I was invited on a trip to Las Vegas to go see art, then it got cancelled at the last minute. Still, everything was arranged, the hotel was booked, plane tickets were purchased. Also, I was on deadline for a GQ story I hadn’t really started, and a few days in a hotel room seemed like a good way to get work done, even if it was in Las Vegas.
I don’t pair well with Las Vegas. My inclination traveling alone is to stay in cheap places, but Vegas takes it to extremes. All the smells of industrial cleaners and cigarette smoke and spilled fluids. So many people vaping, like industrial runoff from a perfume factory. Plus all the grim and grime, the sidewalk pitchmen, “the iconography of desire,” per Dave Hickey, that feels somehow sadder the brighter it shines.
Circus Circus is a resort designed to keep you from going anywhere else. Inside there’s a casino, a wedding chapel and two tattoo parlors. There’s a food court akin to a rundown mall, and a breakfast buffet that appetizes even less. The steak house was empty at eight p.m. The whole place wasn’t dirty so much as overused and antiquated, Vegas now layered over Vegas then. I rode an elevator with four sunburnt, drowsy-drunk British guys carrying pizza boxes. In the lobby was a window for sending mail, in case you wanted to dispatch a telegram to Miami. I have a note dictated to my phone after lingering near one of the casino bars:
Bing Crosby music wedding couple cowboy boots photographer doing shots groom wants a Shirley Temple bride said don’t be a pussy
People who adore Las Vegas stress to me the importance of fully embracing the Strip or going nowhere near it. Mostly I stayed in my room and worked. The article I was trying to write was about me coming to terms with a close friend dying. He passed away three years ago, my first close friend to die. But I didn’t know where to start. I didn’t know the middle. I definitely didn’t know the end. What question was I trying to answer? For three days, I stared out the window toward the mountains. I listened to Bach on repeat, Brian Eno on repeat, I paced the room and did push-ups. Procrastinate, procrastinate, procrastinate; eventually draft after draft, after draft.
I took down a painting from the wall because it was annoying there.
One night, everything unpromising, I closed the laptop and drank three beers and watched a loop of Sex and the City on TV. Hours later, four a.m., I woke up and Carrie Bradshaw was still there, typing questions on her MacBook. I thought, with a touch of dissociated interchange, will she always be there, stuck in the box, stuck in her loop, questions unanswered?
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