Make It Scream, Make It Burn, page 18
I saw a homeless man sitting in the triangular shade of a Catholic church who asked me what kind of God I believed in, then said he wanted to show me his scar but didn’t want to give me nightmares. I saw a dad on crutches beside an aisle of carnival games, his wheelchair piled with the stuffed animals he’d won for his kids: a robot, a banana. I saw a T-shirt bearing the silhouette of a stripper that said I SUPPORT SINGLE MOMS, then overheard a mom telling her son, “We have to go to another branch of this fucking stupid-ass bank.” A man exiting the Luxor, suspicious of the daylight, asked his friend: “Why are we going outside?” Beyond the casino doors, it was 110 degrees in the shade. A dry fountain eager to defend itself said DUE TO DROUGHT. Even illusion had its limits.
Vegas no longer seemed like a rhinestone unfairly victimized by highbrow snobbery. It was a machine designed to make money. Its cheesiness was the ultimate capitalist enterprise. Its profit margins came layered in curtains of crystals, millions of untenable promises: every bulb, every steak, every shark in every shark tank. Even if I admired the honesty of the homeless man whose sign told the truth—WHY LIE? I WANT BEER—I had no desire to defend the economic system that had made him homeless in the first place. But who was I to cry false consciousness on the strangers in two hundred thousand hotel rooms all around me, to say they didn’t understand their own plight? What did it mean that everyone kept losing their money but believed they were having a good time?
After one of Siegfried & Roy’s white tigers attacked Roy onstage at the Mirage in 2003, Roy kept telling everyone that Montecore hadn’t meant him any harm. Montecore had just been trying to protect him. At first the live audience didn’t know the attack had not been a planned part of the show. A ten-year-old British boy buried his face in his mother’s sleeve. “I tried to tell him it would be okay and that it wasn’t real, because this was supposed to be magic,” she told one reporter. During the days afterward, her son kept saying: “You said it wasn’t real, Mummy.” In a land where everything was supposed to be fake, the arrival of reality functioned as the betrayal of a promise, an upending of the deal, a reversal of the plan.
During my days at the Flamingo, I woke up early each morning to work on copyedits for a book deadline. The dirty room-service dishes of strangers stayed in my hotel hallway for days, untouched: the fudge sauce–smeared remains of a brownie sundae, desolate lumps in a filmy puddle of melted ice cream. Had the people who’d ordered that sundae gotten what they wanted? I assumed everyone had been wounded by the same boom-bust cycle I’d let myself be disappointed by.
Lining up for coffee in the lobby casino at 6:30 in the morning, I stood exclusively with people who’d been up all night. The whole place smelled like coconut sunscreen and smoke. One man in line—strung out, dead tired—looked at me with pity. “Good luck,” he said softly, gently touching my elbow. I took my coffee to the thick heat of the flamingo garden, where the air stank of birds and their shit. I felt so sad at the sight of a woman smoking—in such heat, so early in the morning, among flamingos—that it took me a moment to remember I was smoking, too.
While I was working on my copyedits by the hotel pool, in the blazing sun, a leathery man spotted a leathery woman across the field of plastic chaise longues. “You are a beast!” he yelled. “Get me a club soda.” A thirteen-year-old boy wore a T-shirt down to his knees printed with two boxes marked TAKEN and SINGLE. The latter was checked. People measured the price of things in terms of blackjack hands: “I could lose that in six.” At closing time, people at the pool got upset. A man threw his inflatable beach ball at a lifeguard. In a city that advertised twenty-four-hour-a-day pleasure, the next best thing to immortality, every closing time was a little death.
After he got off work, Joe took me to a fondue restaurant tucked inside the Forum Shops at Caesars Palace. Everything was simultaneously too much—chocolate-chip cookies, dipped in chocolate fondue—and not enough. I was irritated by the way Joe kept cutting me off in the middle of my sentences. His medication meant he had no appetite, and that irritated me, too. I was easily irritated. He was saying something about nihilism, how all meaning was subjective and constructed and there was no core from which…but I wasn’t following, totally. I was watching the flames curl from pink crystals below the fondue pot, leaning so close my hair almost caught on fire. The waiter smiled at me knowingly. He said it happened every day. I told Joe that maybe he shouldn’t come to the wedding with me after all. It was too much, too soon. What I couldn’t say to him: You were an idea. Now you’re here. He told me he was working on a novel about an alternate universe where all the Vegas hotels had been converted into prisons. I’d converted Joe into Vegas Joe, but it turned out he was an actual person. He was funny and handsome and kind but he was also struggling, he was also real—he needed things, he was unsure about others—and when I was around him there was a lump in my throat that I couldn’t stop swallowing, a longing not for the man in front of me, but for the man who wasn’t.
In the book that emerged from their Vegas seminar, Venturi and Scott Brown argue that the signs on a commercial strip are more important than the buildings they advertise: “The sign at the front is a vulgar extravaganza; the building at the back, a modest necessity.” This kind of persuasion is also the logic of long-distance daydreams. There can be truth in these dreams, in that signage—and even beauty. But the architecture of persuasion is also the opposite of proximity and inhabitance. Which is all to say: After pulling off the highway, I didn’t know how to dwell in the building I’d chosen. Joe was the real smoke at the end of a fake cigarette, but I wasn’t ready for another person’s full humanity. We had been something far apart that we were not able to be together.
At my friend’s bachelorette party the next night—in a suite at the Venetian, fifteen floors above a chlorinated Grand Canal—other women took turns describing the annoying habits of their Sig Os and passed around glasses of cheap champagne. I no longer drank champagne, or had a Sig O to be annoyed by. After dark, we strolled out of the cloud-painted Venetian sky and into the Vegas night, wearing our sparkly tiaras, walking past what appeared to be a pile of bloody rags bunched against the curb, above a drain pipe.
At the “Thunder from Down Under” male revue, under glittering disco lights at the Excalibur, a firefighter, a construction worker, a doctor, a soldier, and a milkman peeled away their uniforms to show their glinting six-packs. Baby-oiled bodies in the strobe-lit darkness collapsed the distinction between being there ironically and just being there. The emcee had a huge sobriety tattoo inked across one of his biceps—GOD GRANT ME THE SERENITY—and made an old woman cup his balls through his shiny leather pants.
As we walked home along the Strip, an SUV full of women pulled up beside us. One leaned her head out the window and asked: “Which one’s the bride?” We pointed her out—with the largest tiara, and the veil—and all the women started shouting: “Don’t do it!” Before they sped away, they said: “We’re all divorced!”
The next time I went to Vegas, I got married there. It was just fifteen months later. I’d moved to New York and fallen in love with a man who had grown up in Vegas, the son of two pawnbrokers. Everyone he met was surprised to learn that he’d actually grown up in Vegas—that anyone had. But he did. He spent his childhood rolling quarters in the back of his parents’ shops, hearing them get called dirty Jews by angry customers, watching them work seven days a week for their entire lives to give their four kids more opportunities than they’d had themselves.
For Charles, Vegas wasn’t an outsized metaphor for impossible dreams or their deflation. It was Saturday-morning cartoons, and Slurpees from the 7-Eleven melting in the ruthless desert sunlight. It was playing high-school basketball at the same courts where the Runnin’ Rebels played pickup games, back in the days of Tark the Shark, the legendary UNLV coach who gnawed on a wet towel when he got nervous. Vegas was where Charles and his father had cruised up I-15 with the radio tuned to the prizefights at Caesars Palace. It was where he’d made his own backyard boxing ring out of paper strips—a child inspired by the particular materials of his world, because it was the world he knew.
Charles and I met at the workspace in downtown Manhattan where we both wrote. He introduced himself by asking me to translate my tattoo. He had eleven tattoos of his own, the most recent of which was his five-year-old daughter’s name, scrawled in blue across his forearm. He’d promised her that after she wrote her name for the first time, he would get it printed permanently on his skin. I would come to understand that he was always good to his word.
When we first met, I already knew his work. I’d read his first book years earlier, a big sprawling novel about Vegas that I loved for its tender evocation of outsiders: teen runaways sleeping on the streets, awkward adolescent boys who lived for their comic books, pawnbrokers mocked by their customers. And his own personal story was well known in our shared literary world. His wife had been diagnosed with leukemia when their daughter, Lily, was just six months old. She’d died just before Lily’s third birthday.
The first time Charles and I talked, we talked for hours. It felt, as they say, like we could have talked forever. Except we couldn’t talk forever, because Charles had to pick up Lily from after-school at five. During that first conversation, I told him about a ritual I’d taken part in a few months earlier, at a residency in Wyoming: on the night of a full moon, we’d all brought empty purses and wallets into an open meadow and asked the universe for something specific we wanted. I’d asked to care less about worldly success. At the time, this had seemed like a very enlightened thing to ask for. The guy who went after me asked for a motorcycle. Charles laughed at that, as I’d hoped—nervous—he would. When I asked Charles what he thought Lily would request during a full-moon ritual, he said she’d probably ask for a plastic ice castle. Then he paused and said, “Honestly, she would ask for a mom.”
This was vintage Charles: willing to state the truth bluntly, jocular about pain because he’d lived it so fully, deeply aware of life as something simultaneously full of trauma and plastic ice castles. He asked if we could meet up again soon and do our own full-moon ritual in the communal kitchen of our workspace. I told him I would bring the empty purses if he supplied the full moon. The next time we met, at a little table by the coffee machine, he tacked up an illustration he and Lily had made together: three jagged mountains cut from brown construction paper, and a round yellow moon hanging above them.
On our first date, Charles took me out for a seven-course Italian meal, but we had to skip the last two courses so he could get back by the time he’d promised the sitter. Our second date was a midday tryst while Lily was at school. We made out in my apartment all morning and then got turkey sandwiches from the bodega at the end of my block, ate them on the grassy strip of Eastern Parkway with plastic bottles of lemonade and a box of the chicken-and-waffle crackers he loved as a child. Our third date was a road trip to the Catskills while Lily was staying with her grandmother. I booked a last-minute room at a tiny bed-and-breakfast where our room was full of animal prints and photographs of Siegfried & Roy, unmauled and beaming. Those days in the Catskills were full of morning walks down a muddy road, messy with spring thaw, to a tiny highway diner where we got eggs and bacon so salty it stung the tiny cut in my mouth. On that trip, we found bliss in all the smallest things. We bought the best snacks at gas stations: licorice and sour cherry balls. We wondered at the albino tigers on our walls. We could riff back and forth on a joke for ten minutes straight, then return to it a day later, riff a little more. Charles was candid about difficulty, and he was funnier than anyone I’d ever met.
In certain ways, the pattern of our early months—our passionate descent into love—looked like other relationships I’d had. But I trusted it more. From the start, our love was embedded in the business of daily living, in all its scattered rag dolls and bake sales and meltdowns and rubber toys under your feet before you flicked on the bathroom light in the middle of the night. Our romance wasn’t charged by the possibility of total abandon; it was electrified by borders and edges. It was less about engaging with curated versions of each other and more about inhabiting ordinary days that summoned our whole selves: scattered, overwhelmed, trying. Our story wasn’t about getting the skyscraper suite just because we felt like it. It was about finding pockets of effervescence in the midst of daily life—waking up on a red futon in his tiny rent-controlled apartment, kissing first thing in the morning in the shadow of a four-foot-high plastic dollhouse.
In the abstract, our love looked tethered by obligation and trauma; by the demands of raising a child, and the long shadow of loss. But there was another truth lurking under all that difficulty: a felt experience of love that didn’t follow any of the scripts I’d spent my life craving. This love lived in fits of midnight laughter on a futon with a too-small blanket. It lived in an hourly motel near the Hudson, with a sitter at home and a mirror on the ceiling of our room. It lived in the shared language of days contoured by after-school pickup and ballet-class leotards, by Saturday-morning chocolate-chip pancakes and tuna melts at their favorite diner.
I’d somehow rocketed straight from single life—smoking alone on my stoop, lost to daydreams and self-pity—into this life of accountability and intimate beholdenness. It was as if I’d taken a shortcut on the banana-yellow path of the Game of Life, which we often played on the living-room carpet that Lily called “Snow Rug, Throw Rug”; as if I’d jumped straight to the family portion of the game board rather than stopping in my little plastic car and spinning the plastic wheel for my own plastic babies. Instead I’d jumped into someone else’s plastic car. Now I was living out of a suitcase wedged into the corner of his crowded living room.
After barely six months together, Charles and I decided to elope to Vegas. Almost every way you looked at it, this was reckless. I had no idea what it meant to be a mother, much less what it meant to mother a child who’d lost her mother. But Charles trusted that I was capable of showing up for this life, and I wanted to show up for it—for him, and for Lily, and for myself. I trusted him because when I looked at him I saw a man who had been showing up for the people he loved, even through unimaginable pain, for years. It was our extraordinary ordinary life—this life made of actual days, striated by obligation—that we were committing to with our improbable wedding, our clandestine joy.
We got married at A Little White Chapel, under the glowing heart, beyond the Astroturf. Lily was having a sleepover at her cousin’s house. We showed up at the cashier’s desk—past the pink Cadillac, past the Tunnel of Love and the drive-through window—and said: “Marry us!” The woman at the register said we needed to go to City Hall for a license. What had I been expecting? One-stop shopping, I suppose, especially at a place that advertised its twenty-four-hour drive-through window. I asked the woman at the register how many people never came back once they found out they needed to go to the courthouse. She thought for a moment, then said, “Maybe fifty percent?”
When we returned with our license in hand, just before eleven, we did not purchase the flower package or the Elvis impersonator. We did not rent the pink Cadillac. We did not have our ceremony in the Chapel L’Amour, or the Crystal Chapel, or the gazebo. We did not drive our rental car under the cherubs painted across the ceiling of the Tunnel of Love. We did it old-school style, in the original chapel, while “Fools Rush In” played from speakers we could not see. The back wall looked like a quilted comforter, upholstered with white silk. Statues of cherubs held tumbling bouquets of fake white flowers. There were stained-glass windows showing roses, hearts, and doves. None of this felt wrong. It felt—weirdly, improbably—right. If I was hurling myself into something entirely unknown, with no idea what the terrain would look like, then it seemed appropriate to do it someplace so utterly strange. It was almost freeing, like an acknowledgment of all the ways I couldn’t have predicted how my life would turn out.
By the end of the ceremony, we had tears in our eyes. The photographer was the witness. Father Someone quoted Nietzsche: “It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship, that makes unhappy marriages.” He did not quote Nietzsche saying, “We ought not to be permitted to come to a decision affecting our whole life while we are in the condition of being in love.”
We were in the condition. I wore a long blue-and-white dress that Charles had given me for my birthday that summer. It looked like clouds. My red nail polish was chipped. I tried to capture both our faces in a selfie with two painted turtles whose wrinkled necks stretched out from their shells so their small heads could touch.
Back at the Golden Nugget, where we were staying, we got cupcakes in the lobby. We ordered room-service steak. I told Charles that the sharks in the aquarium had once struck me as a symbol of wonder and possibility. He said their tank had been built on the land where his grandfather’s first pawnshop once stood. When we tried to go swimming at the third-story infinity pool, we were told it was closing at midnight, in five minutes. A boy who looked sixteen told us so. “But we just got married!” we said. He looked unfazed. He probably heard that every night.
The next year we would have a ceremony in the woods, with a treasure hunt for a feral pack of blissful children. It would be like a postcard that day: all our people and their toddlers, wading into the glittering water. But that night we had only the absurdity of our little white chapel, our fever dream turned actual, with Father Someone consecrating our love. That night it was just us. It was just ours.
