Ghostman (38 page)

For the first few years of my childhood, I made do with John. I still sometimes catch myself turning my head when I hear someone shout it, as if I expect to see my father standing there and calling me in to eat. He tried so hard to make it fit, but I could always hear a little pause in his voice before he actually said the name, even when I’d call him on the phone late at night as an adult.

It was never really my name.

My father was a very good man. He worked in engineering on the Air Force base, and then later in the suburbs when Vegas started to become what it is. He used to sit with me at the back of our house in the desert and tell me about working with the nuclear warheads. He pointed out to the horizon where the mushroom clouds had been.

* * *

Atmospheric testing north of Las Vegas was over by the time I was born, but I still remember his stories about sitting with my mother on a blanket and watching the blast come up like a sunrise. Vegas was built by men like him who had come here to practice blowing up the world. Without Oppenheimer, he said to me, there would be no Las Vegas. Without Vegas, there would be no me. I ran my fingers over the glossy images of the atomic explosions he kept in an album next to our family photos. He showed each one and I would re-create the blast in my head. He called me Baby as if it meant something.

I grew up in that house. My parents never moved, even when Vegas got huge in the eighties and we could have sold the place for double the money and moved out somewhere else. They sent me to the local school, and I did very well there. I was one of the lucky ones, I guess. I was sharp, and I never went to bed hungry. I thrived on books on ancient history and read every single one stocked in the library. Rome was always my favorite. Some days I would go out into the desert after school and imagine I was Caesar in North Africa, marching with my men across the desert to escape Pompey’s superior army. I would see the whole battle in my mind and hear the great thunderclaps of men in armor smashing into one another. I ran with them across the waste as if I were one of them. The sun would go down and the lights would come up on the Strip in the distance, like one of my father’s hydrogen bombs exploding just beyond the horizon. I would get tired and go home and sit inside and read and wait for my parents to call me to supper. My father never said anything, but he understood. In his mind there was always a mushroom cloud. In mine there was always a man in armor.

We lived at the edge of the desert until I was eight years old, when the developments caught up and built a whole city around us. It happened so fast. One day we were alone, and the next we had neighbors. My father planted grass in the front yard every year. I’d watch it turn yellow in the heat and die. The grass in the subdivisions never died, so my father planted again and again and again. By the time I was ready to go to college, there was no desert left as far as anyone could see, with healthy green lawns around all the houses that by now had nearly reached the Air Force base where they kept the payloads. Vegas grew. My father’s grass never did.

I was John B______ until I was fourteen years old.

That’s when I found the paper bag.

* * *

That paper bag is probably the single most important object in my life. There have been other things, sure, but nothing quite like this. If you want to know anything about me, you’ve got to start there. In a twisted sort of way, it was that bag that made me who I am. It taught me the first thing I ever knew about myself.

But first, you should know where I grew up.

Las Vegas is a big place, and in my lifetime it has gotten much bigger. By the time I was fourteen, in 1988, my childhood home wasn’t just a postage stamp in the desert anymore. It was part of a real neighborhood, with paved roads and sidewalks and frequent buses running back and forth. I was always mature for my age, but I was never quite sure what that meant. I never thought of myself as such. Most of the time I didn’t think anything about myself at all. It was like I was sleeping with my eyes open. There are whole years where I don’t have a single real memory. I never talked to anyone except when the teacher asked me a direct question or my parents asked how school was going. I could usually answer correctly, without deliberation, and then drift off again the very next moment. When I turned fourteen, my parents decided I was mature enough to go wherever I wanted to in the city. They gave me a little money, a dime for the pay phone and a bottle of sunscreen. They said I could go anywhere, as long as I was back in time for dinner. Then they put me out the door. I didn’t know where to go or who to talk to. I’d never been anywhere in my life.

I just went.

I did what any enterprising young man with no clue would’ve done, I guess. I went to the biggest place in town and started from there. I took the neighborhood bus all the way down the line to the transit center, then switched to another bus that would take me south along the Beltway. From the second-to-last seat, I waited and watched as the desert turned into houses and the houses turned into hotels and the hotels turned into casinos. I arrived half an hour later at the corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Flamingo, right in the middle of the Strip.

I don’t remember much about that bus ride itself, but I think that’s when it started. Something changed inside me. It was like I was waking up. I’d ridden through the city a thousand times in the back of my father’s car and seen every inch of the Strip by the time
I was that age, but for whatever reason it was different this time. When I was alone, I felt like I was really seeing Las Vegas. I could commune with the place in a way I couldn’t by walking along beside my father. The glass and the concrete and the lights and the bells weren’t just background noise anymore. They were the substance and the character of my own thoughts. When I got off that bus, it was like I was setting foot there for the very first time. I felt in that moment what a hundred million tourists have felt since the first lightbulb was hung from a wire, as a man with a mustache dealt the town’s first game of cards here in 1920. I felt the rush of blood to my head as I looked up at the casino towers and took my first breath of the devil’s wind blowing up the boulevard.

My god.

It was wonderful.

You have to understand, back then the Strip was a whole different world from the one it is now. Bill’s Gamblin’ was still the Barbary Coast. The MGM Grand was the Marina. Even the Bellagio, that big white marble monstrosity with the fountains all up and down the road, was still a mob joint called the Dunes with one pathetic tower and a sign made of incandescent lights. Before New York and Paris and Egypt took over the skyline, the Strip had its own sort of feel. It was hard to describe. It was comfortable with what it actually was, I guess. It looked and felt like a place that real people had built. There was still the smell of Teamsters’ cigarettes, freshly opened playing cards and desert dust in the air. There was a desperation to it all, but a distinctly American one. Little things were off about it, but that’s what made it so perfect. The white pavement reflected the sun right up into your eyes like sand out in the desert. There were signs up on the sides of old hotels—rooms for a dollar an hour, no questions asked—that hadn’t been repainted in years. There were empty lots where the pavement had cracked and the sand had moved in. Tumbleweeds made of cigarette butts and newspaper were caught in the rubble. The whole city was dirty and ready and burning and halfway under construction. It was so different from anything I had ever known.

When I was growing up, the Strip was always a place we drove through and tried to ignore. It was never part of my parents’ life. We had to go down it every once in a while, but we never stopped. It was like it didn’t exist. But here it was. I can’t explain it. When I was there, I wasn’t in my head anymore. I was in the realm of experience. My senses mattered in a way they never did in the desert or in the library. Smells mattered. Textures mattered. Colors mattered. Here and now mattered. While I was there,
something inside me could cut through the fog of words in my head. In those moments of jaw-struck wonder, I was alive and present and rendered speechless by the tranquility of it all. For the first time, I could hear the whine of the metal bars in the concrete as the trucks rolled overhead on the freeway. The chimes of the slot machines. The growl of all the engines.

For the first time, I could hear my own heartbeat.

From that moment on, going downtown became a regular part of my life. I didn’t even do much once I got there. I just
was
. I did a fair amount of people-watching, I guess it’s called. I used to walk up and down the sidewalks and watch people pass by and observe them and see how they lived their lives. I listened and smelled and touched. I used to lean against the stucco wall in front of Caesars and let the waves of human bodies move along all around me like an ocean. I used to sit at the plastic counter outside the hot dog stand and study the faces of the men and women who came out of the casino doors across the street. That was my favorite place, especially in the evening. I could rest and watch the world. Some of the people who came through those doors were rested, like me. Some were confused, and others in tears. Some came out enraged, or aroused, or like they were in love. There was a kind of magic to it. I practiced imitating the faces of the people I saw. It was involuntary at first. I would see someone and become them, like reading a book on the human soul. I learned something I’ve kept with me my whole life. If you wait long enough, you will see every human emotion come through a casino door. I thought that maybe one day, if I waited long enough, I might even see someone who felt the same emptiness I did.

It went on like that for months. I must have gone people-watching downtown probably thirty or forty times over the course of a year. My studies never hurt for it, so my parents let me go as often as I wanted. I was enamored with the city. It was my only real relationship.

Some days were slower than others. The Strip was dead during the heat wave at the beginning of summer, then again in the fall, and for a few days right after New Year’s. Those days I would sit on the steps inside Caesars under the air conditioning and read one of my books. A translation of Ptolemy. A letter written by Augustus. A poem by Catullus. I’d wait there for the sun to go down and for the moon and the lights to come up, and then I’d watch the people in the restaurants and the nightclubs take off their suit jackets and high heels through the reflection in the glass. I’d sit and make up stories
about their lives and live with them for a few seconds. Just being in such a place was a thrill for me. I could be a thousand people at once. I wanted to be everyone. I didn’t want to be a face in the crowd, I wanted to be Las Vegas.

I thought I could keep at it, too, until that one day in September.

That’s when everything changed.

* * *

If I remember anything about my childhood, I remember that Friday evening. It might be the first memory I have of anything, except for a few fragments of clinging to my mother’s side or playing in my imagination under the desert sky. It’s the first story I have, and I know it by heart.

It was a good day by all reasonable standards. School had finished early because of some teacher-training exercise, so I had the whole afternoon to do as I pleased. I went to the hot dog stand outside the casino on the south of the Strip, just because I could. The bus driver who took me there had seen me dozens of times in ten months, but no matter what I did or said to him once the doors opened, I never saw a hint of recognition in his face. It was like I was a new passenger every time. I couldn’t blame him. They say low birth-weight babies end up either very thin or very obese, but that never happened to me. Nothing happened to me. By fourteen, I wasn’t tall or short. I wasn’t fat or thin. My hair was brown but not too brown, and so were my eyes. They say children are invisible. Invisible didn’t even begin to cut it. I didn’t even exist.

I stopped paying the fare in August.

I remember it was a slow day on the Strip, and it looked like it was going to become an even slower night. I’d brought a book, just in case.
The Aeneid
. September is never a good month here. The weather is better than normal and all the attractions are still there in full swing, but nobody comes to visit. Occupancy goes way down for a few days right in the middle, a back-to-school thing. The whole world runs around adults and their kids, so people don’t take vacations in September. By the second Monday all the schools in the country were in session, and the unsold hotel beds had been made and forgotten. I sat outside under a sun umbrella at the counter and waited to see who would come through the doors across the street. The sky was the color of cigarette ash. My
finger was still holding the pages open. They were old and yellow. It was a paperback of C. Day-Lewis’s translation, and I was almost halfway through. I remember it all clearly. The whole world smelled of burned meat, stale beer and old paper.

And then I saw the paper bag.

Back in the eighties, ATMs were just getting started. They weren’t everywhere like they are now. Las Vegas was full of banks, and the banks were full of cash. You wouldn’t believe the amount of cash. Hundreds of millions, all of it in circulation. People would fly in with only a plane ticket and an overnight bag and take out whole paychecks to throw around on the casino floor. Once the casinos won, and they always did, they’d ship the money back to the bank. It was almost like a closed loop, except that huge sums of cash were moved around like this every day. Tourists would take money out of the banks, casinos would put it back. I’ve been to some parts of the country where a big cash withdrawal is two hundred dollars. In Vegas, the teller doesn’t blink until it’s two hundred thousand. They wrap it up and give it to you in an envelope.

This wasn’t an envelope. It was a brown paper bag.

Sitting a few seats down from me at the hot dog stand was a guy in a white button-down shirt with one of those shoulder-strap messenger bags by his feet. His hair was receded all the way back behind his ears, and he’d made a halfhearted attempt to comb the last few long strands of it over his bald spot. He looked to be in his early forties and was hunched over the counter staring into a mug of black coffee. He was thin and had brown eyes like mine. There was a silver name tag over his pocket. I squinted against the sunlight but couldn’t make it out. He had a look on his face like his day had stretched on for eternity. But that’s not what drew my eye and made me watch him like he was the only interesting person in the world. I didn’t care what his name was or what his day was like.