|
|
|
A Begrudging Admiration of Las Vegas |
|
By LIONEL ROLFE
A few days after returning from a visit to Manhattan, where I hadn’t been in decades, I found myself in Las Vegas after an even longer absence, befuddled by the idea that a whole hotel was built to look like the New York skyline, but you can’t walk into its Empire State Building or Chrysler Building from the street.
The first time I hit Las Vegas it was 1958 and I was engaged in a mad attempt to drive across country with a friend in no more than three days in my tiny red Austin mini-cooper. We slept and drove for three days and made it to New York in the allotted time, although we nearly died doing it.
On my most recent trip to New York, it was a profoundly different place than it had been 50 or more years before. And most certainly, Las Vegas is even more different than it had been half a century ago.
This time in Las Vegas, New York has no there there, just like there’s no there there in Gertrude Stein’s Oakland. What I had discovered on my cross-country jaunt in 1958 was that New York is not about its skyline, but about its street life. That made this last trip to Las Vegas in 2009, more than 50 years later, all the more perplexing.
In 2009 in Las Vegas, I discovered the only streets under the New York skyline is the casino. At one-quarter the size of the real buildings, the scale is large enough that you would think they’d at least have a hint of a New York street instead of just a casino. So there it just sits in the big sky desert, looking more than just a little surreal.
I kept struggling with the idea that you can’t walk into the Empire State Building in Las Vegas except by entering a cavernous casino that’s in the same place the subway and sewage systems are in Manhattan.
Yet I knew that Las Vegas was born from the loins of Los Angeles’s greatest gangsters and from the great Hoover Dam project which employed thousands of men in the Depression to bring the water and power that made the desert bloom. And finally, you add Hollywood into the mix, with its stagecraft and pleasure machine technology, and you can create ersatz reality on a grander scale than the real thing.
You can make a convincing great ship on the silver screen from a three-foot long model, if it’s well enough made. And magic has long been part of the business of organized crime. Thugs have been running prostitution, night clubs, amusement parks, horse racing and have even had a hand in the movie business for nearly a century. Here in the desert, the thuggery has taken on a new and possibly redeeming dimension, by the simple expedient of mixing large amounts of magic and stagecraft into the brew.
Still, it took me a long time to grasp the concept. I walked from one cavernous casino to the next, then back to the old one, before contemplating the New York skyline. My mind was bended just enough by the pyramids at the Luxor and the Roman cities at Caesar’s Palace that glancing at the New York skyline made me want and go check it out.
But there wasn’t a city to check out. It was a concept that everyone else understood right away, but I couldn’t. After about three hours of contemplation, my dim brain began to sort out the fog. This is not a city, it is a gigantic casino. It is not New York, despite appearances, anymore than the other casinos are whatever are whatever fantasies they purport to be.
I guess I am sometimes very slow. I couldn’t get over the notion that someone would build a huge city that’s nothing but a stage set.
I finally got it—but it still made no sense to me. There’s really nothing there there, me thinks.
*
The first time I drove through Vegas was when I was 16, going to the big city. Vegas was still a dusty little place in some of the meanest looking desert there is. It was still a burg that had been founded so the transcontinental trains had a place to get water and fuel. But some of the pitiful looking eateries had casinos. I put some quarters in the one-armed bandits, and left town with five more dollars than I had arrived with.
In 1971, I spent a week in Vegas because my friend Gene Vier, a copy editor who had worked everywhere from the International Herald Tribune in Paris to the Los Angeles Times, was reduced to copy editing at the Las Vegas Sun. Gene knew everyone, he was “the missing link.” Actor Gene Falk based the “Columbo” detective character on Vier, from the old car he drove to the mannerisms to the cigars and way of speaking. The only difference was Gene drove an old Volkswagen, not a Peugeot.
Vier was trying to get me a job there so I lived with him for about a week, spending the nights eating at the buffets and watching him at the gaming tables. I didn’t get the job, but that was OK, because a few days later I got a contract that took me to London for a year to write a book.
Vegas still was not yet the entertainment mecca I saw on my most recent trip there.
In 1959, Soviet Premier Kruschev took the old Southern Pacific Daylight from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and threw a tantrum when they wouldn’t take him to see Disneyland.
Nowadays he would probably have asked to see Vegas. It’s bigger and fancier than Disneyland.
Everyone knows that Vegas was a creation of the Jewish mafia, particularly Bugsy Siegel and Mickey Cohen.
They say the mafia no longer runs the town. Now it’s all “corporate,” as if that’s consolation. But it is no accident that a couple of the biggest casinos in town are run by a guy who’s at the very least chummy with the mob in Shanghai. But technically, I suppose you could say the casinos are owned by corporations, at least that’s what the paperwork says.
The thing that struck me on my 1971 Vegas trip was all the poor working stiffs and retirees, some from no further away than Utah or Idaho or Wyoming, who were gambling away their paychecks and social security checks. Others were gambling away their mortgages, their lives, their wives, their children.
It’s a strange economic model that has fascinated a number of contemporary American writers, from Hunter Thompson to Marc Cooper. Las Vegas is an obvious morality story all about capitalism, exploitation, human nature, and, of course sin and religion.
The town was created by Jewish mafioso, then the Mormons took over for a while, and now others are moving in. Mormons may be the most conservative of all religion, certainly socially, yet Vegas is proud of the fact that your secrets are safe in Sin City. Not being a Mormon, I can’t imagine how they reconcile themselves to their adopted city.
Still, despite all the changes, the casinos still seem to be filled with lots of older ladies who have traveled here from places like San Bernardino or Laramie with nothing but their social security checks.
An unusually high number of them are in wheelchairs. Please tell me what that means. The place just confuses me. I can’t quite figure out a place where there’s a skyline there, but no there there. And a seedy reality that exudes from the gilded opulence. But then I know lots of people get it, even if I ain’t smart enough to understand. My wife Boryana loves the place.
Why did God make a place like Las Vegas just to confound one poor simpleton?
*
Lionel Rolfe is the author of “Literary L.A.” and “The Menuhins: A Family Odyssey,” featured on the Web site, www.boryanabooks.com. His latest book is “Presidents & Near Presidents I Have Known.”
|
|
#1 |
on December 01 2009 12:02:50
#2 |
on December 08 2009 17:11:58
|
|
|
Please Login to Post a Comment.
|
|
|
Rating is available to Members only.
Please login or register to vote.
No Ratings have been Posted.
|
|
|
Not a member yet? Click here to register.
Forgotten your password? Request a new one here.
|
You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ')group by comment_item_id order by a desc limit 10' at line 1You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ')group by comment_item_id order by a desc limit 10' at line 1 |
You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ')group by comment_item_id order by a desc limit 10' at line 1 |
A good little essay, and the looks backward in time were cool.