and to have anything less than that would be very un-Vegas. This has to be the biggest, the best, the most exciting, and that’s what Vegas is. This is symbolic for us . . . this perfect birthday cake, the greatest party for the greatest city in the history of the world.”
Las Vegas tells you that it offers you the ultimate ever conceived by human thought, a paradise, tailored to your specifications, at least for as long as your money lasts. What is the nature of this paradise? The late Hal Rothman, an historian at the University of Nevada, said, “The difference between Venice and the Venetian is that the latter is cleaner, a little less noisy, and has all the amenities. So it takes the world the way it is and makes it the way you would have it if you were in charge.” It is, or is billed to be, a fantasy, an escape, a place where play is all, where you can imagine who you would like to be and then actually be it, where you can ease yourself away from thought and act at all times on impulse, where Dionysius prevails over Apollo twenty-four hours per day and you need fear no moral reckoning. It is taken care of. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.
Paradise means orchard. Aphrodite gives Paris an apple just as the Hesperides give one to Heracles, for the apple is the means of admittance to the Elysian Fields, the orchard in the west where only heroes can go. All Neolithic and Bronze Age paradises were orchards, just as the paradise in the Bible was, only there the gift of an apple by woman to man was a trick and brought a fall rather than eternal life.
Machines
You see the banks of machines when you come out of your gate after landing at the airport. You can start playing as soon as you arrive, or in the last moments before boarding to leave. The facades of the Strip hotels all have a different theme, but each contains a large room you could fit an airplane in, with patterned carpet, waitresses ferrying drinks, and hundreds of machines. They gurgle and flash, with images on them like those on children’s toys. They are in corridors, bathrooms, restaurant terraces. Psychologists are consulted about optimal configurations of tight ones and loose ones. People slouch in front of them with ashtrays and super-sized drinks and hot dogs as if they’re camped there, or watching their fifteenth hour of TV.
The casinos emanate out from the Strip and through the valley. There are small ones, such as those along Boulder Highway, and others like the Station chain which tower over everything else in their districts. Bars have machines along walls and video poker screens set into the bar’s surface. Gas stations have machines. In the one nearest us there were four along a window opposite a rack of motor oil and another solitary one in the corridor between the gentlemen’s and ladies’ toilets. The car wash had one in the waiting room.
Just inside the entrance to our supermarket there was a tiny casino with dimmed lights and carpet and an attendant wearing a striped vest and string tie. People sat in chairs with their plastic bags of groceries at their feet, their faces lit up by the changing colors of the machines. A small woman with wispy, straw-colored hair was often at the machine beside the door. I watched her over two years as her steps grew more hesitant and as she seemed to sink further into her frail frame. Sometimes she looked up, vacant, haunted. Her face seemed to be slowly receding into her skull. Maybe she was sick. Maybe she was trying to spend all she had before she died. But it was as if the machine was absorbing her life.
The machines tell you a different story each time you put a coin in. They can redeem you, cancel your debts, bring you to the promised land. You think, At least they should behave with some sense of mathematics, or justice. You are pulled in. You wait for it all to come good. “Why is an activity with so little to offer so appealing to so many people?” asked a writer named Edward Allen, who used to drive in from Pahrump to the Vegas casinos. “[Why do we give] our money away week after week to people who do not love us? . . . Even if [the compulsive gambler] seems miserable most of the time, there is something very powerful about the instant the dice are thrown, the second the deciding card is turned over, the moment the little ball takes its last spastic bounce into the numbered slot . . . It is a neurological jolt made up of greed, lust, and excitement mixed together with a strong dose of fear.”
Before I ever went to Las Vegas I heard a story about it from a friend of mine in London who had lived there for a while. He and his wife sometimes stopped and talked to an elderly couple who lived along the corridor from them, he said. They had worked for decades and saved their money and raised their children in the Midwest, and then when it was time to retire they sold their house and moved to Las Vegas. They were very happy there, they said. It was comfortable and safe and fun, and they loved the weather. One day my friend heard the old man shouting in the hall and went out. Men were taking all the furniture out of his apartment. The old man was trying to tell them they had the wrong place, he had no debts, they must bring his furniture back. The men kept working. Later the old man found out that since they had moved to Las Vegas his wife had put all the money they had saved into the machines. It was over a million dollars. They had to move to their daughter’s basement in Iowa.
The machines never pause. They console you with their imagery, lure you with their caprices, light up and sing to you so you’ll think you’re winning even when you’re losing. They’re always there for you, any time of the day or night. “The machine is my best friend,” said a man who’d lost his girlfriend and home to it. “It’s been in my life more than any person.” “It was like a kiss from a lover,” said a woman of the machine that drove her to embezzle a quarter of a million dollars from her employer. “It was sweet.”
You will see small signs here and there on the walls of casinos giving the local contact number for Gamblers Anonymous. The casinos will help put you in touch with them if you ask. The signs reminded me of an ad for Samaritan suicide counselors I saw on the strut of a bridge high above the Severn Gorge in Bristol. They reminded me too of cautions on cigarette packs, for casino managers are trained to scent leaking blood. Anyone in a vortex of large loss will be given rooms, cars, alcohol, private jet rides, and anything else that will keep them spinning. A barman once told me he watched a woman growing increasingly hysterical as she went through everything she had on a poker machine. She’d borrowed from friends, got all she could from her cards, had begged credit from the bar and was screaming that she’d kill herself. He tried to calm her down. He told her to stop playing, go home, get some sleep and when she was sober and clear in the morning she could think of what she was going to do. His manager pulled him over and told him he was never to do that again.
“We’re not doing our jobs unless these people lose their cars and houses,” he said.
The Founder
Continuous life in Las Vegas began when William Andrews Clark bought a two-thousand-acre farm and water rights from a widow named Helen Stewart for $55,000. It was a bet on his own ability to sell it as a future boom town based on his plans for a railway spur that would pass through it on its way from Los Angeles to the Transcontinental Railroad further north.
It is worth looking at Clark for a moment, for some of the themes running through his life have persisted in his city. He’d driven mules, sold eggs, and been a schoolteacher, but then became one of the three Copper Kings of Butte, Montana when he ventured into banking and was able to repossess the claims of defaulting miners. With a little of the money he’d made from the mines, he bribed his way into a U.S. Senate seat. In Las Vegas too he super-leveraged his investment, drawing three thousand speculators to his 1905 auction of parceled-up bits of Helen Stewart’s farm—a hundred times more than Las Vegas’s then population—taking $265,000 in sales. He died aged eighty-six in his mansion on Fifth Avenue in New York, having survived his first wife and married a woman thirty-nine years younger who had been his ward as a teenager. When asked about having bribed the Montana state legislature, he said, “I never bought a man who wasn’t for sale.” He was an archetype of the Gilded Age, with a fortune among the top fifty accumulated in America. Mark Twain said of him, “He is as rotten a human being as can be found anywhere under the flag.” The district in which Las Vegas sits is Clark County, named for him.
Signs
In Las Vegas there is a museum of discarded signs.
It is a city of signs. Times Square and Piccadilly Circus have been known for their signs, but these were signs that referred to products that could be bought all over the world. The signs of Las Vegas are about its own unique and central industry, or services dealing with its effects. Sometimes the signs refer to what they say you can get in the building immediately behind them. The MGM lion, the facade of New York New York, and the Luxor beam that astronauts have seen in space are signs. Along the Strip are giant, moving-image screens showing fragments of Cirque du Soleil and magic and burlesque shows. The image changes just as the showgirl is about to turn towards you or her gown is on its way to the floor. The women on the signs tend to have a knowing, complicitous look. They might smile a little, wink. They seem to say, “You and I both know what you want. Just take it.” There are signs that evoke the Old West, the boulevards of Paris or private clubs for discerning gentlemen, signs that announce bargain prices for roast beef or twenty-four hour breakfasts at the casino buffets or the competitive pay-out rates at their slots. The gas station pumps have television screens on the top promoting casinos. You can hear them from the middle of the street. Signs are a significant sub-industry. They are to Las Vegas what tire manufacturers are to Detroit.
Out in a semi-wasteland beside an airport runway to the south of the Strip is the vintage 1959 “Welcome to Las Vegas” sign that much of the world has seen. You could wait twenty minutes to get to the front of the line of people waiting to have their pictures taken under it. It’s internally lit, with star, diamond and silver dollar motifs. It made it into the National Register of Historic Places. The world’s largest bikini parade was held around it, presided over by the mayor. Its designer, Betty Willis, is likely better known to cultural historians and city residents than the architects of the Strip hotels.
The signs gather where movement is at its most dense and change in the nature of what they promote according to what kind of district they are in. When I drove in from Henderson to the university, I turned off the expressway at the airport exit. Here were Barry Manilow and Carlos Santana and Holly Madison, the Playboy model/stripper who had become a city icon. There were grinning comedians with sparkling teeth, Cirque du Soleil ac-robats, ads for clubs with names like Bare, Rehab, Eve, and Surrender, and one called Tao with a delicate Asian woman looking over her shoulder with hooded eyes, a long tattoo running up her naked back. A line of around a dozen bare-topped men in low-slung jeans advertised an Australian male stripper act called Thunder Down Under. There was a vérité-style photograph of an uncertain-looking bellhop, his cap a little askew, kneeling on a hotel room floor beside some Roaring Twenties-style packing cases, caught by the camera with a blonde hotel guest, wealthy and predatory, wearing little under her fur coat, laying back and opening her legs in his direction. It advertised a Strip hotel with the slogan “Just the right amount of wrong.” The signs around McCarran Airport tell you that in Las Vegas you can do what you can only dream about doing elsewhere, you can be bad, you will love it and no one will censure you.
Out on the expressways where the citizens circulate there are signs for teeth implants and breast enhancement and a lot of giant business card-style photographs of tough-looking lawyers in suits who understand how you accumulated such large debts, are angry about them on your behalf, and know how to conjure them away. They can also deal with your drunk-driving charge. Downtown, beyond the neon where the tattoo parlors and pawnshops and last stop before the street hotels are, the signs promote bail bondsmen.
If you drive north out of the city on 15, you pass the Nellis Air Force Base and a speedway and the exit for the mythical-sounding Valley of Fire, climb over a small mountainous wedge of Arizona, then drop down into Utah, home of the Mormons. Here the signs are for bread, tractors, cough syrup. If there is a woman on them, her cheeks are the color of apples and her blouse is buttoned to the neck.
Bombs, Weddings, Vice, and the Desert
The little city boomed for twenty years after William Clark’s auction, then staggered. A rail strike provoked the removal of the maintenance works up to Caliente in Utah and then everyone could see how fragile it was. The desert was right there on the edge, waiting to take it back, as it had Petra. It had nothing to sell. It would have to dance and sparkle and allure to go on living.
It tried resorts, even grassless golf, but vice was easier. Its hinterland was a vast terrain of parched earth and drifting men who worked the mines and railroads. It offered them prize fights when no other state in the Union would. Block 16 was an openly operating brothel district. Gambling and
Prohibition laws were noted, then unenforced. When a Senate investigation in the 1950s leaned on organized crime, mobsters from all over America migrated to Las Vegas, where they knew they would be left alone. They skimmed millions in untaxed casino profits and settled deals with poison and ice picks. They were the City Fathers, looked upon not only with esteem but with a kind of tenderness.
Marriage and divorce became absorbed in the general deregulation. Nevada set the lowest residency requirements for either, then kept trimming them. You can drive in and get married as you would drive in for a hamburger. You can be serenaded by an Elvis impersonator. You can have a vampire minister at the Goretorium. The father of a student of mine had been a wedding chapel minister for twenty years. “Did he attend a seminary?” I asked. “It was just that it didn’t work out when he tried selling insurance,” he replied. One minister reported, “I’ve been doing weddings ten years and I have done a little more than thirty-seven thousand. Eighty-six is the most I’ve done in a day. I did one wedding on stage in a total nude joint. I did a commitment ceremony one night for a man and his motorcycle. I had a lady came in one day, had a couple of attendants with her were all dressed up. She wanted to marry herself.”
Las Vegas shuns control, but the government saved it several times when it was failing, first with the Hoover Dam, then with two military bases during the Second World War. They tried to keep the dam workers in dry, chaste and non-gambling Boulder City, but the workers got to Block 16 and the gambling halls nevertheless. After the war the testing site for the Manhattan Project was moved there. New entertainment features came into being, such as the Miss Atomic Bomb contest, the Nuclear Hairdo, and the Mushroom Cloud Party. “It was a wonderful place for what the customers wanted,” a waitress at the Desert Inn’s Sky Room said in the early fifties. “They would sit around and listen to our piano player and look out the big windows and see the pretty hotel fountain and the guests swimming in the pool and the traffic speeding by on Highway 91, and then, just when they were getting tired, the A-bomb.”
Las Vegas has boomed and busted more starkly than most cities I know. Reading its history is like watching the bellows of an accordion as it plays a slow air. The city is optimistic, as gamblers are when they roll the dice, but also insecure. The desert intensifies this. It is everywhere. Its dry, split “It tried resorts, even grassless golf, but vice was easier.” surfaces are like harbingers at roadsides and between developments. Lawns and pools and air-conditioning and mall walkways where you are sprayed with chilled water cannot entirely make you forget it. You feel its scale and silence at night. You know it can disorient and starve and kill and it’s right there and that in the history of Nevada there are more ghost towns than surviving ones.
Homes
We pulled into the desert when the Mazda began to weaken through the hills and heat not far from the Valley of Fire. There was just scrub for as far as we could see. We took a walk while we waited for the engine to cool. There was a shallow bowl in the desert floor and when we walked down into it we saw cans, a plastic sheet, a burnt-out fire, and a twisted shirt like the limb of an olive tree.
We saw encampments like that beneath bridges, in parking lots, alleys, empty spaces between buildings. In North Las Vegas there is what is called the Corridor of Hope where people live in tents on the pavement. Out on the road we saw tent cities outside Fresno and Sacramento. We saw improvised shacks and tiny trailers baking in the sun in the Mojave Desert all on their own beyond power lines and water supplies. There was a whole village of them near the Salton Sea. You feel you are looking at the traces of a migrating tribe.
There are reported to be around fourteen thousand homeless people in Las Vegas. In one primary school, 85 percent of the children were judged to be homeless or on the edge of being so. Rich Penksa said, “I don’t believe there’s a tree or a field in Las Vegas that doesn’t have someone living under it.”
In frontier times the Chinese built a doppelgänger city in tunnels be- neath the streets of Livingstone, Montana, to house their opium dens. Las Vegas has its own version in the three hundred or so miles of storm drains in the valley. A combination of warm weather, desert meth labs, psychological wounds among veterans, family tragedies, alcohol, and gambling addictions has created a shifting population of around two hundred to a thousand people who have made their homes in the tunnels. They are, Rich Penksa has said, probably the most successful at being homeless of those who are homeless in Las Vegas. They identify their addresses by the casino they live under.
Backstage
It took a while to get a car. We passed on a couple that were pulled out of warehouses in back streets by men who smelled of cologne and bourbon. We saw a lot of men like that, in pool halls, drugstores, bars. They tended to be thin, well groomed and to look like roués, with nervous tics and reptilian glares. We were about to buy a car from a Mexican cleaner, but she crashed it on her way to deliver it to us. The pale gold Mazda was sitting in a parking lot out at Nellis Air Force Base. We bought it from a career soldier who’d been born in the Philippines. The tires were parched and split like the desert floor and there was a complicated system involving a rope that snaked into the back seat for opening the trunk, but it ran with a tractor-like endurance, like he said it would. We put over thirty thousand miles on it by the time we left, and it was still able to do more.
Las Vegas can be very hard on you without a car. The distances are vast, the heat in the summer makes you feel you are inside a smelting works and it could take half a day to get some places by bus. But with a car we could look around. We drove one evening to the Strip and went north along it at a creeping pace through booming music and past the amusement palaces that rose around us in giant, brash cartoonish images and colors like some kind of electronic flame. If you are not actually dazzled by it I think you cannot fail to be impressed by the enormity of capital and effort they are willing to expend in order to try to dazzle you. Later I got to know a little the great writer and ponderer of beauty Dave Hickey, who made the same drive with his wife when they first got to Las Vegas. He wrote, “It’s all about the lights. Their profligate brilliance, I think, goes a long way towards explaining everything, because these lights, these millions of gratuitous lights, don’t light government buildings, or monuments, or corporate headquarters, or famous heroes, or saints, or steeples. These lights sizzle and dazzle and smoke, and light you up. They are there for you. They invest you with grace and embrace you with their shadowless illuminations. So right in the middle of this wild desert town, surrounded by the black oblivion of hard, high desert, surrounded by the gloomy, sleeping ambience of dark America spreading away, there you are, in the middle of everything, glowing like a Renaissance saint.”
As we made our way up we thought we should walk around a little. We didn’t know then that you could park for free in casino garages. I’d bought a round of drinks for three people in a Henderson piano bar and it had cost eighty bucks. We thought that maybe everything was like that—show tickets, mojitos, parking, scrambled eggs. So after we passed the entrance to Caesars we turned into a side street. We found a pot-holed, private but unguarded lot and decided to take a chance on leaving the car there. It was so dark after the blaze of the Strip that we had to wait a moment before we could see. We stepped out. Two goths huddled by a wall looked up, then back to something one was holding in her hand. In the lot were two tour buses, a camper van and some cars with large men sleeping in the front seats.
There were discarded clothes, cans, a burnt-out fire, some escort magazines. We were in the nether regions behind the Flamingo. Out on the Strip was a dramatic, uplit façade; back here were overflowing bins, concrete walls that seemed to seep black grease and an exhausted-looking cook smoking a cigarette under a single light bulb in a cage. The door behind him opened onto white light blasting down on the Flamingo’s entrails. It was like stepping backstage between acts—on one side blooming trees and the balustrade of a castle, on the other pine struts stretching the canvas flat and a stage hand sipping from a flask.
The city doesn’t particularly want you to see the levers and pulleys beind the scenes, but it doesn’t go to great lengths to hide them either. Everybody, after all, knows that Las Vegas is a stage and everybody’s moving too fast to care. So you will see a lot of backstage sights there, even if you are just visiting. You see them in the encampments under the freeway bridges, the last look at a ring at the entrance to a pawnshop, the sudden eruptions of rage by strangers, the faraway look in the eyes and the gray-yellow pallor of the faces at the slots, the smashed cars with the drivers beside them blowing into a police bag. We were once waiting for a lift in a Strip hotel parking lot. It was around 2 a.m. and we were going home. The doors opened and a man of around sixty with dyed hair and dark rings under his eyes stepped out in a kind of trance and headed for the casino floor. Under a long cashmere coat he was wearing pajamas and slippers.
So much of the theatrical can leave you with a yearning for the real. The real is suddenly and starkly there right at the city’s edge and extends for thousands of square miles of desert and mountain and canyon with which human beings can do almost nothing profitable other than to leave it be and just look at it. Rattlesnakes slither, Joshua trees supplicate. Rocks endure the eons of their life spans. It is vivid and dramatic and beautiful and has the sparseness and pitilessness of those areas of confrontation with the self “So much of the theatrical can leave you with a yearning for the real.” that are recorded in holy texts. Right next to the contemporary world’s own Sodom and Gomorrah.
It invites you to drive out into it and we often did, Las Vegas trailing off behind us like a radio losing its signal. We saw peach trees and springtime in California, buffaloes in the snow, the pink siltstone organ pipes of Bryce Canyon. Once in the Navajo lands in Arizona we stopped at the ruins of the seven-hundred-year-old village of Betatakin, set into the alcove of a red sandstone cliff. It looked as delicate as lace from the vantage point high above it. Not far away was the Black Mesa coal mine. Many villages like Betatakin, some say up to a thousand, were destroyed by the dragline buckets that created the mine. Thousands of Navajo were driven from their homes. The water table went down and became poisoned by chemicals. Sheep died and the subsistence agriculture on which the Navajo depended became impossible in the region of the mine. It wasn’t easy for the mining company to get the rights. For the Navajo coal is the liver of the world. Cutting into the skin of the earth to get it is a kind of evisceration. A Mormon lawyer put together his own version of a tribal council when the others weren’t looking and got the signatures he needed. Senators and national officials did their part for the mining company. Navajos have been fighting the deal since.
We drove north from there through quiet land. Outside of Page by the shores of Lake Powell there rises the gigantic Navajo (sic) Generating Station, a coal-fired plant that pours out 250 tons of sulfurous emissions night and day, polluting to the equivalent of 3.5 million cars. The coal leaves the Black Mesa mine by chute and travels by rail up to the generating station, where it is converted into the power that pumps water to Phoenix and ignites the lights of Las Vegas that shine for you.
Water and Time
When we first got the car we took it out one morning and kept going for two hundred and fifty miles, to Flagstaff, Arizona. We had lunch, then came back home for dinner. It was late August and we wanted to feel cooler air, see a different kind of land.
Don’t do that, said our landlady. Just go to Red Rock, or Lake Mead. You’ll get snow up on Mount Charleston if you wait a while. They’re right outside of town.
Lake Mead sparkled a pretty Pacific turquoise in the haze. The land heaved up in ripples and mounds of brown and beige and orange-pink, thenstriations of white where the water level had fallen. The lake, made out of the Colorado River by the Hoover Dam, is, at full capacity, the largest reservoir in America. But drought had reduced the runoff from the Rockies that made the river surge. Some marinas had closed. People said that the marinas had to keep picking themselves up and running after the disappearing water.
In the city, land in its native state is cracked, and as desiccated as ash. At night, on our balcony, we felt the air cool and dampen as the sprinklers came on and poured water over the fairways and cart paths. The sprinklers had automatic settings and flowed even when it rained. Our development had three pools and a Jacuzzi and was covered in grass. The city’s humidity, we heard, could be up to eight points higher than in the desert next to it.
You can learn something about Las Vegas if you think about water and time. It is in the nature of both to be measured. If you place water and time in relation to one another and to city in the desert, there will be something inexorable in the way they interact. Such as, if the city in the desert uses too much water, the time will come when the water will no longer be there.
George Bernard Shaw once said that a nation should be no more conscious of itself than a man is of his bones. I’d never met any place as conscious of itself as Las Vegas. It conceptualizes and brands itself incessantly. The form this takes depends on the exigencies of the era and the imaginations of those doing the conceiving, but most of the time the city is telling you that the odds can be beaten—you at the Megabucks slot, it with the waiting desert. It does not place itself syllogistically into the inter-relation of water, time and city in the desert. It does not think of water, or time, in the way they are thought of elsewhere. It behaves not as a city in the desert, but rather as one in the tropics. Its two springs made the grasslands that surprised a group of Mexican traders into calling it Las Vegas, or “The Meadows,” when they came upon it in 1829. Paiute Indians had been drawing water there for centuries. The Great Basin Aquifer that came down from the north and fed the springs was so abundant that when rain fell the underground water shot up in geysers. “If things really get bad, however, a commentator said, they might ask people to take one less ice cube in their cocktails.” People alive today once swam in Las Vegas groundwater pools. But the city pumped out so much of it that the land out around Nellis Air Force Base began to collapse in on the vacated underground caverns. Afterwards there was the seemingly infinite supply from Lake Mead, but by the time we got there it was down to thirty-nine per cent capacity. A paper published in 2008 gave it just a fifty-fifty chance of surviving beyond 2021. There is still underground water nearby, but large amounts of it were radiated beyond use by underground atomic bomb tests. In counties to the north and east, water surges up in springs, deer and cattle graze on the sweet grass, and alfalfa farmers bring in four harvests per year. Las Vegas covets their water. It has a plan for a $7 billion system of pumps and pipes to bring it to them. It has lined up an expensive team of lobbyists, lawyers and Washington politicians to push it through. It has even bought out a whole county of farmers. But even its own hydro-geologists say that it will turn the northern counties where the water is into an Owens Valley, a once-fertile region of farms and a lake in central California that was sucked dry by Los Angeles. Billowing clouds of dust loaded with arsenic blew from there over the southern part of the state. Los Angeles aspired to be some kind of Connecticut suburb in the sun. In this it was in denial about water in the way many other parts of the world are. Las Vegas is not so much in denial as in defiance. It consumes more water per person per day than anywhere else in America. Around its casinos it puts bays and canals and a fountain of a thousand jets that shoots water 240 feet into the air. Golf courses are spread throughout the valley. The science of ecology is thought a preserve of the weak. If things really get bad, however, a commentator said, they might ask people to take one less ice cube in their cocktails. The city, state, and federal governments look on. Las Vegas may, like the profligate banks, be too big to be allowed to fail.
Time is defied as the natural elements are. A constant neutral, not quite locatable hour is aspired to in bars and casinos that have no natural light or exit signs or clocks, that pump in oxygen to keep you awake and that never close for even a minute. “Party like there’s no tomorrow.” The clock only begins to tick when the money runs out.
Childhood
At Treasure Island you can see actors playing pirates battling sirens in bustiers on a galleon in a large tank. A fifty-four foot high simulated rock volcano sizzles and flames and booms in front of the Mirage. The Star Trek Experience at the Hilton has closed, but there are singing gondoliers at the Venetian, waiters in togas at Caesars Palace, a pharaoh’s tomb at the Luxor, and drawbridge and towers at the Excalibur. There are sharks and tigers and lions behind glass. There are magic shows and acrobats and artists of the trapeze. You can whirl in a rollercoaster around the skyscrapers of New York New York or in the Adventuredome inside Circus Circus or you can be shot to the top of the Stratosphere and then free-fall back again. At the Palms you can have your own bowling alley or basketball court in your room. If you step inside any of these places you can play slot machines that have dragons or wolves or leprechauns where the fruit used to be. You might even hear the old cartoon Chipmunks singing when it is time for a double jackpot.
Almost all the people you see engaging with these features are adults.
I wondered about this when I saw it. Why do so many people seek such ways to pass their time? Among the oldest of human rituals are puberty rites, in which young men and women are pierced, scarred, tattooed, circumcised, taken on hunts and vision quests and initiated into the secrets of the tribe. The rituals remind them that if they are old enough to produce a child they can no longer be children themselves. The rites are lines of demarcation. They have to be able to maintain and protect another life. They have to be accountable. In Ghana, young women are sequestered with their elders who tell them of children and men and their new status as women. The taking of a new name is often part of the ritual. This is the case with the Catholic ceremony of confirmation. The intention is to bring about the transformation described by Paul in a letter to the Corinthians: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man I put away childish things.”
Las Vegas tells you that you need not do this, at least for as long as you are there. It spreads its bets. It offers you both a child’s theme park and an adult playground. It can give you the toys and games and rides you knew from childhood or missed out on because they weren’t invented yet. Then you can go somewhere else and drink with no closing time, make a mess, watch people take their clothes off, indulge, fantasize something and get others to act it out for you. In all cases the message is the same: you have a refuge—no one will ask you to clean up or scold you or tell on you, for what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. It has a unique pull because no otherplace in the world is devoted, as it is, entirely to this psychological relief. It is the siren that says, “Go on, you deserve it. No one will know.”
“I hate Disneyland,” said Tom Waits. “It primes our kids for Vegas.”
Epilogue
We packed our lamps and books and sheets and sent them home. We gave our car to our landlady’s church, said good-bye, and flew out. As we rose over the valley the sun overwhelmed the lights of the Strip and blanched the land. The air rippled in the heat. Again that feeling that the place was not entirely there, that it was vanishing as I looked at it.
We came home to Torun, a medieval walled Polish city on the Vistula River. It was late spring. Bees and butterflies moved among the flowers. I heard the whine of an electrical saw from a carpenter’s workshop, birdsong, the table of my neighbor being laid for lunch, speech, radios, laughter, invective, the passing of car tires over the cobbled street. A student up in a garret played Jean-Michel Jarre. I saw the worn leather briefcase of a passing elderly man through the slats of our wooden fence. Had he had this briefcase long? I wondered. Did it belong to his grandfather? It may have been older than anything I had seen in Las Vegas. I remembered the empty sidewalks in Las Vegas, the huge vehicles that looked so anonymous and predatory, like military drones, the sense of a general turning away. Here the streets were cacophonous. People leaned out of their windows to watch the pageant. The little vehicles passing on the road were the size of a Hum- mer’s door. Everything was there to see, within reach, immediate.
The first person to suggest to me that I write about Las Vegas was the writer Eric Schlosser. “You have in crystallized form there all the ways we’ve gone wrong,” he said. I wasn’t sure what he meant then. I hadn’t been there long enough, perhaps. I felt as FBI agent Joe Yablonsky did when he was sent to Las Vegas. “One of the first responses I had was, Is this really part of the United States?”
I never really did write about it in the sense that Eric meant, but I came to see better his point and, as perhaps Agent Yablonsky also eventually saw, that Las Vegas is not a freak but is, instead, deeply integrated with the rest of the country, and the world beyond. It is symptom, mirror, metaphor. It reads human wishes and incarnates them on the desert floor. Is it not the intention of its most famous promotional slogan “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” to send waves of excitement and moral relief coursing through the psyche? Is this not recognizable to all of us? The city’s story is more the story of these secret human wishes than it is of its ecology or industries or its sequence of mayors.
America embarked on one of its epochal changes at the beginning of the 1980s and as the change moved forward the country came increasingly to resemble Las Vegas. Financial services for the first time surpassed manufacturing in their share of the gross domestic product. New trading devices, both fantastical and inscrutable, were invented. Vast leveraging took place. Debt itself was made into a tradable security, becoming a kind of ball on a roulette wheel and absolving the original creditor of any need to collect. The cautious, sober bankers of my childhood were transformed into the bravado high rollers of the 1990s and 2000s, who played the markets during the week and took their rest and recreation in Las Vegas. They had nicknames, like the notorious London Whale whose vast bets cost J.P. Morgan $6 billion. Profits were skimmed, junk unloaded, bonuses taken. A cult of ostentatious wealth developed. Cocaine, the drug of status enhancement, boomed. Sensation, play, and fantasy too went into the ascendant. Adults went to work on motorized skateboards. Planes, cars, houses, and even people were conceptualized as toys. In a time of cheap production businesses concentrated on creating demand rather than on just serving it. Advertising became tailor-made. Addictions—to games, beauty products, pornography, phones, gossip, processed food—created the paths to profit. Scientists and psychologists and medical doctors helped create the recipes. Now became the time in which people dwelt, in cathartic psychotherapies or pills that offered instant relief, in TV evangelisms that sold salvation, and in mass consumption on credit. It was an all-out binge and it needed money to keep it spinning, money that was becoming increasingly fictional. Government, corporate, and personal debt ballooned. There wasn’t the collateral. The system grew hotter as it spiraled upwards. No one wanted it to end, but it finally did.
The era of debt was succeeded by the era of default. There had been a time of soaring appetites and the invention of new ways to gratify them; there was a time of surfeit, and after that there was a time when a morbid kind of hangover spread over the land. It had happened before. Wild borrowings and speculation preceded the falls of Hapsburg Spain, the Dutch and the British and also the 1929 crash. The same Greek civilization which had invented philosophy and science and politics turned to Epicureanism and Cynicism and a belief in Fortune and Chance when invading Macedonian armies took away their homes.
What happens in Vegas happens above all to those holding the lowest status there, the residents. I used to wonder at the large number of cars in the Strip parking garages, the hordes playing slots in the neighborhood casinos. Could there be so many tourists with old, dusty cars? Why would they come out to a casino on Bolder Highway, or in Henderson? It was, of course, the city’s citizens, people who finished their shifts at one casino and paid in their wages to another. A survey conducted in Canada showed that the 75 percent of casino customers who only play occasionally account for just 4 percent of revenue. The rest comes from high rollers and the hooked, and many of the latter are likely to be local citizens.
Las Vegas is a constantly evolving experiment. It creates templates. It is the world expert at what it does. It sometimes seemed to me like a giant scanning device looking for insecurity and greed and a propensity for fantasy. It reaches out into the wide world looking for marks. On a London tube I saw an ad with an image of the Strip superimposed with the text “Visit a Place Where Your Accent Is an Aphrodisiac. What Happens Here, Stays Here. Go to www.VisitLasVegas.co.uk and Plan a Holiday You Won’t Write Home About.” The more corporate it has become the more finely calibrated its sensors. It looks for those who want to return to childhood, those who seek solutions in a stroke of luck, those who dream of having their secret desires served up to them without censure. They are everywhere to be found. Their migration to Las Vegas was like that of other great American migrations to oil fields and fruit farms and streams running with gold. Some came to walk in the sun and pass their time in supervised play, others to get lucky. Most came for the easy money to be got from low-skill jobs. They found a place that serves and stimulates around the clock, in which every minute is filled, where everyone, even the solitary slot player on Boulder Highway, is made to feel the center of their universe, and yet it is a place where no one is the author of their own entertainment. No one may like to think about it, but they know that you must play by the house rules and with the house odds. When the math runs true and the money runs out and you cannot get it back you are sent away. Then you may feel bad. And when people feel bad, many medicate. Adrenaline and anesthesia are the twin poles between which the bit players in this city pass.
I met many people in Las Vegas who did not live this way. They were healthy, solvent. They kept their homes and attended to their children. But the vacant houses, the halted developments, the golf courses gone to seed “. . . they’ve lived, as one of my students said, in the shadows of a city of lights.” and the default figures pointed to a trend. The desert was creeping in at the edges. It erupted sometimes in the heart of the city. It seemed to me that the hangover aura, the isolation, furtiveness, anxiety, and boredom were all unmistakable. Anger broke out in the roads. I had never been anywhere where such qualities were so salient in the atmosphere of a city. Las Vegas leads the nation in suicides, teenage drug use, drunk-driving arrests, household bankruptcy, divorce, and high school dropout rates. The great sources of the city’s revenue weigh heavily on its citizens.
They’ve grown up with a sickness that is general and chronic, they’ve lived, as one of my students said, in the shadows of a city of lights. There has been very little to distract them from contemplating its weaknesses and its strengths. They try to find ways to survive. They look for the authentic, for meaning, for an adulthood where there is a reckoning for what you do and for some kind of future beyond the insistent, insatiable and never ending Now. They look for some sign of kindness. They suffer, they struggle, try to learn. They have parents who have gone beyond excess into helplessness. In most cases what they learn from them will only harm them, except in a cautionary way, for they live in houses where nature has been reversed, where the child, early in life, became carer and custodian for the parent. They were victims not of war or pestilence or sexual predators or economic breakdown or their own foibles, but rather of a peculiar version of fun.
Timothy O’Grady has lived in the United States, Ireland, London and Spain and now lives in Poland. He is the author of four works of non-fiction and three novels. He lived in Las Vegas for two years.