Viva, Las Vegas!

It is a Hilton property, a “grande,” resort because USA Today is delivered to the front door and the toilets have lids. The pool at the Hilton property is crowded with people of a certain age accumulating body fat far too soon in life. Others have completed the task to monumental proportions, some with coatings of dark fur on pale skin. One man displays stupendous breasts. Most of the rest are content to reveal some portion of their buttocks above low-slung Bahamas.

Two young bucks sit at the café table watching women move by, particularly one in a tiny skirt who switches when she walks. She doesn’t know how thoroughly she’s sized up. Sometimes the more predatory of the two guys looks at me to determine if there’s any cougar-like level of interest.

There is less than none.

He is reasonably good looking if a bit too short and swarthy with a carefully manicured 5 ’o clock shadow meant to present one too occupied to shave properly. Somewhere there is a wife or girlfriend with his children.

Here, a bartender is making margaritas in what appears to be a blender the size of a nuclear reactor.

It is late afternoon. TV people have been replaced by female soccer players from the Midwest. The wind, the overly loud conversations and the relentless 1980s music is punctuated by war whoops.

I am a holdover TV people, an accidental traveler trying to figure out what just happened. It was a big show with 25 times the people who lived where I grew up. It’s a proxy city where you know who you know from having run into them in one place after another. Some love you and some are sick of you. It’s like that in a city, a town, a family. They know you for what you are.

I was not the best of hacks. I was not the worst of hacks. I just was, and for most of it, not at a Hilton property but one belonging to Harrah’s, which is bankrupt if not officially so. I know things I’ll never tell. I know who has money and who doesn’t. I know what works and what doesn’t. I know that people here remember me in the boots above my knees. It was no small feat to walk in those.

I wait now by the pool at the Hilton property thanks to my young and beautiful, cheeky smart friend who will marry the love of her life soon and make small people. I wait to drive back to the coastal city when I’ve safely had enough sleep and every other automobile ever sold there is not idling on the freeway.

It, too, was elegant, once. It too, was young.

As was Las Vegas, when my mom and my dad and my brother and I stayed here in the Gold Key Motel off The Strip and went to a big casino to see Bobby Gentry whom I wanted to be like and whom I still love with unconditional childlike wonder. Bobby Gentry who sang that “Billie Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge” and gave Margo Timmons a career fronting Cowboy Junkies.

That was Las Vegas with little girls in dresses and good shoes and men wearing ties. My father stayed out late and saw Artie Shaw playing with a lounge band. I don’t know it but I hope so.

Vegas is not that place now. It’s changed, but I haven’t. I am still trying too hard, flailing spectacularly and going for broke. And I’m still trying to figure out where I belong.

Viva!

Sunday, May 24, 2009

Copyright 2010 by Deborah McAdams. All Rights Reserved. For Reprint Rights, click here.