Las Vegas is all about propagating desire and promising its satisfaction, but there is an unbridgeable gap between the two, because the house can’t afford to deliver on that promise too often and because when the customer does “win” there is no connection with anything that has to do with heart, or spirit, or achievement. Walk through a casino and look at the grim, unsmiling winners, glazed and consumed.
Even in New York, which is a place of madness, one can find the space to be still and real. I once had an afternoon nap on a bench outside of a skyscraper at Sixth and 50th. The flow of traffic became running water, the taxi horns were raucous birds, people’s footsteps as fallen leaves. The city orientated with my interior compass and so we found each other.
This does not happen in Las Vegas. Perhaps this is the price when a city’s only purpose is entertainment, unbalanced by other energies. Yet it is different from the land of Disney, also devoted to entertainment and also unreal. As Disney perpetuates a world of childhood dreams, Vegas delivers its translation for adults, with pleasure instead of magic, money in place of enchantment, immediate satiation versus the promise of tomorrow and forever.
Seen this way, it’s such a fall into cynical disillusionment, and the re-marketing of Vegas as a family destination seems poisonous.
Even from a distance, when one is on the rim of the valley, the mesmeric beauty of the light below does not warm, or even illuminate. It only pulls one into the pulsing energy, insistent that you draw from it but actually consuming you in the bargain, because the house always wins.
Once, pulled off a frontage road near the airport, facing not the strip but an evening’s purple light, stretched on the hood of the little red car warming me against the approaching desert night, did I have a real moment. Then I left.
Ray Lewis heads up the tax consulting business, Tax Therapy, based in Boulder and San Francisco. Ray writes about everything from finance, taxes, business and technology to sports, travel, politics and music.
He was formerly a technology consultant at The New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer, and served as a faculty member of The Sawtooth Writers Conference in Stanley, Idaho, an annual event dedicated to teaching fiction and poetry to gifted teenagers.
