Trying to Move to Vegas

[mnaz]

(revised/condensed from previous)

I am back to Las Vegas because I need to find a place. Or maybe it just got in the way again, not sure. And what can I make of this gambling city in the throes of late spring? Its melted boulevards, random Burger Kings and pawn shops, and listless palm trees near combustion? Why would sane creatures build a major city here, and a fool's paradise at that? The answer lies deep in air conditioning.
.....It has already hit 110 degrees in the valley. Last night in my Boulder Strip room the woeful air box whined and managed a comfy 80, and at midnight the Nevada Palace sign read 95. Sirens blared, and there was trouble about, under my nose. This place begs for it. Advertises it. A quickie-mart clerk offered detailed info on sex clubs ("I just want a coke, man".) But this is Vegas, with its limitless upside, and it's another sunny day on a bad street incited by heat, and I'm completely fascinated; I didn't come this far to muddle in the mundane. But really I came for the glow; I crawled out from years of cleansing gloom to get here.
.....So I lunge into the shocking heat to explore, only to find the Las Vegas outskirts overrun by construction and bulldozer armies from which a constant brown dust cloud rises. Manic bursts of insta-burbs spread out from the old gangster town, its history to be paved under wild foistings of corporate fortune, from the explosion of insane Strip megaresorts to disjointed beige housing tracts gobbling miles of desert that once rested unmolested.
.....Vegas may be a whore, but a whore with lots of jobs, and cookie-cutter sprawl creeps up the foothills. Hundreds of houses are built at once, overnight, jammed in row after row, and the Big Box Temples follow close behind. And from tract houses across asphalt underworlds they come, lurch and drag, night of the living dead consumers, past tubs of mayo and large screens with explosions on them, inexorably toward Aisle 39, steely-eyed Jims of a million beer commercials, wallets wheezing with credit, a scene always engulfed by vast parking oceans where steely mammoths trundle across freshly-paved desert.
.....I've seen these mammoths before of course, but they really stand out here against the beige backdrop, gluttonous gladiators bred to conquer parking lots and shopping lists, their skin bulging like steel hillocks, their grilles like mad dinosaur teeth; rugged beasts that could easily conquer the desert, though dust is rarely observed on a mammoth. Science continues its inquiry.
..... Perhaps a desert rat has ridden a mammoth, but most anthropologists believe he wouldn't live in Vegas; he would live somewhere like Devil's Playground in an old silver trailer with guns and snakeskin hats, a boneyard full of ham radio and swamp cooler parts and an AM radio tuned to Art Bell's paranormal desert trip. His hair would be splintered and wild between buckboard trips to the junction, and he'd dab cream on his sandpaper face. It would be likely he's never seen a mammoth up close.
.....But never mind all that. The main issue is: why hook up so many water meters in the sprawl? The water comes from Lake Mead, backed up by Hoover Dam twenty miles east, yet the lake sports an eighty foot bathtub ring, which is trillions of gallons below capacity. But this is Vegas, with its limitless upside, and what do trivial matters like "capacity" mean? I picture greasy developers shoving cash at hapless clerks for thousands of ill-gotten building permits as the lake slowly goes dry, but it's heretical to doubt this place; doubt is antithetical to the Vegas psyche. I'm in over my head.

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.....I'm okay with no limits in theory, but it messes with my geography. In old Vegas the desert was a lot closer, where mob matters played out. Before the corporate mob swept in and overbuilt the place. You can't just leave anymore; first you cross a beige stucco sea, 97 identical subdivisions, each on the same four-lane boulevard with scattered palms and spray-painted block fences. You might cross that beige ocean forever and not reach the hills.
.....There must be some soul to the place, but I can't read it; the needle spins. Even the college is on six lanes of aging stucco strip malls under the Perpetual Trail of Jetliners, kitty-corner from Liberace's museum in another strip mall, so where is the cool part of town? . . . Except it's not a real town, not really; it's a vast infrastructure of stimulationism, orbited by random beige.
.....One day I look for the cool part of town and end up in Albuquerque, at some atomic tiki lounge with grass skirts and missile cones on the wall; the only thing missing is Strangelove playing on the ceiling. I drink rum from a steel shaft as Jello Biafra snarls Viva Las Vegas from speakers hidden in the grass skirts. And finally, a place built from more than gleaming hustle, in touch with our inner grunge and cult films, and all because I was repelled by the creeping lounge singers back down the highway. Action-reaction. Newton's law. From Wayne Newton to Slim Pickens waving a hat.
.....But I still have a lot of ground to cover in Nevada, so two weeks later I am back in Vegas; maybe I just haven't gotten its spirit yet. Or maybe, on the run, I'm not able to recognize what I seek even when it emerges. Have I fallen to aimless drifting and heresies of doubt? If so, I'm in luck; here's my chance to settle in a place where doubt has no place. Never doubt Vegas; it only makes you look foolish. There must be some arrangement I can work out, some sort of compromise.

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.....So I kill my doubt and rent a tiny studio at the edge of the grid and the edge of glow, the best of both worlds, as the edge pushes out farther in a brown cloud. I hole up on the hottest days with a Joe Campbell book, and he breaks down grail legends and all the different trails up the same mountain. Sometimes I write bad poems like the one about my fingers, too short and fat to play music; you need supple fingers to play music.
.....The swamp cooler rattles on bad bearings on the edge, as the edge pushes out: glow swept under a tide of stucco and glass. Yet you can always find the edge of any desert town, even Vegas, the distinct line where city just ends and everything yields to scrub. You can literally get out of town, unlike the endless Northern forest-burbs. And if you get far enough out on the arcs, you'll find similar distinct lines where visible scrub yields to glow.
.....Chef Steve, who is on his own road swing, unexpectedly stops by, and he wants to camp by water. So we drive out to the reservoir, but not the first campground: too close to Sin City. No, we drive forty more miles to make sure, through lands of weird little redrock crops like a miniature Utah, then we drop toward a radiant oasis. But there is no oasis at the end of the road, no Lake Mead; it has retreated far past the canyon's mouth. Such is the nature of desert and water.
.....The campground is deserted; only three outfits on the former shore . . . Good, except Steve pulls right beside them and begins to set up. I am already set, so I wander up the wash. I keep it simple: water, whiskey and chicken, a big stash of non-perishables, enough to live on for days. Meanwhile, Chef Steve's truck is packed with all types of cooking utensils and food to last for weeks, and as he sets up a desert kitchen I find suffocating peace beyond the generators and gas grills. Each step becomes more labored, so I have to climb out of the gulch to get a shot of horizon. I sense trouble ahead.
.....Back at camp, Steve makes a four-course dinner as four young men next door chill to virulent strains of rage rock on the radio, which is similar to music except much more infuriated. Not that fury has no place in this post-something funhouse of a planet we're all trying to pack into, but this session plays like a stuck horn, a ceaseless guttural shriek. Bullet after bullet of monster truck scream rap comes at us, and Lord the hellish commercials, the invading horde. And through a great din, the sun bleeds and dies. We eat fine food and commune with a raging earth.

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.....Living in Vegas, mostly I head out; that is the arrangement. But sometimes the towers pull me in. The shock and awe of billions spent inexplicably in one place is irresistible. There's a numb incredulity about the Strip as it flowers in quasi-artful panache, like the quarter-scale Eiffel Tower at Paris, the European mock-ups. One of the gaming moguls (don't call it "gambling") even built a gallery to allow drunken insurance agents from Illinois to view his priceless paintings.
.....Spend enough time in Vegas and you'll find Paradise, the name of a boulevard behind the megacasinos' hulking backs. It's only blocks, or maybe light years from the Strip, where a stale indifference of sun-bleached Temporary Inns dominates. Paradise also has carved-up sidewalks, cheap souvenirs, and ten lanes of stretch limos and taxis with Sigfried and Roy on the door zipping by. Tall golden ghosts rise in the west over Paradise, and everything is out of scale.
.....The Strip is true to its desert roots: indeterminate space and no firm grasp of scale. Imagine immigrants staggering toward water last century on the punishing Old Spanish Trail, where Caesar's Palace now rises in pernicious pomp, or maybe it's a Mirage, flashing in a wonderland of bright, busted span, deep in the desert, both then and now.