The Lost Continent (33 page)

I can never understand these people who rush to buy new gadgets; surely they must see that they are going to look like idiots in about a year when the manufacturers come up with tiny lightweight versions of the same thing at half the price? Like the people who paid £200 for the first pocket calculators and then a few months later they were giving them away at gas stations. Or the people who bought the first colour televisions.

One of our neighbours, Mr Sheitelbaum, bought a colour TV in 1958 when there were only about two colour programmes a month. We used to peek through his window when we knew one was coming on, and it was always the same – people with orange faces and clothes that kept changing hue. Mr Sheitelbaum kept bobbing up to fiddle with the many little knobs with which the thing was equipped while his wife shouted encouragement from across the room.

For a few moments the colour would be pretty fair – not accurate exactly, but not too disturbing – and then just as Mr Sheitelbaum placed his butt back on the sofa it would
all go haywire and we would have green horses and red clouds, and he’d be back at the control panel again. It was hopeless. But having spent such a huge amount of money on this thing, Mr Sheitelbaum would never give up on it, and for the next fifteen years whenever you walked past his living-room window you would see him fiddling with the controls and muttering.

In the late afternoon, I drove on to St George, a small city not far from the state line. I got a room in the Oasis Motel and dined at Dick’s Café. Afterwards, I went for a stroll. St George had a nice old-town feel about it, though in fact most of the buildings were new except for the Gaiety Movie Theater (‘All Seats $2’) and Dixie Drugstore next door. The drugstore was closed, but I was brought up short by the sight of a soda-fountain inside, a real marble-topped soda-fountain with twirly stools and straws in paper wrappers – the sort in which you tear off one end and then blow, sending the wrapper on a graceful trajectory into the cosmetics department.

I was crushed. This must be just about the last genuine drugstore soda-fountain in America and the place was closed. I would have given whole dollars to go in and order a green river or a chocolate soda and send a few straw wrappers wafting about and then challenge the next person along to a stool-twirling contest. My personal best is four full revolutions. I know that doesn’t sound much, but it’s a lot harder than it looks. Bobby Wintermeyer did five once and then threw up. It’s a pretty hairy sport, believe me.

On the corner was a big brick Mormon church, or temple or tabernacle or whatever they call them. It was dated 1871 and looked big enough to hold the whole
town – and indeed it probably often does since absolutely everybody in Utah is a Mormon. This sounds kind of alarming until you realize that it means Utah is the one place on the planet where you never have to worry about young men coming up to you and trying to convert you to Mormonism. They assume you are one of them already. As long as you keep your hair cut fairly short and don’t say, ‘Oh, shit!’ in public when something goes wrong, you may escape detection for years. It makes you feel a little like Kevin McCarthy in
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
, but it is also strangely liberating.

Beyond the Mormon church things became mostly residential. Everything was green and fresh after the recent rains. The town smelled of spring, of lilacs and fresh-mown grass. The evening was creeping in. It was that relaxed time of day when people have finished their dinners and are just pootling about in the yard or garage, not doing much of anything in preparation for shortly doing even less.

The streets were the widest I’ve ever seen in any town, even out here in the residential neighbourhoods. Mormons sure do love wide streets. I don’t know why. Wide streets and lots of wives for bonking, those are the foundation stones of Mormonism. When Brigham Young founded Salt Lake City one of the first things he did was decree that the streets be 100 feet wide, and he must have said something similar to the people of St George. Young knew the town well – he had his winter home there – so if the townspeople ever tried anything slack with the streets he’d have been on to them right away.

HERE’S A RIDDLE
for you. What is the difference between Nevada and a toilet? Answer: You can flush a toilet.

Nevada has the highest crime rate of any state, the highest rape rate, the second highest violent crime rate (it’s just pipped by New York), the highest highway fatality rate, the second highest rate of gonorrhoea (Alaska is the trophy-holder), and the highest proportion of transients – almost eighty per cent of the state’s residents were born elsewhere. It has more prostitutes than any other state in America. It has a long history of corruption and strong links with organized crime. And its most popular entertainer is Wayne Newton. So you may understand why I crossed the border from Utah with a certain sense of disquiet.

But then I got to Las Vegas and my unease vanished. I was dazzled. It’s impossible not to be. It was late afternoon, the sun was low, the temperature was in the high eighties, and the Strip was already thronged with happy vacationers in nice clean clothes, their pockets visibly bulging with money, strolling along in front of casinos the size of airport terminals. It all looked fun and oddly wholesome. I had expected it to be nothing but hookers and high rollers in stretched Cadillacs, the sort of people who wear white leather shoes and drape their jackets over their shoulders, but these were just ordinary folks like you and me, people who wear a lot of nylon and Velcro.

I got a room in a motel at the cheaper end of the Strip, showered lavishly, danced through a dust storm of talcum powder, pulled on my cleanest T-shirt, and went straight back out, tingling with clean skin and child-like excitation. After days of driving across the desert you are ready for a little stimulation, and Las Vegas certainly provides it. Now, in the oven-dry air of early evening, the casino lights were coming on – millions and millions of them, erupting into walls of bilious colour and movement, flashing, darting, rippling, bursting, all of them competing for my attention, for the coins in my pocket. I had never seen such a sight. It is an ocular orgasm, a three-dimensional hallucination, an electrician’s wet dream. It was just as I had expected it to be but multiplied by ten.

The names on the hotels and casinos were eerily familiar: Caesar’s Palace, the Dunes, the Sands, the Desert Inn. What most surprised me – what most surprises most people – is how many vacant lots there were. Here and there among the throbbing monoliths there were quarter-mile squares of silent desert, little pockets of dark calm, just waiting to be developed. When you have been to one or two casinos and seen how the money just pours into them, like gravel off a dump truck, it is hard to believe that there could be enough spare cash in the world to feed still more of them, yet more are being built all the time. The greed of mankind is practically insatiable, mine included.

I went into Caesar’s Palace. It is set well back from the street, but I was conveyed in on a moving sidewalk, which rather impressed me. Inside the air was thick with unreality. The décor was supposed to be like a Roman temple or something. Statues of Roman gladiators and statesmen were scattered around the place and all the cigarette girls
and ladies who gave change were dressed in skimpy togas, even if they were old and overweight, which most of them were, so their thighs wobbled as they walked. It was like watching moving Jell-O. I wandered through halls full of people intent on losing money – endlessly, single-mindedly feeding coins into slot machines or watching the clattering dance of a steel ball on a roulette wheel or playing games of blackjack that had no start or finish but were just continuous, like time. It all had a monotonous, yet anxious rhythm. There was no sense of pleasure or fun. I never saw anyone talking to anyone else, except to order a drink or cash some money. The noise was intense – the crank of one-armed bandits, the spinning of thousands of wheels, the din of clattering coins when a machine paid out.

A change lady Jell-O’d past and I got $10 worth of quarters from her. I put one in a one-armed bandit – I had never done this before; I’m from Iowa – pulled the handle and watched the wheels spin and thunk into place one by one. There was a tiny pause and then the machine spat six quarters into the pay-out bucket. I was hooked. I fed in more quarters. Sometimes I would lose and I would put in more quarters. Sometimes the machine would spit me back some quarters and I would put those in as well. After about five minutes I had no quarters left. I flagged down another amplehipped vestal virgin and got $10 more. This time I won $12 worth of quarters straight off. It made a lot of noise. I looked around proudly, but no-one paid any attention to me. Then I won $5 more. Hey, this is all right, I thought. I put all my quarters in a little plastic bucket that said Caesar’s Palace on it. There seemed to be an awful lot of them, gleaming up at me, but in about twenty minutes the bucket was empty. I went and got
another $10 worth of quarters, and started feeding them in. I won some and lost some. I was beginning to realize that there was a certain pattern to it: for every four quarters I put in, I would on average get three back, sometimes in a bunch, sometimes in dribbles. My right arm began to ache a little. It was boring really, pulling the handle over and over, watching the wheels spin and thunk, thunk, thunk, spin and thunk, thunk, thunk. With my last quarter I won $3 worth of quarters, and was mildly disappointed because I had been hoping to go for dinner and now here I had a mittful of quarters again. So I dutifully fed the quarters into the machine and won some more money. This really was getting tiresome. Finally, after about thirty minutes I got rid of the last quarter and was able to go and look for a restaurant.

On the way out my attention was caught by a machine making a lot of noise. A woman had just won $600. For ninety seconds the machine just poured out money, a waterfall of silver. When it stopped, the woman regarded the pile without pleasure and began feeding it back into the machine. I felt sorry for her. It was going to take her all night to get rid of that kind of money.

I wandered through room after room trying to find my way out, but the place was clearly designed to leave you disoriented. There were no windows, no exit signs, just endless rooms, all with subdued lighting and with carpet that looked as if some executive had barked into a telephone, ‘Gimme 20,000 yards of the ugliest carpet you got.’ It was like woven vomit. I wandered for ages without knowing whether I was getting closer to or further from an exit. I passed a little shopping centre, restaurants, a buffet, cabarets, dark and silent bars where people brooded, bars with live music and astonishingly untalented entertainers
(‘And gimme some astonishingly untalented entertainers while you’re at it’), and one large room in which the walls were covered with giant TV screens showing live sporting events – major league baseball, NBA basketball, boxing matches, a horse race. A whole wallful of athletes were silently playing their hearts out for the benefit of the room’s lone spectator, and he was asleep.

I don’t know how many gaming rooms there were, but there were many. It was often hard to tell whether I was seeing a new room or an old room from another angle. In each one it was the same – long ranks of people dully, mechanically losing money. It was as if they had been hypnotized. None of them seemed to see that everything was stacked against them. It is all such an incredible con. Some of the casinos make profits of $100 million a year – that’s the kind of money many large corporations make – and without having to do anything but open their doors. It takes almost no skills, no intelligence, no class to run a casino. I read in
Newsweek
that the guy who owns the Horseshoe casino downtown has never learned how to read and write. Can you believe that? That gives you some idea of the sort of level of intellectual attainment you need to be a success in Vegas. Suddenly, I hated the place. I was annoyed with myself for having been taken in by it all, the noise and sparkle, for having so quickly and mindlessly lost thirty dollars. For that kind of money I could have bought a baseball cap with a plastic turd on the brim
and
an ashtray in the shape of a toilet saying ‘Place Your Butt Here. Souvenir of Las Vegas, Nevada.’ This made me deeply gloomy.

I went and ate in the Caesar’s Palace buffet, hoping that some food would improve my outlook. The buffet cost $8,
but you could eat all you wanted, so I took a huge amount of everything, determined to recoup some of my loss. The resultant plate was such a mixture of foods, gravies, barbecue sauces and salad creams that it was really just a heap of tasteless goo. But I shovelled it all down and then had an outsized platter of chocolate goo for dessert. And then I felt very ill. I felt as if I had eaten a roll of insulation. Clutching my distended abdomen, I found my way to an exit. There was no moving sidewalk to return me to the street – there’s no place in Las Vegas for losers or quitters – so I had to make a long weaving walk down the floodlit driveway to the Strip. The fresh air helped a little, but only a little. I limped through the crowds along the Strip, looking like a man doing a poor imitation of Quasimodo, and went into a couple of other casinos, hoping they would re-excite my greed and make me forget my swollen belly. But they were practically identical to Caesar’s Palace – the same noise, the same stupid people losing all their money, the same hideous carpets. It all just gave me a headache. After a while, I gave up altogether. I plodded back to my motel and fell heavily on the bed and watched TV with that kind of glazed immobility that overcomes you when your stomach is grossly overloaded and there’s no remote control device and you can’t quite reach the channel switch with your big toe.

So I watched the local news. Principally this consisted of a run-down of the day’s murders in Las Vegas accompanied by film from the various murder scenes. These always showed a house with the front door open, some police detectives shuffling around, a group of neighbourhood children standing on the fringes, waving happily at the camera and saying hi to their moms. In between each
report the anchorman and anchorwoman would trade witless quips and then say in a breezy tone something like, ‘A mother and her three young children were hacked to death by a crazed axeman at Boulder City today. We’ll have a filmed report after these words.’ Then there would be many long minutes of commercials, mostly for products to keep one’s bowels sleek, followed by filmed reports on regional murders, house fires, light airplane crashes, multiple car pile-ups on the Boulder Highway and other bits of local carnage, always with film of mangled vehicles, charred houses, bodies under blankets, and a group of children standing on the fringes, waving happily at the cameras and saying hi to their moms. It may only have been my imagination, but I would almost swear that it was the same children in every report. Perhaps American violence had bred a new kind of person – the serial witness.