Why Las Vegas?

I read and watch everything I can find that involves Las Vegas. It’s exhausting, but I’m motivated. Las Vegas is my hometown. Probably my forever home. I wasn’t born here, but that’s not uncommon. Las Vegas has the highest rate of residents born elsewhere in the United States.

Before there was a me — my Mom — who had never been to Vegas was “dragged here” by her pals to “celebrate” her recent divorce becoming finalized. She acknowledged that she heard Las Vegas was a “fun place” to visit.

My Dad, who was a degenerate gambler and frequent Las Vegas visitor, was in town to execute a money-making scheme involving coupon books for tourists. He had one financial backer in the then-heir to the TV Guide publishing fortune. The game plan was to secure everything needed on the ground to launch a business, meet potential partners and investors, and lay the groundwork for a huge moneymaking opportunity.

Mom and her pals decided to go to the Stardust to see the topless review, Lido De Paris, and were in line to buy tickets.

Dad and the TV Guide guy, a fellow luck junkie, quickly burned through all the capital that had been earmarked for the project on the gambling tables. The TV Guide guy flew home, leaving Dad with the rental convertible they had driven together from Chicago. Dad had totally busted out, but since they had gambled at the Stardust, he had built up enough comp equity to get free meals and a room. Once he had a place to flop, his intention was to rebuild on the fumes of casino benevolence, get enough dough to get out of Las Vegas, and then…whatever happens next for a gambler.

Mom and Dad had gone on a blind date in Chicago six months earlier, but it didn’t lead to a love connection. They hadn’t talked since that date.

Dad saw Mom (16 years his junior) in line and played the big-shot card, getting them comps to the show (an indicator that he had lost a LOT of money). Great seats, too. Impressed by this faux high-roller with real charm in abundance, the night ended in my dad’s free room.

The next day, Dad asked if Mom wanted to go to California, where both had family to visit. Dad prepped the rental car (by then already overdue and likely reported stolen) and asked Mom if she was ready for an adventure. Mom was in. Dad asked Mom for gas money. She invested. They were off.

Three months later, they were married back in Chicago. Six months after that, I was born. When I was three years old, our small family returned, for good.

Much later, perhaps around the time of my bar mitzvah at Temple Beth Shalom in the Crestwood neighborhood, four miles east of the Strip, I remember the first of many times asking my folks, “Why Las Vegas?”

I never got a particularly straight answer. Invariably, it would start with the retelling of a lightly censored version of (sigh) my conception (yuck). Every subsequent ask tended to see new details emerge. Something about losing their little surprise baby in the snow more than once. The promise of sun and prosperity. A group of illegal bookmakers whom my dad allowed to set up shop in the living room of our tiny northside Chicago apartment. A near-miss raid. A midnight escape from said angry bookmakers in a station wagon “borrowed” from my dad’s workplace. A cross-country journey with only enough gas money to make it; no more possessions than what were hastily loaded in the car. My uncle Izzy, a year older than my dad, who had laid the groundwork in Las Vegas and bought a house a year earlier. The hype of money, glamour, and a new start. A job opportunity for my dad as a card dealer at the Sahara hotel. A cheap one-bedroom apartment for the family behind the Riviera hotel. An easy walk down the street from the Sahara. A future.

Unsurprisingly, I resented my parents for uprooting me from what seemed to my younger self as a much more nurturing environment. A major, storied American city like Chicago. Why drag me away from this real city with its long list of accomplished writers, creatives, captains of industry, and the like? Like any “normal” big city where people lived “normal lives.” A city where both my parents and even grandparents were born. Where long-gone relatives had legitimate professions. Where apparently there was once a bakery under the family name. Where my smart and accomplished cousins and a half-sister lived. Where maybe I could thrive in healthier and better ways than what was probably my fate as a kid of casinos.

Chicago was a place I had pegged as filled with substance, at least compared to how I cynically viewed Las Vegas at the time.

Las Vegas, as far as I knew and personally observed, was a city full of folly and unbridled hype. A flashy artifice where hometown kids, especially inquisitive and ambitious ones like me, were patently unwelcome. At best, tolerated. The casino kids were an annoyance to the gambling overlords, but an inevitable by-product of the vital worker base.

Locals were either somehow really rich or, like us, super poor. There didn't seem, at least to my kid eyes, to be many in the middle. But rich or poor, back in the days when it was a smaller town, everyone was expected in some level to contribute to the machine. The mission? Help get the tourists to come and spend, followed by a mental massage them to feel really good even as they were getting chewed up and spit out. Then, and this was the most important part, make sure by whatever means available to guarantee that they’ll not only want to come back and do it over again, but that they'll spread the gospel of the joy Las Vegas delivers. Proselytize to every person back in whatever normal place they came from. In perpetuity.

And if kids didn't buy into the company town, the town was outright hostile. A lot of us left. There's a whole diaspora. Some even made good. So good they forget they had a hometown like this. Their time growing up in Las Vegas relegated to an anecdote or “fun fact” that carries outsized weight in conversations. Like suddenly brandishing a haunted doll with straw hair and a missing eye. A viral non-sequitur. People want to know more, even as they think they already have it figured out. Soon the conversation veers away from, and even abandons, the topic. Then, the former Vegas person can go back to forgetting they ever had a hometown. Or being bothered with thoughts about what being from Las Vegas did to them. Because wherever they've landed, that's their new life and identity. They escaped.

Not me. I’m still trying to figure it all out, even as I'm one of the company town’s biggest critics. Also a cheerleader. And I’m no kid anymore. I’m a bitter old man. Hi.

And yet, to make sense of who I am, my connection to my hometown has been the recurring thread of most of my thoughts and pontifications, and then, what Las Vegas had to offer anyone who lived here. And so I asked, “Why Las Vegas?” I was relentless in asking my parents this question. It has become an early question for anyone I meet in a casual setting who has decided to live here. I haven’t found a particularly satisfying, let alone comprehensive answer. Usually, it’s for a job, or taking care of family, or following a mate (that lasted 6 months), or hearing there was opportunity, or now and again, “drawn to the vortex” without explaining what even that means in persuasive terms. Most of those folks will express a degree of regret or disappointment in the choice. Some will say, “we’ve done pretty good for ourselves here.” But what is it about Las Vegas that makes you want to be in Las Vegas? That’s the tough one; it needs more discourse.

And while Mom and Dad never fully answered the question, they would agree, through raucous laughter, that our move to Las Vegas was, at its core, a compulsive return to the “scene of the crime.”

* * *

How people wind up in Las Vegas, whether passing through or staying, is nonetheless likely the start of an interesting story if they’d dig deeper or at all. I think my story is interesting.

Obviously, others, even those who grew up along with me, have varied perspectives and different stories. They may come to very different conclusions about the meaning and importance of this city. About the truly good things. Even my conclusions are ever evolving. But one thing is for sure: any stories or accounts of events in Las Vegas get a degree of attention that dominates the moment they are invoked. That is to say, heads will turn in any space when Las Vegas is mentioned; a pitch with a Vegas angle doesn’t require a hard sell or a lot of explanation.

As I said, I try to engage with all of them that are put out in the world. Novels, essays, articles, songs, films, episodes of a beloved sitcom, a YouTube documentary, a skit on SNL, an anecdote on a podcast. Sometimes I’ll write reviews or celebrations. I do this with whatever I can get a hold of. It is worth noting right away that the overwhelming majority of work about Las Vegas gets created by people who haven’t lived here or, ultimately, were only passing through. Even fewer who were raised here. (Of course, there are wonderful exceptions). Almost no lifers, though, or people with a multi-generational legacy. But all the works, well, the good or serious ones anyhow, have one thing in common: recognition that the existence and operation of Las Vegas is both a source of endless salacious intrigue (like few other places) and the basis of “lessons” that supposedly explain huge swaths of the human condition. And by human condition, stuff like faith, hope and luck, greed, avarice, other various deadly sins, plucky perseverance in even the harshest environments, the depths of delusion, the art of dream-chasing and the allure of bright light indulgence.

And in doing my many dives, I have formed complex feelings about other people’s feelings about it. Beyond naked defensiveness and a smattering of proprietary indignation, I believe Las Vegas is far more complex, interesting, frustrating and worth understanding than most takes suggest.

Also, as much as any city gets described as a “character” in a creative work, Las Vegas instantly invokes something in the audience that seemingly needs no explanation to have its desired effect. A handy crutch for creators looking for a shortcut, quick cut, or avoidance of a lot of nuance or decoding when it comes to the crucible that characters in, or going to, Las Vegas will confront.

Indeed, Las Vegas is one of the most recognizable names in citydom, and likely, almost everyone who has heard of it has an opinion. Probably a strong one. It’s apparently hard to be neutral for the same reasons that drive so many to write about it. It’s possibly mythical. And I write about it a lot. I write and write in essays, poems, fiction, and a seemingly endless series of unfortunately defensive tweets, all of which acknowledge the surface others have covered and covered, but also more and more confidently dwell above and below. I feel like I’m really getting close.

* * *

It’s a lot harder for me to write about what’s great or valuable about Las Vegas than it is to criticize what people get wrong about Las Vegas. What they miss or fail to contextualize. How the real lessons from the existence of a place like this transcend the glut of the obvious. How it’s more than the clichés, but also the clichés. In a big way, of course, the obvious and clichés. But also the way the City operates and thrives. The challenges, successes, and failures of people who live here. Pursuing investing here. Raise kids here. Were kids, ourselves, here. How it has far too long believed its own marketing hype to the detriment of those looking to make this a healthy, flourishing, and liveable place.

Most people who pontificate about the city confidently “get it” with little effort. And why wouldn’t they? Since making the Depression-era, Faustian decision that tourism (mixed with new-fangled air-conditioning) would save a tiny railroad stop in the desert, a certain narrative and reality took hold in how the town was marketed to visitors. Maybe too well. A projection to the world that worked like gangbusters in the beginning days and endured changing tastes and social mores. Soon, it would glide on its own marketing magic and bum-rush into pop culture, which, of course, drew critical eyes and ears. And no matter the criticisms, the reported grotesqueries, the biased depictions, or the unrepentant, obvious follies of the hype, the city endures as our country’s one and only and forever “Las Vegas.” And you get that, right? More than an obvious geographic place, it has transcended into myth. A state of matter and mind. A vibe.

But to think you know Las Vegas as a write-offable bastion of kitsch, superficiality and irrelevance is imprudent when objectively the city, though all those things, is so much more. That “Strip City,” that area directly on and around the main tourist corridor, is really what most think about when they think about Las Vegas, but also that we all live around, in concert with and despite “Strip City.”

Las Vegas is a tale of two “cities” that are the same city. The greater metropolitan Las Vegas area, covering 1,600 square miles, has grown mind-bogglingly over the past century, from 2,300 people in 1920 to 2.3 million in 2020. The Strip is a mere 4.2 miles long, with no significant stock of residential housing along it. Las Vegas visitors and new residents keep on a-comin.’ Both “cities” are in perpetual terraform.

And the trick, perhaps the daily challenge, of living in a place that’s two cities in one, is accepting that the hyped part can’t help but shape the more provincial parts. Further, that at some point, we probably need to “get over” that our own destiny as a “real city” (I cringe even as I write that) will forever be overshadowed by people who only care about “Strip city” and outside perspectives that swirl well outside our borders.

So, in our “two cities” – is it the best of times and worst of times? Sure. Why not? One city of us; and the one for them. In the middle is the presumption all sides seem to embrace that, but for Strip City, there is no Las Vegas - even as it is a well-known irony that none of Strip City exists within the technical city limits of Las Vegas or the surrounding municipalities and suburbs that are also generically Las Vegas, even as they aren’t.

There are also conversations that should happen in both cities but don’t, especially in the city where we folks live. Ask us about our suicide rates. Cases in the local court system with ties to problem gambling. Bankruptcy, divorce, embezzlement. Well-reported upon, but fast forgotten, political corruption. Inept long-term policy. Double downing on double downing. Let me tell you, also, about boundless optimism. A pervasive sense of freedom. A lab for crazy that might just work. A new chance around the corner. A kaleidoscope of sense, style, and benevolent sophistry. The folly and fun of hype.

Two cities, entwined, even as each, by design, is clamoring for a very different sort of stability and legitimacy.

* * *

And so begins the true journey to “Why Las Vegas?” Why Las Vegas for a home? Why Las Vegas for a story? Why Las Vegas, for a lesson; also, what lesson? And above all, how well can we answer it without getting mired in cliches, gambling puns, and trash talk?

Spoiler: the details are in the devil-may-care. As the great Mojave Desert writer Claire Vaye Watkins wrote, “You have to be careful in Las Vegas. The place will be whatever you need it to be.”

Be careful in both cities. Theirs and ours. For better or worse.

Ask me what I love about this city, and I’ll start with a stock answer. One of many I’ve come to over the years. I call it an original, inauthentic place. A place of outrageous convenience. A town with such nuanced and layered superficiality that it is unquestionably deeper than any other city’s superficiality.

My next try at my favorite thing is “the characters.” And I don’t only mean the ones who show up in supporting roles or background players in fictions that mostly take place on the Strip. But yeah, them, too. But what I really mean are the places and faces, the defining archetypes, the expendable and replaceable ones. Then, new places and faces are always supplanting unsustainable ones.

The real fun is how fungible it all is.

Las Vegas is a rotating vision where those of us who lay anchor must always be recalibrating, only to basically see the same thing. Or versions of the same thing. Or something completely different with roots from a tree long disappeared and with only wispy pages of memorialization, if any at all. No time to lament the loss. And for all we know, we’re barely hanging on.

The sad goal is that this is where it will end. For the normies and the weirdos.

But as I said, I like the weirdos, too. The kind of folks everyone with an opinion on Las Vegas visualizes encountering if they showed up. If it was a family feud question, everything would be the number one answer.

Hair gel. Blue eye shadow. Loud polyester. Elvisness. Big hair. Fake tits. Feathers. Furs. McMansions. Indulgence. Cabana debauchery. Human lizards. Whoops and dice. Brides (and bridal parties) doing bad things. Sex workers and alcoholics doing good things. At least until the moment they don’t. Everyone pulling a handle. Everyone driving down the Strip all the time. Walking down the Strip all the time. A dumb Times Square in a million degrees. A huckster. A scam. A cult. Cheap. Tacky as shit, but oh, look how cool. Expensive without value. Phones out. Only in Vegas, amirite? It’s all just sad, amirite?

I can’t imagine how people live here with all this all the time.

The funny thing, if you warp just right, is that all these characters embracing or embodying all these things you see in film or show or book or article are going to be here. And when you come and see them, you will be validated. Your crappy take on this city will be validated. And you will be instantly relieved of the notion that this semi-mythical place is actually chockful of normies. You’ll get your surreal, silly, outrageous, stupid, bombastic characters.

You can’t help but wonder what root emotion sprang the “personalities” we encounter every minute outside a gracefully air-conditioned domicile. You know the sorts. Many show up as supporting characters. Some are from here, some are visiting (per usual), perhaps cosplaying what they think locals are or what the city wishes them to be.

And my beef is that, even though they ALL understandably get referenced time and time again, there isn’t much scholarly or literary work devoted to their plight. How did they get here? How did they wind up the way they are portrayed? What do they do when their scene is over?

* * *

So why Las Vegas for me?

One. The unique aspects of its weirdness.

Two. The characters.

And then, in no particular order, looking around and seeing vibrant, often pulsating colors, both real and artificial. Brown dirt to pink flamingos. Snowy mountain tops to gargantuan signs. The magical sunsets to the everyday night sky charged with multi-colored light pollution. How much I love people trying the worst stuff, failing, and sometimes failing forward. (It also makes me mad, and I love that, too). I love the seriousness of our intense replication of other places and how we make it our own. I love it when, though on very rare occasions, we muster together a protest - it means so much - no matter the side or the issue. I love when someone thinks of us enough to get mentioned, even in passing, in pop culture - even when it’s in the worst ways. I love that Noël Coward, Frank Sinatra, Celine Dion, Steve Martin, Jayne Mansfield, Neil Hamburger, Tom Jones, Don Rickles, Beyoncé, Nat King Cole and so many more, known and unknown, have recorded “live from Las Vegas” records. I love playing a rousing game while walking down Fremont Street with my significant other, of “character” (impersonator busking on the street) or “character” (a person just living their best life in a weird and unusual way on the street). I love eating delicious gourmet food that seems better suited to more sophisticated places, and pretending that cost doesn’t matter. I love strip malls with incongruous businesses that logically can’t be anything but fronts for money laundering, yet also have curious offerings worth exploring. Also, tanning salons in one of the sunniest environments in the world.

I swoon at our state flower, the sagebrush, even as I know the tumbleweed was a more apt candidate based on ubiquity and solid metaphor. I fawn over crowds buying merch from a traveling poet. I get off on asking hard questions and sometimes, just sometimes, getting a satisfying answer.

And maybe more than all of the above, I love how no matter how stupid we get, we’re still here, and people still wanna come to do some pretty messed up stuff. How people don’t give a lot of thought to the consequences until it’s too late. Look into our hole of hype, and what do you see? Is it a picture of you being happy? Is it a thrill that can’t compare to reality?

I see desperation and desire all at once, but also a mercenary machine threaded with surreal and irresistible flourishes.

There is a common, if unspoken, sense that if we stop being over-the-top, and if people stop coming or moving here, we will die quickly. In that sense, we’re a sort of Ponzi scheme of a city. As long as new money comes in, it doesn’t matter how we think about the long-term vitality of the place as a place for people to live versus a destination for people to visit.

All that said, every aspect of both versions of our city is a tale worth exploring and telling. There is good here. There is compelling intrigue. There is hope and opportunity to be and do better. There is beauty amongst all that other shit.

Maybe more than that, the way we have been shaped and act, why people come here, what people get out of this place, and how they talk about it is the story of America and likely the human condition, too. Americans, especially of late, are unencumbered by meekness, logic, humility or the burden of comparing our current selves to our past selves. And Las Vegas, as an etch-a-sketch City filled with the desert sands, is one where, if you shake hard enough, it gives a blank slate upon which to build. A dream. Or a completely derivative replication of someone’s dream. Either or. Matters not. Las Vegas is here to stay until it isn’t, and if it suddenly isn’t, how disappointed will so many people be?!?

So where does that leave me? A handful of puzzle pieces with no cover art or box to be found. Writing obsessively in a variety of styles about the city, sometimes for pay or stockpiled in overflowing drawers and cardboard containers. Trying to solve for X without fully knowing Y. Talking out loud, sometimes on the radio, or a podcast, or a little too frantic in a coffeehouse. Manic ponderings. Sometimes angry screeds. Also, love…but what kind of love?

Heartstring stuff for those who realize this is not a, urm, normal city. Unrequited or cruel to those who bail at the first chance or crisis. You know, our population basically doubled every ten years from 1970 until 2000, and that’s with all the comings and goings. My family, who came about the beginning of that cycle, never left. Mom and Dad are both buried here. Uncle Izzy’s dying wish, even after living here for more than a third of his life, was to be buried anywhere but this “godforsaken place.” We honored his wish.

There are stories to be told. I’ll share the ones I know as best I can.

As the sign says, “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas.” And on the other side, “Drive Carefully, Come Back Soon.”

📸: Images from the movie Aria (1987)