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.

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 18^th 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.