Johnny Rotten

(This was intended for Tilted Magazine but was unable to get published. Halx asked me to post it in the forums.)

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The heart of the city does not beat on the Las Vegas strip. Greed and desperation are at their most blinding concentration on the boulevard that stretches from the Mandalay to the Stratosphere, sure. I'll give you that. But the pulse of greed is a pulse common to humanity. The greasy darkness of the Vegas soul lies elsewhere, in the cleavage of a stripper's breasts, and in the vapor of the seventh tequila shot of the evening. As there is nowhere to sit at the Palms that does not have a slot machine, playing cards, or bartender in front of it, you cannot escape the true and slick gears, once you have gotten snagged. When you sit in a chaise lounge at the Bellagio, it is but a whisper. When you have two women piled and writhing on top of you, it closes over you, like a shroud. And it always smells like tattered money.

Sure, we played poker. We played 2-4, 4-8, no limit, 100 min-max, Paigow, and a few pokers in between. We went to see shows, like the Blue Man Group and Danny Gans. We played cards and craps at the Excalibur, the Luxor, the Flamingo, the Palms, the MGM Grand, and others. We went to see the Ultimate Fighting Championships: carved, brutal men flexed their macho, beating each other bloody, throwing each other, twisting arms and legs with Greco-Roman wrestling, jiu jitsu, kickboxing, and street fighting. In the title fight, Couture vs. Liddel, the reigning champion tumbled to the floor less than a minute into the match, a victim of an expertly applied fist to his chin, which was followed up by a flurry of blows after he'd hit the ground. Behavior that would have had an athlete instantly disqualified in a boxing ring was fair game in an octagon surrounded by a padded chain-link fence.

We walked the car-choked boulevard at night, in a warm summer night that had stolen its way into early spring. Poor immigrants flicked cards at us - free admission to the club of your choice, only that it typically wasn't one you would choose, because the good ones don't have to ask. We walked a boulevard with America--white, black, poor, rich, beautiful, ugly. Las Vegas is nothing if not blind to your status - welcoming and discreet.

And Las Vegas glitters like rhinestone. Video billboards flash with the power of the entertainer - Elton John, Sean Paul, U2. The towering light emanating from the Luxor sparkles with desert insects, but it looks like fairy dust from the ground. The cannon-shot fountains of the Bellagio impart a slightly maddening salvo of excitement and pomp as they explode higher and higher, in unison and in groups, without end. There is always water in this money - swirling oasis of risk, lies, and chattering slot machines. There is always cigarette ash, and doors that never lock, and floors that are never, ever entirely clean. Those who have gone before know of the miniature Eiffel Tower, and the roller coaster careening over the abyss of the street. We know of the rapid side streets and alleys of the smart cabbie, the oppressive waves of heat and the grace of conditioned air. We know of the smell of a stripper and what shadows the neon will never extinguish.

The first time we walked in to the Spearmint Rhino, it was 2:30 in the morning on a thursday, and it was alive like a hive. There was hardly a seat to be found, and nowhere to look that didn't have at least one woman somewhere in the frame of your eye. We adjusted to the pumping music and the sultry shadows, but we never quite get used to all the nearly-naked women. You never feel entirely good about yourself. The alcohol helps, and the distracting girl in your lap, as they are supposed to.

Yet even here, in the city without judgment, there are lines in the sand. There are some women in the club who just won't be a part of your night. There are areas of the club you just can't afford to be in. Those things are not for you - this time, at least. Like an old job, it's a place you can always eventually come back to as long as you're polite and play within the few rules there are here. I was polite and the girls were polite, and that's how it's supposed to go. No pressure from either party. We're all here just to have some fun. And the girls either had fun or were very good at playing along.

And unlike most other places, we were free to have fun as long as we had the cash. The Rhino never closes, nor does it ever stop serving up drinks from its deep and varied arsenal. Some in our group stayed until well into the next morning, forgoing sleep in favor of controlled debauchery and ridiculous embarrassment that passed without question as easily as a twenty dollar bill passing from one hand to another. "I want you to act like a pirate," he said with all seriousness. "I have this thing about pirates." And they obliged. A girl took a napkin and a rubber band from the bar, and made an eyepatch. She was also drinking straight from a bottle of Jack.

And there's the rub. Even in a high-quality strip club like the Rhino (if I am allowed to combine "high-quality" and "strip club"), the free joy of unfettered sexuality has its shadow, and that shadow is made of money. Those sauntering, alluring girls are not there for the thrill of it, nor are you there for good, clean fun. The novelty carries a price tag. It might be forty dollars for two girls giving you a lapdance at once, a hundred dollars for some full-contact time in a VIP room, or much, much more to buy some time and space in the anointed sections of the club, where the not-for-you busty bombshells swayed. Sometimes they danced for the richer men, but sometimes they just stood and waited. Stood and watched without watching. Stood and waited for a man with a large enough denomination in his pocket. Gorgeous, all of them - and depressingly demeaned.

One of the girls who gave me a dance spent eight years in Catholic school. She joked about how the frocked instructor loved a good dance but wouldn't take a blowjob. She was at the end of her shift, but I drew her in with just a smile, and the money she knew was behind it. We both new it, and thereby was the commerce honest, however illicit. Even though it was the end of her night, she curved and grinned and showed me how a girl can caress you with her whole body instead of just her hands. As a writer and journalist, I find strippers fascinating and I thought about where she might be going, where she'd come from, and if she felt lost or found. I suspect it was somewhere in between, and closer to darkness than the money was willing to tell me.

And some of us demeaned ourselves in that hard, conservative stone in my soul that says, "Thou shalt not cheat." Gladly, I am not married or dating, but I could not understand how these men could walk in, and sit down, and watch, and pay, and smell, and touch, and everything else that usually happens in the mind at three in the morning when you're lying in bed, fully awake and pondering the what-ifs of infidelity, either casually or with anger. I was burned, so I cannot turn away and burn another, and that is the simple fact of how I feel about seeing a man touch one woman while he belongs to another. I cannot escape it but I have learned how to not judge, because this is my life and that is theirs. Besides, amid the neon, the marketed femininity, and alcohol, the rules bend like reeds, as they are meant to.

And eventually we left Sin City. We inevitably took our cabs back to the airport on a horrid, zombie Sunday, and we boarded our planes heading to saner, quieter climes. But the city never quite leaves you. It leaves a little, lurid spot on the mind. One of us played cards with Dave Foley. One of us won $2500 or so at craps and got a comped room. Another won five hundred dollars on one poker hand, and almost a thousand more a few deals after that. The only way to walk away in one piece, though, is to arrive as a slightly different person - a heart in twain. You leave Self behind and arrive as No One, and those two parts slide back together before you've landed at the airport back home. Drift home, and re-adjust. But eventually, you will be drawn back.

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"The idea that money doesn't buy you happiness is a lie put about by the rich, to stop the poor from killing them." -- Michael Caine