SCARY COOL SAD GOODBYE 88

LED arrows inside Harry Reid Airport pointed left to the carousels and right to the liquor store: “the nation’s only non-duty free liquor store located in an airport baggage claim,” the advertisements bragged. “Stop by before getting your luggage to stock up on what you need. We know why you came to Las Vegas, and Liquor Library is here to help you.” The dusk settled into darkness as I smoked a cigarette on the second floor of the parking garage, watching the distant lights of the Strip and the rippling glow of the Sphere. The 108 bus idled at the terminal beneath me, its destination flashing: “PARADISE: EXPECT DELAYS.”

“We know why you came to Las Vegas...” Well, that made one of us. I did not care for “nightlife,” gambling gave me the willies, and I’d already gotten married on a cheap whim once before. But I had never been, and my book was through with edits, and it seemed like an opportunity for a hard personal reset plus some quality material, what others called eavesdropping. Whether or not I would “have fun” was basically beside the point. In writing, unlike in Vegas, the more you lose, the more you win.

Searching for secondhand clarity, I’d started a book on the plane. “In the summer of my nervous breakdown, I went to live in Las Vegas,” begins John Gregory Dunne’s 1974 memoir about his six months in Sin City confronting his recent obsession with death and avoiding his wife and young child. The year is 1969, and Dunne is doing swell on paper: two published books, three-year-old daughter, oceanfront home in Malibu. And yet he exists in a state of panicked dread about his health, his writer’s block, and most of all, his marriage, which is perilously frayed. “I sometimes had the feeling that we went from crisis to crisis like old repertory actors going from town to town,” he writes, “every crisis an opening night with new depths to plumb in the performance.” His wife barely seems to notice when he disappears for days or weeks to drive around the desert loitering in cheap motels. Perhaps this is because she’s just written a novel about the same thing called Play It as It Lays.

After months of languishing, Dunne gives himself an assignment, something to do to take his mind off of himself. “Reporting anesthetizes one’s own problems,” he writes. “There is always someone in deeper emotional drift, or even grift, than you, someone to whom you can ladle out understanding as if it were a charitable contribution.” As for where he will pursue “salvation without commitment,” a random billboard on La Brea serves as inspiration — a picture of a roulette wheel and a message “with a Delphic absence of apostrophe: VISIT LAS VEGAS BEFORE YOUR NUMBERS UP.”

And so he does, moving into a sad apartment off the Strip to watch TV and eat junk food and befriend some local characters who help him write an account of America’s most sordid city, which doubles as a portrait of one man’s personal rock-bottom. The people whom I mention are not his friends, exactly; their relationships are predicated by Dunne’s private knowledge that these eccentrics are grist for the mill. He does not much like Jackie Kasey, a painfully unfunny lounge comic who once opened for Elvis, though he still follows him from casino to casino, taking notes. “I tried not to think how ultimately I would use him,” Dunne writes with a guiltiness that I know all too well, though his shame often feels misplaced for a man who’s run off on his family under the pretense of art.

“What’s new with you?” asks his wife, Joan Didion, when he calls.

“Jackie’s got me a date with a nineteen-year-old tonight,” he says. “She’s supposed to suck me and fuck me.”

“It’s research,” she replies, unfazed. “It’s a type, the girl who’s always available to fuck the comic’s friend. You’re missing the story if you don’t meet her.”

“But I don’t want to fuck her.”

A silence on the other end of the phone. “Well, that can be part of the story, too,” she says after some time.

I checked into my room at the El Cortez, a dingy old casino full of leathery retirees glued to babbling slot machines with Orientalist themes. Far too sober to even briefly consider tossing $40 away at the roulette table, I set off on foot past the drive-through wedding chapel where Britney Spears was married, the 24-hour pawn shop from Pawn Stars, the jailhouse that I recognized from TV’s JAIL. It was too late to turn back by the time it had become clear that the only pedestrians in downtown Las Vegas were tweakers, the homeless, and confused people like myself. I speed-walked down quiet side streets in whose shadows I could sense the occasional moving presence, exhaling when I reached a strip mall where a neon sign above an unmarked door said simply “BAR.”

Open 24 hours a day since the early 1960s, the Huntridge Tavern was a windowless dive bar and package liquor store with video poker screens at almost every barstool and karaoke until 3 a.m. each Tuesday, which it was. Milling through the smoky room were locals of the alternative persuasion: aging punks, Mexican goths, women whose chests heaved from tight pleather corsets. A steampunk fellow in a sleeveless vest and kilt drank directly from a pitcher of amber ale as the karaoke MC gave a lugubrious performance of “Mad World” by Tears for Fears. “Nine dollars,” said the bartender as she slid me a High Life and a full rocks glass of tequila. “Wait, no, I overcharged you. It’s just eight.”

Breaking from his keno game, a 50-something metalhead in a Bret Michaels bandana showed off his permanent eyeliner. “Yeah, that was my midlife crisis,” he said with a shrug, downing the last of his Dos Equis. “Four sessions, 90 minutes each. Hurt like a bitch.” On his phone, he scrolled through pictures of his latest ex-girlfriend. “She’s an ex-Playboy chick,” he gloated. “Hey, I like what I like.”

A pair of older men settled in beside me, wealthy-looking Boomers I initially pegged as perverts, misplaced among the grizzled lifers and polyamorous goths. In fact, they were not creeps but friendly regulars — a longtime local journalist and a prominent restaurateur whose second marriage was to a famous female magician who pioneered the illusion known as the “Drill of Death.” “What are you doing here in Vegas?” the men asked me. “The same thing I do back home,” I said. “Drinking in bars.” They liked this answer enough to pay for my next round.

The journalist shared with me a passage that his friend had written about the tavern. “A few drinks in, I’d talk to anyone — stray cats, my friends called them. A plumber. Coke dealer. A wannabe magician. Their jobs fascinated me; their confessions came easy. One was new in town. One’s card tricks failed more than they succeeded. One turned out to be a raging racist; we sent him packing. Characters with character. Every race, color, creed, gender. My mother always said you can’t judge a book by its cover.”

“Hey girl, you good?” a woman whispered when the men went to the bathroom. “If those guys are bothering you, you can sit with me.” I thanked her for the offer, but she had no need to worry. I did not know how to tell her I was right where I belonged.

Of the many wonderful films about Las Vegas, my favorite is Nina Menkes’ Queen of Diamonds from 1991. The terse and plotless movie is not without its glamour, which comes by way of its protagonist, Firdaus. A blackjack dealer with a face powdered so white she looks vampiric, she struts around the desert in kitten heels, red acrylic talons at the ends of her crossed arms. She is a woman of few words and obscure motivations, suffering from something that she can or will not name. “Where’s your husband? I haven’t seem him around for a while,” wonders her best (and only) friend. “He’s on a trip,” Firdaus says blankly, staring into the fan. At night she deals out cards or spins the Wheel of Fortune as the slot machines babble and the gamblers play on.

“Yeah, I’d like to make a missing persons report,” Firdaus tells a clerk at the police station days later.

“And who is this going to be on?” the clerk inquires.

“It’s her husband,” says her best friend.

“And how long has he been missing?”

“About three months,” Firdaus yawns.

“Can you be more specific?”

“I think it’s better if we come back tomorrow.”

In the end, we watch her lower herself into a stranger’s car, having hitched a ride on the side of the highway. There is no indication of where she’s going, or why. The only thing you really need to know is that she’s going.

Recently a wise man told me that people approach therapy all wrong. To solve the mystery of themselves, they assume that they must figure out why they do the things they do. But ultimately it is not the why that escapes us; it’s what we do that manages to slip right through our fingers. Dunne leaves his family to waste his time in Vegas. Firdaus’ husband disappears, and she does too. And me, I like to sit in bars all day and talk to strangers, far from home and not young anymore.

There isn’t much to do during the daytime in Las Vegas, and the five-mile walk that I had planned was off the table. I ate a hotdog from a stand in the corner of the casino and smoked outside a Thai restaurant in a patch of shade. The heat was 85° and rising in the early afternoon, and a man with a shopping cart was waving for my attention. “You can’t leave that here!” he cried, pointing to the unattended phone, wallet, and notebook sitting at an empty table on the restaurant’s patio. “Not mine,” I told him. “I’m homeless, but I’m not like these other guys,” he said, guarding the table until its occupant returned, a red-eyed 40-something whose beer gut spilled from his shirt. “If someone stole my phone and wallet, they’d be doing me a favor,” said the drunk man, passing the homeless man a cigarette. “The notebook I would miss, though.”

I reached the Double Down Saloon before the end of happy hour, which meant that everything was $4 until 5 p.m., including shots of the house specialty, known simply as Ass Juice. “THE HAPPIEST PLACE ON EARTH,” read a sign over the doorway of the spartan brick building in the shadow of the airport, described by the men I’d met last night as Vegas’ gnarliest dive. Like the Huntridge Tavern, the Double Down was dark and windowless and open 24 hours a day, with a happy hour that ran from 5 a.m. to 5 p.m. A canopy of dollar bills hung from the ceiling and covered the walls, framing the many exhortations to “SHUT UP AND DRINK.” Before each bar stool was a video slot screen and an ashtray. It was the kind of dump I liked, where time evaporated and you couldn’t say for certain whether it was day or night.

“You want some Ass Juice?” asked the bartender, an immaculately stoned punk who owned several “bootleg turtles” from Norway and Argentina. “Sure,” I said. “What’s in it?” “Sugar and spice and everything nice,” he replied, filling a rocks glass to the brim with the mystery brew. “We got a band playing later. Ska night,” he added. “You know, ska? Pick it up, pick it up, pick it up?”

“Should be packed later,” said a man beside me whose dazed smile suggested an acid trip that never ended. “You never know what you’re gonna get here. It’s a mosh-posh. Am I speaking your lingo?”

“I’m picking up what you’re laying down,” I replied, downing the Ass Juice. It tasted better than it looked.

“He’s been coming here for 30 years. They used to call him Freak Boy,” the bartender said. “He passed out here one day in the nineties. They taped him to his bar stool and parked his motorcycle on the roof.”

“That was awesome!” snorted Freak Boy. “I used to park my camper van outside and just get POLLUTED for three or four days. Sheets of acid, jars of mushrooms. Those were the days.”

“Who let Freak Boy in here?” bellowed the 300-pound cowboy who’d just strode in in a leather vest and 10-gallon hat.

“How you doing, Cactus?” said Freak Boy.

“Don’t make me come over there,” the white-haired cowboy tossed back.

The evening bartender arrived, short and squat with hair like Bozo. “His other job is as Trombo the Clown,” the daytime bartender explained. “He comes in on Tuesdays and hosts Trombo’s Wheel of Fuckery. He staples shit to himself. It’s fucking insane.”

Freak Boy had left the building, replaced by a 50-something woman just off her shift as a cab driver, now fixed on her keno game. “My mom’s been sleeping in my living room, but she’s leaving next Tuesday,” she told me, lighting my cigarette. “She knows nothing about me. According to her, I’m nothing but a hardcore alcoholic. Little does she know the truth is actually much worse.”

The woman’s name was Tiffany, though she used to go by “SomeChick,” her online alter-ego in her ‘90s hacker days. These days she drove a taxi and wrote science fiction on her days off. The rest of her time was spent here at the Double Down. “At this point, I’m furniture,” she said, calling for a round of Leprechaun Piss shots, a monthly special I suspected was Ass Juice dyed green.

“Anyway, my mom says I’m living in sin because I have a roommate,” said Tiffany. “What she doesn’t know is that we fuck on the couch she’s been sleeping on. I can’t wait until she leaves.”

The fellow to my right bummed a cigarette. “What do you do?” he asked me. “I’m a writer,” I replied. “I knew that,” he said coolly, staring at me sideways. “I’ve watched you type into your phone. I knew that you weren’t texting.”

“Damn,” I said. “You clocked me.”

“Anyway,” he said. “Want to do some cocaine?”

It was dark out by the time I left the Double Down, and the ska band had taken the stage. How many hours I’d spent inside the bar was not for me to say, though in that time span I had smoked an entire pack of Newport 100s. I’d had big plans for dinner, but that ship had sailed. Instead I tumbled into bed at the El Cortez, sleeping to the jabber of the slots one floor below.

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The sun was baking on Las Vegas Boulevard, where neon signs for defunct motels (Apache, Par-A-Dice, Lucky Cuss, Fun City) crop up between the withered palm trees and the endless storefronts offering round-the-clock assistance should you need an eighth of weed, a tattoo, or a marriage, or perhaps to sell your watch to spring your buddy out of jail. I’d been in this godforsaken town not even 48 hours and had given up all pretense of doing anything of substance. As for sustenance, that, too, was out the window. For lunch had been another casino hot dog with all the fixings. Were my fingers yellow from mustard, or yesterday’s indoor smoking marathon? I neither knew nor cared.

“Welllllllcome to my hotel!” announced a soot-covered tweaker, stepping out from under the awning of a boarded-up motel. “Nine dollars a room! For you? Just four!”

“GETTING VEGAS DRUNK SINCE 1962” said the sign on Dino’s Lounge, a squat gray building halfway between the Strip and downtown which promised ICE COLD BEER, RED HOT MACHINES, and KARAOKE WITH DANNY G. I rang the bell and the bartender buzzed me in, an elderly woman with a twinkle in her eye. “I’ve been working here for 43 years!” she said, uncapping my High Life. “I worked for Dino, and then Dino’s son, and now Dino’s granddaughter. I’m 77 and still holding on for dear life. They’re going to stuff me and put me in the corner when I’m dead, with a picture of my hoo-hah hanging next to it. The caption will say, Still Dry.”

A man in suspenders and a neon safety vest buzzed in. “Happy birthdayyy to y—” his friends began to sing. “Shut the fuck up!” the man said and ordered a double tequila.

Like all the rest, Dino’s was windowless and open 24 hours a day, with a video slot machine and an ashtray in front of every bar stool. “WELCOME TO THE VORTEX” said a message over the barroom. “You got that right,” I said to no one. “Here we go again.”