The dirt and sand along the highways into Vegas glitter with the glass of thousands of smashed bottles. At dusk, they catch the light and encrust the desert with diamond gleams. It’s easy to draw a thousand terrible analogies between the glittering dunes outside the city and the city itself. The shattered dreams. The wealth lost in the desert. Crystal tears of a million losers. It’s too easy. But Vegas is the world's most obvious city. A signifier with no signified. It denies depth.
I did choose to come here. Work brought me. A marketing conference. I won't feign disdain because I'm lucky enough to like my job, my industry, despite the hate it gets. There are worse businesses to be in. I could be a politician, or work at an NGO.The conference lasted for two days, and each night after dinner, I walked the strip, airing my inner flaneur.
Call For a Good Time
The little latino men and women who hand out escort cards are staggered every 10 or 15 feet for miles along the strip. They wear neon shirts, greens and oranges, snapping the cards at you as you go by, trying to catch your eye in a city that exists to grab your attention. They aren’t half bad. The sharp snap of the card, I’m not sure how they do it, made me jump almost each time. It has the same snap as an immense rubber band. I’m not tempted to take any of the cards. You can see them strewn across the strip, images of women with immense breasts and platinum blond hair stare emptily out of them.
Although, I can’t help but wonder how many people actually stop for one? And if they do, do they call the number?
What crooked paths must you walk to be willing to dial that number?
Imagine. You return to your hotel room and you stare at the card. The woman on it is buxom, barely dressed, her face almost entirely covered by immense sunglasses. But she’s beautiful. You can tell. You began to fantasize what it would be like to have sex with her. To have her there, in front of you, ready and willing for… anything. And it dawns on you that it’s actually possible. She’s not some anonymous woman on a NSFW Reddit thread. She’s real. And you can talk to her by calling the number on the card.
So, you call… A man picks up. Which you don’t expect. He explains that he’s Violet’s agent. Violet is the girl you’ve called. You didn’t even look at her name. You couldn’t see past her figure. You’re unnerved but you press on. You arrange for her to come to your hotel. You have to agree to a strict set of terms. You promise to pay a fee, $35. The man, his voice is deep and vaguely foreign, with an undertone of menace that reminds you of the dark alley entrance, tells you that you must pay over the phone. How, you ask? Give me your credit card number, he says. You hesitate again, but you’ve come this far. You can always pause the credit card afterwards. Or dispute the charge. So you give him the card number. Then you give him the name of your hotel. The man tells you that, when she arrives, Violet will call and you will have to go down to the lobby to collect her. You’re a bit turned off by how transactional this entire tryst is beginning to feel . But you’ve already paid the fee, surprisingly cheap, you think, so why not. You hang up and wait.
After she leaves, you walk to the mirror. Your body looks older, more flaccid and soft than ever. Your weakness is reflected back at you. You clean yourself up but it doesn’t help. So you take a shower. You avoid looking at the balled up towels in the corner of your bathroom. Back in your bed, you think about the woman. She was nice-looking–nothing like the woman on the card–but handsome nonetheless. After the act, she stroked your hair. You think about this. You try to remember the last time someone touched you that way but you can’t. But aside from this brief moment of warmth, everything else was perfunctory. Mechanical and transactional. You almost can’t believe it was you, that it happened. Your bed is still warm but it feels as if it happened years ago, thousands of miles from here. You fall asleep, thinking about how she stroked your hair.
There are two sorts of angels in this world
Crossing the pedestrian bridge over Las Vegas Avenue, between the Bellagio and Paris Las Vegas Casino, two women dressed like showgirls strut towards me, immense white feathers arcing out around them. I make eye contact, curious if they’ll try and stop me.
That’s the scam they run. They catch the eye of an unwitting tourist, surprising him (or her) with adoration. They tell him for $60 or so bucks that he can get a picture with them. Then, after the picture, he suddenly finds out that they meant $60 per girl.Surpisingly, most people just eat the cost. It’s part of the experience, they tell themselves. Or they’re afraid to let the girls down.
They politely smile and pass by. Like all the other showgirls I’ve passed. I guess I don't look like an easy mark. But I almost wished they had because I’m stunned by the beauty of one of these girls. She looks like a college cheerleader. Blonde and fresh-faced. All-American. How did she get here? Most of these showgirls, when you get close, look tired and worn. Caked in makeup, they squeeze out smiles that are nearly grimaces. But this showgirl looks like Sharon Tate. She has the beauty of a young Hollywood starlet. I look back over my shoulder, just once, and then head down the escalator back to street-level.
Her face is still in my mind as I reach an intersection crowded with pedestrians waiting to cross. Amongst the throng are men and women dressed like pioneers: Christian fundamentalists. One of them, another blonde girl, could be the twin of the showgirl I saw minutes ago. I’m stunned by the resemblance. If I didn’t know better, and if I hadn’t seen her walk away in the opposite direction, I would think that this was, in fact, the same woman. But as she stops to offer me something, I realize that she doesn’t look much like the showgirl at all.
Rather than a revealing showgirl outfit and high-heeled boots, this young woman is covered nearly head to toe, starkly modest in a way that shocks more than all the skin the showgirls flaunted. Her eyes are like blue drops of porcelain. Piercing but somehow not sharp. No, not piercing. But arresting. Bits of blonde hair peek out from under her bonnet. She tries to hand me something and, without thinking, I wave her away. She smiles and moves on. The men with her, wearing yarmulkes and muttering about Jesus (a juxtaposition I find baffling) are troglodytic.
The walk sign begins to flash and I’m pulled across the street with the rest of the crowd. I look back but she’s already disappeared. Lost amongst the next crowd waiting to cross the street. How has she ended up here? Unlike the showgirls, who politely passed me by, somehow sensing that I wouldn’t take their bait, this young woman tried to offer me salvation. A different sort of card. A different kind of visit for a different type of seeker.
Batting 1000
The entire strip resonates. It hums. There are vibrations that slither beneath the beaten sidewalk and up into your flesh. This is what traps people here. It’s a form of psychic violence, a sense of evil, foreboding, mixed with pleasure. The forked tongue of a succubus. It drives men and women mad. While walking the strip, even just the 2 mile lap from the MGM Grand to the Venetian and back, I saw the tossed off scraps of the city’s violent disregard for life everywhere. The mentally ill morass of humanity that we all pretend isn’t there, that’s too hard to stomach.
Beneath the faux-skyline of New York, New York, out front of the Houston Hot Chicken, A homeless man, I assume he’s homeless, spoke animatedly to no one in particular. In a strangely apropos Brooklyn accent, he muttered, “1000 out of 1000, I’m batting 1000, “ paused, then shouted. “Every. Fucking. Day.”
On the moving walkways of the covered bridges that lead in and out of the Venetian, I came face to face with a scraggly little man who struggled to keep his pants up as he stumbled off the mechanism. Unbalanced, his pants slid down and out came his penis. I joked to a colleague who was with me at the time that this wasn’t the sort of nudity I expected to see on the Strip but beneath the jibe I was disturbed. Not only disturbed, but guilty, because I knew that it was mere chance that separated me from a life like that.
Later, in front of the MGM grand, tired after my two and a half mile trudge, I came up next to another man, dressed in a heavy green coat despite the weather. I felt another shock as I heard him whisper, “People get stabbed in the garage, the people get stabbed in the garage.” I sped up, feeling a pit open in my stomach, frightened by this man and the psychic cage he was trapped in.
Another Kind of Angel
A lone acordeonista, small and dark, stands at the corner of East Harmon Ave and Las Vegas Blv. One night he was there alone, another, a stout, little latino woman–his wife, I assume–stood nearby watching him. He’s dressed in the Norteño style. The accordion is plugged into an amplifier. In front of him, on a stand, is a microphone.
His voice strained by years of wear and tear, he sings melancholic romance ballads. Slow and mournful. They float out over the strip, getting torn to bits by the roar of the passing sports cars and SUVs. He doesn’t seem to belong here, a man out of time. As if whatever was here before the glittering gulches and neon canyons had reappeared like a ghost. Maybe I was the only one that could see him? It didn’t seem like anyone else could. I filmed him, just to make sure. I don’t know where he’s from, but it’s people like him, indigenous and earthy, who walked these deserts before the mormons, the mafia, and the tourists swarmed its sands. And one day, they will all be gone.
But I hope he’s still there, cantando sus norteñas romanticas while, around him, the desert winds whip the city back into oblivion.
I hope he’s there forever.
God please make me a rich man so I can pay for Diogenes of Orem to spend a week in Kabukicho/Fukuoka.
I enjoyed reading this. Strong imagery, an honest voice. I went to Vegas once. It's a sad place, a testament to our lowest tendencies.