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Remembering a First Visit to Las Vegas (1996)

Like those millions of other so-called human beings who find relief for their woes, each and every year, at Coney Island, [this writer] occupies these miraculous premises with purely personal intentions--or, more explicitly, in order to have a good time. And a good time he has. Only when his last spendable dime has irretrievably disappeared and his face sadly turned toward his dilatory domicile, does it so much as occur to your humble servant to plumb the significances of his recent experiences.

--E. E. Cummings, "Coney Island" (1926)

It is common to speak of Las Vegas as a one-industry town, but that industry is not just legalized gambling, which is part of the whole. Nor is the principal industry tourism, though the airport remarkably close to the city reportedly ranks tenth in the world in gross passenger traffic. No, the business of Las Vegas is simply, shamelessly, and amicably separating outsiders from their money. Enter the airport, as we did, and the first thing you notice right in front of you in the arrival area is a bank of slot machines; the next thing to notice is that many people are actually playing them, even though everyone knows--not thinks, but knows--that the one-armed bandits, as they are correctly called, are calibrated to favor not the bettors but the machine's owners. The truth, acknowledged with your first steps, is that people come to Vegas expecting to lose lots of money. That probably accounts for why losers rarely whip out guns, say, to get their money back, even though, all would agree in retrospect, that they have every reason to do so.

Some of the initial costs in visiting Vegas are low, I assume as "loss leaders," to use the American merchandizing term. Delta Airlines charged us only $259 apiece for a "package" that included a round-trip five-hour flight from New York, two nights in the archaically elegant Golden Nugget Hotel, transportation from the Vegas airport and back, and a rental car for only twenty-four hours. Since I could have purchased the same package at a lesser hotel for only two hundred dollars (and other airlines offered competitive bargains), my suspicion is that Delta was being subsidized for delivering live customers. The airport-hotel transport and rental car were probably pure promotionals, given free to Delta in exchange for getting us tourists to use those services, because, in fact, the transport company had a flier offering tours of the Grand Canyon, one of which we took, while Alamo car rental sold me "insurance," which I needed to activate credit card support, and probably expected some of its customers to rent the car for additional days.

You don't believe Las Vegas architecture until you experience it close up. Photographs of individual hotels are simply inadequate for conveying essentially sculptural qualities and thus visceral experience, not to mention their proximity to one another. (The same limitation applies to photographs of the Grand Canyon.) The Luxor resembles an Egyptian pyramid, down to mammoth cats at the entranceway and an awesomely huge interior space. Next to it is the Excalibur, which resembles a medieval English castle; and on the other side of a street is New York, New York, which is a witty collage of bits and pieces of my home town. The entrance to Bally's at night is a sequence of colored neon loops over a pathway so long it has a moving floor for those in a hurry to get inside. At one hotel, I'm told, the ceiling changes color from time to time. The staff's costumes at some hotels reflect their architectural theme; so that those working at Caesar's Palace, for instance, look like they've walked out of ancient Rome, or at least out of a movie about ancient Rome.

Nowhere in the world known to me are so many people simply walking up and down the main street during the cooler nights--the sidewalk isn't wide enough to accommodate the crowds--because the fundamental pleasures of Las Vegas come from being there. There's no need to worry about relieving oneself, because all the casino-hotel doors are open to strangers. Some hotels offer street displays free for all. Directly on the main drag, Las Vegas Boulevard, the fountains in front of the Mirage hotel explode every fifteen minutes to resemble a volcano, with red smoke billowing in the air and fire burning on the water; at the Treasure Island next door, a battle between an American Revolutionary sailboat and an armed British vessel is reenacted every ninety minutes through the evening. After the American boat takes a hit that sets it afire (with flames that can be smelled), the British ship is sunk, its sailors jumping into the water, its captain going down with his ship, to the cheers of the spectators. Like so much else in Las Vegas, this is a fake that knows itself fake. So thick is the self-conscious deception, as well as your experience of deception, that if you drive four hours to visit the Grand Canyon, as we did, your first thought is that the scene before you might be elaborate papier maché.

Walk or ride along the four-mile "Strip," as Las Vegas Boulevard is commonly called, and you see the most intricate flashing signs ever, dwarfing those at Times Square, each kinetic message machine purportedly offering entertainments and/or gambling attractions supposedly unavailable elsewhere. Within the hotels are restaurants, whose food is either remarkably cheap (as in all-you-can-eat buffets for less than ten dollars--another loss leader) or very expensive, and shops offering things that can be stuffed easily into suitcases, such as clothes and trinkets but not, say, hardbound books or home appliances. You can't move anywhere in Las Vegas without confronting some enticement to spend your money.

Between the Mirage and Treasure Island, both owned by the same company, is a monorail, free of course, whose loudspeakers broadcast for the duration of the ride the chief executive's pitch, if I understood it correctly (as I didn't buy), for some expensive photography of yourself against a variety of computer-generated background scenes. In the mammoth gambling halls that dwarf those I'd seen before in Puerto Rico are not only banks of slot machines but formally dressed croupiers offering to take bets. Many are racially Asian, initially to cater to Japanese and Chinese bettors in their own languages--eliminating linguistic alienation. At least one hotel reportedly offers free gaming lessons in Japanese.

Few Las Vegas laws get in the way of its primary business. The casinos need not close. Indeed, most lack visible clocks, so that you needn't feel the pressure of time. No one prohibits smoking, not even of cigars, not even in elevators. Even though other municipalities, not to mention Indian reservations, have casinos nowadays, they finally can't compete, lacking many of the elements contributing to the Las Vegas success. For instance, most of the Las Vegas hotels have gigantic self-park buildings, which are free, in addition to "valet parking," for which the attendant should be tipped. This means that in going from one to another venue no one needs to waste much time between gambling and spending sprees.

Precisely by making gambling legal (or refusing to make it illegal), the state of Nevada created economic opportunity, incidentally epitomizing the American genius for mass-merchandizing something that Europeans thought strictly for the very rich--the pleasure of casino gambling (and losing money). Given these egalitarian openness, Las Vegas became a thousand times larger than Monte Carlo, servicing millions of avid bettors annually. The original Las Vegas entrepreneurs were sometime criminals who had previously fulfilled the American appetite for alcohol during Prohibition and later became experienced at running illegal games of chance. As Las Vegas expanded, they were replaced by businessmen with cleaner records--initially Howard Hughes, then the executives of public corporations--in this case purportedly honest people taking over a mob business, rather than vice versa. The best line in Robert Lacey's biography of Meyer Lansky (1991) has Lucky Luciano just before his 1962 death telling a reporter, "These days, you apply for a license to steal from the public. If I had my time again, I'd make sure I got that license first." In Las Vegas, such license was easy to get.

One result of such libertarian freedom is a continually expanding economy and low crime (which is surprising or unnecessary, given all the amicable fleecing). Migrants continue to come to work in Las Vegas. One statistic has 6,000 newcomers every month, which means 72,000 per year, which means increasing the city's population of roughly one million by seven per cent every year. Not only is the prosperity visible in the continuing building of new hotels and the renovation of old ones, but the young black man "giving" me the Alamo car told me that when he arrived with his van six weeks before, after his department store position in Detroit fell to downsizing, he got his current job in three days.

In the garden of the Hilton Flamingo is a small statue remembering Benjamin "Bugsy" Segal, who, opening an early hotel in the 1940s, realized the possibilities of a resort in a desert so dry it was bare of trees. Since some of the recent hotels have thousands of rooms (the MGM clocking in with 5,005), it is amusing to read that Segal's original Flamingo had only seventy-seven rooms! Segal knew what could be done here, but did not see big enough. It is scarcely surprising that the largest trade shows, such as Comdex, which attracts 250,000 visitors, are held in Las Vegas.

One art that is amply supported here is live performers who you've seen on television but are stronger in person: musicians, boxers, comedians, magicians, even dancers as sophisticated as those in the Cirque du Soleil. Indeed, one motive is offering everyone familiar names that are better live than on television (just as Las Vegas itself is better live), whether because the comedians are raunchier or the acrobats perform with a depth that can be felt, which is to say Las Vegas performance offers kinds of experience not available back home . Some of these acts, like the continuous show at Circus Circus, are free, while others, such as the magician David Copperfield, charge as much as seventy-five dollars. (The accordion-dependent comedian Judy Tenuda was $19.95 before taxes.) One surprising significance is that the casino corporations have become the modern Medicis in keeping alive certain arts that might otherwise disappear, all without government subsidy, needless to say.

My favorite is Cirque du Soleil--a remarkably sophisticated Canadian dance troupe that bills itself as a circus and adds some clowning. Very much in the high modern choreographic tradition of using props as resistance, the mostly Canadian performers put their bodies through a skeletal cube, large metal triangles, upright poles, trapeze bars, bungy chords, trampolines, on see-saws, and much else. They perform twice each night in a theater built especially for them, with remarkably good sight lines for each of the 1,400 spectators. I'd love to see the same show again; that desire is always the simplest measure of excellence. Though the tickets cost each of us sixty-five dollars, I did not feel ripped off, accepting my fate in Las Vegas, though I might have felt differently if a theater anywhere else charged me so much.

Given all the competition at selling essentially the same things, most of the casinos, for instance, offering free drinks to people actually gambling, it is hard to believe that all of them turn a profit and that all the hotels fill enough beds during the year. However, since new hotels are visibly rising, while old ones are being refurbished or spectacularly demolished to make space for new ones, someone must believe it is possible to sell yet more of the same here. (The haze on the otherwise clear horizon is blamed upon "construction dust.") The competition is so keen that most of the people on our Canyon bus trip had paid different prices, some purchasing their tickets before arriving in Las Vegas, others responding to various ads with different prices (and sometimes different names), some of them submitting discount coupons included in fliers.

Some speak of Las Vegas as a sexy town, but I had just the opposite impression. I didn't see single people picking each other up. Instead of the attractive young women normally dominant in deluxe hotel lobbies, I saw plenty of middle-aged, ill-looking, poorly dressed, frumpy, and overweight people, most of them Americans. What the city offers is not sex but its substitute in the form of orgasmic euphoria that can come from the surprise of winning more money than expected. A secondary business is the generation of quick cash, beginning with more pawn shops than I've ever seen in one place anywhere else. One sign offered cash against a credit card, without the need for a secret "pin" number, again illustrating a facility in separating people from their money.

I imagine that most people residing here become inured to the constant sales pitching--they must if they are to remain solvent, no doubt feeling above the tourists. (Our Grand Canyon guide confided that everyone walking on the Strip must be a tourist. Locals never go there.) The truth is that no one is forcing anyone to spend his money; it's all done voluntarily. My assumption is that people surviving here must assume that they're superior to the hoi polloi mob, much as, say, bosses assume they are different from employees (or verse versa) and college-educated people assume they differ from those who aren't. After all, if you can survive on only one buffet a day, eating in hotels might be cheaper than McDonald's.

What Las Vegas represents is the redistribution of American wealth--away from an aging middle-class to corporations on one hand and hospitality employees on the other--all without coercion from either a six-gun or any state. The benefits are as two-sided as capitalism itself. For the visitor who knows not to gamble (in my case, I lost $1.75 at the slots), Las Vegas is an extraordinary adult playground, the Coney Island that my predecessor Cummings never imagined, that I look forward to visiting again.