(400) Stories of Stuff, Including Las Vegas

by Nathan Walpow

I was in Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago, at a writers (writer’s? writers’? Who’s ever sure?) conference, which I attended, as with most such events these days, because I’m in a band made up of suspense, horror, and mystery authors, which plays at these things. I was there for three days, without Andrea, because they scheduled the conference with Rosh Hashanah right in the middle, and Andrea’s a better Jew than I am. As usual, rehearsals started later than planned, and I had plenty of time to wander the city. Which I didn’t do the first day; I was in bed just after 9 pm. A player, right? But in the late afternoon on the second day, I walked from the Palace Station to the Strip, which didn’t seem like much of a jaunt until I realized there were only a couple of places you could cross the train tracks.

So instead of hitting the Strip around the Riviera (where I spent one of the worst weekends of my life the only other time I was in Las Vegas), I ended up walking on Highland Drive, maybe a quarter mile west. There, practically within reach, were the towers and spires, while on my street there was nothing but the kind of commercial establishments the second body is always found behind on cop shows. Furniture, automotive, countertops, that kind of thing, punctuated by a strip club or two.

Eventually I found a railroad crossing and turned east toward the Strip. It so happened that the first thing I came upon (other than some kind of sex museum; perhaps “came upon” was a poor choice of words) was a mall. I stumbled inside, searching for liquid refreshment. (Have I mentioned that it was 98 degrees at the time? And that by the time I found the crossing I’d gone roughly two miles?) And the first thing I found was a Teavana, where I bought an iced oolong and a Yixing teapot. (Shipped home for free! Yay, Teavana!) Then I walked out onto the Strip.

Las Vegas makes me uncomfortable. I feel like I don’t belong, that it’s a place better left to people who either know how to have more fun than I do or know how to be more miserable than I am. I’m an intruder in a strange land. Everyone knows it, and is laughing at me after I pass by. On the Strip were hordes of folk who seemed to know what they were doing there, drunken twenty-somethings with giant plastic drink glasses, women of all ages who got it that being in Vegas allowed them to showcase their breasts far more than they ever would at home, oldsters intently searching down the perfect place to satiate whatever vice they were infected with.

My feet were hurting and I was clearly dehydrated. I decided I’d go as far as the imaginatively-named Paris Las Vegas, because we all know I’m a Francophile. Andrea and I call the place “Fake Paris,” just like we call the Venetian “fake Venice” and New York New York “fake New York.” They’re no more phony than the rest of the city, but for us they symbolize the artificiality better than casinos patterning themselves after Roman villas or pirate lairs or Donald Trump wet dreams.

I know, I know; I’m not saying anything groundbreaking here. Everyone knows Las Vegas is phony; everyone knows that, on some level, that’s a large chunk of the attraction. But it’s not just the phoniness; it’s the alienness that gets me, the feeling that the whole place is not of this earth, and that at any moment V-lizards or something will rip off their masks and reveal that they, and not Bugsy Siegel, were behind the whole thing.

The band’s gig went pretty well; most of the audience was talking while we were playing, which made me feel like a real musician playing in a real club. And I came out ahead; at some point while I was feeding money into the incomprehensible slot machines and watching it disappear a quarter at a time, one of them decided, for no reason I could discern, that I should suddenly be $110 or so richer. So I gambled with their money for a while, and came home a $50 or $60 winner.

I returned on a Sunday, just in time for my in-laws’ fiftieth wedding anniversary dinner; but Las Vegas stayed on my mind, as I wondered if it was the city that was basically askew from reality, or if it was me. Then, a couple of days later, FourStory Executive Producer Jon Webb sent me this link, and I found out about the people living in the flood tunnels under the Vegas streets. There are maybe 700 of them in the 350 or so miles of tunnels, making a living by credit-hustling—scavenging credit slips drunken or exhausted gamblers leave behind in the slots—and by begging and Dumpster diving. Some of them live pretty well, all things considered, and some of them get out, and some of them don’t want to because they’re fugitives. One thing they all have in common is that, should Las Vegas ever get one of its infrequent big rains, they all stand a chance of drowning down there.

Which all made me feel somewhat better about Las Vegas. Because it showed me that it’s just like every other city. It’s got its people on the margins, and those on the margins of the margins, and I just don’t think aliens who were bright enough to come to earth and hang their monstrous spaceships over our major cities, either to save us from ourselves or to steal our water or to eat us, would let something like that go on. Because they’re smarter than us, right?

You’re probably not used to seeing my byline on one of our feature articles, which is due to the fact that I absolutely hate writing non-fiction (and, truth be told, I’m not so hot at kicking out the fiction either, which is why my last book came out in 2005), so I leave it to the people on our staff who are much better at it than I am. Yeah, I’ll do a blog entry here and there, but I can knock those out in short order; it’s not a commitment, see?

But there’s a tradition at FourStory that I produce every hundredth feature. I did the one-hundredth and I did the three-hundredth, and, whoops, I didn’t do the two-hundredth, and I don’t even remember why. (It should be noted that we included our erstwhile fiction segments in the count, 16 of Gary Phillips’s The Underbelly and 24 of my Bad Developments, and, no, I don’t have any immediate plans to get back to it; see the parenthetical comment in the paragraph above.) So here you are, and here I am, and there Las Vegas is, and this four-hundredth story is about it.

There are some changes coming in the next couple of month, to make the site, as we used to say in my long-ago days at IBM, “Newer, Better, Bluer, Redder.” Things like new writers, and an online comic, and maybe some reorganization of material. Our hit counts have doubled in the last three months or so; we want the trend to continue. So spread the word, and soon we’ll give you more to spread the word about.

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