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CHAPTER ONE
A HOME IN THE NEON
It's the strangest thing. I have lived in a lot of cities, some of
them for substantial lengths of time, but I have never thought of
any of them as home. I thought of them as "where I'm living
now." Then, the other morning, I woke up and realized that Las
Vegas has, indeed, become my home--that I routinely think of it
as such. Somehow, in the few years that I have been living here
and traveling out of here, this most un-homelike of cities has
come to function for me as a kind of moral bottom-line--as a
secular refuge and a source of comforts and reassurances that
are unavailable elsewhere--as a home, in other words.
Even as I write this, however, I realize that claiming Las
Vegas as my home while practicing "art criticism" in the
hyper-textualized, super-virtuous high culture of the nineteen
nineties probably sounds a little studied--a bit calculatedly
exotic--as if I were trying to make a "statement," or something.
In truth, this condition of feeling at home in Las Vegas makes me
wonder just how far back things really go, since, when I was a
child, whenever I heard about Las Vegas, it was always being
discussed as a potential home by my dad's jazz-musician buddies
and their "so-called wives" (as my mom invariably referred to
them).
This was back in the nineteen fifties, when Las Vegas was
rapidly becoming the only city in the American West where a
professional musician might hold down a steady gig without living
out of a suitcase. So, for my dad's pals, Vegas shone out there in
the desert like a grail, as a kind of outlaw town, like Butch
Cassidy's Hole in the Wall or Fritz Lang's Rancho Notorious,
where a tiring swing musician or a jive-talking bopster might find
a refuge from the road and from respectability as well. A player
might work steadily in Vegas, and perhaps get a taste of Fat
America, might rent a house in the suburbs, for instance--with a
two-car garage and a yard, even--and still be able to play
Charlie Parker in the
kitchen at 4:00 A.M. and roll the occasional funny cigarette. The
only time I was ever in Las Vegas as a child, we spent a hot
afternoon in the dark kitchen of a pink-stucco bungalow doing
approximately that.
While the sun glared outside, my dad and his friend Shelton
drank beer out of tall brown bottles and played Billie Holiday's
Gloomy Sunday about a zillion times. The whole afternoon,
Shelton kept marveling at the ease with which he would pick up
his axe later that evening, put it in the trunk of his Pontiac, and
drive down to his gig at the Desert Inn. He pantomimed this
procedure two or three times, just to show us how easy it was.
That night, we got to go with him to the Desert Inn, where there
were a million lights, roulette wheels clicking, and guys in tuxedos
who looked like Cornel Wilde. Through the plate-glass windows,
we could see a turquoise swimming pool surrounded by rich,
green grass, and there were white tablecloths on the tables in the
lounge, where we sat with other sophisticates and grooved to the
music. I thought it was great, but my dad got progressively
grumpier as the evening wore on. He kept making remarks about
Shelton's musicianship, and I could tell that he was envious of his
friend's steady gig.
So, having told you this, if I tell you that I now have a
steady gig in Vegas, that I live two blocks from the Desert Inn
and eat lunch there about once a week, you will understand my
reservations about the possibility of our ever growing
up--because, even though the days of steady gigs for sax
maniacs are long gone, I still think of Vegas the way Shelton did:
as a town where outsiders can still get work, three shifts a day,
around the clock, seven days a week--and, when not at work,
may walk unmolested down the sidewalk in their choice of
apparel. My brother calls Vegas a "cowboy town," because
fifty-year-old heterosexual guys still room together here, and
pairs of married couples share suburban homes, dividing up the
bedrooms and filling the communal areas with beer cans and
pizza boxes.
Most importantly for me, Vegas is a town that can serve as
the heart's destination--a town where half the pick-up trucks
stolen in Arizona, Utah, Montana, and Wyoming are routinely
recovered in casino parking lots--where the vast majority of the
population arises every morning absolutely delighted to have
escaped Hometown, America and the necessity of chatting with
Mom over the back fence. This lightens the tone of social
intercourse considerably. To cite an example: While I was having
breakfast at the local IHOP the other morning, my waitress
confided in me that, even though the International House of
Pancakes wasn't the greatest organization in the world, they had
transferred her out of Ogden, Utah, and she was thankful for
that. But not so thankful, she said, that she planned to stay in
"food." As soon as she got Lance in school, she was moving up
to "cocktail," where the tips were better.
She was looking forward to that, she said; and, to be honest,
it's moments like this that have led me to adopt Las Vegas as mi
varrio. I mean, here was an American, in the nineties, who was
thankful for something and looking forward to something else. So,
now, I affectionately exchange stories of Vegas's little quirks
with my fellow homiest I chuckle over the legendary teddy bear
in the gift shop at Caesars Palace that was reputedly sold five
hundred times. Every night, it seems, some john would buy it for
a hooker. Every morning, the hooker would bring it back for cash.
That night another john would buy it for another hooker--and
thus the cycle continued until Herr Teddy, that fuzzy emblem of
middle-aged desire, became irretrievably shopworn. I also defend
my adopted hometown against its detractors--a great many of
whom are disconsolate colleagues of mine down at the
University--lost souls whom I must count among those who are
not looking forward to moving up from "food" to "cocktail," who
do not arise from their slumber thanking their lucky stars to have
escaped Mom and Dad and fucking Ithaca.
These exiles, it seems, find Las Vegas lacking in culture.
(Define culture!) They think it is all about money, which, I
always agree, is the worst way of discriminating among
individuals, except for all the others. They also deplore the fact
that Las Vegas exploits people's weaknesses--although, in my
view, Vegas rather theatrically fails to exploit that most plangent
American weakness, for being parented into senility. This is
probably why so many of them regard Vegas as an unfit
atmosphere in which to raise children--although judging by my
students, the town turns out an amazingly resilient and insouciant
brand of American adolescent, one whose penchant for body
decoration seems to me a healthier way of theatricalizing one's
lack of prospects than the narcotics that performed this function
for my generation.
Most of all, I suspect that my unhappy colleagues are
appalled by the fact that Vegas presents them with a flat-line
social hierarchy--that, having ascended from "food" to
"cocktail" in Las Vegas, there is hardly anywhere else to go
(except, perhaps, up to "magician"), and being a professore in this
environment doesn't feel nearly as special as it might in
Cambridge or Bloomington, simply because the rich (the
traditional clients of the professore class) are not special in Las
Vegas, because money here is just money. You can make a lot
of it here, but there are no socially sanctioned forms of status to
ennoble one's having made it--nor any predetermined
socio-cultural agendas that one might pursue as a consequence
of having been so ennobled.
Membership in the University Club will not get you comped
at Caesars, unless you play baccarat. Thus, in the absence of
vertical options, one is pretty much thrown back onto one's own
cultural resources, and, for me, this has not been the worst place
to be thrown. At least I have begun to wonder if the privilege of
living in a community with a culture does not outweigh the
absence of a "cultural community" and, to a certain extent,
explain its absence. (Actually, it's not so bad. My TLS and LRB
come in the mail every week, regular as clockwork, and just the
other day, I took down my grandfather's Cicero and read for
nearly an hour
without anyone breaking down my door and forcing me to listen
to Wayne Newton.)
This deficiency of haut bourgeois perks, I should note, also
confuses visiting Easterners whom I have docented down the
Strip. So attentive are they to signifiers of status and exclusivity
that they become restless and frustrated. The long, lateral blend
of Vegas iconography unrolls before them, and they are looking
for the unmarked door through which the cognoscenti pass. They
want the "secret Vegas." But Vegas is about stakes, not status--real
action, not covert connections. The "high-roller" rooms with
satin walls are secure areas for high-stakes gambling, not
hideouts for high-profile dilettantes. If Bruce Willis and Shannen
Doherty just want to get their feet wet, they shoot dice with the
rest of us. This seems to confuse my visitors, who don't, of
course, believe in celebrity, but still, the idea of People with
Names gambling in public offends their sense of order--and
mitigates their aspirations as well, I suspect.
In any case, when visiting culturati actually start shivering in
the horizontal flux, I take them to one of the restaurants in town
where tank-tops are (sort of) discouraged. This is the best I can
do to restore their sense of propriety, because the "secret of
Vegas" is that there are no secrets. And there are only two rules:
(1) Post the odds, and (2) Treat everybody the same. Just as one
might in a democracy (What a concept!), and this deficiency of
secrets and economy of rules drives writers crazy! They come
here to write about Vegas. They are trained in depth-analysis.
They have ripped the lid off seamy scandals by getting behind the
scenes, and Las Vegas is invisible to them. They see the lights, of
course, but they end up writing stories about white people who
are so unused to regulating their own behavior that they gamble
away the farm, get drunk, throw up on their loafers, and wind up
in custody within six hours of their arrival. Or they write profiles
of the colorful Runyonesque characters they meet in casinos,
oblivious to the fact that such characters populate half the bar-rooms
in America, that, in truth, they need only have driven a
few blocks for their "colorful characters," had they been inclined
to transgress the rigid stratifications that (in their hometowns)
stack the classes like liqueurs in a dessert drink.
America, in other words, is a very poor lens through which
to view Las Vegas, while Las Vegas is a wonderful lens through
which to view America. What is hidden elsewhere exists here in
quotidian visibility. So when you fly out of Las Vegas to, say,
Milwaukee, the absences imposed by repression are like holes in
your vision. They become breathtakingly perceptible, and, as a
consequence, there is no better place than Las Vegas for a
traveler to feel at home. The town has a quick, feral glamour that
is hard to localize--and it arises, I think, out of the suppression
of social differences rather than their exacerbation. The whole
city floats on a sleek frisson of anxiety and promise that those of
us addicted to such distraction must otherwise induce by motion
or medication.
Moreover, since I must regularly venture out of Vegas onto
the bleak savannas of high culture, and there, like an aging gigolo,
generate bodily responses to increasingly abject objects of desire,
there is nothing quite as bracing as the prospect of flying home,
of swooping down into that ardent explosion of lights in the heart
of the pitch-black desert--of coming home to the only indigenous
visual culture on the North American continent, a town bereft of
dead white walls, gray wool carpets, ficus plants, and Barcelona
chairs--where there is everything to see and not a single
pretentious object demanding to be scrutinized.
I remember one particular evening in the spring. I was flying
back from Washington, D.C. after serving on a National
Endowment for the Arts panel. For four solid days, I had been
seated on a wooden chair in a dark room looking at racks of
slides, five at a time. Blam, blam, blam, blam, blam, ad infinitum.
All hope departed somewhere near the end of the second day,
and I started counting popular iconography: skulls, little houses,
little boats, altars, things in jars, etc. By the end of the third day,
despair had become a very real option, but we finally selected the correct
number of winners--and a number of these actually won. The
rest won the privilege of having their awards overturned by a
higher court on the grounds of propriety.
The moment I stepped off the plane, I sat down in the
terminal to play video poker. Basically, I was doing the same thing
I had been doing in Washington: looking at banks of five images,
one after another, interpreting finite permutations of a limited
iconography, looking for a winner. Sitting there at the slot
machine, however, I was comfortable in the knowledge that
Vegas cheats you fair--that, unlike the rest of America (and
Washington in particular), the payoffs are posted and the odds
easily calculable. I knew how much of a chance I had to win. It
was slim, of course, but it was a real chance nevertheless, not
some vague promise of parental benevolence contingent on my
behavior.
In the reality of that chance, Vegas lives--in those fluttery
moments of faint but rising hope, in the possibility of wonder, in
the swell of desire while the dice are still bouncing, just before the
card flips face-up. And win or lose, you always have that instant
of genuine, justifiable hope. It is always there. Even though
we know the rules governing random events are always
overtaken by the law of large numbers, there is always that
window of opportunity, that statistical crazy zone, before this
happens, when anything can happen. And what's more, if you
win, you win! You can take it home. You cannot be deemed
unworthy after the fact--as we all were in Washington, where
we played our hearts out and never had a fucking chance. So
right there in the airport, I could make a little wager, and there
was a real chance that luck and foolish courage might, just for the
moment, just for a couple of bucks, override the quagmire of
status and virtue in which we daily languish. And if I got really
lucky, I might move up from food to cocktail. Hey, don't laugh. It
could happen.