From its vantage high above the landscape, you can see where the I-15 leaves Nevada to dog-ear Arizona and stretch into Utah, and the sagebrush and Joshua trees yield to cottonwoods and sego lilies. Chalky-peach mesas impassively preside over a vast desert, flat and steely, reaching out past nowhere. You can see hills pixelated by ranks of stucco houses, each more or less identical. The place exudes an air of sameness and ersatz invariance: an eerie suspension, like the dummy-towns built for nuclear ruin at the Nevada Test Site, a hundred miles west of here in Mesquite. That day, no children played in the street. Wind chimes hung above some neighbors’ porches, but they didn’t ring. The only sound I heard as I parked my car on the corner of Cool Springs and White Water was an intermittent popping from behind a ridge, in an undeveloped area. Construction, most likely, though there is a gun range nearby. The open desert offers plenty of space to fire wildly into nothing.
I left the neighborhood and found a walking trail that wrapped around behind it, offering a full view of the backyard. The adjacent houses have pools and barbecues, tables and chairs, decorative clocks and other ornaments. But here there are only more shrubs and immaculate gravel—a blankness, ordered but unsignifying, like a curveless Zen garden. All the blinds were drawn. No way to see inside.
The last man who lived here, Stephen Paddock, is remembered as the person who, on the night of October 1st, 2017, opened fire into a crowd of 22,000 people at a country music festival on the Las Vegas Strip. He killed 59 people including himself, and shot nearly 500 more, injuring over 800 in total (accounting for the wounds incurred in frantic attempts to escape, victims of trampling and barbwire lacerations), and traumatized untold thousands more for untold years to come. Prior to that night, though, homeowners in Prominence knew him as typically “reclusive,” “a real loner,” but, on the whole, a good neighbor, in that he never bothered talking to them much. His family had much the same opinion of him. Shortly after the massacre, Paddock’s brother Eric told reporters “this is like you called me up and told me my next door neighbor did this and I’d go ‘wow…well all I’ve ever seen him do is mow his yard.’” Around that same time, one of Paddock’s next door neighbors put a sign on their door that read: “We do not have anything to provide relating to the actions of our neighbor or insight into his behavior. We did not know him.” (...)
The details of Paddock’s life aren’t uninteresting, but in the light of his crime they somehow manage to neither provide good answers nor raise good questions. Stephen was the eldest son of Benjamin Paddock, a bank robber who spent eight years on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list. You might think this could suggest possible childhood trauma or inherited psychopathy, but Benjamin was largely a nonentity in his life. “We didn’t grow up under his influence,” Eric assured his interviewers. Stephen Paddock worked for the U.S. Postal Service, then as an IRS agent, then as an auditor for Boeing and Lockheed Martin, and eventually opened a real estate business with his mother. For the last half of his life, though, he made most of his money gambling. “He did it because it was a way to have a fun life, and he didn’t go poor doing it,” Eric told reporters. However, in that same interview he claimed that his brother “didn’t love the casino,” that it was merely “a means to an end…a place where you lived and they were nice to you, and you could get it paid for by playing slots.” The best summation he could give of his brother’s life, delivered with such bewildered sincerity that he might have believed it to be a sufficient epitaph, was this: “He’s a guy who lived in a house in Mesquite. He’d go down and gamble in Las Vegas. He did stuff. Ate burritos.”
“Something happened,” Eric said, “that drove him into the pit of hell.” (...)
I write this as I sit at a bar in the Eureka Casino, one of Paddock’s old haunts. It’s a Saturday, late in the morning. In the parking lot there’s a red, prism-shaped tower holding signs that read
Thank you for voting us
Best Casino
Best Table Gaming
Best Hotel
Best Customer Service
Best Seafood
Best Buffet
Best Restaurant
Best Prime Rib
Best Breakfast
Inside, the light is dim and the air smells like any other locals’ casino: like chlorinated shampoo intermixed with liquor and smoke, strangely redolent of some kind of embalming fluid. Frankie Valli’s scratchy falsetto soars from the oldies station, above the warbling of the machines and spasmodic hooting from the craps tables. The clientele is turkey-necked, shuffling across the casino floor in bulky orthopedic shoes and thong sandals, in Bermuda shorts, cargos, polo shirts and visors, sunglasses perched on foreheads. The patrons at the bar, fiddling with the thin little straws in their cocktails and idly tapping on the video blackjack screens, look as though they were animatronic fixtures, their expressions weary and unvarying. The mood is purgatorial. This is where some people come to enjoy the twilight of their lives, and there’s a certain grotesquerie to them, to their looks of quiet indignation. There’s a bald man in wire-frame glasses sitting at a poker machine with one leg crossed over the other, distended gut pouring over his belt and an arm draped over the back of his chair. Two cocktail waitresses in black fishnets and heels have flitted by to ask if he’d like another drink and he’s waved them both away without a word. It occurs to me that he could be somebody who might have known Paddock on at least a superficial level, regular to regular. I think of going up and talking to him, but he comes off as someone who takes his leisure time seriously and wouldn’t take kindly to interruptions.
People come to Vegas looking for an experience: for risk and disinhibition, all highly monitored and controlled without seeming so. They go to the poker tables to test their confidence against that of strangers, and the thrill comes from reading their intentions and the compounding misjudgments. Video poker tends to attract locals. It’s quiet, solitary, unglamorous, but in many ways less intimidating, and that’s why I think they like it. It’s also one of the worst culprits when it comes to gambling addiction. The computer doesn’t make mistakes, and it can’t lie. It’s designed solely to let you win just enough to keep hope alive—in the language of behaviorism, the reinforcement is variable and intermittent, the kind most likely to get you to keep playing and keep losing.
There are some people, though, who are canny enough with numbers to know the odds of any particular machine paying out to a few hundredths of a percent, game it to their advantage, and make a living doing it. Stephen Paddock was one of them. David Walton was another. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Walton recalled one day in 2007 at the Mandalay Bay—ten years before Paddock would ascend to the 32nd floor of that very same hotel to carry out his massacre—when Paddock sat at the sole Jacks-or-better 9-6 machine in the casino, offering the best odds out of any other machine in the casino, and gambled for 24 hours straight. Paddock would gamble over $120,000 an hour to win tickets to enter the $100,000 raffle, hardly speaking at all.
There’s an episode of The Twilight Zone titled “A Nice Place to Visit,” where Rocky Valentine, “a scared, angry little man,” “tired now, tired of running or wanting, of waiting for breaks that come to others but never to him,” is shot dead by police after robbing a pawn shop. He wakes up, apparently unharmed, greeted by a man in a white tuxedo who introduces himself as Pip. Rocky asks him what he’s after, to which Pip answers, “Only one thing, Mr. Valentine: your comfort. My job is to see to it that you get what you want. Whatever it may be.” Pip brings Rocky to a posh hotel room, which he’s told now belongs to him, and that his every wish—for money, for women, anything and everything—will be granted. Rocky asks if Pip is his guardian angel; “Something like that,” Pip responds. Rocky goes to the casino and finds that he can’t lose. Rapturous with his good fortune, he asks Pip if he can see his other friends who’ve died, and is told that he’s the only person who actually lives in the place. After a month, Rocky can’t stand it anymore:
“I’m bored! Bored!…There’s no excitement around here. No kicks…When you win every time that ain’t gambling, that’s charity…it don’t mean anything if it’s all set up in advance. Everything’s great here. Just the way I always imagined it, except that I don’t think I belong here. I don’t think I fit in. I don’t belong in Heaven, see? I want to go to the other place!”
“Whatever gave you the idea you were in Heaven, Mr. Valentine?” Pip exclaims. “This is the other place!”
Stephen Paddock was no Rocky Valentine. Towards the end of his life, reports show that losing might have finally caught up to him. He hadn’t made it to Hell quite yet. But it’s possible to imagine his life as one long, solipsistic delusion, just like Rocky’s. He was considered what’s known as a “comp hustler,” playing and winning enough to be rewarded with free suites, meals, and other perks and special attention from casinos. For Paddock, this may have been enough to convince him he had invalidated the idea that there are some things money can’t buy. “It was fun to hang out with Steve because he was a rich guy who hung out in hotels,” Eric said. He wasn’t like those other rubes, frittering away their savings in games rigged for their failure. He was smarter than them. He beat the system, and did it all on his own; he was self-made. He didn’t need other people—though he didn’t mind if people needed him.
Americans in general are preoccupied with self-reliance, but Nevada in particular—and even more particularly Las Vegas—engenders and encourages that mindset.
by Andrew Cardenas, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: uncredited[ed. For future reference: Jacks or better 9/6 strategies here and here. See also: Six Leading Rationalizations for Doing Nothing About Gun Violence (NY Mag)]
