Las Vegas: Woke up and
showered and packed (I slept in, Tim had to wake me up). The drive out of Berkeley felt longer than it actually was
because we weren’t in “road shape.” Had
gone soft. Hard land breeds hard
people. Soft living, the opposite. Tim’s drive, the first shift, was admittedly straightforward. Miles of roadside apricot trees. Saw a couple dust devils. Signs to “Stop the Congress-Created Dust Bowl.” Damn.
In-N-Out for lunch again. No
shame. Soft living. Switched drivers and promptly entered the Nevada desert. Mojave, it
seemed. Stunned by the distance you could see from
the road. The land was so flat and the
air so dry that you could see miles and miles out to the far
mountains and still make them out pretty well in the haze. There were places on the horizon where
the landscape would just fade to blue before anything could be seen at
all. We stopped for gas (and as an
aside, it seems to be a Nevada thing to list your gas as being one price and
then charge like five to ten cents more for it).
The town where we stopped had a Spanish name though I can’t remember
what it was and we saw signs for a correctional facility there. We were looking around for the CF and thought
we’d found it but it turned out we were looking at a high school. The road was easy
enough to traverse (we were going like 90 the whole time…that was just kind of
the pace of it) but in the one spot in the middle of the expansive desert
where our road met another there was a massive traffic jam. As a road planner, how do you screw that up
so badly? That you can’t figure out a way
around a traffic jam with hundreds of miles of land at your disposal? Anyway we ended up driving through a section
of the desert (Death Valley? Tim says no)
where we saw a sign that urged us to turn off our air conditioning to avoid
overheating. We followed the direction
but soon needed to open our windows for some air and…dear God! The air was 108 degrees! It was like driving through a hairdryer! After a while I started to get lightheaded
and my left hand started tingling. We
stopped and switched drivers and I got some water and a cup of ice at MacDonald’s
and realized I’d probably become dehydrated sitting in the sun-assailed
driver’s seat. My face was sunburned.
Tim was driving and I
DJing when we pulled into Las Vegas and then unintentionally onto the famous LV strip (we
got lost looking for self-parking at the Luxor). We listened to some Elvis on the way in, as
well as Sinatra’s live performance of “Luck Be a Lady.” We arrived at the Luxor, a giant pyramidal black
building, a little after 6 and were
checked in by a greasy-haired tan guy named Steve. Steve looked like he
needed some sleep. He wore a pinstriped suit
that was too big for him and as we asked him questions (“What deals do you have
for us today?”) he seemed to be barely holding back a rage. He kind of looked like a movie star, though I
can’t say which one, and it's possible he’d been handsome once. Now he just looked defeated. Actually we encountered a few of these
characters in LV: Tom, the bartender who never cracked a smile and had, we
agreed, sad eyes. He was a big guy and
might have been an athlete back in the day and we liked him. The fat, sort of affable, sort of reserved
bartender at “Rice” who made a rote joke about the coupon we presented him. The other Rice bartender laughed at his buddy in a practiced, un-spirited way. The mousey woman who showed canned sympathy at my
cashing a voucher for $6 at the end of the night (down from $20...I wasn’t upset about this outcome having
expected to lose). She had me take a
picture with a “winning” voucher and I played along as if this were a really
funny and original bit, but it was pretty clear that she’d been trained to make the same joke with everyone who came to her "down on his luck."
As to the look of the Luxor itself: big and
cheap. Kind of like a pyramidal
mall. Some Egypt-themed fixtures
(faux-ruins, for example) but mostly just odd shops and stores. Nothing seemed Luxor-specific
except for the buffet area, located appropriately at the bottom of the
pyramid. Simulacrum servants
quarters. I’d never felt closer to my
Jewish ancestors. Oh, and the elevators
had in them faux-hieroglyphs on faux-rocks as if these artifacts had been
dug up in the field and immediately shipped off to the Luxor to be
displayed in its elevators. The room was
nice. Faux-luxury. No mini-bar, but that was probably for the
best. The bathroom had this elaborate
mirror system that forced you to look at yourself from three angles and take responsibility for the state of your body. Also the lighting was such that you looked OK
standing about four feet from the mirror but became a hideous monster when you
leaned forward to inspect yourself.
Perhaps this was an accident but I couldn’t help thinking that
everything at the Luxor had been put together with statistical
precision. There must have been
some reason for these mirrors and this lighting,
just as there was a perfectly calculated spaciousness to the slot floor which
kept it from seeming sad. Not as many
bombshell women as we'd imagined there would be here. Mostly middle-aged folks, tourists in
packs. Saw a woman with a wedding veil
on and whether she was really getting married or just possessed of a special shrewdness
we didn’t know. The energy of the place
was not that GO NUTS! fervor we’d been trained by the movies to
expect. The Luxor had nothing on Pride.
I digress. After checking in with
Steve, we made our way to the room, showered, and headed back downstairs. We decided to eat at the Luxor’s buffet to
maximize our money-spent-to-food-eaten ratio.
There was also something dangerous-seeming about eating at a casino
buffet and maybe this was to be our first big gamble of the night. The buffet itself was called "MORE." It took a long time getting in. Long line.
Ate like very, very poor kings or maybe minor nobles. Stuffed our faces and did feel bad about
ourselves (mission accomplished) but didn’t enjoy the food particularly. I had mounds of seafood, my rationale being
that LV would magically keep me safe from the bacteria that usually
plagued places like this. It did indeed
but somehow this engendered in me more wariness than faith. Tim objected to the fact that there were no
spring rolls in the “Asian” station (the buffet was split up into three stations representing
the three universally recognized culinary divisions: “Asian,” “Italian,” and “American”). After dinner we went to “Rice &
Company.” Had a coupon for $20 off. Drank some sake and beer but didn't get the most we could have for our money. LV is all about reading the fine print. Afterwards we went to the slot floor and hit
the bar and met Tom the bartender. We
were so unprepared for gambling that we didn’t know where to begin. “How do we get the machines to take our
money? Help us, Tom!” Ordered a bucket of beer (Bud Light) and slowly
lost money playing blackjack and poker on the small electronic screens that
were built into – yes, built into – the bar.
No one talked to each other at the Luxor and this seemed calculated too,
though whether it diffused the sadness or concentrated it I don’t know. Tim bought a cigar – very stinky – at a
convenience store down a hallway and from there we went to
play the slot machines. I wanted to find
“The Rise of Ra,” which I’d seen upon entering the Luxor and which seemed to
fit the theme of the casino best. We did
find it. While I had, as he describes
it, “the worst luck of any human being in Vegas,” Tim got on his first spin a
bonus that netted him a cool $7. We
still aren’t sure how or why this happened. Paranoid Me suspects that the machines
somehow knew that I was sitting adjacent to Tim and that his winning would spur
me to play a game of my own. Slots proved
INCREDIBLY confusing. Every machine we
went to had an extensive instructions page.
Again, fine print. Eventually we
wound up back at Tom’s bar. Then we went
to a sports bar that was mostly uninhabited.
Notably the bartenders there were young (a man and a woman), not
middle-aged. It was here that I realized
my Coronas had been costing me the same as Tim’s whiskeys and this was utterly
appalling. Had I really been paying $8 for single bottles of beer? Realizing my
mistake I switched to whiskey but it was too late. We went back to our room and went to sleep. I woke up the next morning with a near-full
Bud Light on my bedside table and it pained me to pour it down the drain
($8!!!!).
With more people in our
group and more time to spend at the Luxor we might have had a better
experience. Still, I think the whole
place had about it a staleness that would be impossible to ignore regardless of circumstance. Appropriate that the casino be housed in a
pyramid: it was tomblike. Even sitting
at the bar at Rice, where Tim and I were having a relatively raucous good time,
it didn’t escape me that everyone around us was alone and not talking to anyone else and not even eating the mediocre, overpriced Chinese food that had been set
down in front of them, and not even drinking.
Just sort of existing at the bar.
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