VIVA LAS VEGAS

I haven’t been carded. I haven’t been asked for my identity. I just signed a release form and now I’m holding a smoking Uzi in my hand. The gases from the spent bullet in the barrel warms my hand, the same temperature of a domestic radiator.

I’ve been in America 23 hours. I’m looking at a 36” x 24” poster of Osama Bin Laden complete with three small bullet holes punched through it.

I never even got to fire the Uzi properly. So far just three cartridges have been fired, each jamming the chamber as they vomited forth from the chamber. I just walked into the shop, paid my twenty five dollars, and there’s still three clips of unspent ammunition, some seventy two bullets yet to be fired.

Of course, in the land of the free, the home of the brave, you can have anything you want. And I want a M-4 Carbine. And a Heckler and Koch MP5. A lightweight, aircooled, magazinefed, delayed blowback operated select-fire weapon that can operate multiple cartridge sizes, and kicks out 35 rounds a second. At a full burst I’ve got 2.1 seconds with this baby, so I’ve set it on a short burst 10-round capacity.

You’ve got to aim slightly down with one of these, as you would with any semi-automatic, as the recoil from the spring-cushioned stock will inevitably push the barrel up. So aim down, and slightly to the left.

Firing a sub-machine gun is so easy.

To my right stands a fiercely stoic fortysomething, knocking off single rounds from his handgun, legs 18 inches apart, body tensed like a snake. Even with hearing protection, this thing punches the air with brutal sounds like God shouting in your ear. To my left, I’ve got Snoop Doggy Dogg (nb: not the actual Snoop, but he’s packing, so I ain’t bitchin’) with his braids, his enormous MOBLIFE tattoo on his inside arm, and a great big fuckoff semiautomatic. Behind him, his Ho, with a tattoo of a mans name on her lowcut floppy breast, whose just popped off a clip of her own.

So, welcome to America.

Gee, us Brits just love America. Mostly the Brits who come into lasvegasgunstore.com at 2900 East Tropicana Boulevard are coppers and Special Ops law enforcement guys. Either keeping in trim with their skills, or learning the ropes for when they try to join Special Ops. They ain’t exactly used to tourists, but they take our money, and they don’t mind at all. Even if they do tell us that Arnie’s a pussywhipped faker because no-one can fire an MP5 the way he does and hit anything but airplanes and UFO’s.

So here you can get anything you want.

I’ve lived a sheltered life. Sort of. I don’t necessarily believe that travel broadens the mind : a trip to Milton Keynes proved that. I’ve never been to Glasgow. I’ve never been outside of Europe - in fact, I only leave the British mainland for about a day a year.

The first time I ever stepped on American soil was in Las Vegas. Las Vegas, Nevada. The only place in the world where, in the airport terminal, before Customs and Immigration Control, you can find wall-to-wall slot machines.

Anytime, day or night, sat on cheap plastic chairs, young and old, lined up feeding the machines quarters, dollars, dimes, money, big or small money, the city doesn’t care. Just keep that money rolling. And have a nice day.

That’s what it’s all about. Money money money. Must be funny in a rich mans world. Well. Maybe this is like seeing London through the eyes of a monk. Maybe this is like seeing Vegas through the eyes of a fundamentalist.

It’s the little things you notice first. The policemen with loaded firearms by their left pocket. The fact that all the currency is the same size, shape, and colour. The fact that every time you enter a shop, everyone’s really friendly to you. Too friendly. Frighteningly friendly. But then again, if you’ve got money, everyone wants to be your friend.

The cab stops at the lights in the baking sun. Large articulated lorries, wheeled boxes, huge cars with high centres of gravity and low-yards-per-gallon-ratios pass before my eyes. And, to my left, literally at an arms length, vending machines dispense free ‘Adult Entertainment Guides’.

Culture shock is like getting the bends. Everything looks off, and decompressed. The fact that the portions are so big, and that there’s porn everywhere.

Yep. Strippers direct to your hotel room just call the number on the guys shirt. $69.99 for a real live stripper. As advertised on the chest of hundreds of Mexicans in straw hats. Yeah, gimme gimme gimme free stuff. I want, no, I need hundreds of flyers being shoved at me, because I want that choice from literally dozens of hookers. Sorry, I mean strippers. Did I tell you, you can get them delivered direct to my room for only $69.99?

EVERYTHINGS FOR SALE

I’m not sure what my perception of Las Vegas is. Maybe its because I’ve been up for 26 hours, maybe its because I’ve spent fifteen hours trying to forget that I’ve been cultivating deep vein thrombosis. Maybe I’m just plain shellshocked. Maybe it is just that this place is fucked.

I mean, not fucked like literally. It’s just surreal. I’ve never been to the United States before, and it’s everything you can imagine it is. And more, more, more. I’m trapped inside a television set : the brightness, contrast, and volume are all overcranked, and there’s no escape. I’ve lost my remote control.

My God, this sun is warmer than a ovecranked PC heatsink.

The heat strikes you like a fist. There’s no such thing as a windchill factor here : the wind is just the movement of hot air. And it’s so bright I feel as if I’ve had a layer of film peeled off my eyes. I’m getting passive radiation.

I know pyramids belong in the desert. That’s logical. Pyramids. Desert. Heat. Sure. That makes sense. But mountains? Pyramids made out of slot machines? A scale model of the Sphinx?

I’m not dreaming. The Luxor is a hotel that’s a pyramid with a minature sphinx outside. And inside it’s made out of slot machines. Big ones. Small ones. Long ones. Tall ones. Ones with ELVIS written in huge flashing neon letters. Ones that pay out $1,000,000 for a $1 bill and a pull on the big lever. That’s a pyramid, Vegastyle. The final resting place of the sacred object – ca$h.

So maybe that’s what they mean when the billboards flash “UNITED WE STAND” and “ONE NATION UNDER GOD”. In the absence of any religious iconography, the God I can see that this nation stands under is the mighty dollar.

But you know money talks, bullshit walks, and nobody walks in Vegas. Even if you’re crossing the road, get a cab. It’s far too warm. Like a bad heavy metal album, it’s over 100 degrees in the shade. So crank it up, get out the spandex and rock like there’s no tomorrow. In Vegas, there is no tomorrow, for the day never ends. The city never sleeps, and it’s got the bloodshot eyes to prove it. If you don’t sleep long enough, you get to hallucinate.

And I swear this place is a hallucination. It’s made out of Lego, designed by a child on LSD with an infinite overdraft, and there’s only question in Las Vegas is “Why Not?” And there’s never an answer.

Just do it. Build a 1/3rd scale model on New York and make it into a hotel. With a rollercoatser. Put the Eiffel Tower in the middle of the desert. Make the tallest restaurant in the world at 1,149 feet, and then put a rollercoasters on top of that. Just one? No. Let’s put two. Why not?

NOTHING EXCEEDS LIKE EXCESS

And there’s nothing quite as beautifully excessive as the Bellagio. Smooth marble floors. An Andy Warhol Art Gallery. The most expensive, prestigious roulette tables and slots in the nation. And a 40 foot bronze bald eagle, wings spread over the rear hall, it’s claws clenched over the globe. One nation under the Bird God.

This is our hotel. Hey, if you’re going to do it, do it in style. Go large with your meal. Five Stars. To The Max. Tourism Extreme. Just Over-Do It. Why not?

When they say five stars, they mean five stars. Everything drips money. You don’t even realise how ostentatious money is - until you know what not having money is like. There’s space. More space than you need. And space is always a luxury. There’s more carpets. There’s more in the minibar. More room service. More everything.

From the window I can see Palm Springs, Rios, Caesars Palace, The Mirage, Siegfried and Roy, and the Stratosphere. Some of these names may be meaningful to you over the next few minutes. Even if the names themselves are meaningless.

Black mirrored windows. I feel like the President.

And talking of the President, I can’t believe I’m here in his land. From where I’m from, England, I’m used to healthy criticism of the government. Here, if I criticised him I’d feel like a seditious traitor, guilty of treason, and exiled to the gallows pole. Especially as the cops carry guns, I’m free to do as they tell me.

Jetlag. It’s 4.00am UK time, and I’ve been up for twenty two hours straight. So what better thing to do than go out on the town. In the daylight. Let’s have burgers and lager for breakfast.

Why not?

So here we are now. Entertain us. Through the patio windows I get to see the apparently legendary Bellagio fountains. We get to see the Parisian, the one-fifth size scale model of the Eiffel Tower. We get to see stuff most people don’t even get to imagine, let alone build.

You can never say no in this town. And so onto the streets of the city – into the heat and the people and stuff. Into the stuffed sidewalks where there’s someone trying to sell you bottled water every ten feet, where the air is closer and tighter than clingfilm, and where Caesars Palace is visible from everywhere. Tonight and for the rest of your life, Celine bloody Dion. No Parole. No release. A permanent penance.

FEAR AND LOAFING IN LAS VEGAS

You always feel that you’re being watched. There’s cameras everywhere, watching everything, even if you can’t see them. But the eyes that follow you everywhere belong to a white tiger and two magicians, Siegfried and Roy. Siegfried and Roy are gay, two blonde Adonis’, magicians of the century, camp arseholes of Vegas. Long blonde manes not seen since a Bon Jovi video, and an advertising campaign that makes them look like participants in a gay bestial love triangle. They see all, for their eyes are everywhere.

Are the horrors that I see behind closed eyes the impervious faces of Siegfried and Roy? Not yet. But if I swear that if I’m going to be here much longer, Siegfried and Roy would be my nemesis, my own personal Colonel Kurtz’s, and the Strip would be sucking me further and further upriver with every passing minute, until I had no choice but to kill the king and call in the airstrike.

Vegas is the Da Nang River. It’s everything that’s wrong with the world. Everything that some people hate. Everything that Bush thinks the terrorists want to destroy is here in the lights, in the sleepless neon, the insomniac cabs, the strippers direct to your door, the capitals of tin, the green beige tables where fortunes are lost in tiny, dime and dollar sized footsteps. It’s all here.

Walking around Caesars Palace I feel as if we’re entering the last few days of an empire. Surrounded by girls in slave outfits, on plush tiled floors, drinks direct to my table as a jazz band tinkles away, these are the end days. Fiddling whilst outside the desert burns. I haven’t even mentioned the forty foot wooden horse that serves as the entrance to a toy shop in the Forum shopping centre.

Time is running out. How much longer have we got? Outside in the baking heat, the heat of the desert sun that chokes even in the darkness, the night is young – and so are we. We leave Caesars Palace after six cocktails and six low-alcohol beers, into the night, from the fall of Rome, across the road to the apocalyptic flood of the sinking city.

The Venetian. A 27million dollar theme park for adults, with impenetratable defences, ice cream stores of every denomination, themed bars, and shops for everyone. Just name it and they sell it. The hotel has its own internal taxi service – hand-drawn gondola via the minature canals that cross the length and breadth of the Venetian.

We elect not to travel by faux-gondola, and therefore find ourselves stuck at the furthermost point from any exit at midnight. At midnight, the art shop is still selling original animation frames from Peanuts at $800 a throw. Everyone tells me to have a nice day, even though the day is done.

Am I missing something? Am I mad? Am I losing it? Or did I never have it?

Service culture here is too nice. Too friendly. Everyone is too fucking polite. Everywhere you go everyone asks how you are, everyone wants to talk, everyone wants your money. Please. Sometime I just want to be left alone to look at stuff. I just want to pay and go.

Goddamn typical English repressed reserve. We’re afraid to merge. We’re afraid. I’m afraid of this place. It’s too much. It’s sensory overload – there’s not one second of grey here; every light burns into the retina, every sound punches the ear canal, and sleep is just some distant memory.

To call what happens next sleep is a bit dramatic. After being up for a day and a half, after feeling as if that reality is somehow curved, that I’m tripping whilst somehow apparently completely straight, sleep doesn’t happen. Whatever happens next isn’t sleep, but merely an absence of consciousness, some dreadful moment where the curtains block out the light just enough to allow you to fool yourself that you can sleep. But in a city that doesn’t sleep, why would you want to?

We’re always afraid of missing something. Well, why stay awake in las Vegas? Well, why not?

IN THE HEAT OF THE DESERT SUN

Cut To : Saturday Morning.

The Buffets here are legendary. You can have as much as you want, and then have some more. Not because you need it of course – but, like Everest, because its there. Drones patrol the tables, bringing orange juice, coffee and tea whenever you need them – and often when you don’t. And don’t forget to have a nice day.

Wherever you look, on six foot tall display boards, you can see a Keno game running at all times. Even in the restaurant at the Bellagio. The lure of the punt is omnipresent. And at 10am, over three rounds of bacon, brownies, and breakfast pizza, we’re on Game 285 and about two or three hours of broken sleep. Boy, I suddenly feel very very tired. And there’s still two days of Las Vegas madness left to go.

Cab. Heat. Mandalay Bay, at the end of the strip. A million dollar slot. Rows and rows of slot machines. Tables. Roulette tables. Blackjack tables. Craps tables. Keno. Take your chances. But the house always wins.

You can have it all, anytime you want it. If you’re the house.

And here is the House Of Blues, a small themed restaurant come venue set deep inside the Mandalay Bay casino. Here is the autograph shop. See Kurt Cobains autographed guitar at $6,500. See a fraction of a guitar string used by Jimi Hendrix for $2,750. See Elvis’ Gun Licence at $7,500.Uh huh huh. Everythings for sale.

Oh sure, you can get the monorail to the Luxor, travel by magnetic levitation a few hundred yards to a giant mirrored pyramid in the middle of the desert. Yeah, you can walk under the scale model Sphinx. Yeah, you can tip the cab driver for doing his job, doing what he’s meant to do in the first place. This place is fucked.

Until Saturday I’d never ridden a rollercoaster. Well that’s a lie, but I’d never ridden a rollercoaster like this. Half a mile long, 200 foot high, 6 G’s – who hasn’t ridden one of those? Except this one goes through a one-third scale model of the New York Skyline. This one goes past a scale model of the Empire State Building, this one goes past a 150 foot replica of the Statue Of Liberty, this one goes past Manhattan Square in miniature - with a hotel stuck inside it.

Everyone’s a Vegas Virgin sometime. The only limits are the human imagination and my imagination obviously less obscene limits than others.

Everyone gets that quick thrill when they see a six foot tall, ten foot wide, one million dollar slot machine. Everyone feels that rush when they see an Elvis slot machine – five slots, each for a letter of his name, each under a six foot tall, pink neon letter. E. L. V. I. S.

Not even the worlds best cookies and five dollar shake can take the edge off a thrill like that.

There’s a bridge that crosses the road. It bisects the strip like some god, with its leg astride the valley. And over the other side, in a land without restraint, stands the colossus. 45 foot tall, 45 foot wide. Bronze. A roaring MGM Lion. Occupying 91,125 square feet of Las Vegas skyline on a plinth rising to the mountains.

Welcome then, to the next level of this strange, hallucinatory trip. Inside the cool, air conditioned casino floor, the red plush carpet, the patterned rows of slot machines, the cars rotating on plinths for a three coin bet if you hit the jackpot, past the Studio 54, the Bacchalian nightclub on the edge of Rome’s decadent fall, past all this, comes the next level. Lions. Three white lions, bored, depressed, their thin, wirey whiskers lain flat on glass ceilings, their bodies baking in the hot sun, their breathing the kind of slow, regulated, apathetic slumber that only comes from resignation. Nature’s greatest animals wait to die in captivity. And somehow, this is glamorous. Exciting. Attractive even.

Would shaving them be an act of kindness in a heat like this?

The question is lost. It’s all about priorities. By now the cab is shooting down the long boulevards, the endless tarmac, looking for thelasvegasgunstore.com, looking for submachine guns.

AT YOUR CONVIENIENCE

You can’t hail a cab on the street. You can’t jaywalk. There’s so many things you can’t do in the land of the free. You can’t even smoke in public. So, in the land beyond sleep, in the endless insomnia, we wait for a cab in the 24 hour convenience store. A huge Buddha-like pensioner, lets call him Roscoe, shaved head sweating out his remaining years, stands hunched over a public telephone, eyeing us suspiciously. In this curved space, we turn to what we can get, and indulge ourselves in RockStar™ Energy Drink. You can live like a Rock Star! it promises. Another local, lets call him Cleetus – with his moustache and blue jogging vest - and his midget underdressed nymphette Asian girlfriend again eyes us as if we’ve landed from another planet in our flying saucer as he picks up his cooled six pack for a hard evenings slouching.

Man, if we look as if we’re from another planet, what the hell does Cleetus thinks he looks like to us? I try to count the number of fingers he’s got. I run out of fingers. And if I talk he might hear me.

But fuck it man, I just shot 75 rounds out of a submachine gun. You looking at me punk? You want some muthafugga?

By 7pm, as our cab screeches, Grand Theft Auto style into a side alley round the back of the Harley Davidson café (distinguishing features : one huge 10 foot tall, larger than life Harley bursting forth out of the wall), I realise we need food and sleep. And anything else we can get except strippers direct to our room.

We take the plunge. Vegas’ immortal, 24 hour burger bar, the immortal FatBurger beckons.

As with everywhere, FatBurgers sign is in flashing striplights. And with a name like FatBurgers, you gotta go in the land of excess. You gotta see how big the portions are, how large the sodas are, how salty the Freedom Fries are. I’m expecting burgers that reach for the sky. Layers upon layers of burgers that tower over the city. Gallons of sodas, of cheap syrups and a multitude of additives.

FatBurgers then, does not disappoint. There’s cops with their guns holstered digging into burgers cheesier than Abba. There’s natives trying to sell passing tourists flyers by pretending they are VIP tickets. There’s everything good and bad about the nation.

How much more can I take?

There’s a human limit, and I want to break it. I’m breaking it. I’m trying a new version of the Atkins diet – low sleep, high fats, high red meats, low carbohydrates, fat, fat, and extra fat. I’m not sure about the bread in my burger bun, does that break the diet? I can feel my arteries hardening as I swallowed. I felt that hard.

I couldn’t take it. I was shitting liquids, puking spirits, and sleeping at 10.00pm on a Vegas Saturday. Viva Las Vegas. Jetlag is a beautiful thing, and sleep deprivation is just a different way of life.

So, after this, a quick nap during the height of Vegas nightlife seems the only sensible option. I’m almost thirty man, and this is way past my bedtime. So far past my bedtime, its time to get up. So lets go to sleep.

AT THE BEACH

Cut To : Sunday

12.19am. At what better time is this to get up? It is after all, Sunday Morning, and I’m going to get breakfast. So, suited, booted, and with the campest pink shirt in the history of mankind, I go downstairs to Bellagios Nectar Bar for cocktails for breakfast.

It’s my favourite way to travel. And at the Nectar, I find Paul and Mark, my hitherto unmentioned partners-in-crime, regaling me about the waitresses extremely fine arse. Paul is wearing a white tie, black shirt, and the biggest pair of 80’s shades in the country. Very Miami Vice.

We did actually try on pale blue Crockett-And-Tubbs suits before we flew out. I couldn’t get one in my size. There was a pale pink one…. But pink is so Siegfried and Roy.

After this, Blame it on Rio’s. Rio’s very own Bikini Bar is a) naff and b) deeply confusing. One room has a faux beach, with sand, and dancing girls in tubs. The view by the way is tremendous. Thin green thongs and Hawaiian Lei’s. Better than Morden anyday.

And the music? MC Hammer, Vanilla Ice, and Madonna. U Can’t Touch This. Ice Ice Baby. Into The Groove. Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ‘Em.

Oh my God. I’m living in an episode of Miami Vice. There’s cop cars and police bikes and big men in dark suits. There’s dancing girls on podiums, $11 cocktails, and probably Robert Downey Jr. in a dark corner breaking parole. There’s sleeping men, sleeping women, people of all colours, shapes, sizes, and sexualities, there’s Snoop Dogg-alikes, there’s white trash, black trash, and British Ocean’s-Eleven-trash. That’s us by the way. I still can’t get over the dancing girls and the faux beach.

And there’s plenty of girls who are underage. Well, overage in my book, but anyone under 21 in Vegas is still jailbait at the bar. Even if they’re not in the bedroom.

But the big question round Paul’s neck is “Where did I get that medallion from?”

I’m not sure we can remember the answer. We definitely picked up a medallion at some point, but we’re not sure where, or when, or why. I think it was at some point in the Bikini Bar, but unless we go back and check the CCTV tapes, we’ll never know.

And so, the cab pulls us back to the Bellagio. The tables are still humming with the electricity of the punt. Lined up in rows like armies wading into battle, the hungry mouths of the golden slots eat the dimes, the nickels, the dollars and the shrapnel. Anything they can get. The rows have thinned with less insomniac gamblers, but they’re still there in all ages, shapes and sizes. Old and young, man and woman, black and white. Those with hats, and those without. Suspect is hatless, repeat hatless.

At 5am, every table is manned. The Bellagio drones, with their white shirts, red overcoats, are ready for your every last gamble. Minimum bet is only $5. Maximum is five-fucking-thousand-dollars. Man, that is way too much. But in the land of excess, you can get anything you want.

We throw money at slots and tables. It’s the best way to travel. Admittedly I only lose thirteen dollars. That is so like nine pounds, and Paul makes twenty dollars out of the house, which is so like fourteen pounds. But the house always wins.

THE HOUSE ALWAYS WINS

But we played the tables at the Bellagio. In Vegas. Which is extremely glamorous. Admittedly, only to an extremely small degree, and I still fail to resemble Brad Pitt, or George Clooney, or even one of the Baldwins, but we did it.

And when you come from Cotteridge, Vegas is extremely glamorous ; actually, no matter where you come from, Vegas is very glamourous. I haven’t seen white trash on scooters with white tracksuit bottoms and baseball caps for days. I don’t miss them.

Apparently this is One Nation Under God. I can’t work out which God, and I can’t work out what the religion is, but it is Sunday Morning, and I think people are getting married in churches further down the strip so there must be something spiritual going on, but I don’t know what it is. Is money a religion? Are the slots the sacrament? Are the Casino’s churches?

Out of the window anonymous streaks of light move left to right, right to left. I can see the mountains and the desert as the sun flirts with the horizon. As the sun comes up, we go to bed. Never grow old. Never die. It’s fun to be a vampire. I think. We’re lost boys. Men on the edge of 30 trying to be boys. There’s a word for that ; ‘Tweenagers’. Bloody hell, what a word. Sounds like a kids TV show that, doesn’t it?

And so, Sunday Morning I spend by the pool. Well, not just by the pool, I get a detour via the incredibly cheap Virgin Megastore where I manage to contribute to the Vegas economy by buying all those pesky films that apparently there is no market for in the UK; all those that nobody buys in the UK, not because nobody wants them, but because nobody can buy them. Isn’t freemarket economics brilliant? We tell you what you want and you want it because you can buy it. If nobody sells it, nobody buys it, and there isn’t a market for it.

There – capitalism made simple.

ELVIS A RAMA

Breakfast consists of melted M&M’s and a quick go in the hot spa, so after breakfast, and the shocking revelation that Andy Warhol T-Shirts from the Art Gallery shops are $295, we decide we’re going to Elvis-a-rama.

Well, you’ve got to haven’t you? Las Vegas is home of The King. And being a Brit, I’d much rather by ruled by The King than by The Queen. Gracelands is my spiritual homeland.

The Cabbie, taking us in the traditional, supercool yellow cab, (with the omnipresent Siegfried and Roy advert on the roof), is probably the first cool American we get to meet. Colin Phillips (probably pronounced ‘Co-Lin’), for that is his name, informs us coolly that after a hard days work he beats his wife, and then lets his neighbour come round and fuck her. I think he’s joking.

Once we get to Elvis-A-Rama, everything changes. The biggest private collection of Elvis crap in the world outside of Graceland, and here we are. Elvis’ Boat, his cars, his scarves, and even a tribute Elvis show every two hours. How much Elvis do you need? Well, how much you got? Do you want to go large?

The shop is almost as much fun. Here we get Elvis shirts, baseball shirts, t-shirts, prison shirts, mugs, cups, clocks, fridge magnets, keyrings, sunglasses, Elvis dollars, every Elvis CD ever released anywhere in the world, and just about every single bit of Elvis you can possibly buy. They don’t sell Elvis cufflinks though. But they do sell a truly fabulous Elvis baseball shirt, which is only $850, as Elvis actually wore it. Even I can’t afford that!

In the States you can get anything you want. And not just some things, any thing. And next door to Elvis-a-rama, the porn shop. Well, why not? The mind boggles. You can get anything you want, as the visit to this particular shop proves. Pregnant girls, lactating girls, fake girls, big girls, slim girls, asian girls, black girls, BDSM, everything, stuff I can’t even imagine and stuff I don’t want to imagine.

And out into the heat. It doesn’t get any easier, being punched in the face by the heat. You don’t want to be out here for any longer than about …. thirty seconds or so. So we take the first cab we can get.

Bad move. Real bad move. In the world of the bad, only Michael Jackson is worse.

HEAVENS ABOVE, VEGAS BELOW

Take us to the Stratosphere. Take us to the highest restaurant in the whole of America. Take us a 1,149 foot tall needle with a amusement park on top.

And so, we go Off-Strip. It’s pretty frightening to be honest. Further down the strip, past Siegfried and Roy, past the glitz and glamour, past all these things, to a place where the buildings go no higher than six stories, then four, then two, where the wasteground is actually just little patches of desert, where everything is flattened.

And at the end of it, the Stratosphere. Dinner is at 6pm on Floor 106. Desperate not to see the huge, imposing monster of concrete that reaches to the heavens, I take the wimps option and run into the shadows. By getting nearer to danger, it becomes so big that I can’t actually see it. Hooray. Hide in the mouth of the lion.

I should explain that I’m actually quite frightened of heights. Well, not actually of heights, but of incredibly tall things that look like they shouldn’t stand up. Like giant pencils stuck into bluetac. This doesn’t look like it should actually be able to stand up.

There’s debate inside the cab. I can’t see it or hear it, but I know roughly what’s being said. Apparently us Brits don’t tip enough. Paul had only offered a tip of $1.50 – about £1, or, about 25% of the total cost of the cab ride.

Hang on a minute. Hang on one fucking minute. Let me get this right. There’s a cabbie complaining that we don’t tip him enough. Julian H Cope, that is taking the piss.

We paid him for the service. We paid him $6.50 for a mile. And just because we’re so lovely, an extra $1.50 to Chief Mange Laughing Boy, the grumpy red Indian in his straw hat. But it’s not enough.

Jesus, I wish I got 20% tips at my work. I wouldn’t be such an ungrateful, stupid, thieving cunt as to demand, defuckingmand more money as a tip.

Here’s a tip : go out and get another job mister, because you’re fucking crap at the one you’ve already got.

I’m already in the Stratosphere casino. Wandering around, eyes squinting in the darkness, like a mole emerging into the daylight. The only way to reach the tower, in the way that America excels at, is by travelling 359º through the geography of the tower, through every amusement arcade, through six miles of shops, burger bars, Ice Cream shops, Elvis casinos, and another amusement arcade.

Without a reservation, it costs ten dollars to ascend the lift to the 109th floor. Good old Mark and his dinner reservation. There is such a thing as a free ride. I think. Godammit I love America.

The outdoor observation deck is 1130 feet high. And there’s no wind. At this height I feel the way God does, or at the every least, like a lone sniper. Tiny people look like ants. Cars look like toys. Everything goes horrendously like Grand Theft Auto (the original, 1997 PlayStation game). I can see California, the Nevada mountain ranges, deserts, and, of course, a military airforce base. You know no matter where in the US you are, you can always see a military airforce base on the horizon.

At least that’s how it feels.

And from this kind of height there’s nowhere to go but down. You can’t get any higher west of the Mississippi, unless you leave the ground.

Meanwhile, back here on the ground, life looks kinda deflated. Crushed by the wheels of ambition. One block from the Stratosphere, life is back to single storey, struggling businesses, dying tattoo parlours, and the kind of heat that I last felt when I opened an oven door. I should be turned over and basted in a few minutes.

Since you can’t hail a cab in this wasteland, all you can do is find somewhere that cabs tends to stop near, and hang around until you find one. I manage to lose at least five pounds waiting for the lights to change at the corner of the sidewalk opposite the Sahara, which incidentally has a rollercoaster running around inside the hotel.

That’s easily the best thing about the Sahara, after that its all downhill. We decide that the only thing to do is to sample every casino floor and roulette wheel. But the Sahara is the DSS of casino’s. Everything looks and feel cheap. From the dirty, sticky carpet to the red, faded uniforms of the telling staff and the dealers. Every face tells a story, and every story is one where hope doesn’t make it through to the end. Life is what happens between the hard knocks of bad luck and bad decisions and everything ends somewhere. Someone’s got to die in the desert.

THE SAHARA

Cut to – one hour in the future.

And here we are, stuffed on room service pizza, garlic bread, all manner of everything, watching Lethal Weapon in the Bellagio. In the meantime, we just watched the end of Lethal Weapon 2. What next, Lethal Weapon 4? Bingo! I love America. I’ve managed to watch the Lethal Weapon quadrology in a bizarre out-of-order sequence, with time-compression, badly redubbed melonfarming real firing guns, but with extra added gore; a land where the F word is more offensive than seeing a guy getting speared to death in slow motion closeup.

There’s only one more thing to do; to merge with the crowds coming ot of Celine Dion’s useless residency. I need to see what exact type of scum go to Vegas to see Celine Dion and her useless warbling.

We hit Caesars Palace at precisely 10pm, about turf out time at the Palace Colliseum, and there’s a sea of people. Young, old, fat, thin, all though One Nation Under God. Well, maybe not a God so much as One Nation Under A Diva. The streets and sidewalks overflow with a sudden influx of fools, as 4,000 pairs of feet are ejected from a fake roman colosseum and onto baking concrete of a Nevada Summer.

I can’t think of much worse than being stuck with 4,000 Celine Dion fans on the baking crowded streets of a city in the desert. There’s a quick, furtive escape down an alleyway to the shopping centre, with its panoramic 360º fish tank (sample contents; Guppys, Manta Rays, and Basking Sharks) and it’s hourly Roman fountain battle. (Don’t ask, something to do with fountains and actors pretending to be gladiators). And it’s forty foot high Trojan Horse ; you know about that one already.

Paul’s back at the hotel, ‘enjoying’ a castrated TV edit of Lethal Weapon 1, we’re baking like a basted chicken in the desert sun. When we finally return, jetlagged, boiled and exhausted, we’re now in the middle of Lethal Weapon 4 – not since Star Wars has there been such a liberal approach to numbers. George Lucas taught us well, young padawan : 4,5,6,1,2,3 is how we count.

Such a liberal approach to numbers does us an injustice with sleep. I last remember being awake at about 1.30am, and remember waking at 5.19am. Not that I’m obsessed with numbers, that’s about 2.19pm, and I know the plane lands at 9.10am on Tuesday so I know I’ve got at least 15 hours flying time ahead of me.

Except we don’t get up until 7am, as each of us is united, one hotel room united under the God of sleep. So we all lay awake in bed trying not to wake anyone else up. I see the sun rise through the thin sliver of a gap in the curtains. A thin dark strip becomes a thin white one.

Sunrise in the desert can be so underwhelming.

And so, we grab a cab, wandering in a shellshocked daze through the casino floor. At 7.30 on a Vegas Morning, the tables are still manned, the slots still hungry, the losers still losing, the house still winning.

The city never sleeps. The house always wins. This is a land of clichés, and I am a cliché too, the dumbstruck, shellshocked, gaping mouthed tourist.

Ahead of me, breakfast, a five hour domestic flight including lunch, dinner at Atlanta, a two hour changeover, another dinner, a five dollar milkshake (just to spend the dollars you know), breakfast, a fruitless attempt to find some deodorant at a huge international airport, and another evening meal on the plane. Got that? Two breakfasts, lunch, and three dinners in seventeen hours. You haemorrhage food on transatlantic flights : your body clock gets even more confused. (Which is possible).

No wonder I can’t sleep; I’m too busy staying awake as the excess energy burns its way off my body as I meditate on the endless variants on boredom ; exhausted boredom, bored boredom, tedious boredom, and best of all, exhausted tedium. No wonder the in-flight ‘entertainment’ consists of a mis-tracking VHS copy of Wall Street, a silent version of Jackie Chan’s awful Shanghai Knights, and watching a whole bunch of people trying to sleep for seven hours. I’m tired just thinking about it.

I haven’t got to the stage where I’m hallucinating – there really is a city in the middle of the desert called Las Vegas, and I really did go there. Unless it is just a figment of our collective imagination, at which point I applaud mankind’s astonishingly ability for self-delusion. At least, I don’t think I’m hallucinating. But I admit, if anyone thinks a good idea for a city involves building a third-scale replica of New York, Paris, and Pyramids in the middle of a desert, I’m inclined to say that that is a delusion. Or a hallucination. Or something plain and simply weird.

And so, we land after seventeen hours of jetlag, to plain old Gatwick. A land where the prevailing colour is grey, where nobody has a nice day, where there is weather that isn’t hot and sunny (though the appeal of cold and stormy weather wears off real quick), and where everything is expensive. I love America. I love England. I love anywhere, actually, that isn’t run by Communists or fundamentalist religious nutters. Even if America is One Nation Under God, the God they believe in is loaded with cash, and certainly seems to keep his nose out of the minor – or major – transgressions of his teachings that freemarket capitalism. That’s the kind of God we like – non-interventionist and full of dollars.

THE AMERICAN DREAM

So that’s America. Seducer and Demon at the same time. A velvet trap, a land that promises everything and delivers only to the rich. A land where the poor are second class citizens, and where everything has its price. The land is a liar, and it tells us everything we want to hear. It’s the lover that cheats on you, that lies to you, the worst lover you’ve ever had – and the one you keep coming back to. And you can’t help it.

I love America. I hate America. It seduced me, and abandoned me, it told me every lie I ever wanted to hear, and ripped me off. America is capitalism embodified, and if Las Vegas wasn’t for real, I would think it was a dream, a hallucination.

It’s beautiful and ugly, angel and demon, lover and leaver, all at the same time. I know it’s real. I’ve seen it. I’ve been there. It has to be seen to be believed, and has to be believed to be seen. You couldn’t invent it, and yet, if it didn’t exist, you’d have to invent it, believe in it, the ultimate capitalist nirvana, the place where everything is real, and nothing is real. Everything’s for sale, everything has it’s price, and reality is just another price to be paid. Give me a dream, the American dream, the finest dream worth having – that of equality, freedom, opportunity – and I’ll take it. After a dream like that, who wants to wake up? I’ve been seduced and abandoned.

Dammit. I love America. I hate America. But I can never be innocent again. I’ll take the dream. I’ll take the Matrix, the simulatrion, if that’s what it is. Reality is such a comedown.

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