Turn of the Century (31 page)

“All I know is he’s talking to tech people. Don’t count Harold out, man. He gets it.”

Harold?
Mose
.

“I don’t know. The TV shows suck.”

“They get some great numbers. Network numbers. That artsy cop show they have, with that bleeding-heart actress. You know, older, but cute, with the tits, Annie …”

The elevator opens.

“Angela Janeway,” says the other Wall Street asshole, stepping into the air-conditioned interior piazza. “I
hate
that cunt. Won’t watch it because of her. Besides,” George hears the Angela-hater say as the two men march off, “isn’t that show kind of over?”

Wait. No!
No!
According to the most current audience research, eighteen-to-thirty-four-year-old A County male viewers—fellows like
you!
—have 63 percent
positive
feelings about Angela and the Jennie character. And while, yes, ratings have slipped lower for two consecutive episodes, modestly lower, the average rating, even
excluding
the New Year’s show (which you guys probably heard about), is still higher for the second half of the season to date than for the first half. And while the producers have certainly experienced their own share of exasperation with Angela over the last year, successful creative people are by their very natures passionate and strong-willed. You arrogant know-nothing frat-boy Wall Street assholes.

“Good
evening
, Mr. Mactier,” a concierge says, grinning and bowing slightly as George passes. “So glad to have you here in person.” Not bad. “In person?” Maybe the idea is to make everyone feel like a star, someone who exists other than in person. A doorman winks. It’s Vegas.

He grabs a leaflet about the new hotel’s trained pigeons (“four flock-shifts of two hundred Old World birds, together comprising the most complex animal entertainment production in Las Vegas”) and walks off smartly across St. Mark’s Square in the direction of the Strip and BarbieWorld, sending a dozen of the current pigeon flock-shift skittering out of his way toward the Doges’ Palace.

When George first walked down the Strip one afternoon in 1972 (a date closer to World War II, he obsessively-compulsively calculates, than to the present time), he was alone, just about the only pedestrian
on the eight-lane highway between the Desert Inn and Caesars Palace. Back then it didn’t seem like a city at all, Vegas along the Strip, but like upper Manhattan in the 1870s, or a twenty-second-century NASA colony—gawky, melancholy stretches of vacant sun-blasted flatland with one odd structure stuck randomly here and another way, way over there. Now the Strip is almost entirely packed with buildings, complete from Sahara to Tropicana, and packed with thousands of people on foot. Isn’t the Las Vegas Strip pretty close to the urban planning paragon of the last forty years? Motley (that is,
diverse
) crowds of people strolling in and out of
diverse
, people-friendly architecture! Rich and poor, black and white and brown and yellow, old and young! Very young, tonight. George has passed dozens of happy little girls carrying shiny pink BarbieWorld bags. The Strip is a genuine Main Street that happens to be built at super-jumbo XXXL size. Where is a livelier urban space between Chicago and the Sierras? “George, it’s just a giant carnival,” Sally Chatham, one of the
Newsweek
snobs, said when he proposed a special issue on Las Vegas. “It’s just a shopping mall on steroids, George,” one of the ABC News snobs said when he proposed a prime-time documentary on Vegas. Yeah. So? He mounted the same defense in both instances, struggling to seem neither snappish nor pedantic nor arch. Carnivals and shopping malls were just early, slapdash attempts to cook up some urban juice in the middle of the American nowhere, beta versions, and Vegas is the best and latest iteration, a midway that’s a real city.
Whatever, George
, their smiles said. He cannot abide dumb snobbery, easy snobbery, snobbery ten or twenty years behind the curve.

BarbieWorld! It’s bigger than it looks in the photographs in
GQ
and
Wallpaper
and the
Times Magazine
. The grand opening has been under way all day, but the children are now being ushered out a side door as the invited grownup guests arrive. The complex has three parts. BarbieWorld proper is like a curvilinear Alvar Aalto glass vase enlarged to Claes Oldenburg size. It’s pink, a soft pink that glows from within the translucent, undulating cast-glass walls of the building. On the roof, there’s a transparent dome with people inside, surrounded by rays of pink and purple and golden laser lights shooting out into the night sky. The
BARBIEWORLD
sign is classic Vegas semicursive lettering, twenty-five feet high and hot pink. Inside each letter, gallons of viscous pink liquid bubble
and flow, sequentially filling and draining the hundred-and-fifty-foot-long word every half minute or so, in a kind of perpetual slow-motion flood surge. Next to the big pink building is a fifties-style casino building, low and rectangular, all glass and white steel. It’s brand-new, the synthetic lava nuggets on the ground around the last palm tree even now being tamped down by a skinny man in a dirty pink jumpsuit. The casino is called Swank City, and an old-fashioned flashing yellow-and-silver sign says
CASINO AND VIP LOUNGE
. Swank City is small and decorous by Vegas 2000 standards. Tucked behind BarbieWorld and Swank City is the third piece of the complex, a black high-rise, a half-size Seagram Building with a shining sign on top, hotel 1960, spelled out in turquoise lowercase letters.

Limousines, all of them white and just long enough to be ridiculous, are lined up around the circular driveway and for a half block down Las Vegas Boulevard. Out of the one now at the entrance steps a very tall, very pretty woman, about twenty-five, with big blond hair and wearing a tight, bright blue sequined gown that’s vulgar but oddly demure—very large breasts, relatively little décolletage. Photographers flash, nobodies clap and yell. She must be a TV star, George figures; he has no idea who. Her close-cropped escort, extremely and blandly handsome, follows her out of the limo and onto the serpentine, rainbow-colored people mover that leads to the BarbieWorld entrance. Onlookers applaud more enthusiastically. Photographers pop off frames of the couple, standing still and waving as they’re conveyer-belted away. The man is famous too? Maybe he’s the star of
Ben-Hur
, the new ABC series. Which could make her, George hypothesizes, one of the Cartright great-granddaughters from
Bonanza: The New Generation
, on NBC. (He read somewhere that the
Ben-Hur
guy and the
Bonanza
girl met and fell in love last Thanksgiving at a pistol range in Hollywood.)

The next white limo pulls up, and another tall, young, bosomy blonde steps out, wearing a dress very much like the first woman, tight and sequined but chartreuse. And her escort looks just like the first man, except he has longer sideburns and military decorations pinned to his dinner jacket. A paparazzo shouts, “GI! Over here, GI! This way, GI! This way, Joe!” Has George also read somewhere that the star of
Ben-Hur
has an identical twin who works as his stunt double? Or is he getting them confused with the identical twin sons of the Gulf War
hero who are going to take turns playing the toddler Jesus on the new CBS series
Savior
next fall? Whoever this couple is, photographers shoot and citizens cheer. But now George detects an edge of amusement in the smiling eyes and hoots of the onlookers, something verging on disrespect, not the pure, grateful, shaky awe he sees on the street and in restaurants when he’s with Angela or the other
NARCS
stars. Maybe it’s some Vegas vein of embedded irony.

Out of the next white limo emerges a young black couple, both very pretty. Flashes, applause, a little less applause. Her dress, kelly green, is tight and sequined, cut just like the last two.

“Yo! Yo!” A fat white photographer in a ratty satin “We Are the World” jacket and an
Us
magazine baseball cap is shouting at the woman. “Black Barbie! Black Barbie! Shooting for Jet! Over here! Give us a smile over here!
Without
Ken, please! I need a one-shot, Black Barbie!” The woman obeys, sliding out of her escort’s grip and pivoting toward the photographer, who snaps away.

As the line of white limos all pull forward a few feet, each waiting its turn to disgorge more Kens and Barbies, George reaches into his jacket for the pink plastic oval ticket marked
VIP
in seventy-two-point glitter letters and steps through the crowd, past the security men, onto the rainbow-colored conveyer and into BarbieWorld.

The interior is a three-level shopping center decorated in Camelot mod. The pinks come in even more varying intensities and textures, along with a lot of silvers and golds. Every BarbieWorld employee is under thirty, and both genders have the look of tarted-up Protestant missionaries or very wide-eyed adult film stars. In the Date Zone, one of three restaurants, there’s a (pink) telephone on each table from which diners place orders for deep-fried fat-free cheese sandwiches. The gym offers karaoke aerobic dancing, and life-size “As
If
” portraits—live, giant-screen video images distorted by means of a very convincing digital effect to reduce apparent body mass by up to 20 percent. The basement Equestrian Center, which a sign says will feature white ponies exclusively, is still under construction. Barbie Home is a large pseudo-apartment where Barbie ostensibly lives (like Santa in his workshop in Macy’s), and where all of the furnishings are for sale. BarbieWorld has what one of the guides describes as four separate “wearables boutiques,” or clothing stores, for girls and women—Barbie
Baby, BarbieWear, Maximum Cute (for teenagers), and Madame Barbie (sizes up to 24). Doll clothes for Barbie (and for every friend and hanger-on she has ever had) are available at the Totally Perfect Mall, a warren of seventeen separate “fashion miniboutiques” packed into an acre of floor space.

There’s a hair salon, two stories high, for adults as well as children, for humans as well as dolls. Up in a second-floor loft area, a male guide sounds like he’s leading a tour at Cape Canaveral or the Supreme Court, describing the BarbieStyle Beauty University as “the world’s first and only fully equipped hair-play mezzanine.” BarbieStyle Beauty University consists largely of several endless counters with scores of Barbies bolted into doll-size leather salon chairs, as well as a dozen real, Barbie- and Stacey-like women, sitting in full-size salon chairs between the counters. Patrons (or “groomer apprentices”) may comb, brush, and style—but not cut or permanently color—the hair of both the dolls and the women. Ordinarily, the hair-play mezzanine will be open only to girls fourteen and under (until the class-action suit on behalf of little boys is filed), but tonight, because of Swank City’s grand opening, adult men are invited to try their hands at combing, brushing, or styling (but not cutting or permanently coloring). George sees the two Wall Street assholes from the elevator waiting in the human hair-play line. They are joined by a third Wall Street asshole, a young black man who says, “Zig! Shepley! Viva Las Vegas, gentlemen!” Each man is drinking a Cosmopolitan, which is the free pink cocktail du jour at BarbieWorld tonight.
“¡Excellente!”
replies the one who won’t watch
NARCS
because Angela Janeway is a liberal. Seeing these three doesn’t literally make George ashamed of being a man, a well-to-do heterosexual man who has voted Republican a few times, but it does tip the somewhat delicate balance of George’s Vegas-reveling mood in an unhappy direction.

The rooftop restaurant is called Barbie’s International After-Hours Penthouse Bistro, but the name aside, it is authentically handsome, actually glamorous.

“Welcome to the Penthouse, sir,” says a young man with a Spanish accent. “I’m Klaus.”

On the sound system are Miles Davis and John Coltrane playing “Oleo.” A Willem de Kooning painting (bought for $12 million, a sign
says) is suspended in midair by cables over the bar. Un-pink drinks are being served. George orders a Jack Daniel’s, neat, from a European waitress, French or Belgian. He wonders if all the non-American employees are relegated up here, where the theming requires no one to portray Barbie or Ken and so there’s no effect for the foreign accents to ruin. This is the one place in BarbieWorld where the lighting is dim and where the sexual subtext of the Barbie ethos is rather less sub. George didn’t notice from down on the Strip that the dome itself, a hundred feet wide and fifty feet high, is a slightly greenish glass half globe, etched with longitude and latitude lines and the outlines of the land masses of the Northern Hemisphere. Unanchored by work or family to his middle-aged present, he’s sliding once more back to age fifteen, fourteen, thirteen, thrilled speechless, watching Stanley Kubrick (the first-class monochrome serenity of the spaceliner in
2001
, the Korova Milk Bar in
A Clockwork Orange
) and reading
Playboy
.

The spherical tip of a silver Barbie’s International After-Hours Penthouse Bistro swizzle stick sticks up from George’s drink, pointing at him. On it are little swizzle-ads for the Working Assets Titanium MasterCard—
FROM EACH ACCORDING TO HIS/HER ABILITY, TO EACH ACCORDING TO HIS/HER NEED®
—are spelled out in black on one side,
LIVE WELL, BUT LIVE GOOD®
on the other. Every time a cardholder charges something, each of several dozen leftish causes receives a fraction of a cent. Lizzie ordered Working Assets Gold MasterCards for herself and George. George rarely uses his card, as Lizzie reminds him once a month when she pays the bills. He finds the ostentation embarrassing—money ostentation, as with any gold or silver credit card, plus righteousness ostentation, like illness-specific dinner-jacket lapel ribbons. The show of charity is supposed to sanitize the show of venality, but to George it only makes it worse. He finishes his Jack Daniel’s just as the waitress brings his second.

Near the spiral staircase tube that leads to the Penthouse from BarbieWorld proper, George notices a small sign that says
UNACCOMPANIED CHILDREN ARE WELCOME IN THE PENTHOUSE BEFORE FIVE P.M. THANK YOU!
What’s the drinking age in Nevada—twelve? Fourteen on school nights? Then he watches a middle-aged black woman clomp slowly up the tube, followed, sure enough, by a child, a white girl of ten wearing a blue leather Ann Demeulemeester dress. And right behind
them, also holding the little girl’s hand, Ben Gould, wearing a tuxedo.