Neon Babylon

That’s the thing about this city…it ensnares you like a fishhook through flesh. This town is a sly seaman; he baits his rod with strong drinks and glitter, with aces high and uncovered nipples, with unfathomable ceilings and cigar smoke, with the grinning ghosts of Frank and Sammy. We—the daffy little fishes that we are—take one look at that spangled lure, our pupils dilate like pancake batter on the griddle. Dangling there in the sunlight is our chance to kiss inhibitions goodbye, to lap up fame and fortune, to wrap our lips around a fat stack of poker chips. We bite down, grinning into the sun as we’re hoisted out of the droning sea of domesticity and into a gilded galaxy that none of us really come back from. We’ve all returned, but we’ve all left something there—whether it be our last two-hundred bucks, our new Ray Ban’s, our dignity, our innocence.

You don’t escape the hook without a scar, and you don’t escape the strip without a story.

Flash forward to my last few hours there, sitting at Margaritaville, catching the last few glimpses of sin city through bloodshot eyes. I was slumped over a plate of fajitas at 9am, watching the two men outside dressed as roman soldiers hand out flyers. They leapt at the pedestrians like dancers, shoving paper at them. When someone shook their head and waved them away, the soldiers spun around on a dime and threw themselves on the next person. Over and over and over again they extended and retracted their pamphlets; desperate but detached. And that’s when it hit me. Detachment.

That was the secret to this place. If only I had realized that the first day I was there.

The only way to have fun here is to let go of everything, to release, not worry, not look back and not look anyone in the eye. Disengage yourself from all that is real and submit to this gold-plated movie set of a city.

The experts, the return customers, the seasoned visitors, they’ve learned the secret to this place. They bleed into the background, but you can pick them out if you really look. If you wade through the crowd of thirty-something frat boys and the white-haired men with tan legs and big-breasted wives, if you wait for the cold plumes of cigarette smoke to clear, you’ll see them at the craps table. They aren’t dressed up like everyone else, they don’t have that awestruck and confused expression plastered on their faces like the rest of us, they’re quiet and blank, yet efficient and eternal.

They’re the ones at the slots that always have a drink in their hand, that are there when you arrive and there when you leave, that—on the rare occasion you see them switch machines—know exactly where they’re going. I remember one woman planted in front of a penny machine at Treasure Island, cherries and big red 7’s reflecting in her eyes; she looked like she’d been there all night, glued to the machine like she was hooked up to a saline drip. They’re the ones on the street who walk past everyone without a second glance. No eye contact, no interaction, free as a bird, weaving through the sea of people as though none of them are there. They are surrogates—they are here—but oh, so far away.

If I had to gather all that is sin city into one word, it would be gilt. No, not guilt—although that applies too—gilt. Everything you see, touch, hear is veneer. It’s fool’s gold, a picture frame hung over a hole in the wall, a metal crown on a cavity. The fake skies and ceilings in the Venetian, the fake breasts, the fake fruity drinks, the fake smiles from the employees. The illusion of opulence and abundance within the city walls depends desperately on the 387 million gallons of water a day it sucks from the Mojave. That’s not what they want you to think about when you’re gaping at a 600-foot Eiffel tower replica with twinkling lights that drown out the stars.

But I guess we all do some gilding of our own. We harbor the unsavory parts of ourselves. As I slid into the hotel pool, hoping to achieve some sort of baptism that would cleanse me of the overwhelming volume of people and sizzling heat, the water was as hot as the outside air; it was like expecting to jump into a glacial lake and instead, willingly dipping yourself in a vat of hot oil. The drinks were big, sweet and expensive, but I sipped anyway, keeping myself busy and distracted from the circus surrounding me. Every square inch the roof was crawling with people, everyone teetering on some extreme. There were the muscular dudes in board shorts playing volleyball—their veins protruding out of their necks and forearms like rockets ready for takeoff—spiking and diving and scuttling across the concrete like a frenzy of brawny lobsters. Next to them were the impossibly beautiful women, waxed and glistening from teeth to toe ring, barely covered by hot pink string bikinis and dripping with Swarovski crystals, laughing and running long nails through their hair. Then there were the couples in the pool attached from lips to hips—swirling, dipping, gyrating masses of collarbone tattoos and flailing limbs—that were impossible to stand next to if you wanted to keep your drink in your cup. As I clung to the edge of the pool, the remixed party anthems blaring from the stadium-sized speakers assaulting my ears like a fuzzy sledgehammer, bald bodybuilder with “no mercy” tattooed across his back knocking into me each time he caught his nerf football, sequins and feet and beer cans and pinky rings flashing before my eyes, roasting in a booze bathtub with 100 strangers, I thought to myself: please somebody air lift my ass out of this hot box.

Some say this city is hell. But hell doesn’t false advertise; it doesn’t parade around as a 5-star sauna. It touts fire and demons and hot pokers up the ass and that’s exactly what you get.

But this city of lights is all but candid. It lures you in by appealing to the damaged child in us; that child we keep locked away that starts making noise when it hears tell of rollercoasters and razzle dazzle and “Disneyland for adults”. All the voids in your soul caused by childhood trauma are awakened and aroused, straining for attention like baby birds snapping at a mother’s regurgitation. It catches you by the short and curlies with burlesque, bells and whistles and bloody Mary’s, the freedom to be as douchey, as flamboyant, as careless, decadent and drunk, as childish as you want. And everybody looks the other way.

It was like being on another planet where everything was meticulously painted to look like home, but you didn’t act like you did at home. You bite into an apple only to find that its apple brandy-flavored Styrofoam. You approach Elvis from behind to have him turn around and reveal his beach ball belly and Velcro sideburns. All the bottomless mimosas in the world can’t cover up the charming hypocrisy of this city.

The nightclubs are empty shells promoted by towering men popping out of black blazers, speaking in hushed but commanding tones, convincing you that twenty dollars and an hour wait in line is going to get you into the most exclusive party of the night where girls drink free and the less clothes the better. You buy into it and brush past the heavy black curtains—your eyes darting back and forth anticipating a room teeming with beautiful people jumping in front of blue lights, barely enough room for you and your friend to squeeze in and join the mob—and you turn the corner and find the space deader than a doornail and emptier than a Scientology Org. So you spent twenty bucks to have one free drink in the dark as music you hate plays on an endless loop.

When your friend’s cousin hooks you up with the right people, you get into the “good” clubs, that are on breezy rooftop patios with glass railings and bars slick with whiskey. The people here are young and look more like you, but you don’t look like them. I found myself pressed up against the glass, tracing the skyline, searching for a place for my eyes to rest, where there was no movement, no flashing lights, just stillness. And then my friend introduced me to two law students who went to the same university as us she had met in the 15 seconds we had been there. While she talked to the more outgoing one, I shared a cigarette with the quieter one. We shouted over the noise about our disenchantment with this city and he started going on about a case he was working on that involved brothers cheating with each other’s wives. Or at least that’s what I could make out over the music. We hit a lull in the conversation and just sat there and smoked. It wasn’t the exact stillness I craved but it let me catch my breath. As he passed me the cigarette, I met his eyes—wide, brown and watery—and he gave me the tiniest of nods that expressed some kind of knowing that only he and I shared. It was a current of mutual and mystified misery that connected us, that made it so that we didn’t need to talk to understand each other. I nodded back at him and we smiled to ourselves, sitting there until we had sucked the last embers of life from the cigarette.

Later that night my friend and I just stayed in our hotel room and watched Harry Potter. As I chewed on a half-frozen burger from the night before, I imagined Harry and Ron in that nightclub, in their sweaters and sneakers, gawking at the dreadful magic all around them. All those people were enchanted, possessed by this city, writhing around like animals, and on Monday they would fly back to Indiana, put on their headsets, and start making sales calls as though they’d never left. Bloody hell is right, Ron.

They say what happens there, stays there. So, what did I leave behind? A twenty-dollar bill in a slot machine, a pair of pants in my hotel room, an empty bottle of vodka in the mini fridge, and a moment of stillness on a rooftop—a favorite moment, really. A world of unexpressed thoughts between us that was somehow articulated in one dip of the chin. A look in his eyes that told me he got it. An instantaneous tick that nobody in the world caught but me, that was meant only for me.

In a place full of grandeur and spectacle where everything was enormous and loud and exaggerated, my favorite moment was a tiny nod from a stranger, a moment that—if only for a second—shielded me from the blinding neon lights.