My brain is squeezed inside my skull as the airplane gains altitude. I am myself squeezed between two fellow passengers, one a stranger, the other familiar but, in his way, still strange.
“Let me show you a picture of her,” my friend Jerome says, his iPad propped horizontally onto the meal tray extended in front of him. I’d planned this vacation for all of two weeks, to Las Vegas, and the itinerary is coming together on its own. Jerome, a 20something frequent flyer to the city of sin, touched base with an elementary school acquaintance, via the glorious randomness of Facebook, and we’re to meet her and her friends, strange, shortly after our arrival.
Impulsiveness is the theme of this week, this Sunday-night-through-Wednesday night expo through the city that Carrot built. This is the first real vacation I’ve taken in my adult life, it must be said. On a typical seven-day stretch of paid time off, I split my time between staring at the northeast wall of my living room, where the television is, laying flat on my back in bed, and generally going over each and every mistake I’ve ever made in my life and how they led to me spending the majority of my free time staring at the northeast wall of my living room and laying flat on my back in bed.
..
The stink of drugstore-brand suntan lotion and cigar smoke wafts throughout the entire lobby of the Orleans hotel. The experience is nauseatingly sweet and bitterly stifling; I feel like I’m navigating the viscous insides of a jelly donut. Planted all around the main level is a dazzling arcade of slot machines and Digital Poker, their exteriors tracked by a varied sequence of colored light bulbs, a simple distraction tactic that obfuscates the identical function and nature of each and every playbox. There are literally thousands of these machines populating the insides of Every Single Building on the Strip and off. You will find the same flickering dollar-suppositories cluttering the lobby of the MGM Grand that you will find in a gas station on the outskirts of the city.
There’s a reason for this plentitude, obviously – I have never seen so many obese, leather-skinned, bad-haired people separately in all my life that I have seen in the first day of my visiting vacation to Las Vegas. The darkly endearing “Sin City” should be replaced with the more appropriate, if less marketable, “Sin Sitting.” There are so many obese retirees whizzing around on well-oiled motor-carts that I have a mind to propose the world’s first indoors traffic legislation. Besides them, the otherwise able-bodied desperate and fallen Americans are installed in tables flagged under tall makers what read TEXAS HOLD ‘EM, BLACKJACK, and ROULETTE. The activities have all of the trappings of social intercourse, with four-to-five chairs placed around each burningly lit table, cluttered with ashtrays and empty, soiled plastic cups, but no words are exchanged between players and dealers. There are mechanical movements, head nods, waves of the arm understood by all, a universal language dense with meaning but sparse on vocabulary.
Once again I am on the outside, walking, retreating to the mercifully familiar SBARRO, sure of nothing than my hunger. I happen to turn one way and am suddenly trapped between the fish-eyes of a pale, brown woman in a tight black dress. She sits on a wooden park bench that seems misplaced, like me, indoors. She stares back and I am flattered. In my naïvete it takes me whole minutes to finally suspect that this woman has walked this beat before, that her eyes, like the eyes of the men and women surrounding the Mah Jong tables, had been shooting lasers of innuendo. “It’s the five-second stare,” my friend Jerome says. Five seconds is all it takes to set the wheels in motion that lead to service for hire in the most intimate sense. I experience a flash of regret; why am I here? If these are the people, if this is the population of a city that never even tried to hide its true face, then why did I insist on the visit? What am I really here for?
..
I’d gotten a couple of reports from work that pulled down my mood further. Nothing specific, just random, situational minutiae that cascaded until I fell into a debilitating mood malady that I am still, a day later, reeling from. This trip would have been perfect for one day, perhaps an overnight. Still, there is Carrot Top to see, and lions, dolphins in captivity, stand-up comedians (in captivity) more hotels with interiors painted to appear exterior, and the continued parade of girls in declining stages of undress. But I need to shake off his feeling. The drugs don’t seem to work anymore.
..
I’m already fatigued from this vacation. I can’t even relax. Everything is a stress. Half of my shirts reek of novelty, It’s A Girl! cigars and the gums around my bottom teeth hurt from eating cheap late-night steak and eggs. They say Vegas is Disneyland for adults, but I don’t know that I would want to stay in Disneyland for several days, even as a kid. I feel a compulsion to go home, and research grad schools and revise my short stories. More than anything I'd rather be in the northeast corner of my room on a warm afternoon, watching dust swim up along a sunbeam, waiting for something, anything, to happen. Something worth experiencing.
