Floating monte carlo heads with green eyes and other desert musings
Every time I return to Las Vegas, I think of all the other times I’ve been here.
It’s the only place in the world that makes me do the time warp. I start checking off the list.
“There was that time, and that time, and oh yeah… that time.”
This time I flew in from Santa Barbara, a first for me. It’s a small municipal airport. Basically a breezy little runway lined with palm trees. There’s one terminal. The building is a Spanish adobe, an architecture many buildings in Santa Barbara find themselves fashioned in.
The plane was small, especially for a commercial plane. It was like some plane Southwest Airlines had requisitioned from a South American drug runner. But it did the trick and I got in with no incident. 44 minutes in the air. Easy breezy, lemon squeezy. The crew was in a jovial mood, perhaps because the passengers were all easygoing. They were all already in Vegas in their minds. Vegas does that to most people. Not me.
I only had a minor issue when I was deboarding. I went to grab my hard-shell roller bag from the overheard bin and some guy in front of me claims I “almost knocked him the fuck out” with it. Too bad I didn’t.
As soon as I touched down, I was sniffing for beer. Las Vegas is full of that and many other arrays of substances, but if there are two things in life that I require to be of high quality, it’s coffee and beer. I wanted to find a craft brewery, but alas, my hotel was too far away.
This trip, I’m staying at The Orleans, one of those “just off the strip” discount joints with a locals casino and seedy crowd. The theme of the hotel is “New Orleans” but when you mix that with Las Vegas, you get a very dark and bastardized version of the thing. Las Vegas also has bastard versions of Paris and New York City and Venice and Egypt, but New Orleans takes the cake for biggest bastard in town.
The inside of The Orleans Hotel & Casino is as dark abyss, even by darkened Vegas casino standards. When I first entered, I had to grab around like a man struck with spontaneous blindness. I clung to a slot machine, holding on for dear life until I got my bearings.
That’s when I was finally able to size the joint up. It’s Creole Cottage chic but designed by Hunter S. Thompson on a mescaline trip. Some of the bayou alligator statues look like a mixture of demonized versions of animatronics from Splash Mountain at Disneyland and the lizards from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
There are also large floating Monte Carlo-style heads with glowing green eyes hanging over select poker tables, and animatronic French call girls waving from high perches to really tie the casino floor together. A real bastard surely designed this place.
After a few green bottle beers at the Alligator Bar, I wandered my way up to my room. The place only gets darker the higher you ascend. I needed a flashlight to see down the hallway once I got off the elevator.
My room looks like a heroin den for a failing jazz musician. Someone has definitely done smack in here and drifted to another plane of existence.
This is a lonelier trip for me. I’ve been to Vegas by myself before, but for work trips where I would mingle with my colleagues at least between the hours of 9am and 5pm. This time, I am alone for highly uninteresting reasons that might ruin this story as it already wobbles on the rails.
The Orleans Hotel & Casino is rude and nasty and alive at all hours, even in its darkest and most intimate corners. Loud children run the halls, screaming like mongrels in a playground into the late hours, no parents in sight, likely many drinks deep and no longer feeling like being “on duty.” Loud phone calls from distant rooms down the hall, burning up the phone lines into the late hours, likely conversations going nowhere at all but still meaning something to someone as late-night musings often do. Televisions blaring eternally with the same 5 advertisements offering random household items or some strange new Las Vegas attraction. Slamming of doors, each one heavier and louder than the next.
There’s very little sleep to be had here, and now I realize it’s all intentional. Sleeping customers don’t spend money, at least not until they find a way to automate gambling where all the action like pulling levers and throwing chips and making questionable decisions can still take place subconsciously. Just sign this paper here and let us insert a chip there.
So that’s why I write this. I’m not a gambling man, but I’m a drinking one and we might as well make the most of this insomnia. It’s a setting that makes for the perfect time to truly reflect on ghosts of Vegas past.
I remember the few times coming here as a kid, wandering around the strip with my parents, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. I was a chubby little thing who just wanted to hit the M&M store and pound chocolate into my body as quickly as possible. We’d walk up and down the strip, visiting all of the different hotels, too dumb to know they’re all just one of the same thing, each with its own façade to draw in one sucker or the next.
As I got into my pre-teens, I came here and was still just as chubby and bright-eyed and bushy-tailed but I had a taste for another kind of sweet. It was the dawn of the DVD age. Gentleman’s Club promoters would hand out baseball stat cards, but instead of seeing some MLB batter or pitcher, these cards would have provocative pictures of dancers in lingerie just barely covering their tits and holes. This perhaps was the first time I felt lust for women, collecting these cards. It introduced me to the sin in sin city.
Then I came to a wedding out here, late high school-early college days. One of my close friends is Russian-born American, and his older brother had decided to marry his Russian girlfriend lest she be deported since her paperwork or something like that wasn’t right. The ceremony was at one of those little Elvis chapels where the officiant is dressed like The King. The bride was late and we wound up having to have the ceremony in the parking lot because we lost our allotted time inside. There was a party in a fancy hotel room afterwards, filled with lots of vodka and white cakes and caviar varieties and Russians who did a sloppy double-cheek kiss with you every time you took a drink with them. The next day, the groom, my friend’s older brother, took us to McDonald’s for breakfast. We all had some McMuffins while the groom had his “breakfast” of white powder off the steering wheel then gave some to the bride. They got divorced two months later.
After that, I started coming here for work a lot. I used to work in live events and award shows. I’d arrive and see the T-Mobile Arena from the airport and my chest would thump. The T-Mobile Arena still induces this effect on me today. The shows were always stressful. High expectations, high pressures, low stakes. Every year, television viewers tuned in less and less and they struggled to even bring in in-person attendees. They used to pass large stacks of free tickets to employees, begging us to invite friends and family. It always felt like shipping out for war. I used to sit in my hotel room every night and drink myself to sleep. I built my liver up in those nights to achieve the decent intake I’m capable of today. I learned a valuable lesson on those trips: get out of something you don’t like doing. There is no such thing as finding a way to fall in love. It always hardened my view towards Vegas. It no longer was it just a sanctuary of paradise. It was also a city of pain and hard times and endless temporary cures for bad feelings.
Then I was here for a bachelor party. Good friends with bad intentions. The trip revolved around two main activities: topless pool party and strip club. What they don’t tell you, or at least what you don’t realize until you get there, is that “topless pool party” means everyone is topless and the types of women men want to actually see topless are not around. It’s mostly men with tits and old ladies letting the bags fly. They must have to change the water in that pool daily; no amount of chlorine could cleanse that water. I never know what to do at strip clubs. Nothing makes me softer than purchased affection. I just can’t do it. It’s a waste of money to me. It was a true boys’ weekend though, lots of laughs and drinks and memories. New bonds forged or firmed stronger.
Then I came for some more work trips, but for a different gig. I was working these ridiculous hair shows. Some real Zoolander/Mugatu shit. Hairdressers would perform on these massive stages fit for rock stars, cutting hair with the swagger and prancing and theatrics of ‘80’s hair metal. I never got it at all. It was beyond pretentious. One guy even parachuted in from a helicopter, landing on stage like he was James “Vidal Sassoon” Bond with a barrel roll and then proceeded immediately chopping some model’s hair. I felt like a real outsider at those shows. Like everyone was on some sort of drug that had no hold on me. Or like someone told a joke and everyone was laughing and I was just standing there scratching my ass trying to figure out what was so funny. Those were my loneliest nights in Vegas, where you look out at the strip into the endless barrage of lights and wonder why everything is so bright and flashy.
Strange musings tonight in Las Vegas. My memory has served me well, dispatches from my past selves connecting with me tonight, hoping things are better in the future. It’s a shame to say, things are still up in the air, but I still keep a light on and the beer cold as I notch yet another trip in my belt, another night to remember, another story to tell for no reason at all other than to tell it.