A LONG WAY FROM MANY PLACES

Apprehension and Disliking in Las Vegas (Part II)

A kid wearing a St. Louis Blues home sweater asked me for a light. He said he’d lost his lighter. I handed him my Montreal Canadiens Bic and said, “If you lose this, I’ll kill you.” Ann and I were in The Park, the immense pedestrian plaza in front of the T-Mobile Arena shoehorned between New York New York and another MGM branded property different from the green Grand across the boulevard. We were sipping tins of Stella Artois, stupefied by the pre-game festivities of warm weather hockey. We moved like crabs through the throng, sideways past the liquor kiosks, flowing with the current of the pounding techno. Gazing upward I noted the masked, tennis ball-green security forces looking down on the crowd from every storey of the Toshiba Plaza. My emotions were mixed, I wasn’t sure if I was comforted or discomforted.

The sports story of the last decade is the Vegas Golden Knights. The expansion club was great from their first puck drop. But, man, their marketers were all-stars. Knights gear is for sale everywhere and seemingly every business here trumpets some official affiliation with the team. This is the way hockey permeates Montreal. Looking at all the sweaters in The Park, boring colours and a decent crest, I understood that there’s a fan base in Las Vegas which in turn led me to an absurdly obvious though shocking conclusion: people actually live and work here. If the transient, carpetbagging football Raiders get it right, their confrere Chargers in Los Angles proof that it’s not a given, there’s more golden nuggets to be mined in the desert.

When I eventually reached the wicket window, there were just 18 seats available in the rink. For $140 each plus service charges and taxes - about another $75; Ann and I would not even be able to sit together. The ticket agent was friendly and helpful, good at her job. My mind spun: 7, BAR, lemons. The game meant nothing to us although I suppose I would’ve paid that much to watch the Canadiens lose. I politely demurred.

Because I have effectively mismanaged my personal life since the last notes of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ faded at one of my Secondary Three high school dances, friends and family were concerned that Ann and I might exchange marital vows in Vegas, stood before some plump rhinestone Elvis Baptist preacher. There has been more than enough grief in our lives. We opted instead for Love, the Cirque du Soleil’s Beatles tribute at The Mirage, a few monorail stops away from MGM Grand. I never did buy the Apple soundtrack because I wanted to hear and experience the deconstruction of their songs within the context of performance. My father took me to see a circus once, around the time I was preparing for my First Communion, so 1967. Some snotty little puke about my age in the row behind us vomited on him. We left early, missed the finale.

There has been a trend in theatre recently to foist jukebox musicals on patrons, hit songs strung together by a tenuous and shaky narrative thread. Beautiful and Million Dollar Quartet are not documentaries; facts don’t matter so much as the attempt to somehow lift the curtain on the miracle of art, humanity’s finest creation. The Cirque adds miming acrobats and a highwire. Love’s stage is populated by athletic avatars of Beatles characters, Eleanor Rigby, Mr. Kite and Lucy. The Fool on the Hill, maybe an Eggman and a Walrus, everybody on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s, I couldn’t be certain. Imagine the era of post-war, pyrrhic Britain to John’s murder condensed into a Yellow Submarine cartoon with live actors zipping up and down through strobes and fog and all around Blue Meanies, glass onions and mojo filters interspersed with short, deferential tangents vectoring on George and Ringo, one song each – just like the albums. I’ve taken magic mushrooms and God knows what else in my time but I’ve never hallucinated anything quite like Love. Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees learned harsh lessons messing with the Beatles’ music and legacy. This audacious, carefully choreographed spectacle is so over the big top, enough as to be deranged and yet not without flaws: Ann noted the flaccid nets and unused trampolines during 'Revolution,' many cues were missed.

But the Cirque organization is everywhere with different shows in every resort, as ubiquitous as the colourfully explicit escort calling cards that paper the city. Las Vegas is the only holiday destination you’re tempted to escape from even while you’re there. It’s all too much. I was reminded of the downtown Edmonton apartment I rented 30 years ago following my first divorce. Even though I lived by myself I hated going home. I tried to explain my existential crisis to my older brother. He said, “You get home after work, unlock the door and it’s just you, and you can’t stand your company.” I said, “Yeah, no, maybe.”

While the slots are modern machines in the “fabulous” Flamingo, it’s the only joint on The Strip that still possesses a whiff of Rat Pack pomade. Ain’t that a kick in the head? There’s a pit bar in the middle of the casino. There are paper matchbooks available. But to really get away from it all without flying home, we flagged a cab downtown to Fremont Street. Our taxi sped by peeler bars, liquor stores, drug stores (not Walgreen’s or CVS) and auto body chop shops. After I paid our driver I slid my wallet into a front pocket of my jeans.

The branded Fremont Street Experience unfolds beneath a programmable electric sky, an LED canopy that extends for three city blocks. On the mall under the trance inducing lights are live bands and deejays, fishnet stockinged dancers, open air bars, kiosks selling junk and palm readings, street performers and street people. It’s a grittier scene than the vaguely Disneyfied Strip, though paradoxically as plastic as the discarded beer cups, yet its scale is human. A visit forces you to ponder the human condition such as it is in the wake of a few thousand years of civilization. My God, what some people (don’t) wear. Ann and I attended on a Friday night and returned again on a Sunday morning to survey the wreckage in the harsh desert glare of hangover day.

I heard a guitarist grinding out a Keith Richards riff through the open windows of an Irish pub called Mickie Finnz. Ann and I went in for the happy hour specials. Immediately inside the entry we were greeted by a large aquarium populated with a few undersized, clinically depressed lobsters. YOU CATCH IT AND WE COOK IT. Christ. I judge the cleanliness of an eatery’s kitchen by the state of its men’s room. I would not chew my fingernail in Mickie Finnz.

Ann was equally intrigued and appalled by the neon wretched excess across Fremont. The Heart Attack Grill offered free food to patrons weighing over 350 pounds. There was a scale on the street. A drinker beside us told Ann that he dropped his wife there about once a month and waited her out in Mickie Finnz. He said, “If you can’t finish your meal they spank you.” I had so many inappropriate questions with which to pepper him. For maybe the second time in my life I kept silent, bit my tongue - not on the menu at Mickie Finnz but at least I knew where it had been.

The Mob Museum is nearby on Stewart Avenue. Despite its silly name it’s no Ripley’s on Times Square. History, while always fascinating, is often ugly. I believe it should be documented and acknowledged rather than erased. I was reminded of a museum I visited in Bristol, England which was surprisingly forthright about that port city’s role in the slave trade and how its abolition crunched the local economy. The universal hallmark of progress is disruption. There is a mild MAGA odour wafting through The Mob Museum as the panels of text herald the noble forces of American law rising up against the Italian, Irish and Jewish immigrants who imported their evil ways to orchestrate a New World gangland. It’s not the facts so much as how they’re presented.

When I was a good Catholic boy many of my friends had little Red Cross badges sewn onto their bathing suits. I badgered my parents for swimming lessons because I wanted a bathing suit badge too. One of the tests was treading water for 30 seconds in the deep end of the pool, under the low and high diving boards. I was terrified. I didn’t smoke back then and so I managed not to drown for 29 seconds. I was passed anyway, sort of like that mercy 51 grade in Secondary Three chemistry. Maybe that’s the story of my life and career, barely adequate.

When Ann and I felt we were flailing and floundering, asea in the grotesque, we repaired to the Triple 7 sports bar in Main Street Station close by the western top of Fremont, near the Plaza and the Golden Nugget. The micro-brewed beer is as good and as reasonably priced as the food and the casino’s men’s room is immaculate. You can piss against a segment of the Berlin Wall (the reassembled St. Valentine’s Day Massacre wall is in The Mob Museum). We took the same stools every visit, down at the end of the long wooden bar. I don’t pay attention to American football any longer but, boy, watching a playoff game with people who have stakes riding on multiple outcomes, over-under, spread, winner, is some kind of secondary rush. Should we ever return to Las Vegas, this is where I’ll establish our unofficial headquarters.

Provided you get a good night’s sleep, leaving Las Vegas is easy. We were mortified when a black stretch limo turned up at the MGM Grand to take us to McCarran, the primary point of our journey back to reality. We don’t habitually move in such ostentatious circles. I’d booked sedans for us. I guessed this embarrassing vehicle was a make-good for the foul-up upon our arrival. I assumed the rims of our eyes were as red and rusty as the surrounding shimmering distant desert peaks; razor wire and palm trees with giant pineapple-like tumours high up their trunks under their dusty fronds animated in our tinted window-framed foreground. Goodbye to all this and that. An e-mail alert: our flight was delayed which meant our connector from Vancouver now became something of a slots SPIN button result. Ann’s weather app indicated we’d eventually get home to Edmonton’s freezing temperature amidst a snowstorm. There was nothing we could do except sit back and enjoy the somnambulant ride. What else could possibly happen?                                  

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced, inaccurate alternative source of travel writing since 2013. Sign up for e-mail alerts from the Crooked 9.