4/20/00
What I'd heard about Vegas was your standard stuff. Giant hotels, stay away from the girls, free drinks to gamblers, something funny going on with Siegfield and Roy, the mayor is a mob lawyer who defended half the characters from Casino.
What I hadn't heard is that it's a long walk from anywhere to anywhere else. Casinos are the size of Central American countries, so walking next door requires a full meal beforehand and a pup tent if you can't make it within that day.
The city tries to help the walkers out. The whole city is built on taking tourist dollars without them complaining, so anything to speed along the time between casinos is a wise business move. They put a roof over five blocks of Vegas, for God's sake; I'm sure they're working on air conditioning for the rest of the city. There's big arches over parts of the strip and bisecting roads so you don't have to get run over by a coked up Hunter S. Thompson. They all have escalators on the ramps up them, outside, with no coverings of any sort. I don't know what they do when it rains. Maybe the mayor paid off local Indians to hold off on rain dances.
All the major hotels work out deals: they all offer some stuff, and then all not offer other stuff. No one gives you a shuttle between the airport and a hotel; you gotta blow $15.60 on a seven minute cab ride, and when you give the driver a twenty, he'll say "Thanks!" and run to his driver's seat before you realize he's not giving you change. None of the rooms have HBO, just ESPN to raise sports oddsmaking interests, and CNN for the smaller but still profitable news oddsmaking. I've got twenty bucks on HR 2705 to pass. All the rooms have coffee makers, to add free caffeine to the blood pumping with free alcohol from the girls drowning green tables with it. All rooms come with a toilet, which doubles as a slot machine if you don't wish to go downstairs.
My room had a round porthole in the shower, looking over my bed. Nice addition; now instead of simply sitting in a hotel room sadly bigger than my apartment, I can sit in it and distinctly notice the lack of a naked girl in my already lousy life. One flaw with the porthole; the shower door was glass, so the shower view is also a very nice toilet view.
Speaking of free shows (or speaking of craps; I got two transition jokes for the window) I decided to hit the strip and see just why so many people blow their own money to come here. Me being cheap enough to take the complimentary pen every day and save the 8 cents of buying one, I focused on the free shows the hotel lobbies put on.
1st place goes, hands down, to the pirates at the Treasure Island hotel. Two full ships of pirates do some stunts, blow each other up, and (true to Irish fantasies) the British lose. It's crowded for every show, but well worth getting crushed next to Heloise and Bob from Duluth.
2nd place is the volcano at the Mirage. I was mildly disappointed to find it wasn't real lava, just water with orange light bulbs under the cone for effect. I got to see a four year old watch it for the first time and practically have an embolism. It's rare to see joy so powerful that it almost slips off the guard rail and gets its parents really worried.
3rd is the fountain at the Bellagio. Hundreds of water jets launch in patterns for a demonstration that surpasses the inherent touristy crap and comes close to being art. A Whitney Houston cover song plays in the background. It's possible Whitney Houston was the one who performed the cover of an originally French song. Not probable, but possible.
4th place is the indoor parade at my hotel, the Rio. A few dozen people dressed like Miami drag queens run to a stage that rises out of nowhere, singing all the songs that make me run to a chair when I hear them at a wedding. Parade floats literally float over your head, running on tracks in the ceiling. You can pay ten bucks or so to ride one of the floating floats, if you have a desire to be a Miami drag queen.
Last place is the dragon/wizard duel at Excaliber. I was expecting something cool here; after the pirates and volcano and all, I wanted fire breathing winged reptilian carnage. But what I got was a veeeeeery slow moving green boat, and an unmoving neck with construction paper pasted to it. The head nodded and little poofs of fire came out, but this was after five minutes of Smaug here moving at the speed of Italian paperwork. It wasn't even a real wizard who fought him, just an animatronic who rolled out like a cuckoo clock chime. A few tiny firecrackers flubbed out of his cane, and the dragon, thus terrified by fifty cents worth of Chinatown wares, began moving backwards at the exact same speed. But it was free, so I can honestly say it was the best free dragon I've ever seen.
The free show you won't find on brochures but will get everywhere is the strip club guy dodge. You'll be doing this one yourself. I was used to the New York guys handing out strip club pamphlets: orange vests and a casual swing of their arms. It's New York, so the personal space rules are strictly observed; nothing gets within a foot of you. In Vegas, no one dresses up, but to a man, each one of them thwak their literature on their leg and stick it in your face like a TV reporter confronting an absentee landlord. There'll be five or six guys in a row, an obscene-in-Utah kickline. You'd think the fifth or sixth guy in the chain would realize it's a wasted effort, but they always give it their best. I'd hire them, if I had porno to distribute.
As nice as getting papercuts on my eyes was, this wasn't the true Vegas. The locals didn't go to the strip every free minute to play slots. I had pressing business in town to attend to (taking notes on insecticide and incontinence product prices), so I decided to take the bus to the stores, and then walk back. This would be the true Vegas, the place people lived rather than rented for three nights.
There's reasons why no hotel has been made with the theme of public transportation. Vegas buses are $1.25 for a fare, and are as crowded coming from the strip as a new steam tray of shrimp at the buffet. There's a big empty space in the back of the bus. It's not storage or anything, it's just this three or four foot flat space between the last row of seats and the back window. Here's a surprise: it's filled with McDonalds bags and Snapple bottles.
The further you get from the strip, the cheaper and bigger the steaks. Two blocks from the strip (remember these are Vegas blocks, so this is a mile and a half) a 18 oz. porterhouse was $3.95. I was being reimbursed for meals, so this was the one time to not price down for food. But I was looking to see what the locals did, and the only tourists besides me who'd make it here would have to make exactly three wrong turns, all of them lefts. I went inside. Inside, it was a bare walled bar with three slot machines and a grill in the same cage the change gets divvied out of. The people were definitely natives, but the sort to all get killed from falling asleep with lit cigarettes. I left, and ate in my hotel. I was willing to pay a little more of my company's money to eat with a little ambiance (although Vegas has a little ambiance the same way the Exxon Valdez has a little leak).
Vegas houses are mostly one story, almost all have Mexican red tile roofs, and like shore houses, any grass requires a huge amount of watering, so most front yards are white pebbles or one dehydrated ling of a tree with scrub in its shade (sapling - sap = ling). All are completely barred. Some of them look elegant or are painted the same color as the rest of the house, but there're thick steel bars over every door and window. By the same logic, most of the cars driven with Nevada plates were pickups so worn and beaten that not even the most desperate tapped gambling addict would try to take it if the keys were in the ignition.
The first night there, I put on a tie to go out wandering, since you got dressed up when you went to Vegas. I heard that from Swingers. Although a good movie, Swingers has music from sixty years ago for a reason. I can positively say that I did not see one tie among the thousands of tourists who a walked through. T-shirts, cameras, size 48 shorts that obviously came for the buffet, pointing and yammering in a polyglotineous mess, but no ties. Every casino I went into, people thought I worked there. So I dropped the ties, wore t-shirts, carried a camera, and filled a pair of stretch pants with cottage cheese to complete the illusion.
I was accidentally dressed one night as Danny Gans. I was just wearing a black t-shirt and jeans, but that was Danny Gans' attire as well. Who's Danny Gans? He's the headliner at the newly built Danny Gans Theater, with giant pictures on taxis and billboards the size of runways. I'm still working on the steps he took in his celebrity rise from guy in a t-shirt to mainstay of the legendary Danny Gans Theater. All I can pin down is that he was the voice of Monterey Jack, the Australian mouse from Rescue Rangers, and he does a George Burns impression somewhere in his repertoire. Australian mouse and George Burns impression. The Frank Stallone Theater should be going up right next to Danny's.
Everything in Vegas is an impression. There's impressions of Italy (the Venetian, Caeser's Palace), France (Paris, Monte Carlo), Egypt (Luxor, Sahara), and Johnny Two Times (New York New York, Circus Circus). All the hotels have similar arrangements of slots and tables, and the waitresses all wear different variations of the same square foot of sequin, so they're all just doing impressions of each other. The entertainers all sing well known songs and do impressions of all the other guys currently playing Vegas (Wayne Newton does a mean Danny Gans). Strip it all away, take a look at what's left, and it's a blackjack dealer smiling as he eyes your wallet.
As I left, I got a great view. The airport runway is right by the far end of the strip, so looking out the left side of the plane, all the casinos rush by you and sink below. The giant pyramid, the complete architectural history of New York, the giant green ziggurat of the MGM Grand, all left in the dust. It's a nice place to visit, but I see what Sheryl Crow's talking about.