The Weekly Screed (#941)

Y’know, it’s fake

by David Benjamin

“Las Vegas is the only place I know where money really talks — it says, ‘Goodbye.’”

— Frank Sinatra

MADISON, Wis. —  The vignettes are haunting, and as commonplace as the little hooker leaflets strewn on the pavement along the all-night electric Strip from the Mandalay Bay to the Golden Nugget. 

Outside the Venetian, posing on a poured-cement, plaster-veneer copy of the Bridge of Sighs, two Chinese girls selfying themselves. Fake gondolas in their background bobbing on a faux canal, its Windex-colored water speckled with cigarette butts.

During my annual trip to the Consumer Electronics Show with Hotlips the technology reporter, I realized how long I’d been making this forced pilgrimage. In all those years and long before, since the dewy, halcyon days of Bugsy Siegel and Jerry Vale, this surreal oasis has been metastasizing over the Mojave sands like a rampant neoplasm.

On a 9 a.m. hike to the Sands Convention Center (although the Sands itself went poof in ’96), a woman in mismatched sneakers who might be 40 or maybe 70, frazzled hair, a figure crumpled like a used Kleenex, leaning on the rail over Flamingo Road, drinking her breakfast, a sixteen-ounce can of Bud Light.

Now and then, I spot folks from Topeka or Toledo lining up for photos in front of the “Eiffel Tower” or the “Empire State Building,” or the pyramids of Giza. I want to — but I don’t — sidle up and whisper, “It’s fake, y’know. All of it.”

A family of seven trudging the Bally’s casino — mother, dad, four ambulatory kids and a babe in arms — decked out in Goodwill third-hand, wide-eyed, eager and — to a sane observer — inconceivable. Why are they here? Mom and dad have the hard-used look of folks who, between them, work three minimum-wage jobs just to get barely by. Here, feeding the slots, putting kids on the roller-coaster, forking over three figures for tickets to warmed-over Broadway musicals, Cirque de Soleil and some guy named Thomas John the Psychic, paying seven bucks for a $1.50 cup of coffee, they’re coughing up a third, even a half of a year’s wages, to see a hundred sights that aren’t real, placing bets they cannot win in a million years and squandering a nest egg they don’t have… and never will. 

My heart aches for them until I turn. There, an identical down-at-the-heels family, ill-clothed, hungry-eyed and hopeless. And more of them yonder: penniless, deluded, desperate. But they’re all here. On purpose. Jesus, why?

Later in the day, another pedestrian bridge, a young man in rags, pressed to the wall, a dented paper cup near his feet, plucking fecklessly at an electric guitar, begging for enough quarters to buy an amp… or a bottle of wine.

In front of Margaritaville, parrots and luau shirts in the window, another tempest-tost mendicant. I stop and unload my spare change. Waving at the passers-by, their eyes averted, he vents, “Just tryin’ to buy a blanket for my kid. They won’t even look at me. Hey! Look at me, goddammit.”

Until I arrived, his cup was empty. Eighty cents isn’t enough for a blanket.

People come here expressly to waste their sustenance. Waste has an allure as wired into the psyche as sex and hunger. Vegas is the Vatican of waste, tinseled temples of profligacy and prostitution where Americans who are circling the drain gather to sacrifice their last dollar and pawn their wedding rings in meek obeisance to the rich and cruel of the voracious One Percent. There is no laboratory  of economic inequality more blatant and revealing of our sins than Sin City.

The Strip is a carny sideshow of costumed effigies. In a few hours there, I pass four phony Elvises in smudged white jumpsuits, one faux Captain America, a number of nylon-pile toons, including Yogi Bear and Astro Boy, two Mickey Mouses, a headless Minnie and one degenerate rodent that looks like Mickey’s pedophile uncle, eight fake bondage bimbos in policegirl bustiers and mesh stockings, and at least thirty counterfeit showgirls in pasties, thongs, stilettos and synthetic feathers. Following two in purple rooster-tails, I watch ’til they turn. On the right, a pretty teenage moon-face beneath smears of black mascara and indigo gloss, lively eyes and a species of freshness that Vegas hunts down and slimes. I take no note of her body but most of it’s exposed to the evening chill. I picture goosebumps but I also picture her grandparents encountering her here. I see them hug her and ask if she’s getting enough to eat, does she have a place to stay, is she safe, as she whispers that she can’t talk long — she’s being watched — unless they pay to take a photo with her in this misogynist nightmare of a tits-and-ass caricature, and they wonder, do they want a picture of her, like this, with them? I see them walking away chastened, bewildered but hoping, saying — probably not out loud — she’s just a kid, this will pass, she’ll be okay, we’ll laugh about this someday. But terrified that they’re wrong. 

There’s a doorway at the Flamingo where a “star” has been embedded in the sidewalk. It commemorates Bobby Darin, a wry vocalist whose talent and class lent an undeserved flicker of luster to this city. Now, though, Bobby’s been brought down to Vegas level, his star defaced by souvenir vultures. Brass letters pried from the pavement have reduced the great jazzy crooner to just “BY DARIN.” Below, all the letters of “LAS VEGAS” except, for some reason, the “L” are gone, leaving a scar that foot traffic has has filled with filth. 

Looking up the Strip from Bobby’s vandalized memorial, I notice on distant towers two juxtaposed words that join to say, “TRUMP TREASURE.” No better motto — or epitaph — I think, for a city built by long-past gangsters who were dazzled by glamor and desperate for legitimacy. But the message is incomplete until I raise my camera and focus. Sharing the frame with “TRUMP” and “TREASURE,” without irony, with no insight, judgment or cause for reflection, hovering above the Strip, one word: “MIRAGE”.

It comes to me, as I return to the CES grind, that maybe it’s mirage we prefer. That’s why Vegas sucks in its suckers so easily and bleeds us dry without peep or regret. Maybe we’re all fatalists (or enough of us to tolerate in our White House a treasure-lusting pseudo-mobster), so sure of getting screwed that we ask for it. We know it’s all razzle-dazzle and mirage, but we flock here to be screwed willingly, paying three or four times what it would cost to be forcibly screwed back home. Maybe, deep down, we thrive on the sort of crushing disappointment that Las Vegas bestows, sending us away with barely enough for gas money, bequeathing little more than neon memory and a new (poker) chip on our shoulder. We leave Vegas knowing we were cheated — by ourselves — validated in our ever-growing alienation from everything we were conditioned to trust and believe in.

Beneath a “TRUMP TREASURE” skyline, Vegas auditions as the symbol of America’s quandary. Our knight-errant quest has dead-ended in an anti-Camelot where eight-foot whores cruise by on moving billboards and Elvis is the walking dead. We gaze gullibly at a plaster statue of a bogus emperor who teeters on a pedestal of cracked falsehoods over a fountain of toxic water, spouting idiot boasts and making hollow promises through a mannequin mouth.

There was a shooting here a while ago, fifty-nine celebrants gunned down by a sadist in a hotel tower. Here was this Sodom’s ultimate sacrilege, a defiling of every facile value — phoniness, insidious illusion and sparkling deceit — that it has always stood for. The bullets were live, the blood was real, warm, authentically red. The scattered dead bodies were actual corpses killed not by gradual, relentless discouragement — in the hospitable Vegas style — but suddenly in an ugly mess, before they could lay down one final, futile bet.