Las Vegas

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.

Waltzing with Queen Nefertiti at the Luxor.

Yesterday evening I was hanging around the entrance area of the Luxor hotel marveling at the oversized fountains and massive statues of Egyptian monarchs when this gorgeous couple, dressed, I thought, like Cleopatra and Mark Anthony on prom night, strolled over to say hello. Well, they weren’t Cleopatra and Mark Anthony at all. They were Queen Nefertiti and the Pharaoh Ramses. Of course. I should have known that. They are, it seems, the Luxor’s version of Mickey and Minny Mouse and their job is just to come out into the lobby every once in awhile and say hello to people and get their pictures taken.

“We’re not historically correct,” Ramses told me, “but then again, this is Vegas. Liberties are taken.”

I asked Nefertiti (whose real name was Elizabeth) what it was like to be the Queen of the Nile in Vegas. “It totally rocks,” she said. “When I was a kid I always watched this cartoon show, Isis, who was this Egyptian superhero before there was any Wonder Woman or anything like that and I thought she was so cool. And now I get to be an Egyptian Queen.”

Little groups of foreigners—Indian, Greek, Japanese—kept interrupting my conversation with the Queen to have their photo taken. “Half of them don’t speak English,” she whispered, “but they’re all so happy to pose with us. The Japanese kids in particular get very excited.”

She told me that they have to be very strict about the way the photos are taken. “They can’t touch us,” she said. Or her costume which costs $3,000. “They can stand next to us but no arms around the waist or anything like that. Afterall, I am a Queen.”

Which is when, on an impulse, I grabbed her hand and started waltzing her around the lobby. The Queen couldn’t stop laughing. “No one’s ever done this to me before!” she said. I’m sure not.

It was just for a minute or two. I knew if I pushed my luck the Luxor security would be on me in a heartbeat. But I have to tell you that it was great fun.

Frank Sinatra at the Sands. Courtesy of InOldLasVegas.com.

The very fact that my dad took my mom to Vegas the time he won enough to buy her a German stereo always perplexed me. Because my dad never took my mom to Vegas. “Vegas is a guy’s town,” he’d say by way of explanation. When I was younger I always wondered what that meant. As I grew older, it became obvious.

Vegas was the place where he could do the opposite of what he was allowed to do at home. He could drink highballs at noon. He could stay up all night playing craps. He could flirt with pretty women.

Whenever my mom would propose that she go with him, he’d dismiss the idea out of hand. As if she’d just asked him if she could join his Thursday night bowling league team. “Vegas is not a place for broads,” he’d explain (yes, he used that word; his homage to his hero, Frank Sinatra, I suppose).

But Ol’ Blue Eyes is gone and so is my dad, and I have reached an age when it seems important to tie up some emotional loose ends. So I have made what I imagine might be my own last trip to Las Vegas. Not to see any of the seven Cirque du Soleil shows or the Blue Man Group but to see if there are any remnants left of the old Vegas. The one my father and Frank knew. The one that “wasn’t for broads.”

And to be honest with you, I also want to see if I can match the old man just one time: I want to win enough money to buy a new stereo. Perhaps a German one.

Last night a little before seven I went down to one of the many bars at the Luxor and asked the most perfect blond I have ever seen, wearing a crushed black velvet toreador jacket and matching mini-skirt, for a draft beer. With great boredom she informed me they had no draft beer. “Only bottles, hon.”

“Okay, what do you have by the bottle?” I asked her.

She looked me straight in the eye and said, “Everything. We’ve got everything, hon.”

“Great,” I said. “Give me a Negra Modelo.”

Only slightly annoyed, she rolled her eyes and gave me a faux frown, like a little girl who is trying not to get upset that you keep asking her to pick her clothes up off the floor. “Hon,” she said, putting a hand on my shoulder, “we don’t have those kind of beers. Just like, you know, normal stuff. Nothing weird.”

She seemed so sweet and sincere that I decided right then and there that if I were not already married, I would ask her to be my fiancé. But figuring that might not be cool since we’d only just met, I instead asked her if they had Sam Adams. She giggled and threw one hand up in the air as if she were waving to fans from a float in the Rose Parade. “Of course, silly,” she said.

So off she sashayed, looking quite smart in her little crushed velvet toreador jacket, to get silly ol’ me a Sam Adams. While I was waiting for my fiancé to bring me my beer, I checked out the crowd. Mostly there were pods of business men and women, wearing suits and such, with name tags in plastic holders strung on pink shoe laces around their necks proclaiming them to be, in a very large typeface, MIKE or LINDA or JENELLE. They all seemed to be drinking either Budweiser (from the bottle, of course) or Coke.

To my right was a small group of bearded Germans wearing very bad plaid sportscoats and smoking cigarettes and laughing loudly. And across the room in the corner was a large group of Japanese men sitting very close to one another as if they were conferencing about something or other except none of them seemed to be talking. In the background to all this were the thousands of slot machines with their odd calliope noises. Like musical fish they swallowed quarters and dollars and burped high-pitched tunes that, I fear, will be part of my sleep for days on end.

Meanwhile, I was still waiting for my fiancé to bring me my beer. I looked around the room and saw her flirting with the hirsute Germans. What a naughty girl. When I flagged her over to see what the hell had happened to my Sam Adams, I realized it wasn’t my fiancé at all. It was someone with a name badge that said STACY who looked remarkably similar to my fiancé, crushed velvet toreador jacket and all. According to STACY my fiancé had left. Without so much as a good-bye. Or my drink.

“But I can bring you a beer, hon. What would you like?”

“What do you have on draft, Stacy?” I asked.

Like a small white ball clattering around a roulette wheel, our plane circles endlessly over Las Vegas, waiting for an open gate so we can land. Things are backed up. Something to do with icy airports back East and an endless stream of delayed flights ferrying tens of thousands of conventioneers, plus me, to the strangest, gaudiest, most alluring city in the world.

I sip my Bloody Mary (a concession to the fact that it’s not yet noon) and look out the window as we make another pass over an ersatz Statue of Liberty and a glistening pyramid. Oddly, I seem to be the only one drinking. Everyone else is passing the time by scrolling through spreadsheets or squinting at car rental agreements (for the tenth time) or thumbing through magazines.

Finally a squawky voice comes over the P.A. commanding us to raise our tray tables and stow our belongings. A harried flight attendant hurries down the aisle and practically snatches the remains of my Bloody Mary from my hand. I bring my seat to its full upright position. The pilot implores the flight attendants to prepare for landing. Quickly we begin to descend.

But first, before we land, I want to tell you a little story.

It is sometime in the early Sixties. I am a tall, lanky child who likes to go to bed with a flashlight and a deck of cards and play blackjack, a game my father has taught me, beneath my tent of blankets. I am both dealer and player so one way or the other I always win though it will be a few more years before I understand the irony of this.

A couple of days earlier my father had purged the cookie jar, where he stashes the odd ten or twenty from his paycheck, and taken my mother to Las Vegas. In their absence, Aunt Cathy, my father’s spinster sister, is caring for me and my mother’s beloved dog, a yappy little Pomeranian named Liberace that she only half-jokingly refers to as her “baby.” Aunt Cathy hates Liberace, who pants and yelps in equal measure, and I feel pretty much the same about Aunt Cathy because she has taken my well-worn deck of cards away from me and hidden them. Plus Aunt Cathy isn’t particularly fond of children. Even a certain nephew. So we are all a little bit nervous here, a little bit on edge.

While we are sitting on opposite ends of the couch watching some Western TV show—perhaps Maverick or Wyatt Earp or The Rifleman—there is a knock on the door. Two men are lifting a large cherry wood console, the size of a desk, out of a truck parked in our driveway. It is a German-made hi-fidelity record player and radio. My father, I learn later, has parlayed his hundred dollar cookie jar money into a modest fortune and, at my mother’s insistence, has bought the German stereo in Vegas and had it shipped home. As insurance against the inevitable losses that always follow one of my father’s infrequent windfalls. As the men hook up the stereo, I run around in circles in the living room making almost as much noise as Liberace who chases behind me snapping at my heels.

I can’t believe my father’s luck. I can’t believe our family’s good fortune. It’s like Christmas, I think. No—better than Christmas. Because it’s unexpected. A gift from the heavens. No wonder my dad loves Las Vegas so much. No wonder he’s always going out there. I am so happy that I actually hug the leg of one of the deliverymen which is when Liberace, yapping and barking and dashing about in all directions, eludes Aunt Cathy’s clutches and flies out the front door, chasing after the paneled truck as it backs out of the driveway.

“Bad boy, Liberace!”Aunt Cathy shrieks. “Bad, bad boy!” She runs down the driveway after the dog and the truck but it is too late. Liberace has lost a brief but violent battle with a rear tire of the delivery truck in a most gruesome manner. Liberace, looking like a deflated swim toy, takes two wobbly steps away from the truck and collapses in the gutter as dark, frothy blood flows from his mouth and nose and even eyes.

And so I learn my first important lesson about Las Vegas: Once in awhile it giveth but it always taketh away.