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Las Vegas, Part Three: Strippers

16 Nov

from August 25, 2008

I’ve traveled a bit. In the US, I’ve been to Chicago, where the river is as viable a route across town as the train is here, but less polluted. In Houston I visited the battleships and memorials. I’ve seen the Air and Space Museum in Washington, the Liberty Bell and the corner of Swanson and Ritner in Philadelphia, Fenway Park in Boston, the sunset in Orlando, and in Cleveland I, um, played catch in the hotel parking lot because, let’s face it, there’s no reason to visit Cleveland. Once you’ve been to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame you may as well go home because that’s it, unless you can get some kicks out of seeing the building from the Drew Carey Show.

I spent two weeks in London and saw Buckingham Palace, visited Stonehenge, toured Scotland and fell in love with Edinburgh Castle, the prototypical “castle overlooking the town,” and in Paris I saw the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame. It is fair to say that I’ve seen some sights. But none of them was quite like the Las Vegas Strip.

Or maybe I should say that all of them were quite like the Las Vegas Strip, because I saw castles, towers, statues, cities, ships, and even the Eiffel Tower in Nevada. Take the best of everything and you’ll find a big, gaudy replica in Vegas, all one after the other. The Strip is “big, really big.” Not so much in size as in sheer length, height, and lights. New York is denser, Hollywood has more celebrities, and Detroit is downright more deadly, but none of them can rival what Vegas has in sheer “whoa.”

We had just gotten off the shuttle from our hotel and were standing in front of Caesar’s Palace. Really, though, no matter where I stood for two blocks in either direction I’d be in front of Caesar’s. It is so big that if I won a jackpot in a casino at one end the news would reach the other end via the internet faster than if I stood up and shouted. Sound travels at over 300 miles per second. At that rate, news of my jackpot would reach the other end of the casino in a day or two. And by then I would have already been besieged by a dozen or so previously unknown and ne’er-do-well relatives begging for money.

We were towards the western end of the strip, and the M+Ms store was at nearly the other end. OK, sightseeing time. We walked down the strip.

And we walked, and walked, and walked. The Strip is “big. Really big” and we stopped for pictures. In front of Caesar’s it looks like you are in Rome, with statues and waterfalls and statues and statues and waterfalls and statues all over the place. The tourists weren’t too bad, and we all took turns taking pictures for each other. My favorite was a family from Japan who put their toddler in the fountain and then watched as he ran to the falling water and out of their reach. He didn’t want to come out and the father had to wade in after him.

Good thing they didn’t go to the Bellagio. That hotel had a huge array of fountains that “danced” to various songs. I was there for the “God Bless The USA” show. If the kid got in the water there the fountain jets would have shot him to Mars.

There are all kinds of theme hotels and casinos in Vegas. There is the Roman theme hotel, the Paris theme hotel, and the circus theme hotel. I saw the medieval castle theme hotel and the Egyptian theme hotel. By far, though, the most popular theme hotel is the Under Construction Theme Hotel. Every where we looked, we saw the skeletal beams of new hotels. They really carried the theme far. These places had doormen in hard hats and waiters in construction boots. Men with stop signs waved you past and barricades helped with the illusion.

The sense of opulence faded a bit there. In front of the cassinos it was clean and bustling with tourists. In front of the construction sites no one stopped. Everyone was rushing past to get to the casinos on the other side. This is where the seedier side of Vegas took root.

Every ten or fifteen feet was a short immigrant wearing a bright orange or yellow shirt that said “GIRLS! Delivered to YOUR ROOM! In only 20 MINUTES!” They all had business cards with naked women on them and offered them to whomever, male or female, walked by. Getting past these construction sites was like running a porno gauntlet. The guys didn’t just try to hand you the cards, they had a method which they seem to have perfected over the years and passed on to everyone working the strip. A pornographer would take a card from the stack in his left hand, tap it loudly twice to get your attention, and flourish it toward you. They never actually touch you, nor do they get right in your way, but they make it hard to ignore. At first it was funny, but after the first five or so it became less than a joke, and after twenty it became reeeeaaaaallllly annoying and I’d just glare at them before the tapping started. They did it anyway. At night these same guys wore giant illuminated billboards over their heads hooked up to big batteries hanging from their belts. I was sure someone was going to be electrocuted giving out a hooker’s phone number. I bet the paramedics there see a lot of that.

I also saw an actual pimp, in a big Snoop Dogg pimp outfit, driving a pink Cadillac. Take that, Philadelphia.

Once we got past the porn hawkers, we had another challenge- crossing the street. Think traffic in wherever you live is bad? Seen worse traffic? You haven’t seen Vegas. The lights never change, because on the rare occasions when they do, the tourists swarm across the streets, regardless of the light being red or green, regardless of cars inching their bumpers toward you, regardless of drivers screaming at you. Vegas has decided that it is just safer if no one ever crosses a street. This is bad for the casinos so they created giant walkways over the intersections. Great. But they lead directly into the casinos and good luck finding your way back out to the street.

It was hot, just over 100 degrees. It was very, very dry and, believe it or not, despite all the walking, and by now we’d been walking in the hot sun for the better part of an hour, I had not worked up one bead of sweat. If I had, there were plenty of guys hawking “the coldest water on the Strip!” every few yards.

Soon we reached M+Ms World. It was located between the World’s Most Neon McDonald’s and a mall that specialized in things like children’s tee-shirts and adult bondage outfits.

 

 

TO BE CONTINUED

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Las Vegas, Part Two: Oddities of The West

16 Nov

from August 25, 2008

Nevada is the farthest West I have ever been, taking the crown from Houston. As I flew towards McCarron Airport, it was mainly thoughts like “I’m out West! WEST!” that crowded my mind, but there were other things too.

Nevada is home to some serious Air Force bases. In fact, a large part of the air traffic in Las Vegas is military, and I saw a large number of military personnel in and around the airport. Groom Lake is where every aircraft since World War Two has been tested. Most of them were Top Secret, like the stealth fighter and stealth bomber. The Raptor, the plane due to replace the F-16, was developed there. Every X-plane came out of there, as did some of our very first astronauts. Not coincidentally, Nevada has a very high percentage of America’s UFO sightings. Much of this is due to the testing of planes like the stealth bomber, which even today, unclassified, is still reported as a UFO due to its very odd triangular design. It is speculated that the TR 3B, the new, still alleged, “silent triangular UFO” was developed there. Groom Lake is also near the infamous Area 51, home to much of our classified and still denied extra-terrestrial material. If you believe that sort of thing. Which I do. Reports of the last few years seem to indicate that much of the Area 51 operations have been moved to a new location. At any rate, I saw no strange planes, no odd lights in the sky, and no UFOs. But I was out West! WEST!

Pahrump, Nevada, is the home of the infamous Art Bell and his “Radio Ranch.” Art is the founder of the immensely popular Coast to Coast AM overnight radio show and has several AM, FM, and ham radio towers on his property. Here’s bit from Wiki about Art Bell and Area 51. Note the date:

At about 11 p.m. PST, Thursday, September 11th, 1997,he designated one phone line for Area 51 employees who wanted to discuss the secretive base. Several callers claimed to work at Area 51, but the bizarre highlight of the night came when a seemingly distraught and terrified man claimed to be a former Area 51 employee recently discharged for “medical” reasons. He cited malevolent extraterrestrials at Area 51 (“extra-dimensional beings” who are not “what they claim to be”) and an impending disaster that the government knew would take out “major population centers.” Midway through this call, Bell’s program went off the air for about 30 minutes. After talking to network engineers, the official explanation was that the network satellite had “lost earth lock” or forgotten where the earth was. Network officials were baffled, and the cause remains a mystery.

While all of this was forming the background of my thoughts, I was looking out the window, really bothering the old woman next to me, and wondering where Las Vegas was because we were getting kind of low and very close to those hills up ahead.

Then we were over the hills and there was Las Vegas spread out before me. It really did seem to be nestled in the foothills, at least at first, then it spread out far and wide. Low, though. Except for the Strip, Vegas is a very low town, with virtually no tall buildings. In the middle of nothing, it really is an oasis in the desert. An oasis designed to rip you off, but an oasis nonetheless.

The airport is very close to and directly behind the strip. We flew behind every major hotel and casino: Luxor, shaped like a pyramid; Caesar’s, which took up more space than any other two casinos combined; and New York New York, which looked not so much like New York as it did a moderately talented child’s idea of what New York looked like, despite never having been there. Plus it had a roller coaster that went around the Empire State Building.

We got off the plane, skipped baggage claim, and right there, in the middle of the airport, was a glass-enclosed room filled with slot machines. Who would play a slot machine in the airport? Aside from, like, a gazillion casinos just a stone’s throw away, those slots have to have the worst odds in the world. They must never pay off. Who would sit down to play one of those? Not me, but a lot of other people, all of whom seemed to have gotten off the same tour group. They wore jeans, denim shirts with some embroidery that I could never make out, and odd little straw cowboy hats. They were all over, I’d estimate, 120 years old and they all smoked.

But we needed to get out. My brother and I had traveled far and we made our way to the taxi stand and then we were off to the Rio. I spent the whole time looking out the window. Sure, I had a fantastic view of the Strip, but it was the hills I was entranced by. West! And all of the vast nothing stretching out past the hotels. I also spent too much time looking at the palm trees. Palm trees! In the desert! Yes, it was a very long flight and I was very tired and maybe a little punchy. But I was out West! The cab driver, who was not Middle Eastern and spoke excellent English, being a citizen of Nevada, born and raised, asked us some questions, made small talk, and said he knew we were in a hurry and that he’d take a short cut to the Rio. And as I found out later, he actually did just that.

The Rio is located just behind the Strip. It is an all-suite resort complex, with four swimming pools (one was “Brazilian,” which is a code word for “topless”), two theaters, a spa, more restaurants than you’d expect, and a bowling alley. Yes! After leaving the relatively unsophisticated NYC I was dying for an exotic bowling alley. Our suite was on the side of the tower (there are two) which faced both the Strip and the pools, giving us a great view. Seventeen floors up was a little high to see much detail in the Brazilian pool, but you’d be amazed what a high resolution digital camera and good editing software can do…… or so I hear.

Our suite had a huge sofa and a separate area for eating, plus a mini bar. I wanted to take a look. I was dying to see what a $5.50 bag of twizzlers looked like but, and here I caught a break, the door was stuck and I never did open it. I was just sure that in the middle of the night I’d get up and drink a $13 bottle of orange juice.

Well, after a quick shower and a change of clothes, we went down to the casino and ate in one of the dozens of steakhouses that seem to be located within ten feet of any slot machine, twenty from the tables. I think they used an algebraic algorithm to place them for the most strategic steakhouse density per gambler.

Bowling seemed very tempting, but we pulled ourselves away from the allure of the lanes and headed out to the Strip. Besides, I had forgotten to pack my bowling shoes.

The Rio, being close to the Strip but separated by a highway, offered free shuttles to spots on the Strip and back. We took a shuttle to Caesar’s. We had one goal: Find the M+Ms store.

My brother has a woman on staff who is an M+Ms fanatic. She collects all kinds of Blue (and only blue) M+M memorabilia and Las Vegas has one of the only three M+M World stores in the United States. She had put in a request and my brother, being a good boss, said sure. We decided to get it out of the way early.

So, there we were, on Day One in Las Vegas, trekking to the M+Ms store to buy a blue M+M.

 

 

 

TO BE CONTINUED

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