Losing Las Vegas

Las Vegas is SOMETHING ELSE. Big casinos and hotels. Sidewalks full of people who, from the looks of things and like me, are from SOMEWHERE ELSE.

Our plane touched down just a bit over an hour after rising up, and 30 minutes later we were situated in the MGM. We'd arrived there by shuttle bus, the driver of which I irked as we asked how much the fare would be. "You give me six dollars each, I'll get the tokens from the machine over there." In all innocence I asked if I could get the tokens for free--I thought he wanted six dollars for himself to buy the tokens. He accused me of calling him a liar. Worse, he accused me of being from New York.

"You from New York?" he in fact asked.

"No," I said. "I just didn't know what you meant."

"He's from New York and thinks I'm lying to him," he said to SOMEONE ELSE, someone who told me how the whole token-thing worked. "You're from New York, aren't you," he continued.

"I'm not," I said.

"Where are you from?"

"SOMEPLACE ELSE," I said as my wife handed him the $12 and he took our one piece of luggage. "I'm not from New York."

When we got off the shuttle at the hotel, he asked if we had any bags--I was glad to see that he'd forgotten us.

So, Vegas is big. I've been to Reno, which is not so big and where the hotels-casino combinations do not take up many, many city blocks. I've been to South Lake Tahoe, which is beautiful and refined and touristy. I've lost money in all these places, though these days I'm too frugal to lose too much.

The streets are filled with people--young, mostly, with enough inebriation to last a lot of people a long while. And lots of Marines, it seems: you spend enough time in the Navy, you learn to spot Marines. Enough said. The casinos are full of young, middle, and old, with me being in that final group. The weather is wonderful--warm, sunny days, cool nights. Disneyland for grown-ups--thematic casinos that, really, are illusions that cover their central casino cores: you get into New York and Paris and Disneyland, and you find are identical beeps and whistles. There is a new part of town and an old part, and the old part seems more genuine, if older and more impregnated with cigarette smoke that has gestated for decades.

We spend much of our time exploring the standard Strip highlights, not venturing onto the sidestreets that a friend warned me were not the best places to be. But I don't know: there is enough salacious material ("Girls direct to you" boasts one mobile billboard) on the Strip that I can only imagine what lies to the sides. We visit a mall for some quick shopping and a cold beverage, and we encounter a woman selling shoes who lost her Florida home to one hurricane or another and is glad to be someplace warm, someplace where there is no threat of natural disasters, in a state where there are view of those "social programs" that bothered her and her husband. I want to tell her that, I believe, earthquakes are always a possibility. She will soon be old enough to retire, and I also want to ask her if she will collect Social Security, which some people might consider a "social program." Her eybrows are drawn onto her face, whoever drew them was no artist--except perhaps in a Picasso sense.

As we walk around town, I remember Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which I have not read in decades, as well as the movie Leaving Las Vegas, a fantastic but damned depressing flick.

Departing on a Saturday night, I think of the poem "Flying Over Sonny Liston," which was written by the poet Gary Short, someone I knew a long time ago but who has gone on to wonderful things. Perhaps not coincidentally, just 3 days after I leave Las Vegas, Short appears for a poetry reading at the college where I teach. He makes reading poems as easy as it seems he writes them, and I enjoy listening to him. At the reading I run into Shawn, another fine poet and someone with whom I am scheduled to read in just a few weeks. "No need to be apprehensive, you'll be among friends," one of the hosts told me when I announced my nervousness. I think, though, that a firing squad might be friendly too.

We are glad to be home, and we talk about how we might do things differently now that we have seem certain things. I would like, next time, to extend the trip and venture beyond the city, perhaps visit Hoover Dam, perhaps explore the desert that makes up so much of Nevada.