Why Las Vegas Matters

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.