A Girl...

Artifice (in Moderation)

For our last meal before departure from Vegas, we wanted to eat out on the patio at the Bellagio Hotel and Casino™, but the single outdoor restaurant in the joint had already stopped serving for the morning, so the hostess suggested an alternative: Café Bellagio. "Is it outside?" Simon asked? "No, but it's fake outside!" she said. "It's very nice," she assured us with a nod and a wink. It was very nice, but it was also indeed fake--an atrium of flower art in which the only things that weren't made of flowers were the flowers themselves, which were made of glass and fifteen feet tall.

I can't even begin to tell you how many fake boobs and fake tans and fake hair and fake quadruplets we saw, many of which were denizens of the swimming pool with the fake waves and surrounded by the fake sandy beach. In fact, the whole place is fake--fake Eiffel Tower and fake Venetian canals, but also the structures themselves are built out of fake stone and fake wood and fake marble. Some of it is real--the plants, usually, for instance--but even then we are being forgiving because, after all, those tropical blooms and ferns aren't exactly native to the desert of the American Southwest. With climate control, however, all things are possible; it might be high noon and 100 degrees outside, but pass through those gilded front doors and all of a sudden it's a cool 69 and late enough to start in on the cocktails.

I like it, though, and only now that I've called it out in this way do I understand why. Historically, my two favorite places to vacation have been Las Vegas and the Shakespeare Festival in Cedar City, Utah--a little community tucked in the redrock with nothing to distract one from the high drama onstage. The two destinations always seemed to me like opposites, but now I realize my attraction to them (and to period literature and movie musicals) is exactly the thing I seemed to be criticizing above: I like the fakeness. I like the fakeness when it is self-conscious and unabashed and so painfully obvious that it's not painful anymore. Why not throw the Campanile di San Marco to the right of the Rialto Bridge? Why not plunk down the Arc de Triumph beside the Eiffel Tower? Why not have your main characters break out into a well-choreographed song and dance number? It's not like you're fooling anyone in the first place, so why not take it all the way?

As for the gambling, Vegas became one of my favorite places many many years before I could gamble (legally) (in public), so on this trip it took some reflection to figure out how I feel about that whole industry. When I was little, I knew that kids weren't allowed to loiter in the casinos, so me being the little rule-follower I was, I pretty much glued my eyeballs to that crazy carpet while passing through for fear that if I so much as glanced at a roulette wheel the authorities would wrench me away from my beloved parents and keep me in a cave clad in drab rags with all the other stolen children of Vulgaria.

Now that I'm older and less prone to worst-case-scenario obsession (maybe), I played a few slot machines and was a backseat bidder while Simon sat at blackjack. Although it was thrilling to watch him win fifteen dollars, just like that, by sticking on seventeen, I have to admit that I was just as excited, and probably moreso, to watch the credits rack up on the nickel slots. Two dollars feels like one hundred when the machine is ding-ding-dinging and the yellow lights are blinking furiously and, when I throw my hands up for high-fives, Simon looks back at me with equal glee. Not that we wouldn't also be tickled to win a hundred dollars, but you take what you can get.

I learned about gambling from my father when I was around ten years old. My aunt, who has a way of attracting the strange and unusual, got a hold of an old Japanese pachinko machine--a hybrid slot machine and pinball game), and my dad decided to charge me ten cents for each metal bebe used to play. Over the course of an afternoon, I won some, I lost some, but it didn't take long before the state of my earnings was completely forgotten. As long as I had the balls to play with (ha), I was gonna play 'em. It was the perfect trap: my OCD side was all fired up by the repetitive motions it took to play, and my non-OCD side was giddy at the randomness of the game. To me, random signified endless possibility. I could put one ball in and win twenty! Heck, I could put one ball in and win them all!

Of course, I could also put in ball after ball and win nothing upon nothing until my pockets were empty, which is eventually what happened. Still, it wasn't like I'd wasted my time and lost all my money. I was ten years old and playing in the living room with my father, so what was the harm?

"Oh well," I said. "I guess I lost. Bummer."

"Yeah. Bummer," said my dad. "Now pay up."

I protested that it was just a game, that I was just a kid, that it was just for fun, but he insisted and took my money. Tough love is the pits, but it works.

Walking through the casinos last weekend I wasn't ever tempted to try to win the shiny red Viper or the progressive jackpot. Although we shook hands with one-armed bandits up and down the Strip, playing the penny slots for ten minutes was probably my most satisfying venture because those machines put out more than any of the others, even though in vastly smaller amounts. Looking around, I saw people slumped into chairs in front of dollar slots, five-dollar slots, many of them earning "frequent player points" via special cards affixed to bungee cords connecting humans to machines, like IVs. I wondered if Dominoes would deliver a pizza to the casino floor, and then I joked to Simon that the Next Big Thing would be specialized gambling catheters.

What are these people doing? I thought. Is a fifty-dollar jackpot really worth celebrating when you're down three hundred for the weekend? Most of these people aren't, I assume, like that one guy we saw playing craps--Bobby, the dealers called him--who, while placing bets and rolling dice was all the while fidgeting with a stack of seven chips, each labeled $5,000. (Drop one! Drop one!) If Bobby wants to play the dollar slots all day, I have a feeling it won't make much of a difference, but I'm pretty sure that a good percentage of all those other people are the type who complain (like me) about having fork over three bucks for a bottle of water. And that's for a product in return, not just twenty-seconds of entertainment and the ever-so-brief gift of possibility that this time might be It.

That's the thing, though. In a fleeting moment of Pollyanna thought, I convinced myself that Las Vegas (and Reno and Tahoe and Atlantic City and Monte Carlo) are not places of despair and desperation. On the contrary, they're little oases of hope in what, for some people, is probably a fairly dark (or at least dim) existence. Because why would anyone gamble unless he felt he were lucky, he were due for some good fortune, he were worthy, he were a winner deep down, in spite of everything else. When you think about it that way, it's kind of inspiring, to see all those people believing in themselves and their self-worth so fiercely. So devotedly. So obsessively. So addictively. So pathetically. See, I told you the Pollyanna moment was fleeting.

Do I still like Vegas? Absolutely. On the way to the airport our shuttle was behind a truck carrying two white tigers. Where else do you see that? We also saw Pete Rose signing baseballs in Caesar's mall ("I'm sorry I bet on baseball. Pete Rose"), we collected dozens of nudie cards, and we saw the one Cirque du Soleil show you can't see anywhere else. We also sat by the too-crowded pool and whined about the opressive heat and the $12 daiquiris, but even that I'd take every once in a while. Vegas, you are a hobby not a lifestyle, a home-away-from-home but not capital-H Home. I really like you, but let's just be friends. Besides, I'm in love with someone else.

More photos (all taken with Simon's camera, and most taken by the man himself) on Flickr here.