When
I was a grade school pipsqueak growing up in Lewiston, a video arcade
called “Aladdin’s Castle” set up shop in a local mall. For nerds, it was
a watershed event. Mine was the
first generation to become obsessed with video games, and a video
arcade is to gaming what a movie theater is to film: A way to transform a
home entertainment offering into a legitimate outing, something
requiring a car ride and clean pants. Our parents didn’t
get it -- they were of the go-play-outside generation -- but we kids
were enraptured. The loud noises, the colored lights: It was like
stepping inside a giant disco ball filled with glittering jewels, and if
you were handy with a Skee Ball you could leave
with a big plastic dinosaur. Kitschy, but fun.
Las
Vegas is sort of like that, only it pulses with mutant strength and
scale. Imagine a video arcade that doesn’t end. Garish neons and deep
shadows battle for space on the casino
floors, rolling beeps and pings banish the silences of the
night, and every face is lit by the glow of something artificial -- the
screen of a slot machine, the lonely spotlight over a gold-rimmed
blackjack
table. There are even plastic dinosaurs, although most of them are
either wearing bikinis or holding giant pot leaves.
Seeing
it all in person for the first time last week, it occurred to me that
Vegas is basically a mammoth video arcade for adults. Adults with vices.
And disposable incomes. And
a hankering for bazooka-sized chili dogs.
Granted,
my perception of Sin City was limited by my mission and duration of
stay. This was no vacation. I was in town for work, spending most of
three full days in the Sands Expo,
writing stories based on coma-inducing Powerpoint presentations, and
taking photos of expensive ties knotted around wealthy necks. Paying the
bills in a most bizarre fashion. What I saw of the prototypical Las
Vegas experience was snatched in odd moments of
free time, mostly at night, when you could stand in front of a
20-foot-high CVS sign and get a suntan from its near-nuclear glow. I’m
convinced the city is powered by a secret underground sun.
My
admittedly intermittent exposure to the nightlife seemed like an
accurate impression regardless. The first full night I was there, I
arrived at Planet Hollywood to meet some
coworkers for dinner. I’d gotten there early thanks to a cabbie who had
no respect for traffic laws, so I found a bar near the casino and
nursed a beer while I waited. Nipping at the bottle as I passively
watched a basketball game on TV, I was distracted at
one point by the guy sitting next to me, who was hunched over a video
poker device installed directly into the bar. He was muttering to
himself in a manner that suggested deep mental instability, and rubbing
at his forehead as though he expected a genie to
pop out of his skull. His other hand kept pumping in dollars, punching
buttons, pumping in dollars, punching buttons. He was clearly losing
money, and I was about to feel sorry for the dude, but then I was
approached by a waitress wearing fishnet leggings
and a corset. One wrong move and certain anatomical features would have
come tumbling out like the inflatable slides on the sides of airplanes.
I think she asked if I wanted another beer. I’m not entirely sure.
As
she was leaving, I looked from her back to Poker Guy and thought,
“Well, I guess this is sorta what I expected.” Gotta give the city props
for truth in advertising.
Technically
I shouldn’t be sharing any of this, because what happens in Vegas is
supposed to stay there, isn’t it? Any minute now some brass-knuckled
goon will materialize in my
living room and snuff out his cigar on my forehead. There’s a code.
Only I’m pretty sure I’m exempt from all that, because this was
business, not pleasure; I showed up, I wore a suit and said words like
“synergy” and “analytics,” and then I left. This lent
me an objectivity that not a lot of people in Vegas can boast. When I
checked out of the hotel I spied an old man in the casino cranking on
Lucky Strikes and blankly pulling the lever on a slot machine. This was
at 3:30
in the morning. Did the old man realize
how bizarre and vaguely sad this whole scene was? Probably not. But I
did. I was unique in that I was sober and could still afford to buy
socks.
It’s
a strange town. The bad things you hear about it seem to be mostly true
-- the tackiness, the audiovisual assault, the $12 snowglobes. Despite
all that, there’s great stuff
there if you do a little digging. Midweek, I was assigned to shoot
photos of a private event at Madame Tussaud’s famous wax museum, which
features sculptures of people who make way more money than me. It was
closed off to the general public for the night,
but since I was a fancypants media person, I was privileged to duck in
ahead of the crowd and set up shop. It was creepy from the onset, but in
a cool way. With the shindig still half an hour away, I found myself
alone in a room with fake Will Smiths and Sandra
Bullocks staring at me with inanimate eyes, giving off a faint zombie
vibe that would have been right at home in an epic haunted house. Larry
King smiled at me over a pair of wax suspenders. The moment was so
surreal, I had to chuckle to myself; in the midst
of the glitz and hubbub, there existed a moment of serenity so
unexpectedly perfect that, for a while, I didn’t mind all the neon and
cheese. It’s an offbeat culture, but it’s culture nonetheless, and
there’s value in experiencing that kind of thing.
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