Disclaimer: Diptesh P. Soni and his fellow travelers did not partake in the use or abuse of any illicit narcotics while in Las Vegas. All mention of drugs and alcohol (or strip clubs) is strictly fictional. I’m super serious, guys.
The first person to greet us in the city was our cab driver Keith, a limping hulk of a man with thick-rimmed glasses and long greasy hair that waded over his bald scalp like tentacles.
“This place isn’t like any other place in the world,” he told us once we got into the cab. “There are no open container laws, which means you can walk around anywhere with booze in your hand. There’s an indoor shooting range just off the strip where you can shoot anything from Lugers to Uzis for between twenty and fifty dollars. And the strip clubs, man, they’re great.”
He was right &- it was like a town without a sheriff.
The trip to Las Vegas left me in a strange place. The four nights were a hazy blur of lights, liquor, flesh, sound and a whole amalgam of other factors I need not mention here. I had a great time, and to my amazement, I came back with my dignity and my wallet still intact. What threw me for a loop, however, was my inability to bring the hammer of moral judgment down on the whole scene.
There are two sides to Las Vegas. The first one is the Hunter S. Thompson-esque image of a hideous city crammed with equally hideous people &- those “caricatures of used car dealers from Dallas. . . humping the American Dream” in the “pre-dawn chaos of a stale Vegas casino.”
On the flipside, Vegas is populated and patronized by a whole mix of seemingly average, decent people.
For the most part, everyone is amicable. From hotel administrators to cab drivers, card dealers to drug dealers, all transactions are done with a smile and a thank you.
Even the strip club, what most would consider the nexus of depravity, had some redeeming qualities. A stripper by the name of Tatyana told us of how she had come to America after having attained a law degree in her home country of Ukraine. She was using the money she made from stripping to pay for her part-time law classes. Three cheers for the U. S. of A.!
There was nothing truly depraved about a hard-working immigrant trying to make a buck in a rough economy. If you got it, flaunt it &- that’s what I always say &- and Tatyana most certainly had it. What was depraved was the inherent animalistic nature of the booby bar: eager testosteronic men, myself included, salivating over the exposed flesh of young girls, howling beneath the midnight moon with a dirty wad of crumpled singles in one hand and a Miller Lite in the other.
It was this symbiosis of inherent decency and depravity that pervaded my entire Las Vegas experience. Yes, the people were friendly, but in a town built on tips and kickbacks you can’t help but think that behind every amicable interaction there’s some sort of monetary, if not sinister, motivation.
When I asked native residents about Las Vegas’ redeeming qualities, they usually scoffed, laughed or vehemently told me it had none.
Las Vegas is the kind of town that hugs you and picks your pocket at the same time. It is a town built on deceit &- a town built on the feeble hope that you’ll get lucky, that you’ll strike it rich when all empirical evidence says otherwise. It is a place where the ordinary can escape, at least for a night or a weekend, and bask in the false opulence of a false town.
But the people are all too real.
At 3:30 on a Sunday morning, illuminated by the dim glow of the penny slots and neon lights, the garishness of Las Vegas meets the normalcy of its part-time inhabitants, and at that slow point of impact you can just about see how ugly the whole thing really is.
No, these people weren’t all caricatures of used car dealers from Dallas as Thompson described. They were human beings &- store clerks, waitstaff, moms, dads, teachers, students &-&- you name it. And those small, round discs they stacked so purposefully were the embodiments of hard-earned dollars.
You couldn’t feel bad for them, but you could see where they were coming from &- automatons that had been fed the same genetically modified American Dream for their entire lives, now just barely sustaining themselves on the occasional thrill of winning at least some of their money back.
By day four, I was ready to get back home. It had been fun, chasing the dream, but like Disneyland, you can only go on so many rollercoasters before you feel like puking. When the smoke clears, when the chips are cashed in and you’re all out of singles, there’s nothing to do but crave the normalcy of a life you so dearly yearned to escape just days before.
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