Posted on 06/08/2002 6:07:23 PM PDT by WaterDragon
Vegas!
Yeah, I'm cool. A white-haired, old around the edges kind of guy with a fantasy of slipping into The Strip some fabulous night in a '71 Caddie, top down, black silk shirt open to the navel, lot of gold chains, fat cigar, the valet kid impressed and thinking I'm some kind of high-roller from L.A. instead of a big bland dude from Portland (Oregon) heading off for the 10-cent video poker machines.
Instead, conned into by my companion, Lola (a name quite appropriate), I'm standing on line two hours with a coterie of French tourists, all of us waiting to pay $100 bucks a head to see a couple of gay krauts do large magic with a stage full of boys, broads, a mechanical dragon, some white tigers and an elephant that is made to disappear along with our two hundred bucks, while all around us people are saying, How do they do that?
(I know how...It's a trick!)
I admit to being sort of dazzled by all of this, however. By comparison to the current dancing fountains, Eiffel Tower, Canals of Venice and et al, a glut of unbelievable extravagance, Las Vegas on my last visit was little more than a rut in the desert occupied by Liberace, Wayne Newton and a Three-card Monte game. But they built it...and I came. And like the rest of these people from, apparently, everywhere in the world, I crowd onto the sidewalk and gawk; all of us caught up in the fantasy of hope over experience, forgetting the city's raison detre and its worn aphorism. They don't build these places because people win.
Pinocchio, if you will recall, fell in with nefarious companions and was lured to Pleasure Island, a deceptive amusement park where irresponsible, slothful youths were trapped, turned into braying asses and put to work. Pinocchio was fortunate in that he escaped with only donkey's ears and a tail. I thought about Pinocchio a lot during my stay in Vegas. At 3 a.m., after hours on the video poker machine, I repeatedly checked myself for larger ears and a tail, and again after Lola had lured me to a medieval feast where dinner guests were spectators to a joust.
That's right, a joust; indoors, the crowd cheering, and waving greasy legs of roasted chicken while young champions knocked opponents onto their asses from the backs of real-live, dirt-churning horses; then, with swords, maces and such, armor clanging, continued the combat on foot while I wished for a knife-and-fork. Great stuff if you're ten years old and like to eat with your hands.
Las Vegas, in its present incarnation, sans the Mob and retaining but a romantic whiff of the boozy, smoke-filled nights of Frank, Dean, Sammy and other Rats in the Pack, has become an adult theme park: Disney World's darkside, if you will, a place where us older cats can be goofy without running into Mickey Mouse.
Just strolling The Strip is a trip. And more so at night than during the day, when a razzle-dazzle of neon-lighted immensity evokes a space colony established by Sybarites. Immersed into this crowded midway, you realize that the place is just exactly what it is supposed to be: an exaggeration of greed and opulence that feels just fine....(snip)
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Please tell me this guy isnt my future roommate this August. :-)
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