Germinated on the greed and profligacy of mankind, it’s now the fastest-growing city in the US whose every new building rises like a brittle, neon flower out of the scorched earth. Sticking up its finger to the notion of living anywhere close to within its means, it leeches resources from its neighbouring states only to repay them by polluting their airspace. It currently boasts a reckless 360-gallon water usage per capita despite being built on a spot so arid that a sky-diving honeymooner squeezed into a white nylon Elvis suit is more likely to land on your head than a single drop of rain. I’m talking, of course, about Las Vegas, Nevada, the devil’s very own Garden of Eden.
Vegas has always been a repulsive town. It sold its soul long ago to the strip developers and the gaming corporations who have grown fat feeding off the most corrupt of human failings. It’s a place of futile hopes and shattered dreams offset by the occasional ker-ching! of an instant fortune.
However a city that adopts the prefix ‘Sin’ is hardly looking for any back-slaps from the righteous. Who cares if you lose your shirt when you can soak away your troubles in a Jacuzzi shaped like a monstrous gold clam? So what if granny blows her social security on the roulette table when later she will brush her teeth overlooked by the intertwining necks of two fornicating bronze swans — Vegas is crass and vulgar and gloriously kitsch. This is the number one, no shame-no blame entertainment hotspot for all the world’s losers and winners. In short — Vegas is fun.
At least, it used to be.
I’m standing in the much-hyped Wynn hotel whose bedrooms (so the blurb claims) took a year longer than the Sistine Chapel to complete. Consequently, I’ve been anticipating a whole new level of Gracelands flashiness — perhaps even hand-blown glass cupids suspended from my ceiling, but shock horror, I’m looking at nothing but beige. From the furniture to the upholstery, everything is colour co-ordinated, muted and, most disappointing of all, nearly tasteful.
Okay, cards on the table. I’m not the Wynn’s ideal client. I’m here to meet my eldest son Jesse and a couple of his friends, but at 20 they’re not allowed to drink let alone gamble. Oh, they can sign up for war and dig up dead babies from beneath the rubble of Baghdad but they can’t push a quarter into a slot machine lest the sight of all those oranges and lemons sends them off the edge!
So how to amuse ourselves for 24 hours? Well there’s Circus Circus! And lobbies galore! There are stretch-priced limos and wildly expensive prop shops where the boys kit themselves out in puppy dog hats and seersucker jackets, but there’s little respite from the 112°F heat which eventually beats us back into one of the Wynn’s climate controlled cabinas which flank the hotel’s ‘water attraction’ — a long narrow trough of a thing down which sweaty punters float belly and feet up, like colicky cows towards a turquoise oval pool. There’s a high quota of bling, pinchingly small Speedos and the occasional unseemly bottleneck whenever two fatties find themselves simultaneously water-borne. But at $500 it’s undeniably good value for money when compared with, say, golf ($1,000 a round for two people) or breakfast ($120 a head) — but none of these attractions begin to compete with the boys’ cheapy motel where later that night (and for only $49) they get a corpse lying in a pool of blood in the lobby and a receptionist dabbing at the human bite on his leg. Unfair. The truth is that Vegas, cheap and toxic, I can stand, but its pricey new veneer of chicness leaves me cold.
It seems I am not the only one mourning Vegas’s good old days. On the way out of town we stop for water. A heavily lined woman with lank hair and a wet rolling cough emerges from the gloom of the liquor store’s backroom. She eyes me shrewdly as I pay with my fistful of remaining single bills. ‘Whatcha been doin’ girl?’ she demands, apparently sans irony. ‘Waitin’ on tables or strippin?’
‘Stripping,’ I tell her, ‘pays better, doesn’t it?’
She shakes her greasy head. ‘Not for me babe, she says sorrowfully, ‘not any more.’
Comments