The legend that surrounds Las Vegas is, like
most legends, much larger than its reality. What one might expect of that city in the desert is itself an alternative fact, a gross accumulation
of a place’s social and cultural significance. I had never been to the
place where What Happens There Stays There, but I created the opportunity in
mid-April, as part of a further-westbound leg of an already-extensive journey.
My vehicle contained everything I had needed or wanted over the past three
months, and its rear shocks were laughably inadequate when I headed west out of
the Rockies and down into the wider tan landscapes of northern Arizona. My passenger seat was stacked with all immediate and necessary provisions: camping
gear, a cooler with food and drink, a stash of clean clothes, shoes. The rest
of the station wagon had all else: books, records, instruments, a desktop
computer, binders containing the coming fall’s syllabi, academic and personal
projects, art, and so much more. The front seat was as crowded as a rush hour
ride on the T back in Boston, thousands upon thousands of miles away. The road west
to Vegas was long, dark, and sleepless: I knew there was little to see, and,
for better or for worse, I had been in no rush to leave the San Luis Valley of
Colorado. Dawn was coming, and though the sun was hours from coming over the
horizon, it was already making itself known, throwing light and inviting
shadows out across all terrain features. The sky was turning colors I had never
seen and will never see again.
I had lost interest in monitoring
the GPS, and was listening to CNN when the car rolled around a curve and down a
hill, and unlike so many turns and hills before, suddenly on the other side of
the windshield appeared the vast valley of development that is Las Vegas, with its
maze of streetlights and houselights and casino lights twinkling against the
lightening desert sky. “City of tiny lights/don’t you want to go/talk about
them tiny cookies,” as Frank Zappa wrote, I thought to myself. I would leave
Las Vegas having learned there are no tiny cookies, or tiny anything, in Las
Vegas, and that the place is an expensive and ethically-questionable playground
for adults. So much of Las Vegas exists to be aimless, without ideal or value,
but to allow individuals to wander, without thrift or consequence, among pavilions
and gaming halls and restaurants, the false and real storefronts, Atlantic City
without an ocean or boardwalk, merged into the world’s largest shopping plaza.
I was there not only to scope out
the scene for myself but to attend a conference on cybersecurity at a resort
hotel blocks away from The Strip. My intention was to park the car and enjoy a
few nights under a roof and away from the omnipresent steering wheel. Once the
GPS led me to the parking lot of the hotel I found I overshot my goal, arriving
hours earlier than necessary. I rolled down the window and sleepily watched the
sun come up from behind the palms. With my eyes closed but still awake I felt
the air inside of the car and outside of the car begin to grow warm. After a
ten minute non-snooze from behind my sunglasses I decided to find food and
walked to the chain diner down the block. There were a dozen of us there in the
seven o’clock hour: off-shift wait staff, off-shift security guards, career
gamblers, loners. Quiet conversations and coffee filled these morning minutes,
and later there was bacon and eggs. Las Vegas seems to be a lonely place, as
lonely and as transitory as a bus stop. Maybe it is loneliest in the early
morning, at that hour when the sun’s daily beat down has again become obvious
and unavoidable, in those hours among the stoic towers and neon, just people begin
to emerge and wander, with a unique and ruthless intention, not unlike the ominous
desert sun.
Besides attendees of this cybersecurity
conference, Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys, and aged hipsters Steely Dan
were all appearing in Las Vegas over these few days. Tickets for Steely Dan,
the only performance I had interest in, were selling for around $250 each at
the box office. While the Dan’s song catalog contains unparalleled chestnuts of
20th century pop songwriting, I knew their stage show was very likely to be an
incredibly-tight iteration of the Blues Brothers Rhythm and Blues Revue
featuring resident aliens Walter Becker and Donald “Nightfly” Fagen, with
ultra-great musicians doing the heavy lifting wonderfully. $250 was nothing in
Las Vegas, but represented to me much of budget for this adventure. I finished
my breakfast and walked back down to the hotel and conference center to check
in. The air felt thick and warmer than before. The traffic was thickening, as
morning commuters sped along downtown streets, racing themselves to the next
light and to work.
The format for the conference was
familiar: presenters covered topics that at times very-nearly fell under a main
theme as big as the entirety of the western sky. Perhaps due to the technical
nature of the participants and presenters, I found some of the PowerPoint
slides to be incredibly complex and hard to comprehend. I may have been the only attendee who hadn't flown in for this. One lunchtime keynote
was extraordinary: a witty and sharp British economist explained how
Bitcoin started a blockchain economy that would soon change wealth forever.
Some of us listened intently while others occupied themselves on laptops and
other devices. Around all of us circulated tales of escalating cybercrime and
continued digital threats to national security, filling the room like the
pumped-in cold air in the windowless hall. Money would soon hold itself accountable, he said in so many words. Whether this meant the End of the Fed or had any immediate implications was unclear. But I know many of us were simultaneously reading the headlines on
our phones as he talked. Prepared presentations continued on, focusing on the economics
(but not ethics) of customer compensation practices following large-scale data
breaches, the theoretical (but not necessarily practical) arrangements of data
centers, and the forthcoming digital synergy between business and money. Some information provided at this conference will inform and enliven my classes this fall-- those whose syllabi had already been prepared and refreshed, and were waiting for use, deep inside of my hot and idle car.
Later that afternoon I was glad
to leave that air conditioned space and the heady convo. I walked outside to let myself be struck
in the face by the early-summer heat of Vegas. The small wind that moved
between the tall buildings was hot and smelled like a city bus. The sun was
blinding. Somewhere, cultural icons-- from Britney to Pawn Stars’ Chumlee--
were going about their business, as herds of tourists waited at crosswalks to
wander down the next block. The sun made even the dull concrete sidewalks shimmer.
This heat was nothing for this town, and I could feel it: everyone was ready
for what could very well be the hottest summer on record, if not meteorologically at
least financially. There is nothing like a blockchain economy in place on the
casino floors of Las Vegas, but I am proud to say I did hear talk of such while
I was there. I walked for miles, as I used to in Atlantic City; The Strip is ever-changing, with gamblers dripping from and into casino entrances at all hours. At one point I visited NBC’s “Television City,” where, in exchange
for enduring a 47-minute unnamed pilot and providing my on-the-fly rating and
written assessment afterwards, I received a ten dollar food credit and ten
dollars’ credit at the NBC/Universal gift shop. I ate my kinda-free pretzel and drank my kinda-free lemonade, and wondered if I was drunk as I found myself considering buying a
Star Trek t-shirt, just to use the coupon (I didn't). The most interesting retail
shop I found featured a variety of products featuring highly polarizing political
rhetoric. I asked a passerby to photograph me with the cardboard cutout of the
President, and a well-known figure in Las Vegas, behind a mock Presidential
podium.
Las Vegas’ relaxed prostitution laws-- and the promotion of that economic activity-- defines everyone’s experience on the sidewalks that are The Strip. At every corner, promoters offer business cards featuring naked women, with phone numbers to call, and rates for companionship, per minute. These business cards litter the sidewalks, some of the only garbage I saw on the busiest walkways. I was sad to see how many people have abandoned their dignity in this regard. I encountered a promoter for a medical cannabis delivery service, as well as a promoter for a medical cannabis license processing establishment ($100 gets you an official Nevada medical cannabis prescription, plus a free 1/8th ounce; doctor on-site, 24/7). But while cannabis is present in a limited sense on The Strip, alcohol rules the day: one may carry a drink anywhere on The Strip. Many twentysomethings carried three-foot-tall plastic beakers containing frozen drinks, as if having just emerged from 7-11 with adult-beverage Slurpees. Where in the rest of the world behaves like Las Vegas? I know no other place—Memphis’s Beale Street, Burlington’s Church Street, Harvard Square—these are all pockets within larger, more sensible cities. Las Vegas holds in its heart these adult Slurpees, accessibility to video poker screens and ATMs, and cheap thrills beneath the waistline. People watching is fun in Las Vegas, but only if you enjoy seeing people behaving in an uncommon way—perhaps more disembodied and disconnected from themselves than when spending a night out in their nearby metropolitan area or hometown bar.
Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville was
the only bar I could find on The Strip with seating that put you right on, and four
feet above, the sidewalk. From this vantage, the passersby became the show--
prostitutes, with or without men on their arms; couples, happy and talking in
to each other’s ears; people consumed by their devices; gamblers and hustlers
walking fast; a group of women, talking and laughing; people passing and
speaking quickly in foreign languages; a bachelorette party sparkled by. I ended up sitting at this bar a while, alongside a scrawny, verbose early-twentysomething local who didn’t mind making
a scene: as people passed, he called out a celebrity he thought they resembled,
shouting “Al Pacino! MY MAN!” and “Gwenyth Paltrow! My wo-MAN!,” echoing back
to Las Vegas his drunken recognition of our celebritocracy (he is pictured here
with a parrot, lent to him by a passing Johnny Depp lookalike). This went on
for at least an hour, and got this guy into almost two fights. When I came back from the
bathroom Jimmy Buffet’s security guard was standing around
on the deck, putting an end to the silliness. Later I ran into a street
performer with an acoustic guitar and without a care in the world. He played
for me his own rewrite of the anthemia “Margaritaville,” with lyrics focusing
on his love for recreational cannabis consumption. There were other street
performers, too: a guy in his late teens playing a homemade, PVC-constructed
saxophone; a jazz saxophonist who carried with him an elaborate homemade PA
system; guitarists and singer-songwriters, some of whom were being paid by the
casinos; sleight-of-hand magic tricks, one of which involved my ring; a short man with an amplified electric guitar who played horrifically
while standing next to a Marylyn Monroe lookalike; and others, who had no
instruments to play.
There is much more to Las Vegas
than The Strip but I didn’t see it. To support the infrastructure of the main
attraction, a full separate community of workers exists, with homes and
families and driveways and living rooms, and I did not try to understand or see
that part of Las Vegas, but rather stayed grounded at the conference,
distracted by as many all-hours walks around The Strip as I could handle (which, suddenly no longer living at elevation, was a lot). I left Las Vegas on the morning of April 20th,
a day when many back in the Rockies and back east were rallying for the
recreational consumption of a substance other than what is condoned outright on
The Strip in Las Vegas. I did stop into a Goodwill on my way out of town (and a
closing Radio Shack), and waited twenty minutes in line as a team of
cashiers dealt with inoperable registers. A mother and son complained loudly before leaving. I paid one dollar for a CD copy of electric fiddle
genius Papa John Creach’s album Rock Father, its own carnival of studio
musicians and guests, no less frivolous than all of Las Vegas (I do not remember, however, where I got the vintage cell phone pictured in this post: a yard sale, Goodwill, or?). While my notes
would allow for a more complete chronological account for my few days in Las
Vegas, not all of What Happens There is worth indulging, or even understanding; some of these
photographs may be worth at least a thousand words apiece-- "but let me call a buddy of mine who's an expert and he can tell us for sure." My time on The
Strip showed me a city able, willing, and ready to aid and abet a corporate
carnival of entertainment, a Mecca for the culture that is big business and for
the big business that is the promotion of a specific American culture-- a place where everything, especially fun, has its price.
Note: verbal permission was secured prior to taking the few posed photographs of individuals included in this post.
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