Las Vegas Boulevard
“When I sin, I like to sin clean.” This is a quote from Ernest Hemmingway’s mistress and is applicable to our family trip to Las Vegas because, in Vegas, it is all about the cash. There are no pretensions to altruism and everything was exactly as it appeared to be. It was all surface stuff. There were party girls who would do anything for you if you bought them a drink. These girls did not believe in healthy living; they were loud, immensely overweight, and looking for a good time. There were other women, the ladies of the evening, thin and hard and muscle-bound, who took their craft more seriously. They looked me up and down, trying to decide if I was worth the effort, knowing that their time being young and attractive was limited so they were trying to make their best deal while they still had the time.I have a hard time sleeping at night and, since my sleep schedule was still on Eastern time, I was up and ready to go when many people in Sin City were just winding down their Saturday night. Let me take a few minutes, Jack Kerouac style, to describe what I saw on Las Vegas Boulevard as I took my walk at 4:30 am. The homeless population made an impression. There was a guy who was taking a dump in front of Caesar’s and was singing at the top of his lungs so that the pedestrians walking by could not but help to witness his natural act. Another homeless guy blocked the stairs leading to the pedestrian bridge, clearing enjoying the temporary power that he held over the tourists, while a casual observer said, “He’ll move” to the couple that was climbing the stair case. I took an escalator up to the “Denny’s” that was on the second floor but when I reached the top a young lady barfed up all of the contents of her stomach. Instead of waiting in line, standing in someone else’s puke, I immediately took the escalator back down again to the ground floor and exited to the boulevard.
Joseph Conrad wrote, in “Heart of Darkness,” how civilized adventurers journeyed into the African bush to see how the savages lives. Similarly, I am a rich white guy from Kentucky so I walked Las Vegas Boulevard at 4:30 in the morning to see how the other half lives. I wasn’t looking at the drunks with a disapproving glare of a saint. No, I gave each participant a quick glance, without judgement, and then moved on. Keeping my head on a swivel, I was careful to be aware of my surroundings, but sensitive enough to take note of anything unusual. For example, I saw a man in a wheelchair at “The Venetian” who had locked himself in the stall in the public bathroom and who was using the toilet to wash out his clothes. There were fake showgirls who wore nothing but pasties, a thong, and a feathered headdress who charged you twenty dollars to have your picture taken with them. The homeless were passed out on the sidewalk or laying in the decorative bushes. Meanwhile, there were police officers outside of “The Flamingo” who were sweeping the ground with their flashlights, looking for evidence. A large black man was bending wheeled out of the casino on a stretcher. He was well dressed and looked high class but the paramedics were taking his to an ambulance for what was probably dehydration.
This is not a “there but by the grace of God go I” type of story. No, these people deserved their fate. They were the lowest form of humanity, black or white, hugely overweight, dull and simple and willfully uneducated. The people who lurked on Las Vegas Boulevard at 4:30 in the morning were my worst nightmare; dull and simple and content to remain that way. They were satisfied to wallow in their own filth and interested only in making a buck. There were no winners on Las Vegas Boulevard at that time of the morning, only losers. Many of the partiers were young but they they had already let themselves go; the women wore cheap Lycra body suites that revealed an over-flowing gut, spilling over their waistline. The young men had already developed a slight bend to their posture, the weight of their lives had been a burden. They must have know, deep down in the recesses of their minds, that they were only young once so they may as well burn through their youths while they could because their bodies, and their minds, would degenerate soon. Looking through the situation in that lens the whole thing was just so sad.
Not everything that I saw fit into a paragraph form. I have written some bullet points on the other things that I saw on Las Vegas Boulevard.
1. A Couple of little kids following their parents at 4:30 am
2. Cannot tell, by the way that they are dressed, if the women are prostitutes or if the men are pimps
3. Openly smoking marijuana because it is now legal in Nevada
4. Keep your distance, don’t gawk, and they will leave you alone.
5. Garbage picker looking in canisters for aluminum cans to recycle
6. Compare clientele of the Flamingo to the clientele of The Wynn.
7. “I like the energy,” said the white guy, encouraging the black girls to continue to yell at the traffic, hoping to get some play
8. A drunken woman sitting next to me blurted out, “I’m going to sleep right here!” And then passed out at the bar.
9. Whores were looking me up and down, trying to decide if I could be their last trick of the night before their evening’s work was done. Most of them couldn’t be bothered to look up from their iPhones
10. A couple had just finished with their tryst. The woman said goodbye to her partner before leading him to a cab. After she was sure that he had left, she called a cab for herself.
11. A bachelorette party was winding down and the girls were twerking with absolute strangers as they danced up to the hotel bar.
12. A bunch of fraternity brothers were egging each other on by yelling, at 4:30 in the morning, “Do you want to go to bed or do you want to see some strippers?” It was a rhetorical question because the answer was so obvious.
13. Wannabe rock stars pressed home made CDs into our hands in the hopes of getting five dollars for each copy.
2. The Buddhist monks, who wanted five dollars for a beaded bracelet and a prayer, weren’t even real monks. “Everything here is fake!” Said Grant. I replied with, “the beauty and the tragedy of Las Vegas is that everything is fake.”
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