Darling (7 page)

Recently, a complex of hotels and condos and offices in a sober international style has opened on the Strip under the mundane designation CityCenter. Its owners obviously intend a kind of restraint Las Vegas normally does not engage—gray exteriors, dark atriums. The visitor could be in São Paulo or Seoul or wherever the money flies. A cab driver tells me the new complex will not draw because there is no craziness to it. Here, you gotta be crazy, he says. Togas. Tigers. Tits.

In the lobby of the Aria hotel, part of the CityCenter complex, an eighty-four-foot-long sculpture,
Silver River,
by Maya Lin, is
suspended behind the registration desk like a bough. Credit cards click across the marble counter as hotel guests check in or out. Maya Lin's sculpture is a trace-image of the Colorado River; it was cast from thirty-seven hundred pounds of “reclaimed” silver—sauceboats and Saint Christopher medals. The sculpture resembles artery, lightning, umbilicus, statistical graph.

During the week we are in town, there is a competition in Las Vegas among investors who are interested in developing a gangland museum. (And, two years later—Valentine's Day, 2012—the $42 million Mob Museum has opened.)

Other American cities might prefer to forget a criminal past. Las Vegas foresees profit in promoting its dark legend as an invitation to middle-class visitors to risk a little carelessness—to gamble more than they should, to tip the topless waitress more than necessary. Compared with Berlin in the thirties, compared with Ciudad Juárez today, compared with nineteenth-century America of the robber barons, compared with Chicago of the twenties, compared with Wall Street, “Sin City” must seem a wader's pool of wickedness. The sin on show is not what would be unimaginable in Indianapolis. Rather, it is precisely what Indianapolis would come up with if Indianapolis were charged with imagining Sin City.

On the grounds of the Flamingo Hotel, over by the wedding chapel, stands a monument to the mobster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel. Hollywood mythmakers credit Siegel with the idea of Las Vegas. Siegel's idea of Las Vegas was the idea of luxury and chance in a landscape where there was no chance of luxury.

Benjamin Siegel was born in 1906 to Russian immigrant parents in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York. He constructed his sense of glamour—of class, I think he would have said—against the meanness of the streets of his childhood and
the distant Manhattan skyline. According to
Bugsy,
the 1991 Barry Levinson movie, Las Vegas was a sandlot prior to Siegel's coming. In truth, by the time Siegel conceived the potential for money in Las Vegas, there were already hotels and gambling parlors downtown, along Fremont Street. And the El Rancho Vegas had opened in 1941 on the two-lane highway that would later become the Strip—six years before Siegel's Flamingo.

What Siegel conceived was an aesthetic, and a pretty good one: He intended to build a resort in a desert-moderne style—something along the lines of Frank Lloyd Wright, something along the lines of Palm Springs—a lure for the best class of people, by which Siegel meant Hollywood. L.A. likes to think of Las Vegas as the populuxe mirage of Hollywood, a place where middle-class tourists look like movie stars but aren't, spend like millionaires but aren't.

Siegel went overbudget constructing his dream and the fancy people didn't show. Mobsters were looking at a loss. Benjamin Siegel was shot in the head in Beverly Hills, California, on June 20, 1947. He is buried in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, Hollywood, California.

•   •   •

No sooner had Peter left to make some phone calls and to try to take a nap than Luther turned his head toward Jimmy:
Bathroom
.

I'll tell the nurse, said Jimmy.

Hurry,
Luther said.

Jimmy hurried. The nurse was at her station. Mr. Thomas needs to make a bowel movement, Jimmy reported. The nurse turned from her computer, paused, as if she were about to say something wonderfully unhelpful. Instead, she said: OK, I'll talk to him.

Mr. Thomas, the nurse said, coming into his room.

Bathroom,
said Luther. (Bambi.)

You are too weak to get to the bathroom, Mr. Thomas. There is a plastic towel underneath you—she gave the towel a tug. You can have a bowel movement right where you are. Press the buzzer if you need me. The nurse placed another half-plastic, half-paper sheet over Luther's midriff. She glanced at the thermostat. She left the room.

Luther turned toward Jimmy, removed the sheet, smiled.
Bandage,
said Luther.

There is no way Jimmy is afraid of Luther—Morphine Luther, Luther Demented, Luther with one foot in the grave. But this, Jimmy saw, was play.

Bandage? Jimmy said.

Luther grabbed the aluminum bed gate and rolled himself onto his right shoulder. Now Jimmy could see Luther's backside was papered over with a disc of green latex.

Off,
said Luther.

Jimmy examined the bandage. (Probably a bedsore.) What's that for?

Off,
said Luther. (The Red Queen.) Luther came late to the literature of childhood. In his thirties he read nursery classics. He loved them. The Alice books.
The Rescuers. Winnie-the-Pooh
.

I'll ask the nurse, said Jimmy.

Excuse me, he said. Again. I'm sorry but Mr. Thomas cannot have a bowel movement because there is a bandage covering his bottom, Jimmy reported to the nurse at her station.

If you press the button, someone will come, said the nurse at her station. The bandage will not hinder Mr. Thomas, she added.

Jimmy returned to the room to tell Luther he could have a bowel movement with a green latex waffle pasted to his behind. The game had progressed in his absence.

Chair,
smiled Luther, his purse-arm extended vaguely. (Mrs. Miniver.)

You want to sit for a while?

Down
. Luther indicated the bed gate. Jimmy crouched to examine the lever of the bed gate, then finally succeeded in lowering it.

Pull,
Luther said; he proffered his hand.

Jimmy pulled Luther to a sitting position; he put his arm around Luther's shoulder to support him. Luther was already fishing for the floor with one bare foot.

Let me pull the chair up to the bed. I'll have to lay you back down for just a minute, Jimmy said.

Pull!
(Red Queen.)

Jimmy pressed the button.

Within seconds, the nurse.

He wants to sit in the chair, Jimmy importuned.

Who turned off the air-conditioning?

I don't know, Jimmy said. (He had watched Peter turn off the air-conditioning before he left. Luther gets too cold, Peter said.)

The nurse switched the air-conditioning on. It's easier for him to breathe if the room is cool, the nurse said. To Luther: When the aides have finished what they're doing, we'll put you in the chair.

I think I can manage it, Jimmy said.

It takes three people, the nurse said; it won't be long. She raised the bed gate and covered Luther with a sheet. Luther smiled. (Harpo Marx.) The nurse left. Luther plucked the sheet away, grasped the bed gate.

Down
.

Well, let's just wait. . . .

Down,
said Luther. (Red Queen.) Jimmy put down the gate and sat on the edge of the bed; he put his arm around Luther's waist to prevent Luther from slipping to the floor. Luther did not
acknowledge the counterforce; he grunted forward in medicated slow motion; he now had both feet on the floor.

Peter walked in.

He wants to sit in the chair, Jimmy said helplessly.

Peter snapped off the air-conditioning. He loves that chair, Peter said. All right, come on old man, Peter said. He easily transferred Luther into the recliner. Has he eaten? To Luther: Have you eaten?

Luther shook his head slowly. Smiled.

All on a summer's day.

•   •   •

Though I found no school in town or library or government building named in his honor, my vote for the founding father of today's Las Vegas would go to Herbert Clark Hoover, the thirty-first president of the United States. Hoover signed the bill funding the construction of the great dam that today bears his name.

In 1928 Hoover won the presidential election by a wide margin. A year later, the stock market crashed, leading to the Great Depression. Americans blamed Hoover for a financial collapse he did not cause but could not cure. Thus did Hoover, a superabundantly competent man, become a byword for incompetence. “Hoovervilles”—encampments of destitute Americans—sprang up across the country.

After President Hoover authorized the construction of the dam at Black Canyon, the state of Nevada revoked its ban on gambling. Las Vegas did not feel the brunt of the Depression, in part because as many as five thousand men found work, albeit dangerous work, building the dam. Las Vegas conspired with human nature to provide the laborers with weekend entertainments that would separate them from their pay.

In the winter of 1933, President Hoover was obliged to travel
from the White House to the Capitol in the backseat of an open limousine alongside Franklin D. Roosevelt, the patrician president-elect. In a flickering news clip, we see the two men exchanging a few words as the car moves up Pennsylvania Avenue. Roosevelt spontaneously raises his hat to the crowd. Hoover's face is constrained with discomfort; he resembles W. C. Fields, the comic tragedian.

Two years later, in 1935, President Roosevelt passed through Las Vegas on his way to dedicate the new dam; he called it Boulder Dam, as did other members of his administration, and so it was called for fourteen years. Only a motion by a later Republican Congress would cement Hoover's name to the project that changed the West.

By whichever name, Hoover Dam was evidence that Nature could be harnessed: that the unruly Colorado River could be made to water the dry land of several western states, that the power generated from the controlled flow of water could light up the night.

•   •   •

Good Friday. Yellow tulips, closed and as thumpable as drumsticks, are massed at the entrance of the coffee shop at the Bellagio. They remind me of those phalanxes of acid-yellow flowers from behind which desert tyrants address the world with
frown, and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
.

In Percy Bysshe Shelley's burlesque of royal pride, “Ozymandias,” a desert traveler comes upon
two vast and trunkless legs of stone,
beside which, half buried in the sand, lies a toppled royal visage. Some long-dead artisan has incised on the monument's pedestal a deathless boast:

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Over millennia, rulers of desert kingdoms, and not only rulers but prophets, and not only prophets but shepherds, but slaves, but women, have brooded on impermanence. There is not another ecology that so bewilders human vanity. Thus must palace engineers and the slaves from foreign lands be pressed into raising Pharaoh's pyramid over and against all, withstanding dynasties of sand and wind. It is a testament to the leveling humor of Las Vegas that Pharaoh's dream of eternity is mocked by the pyramid of the Luxor Hotel. The Luxor's pyramid is not made of limestone blocks but of rectangles of smoked glass that reflect and appear to change density according to the constant fluctuations of the desert sky.

In 1972 Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour published an architectural monograph,
Learning from Las Vegas,
in which they celebrated the disregard for history, for propriety, for landscape in the architecture of suburban sprawl—Wienerschnitzel Chalets, Roundtable Castles, Golden Arches—an attitude best exemplified, they wrote, by the Las Vegas Strip. Their homage came at a time when East Coast architectural schools were in thrall to postwar European brutalism and city planners disregarded any necessity for delight.

In the years following the sensational Venturi–Scott Brown–Izenour essay, “old” low-rise casinos along the Strip were replaced, one by one, by grandiose hotel towers that, nevertheless, at ground level, invited tourists to inhabit cinemascopic fantasies: Rome. Egypt. Venice. Las Vegas was constructing an elaborate jest against the instinctive human fear of impermanence. Las Vegas cajoled its visitors to be amused at what the Romantic poet and the ancient prophet regard as the desert's morbid conclusion. The Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building, Caesars Palace—
nothing in the world is rooted, nothing is permanent, nothing sacred, nothing authentic; architectural conceits are merely that.

Herbert Hoover died of a massive hemorrhage on October 20, 1964, in Suite 31-A at the Waldorf Towers in New York City. He is buried at the Herbert Hoover Library in West Branch, Iowa—the town where he was born.

•   •   •

No truer daughter does Las Vegas have than Dubai on the Persian Gulf, with its penthouse views of the void, its racetrack, its randy princes, its underwater hotel. Dubai and the oil-rich Arab kingdoms have purchased an architecture of mirage that is incongruous, and, therefore, defiant of the desert. Dubai has water slides, an ice palace, an archipelago of artificial islands in the shape of palm trees. The geometry that springs from the desert's plane is an assertion of human inanity in the face of natural monotony.

Even the sacred city of Mecca has taken some calibration from Las Vegas. Within the precincts of the Grand Mosque in Mecca stands the holiest site in Islam—a stone building without windows that was built in ancient days by Abraham and Ishmael. The Gate of Heaven is located directly above the cubical structure called the Kaaba. The Kaaba, covered with black silk draperies, represents the fixed point where the eternal and the temporal intersect, and around which the tide of living humanity circumambulates, counterclockwise.

For the infidel—for me—the Kaaba represents what is ancient beyond recall, but for the faithful, the Kaaba is a touchstone: affixed to a corner of the Kaaba is the Black Stone of Heaven, a stone given to Abraham by the Angel Gabriel.