A lesson from Cook E. Jarr

Cook E. Jarr doing his thing.

As might be expected, I’m having a helluva time finding my father’s Las Vegas. If he somehow came back to life today and reappeared in the middle of Las Vegas Boulevard he’d be totally lost. “Where the hell is the Sands?” he’d say. “I saw Sinatra there twice.”

“It’s now a place called the Venetian.”

“The Venetian? What kind of a name is that for a craps joint?”

He’d have a point. Back in the 50s and 60s, all the Vegas hotels had desert names, cowboy names, monikers that conjured up the wildness of the place: Sahara, Frontier, El Rancho, Desert Inn, Hacienda, Sands, Dunes. Manly names. Now the Dunes is Bellagio, the Hacienda is Mandalay, and the venerable Sands long ago was imploded to make way for a faux Doge’s Palace and a Grand Canal littered with singing gondoliers plying their way in front of a Disneyfied St. Mark’s Square. It’s crazy.

I’m bitching about all this to a bartender at the Bellagio yesterday when he grabs a cocktail napkin and writes an address on it. He taps the napkin with two fingers. “This guy is old Vegas,” he says, straightening out his bow-tie. “Cook E. Jarr.”

“Are you serious? What kind of a name is that?”

The bartender shrugs. “Who knows? But he’s like Tom Jones and Frank Sinatra rolled into one, know what I mean?”

I had no idea what he meant.

“Give this address to a cabi. But don’t go out there until midnight or so. That’s when the women are gassed and Cookie is at his best.”

So later that night I grab a cab and the guy takes me to some hole-in-the-wall beer joint where this velvet-voiced lounge lizard, Cook E. Jarr, is playing to a packed house of sweating, gyrating, drunk and a mostly female audience, belting out “What’s New, Pussycat?” and “That’s the Way (I Like It)” and “Jungle Love” and even “My Way.”

Cookie is wearing a tuxedo jacket but no shirt and has a coifed helmet of hair that would have looked perfect on Davy Jones of the Monkees back in the 60s. Except Cookie has got to be, what?, at least 60 years old? But everyone in here just seems to love him. They slip him big tips in a plastic tip jar that says “Feed the Cook E. Jarr” on the front and pretty young things who look like they go to UNLV are bouncing their peaches directly in front of him and the sweat is dripping off the thick gold chains gracing Cookie’s bare chest. It’s amazing. I wouldn’t say he exactly reminded me of Frank Sinatra (or even Tom Jones for that matter), but I did learn something from going to his show: Anything older than yesterday in Las Vegas is either imploded, rehabbed, or pickled in a Cook E. Jarr.