Even my insistence that the trip was “for work” fell mainly on deaf ears, except in the case of my friend Kate, who snarkily enquired if that meant I was planning on becoming a prostitute. Why else would I want to move to Sin City for an entire month?
Actually, Kate wasn’t far off the mark: the naked commercial truth was that my UK publisher—in the form of my new “publicity manager,” Jess—was badgering me for idea on how we could promote
The Upgrade
in the old country.
“I could spend a month dicking around in Vegas hotels and writing about them,” I suggested, without really thinking through how much work that would actually entail. “And this will be my first visit to the Strip since I stopped drinking. Thirty days sober in Vegas might actually kill me.”
Jess’s reaction to the idea went way beyond mere professional approval: she was positively bouncing with excitement, while also seething with jealousy. British people who have never been to Las Vegas really want to go to Las Vegas: Jess’s enthusiasm and envy were shared by every one of the Brits and other Europeans to whom I mentioned the plan. My friend James from London promptly canceled all of his meetings and booked a plane ticket to join me for a week.
I’d expected a mixed reaction, but not one so neatly divided along nationality lines. My non-American pals couldn’t imagine a more fun place to spend a month than Vegas, while my American buddies would rather put their eyes out with the blunt end of a cocktail umbrella than set foot in the Bellagio or the MGM Grand.
So what gives? Why do so many Americans turn up their noses at Vegas, while we foreigners can’t get enough of it?
For a start, Americans’ familiarity with Vegas has matured into the mother of contempt. Forty years have passed since Hunter S. Thompson and his “Samoan” attorney jumped in their red shark and began the journey that would forever brand Vegas as the global center of decadence and depravity. In the four decades that followed the publication of
Fear and Loathing
, Las Vegas has swollen unrecognizably wider and taller and brighter and costlier and pornier. Compared to Thompson’s bleak and gritty Vegas, today’s Strip is like Disneyland—if Disneyland doubled its prices and paved its streets with badly-Photoshopped hookers.
Hollywood hasn’t helped: 2010’s most popular movie—
The Hangover
—told the story of a gaggle of man-children who travel to Vegas and nearly drug themselves to death. Indeed, every single Vegas-based movie or TV show from the last couple of decades—
Fear and Loathing
,
The Cooler
,
Showgirls
,
Leaving Las Vegas
,
Honeymoon in Vegas
and every episode of
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
—has delivered broadly the same message: Vegas will mess you up good. And
certainly my own history with the city would appear to bear that out.
Then there’s the mounting economic argument against celebrating Las Vegas. Writing on The Daily Beast, Meghan “Daughter of John” McCain blamed Vegas’ reputation as a den of reckless abandon for the fact that her father is no longer able to visit—lest Democrats accuse him of possessing poor judgment.
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Why, then, are we foreigners still drawn the place? Aren’t we supposed to be the cultured ones? Well, yes. And that’s sorta the point: we love Las Vegas for precisely the same reasons that we love America. The town is the living, breathing embodiment of the phrase “only in America.” Frankly, no other country but the USA would have the solid brass balls required to build the place; to see a patch of desert and declare “what this place needs is a bunch of casinos, hookers and a big, glass, Egyptian-themed pyramid with an American flag suspended from the ceiling!”
Sure, the Chinese have the money and the love of gambling, but they lack the showmanship: there’s a reason the Triads have failed to produce their own Sinatra. The Saudis love to waste their oil money on giant playgrounds surrounded by sand, but their squeamishness over booze and naked women takes them out of the running. Europe? Please. The Germans lack the sense of humor; the Spanish would never get it finished, we Brits don’t have the space—and the French? Two words: Disneyland Paris.
No, Vegas is as quintessentially American as a teenage kid pleasuring himself with an Apple Pie, and in the past half-century or so it has grown to reflect all of the best and worst of the land of the free. The impossibly beautiful women; the love of risk-taking and the life-changing consequences those risks can bring; the sense of well-pack-aged
fun; the really freaking amazing weather. Hell, the town even has its own Statue of Liberty, just like the one that has beckoned so many immigrants to a new life on these shores. Except, of course, the Vegas version has its own roller coaster. Tired and huddled masses? Not any more!
In a final ironic twist, while various American editors were interested in commissioning me to write a one-off piece about my trip, it took the Greek-born founder of what is now the content arm of America Online to see the full potential of the adventure. “You have to write a daily diary,
daahling
!” cried Arianna Huffington in that way she does (she really does). “And take this Flip Cam! Get video!” God bless you Arianna: the American Dream is you.
My plan was to start out in LA, where I’d rent a suitably American car, and drive three hours across the desert until I hit the Sahara hotel—the one-time home of the Rat Pack that was now just weeks away from closing permanently after a lifetime of service. From there, I’d just follow the best deals along the Strip, writing about whatever fun occurs along the way.
More importantly though, I wanted to spend the bulk of my trip away from the bright lights. To meet some of the people who work and play in Vegas, with no less hubristic a goal than to figure out what modern Vegas can tell us about the state of the American dream.
I wanted to spend one day with a Vegas cop, and another with some kind of sex worker (“FOR WORK”). I wanted to find God in a casino chapel and ask a real-estate expert to explain why the Vegas housing market is so screwed that people have to live in storm drains. I wanted to meet someone who lives in a storm drain. I also wanted to get married to a cocktail waitress dressed as Elvis, shoot an assault rifle, jump off a building and talk to fat people in the Burger King at the Luxor. God, I hate the Luxor, but I’d lay money that some interesting stories pass below its stupid pointy roof. And one more thing: 5 percent of
Las Vegans are members of the Church of Latter-Day Saints—maybe, finally, I might meet a fucking Mormon.
Thirty-four days later and, of those lofty goals, I’d achieved precisely two. I’d spent a downlifting afternoon in the company of two foreclosure lawyers who painted a picture of the greed, misfortune and human stupidity that was neither limited to the bankers nor the punters. And, yes, I’d finally met a Mormon: a spa consultant who invited me to join her for a “couples” massage treatment that she had designed for the Cosmopolitan. Four hours naked with a sexy female Mormon: done and done.
My final few days on the Strip were a curious whirl of press—TV, radio, magazines, newspapers of various stripes—all of whom asked the same question in a different way: how has 33 days in Las Vegas changed my opinion of the city?
As I stood outside Caesars Palace, being interviewed by Fox5’s Elizabeth Watts, it occurred to me that there’s probably no other city on earth in which a man wanting to stay an entire month would constitute headline news. But Vegas, of course, is unlike any city on earth: it’s a place where, so the popular narrative goes, out-of-towners like me fly in in our millions, drink our body-weight in alcohol, accidentally fuck a hooker and go home with enough “crazy” stories to get us through the rest of the year.
Embarking on the Vegas trip, I expected—and received—a lot of cynicism from Las Vegas locals. Blogs with names like Vegas Chatter and Vegas Tripping crowed that I wouldn’t last a week let alone a month. And I get it: for people who call Vegas home, the idea of yet another journalist coming to their town and living out a Hunter S. Thompson fantasy on the Strip might be cause for rolled eyes and cynical sighs.
Hell, even people who were professionally obliged to be nice to me weren’t. Most hotel PRs on the Strip flatly declined to meet with
me. On the few occasions when I wrote negative reviews of hotels or shows, the reaction was swift and, well, mental—Criss Angel’s publicist spent half an hour on the phone railing against the “inaccuracies” in my review of his show (“You said that Criss is a ‘douche’—he isn’t” / “Actually, I said he dresses like a douche. And he does.”) while somewhat-sinisterly insisting that she’d hate for one negative review to ruin my relationship with the Cirque du Soleil “family.”
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I’ve dealt with a lot of big city PRs in my life and I’ve never, ever seen the kind of defensiveness I experienced in Las Vegas. Maybe they’re just not used to being asked actual questions, I thought. After all, the city’s most high profile entertainment “journalist” is Robin Leach: the guy who used to host
Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous
—a man who, had he been present for the killing of Osama bin Laden, would have felt compelled to praise the man’s history of charity work.
For the longest time I was baffled. The locals distrusted me—until they met me at least—the PRs hated me and the media couldn’t understand what the hell I was doing spending so long in their town. What could I do to please these people? And why on earth would Las Vegas of all places—a city that prides itself in crazy behavior and not giving a fuck—act so defensively and insecurely when faced with an unpaid blogger from—gasp—The Huffington Post?
Again, it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out the answer. For a start, let’s once and for all dismiss this myth that Las Vegas is a crazy place where “anything goes.” It isn’t. It’s a place where almost nothing goes, especially if it’s likely to offend Jesus. Gay people can’t get married; and most chapels flat-out refuse to even perform civil ceremonies for (as one wedding chapel worker put it) “those people.” Strippers can’t get fully naked where alcohol is served. Escorts can’t ply their trade or get health benefits. The mannequins in the lobby of the
Mirage wear pasties for fuck’s sake. Pasties! But—ooh!—at least you can smoke in casinos.
Rampant capitalism—and a bedrock of religion—do that to a place: filing the edges off the fun and distilling everything down to its most efficient money-making core. There’s no profit in anarchy; you can’t spend money when you’re unconscious. And why on earth would you want to frighten away the Bible Belt Republicans? They’re the ones with all the cash.
Let’s also dismiss that even more prevalent misconception—particularly amongst us outsiders—that Las Vegas is a big city that doesn’t give a fuck. It most certainly is not. Las Vegas isn’t a big city, but rather a small town which—thanks to a confluence of legislative, geographical and historical events—happens to attract billions of dollars of tourism revenue each year, centered around a single street that mostly lies just outside city limits. Oh, and it very much does give a fuck.
To be clear, when I say Vegas is a small town, I don’t mean it’s a big city with small town attitudes; I’m mean it’s actually a small town. A place where, away from the Strip, you can’t walk into a bar or a coffee shop without bumping in to someone you know by name. A place where the arts scene is confined to two or three blocks, but where a passionate group of local business people and culture-lovers bust their asses every day trying to help it grow. A place where the mayor gets elected time and time again with 85+ percent of the vote, despite his fondness for organized crime, and no one being sure what he actually does. A place where the next mayor will be the old mayor’s wife. A place where foreclosures hit hard, unemployment is amongst the highest in America and where the education budget is being slashed. Again.
Once you realize all of that, suddenly everything else starts to make sense. The distrust of outsiders—particularly reporters; even bloggers—isn’t because the people of Las Vegas are mean; in fact everyone I met was as warm-hearted as the people I’ve met in any town in America.
It’s because every month another journalist or filmmaker comes into their small town and writes the same story, or makes the same movie.
Those writers mention the wedding chapels (ho ho ho), but not the museums; they meet the “larger than life” mayor but not the people actually building businesses and raising families here. And then they fuck off and leave the good people of Las Vegas to continue worrying about their mortgages, or their kids’ schooling or their jobs. And that includes the PR people who—as one admitted under promise of anonymity—don’t want to get fired for “allowing” a rogue journalist to write something bad. “We’re used to controlling the story,” said my source, “we give them a comp and they write what we tell them, and everyone’s safe.”
Me not wanting a comp during my trip (uncharacteristically, I paid for all but three of my rooms—I wanted to see what the hotels were really like, not some sanitized media version) wasn’t a positive sign, it was a red flag: I was up to something. And no one ever got fired for saying no. Furthermore, in a small town, no good can come from negative reviews: when tourism is the lifeblood of a place, every show has to be AMAZING, otherwise—oh God, oh God—people might stop coming.
But of course, the cynics were right weren’t they? Read back the above paragraphs and there it is: the hit-job they feared. Silly old small town Vegas, with its silly terrified people—and clever old me coming in and cleverly understanding what makes the city tick.
Except that’s the precise opposite of how I came to feel about Las Vegas.
I came in to the city with all the swagger of a Strip-striding weekend tourist, ready to confront the place based on my misconception of its size and self-confidence. I wasted a huge amount of time being confused by the defensive attitudes I encountered and being surprised by the culture, the arts scene and how friendly everyone was when I finally got to speak to them.