This is how Protestant countries work. Civic spaces are designed for polite, hard-working respectability, and young people let off steam and the sinners do their sinning in self-contained places outside town limits. The US is a very Protestant country, and Las Vegas is its barn.
Actually it’s two barns, a couple of miles away from each other. The original one, Fremont Street, Downtown, is a ramshackle place. Apart from the slickly remodelled Golden Nugget, the one-time Glitter Gulch is a couple of shabby blocks of casinos and bars and souvenir shops covered by a canopy and blasted at night with music and air-conditioning and lights (“The Fabulous Fremont Street Experience!”), surrounded by slums and bail bondsmen storefronts. The other, the Strip, is the gaudy place of postcards and movies and the “Welcome to Las Vegas” sign, where high-rise casino-resorts stretch out along Las Vegas Boulevard. (...)
In July, I’d driven in from LA in the company of two old friends. We followed Interstate 15 through the Mojave Desert shimmer of heat, truck stops and Joshua trees and the occasional sun-blasted forsaken town. Both of my companions are Londoners who have been living in Los Angeles for about 15 years. One has made it big in Hollywood as a writer and producer of network television shows. The other is a professor of the history of science at California State University.
The Money and I had planned this trip some months ago. The Professor had joined us at short notice, leaving his wife and two small children behind. The Professor’s wife had been unresisting, maybe even encouraging. Because this is America, it is understood that men need to get together, to drive through the desert, that men need to drink cocktails and argue about politics in the Bellagio bar. But I wasn’t here to let off steam. I’d come to Vegas for a meeting of the board of the UK Poker Federation, and to take part in the World Series of Poker (WSOP). (...)
The journalist Marc Cooper published a very good book about the city nearly ten years ago that was called The Last Honest Place in America. Its thesis was that Las Vegas is brutal but self-evident: it’s all about money. Anyone can wander into the high-end casino-resorts, and people do, streams and streams of them, looking for bars and nightclubs and adrenalin adventure, drinking luminous cocktails from giant glasses, girls in tiny skirts and high heels, boys trying to act like high rollers, the prostitutes waiting in the casino bars, with the looks they send out that manage to be both candid and modest, You’re a discerning and attractive gentleman. You and I maybe could . . . ? and the disabled people rolling slowly through the aisles between slot machines in wheelchairs and mobility scooters – because, as the recession deepens, the proportion of disabled people in Vegas has risen noticeably: Mammon has finally found its Lourdes. And, if you’ve got a dollar in your pocket, you’re entitled to play. But Cooper’s book was published when Vegas was indisputably the gambling capital of the world. It’s lost some of its swagger recently. It has become more expensive. Profits from the casinos of Macau now exceed those of Las Vegas, which need to protect their income stream from the likes of Dolores Smith.
Nonetheless, I still love Vegas, its calculated gaudiness, its relentlessness, the haven it has made for smokers and gamblers and pleasure-seekers. In other contexts, I might find it decadent rather than magnificent that a resort in the desert has more championship golf courses than anywhere else in the world. The water comes from the Hoover Dam and, I’m sure, is also diverted from helplessly thirsty towns in southern California. As the journalist and president of the International Federation of Poker, Anthony Holden, says, “I love its nerve and its boldness and that every year something new happens.”
The conversations with cab drivers here are better than any you’ll find anywhere else, such as when the ex-marine explained to me the difference between gay and straight couples travelling in the back of his cab: “They want to give each other blow jobs? The straight couples ask you first. The gays just do it.”
And I love that you can play poker here all of the time, with many hundreds of games to choose from at any moment in the day. Every cash table, it seems, has at least one of the following: a cocky young man wearing enormous headphones, an implacable white-haired gentleman, an American Oriental who’s a dangerous opponent and a ferocious old lady with dyed red hair who bets aggressively, and whose ancient hands are covered with heavy jewellery and raised veins.
This is what I was here to do. In a fog of jet lag, I set about trying to raise my stake for the Main Event. I spent my days and nights in Vegas, as the Money and the Professor sampled cocktails and swimming pools and Vegas steaks, playing poker tournaments.
by David Flusfeder, The New Statesman | Read more:
Photo: Getty Images
