My Love/Hate Relationship with Sin City
by Lynn Sampson
There is
a lot to hate in Vegas. It is gaudy and mercilessly lascivious. It
is full of the coarsest distractions and reeks of artificiality. It
is the gold standard around the world for licentious materialism.
Still, I think it short sighted and unfair to be so unyieldingly
negative. My visits to the glitz capitol of the world have left me
with an entirely different impression.
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| Las Vegas Strip by Night |
I first
saw Las Vegas when I was nine years old. The year was 1958. A
handful of relatives lived there and we were summoned from our home a
few states away to a reunion. We flew in a DC-10, propeller driven
commercial airliner on a chilly Colorado morning off to the perpetual
sunlight and warmth of Southern Nevada. When the plane dropped out
of the clouds and landed at McCarran Airport, I became an eyewitness
to history. For a brief few days, I saw the Las Vegas that was
someday to be the subject of novels, films and folklore. I remember
it vividly. In fact, I was fortunate enough to visit the epicenter
of late ‘50s mob activity in Vegas. At my impressionable age, I
had the privilege of walking through the lobby of the Stardust Hotel
– the most corrupt and tainted casino in Nevada’s history. I got
to see it up close, observe the patrons, smell the smells, feel its
ambience, and absorb its lurking evil. I may have been young, but I
was attentive. Fourteen years later, I returned. This time it was
in a Corvette on Memorial Day weekend with my sultry brunette wife in
the passenger seat. Upon arriving, I drove immediately to the
Stardust. It was 1972. No one knew it, but its reign as Las Vegas’
centerpiece of corruption would soon be over. Federal authorities
were closing in on it and an ever tightening noose of surveillance,
wire taps, informants and court-ordered searches were slowly
strangling it. Waiting at the gates were cadres of junk bond
merchants eager to lap up its charred remains once the indictments,
arrests, and injunctions had done their work. It was twilight for
the criminal-run Vegas and the birth of a new era of entrepreneurs
and social responsibility.
Twenty
years later, I returned for a day and a night en route to a religious
retreat at a tiny monastery 70 miles north of Vegas. This time I
didn’t go near the strip, staying in a downtown hotel instead.
Fremont Street at night was ablaze with a spectacular light show and
crowds were everywhere. Ten years after that I came back to the
strip the week of New Year’s. I was now nearly 60 years old, and I
was rendezvousing with a daughter who was as old as I had been when I
had arrived in my Corvette so many decades past. I stayed at a
trendy hotel a half block off the strip. My night flight to Vegas
had been amazing. Coming into the valley in which Clark County
rests, low over the desert hills, the lights of the city exploded
into view. It was spectacular to emerge out of the black, starless
void onto a 20-mile wide carpet of bright lights reaching to the
horizon. Once we had landed, I scurried off to my hotel and dinner
with my daughter. The restaurant in the hotel was expensive, gaudy,
and cluttered with Baroque décor. Fawned over by an officious
waiter and surrounded by statuary and ornamental art of all shapes
and sizes, we dined in Rococo excess all night. The evening was
magical. There is something about Vegas that opens you up and
relaxes your intellectual inhibitions. Conversation flows easier.
Jokes are funnier. Smiles are wider and time moves more comfortably.
The next day I worked out at a nearby gym and then caught a flight
home.
Each of
my four visits were snapshots of the history and development of
America’s premier playground. I was there at the beginning and at
every significant transition. I saw Mafia-run Vegas, entrepreneurial
Vegas, downtown redevelopment Vegas, and mega-corporate Vegas. I
gambled at Bugsy Siegel’s Flamingo only a few years before it was
demolished. I perused the men in suits and the women in spangled
cocktail dresses in the hushed, softly lit Stardust Hotel. I sat in a
lushly appointed hotel room a few hundred yards from the strip and
basked in the golden bathroom fixtures, the nine pillows on my bed
and the seven Renoir framed prints on the walls.
In the
early 1990s San Francisco experienced a bitter newspaper strike. The
fact that the striking workers were handsomely paid and had excellent
benefit packages didn’t deter the unions from shutting the city’s
two dailies down for a month over a minor clause in their generous
contracts. Very few outside of the Bay Area had much sympathy for
the strikers. Not so in San Francisco itself. There the
rank-and-file workers were hailed and feted. Restaurants sent free
catered meals to union headquarters. Passer-bys shouted
encouragement to picketers. Radio and television stations broadcast
features extolling their plight and excoriating management. Labor
and social justice are the darlings of San Franciscans. It has been
so ever since the infancy of labor movements at the turn of the
century. The working man can do no wrong in San Francisco.
There is
a similar kind of bias in Las Vegas. It will come as no surprise to
anyone that in Vegas sex is a sacred cow. Prostitution,
exhibitionism, and promiscuity are winked at in Sin City. Locals see
tasteless exploitation of women as just a part of the landscape of
Southern Nevada. It is an inescapable fact of life. There’s
nothing to be done about it. In San Francisco every labor grievance
is a mandate from God and in Las Vegas, debasement of women is a
civic duty. “Fantasy Girl,” “Sin City Bad Girls,” share a
nightlife replete with naked vampires and topless circus performers.
It is artificial, cheap, pointless objectification and they love it.
There’s no stopping it. Tawdry sex is there to stay.
It is
interesting to note that the Las Vegas we know today would not be
possible without Hispanic Americans. I have an Ecuadorian relative
who was recently hired to run much of the food service operations of
one of Nevada’s largest casino-hotel complexes. To get the job it
was essential that he have a college degree, at 10 years experience
in restaurants, and, most of all, speak Spanish.
Christmas
2009, I returned to Vegas once more. For the first time in all my
excursions to Sin City, I stayed on the Strip. A few days before
Christmas, I drove the 600 miles from my home in Central California
into Nevada. I arrived on a windy, slightly chilly evening on
December 23. In all, I stayed three days and two nights in the heart
of America’s glamour capitol. Las Vegas Boulevard is everything it
is suppose to be. Mammoth digital signs crowd together with 3,000
room behemoth skyscrapers on a bit of four lane roadway barely six
miles long. It is intoxicating just standing beneath the gargantuan
medieval towers of the Excalibur while lime green lights bathe
Mandalay Bay’s 39-story tower a block away and a half-size replica
of the Eiffel Tower reaches into the night sky across the street.
Dual rows of palm trees stretch up and down the median between
bustling clusters of traffic while crowds of sloppily clad tourists
jam the sidewalks and pedestrian overpasses. Before I left to return
home, I had eaten prime rib, visited an indoor theme park and drank a
fruit juice concoction in a glass whose lip and base blazed with
bright flashing lights. What more could you ask of a vacation?
Standing inside the strangely quiet interior of the massive Luxor
pyramid and gazing upwards into the vast expanse of its ceiling, I
was for a moment that same nine-year-old boy who first saw Vegas in
1958 – wide eyed, open mouthed and completely smitten.
Nowhere
can you find better lodging and food or a wider variety of free
entertainment. Nowhere else can you get a rare steak, a hefty baked
potato, fresh vegetables, a shrimp cocktail and a giant slice of
chocolate cake for 12 bucks. Nowhere else can you find four comely
dancers backed by a live band in an hour-long music revue for the
price of merely walking into a casino. I’ve had sausage and
biscuits for $1.29 at 1 a.m. and listened, free of charge, to good
Reggae at 2 a.m. I’ve booked a room in a hotel tower in the 18th
floor for $22 and eaten Eggs Benedict for $2.99. Nevada is the only
place on earth you can get real barbeque ribs in your hotel room from
room service at 11 o’clock at night. It is the only place you can
visit a Rembrandt painting at noon and do a double inverted loop on a
roller coaster 15 minutes later. It is the only place you can see
live theater, circus acts and the music super stars live in a single
evening within only a few hundred yards of real estate.
If you
think Las Vegas is full of lunacy and excess, try spending a weekend
in San Francisco, Chicago, or New York City. What is more insane –
fighting with Asian tourists and conventioneers for a spot in the
buffet line or trying to find a parking space on Market Street,
paying $100 to see Celine at the Mirage or paying $200 to see “The
Producers” on Broadway, Losing 50 bucks at Blackjack or paying $75
for drinks and a salad on Navy Pier. Give me Vegas any day. I
welcome my visits to Vegas and dread driving to places like Los
Angeles or Denver. Yes, I wince every time I see a billboard of
half-naked bimbos, but love the bargains and convenience. I recoil
in disgust every time I see a tattered, grizzled loser dig into his
grimy pockets and come up with one last, hopeless $2 bet at a craps
table, but love the dancing fountains at the Bellagio. I look away
whenever I catch sight of an innocent tourist being plied with free
drinks by a winsome cocktail waitress while in an alcoholic stupor
and mesmerized by an unforgiving slot machine, but I love hearing
free cover bands at midnight in the lounge above a 30-foot bar bathed
in a soft blue light. Vegas may be profoundly flawed, but its brand
of mischief is infinitely superior to the congestion of Frisco, the
perpetual smog of LA, the highway robbery of Manhattan, or the just
plain boring suspended silence of every other mid-sized metropolis in
America at midnight on a Monday night.
