Driving to Vegas...

[mnaz]

The sun crashed into the Panamints and it took an hour to put out the fire. I saw it from Route 127.... it all went down so fast. I had a stone groove in the FM static chamber blasting through the speakers in time with the yellow dash, so my judgment of time may be a little off.

I picked up the energy on 95, fifty miles out.... the glow. Not much longer now. But static implosion killed it halfway up the next grade, so I slipped in a tape.... much too fast.... a stone groove punk abomination which ran circles around the yellow dash. What the hell were they thinking? I cranked it a little higher.

I rolled up on some lights.... neon beer in the window. I checked my parch gauge.... halfway between eastern Sahara and Mojave dust. Time for a beer. There was an awkward pause when I walked in, but no obvious signs of local hundred-proof menace, so I bellied up. The bar was steeped in Nevada culture.... a slot jockey hunched over his machine.... blip-beep mechanical theft and sweat and layers of tobacco, sliceably thick. I could watch the stains form. Clara, the bartender, spoke in a smoker's rasp and called everyone "hon". She set down a Bud as news of a fight over legal brothels in Nye County spilled from the TV.

Across the bar sat a man named Frank, whose furrowed face recalled a maze of burnt canyons eighty miles back. He was in ranching, I gathered. Next to me sat Josephine.... rosy and robust, with pigtails. The tobacco cloud could never touch her. I told her I was a desert rat and she asked if I was a paleontologist, or perhaps a geologist. I insisted I was neither, but she would have none of it, and proceeded to introduce me to the bar as a traveling paleontologist. Luckily, the bar had no particular interest in paleontology that night. Next to Josephine sat Bernice, whose home had been cut off for days in the Great Flood of 2005 a few weeks ago. She was seventy and unflappable, and she looked like Gary Busey when she smiled, which was often.

Josephine once walked a full mile into a mine shaft with some friends. They carried a dozen flashlights to better their odds. If you lose your light down there, it's over. The vertical drop shafts only allow a foot or two of safe travel on either side.... best to always keep one eye to the ground. She warned me several times about the mines, though each time I assured her I had no interest whatsoever in going there. "Never enter alone", she kept repeating. Finally I asked her what she saw in it.... some amazing rocks, apparently. Funny, I had seen a few of them myself earlier, up on the mesa.... no flashlight required.

Vegas would be hard-pressed to top any of this, but I turned the key anyway.... only another hour, but that tape had to go. When I got there, I found an absurd sinkhole.... well-lit and overplayed. It was Caligula's palace, minus some of the undisguised random murder.... a chance to drink dissolved gold with a deranged emperor in Rome. I put boots on and hiked one, (or was it ten?), miles down the Strip, drinking in the sensory attack and swindle, drinking properly to view it. A security guard at the Bellagio let slip that it cost several billion dollars to build the place, and I wondered if I could still get a free drink there.

I saw right away the value of Las Vegas.... a sworn whore from Day One, which allows for endless creativity on the theme and edges ever closer to the elusive fully-realized waste-of-time. It is many things to many people.... merciful relief from reason, an alternate-reality port, a repository for base, pent-up impulses, completely anonymous. Rarely is it ever simple geography, or measured space. It is a light shaft thrust into space.... a middle-finger method. It is a parable.... a temple of isolation. There is no exit sign, no clock.... only you trying to take down the same. The table, the odds, the others are mere props.... whiskey zen.

In short, Las Vegas is a hard-ass bastard town, founded by hard-ass bastards in a sweltering dust bowl.... a town of near-zero substance and pointless excess which has no justifiable reason to exist and no calculable contribution to humanity at all.... a town of multi-billion dollar disaposable structures and monuments to irrationality, which hyperactively reinvents itself continually as the desert waits patiently to reclaim the whole dubious experiment inside of a hundred years, guaranteed. In short, it is a snapshot.... a moment. It is perfect. Navigate well....

[sooZen]

Hah! Another perfect view...thanks Mark for the insight of the outside.

Maybe Gonzo isn't dead after all...

Smacks,
Soo

[Zlatko Waterman]

Swift, punchy and sharp-edged.

This is a strong piece and deserves ( like your other pieces) wider publication.

I used to be a citizen of Nevada and have many gruesome "tales from the crypt" to relate myself.

You caught the green dollar-tinctured shimmer in the air just right. The perfume of money--- "plutography", Tom Wolfe calls the Las Vegas kind of writing . . .



--Z

[mousey1]

I knew I was gonna like this story right from the first line.....

The sun crashed into the Panamints and it took an hour to put out the fire.

And you did not disappoint.

Excellent reading. Excellent writing!

[mnaz]

Thanks all....

much appreciated....



This is why I tell everyone.... I love Nevada....
You can't make this stuff up!