Make It Scream, Make It Burn, page 17
The Real Smoke
Two years into sobriety, I found myself ordering a mocktail at the heart of the Vegas Strip. This was in a three-story cocktail lounge enclosed by a giant chandelier made from two million crystal beads, their sparkling curtains wrapped around a secret place called Level 1.5, where you could order real drinks with names like the Forbidden Fruit and the Infinite Playlist. I got something that tasted like raspberry sherbet. It came in a cosmopolitan glass with coarse sugar crystals around the rim.
I’d been flown out to give a reading at a writing program in town. It was one of the first times I’d ever been flown anywhere; even the syntax felt glamorous, thrillingly passive. It seemed like proof of being wanted, though it had brought me to a city that was all about degrading yourself by wanting too much, too rashly, without any hope of getting even a fraction of what you’d fantasized. Back in New Haven, I’d been reeling from the end of a four-year relationship that I still felt constituted by. My life with Dave had cut right to the core of me and burrowed there. It wouldn’t give up residence for a long time. I could say I didn’t know that then, but I did. I knew. Every time I said something to anyone, I was still trying to say it to him.
After my reading, my hosts said they wanted to take me to the Strip. We were all young, none of us tired, all of us buzzed on the prospect of having an ironic experience of the city’s relentless pageantry. My hosts were grad students who said they never went to the Strip unless they were taking someone from out of town, except for one woman who worked there as a cocktail waitress to supplement her financial aid.
On nights like that one, sobriety still felt like deprivation. With strangers, drinking had always been the way I’d let the night unravel into something we couldn’t see the edges of. Without it, I was stuck inside a container with visible boundaries. Now I was stuck inside a three-story chandelier. When someone suggested getting a mocktail, I recoiled. I had no interest in the simulated version of the actual experience of getting drunk. But then I thought, Why not? The most authentic Vegas experience was simulated experience anyway.
As it turned out, my mocktail tasted great. I was drinking juice in the land of two million crystal beads. The night was just getting started. We went to a secret pizza joint hidden behind the slot machines, deep in the interior of the interior, far from any windows or clocks. We went to a humid greenhouse where golden trees sprouted golden coins from their branches. Red lanterns flickered in the shadows. The snails were made of roses. We passed an electronic billboard that said WE RESPECT YOUR OPINION OF ASPARAGUS BUT DISAGREE WITH IT and then HAVE A SAFE TRIP HOME! But we weren’t going home. We were going to the Bellagio fountains. We watched the water dance to an instrumental version of the Titanic theme song. Those illuminated surging plumes stirred the part of me—deep inside—that wanted to find beauty in what other people found absurd.
One of my hosts, a man named Joe—handsome in his hipster jeans, with curly blond hair and a perpetually wry, bemused expression on his face—asked if there was anything else I wanted to see. There was something, I told him. I wanted to buy a onesie. It was for one of my best friends, who was about to have a baby. She was possibly the classiest woman I knew. She had an elegant West Village apartment, an elegant dog, and an elegant chef husband who made elegant farm-to-table food. I wanted to buy her the tackiest onesie I could find.
“I know a place,” Joe said, and took me to the biggest souvenir shop in the world. It was closed. Nothing was supposed to be closed. He said, “I know another place.” It didn’t have what we were looking for. He said, “This isn’t done.”
It turned out the only thing better than finding the onesie was not finding the onesie, because then we got to keep looking. It felt good to cruise the mild winter night in Joe’s Jeep, to see the neon blurring and dazzling around us, dispensing enchantment like an IV drip. You got it in your bloodstream and things started to hum. This night felt more like the first night I’d done cocaine than anything had since.
We cruised the clutch of all-night wedding chapels that connected the Strip to downtown. We passed the Chapel of the Flowers, the Chapel of the Bells, Graceland Wedding Chapel, and A Wee Kirk o’ the Heather, as well as the grande dame, with its humble name: A Little White Chapel, where Frank Sinatra and Michael Jordan and Rita Hayworth had each gotten hitched, all their ghosts sheltered under a towering Elvis in a gold lamé suit who promised, in cursive, with love. It was where Britney Spears had married her best friend at three in the morning, in a rented lime-green limo. “They were laughing, but crying, too,” said the chapel’s owner. “I thought it was a marriage that would last forever.” They signed annulment papers the following afternoon. Reality was like that here: You ordered what you wanted, and then if you didn’t want it anymore, you returned it. You could switch from Paris to Venice, from Luxor to New York, from the circus to the castle. These were the fruits of restlessness, the capitalist gospel of choice. You could get married. Then you could take it back.
Joe took me to the swimming pool at the Golden Nugget, where an enclosed glass waterslide curved through a massive aquarium full of ancient-bodied sharks circling their kingdom, cool as you please. We flirted beside the sharks, in the hotel corridors, in the parking lot. If the sensation of flirting were an interior landscape, it would be a cavern lit up like Vegas at night—flickering with possibility, sizzling like moths against neon.
We ended up finding our onesie on Fremont Street, in the shadow of forty-foot Vegas Vic, who smoked a neon cigarette between his neon lips. Once upon a time, that giant glowing cigarette had sent up actual puffs of smoke. Now Fremont Street had become the Fremont Street Experience: a pedestrian walkway covered by the massive canopy of a curving LED screen. This felt like a natural extension of the logic of the casinos, which kept you far away from windows—away from the rhythms of day and night, the vast otherness of sky. Now the sky had been banished completely. Strangers screamed above us on zip lines.
For the first time since the end of Dave, I was feeling the glimmering suggestion of what it might be like to fall in love with someone else. This feeling of anticipation was quite different from actually falling in love. It was arguably even better. Nothing was really at stake. It was more like opening a window without having to go outside and face the sky. I spent the ride home wondering if Joe would kiss me when we pulled up to my hotel in his Jeep. It was like being sixteen again. He didn’t kiss me, but I knew—from the particular way he hadn’t, from his pause—that someday he would.
In 1968 the Yale School of Architecture offered a seminar called the “Learning from Las Vegas Research Studio.” The professors who designed it, Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi, believed that architecture had become too “socially coercive,” imposing taste rather than responding to it, and they believed the Las Vegas Strip pushed back against this coercion as the “purest and most intense” manifestation of consumer desires. Their course centered on a ten-day trip to Vegas devoted to “open-minded and nonjudgmental investigation,” seeking those truths that might dwell in the urban forms that other architects regarded with disdain.
It was an unusual venture: a couple of Yale professors and their students showing up on the Strip, freshly sprung from the Brutalist concrete palace of their architecture school back in New Haven. They stayed in free rooms at the Stardust. They got an invitation to the gala opening of the Circus Circus casino, where they showed up in Day-Glo castoffs from a local Salvation Army. After they asked for local funding, one headline read: “Yale Professor Will Praise Strip for $8,925.” The implication was clear: these diplomats from the land of the highbrow would not deign to praise the lowbrow for free. But Venturi and Scott Brown didn’t believe the highbrow and the lowbrow were separate. They wanted to put “A&P parking lot” and “Versailles” in the same sentence. They wanted them to share a lineage. Midway through the semester, the students started calling their course “The Great Proletarian Cultural Locomotive.”
Decades later, I shared their impulse to frame Vegas as an underdog in the great games of taste. It’s easy to call Vegas cheesy, but what is cheesy, anyway? Its current meaning is an ironic reversal of what it meant in the days of the British Empire, which was fine or grand, as in the real chīz (chīz being the Urdu word for thing). Now it means something inauthentic and unsubtle, something that tries too hard. All of Vegas tries too hard. But is it inauthentic? I’ve never thought so. If inauthenticity depends on pretending you are something you’re not, then Vegas has always been adamantly honest. It is all fake, all the time.
Vegas gets it. There’s no escape from artifice. You can pretend you aren’t performing, or you can admit you’re performing, but either way you are always performing.
“Let me confess my preference for the real fakery of Las Vegas over the fake reality of Santa Fe,” writes art critic Dave Hickey. “For the genuine rhinestone over the imitation pearl.” That night at the Chandelier Bar, Vegas was a genuine rhinestone. It followed its fakery so far that it ended up being radically honest. Even if it was trying too hard, it wasn’t trying to be something it wasn’t. Sure, it was lowbrow and absurd. Sure, it was tasteless. But fuck the snobs of taste. Why disdain Vegas for openly admitting what was already true everywhere? The whole world was making promises it couldn’t keep. The whole world was out to scam you. Vegas was just upfront about it. It put marquee lights around it. To me, Vegas felt like the urban-planning equivalent of the homeless man we passed whose sign said: WHY LIE? I WANT BEER.
Maybe I was just drawn to the city because I liked finding beauty in what others found ugly. My awe at the Bellagio fountains wanted to believe it was compensating for someone else’s disgust. Vegas understood that any time you were somewhere, there were a thousand elsewheres you might be longing for. So it jammed them together: New York–New York, Paris, the Tropicana, the Mirage. Its glaring neon landscapes were an articulation of collective longing. It acknowledged how much of our lives we spend looking toward illusory, impossible horizons. It suggested that this longing was not delusion, but one of our central truths. It constituted us.
When I got back to my New Haven winter, Joe and I started writing to each other. We turned our lives into stories and lobbed them back and forth. He told me about breaking into the Circus Circus midway after hours and playing free Skee-Ball in its empty aisles. He told me about shattering a bunch of empty bottles by throwing them off his balcony one night. I imagined his glowing city from the middle of my Connecticut blizzards. When I told my friends about him, I started calling him Vegas Joe. This wasn’t dismissal, exactly. It was more like an acknowledgment of the ways that I had already cast him as a character in the story I was trying to write about this next chapter of my life. He was the mascot of Possibility in Aftermath.
We agreed to meet in Boston, at the massive annual writers’ conference that I annually dreaded attending. That year I was desperate to get there. I dug my car out of three feet of snow and fishtailed down icy highways. The swell of potential worked on me like a drug, blocking out everything else: the pelting sleet, the black ice, the road slipping under my tires. I cranked up my radio: “I’m living on such sweet nothing.” Joe kept texting, “Don’t die!” He texted: “When will you get here?”
We booked a room that night. Because the conference had filled the hotel, the only room left was the Presidential Suite. We got it cheap because it was already 10:00 p.m. and it wasn’t occupied. It was huge, with three rooms and panoramic views of downtown Boston’s glassy skyscrapers. It didn’t even have a bed, because it was used exclusively for large corporate cocktail parties. It had a wet bar and sectional leather couches. We ordered a trundle bed and a bucket of seafood: crab legs, oysters, lobster tail. We didn’t sleep much.
After that night we found ourselves in a state I knew well: the giddy rush of offering ourselves to each other. To start, we offered each other rough transcriptions of the ragged emotional arcs of our last long-term relationships. He wrote about driving out to a ghost town on the shores of the Salton Sea: the gutted homes full of plates, a flock of white pelicans. He wrote: “Here’s to unbland wellness,” a phrase I’d used in an essay about an author who’d been afraid that sobriety would make him bland for good. I wondered if I was falling in love. I wondered if I was built exclusively to fall in love. I worried, sometimes, that I was built more to fall in love than to be in love. But didn’t everyone worry about that? You couldn’t think your way past it. You just had to keep falling in love, over and over again, and hope that it stuck once, to prove it could.
A few weeks after getting back from Boston, I visited the Yale architecture library, looking for a book called Every Building on the Sunset Strip. Published in 1966 by the artist Ed Ruscha, it is an accordion-style art book that unfolds to a length of twenty-five feet. As its title promises, it documents every building on the Sunset Strip between Doheny and Crescent Heights: motor inns, faux Tudor cottages, a big shed called Body Shop Burlesque, a smaller shed called Sea Witch, a café called the Plush Pup. The book had helped inspire the Yale Vegas seminar. When Venturi and Scott Brown took their students to Vegas in 1968, they drove the length of the Strip with a camera mounted on the hood of their car, just as Ruscha had done on Sunset two years earlier.
I was drawn to the premise of Ruscha’s book for the same reason I’d been drawn to the premise of the Vegas seminar: both wanted to find beauty in the same bric-a-brac sprawl that others called the epitome of ugliness. This was part of my heritage. All my life I’d been told I didn’t seem like a person from Los Angeles. But all my life I’d been a person from Los Angeles. The more frequently I was told I didn’t seem to be from L.A., the more strongly I wanted to defend it. It was a place other people loved to call shallow or fake, but I found its strip malls and their parking lots oddly gorgeous: sunlight glimmering off gritty streets, palm trees silhouetted against smoggy sunsets.
Ruscha’s book made me want to walk the Vegas Strip from north to south, four miles total, and take notes on all of it. I would find the blueprints of collective fantasy. The project started gathering the force of an ethical repo job. I’d salvage meaning from what others had called blight. But who was I kidding? I also wanted a reason to go see Vegas Joe.
I hatched a plan. A friend of mine was getting married at Zion National Park in early July, just a three-hour drive from Vegas, and I would go out a few days early to stay with Joe and walk the Strip. Then he and I would go to her wedding together.
A few weeks before the visit, Vegas Joe told me he had bedbugs. He was trying to get rid of them by cranking his heater in 110-degree weather and opening all his windows. I knew it wouldn’t work. You needed professional temperatures. But the longer his bedbug saga dragged on, the more I started to suspect he enjoyed something about the battle. Once it became clear that his bedbugs were ongoing, I booked a room for forty-nine dollars at the Flamingo. A few days before my flight, Vegas Joe sent me a photograph of his thigh with three dots of dried blood neatly aligned across his pale flesh. It was the signature trio of bedbug bites that the internet called “breakfast, lunch, and dinner.” I recoiled from the image—not so much the image itself as the threshold crossing that it seemed to signify. We were no longer awestruck strangers watching a dancing fountain, or new lovers perched fifteen stories above Boston. Now we were talking about our bug infestations. His notes made me itch. It was as if his little bugs were powerful enough to reach my brick row house across the country. I was no longer sure I wanted him that close.
From the moment I stepped into Joe’s Jeep, outside the baggage carousels at McCarran, I felt the whole endeavor suffocating under the weight of our expectations: four months of notes and daydreams, all built from one night by a shark tank and another spent in a skyscraper surrounded by the crystalline lights of office buildings. All that fervor had been the intimacy of two curated selves culled from the mess of two actual selves. But this was something else: the sweltering desert evening, the smell of him, the awkwardness of trying to speak to each other in his front seat after months of speaking to each other without our bodies hanging around. I tried to remember that first night in his Jeep but could access only a memory that gleamed like a sparkling awning, a night I’d already conscripted into personal mythology: the night I knew I would survive my breakup. As soon as I got into his car, I started wondering if it might be best for me to go to my friend’s wedding alone.
We drove down Paradise Road, the street running behind the huge hotels like a desolate backyard. It had shops selling uniforms for casino dealers and costumes for strippers. It was full of the detritus that had fallen off the edges of the dream. One billboard asked: INJURED IN A HOTEL? and suggested www.injuredinahotel.com. A vasectomy ad bragged NO SCALPEL NO NEEDLE at www.ez-snip.com. At the airport, I had overheard a man telling a stranger about his battle with cancer. “They took out my bladder and made me a new one from a fifteen-inch piece of my small intestine,” he’d said. “Everything works great now.”
I kept imagining bedbugs in the back of the Jeep, folding their tiny bodies into the crevices of my suitcase zippers and pockets. I vaguely understood that Joe’s bedbugs had become a kind of psychic stand-in for his actual and flawed humanity: all the parts of him that could not be sculpted and viewed from a comfortable distance, all the parts that were imperfect or vulnerable or struggling, trying to get his depression medications right.
He spent the night with me at the Flamingo. We lay together in a king bed that suggested certain stories—an illicit tryst between lovers, a drunken night between strangers, a wedding anniversary—but we lived another kind of story. Our bodies didn’t touch at all.
What I saw when I finally walked the Strip: the Palazzo, the Venetian, the Mirage. Treasure Island, the Wynn, the Encore. Circus Circus. New York–New York. Mandalay Bay. Hooters in the distance. An animatronic Atlantis, drowning and rising every hour. A recovery meeting in a Riviera conference room that smelled like stale popcorn, where a man said it was tough for him to stay sober as an electronica DJ. What else? Jeff Koons’s tulips with their own security guard. Signs advertising yoga with dolphins. A prize booth called the Redemption Center that I turned into my Twitter backdrop.
