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| Illustrations: Sin City or Bust, Baby |
Posted by
Comedian on Monday, December 15, 2003 - 12:07 AM PST
Tired, grudging students start piling into the lobby of the small liberal arts college campus at about fifteen minutes before they're supposed to leave at seven. The prompest one is a young ample Mormon girl and one of my co-workers; she lifeguards rarely and is on-call but won't cover even if you really need her. The premise of the trip is going to see the controversial Yucca Mountain Nuclear Storage Facility, and has been a debauchery of student planning since it was first arranged nearly a month ago.
As we sort out who's riding with who in the four cars, I pick the half-Hispanic and a young Jew along with the girlfriend of a buddy who's a comp sci major as my ride partners. The girl is sveldt and elegant, with a knack for music. She can sing like a bird and pick up any instrument and instictively play or teach, which is a rare gift. The half-hispanic I've met before and know as a party animal, while the Jew masquerades partially as a Fear and Loathing sort, though any type of actual fun or joshing comedy is met with a sincerely unhumoured rapport. I try to convince them to let me bring my .357 magnum along for shooting road signs along the way, and the two gentlemen blanch while the woman revels in the idea. In the end, however, I am forced to merely imagine the joys of leaning out a car window barreling through the desert at 110 miles per hour aiming for speed limit signs.
The ride to Vegas down Alt. Route 95 takes you through what America would be if its economy was such as that of Capetown or any member of the Czech Republic. Hawthorne, Yerington, Weed Hill, Walker Lake, Mercury - it's a different America out there. Goldfield was small, a mining town that's still partially alive. The 10-room High School and 'Home of the Muckers' was twenty-feet from the one fast-food chain in town - a simple little McDonald's styled in the noveau-retro arcs and high glass windows. An old man bundled up for desert winter staggered between the main corner in town between the four tall stone facades of the county minucipal buildings, drunk before 11 A.M. on a Sunday. These small towns have to order water from Dasani and Evian because their own drinking water is contaminated, and the big cities like Vegas and Reno hold the deeds to quite a few water rights. Local supplies are either poisonous or so heavily laden with mercury they lead to severe retardation before kids even get out of their teens. This is all in America - so the one dealership in the town is Ford, and you rarely see anything on thelot older than a '98.
It's Sagebrush for a long way. I remember reading once that if you put all the people in the world - roughly 7 billion - into a per-capita population density equal to New York - roughly 60,000 per square mile, or some such - you could fit everyone into a country the size of Yugoslavia. Looking out, across unpopulated region, where per-acre costs are usually around ten dollars an acre, you feel dwarfed. You can look out for miles, clear as day, and all you see is desert. Sagebrush, and the low-growing cactii. The telephone lines, which stand starkly tall in the enviroment, are really something that makes you wonder. How did they bring it up? 100 miles from the nearest town, and they strung up phone lines - even in the most desolate and unfriendly terrain, they managed to put the basic neccessities of our technological age. In an odd way, it gives you hope for civilization and the determination of man to conquer against all odds.
We arrive in vegas at roughly three p.m. - record time, but that's what you usually expect with road-tripping college kids. The first thought on all of their minds is hitting the buffet at the Rio - the cheapest one in town. They told me about having starved themselves for two days, and, shaking my head, I told them that I would bury them in an eating competition. It proves to be true - after my fifth plate I got my mid-meal salad - a heavy plate stacked like a italian salad but with an excess of the croutons - and they stare at me, open-mouthed. Even the obese have stopped and just watch me, terror and nausea welling up behind their eyes like a seasick person watching the shore retreat into the horizon. Curled in the fetal position, two of the girls on the trip threaten to barf if I don't stop. And, grudging them the favor, though I am still hungry, we leave barely twenty-minutes after starting.
Cruising Vegas at sunset is something everyone should do - it's the perfect metropolitan image now. Red Hot Chili peppers on the CD player with four other people in the car, while the desert turns the sun to the kind of bright orange that reminds you of watching fires on a winter evening, sharp in the darkness contrasting it. There are no purple clouds, but the sun can get as big as when it sets in the plains in Texas. The clouds make it shimmer and round, like tinted mercury splattered on a glass surface.
The downtown core is rotted out in Vegas, much like an apple used for a bong. It sounds like a bad analogy, I know most of all - but as soon as you step out into Vegas night, all you can smell is marijuana and cheap air-freshener. A hint of whiskey in the breeze, and chlorine from all the fake waterfalls mingles with the fresh scent of the miles of desert flowers that surround the oasis. It really is something amazing, Clark County. It's not in it's death-throes yet, but it's living life the moment before the bullet hits the bone. Things are burning bright and burning out all over - The Colorado river is maxed out for water supplies, and the developers just keep wanting to move people in, despite record-slow tourist seasons for the past two years, and there's a Nuclear storage facility opening up just an hour and a half north of them.
Though, Vegas finally has integrated a bit more. It's not in Nevada any more, it's L.A. 2 - Bigger, Faster, Grittier. It's not a white-washed community any more - black children run and play on the streets openly, Hispanics ride in limousines, and Chinese blackjack dealers bring home the bacon for kids. Two koreans and a black work one of the small pizzerias outside the strip, and gang grafitti stolen from the Coastal Wars springs up on the underpasses and concrete walls that line the low-rent districts that used to house so many more maverick card players, obsessive compulsives and burned-out dice-heads.
We head out to Yucca far too early the next day. The college studnets now are working with two nights of minimal sleep, and look groggy as they push the plunger of the cheap coffee pots at the Howard Johnson Airport Inn where we spent one filthy night. We pile on to a tour-bus with some of the benevolent chairpeople and educators of esteemed age that are just visting for the trip and flew down from Reno, who had to be up at five for their pick-up. We stop off at the Educational Facility to pick up our security badges and get some minor education about all that's going on out there - ecologically, geologically, financially, and, most importantly, financially. It's too many 'lly's' for the kids this early, and most of the info sloughes off them like rain on a cheap plastic poncho. We pick up our tour guide - one of the head brains at the facility - who acts just like what his is. The egghead talks and talks and talks - about nothing in particular - because they don't let him out to lecture very often. I fall asleep five times during the bus ride out, and each time - during the course of two and a half hours - I wake up to hear him still talking.
Yucca mountain is desolate. They show us the pens where they keep protesters who cross over the property line into Area 25 - they used to run shuttles twice a day to Humboldt county for booking, but now they usually take them in the military desert patrol jeeps, because the few that come are usually just in it for the booking on their criminal record - to say they had protested it. The relatively elderly military guards outside the facility only carry 9mm-sidearms - p226's - and laugh when I make jokes about saying "Allah Akhbar!" There's no nuclear waste there yet, and everyone is taking it as a bit of a joke.
We stand on the Vista overlooking the property of Area 25 - three or five mountain ranges, and miles of flat desert between. 1000 feet below us, trolleys hauling scientists and miners in and out rumble slightly, and the slate-gray sky is smooth with clouds. One of the tour guides is an English Major - I ask her if she believed she'd be doing this when she graduated, and she answered that she hadn't expected it at all. Community relations and communications takes up people of any skill, just so long as you're smart or well-spoken, and will put you to work.
After a cold lunch from Marie Callendar's - the appointed caterer of Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Storage Facility - we head only a quarter-mile into the five-mile tunnel. The first research alcove is pitted and bored out, with numerous roch samples taken out for the helluvit. The catwalks and safety needs are overly exaggerated - 8,000,000 worked hours with no accidents. But walking in is something out the Science Fiction. The ventilated air runs along the roof of the cavern, the spine, while steel supports curve along the side, ribs. It feels like you're walking down to the belly of a snake, with a slight downgrade.
Just to cause trouble, I ask them why they don't merely tear up all of Area 25 - a former nuclear test site - and just pave it with solar panels which would provide enough energy to power all of the U.S. A Nevada resident, and tour guide who has been working on Yucca mountain since its inception says to me, "It would destroy the precious desert ecosystem." I ask if they worry about desert reclamation - cloud seeding, controlled thermals, and offshore turbines - eventually re-habilitating the desert atmosphere and turning everything green. They laugh at me, and ask why anyone would want to do that. "The City of Las Vegas has drastic water needs, and wouldn't think twice about shutting you guys down, aside from making southern Nevada a forested area." The egghead turns to me, smiles a completely unfriendly smile, and just turns back to his determined path along the catwalk.
We head out almost immediately - civilian populous can't go very deep into the facility at all. They tell us that Yucca Mountain won't be storing waste for another 20 or 30 years. We see the drill that mined the cave - a massive thing 25 feet in diameter, and about 70 or 80 feet long - that they are just leaving outside the facility because it's cost effective to let it rust in the rain rather than disassemble it. I didn't know what to expect of it - something out of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, maybe - but it was flat, with a series of spinning plates that looked like flying saucers. Not drill-like at all.
Back in vegas after another two hours of lecturing by the egghead, and we cruise downtown during the early afternoon hours. Vegas is different before all the creeps come out for the night - then again, any city is normal during the day. An Elvis impersonator steps out of the Tropicana Lane apartment suites, and a Japaneses girl runs out to hand him something - she touches his arm when she hands it to him, longily, for an instant too long, and betreays their secret to anyone watching. As she walks back to the apartments, he looks at her one last time, then gets in his Van to head out to tonight's gig.
After two hours of sitting in the Howard Johnson rooms, debating what to do that night in democratic style - the most inefficient method in the world - the entire group decides to go walk the strip together. They walk up to a second-story food court above the M&M and Coca-Cola super retail outlets, and, in digust, I ditch them for New York New York. The pizza place on the lower mezznie really should be at the Hotel Desk - the crust i light, and perfectly moist, which is rare in the desert - with the grains and salts just crusting the bottom. The sauce is also good, and, after peeling through two slices, I walk over to the Boardwalk, where one of the pizza place employees advises me I can get an automatic tab set up and they won't card.
Vegas is a funny place, and it's best categorized by its Casinos. The Boardwalk is the kind of Nightmare Hunter Thompson wrote about the Circus-Circus being thirty years ago, played out on a much more grotesque and abomindable level. The clown behind the bar doesn't card me after all, and after racking up 100 dollars in drinks, I ditch the bar and walk through five casinos, criss-crossing the street to throw any goons off. Monte Carlo, Flamingo, Caesar's, Bellagio, Imperial Palace, Aladdin, Paris - all have a theme, and all the themes are executed poorly. A belligerent woman, stepping out of the mock eiffel tower at the Paris could be overheard saying, "Well, now that I've done that i dont have to go to France." Reconsidering, I hazard the guess that for the undiscerning customer, they are executed fantastically.
I discuss the recent changes in Vegas with some of the rickshaw cyclists in the parking lot of the Bellagio while they smoke out - and Vegas seems more and more like New Orleans in a very small enviroment on four kinds of uppers. People are always moving fast here - a lot faster than Mardi Gras, but with all the same tricks and products - poor Mexican immigrants with hands worn from labour on both sides of the border hand out advertisements for sex lines, prostitutes, and strip clubs on every street corner where Hotel security can't touch them. Rickshaws move up and down the stret trying to coerce passengers out of the crowds of jacketed tourists that try not to make eye contact and still look at the lights. I watch with mildly inebriated glee as a man picks up his phone-order hooker on the street outside the Flamingo - they proceed back to his twelfth-floor room and have rage sex - forgetting to close the curtain. A floor down and five rooms over, a businessman looks out on the strip while drinking, his suit jacket removed and his collar undone.
Walking down the strip you see all types - groups of your stereotypical asiatic tourists with small hand-held DVD-recorders and cameras running in their tight-knit clutches through the streets, businessmen, the groups of middle-aged balding, mildly overweight Amrican men on business trips all in the same pair of leather jackets and jeans. Reuniting with the group of students, we go through everything I've already done, watching the water show at the Bellagio. Those of you who saw it in Ocean's Eleven probably know what I'm talking about - but every night at nine p.m. now, they play "Proud to Be An American" to the adjulation of the myopic onlookers. The show stinks of far too much chlorine - probably enough to kill any birds that land in the pond.
Walking back to the Howard Johnson alone - after another trip to new York New York and a cone of gelato at the Bellagio - where I also interviewed one of the gallery's employees, and mocked the shoppers at Gucci and Prada - I mock a troupe of twelve marines in dress uniform, questioning which one of them was the bride at the JROTC winter ball. They keep up with me for about five blocks, but after running through the Exalicubr, the Tropicana and the MGM Grand, I manage to lose them all. Arriving back at the hotel, I find most of my fellow collegiates involved in a drinking game with the teacher on that trip, and we order more pizza from one of the 24-hour shops down the strip.
Driving back the next day bleary-eyed and with unintelligble curses. We stop off early for breakfast at a upper-middle-class breakfast/bagel chain store, and my car compatriots purchase their breakfasts. As we head out, I spot the woman in front of us in line. I stop by her near the door, and say, for the hell of it, "Pardon me, ma'am, but you have the most exquisite and soulful brown eyes I have ever seen." She looks at me blankly for a moment, as if it is a corny pick-up line, and I walk away without another word. She blushes madly and drops her face into her paper, the singer says to me, as we step into the car to head back.
We push 120 the entire trip back, but my sleep is interrupted occasionally by the spotter shouting out "COP!" and the erratic braking of the anti-locks. A triple murder had been committed near one of the whorehouses out in the desert, and the highway patrol was out in force. We still make good time, passing by the Cottontail ranch and the Shady Lady trailer. A UPS van is parked outside the Cottontail, and I wonder if he's delivering or picking up. We arrive back to see the Thanksgiving dinner finishing in the halls of our esteemed college. I grab three of the freshly dipped strawberries in chocolate, and head back home to sleep.
The Vegas experience is best caught at two times - sunset, and sunrise. Though few cities can be catogrized this way, Sin City is only really experienced in this manner. A rushed feeling, a euphoria of Having Gotten Away With It, all of it is captured in forty minutes of near-light. The world moves on, but for those moments, the gestalt of stress an women and booze and risk, calculated gambling and neon lights, beautiful women you can never acheive that you know slouch back home to abusive boyfriends or empty lives - that's Sin City.
It's a love-hate life.
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Average Rating : 4.5
Total ratings : 4
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| Sin City or Bust, Baby | Login/Create an account | 3 Comments |
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Re: Sin City or Bust, Baby
by chameleon on Dec 16, 2003 - 11:10 AM
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I'm giving it five stars and thats that.
I like stories like this because it shows that the author "realizes life as they live it, every every minute" to quote Emily Webb. Amazing that you could remember all of this, amazing the little nuances and subtle completions of thought you use to finish stories of other people: just flat out amazing. Wish I was there...
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Re: Sin City or Bust, Baby
by MystryssRavynDarque (A1Mandi04@aol.com)
on Dec 18, 2003 - 08:09 AM
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Ooo, this sounds like so much fun! I wanna go! My aunt and uncle lived in Vegas, but just moved back here. In all of their time living there, and the trips my parents took to see them every 5 years, I have never been to Vegas. Maybe someday I can find my way out there. I don't care about gambling, but the sites and sounds will be most entertaining. Plus being the people watcher I am, I will just have a hell of a time.
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Re: Sin City or Bust, Baby
by callei on Dec 21, 2003 - 05:56 AM
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As you say, everyone should do Vegas. I particularly like the drive in from the north in winter when you dont need headlights cuz the moonlight is so bright and you can just follow the dizzy radioactive glow like a compass point.
The drive in from the south is uplifting in the short days of spring. vast open sand with unexpected bits of vivid, lurid green, yellow, orange, purple, and red jumping out at you. I think that is when the dessert is most like the strip itself.
I think this is one of your better one's. Or at least it took me back to Vegas and reminded me why i confuse cheap perfume and clorine to this day.
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