EUREKA! FOR THE GENIUSES (OR CHASING WITH DAVE HICKEY)
Cozying up to Las Vegas' most lauded thinker, and then he left.
I don’t know if you know the name Dave Hickey, but he is arguably one of the most influential art and culture writers of the late 20th century. Wikipedia basically backs that up, and whenever I find myself talking to art folks anywhere, they know who he is, right away. Also, in my small circle of self-described intellectuals in Las Vegas, there is a consensus that Dave is a big deal. But then again, we don’t get out much.
And while I’m not an art guy, per se, I truly enjoy museum and gallery walkarounds and have enough knowledge from my formal general education to bullshit my way through an unlikely conversation referencing “art.” I know what I like, and I like more than Van Gogh or Monet. Or Manet. Whichever. But that’s about it. Also, every single one of the dozen or so Las Vegas-based or connected artists whose work hangs on the walls of my house, because of the Vegas connection, knew or knows about Dave Hickey.
I also know that by the time Dave, then in his early 50s, relocated to Las Vegas (sometime around 1990), he was already prolific on a wide range of topics, and regularly published in places from Rolling Stone (the trippy early years) and Artforum to Interview, Vanity Fair, The London Review of Books, and countless others. By 1993, a prominent, even seminal, collection of his critical essays titled The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty had been published. It got a lot of attention, spawning a flood of reviews and profiles in every major art journal and virtually every mainstream newspaper and magazine worldwide. This piqued my interest. I try to keep tabs on people doing significant things out of Las Vegas, especially writers. This was only a couple of years after I came back home from college and law school and began my more focused journey to understand this place.
I believe a deeper exploration of Las Vegas as a city holds great value.
I picked up his book before I ever met Dave with great hope of being enlightened. Sadly, I couldn’t get really into his art theories. Way too dense for my limited exposure. Also, to my eye, the insights gave little accessible perspective on my city. I did, however, revel in the book reviews and profiles on Dave. Here was an interesting guy who chose Las Vegas as his new hometown and seemed to see something of value in the comings and goings of the city. In an interview of that era, Dave said,
I’m a writer who lives in Las Vegas (laughter), which is the opposite of everything right and good and fashionable. Vegas is a permissive, unfashionable, commercial town and I’m a permissive, unfashionable commercial guy. I do retail. I write words, I get money, I buy Wheaties, I get calories, I write words, etcetera. That’s commerce. Also I am an art critic, which is the single unfundable, ungrantable, unendowable endeavor that is even vaguely connected with the arts. And justifiably so, in my case, since I am not with the program.
Later, when the same interviewer tried to lavish praise on Dave for his newfound status as an in-demand “rogue” art reviewer with revolutionary ideas about the connection of art to beauty, entertainment, commerce and in conflict with institutions where art is taught, Dave responded, “I don’t want to be the high priest of anything except video poker.”
It was clear to me that Dave was a “hometown” person worth knowing, even if he was relatively new to the City and, like most, probably ready to leave at any time if things didn’t work out. And honestly, knowing a guy like that might help me not only find my voice, but amplify it in the same fancy journals that were clamoring for Dave takes.
* * *
Regarded authors have written critically about Las Vegas since it firmly emerged in the pop culture scene in post-WWII America. Most point to Tom Wolfe’s 1964 Esquire magazine article with a title too silly to repeat as the first important, more-or-less canonical work about the city. Many followed. Pontificators with hot, lame, unique, hackneyed, and every other flavor of take. Popular takes (at least to the outside world) for sure.
But the list of those writers who lived here, like, truly lived here versus passing through (let’s say at least 3 years! - I know, not very long, right, but we are a transient society), is narrower. Book and magazine writers, who you may, or more likely, don’t know, or know well. Good folks. Smart folks. Folks I didn’t always agree with, or whose work I don’t always like. Sometimes love. Journalists, novelists, historians, poets, social commentators, and critics who thoughtfully and confidently pontificate on a national stage about the workings of the city. They are all worth checking out. Folks including (but not limited to): Jennifer Battisti, Charles Bock, Geoff Carter, Gregory Crosby, Sally Denton, Krista Diamond, Amanda Fortini, Scott Dickensheets, Tod Goldberg, Michael Green, Andrew Kiraly, Laura McBride, Eugene Moering, Hal Rothman, Nicholas Russell, Geoff Schumacher, David Schwartz, Kate Silver, John L. Smith, Claire Vaye Watkins, and Claytee White. (My personal “for additional reading” appendix - you’re welcome).
But as prolific, well-intentioned, or genius as some or all of those writers are, Dave is the stand-out. Dave’s essays, or quotes from Dave, or essays that incorporated quotes from his essays about Las Vegas, greatly overshadow all other locals, before or since.
The Vegas-based writer Scott Dickensheets reminded me that in his monograph on the artist Robert Gober, Dave dropped the opening line: “High art in low places - my specialty.” Yup, that was Dave’s Vegas, too.
Dickensheets went on, “the many media profiles of Dave over the years were gaga about the glamour of a maverick art critic swanning about a maverick city.” That is to say, a city that is maverick because it is not especially respected in the blue-chip art world. Dave messed with the status quo and he got branded a genius. Indeed, he remains Nevada’s only MacArthur Genius Fellow recipient to date. And since well over a thousand of these fellowships have been awarded, this is both impressive (for Dave) and depressing for the rest of us.
With his 1997 collection of critical essays, Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy (generally more accessible than the first), I finally got Dave, and was hooked. Here, amongst an array of solid pop ponderings, were intermittent Vegas takes gathered in one place. Dave’s take on Las Vegas quickly became important in my understanding of my own relationship with the city. A city, he said, with a “flat-line social hierarchy.” He summarized that America…
“...is a very poor lens through which to view Las Vegas, while Las Vegas is a wonderful lens through which to view America. What is hidden elsewhere exists here in quotidian visibility….the town has a quick, feral glamour that is hard to localize- and it arises, I think, out of the suppression of social differences rather than their exacerbation. The whole city floats on a sleek frisson of anxiety….”
So many resonant words that made me a fan. Then, maybe some time later, a friend. I once told Dave that, despite being about a decade into my seemingly blossoming career as a lawyer, I wanted to be better known for my writing about Las Vegas. At that point, I already had a modest, albeit forgettable, publication record on the topic, but I felt that, as someone raised in the shadow of the Strip and living an interesting Vegas life beyond it, I was poised to make bigger strides. Maybe a unique voice? Ready to offer interesting takes on a city where so many intrigued tourist-writers steadily produced shitty ones? I shared my overly esoteric essays with Dave. He was encouraging, but not as effusive as I wanted him to be. This was his wont. I solicited his advice. He was generous. I madly scribbled down his words. He cautioned that it was impossible to place a work set in Las Vegas, fiction or non-fiction, unless it had “a lot of sex or gambling or both.” He explained it’s what editors almost uniformly expect and demand.
Dave gave me this advice while we were both pressing the buttons, sitting side by side, staring straight ahead at the video poker machines at the dinky Eureka casino. Nothing sexy about this conversation; nothing sexy about the setting. Just the gambling, so in retelling this story, I probably only get half credit. And to be honest, I think that was advice for a nascent writer, not something he was particularly concerned about in his own work about the city. But perhaps he saw the clamor at his editorial alligator pond and passed it on as a hot tip.
* * *
To this day, the Eureka remains a small but vibrant slots-only gambling space. It’s in a well-maintained structure built in 1963, owned by a long-standing family of note in the community, the type of people who serve on local non-profit boards and do more of that noblesse oblige stuff than most local casino owners. Certainly, per capita, given the size of their endeavor compared to the bigger, better-known properties. In addition to the slots, there’s a destination-worthy café with an ambitious menu of scrumptious items like pork belly baos and short-rib grilled cheese sandwiches, as well as standard buffalo wings and burgers. There’s a 24-hour traditional horseshoe-shaped bar in the middle of the casino that plays nonstop sports on mounted television sets, and a cast of regular patrons who are familiar both with one another and the loyal, long-time staff. It’s the epitome of a “locals only” joint with an overstimulating abundance of varied slot devices: old school video poker and video keno; cartoony themed slots like Betti the Yeti and a classic machine that sporadically bellows Buffalooooooooo; and, lately, towering, trendy, kinetic, 7-foot high cabinet games with giant dystopian digital screen displays. The Eureka can be a loud and smoky place, but not as loud or smoky as a 250-plus machine establishment could be. Fortunately, they try to mitigate and mute it all a bit. Try.
Most Eureka customers come from the mixed-bag neighborhood immediately surrounding it, and by mixed-bag, I mean to say that it is smack dab at the center of real expensive condos, Las Vegas’ most established, gated country club and golf course and the oldest continuously residential neighborhood in the city where I bought a house in 2000. It also sits on Sherwood Street, whose other prominent features are a cluster of dilapidated apartments and the debris surrounding them. Sherwood has one of the highest 9-1-1 call rates in the Las Vegas valley. I’ve heard polite local law enforcement refer to the street as “the dirty forest.”
While it’s not outrageous to run into a lawyer, doctor, realtor, or other professional at the Eureka in the sneaky throes of slot machine immersion, it’s more likely you’ll see someone on the cusp, if not in the full-on struggle, of poverty. The Eureka’s building sits on Sahara Avenue, a busy arterial lined with businesses, literally the border between the unincorporated County (where the Strip lives) and the actual city of Las Vegas (where it does not). The structure could be mistaken for an auto parts store or a Denny’s knockoff if you don’t look closely enough to see the offers of player rewards and specials on the modest marquee.
I was never sure whether the Eureka appreciated Dave for his bona fides in the art and literary worlds as much as for his loyal and sustained patronage, but they treated him as well as any genius deserved. Then again, as rumor and Dave’s own bluster to me revealed, he did (poorly) invest a healthy chunk of his $500,000 MacArthur cash award in this modest building’s version of “entertainment.”
Around this time, he was quoted in Time magazine saying:
“This is the one place where you can come and everybody gets treated the same. Money doesn’t mean anything here, in the sense that money buys virtue everywhere else in America. All it is here is just shit you gamble with, and that really changes the tone of the city.”
***
More residents of Las Vegas come from somewhere else than are born here, and that’s a fact only folks who were born here tend to decry. I get it. It’s one of those places where there’s possibly less advantage being generational than a carpetbagger - so long as one lays those carpets hard, fast and fully. Carpet Diem!
Dave was born in Fort Worth and spent his formative years there. He went to grad school and beyond in Austin and relocated to Las Vegas with his wife, the art historian Libby Lumpkin, in 1990 because he saw something uniquely American in the city. In between, he did stints in New York, Nashville and Albuquerque. He proclaimed in an Air Guitar essay called “A Home in the Neon” that despite living in a lot of cities, he never considered any of them home until one random morning, he woke up in his condo in Las Vegas and decided it was home; he defined home as “a secular refuge and a source of comforts and reassurances that are unavailable elsewhere.” So sure, for Dave, Las Vegas was his “home.” And while I’m convinced he loved being “of here” for the two decades he was, I never heard him refer to himself as anything but a Texan.
This isn’t an uncommon irony. Most transplants consider themselves “locals” after even a short amount of time, but are more likely to claim some other place they’ve lived as where they’re “really from” when asked. I find this to be true for people who have lived here for decades, too.
Either way, Dave clearly appreciated the city as a good home base. Close enough to the important L.A. art scene to almost be a part of it. A cheap hub for flights to and from his international speaking gigs. Unmistakably, the absence of a state income tax was a draw. Also, there was his addiction to video poker. A high priest of it, if you will.
Early in their relocation, Dave and Libby became faculty in the Art department at UNLV, but eventually Dave moved to the English department. Call his first placement a poor cultural fit. It certainly was for a handful of the other Art faculty, whom he regularly, albeit hyperbolically, belittled in interviews. He also had a patron in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop alum cum long-time gambling titan, Glenn Schaeffer, who at the time was the president and CFO of the luxe Mandalay Bay resort on the Strip. Schaeffer endowed a chair for Dave in English. To my knowledge, he is the only person to hold the position of “Schaeffer Professor of Modern Letters.”
That’s where I first met Dave and inserted myself into the outer layer, at least, of his sphere. At the time, I was just wrapping up my short tenure as an interim Las Vegas municipal court judge and, at a community literary event, boldly asked him if I could audit his “creative non-fiction” class (a course Dave initially called “Intellectual Journalism”). He agreed, and I took a variation of that class three times. And by variation, I mean to say it was more or less the same class with a different title: always at least one story of his personal rock and roll excesses in the 1970s, one tale of life on the road with Bachman-Turner Overdrive, and time set aside for a deep analysis, line by line, of at least some section of Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon.
Dave called me “judge” long after that gig had ended. At one point, he offered me non-traditional “office hours” to discuss writing, politics, art, Las Vegas, really whatever I wanted (a friendship, right?) at a local taqueria near the Eureka, or the Eureka itself. The Eureka was roughly halfway between our residences. It was not far from the neighborhood where I grew up and, seemingly, continue to grow up.
Dave was easy to spot. His classic Cadillac convertible, another of the spoils of his MacArthur Fellowship payout, would be in the parking lot. He was usually at the same bank of slots against the eastern wall, in a satin jacket, a navy blue hat embroidered with the word “Navy” covering his balding head, a supersized, non-alcoholic beverage by his side, and a tarnished halo of smoke from his chain of cigarettes above it all. Dave was a little past the cusp of chubby, with remnants of a Texas accent, and he had a distinctive tic when he spoke, which made his neck abruptly swivel left and right and his bright eyes dart slightly as he pontificated. He was able to simultaneously hyper-focus on drawing electric cards on the screen in front of him and talk about whatever was on my mind – usually the folly of my writing career and a needy search for validation and advice. Sometimes the action would be interrupted by the time-out required for a jackpot, but more often the break would come when one of us busted out.
It was always my sense that neither one of us could afford the addictive behavior in the background stream of our conversations, though Dave certainly had more ammunition than I did. I should probably confess that my adventures with Dave at the video poker altar were not my first, nor last, foray into compulsive too-much-to-be-considered-healthy gambling in Las Vegas. It was a trait, perhaps unsurprisingly, handed down from my parents. It’s a different story. Las Vegas has lots of stories.
While highly paid for his own prose that would land in places like Vanity Fair, Playboy, Harpers and various fancy art journals, Dave reveled in having that fat genius grant money to fuel his compulsion “hobby,” presumably with an expiration date. But money just wasn’t an outward concern to Dave. He seemed to have all the contingencies in place to make sure he never “bottomed” out like so many hardcore gamblers. In fact, he once told me the main reason he taught at the university he openly disrespected was to secure good health insurance.
Dave also bragged/lamented on numerous occasions in my presence that, given the decadent lifestyle of drugs, rich food, sex, and other trappings of being a touring rock critic, songwriter, and gallery owner in the depraved 1970s, he was already on “golden” time. That is to say (a favorite transition in Dave’s conversations), he believed he should have died long before we met.
And while technically I could chalk up these glorious one-on-one interactions with the guru to our mutual immersion in gambling, that would be a justification that doesn’t pan out as a positive for gambling. In other words, while gambling led to good conversations with a cool dude, it otherwise really sucked. Gambling for locals in Las Vegas—even with its potential social engagement niceties, even with my personal jackpot as it indirectly supported my indulgences as an aspiring writer—is not a good thing. Not even a little. And while I appreciate Dave’s attention and support in and away from our “sessions” at the Eureka, I mostly loathe this part of my own story. I loathe myself in a gambling space. A space that consumed my parents, too. And others I espied who I know (and don’t know) in these spaces. And the stats. And the history.
***
Dave could have ridden out his years here for sure, but I sensed he was always ready to bail on Las Vegas the second it turned on him and his wife. That finally happened around 2010. It wasn’t unexpected, since beyond the small community of literati, intellectuals, and artists who also sought his attention, Dave Hickey was mostly ignored in Las Vegas. Oh, also, the owners of slot places. They always kept track of Dave’s comings and goings. Sure, Dave was protected with his “chair,” but when his wife, Libby, who was at the time a visiting professor at Yale, was denied tenure on a petty, pretextual rationale, it was time to go. It read more like a proxy attack on her oxygen-stealing superstar-critic husband than anything she deserved. There was also the fact that, despite being prolific, Dave’s insights were relatively undiscussed locally. His influence on decision-makers among hometown powerbrokers remained almost nonexistent. Of course, if I can be a little reductive about his vast body of work on Las Vegas, Dave’s main theory was that Las Vegas succeeded because it was an unabashedly audacious place that held space for bad decisions and rambunctious acting out. He reveled in its gaudy aesthetic and perverse honesty. A refuge from the mundane, filled with optimism, although grossly misplaced.
Perhaps, there’s a reason those in charge of keeping Las Vegas a viable “real city” weren’t so interested in Dave’s work.
In 2019, two years before he passed at 82, he told me that the only thing he really missed about Las Vegas in his new home of Santa Fe, New Mexico, was the slot machines. I both did and did not believe him. Then, selfishly, when he did pass, grieving for the man I really liked was compounded by a lament that I never felt confident enough to take up Dave’s offer to help me place creative work about Las Vegas. He said that as long as it met two conditions, he’d be my champion like so many art students before me. One - I had to feel it was brilliant. And two - he had to agree. And however buoyed I was by the offer, I never did give him anything to look at after that; self-doubt and a desire for elusive perfection were my curses in that era of my writing. And while I don’t kick myself for squandering an “opportunity,” Dave’s passing, like the original offer, reinvigorated my desire to continue to explore my hometown.
I intend to supplement it with as much intellectual journalism, erm creative non-fiction, as possible to give the res gestae of a curious land that people struggle to get their heads around. But a city that, people seem to convince themselves, is also easy to “get” from the get-go.
The challenge that Dave galvanized me to tackle, of course, is convincing anyone else that our tandem of darkness and light, unhinged hope and chance, normalcy with asterisks, and the solace of “break-even” all add up to a reflection on the human condition in ways perhaps unexamined or ignored. Ways that even Dave didn’t get because, in the end, he was a traveler, not a lifer. In ways that still titillate and provide catnip for the people who go “wow” when they think of Las Vegas, even as the conversation needs to leave the Strip.
And through a mishmash of genres and tales that aspire to transcend, or at least, festoon the obvious, I can muster the self-confidence to share. Convincingly present Las Vegas as a stardustian wonder of many parts. Imbuing it all with the hope that it’s enough to be considered, if not genius, then at least genius-inspired.