Skipping Towards Gomorrah (4 page)

If the insufferable, clenched-butt snob I was in college could see me now, he'd never stop throwing up. I have to confess that I've fallen in love with Las Vegas. In my defense, it wasn't love at first sight; Las Vegas's charms where entirely lost on me the first time I visited. In fact, each and every prejudice I held about the city was confirmed on that first trip—even before my Vegas-bound plane could get off the ground.

I was thirty years old when I first visited Vegas in the flesh, and I went under duress. It was a business trip of sorts, and not one I had been looking forward to. My worst
Godfather-Koyaanisqatsi
fears about Las Vegas were realized before my plane could push away from the gate. The man who plopped down next to me was so fat he couldn't put his tray table down, and so pushy that he set his meal—four cherry Danish (!) and a rum and Coke (!!)—
on my tray table without asking permission
. I had long suspected Las Vegas to be a city larded with pushy, greedy gluttons, and the man sitting next to me was solid—massive!—proof that I was right. I dreaded the idea of spending three days in a hotel filled with people like him: greedy gamblers, fat-assed gluttons, and hopeless drunks.

But no one had warned me about the clowns.

All done up in shades of pink and white, Circus Circus Hotel Resort and Casino has—can you guess?—a circus theme. “Circus Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war,” Hunter S. Thompson wrote in
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
. “This is the Sixth Reich.” I'm not sure what Hunter means exactly, but Circus Circus is as creepy as any other place filled with clowns; in fact, there isn't a corner of the hotel's gigantic lobby or casino that escaped the wrath of Circus Circus's clown-mad decorators. A twelve-story-high neon clown greeted me out front, bas-relief clowns assaulted me at reception, clowns on slot machines dinged and whistled. Like all sensible adults, I loathe clowns, and being trapped in a clown-themed hotel for three days was not my idea of fun. It wasn't my idea
at all,
actually, and I made up my mind to order a horse head put in my travel agent's bed when I got home. When I found myself alone in my clown-themed hotel room, which I rode to in a clown-themed elevator, I wanted to hide under the clown-themed bedspread and cry.

Needless to say, my feelings about Las Vegas didn't change as a result of that first, traumatic visit. Besides eating (at the clown-themed buffet) and gambling (in a clown-themed casino), there was little to do at Circus Circus, and I wasn't allowed to stray far from the hotel. As I'm not a gambler and only an occasional, guilt-ridden glutton, when I checked out of Circus Circus after three miserable days, I vowed never to return to Las Vegas. But return I did, and it was on my second trip that a love affair that has yet to end was sparked. And, irony of ironies, I returned to Las Vegas to prove to a friend that it was just as bad as I'd told him. After listening to me complain, my best friend wanted to see this American Gomorrah for himself, and so I tagged along on his first trip to Vegas. I wanted to make sure he had just as bad a time in Las Vegas as I did. This time, I wasn't going for work—and I wasn't going for three days, either, just overnight. This time I was slumming in Las Vegas, and I planned to spend the day making snide remarks at the expense (and the expanse) of all the other visitors to the city.

But a funny thing happened on the way to making sure my best friend hated Las Vegas just as much as I did. Maybe it was staying in a hotel that was clown-free (MGM Grand), or maybe it was my best friend's infectious enthusiasm, or the fact that we stayed one night instead of three. But by the time we wound up strapped to the Big Shot ride atop the Stratosphere Hotel and Tower—imagine sitting in a chair on top of the Empire State Building and being shot a hundred feet into the air, and then free-falling back down to the roof—I had to admit that I was having a . . . good time. I was having a great time, actually, in Las Vegas.
And it wasn't a coincidence.

 

W
hen Las Vegas was just a gleam in the eye of America's organized crime families, the lure of legalized gambling was enough to attract hordes of none-too-demanding gamblers and tourists. As there weren't any places to gamble legally outside of Nevada, Las Vegas's first wave of hotels didn't have to offer much beyond slots and cheap drinks and the occasional sleazy floor shows to lure the suckers into the building. Today, of course, things are very different. First of all, Americans no longer have to travel far to gamble. The first legal casino in the United States may have opened in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, in 1931, but by the end of the 1990s, there were lotteries in thirty-seven states and some kind of legalized gambling in forty-seven states. Today only the residents of Hawaii, Tennessee, and Utah are unable to gamble in their home states. Even people who live in these holdout states, except Hawaii, don't have to roam far afield to gamble; chances are, wherever an American lives, a riverboat or a Native American casino is only a short drive away. Cities that used to be punch lines to jokes about towns with nothing going on—Biloxi, Mississippi; Dubuque, Iowa; Gary, Indiana—have become regional gambling meccas, petite Las Vegas knockoffs. And with the advent of on-line gambling, there's really no such thing as a gambling-free state anymore. We can place bets on our computers in our bedrooms, dens, and offices. Even in Hawaii.

Around the same time gambling was being transformed from a sinful and largely illegal activity to America's pastime—which was around the same time gambling got a new name: gaming—resort owners in Las Vegas realized that they had to offer something more than just slots and craps and cards to keep people coming to a strip of hotels in the middle of a friggin' desert. Most Americans live within a forty-minute drive of legal craps tables, card games, and slot machines. To keep pulling in gamblers, Las Vegas had to offer us things smaller casinos could not. In the early 1990s, Las Vegas transformed itself into a “family friendly” destination spot, with amusement parks for the kids, floor shows suitable for children, and, of course, casino gambling for the parents. Family-friendly Las Vegas is lately giving way to adults-only Las Vegas, with bare-breasted showgirls making a comeback at otherwise “respectable” hotels. But family-friendly or bare-breasted, Las Vegas knows it has to wow us to keep us coming back. Gambling isn't enough anymore.

My first trip to Vegas, as it turns out, was poorly timed. Most of the big, new resorts were still under construction, and all I saw on that first trip were clowns; construction cranes; boarded-up, soon-to-be-imploded old hotels; and dingy, depressing casinos with few attractions for the nongambler.

On my second trip, I wandered over to the Bellagio and its art gallery and fountains; then over to New York, New York, where I rode the roller coaster; and finally to the Stratosphere Hotel and Casino and its mind-blowing Big Shot ride. Paris was going up, along with its one-third scale Eiffel Tower, the Aladdin was being rebuilt, and the canals were being dug for the Venetian. All of a sudden, what was going on outside the buildings was as interesting as the gambling going on inside. Old Las Vegas was a collection of big boxy hotels built over big, smoky casinos. To make money, all a resort owner had to do was build a stack-the-suckers tower over a soak-the-suckers box. Fill the tower with hotel rooms, fill the box with slot machines, open the doors, and watch the money roll in.

By the mid-1990s, full-size warships were sinking outside of Treasure Island, Cirque du Soleil had taken up residence at the Bellagio, the Blue Man Group was imported from the actual New York City, and a real show, the Broadway revival of the musical
Chicago,
was running at MGM Grand. No longer did you have to be a gambler to appreciate the spectacle of Las Vegas. The casinos, while still the moneymaking machine that fed Las Vegas, were no longer the focus. They were a given, and everything else—four-star restaurants, legit theater, the decorative arts—had taken center stage. And each of the huge, new casino-resorts had huge, new shopping malls (the Forum Shops at Caesar's Palace, Desert Passage at the Aladdin), which were filled with the same stores that can be found in every other mall in North America. Setting aside the bizarre notion that shopping is a recreational activity—and never mind why someone who lived in a city with malls of its own would get on an airplane and go to Las Vegas only to spend all of his time shopping in stores he could drive to or walk to at home—this was still something new.

And I fell for it. Many of the new hotels and resorts were beautiful, and I'm just a sucker for the decorative arts, I guess, so even the fake Paris charmed me. Still loud and crass, yes, and outsized, but beautiful. I didn't feel like a loser walking into the Venetian or the Bellagio. I felt like a guest, not a mark.

Oh, don't get me wrong: there's still a lot of crap in Las Vegas. Even the big new hotels are crap, really. It's just bigger, bolder crap, more contemporary crap. Some people still spend all their time at appallingly ugly old hotels, of course, like the somebody-implode-me-please Tropicana. You can still catch David Cassidy in a bloated show at the Rio, or Tommy Tune in a bloated show at the MGM Grand, and rumor has it that the reanimated corpses of Siegfried & Roy are still playing the Mirage. At the Tropicana one day, I saw an animal act that Chuck Barris would've gonged thirty years ago. But you don't have to spend your time at the Las Vegas of Bugsy Siegel, not if you don't want to. What Las Vegas has now that it once lacked—what it didn't have when
The Godfather
and
Koyaanisqatsi
were filmed—is some balance. You can take in the naked boobies of the showgirls at the Tropicana or the subversive artistry of the Blue Man Group across the street at the Luxor. You can spend all your time in all-you-can-overeat buffets or dine in expensive restaurants run by big-name chefs who serve tiny portions.

And Americans are flocking to Las Vegas. Wandering around the casinos of Las Vegas you don't see a lot of urban types. The people conservatives believe are leading to the moral collapse of the country—feminists, immigrants, gays and lesbians, African Americans—are underrepresented in the most sinful city in the United States. Las Vegas's casinos are filled with little old ladies, respectable-looking soccer moms, and conservative-looking dads. In the lobby of the Venetian on my last trip to Las Vegas, I started asking people who they voted for in 2000: Bush or Gore? Among the sinners in Las Vegas, among the gamblers, drunks, and sleazily dressed women, Bush—President Abstinence, President Born Again, President Doesn't Drink—won by a landslide. Of the forty-six people I asked before a security guard told me to knock it off, thirty-two had voted for Bush.

The list of sins I haven't committed isn't very long. You name it and, with the exception of cunnilingus, I've done it. I've burned with lust, eaten myself sick, envied people who were smarter or better looking than I am, and lain around the house watching television when I was supposed to be studying or writing. Gambling, however, was a seedy, sinful pursuit that I could resist with very little effort. I've never made friendly wagers, I don't own stock, I've purchased lottery tickets three times in my adult life—and felt like an idiot every time. So while everything else in Las Vegas attracted me, the casinos in themselves held all the appeal to me that I imagine a thorough prostate exam has for Tom DeLay.

Even after I got over my anti-Vegas animus, I still felt dirty walking into casinos. Being in a casino said something about a person that I didn't want to say about myself. It said, “I am greedy and gullible.” The losers far outnumber the winners—everyone knows this, right? That there are and always will be, by design, many, many losers in Las Vegas isn't a secret. Casinos aren't run like tobacco companies; they don't make much of an effort to hide the bad news.

The reason that I always had fun in Las Vegas—going to restaurants, shows, stores, and getting the occasional overpriced massage at the spa—was because I avoided the casinos. I never looked around Caesar's Palace or the Bellagio and thought, “Hey, I'm gonna take this place for all it's worth.” Ironically, by not gambling I
was
taking the house. Resort owners lose money on hotel rooms; they make money when their guests
gamble,
not when guests check out. So while I never left Las Vegas with more money than I came with, I never left Las Vegas out more than the cost of my room, food, and entertainment. Las Vegas lost money on me—and, being Catholic, I felt guilty about it. In a city built on sin, the nonsinner is the transgressor.

So after seven trips to Las Vegas, I succumbed. Guilt got the best of me. If I wanted to keep going to Las Vegas—and I did—I would have to learn to gamble, if only to give the hotels a chance to start breaking even on me. And here was this sinful pleasure—gambling—that was so attractive that a multibillion-dollar industry had been created to indulge people who longed to commit it. It didn't look like fun to me, true, but neither does cunnilingus, and lots of people seem to enjoy the hell out of
that
. And if gambling was all about greed, as I suspected it was, hey, I'm greedy. I could be flattering myself, I suppose, and claim that I don't care about money. But I love money just as much as the next guy. And someone had to be making money somehow—I mean, if everyone lost, and lost big, every time they came to Las Vegas, well, people would stop coming, right? I'm a pretty smart guy—at least I like to think I am—maybe I could, with some practice and a little help, beat the house at the gaming tables instead of just at checkout.

 

F
irst, slots.

There's not much strategy to slots. Find a slot machine in a maze of slot machines, one that hopefully isn't too close to a smoker or a granny hooked up to an oxygen tank (most of whom are also smokers), park your ass on an upholstered chair that's bolted to the floor, and start pumping in quarters. The slot machine tootles and bleeps; it may even speak; every casino has at least one bank of slot machines that scream “Wheel! Of! Fortune!” day and night. You put in a coin and push a button. (No one pulls the “arms” of one-armed bandits anymore; most slot machines still have arms, but they seem to be vestigial.) The computer program spins some apples or cherries or sevens or stars around, the machine tootles and bleeps or wheel-of-fortunes some more, and then one at a time, from left to right, the apples or cherries or sevens or stars stop spinning. And you're out a quarter. So you put in another quarter in hopes of winning your last quarter back. Repeat.