[Summer of 2005]

It’s immoral to let a sucker keep his money.

– Amarillo Slim

For years after retirement, my Grandpa Angelo drove a Lincoln Limousine for this guy Brian who was, and still is a CEO. The epitome of 1980s elegance and style. My grandpa landed the gig by chance based on a joke my Aunt Jackie played on him by applying for the chauffer role on his behalf.

The comedic part was the irony that my grandpa was known to be an insanely erratic driver. But Brian loved him…specifically because of his Formula 1 level speed and the calculated chances he took on the road. Running red lights, doing ninety in a forty-five. Plain and simple; even if he tossed Brian on the floor of the limo here and there, spilling champagne on his slacks, my grandpa got the guy to where he needed to be.

“That was a close one, Ang!”

When my grandpa retired from the driver position, as a gift, Brian gave him ten open-ended, non-expiring first class plane tickets to anywhere in the world.

He never did cash in more than a couple of the tickets, letting the balance go to waste out of guilt. But in 2005 he used two of them for a trip that he and I decided to take. He originally wanted to go to Disney World. For me, even at age twenty-five, I’d have gone anywhere with the guy.

Disney would have been an odd choice, but it was at least a nostalgic destination for me, and I wouldn’t have turned it down. Trust me, the potential for esoteric adventures in an epic like that would not have been lost on me.

I am, however, thankful that my father stepped in and suggested a journey to Las Vegas. It was the key I needed to get myself out of a peculiar expedition involving two grown men on the Haunted Mansion ride together.

To this day Vegas is still the only time I’ve ever flown first class. There’s nothing like it, and trust me, it’s everything a standard economy passenger could dream of. On June 1^st, Sam Rothstein the Handicapper and Card Shark Johnny Chan made their luxurious way to City of Neon.

Las Vegas, Nevada – where the sand turns to gold.

…

We stayed at Circus Circus because it was $17 or something ridiculous per night. Definitely the cheapest hotel on the strip, and this is probably because it was the only hotel on the strip that allowed children inside.

Now, what I witnessed at Circus Circus was a bizarre experience.

Hunter S. Thompson once wrote:

The Circus-Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. This is the sixth Reich. The ground floor is full of gambling tables, like all the other casinos…but the place is about four stories high, in the style of a circus tent, and all manner of strange county fair, Polish Carnival madness is going on up in this space.

We’re talking clowns jumping around the halls and sqwonking horns and balloon artists rendering penguins and Bengal tigers to amuse resort visitors.

A casino on one floor and a full area upstairs filled with children’s carnival games and a gargantuan video arcade. It houses Adventuredome – a five-acre, indoor amusement park with a laser tag and animatronic dinosaurs. This playland for adult and child alike, was built in 1968 and it still houses the largest circus in the entire world. Trapeze acts and bally girls and contortion performances. All the god damn cotton candy you can eat.

You can get married there at Chapel of the Fountain, enjoying snow cones under the now-defunct Circus Sky Shuttle monorail track. Circus Circus houses the only RV park on the entire Las Vegas Strip.  

I’ve read about when they opened in the late 60s: costumed table dealers, carnie cocktail waitresses, and small, pink elephants that you could ride around the casino. Monkeys roamed about the tables and interacted with patrons, paying out winnings and performing chaotic tomfoolery. An elephant named Tanya was trained to pull slot machine handles and toss dice with her trunk. Baby elephants were transported around the casino via sky tram, with the illusion they were flying around overhead like mini Dumbos.

My grandpa and I ate at the free “Diet Buster” buffet there, which was known for years in the Las Vegas Reader as the worst buffet in the city. Two major players gorging on open air sausage and coagulated scrambled eggs. I was just happy to be there to share the experience with him.

…

The coupling of my grandfather and I in the year 2005 was a true rendering of the phrase “What Happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas”. But this is mainly because we didn’t do anything, and our lack of intriguing stories from the trip is kind of embarrassing. We didn’t drink or really even bet. The biggest gambles my grandpa ever made were in the limo – taking the shoulder on the tollway to get Brian to O’Hare on time.

The meaning of the Sin City slogan as it pertains to us is completely and utterly ineffectual, so honestly what happened in Vegas should be staying in Vegas because it was just that uninteresting. I’m only writing about it here as an ironic twist with an idea that as a duo of innocence, we really might as well have just gone to Disney World.

The Strip, for some reason, we thought was one mile long. Day one, we decided to walk the entire Boulevard both ways. I learned that afternoon that prostitution is legal in Las Vegas. I mean, I kind of knew, but not really. There was a man on every single corner with a stack of little brochure cards depicting sex workers’ photos, names, and phone numbers. Flipping them, making a strangely distinctive sound. I’ve found that paper flipping noise definitive to anyone who has ever been there.

Pamphlets and booklets of show schedules paper the sidewalks. 2005 Celine Dion and Carrot Top residencies. You can also walk around outside from casino to casino with alcoholic drinks in hand, which felt surreal and it’s something I wouldn’t see again until my visit to New Orleans.

In the dry, relentless heat of our walk, my grandpa nearly keeled over. Halfway back I flagged a cab. The cabby told us that the Strip was actually four miles long. Suddenly our idea of an easily obtainable, two-mile hike was extended to an eight-mile epoch that nearly ended in death by dehydration.

We visited Old Vegas on Fremont Street, northwest of The Boulevard. Retro Row. We went into The Golden Gate – the oldest and smallest casino hotel in the city. Fremont Street is encapsulated by an overhead tunnel of vintage neon and televisual effects. A light show blazes forth at night in a spectacle of illuminating opulence. Lasers and pink and seizure-inducing brightness.

We’d maintain our respective schedules of waking up at 6 AM to meet for coffee and pancakes every day. You see, when you’re not sleeping until 10 AM due to a skull perforating hangover after a night of the glitz, glamour and extravagance you might read about in other peoples’ blog essays, you have no issue getting a jump on the day.

When the itch to blow through every last dollar you own isn’t even close to your radar, it’s fun to just enjoy the drunk characters stumbling about at the crack of sunrise while indulging in an al fresco omelet.

We did a sightseer bus tour over the oasis reflected desert terrain.

A lot of holes in the desert, and a lot of problems are buried in those holes.

The conveyance took us to Hoover Dam, which my grandpa insisted on calling “Boulder Dam” even though the name was changed in the late 1940s. Some relics from his World War 2 era never dropped off. The site, a concrete arch-gravity dam located in the Black Canyon of the Colorado River was quite a marvel to behold. One of America’s Seven Modern Civil Engineering Wonders of the World.

For some reason my grandpa was excited to view Wayne Newton’s house from about a half mile away. He didn’t even listen to Wayne Newton (was he even a singer?). I still barely even know who Wayne Newton was (is he still alive?).

The only other thing I remember was stopping at an M&M factory. While most Vegas tourists were trying their hand at poker and drinking Manhattans, we were sampling a rainbow of pastel coated chocolate and learning together about just how those tasty candy shells are fabricated. Not unlike like my Grandpa Angelo in the scheme of things – vibrant and colorful on the outside and just as sweet on the inside.

…

I wasn’t interested in gambling, and I’m still not. I don’t see a rush or get a thrill from the mere chance like some do. I don’t like the math involved. I also didn’t know how to play games like craps or blackjack or poker.

A lot of this was tied to a Conservative Christian upbringing. I don’t remember it being intensely preached against, but that’s probably because it just wasn’t in the Conservative Christian wheelhouse to begin with. I don’t really remember casinos as being off limits, but it felt like they should have been based on the culture.

It’s like, “Yo. You’re spending time at a full city of venues, where every move you make is proudly announced as an iniquity? You’re drinking, smoking, gambling, and possibly soliciting sex at the same exact time? You may have bigger issues on your hands than merely just heading to Hell.”

Some decision in the church hierarchy must’ve been made along the way where the idea of morally tackling the casino landscape was deemed as a lost cause. I will say – the church took a lot of my money; way more than Las Vegas ever did.

I didn’t have a familial tie to gaming, and no one ever showed me how to play. My grandparents and their friends seemed to go to Vegas every now and again in the 1970s and 80s. It felt oddly confusing to me, again, seeing as how they considered even going to a movie theatre or wearing jewelry both as mortal sins.

I spent most of my time there walking the Strip and going inside to explore the massively vast casino building complexes – each dazzling venture having its own theme. This appealed to me as a collector by nature. Most of them I only knew from references out of the movie Rounders.

Luxor was a giant black pyramid with a spotlight that shot directly upward that you can see from outer space. The dancing fountains at Bellagio, the exploding volcano at The Mirage, the cartoonish automated humanoid pirates at Treasure Island. The medieval castle of King Arthur’s Excalibur. Flamingo, Tropicana, The Stratosphere. I went inside each and every one, at least for a few minutes.

New York, New York had a giant roller coaster on top of the skyscraper facade, cruising screaming patrons past a mini-Manhattan cityscape. The Venetian designed with an interior river, had a full-on gondola ride inside the casino. Ceasars Palace is by far the biggest building I’ve even been inside of. The sheer size is just completely astounding. I walked and walked inside and like a brilliant Star Destroyer, it never seemed to end.

Why visit France, Rio, New York City, Rome, Venice, or Egypt, when you have it all in one dumbed down, microwaved, single serving sad man four-mile moneypit tourist trap!

MGM Grand happened to be my favorite. On the yellow brick road from Munchkinland I saw on the horizon the humongous, mesmerizing structure of green glass at the end of the Strip. The Emerald City. Man, it looked awe-inspiring just glimmering in the desert sun in brightness and glory.

A witch with no magic is a miserable being.

Five thousand rooms and an entry way with a seven-story dome ceiling that supernaturally changes from day to night, randomly summoning an intimidating tropical storm.

I had dinner at Rainforest Café at MGM Grand, because apparently that’s how I was rolling as a lame-oid with zero basis, seemingly unequipped to have the instinct to do anything cool. Studio 54 existed at the resort. From what I’ve read it contained memorabilia from the original New York City location. One would think I could manage to plan out some interesting visits while I was there, but instead I cheers’d my Vanilla Pepsi to no one, surrounded by robot toucans and gorilla droids.

I paid homage to 2Pac since his final night in decadence was spent at the Mike Tyson prize fight at MGM Grand Garden Arena. I went to the intersection of Harmon & Las Vegas Boulevard where he was gunned down in cold blood. Riding shotgun to Suge Knight in his BWM 7 Series he took four rounds through the car door from a .40 caliber Glock.

Murdered at my age, then – twenty-five.

…

There are no clocks on any casino floor. No one wants or needs to know what time it is, and nothing ever closes. I saw drinks being comped to players, obviously a free lubricant with intent to keep the buzz going, keep the machine running, and keep the house winning.

I stood there forever at Paris watching the craps tables as tens of thousands of dollars were raked in back to the dealer, after one roll of the dice. Just pausing in an indefinite daze, seeing it happen over and over again. One minute you’re four thousand dollars up and before you know it, you’re begging for change for the bus ride back to The Tangiers. Joe Pesci just got done popping that guy’s eye out of his head for Charlie M., and you’re next.

It was very peculiar. Stunning, really. Hanging there for hours seeing people lose their funds, I fell into the same zombie-like trance as the people who would sit and stare at the slot machines. Putting in coin after coin after coin and pushing the button in mechanical repetition, getting a glimmer of hope every single time.

You can have the money and the hammer, or you can walk out of here. You can’t have both.

I saw men in very nice suits, on the benches out front on the Strip just completely showing their hand in the fact that they lost everything. Heads buried, looking as though they pulled their kids’ 529s to lose to Amarillo Slim on a bluffed hand of Seven Card Stud.

My grandpa’s only vice was playing the penny machines at Slots-a-Fun – a small casino funded by the Kansas City boys, connected to Circus Circus that replaced a giant merry-go-round in the early 70s. Every day I’d find him in there with his plastic cup of coins.

The only game I played was roulette. And I only spun once. Putting chips on red or black carries odds of a 48.6% chance of winning. The best odds in Vegas. But you can only win what you place. My dad gave me $100 to gamble with. I got my chips at MGM Grand and I put it all on black, the color I was dressed in.

I won $100 and I walked away. Counting the stack of checks on the table I could barely see over; I knew I was a whale that Vegas couldn’t tame. I beat the house like Nicky Santoro manhandling a bookmaker.

Look, when you’re in the Entertainment Capital of the World and the stakes are high – you’ve got to know when to hold ‘em and know when to fold ‘em.