Why Las Vegas?

Buckle up. This is a rambling manifesto that may or may not be the "artist" statement behind that book I keep threatening to put out into the world.

I read and watch everything I can find that involves Las Vegas. It’s exhausting, but I’m motivated. Las Vegas is my hometown. Probably my forever home. I wasn’t born here, but that’s not uncommon. Las Vegas has the highest rate of residents born elsewhere in the United States.

Before there was a me, my Mom, who had never been to Vegas before, was “dragged here” by her pals to “celebrate” her recent divorce becoming finalized. She acknowledged that Las Vegas held a promise to be a “fun place” to visit.

My Dad, who was a degenerate gambler and frequent Las Vegas visitor, was in town to execute a money-making scheme involving coupon books for tourists. He had one financial backer in the then-heir to the TV Guide publishing fortune. The game plan was to secure everything needed on the ground to launch a business, meet potential partners and investors, and lay the groundwork for a huge moneymaking opportunity.

Mom and her pals decided to go to the Stardust to see the topless review, Lido De Paris, and were in line to buy tickets.

Dad and the TV Guide guy, a fellow luck junkie, quickly burned through all the capital that had been earmarked for the project on the gambling tables. The TV Guide guy flew home, leaving Dad with the rental convertible they had driven together from Chicago. Dad had totally busted out, but since they had gambled at the Stardust, he had built up enough comp equity to get free meals and a room. Once he had a place to flop, his intention was to rebuild on the fumes of casino benevolence, get enough dough to get out of Las Vegas, and then…whatever happens next for a gambler.

Mom and Dad had gone on a blind date in Chicago six months earlier, but it didn’t lead to a love connection. They hadn’t talked since that date.

Dad saw Mom (16 years his junior) in line and played the big-shot card, getting them comps to the show (an indicator that he had lost a LOT of money). Great seats, too. Impressed by this faux high-roller with real charm in abundance, the night ended in my dad’s free room.

The next day, Dad asked if Mom wanted to go to California, where both had family to visit. Dad prepped the rental car (by then already overdue and likely reported stolen) and asked Mom if she was ready for an adventure. Mom was in. Dad asked Mom for gas money. She invested. They were off.

Three months later, they were married back in Chicago. Six months after that, I was born. When I was three years old, our small family returned, for good.

Much later, perhaps around the time of my bar mitzvah at Temple Beth Shalom in the Crestwood neighborhood, four miles east of the Strip, I remember the first of many times asking my folks, “Why Las Vegas?”

I never got a particularly straight answer. Invariably, it would start with the retelling of a lightly censored version of my conception (yuck), but in each additional ask, other details would emerge. Something about losing their little surprise baby-me in the snow more than once. The promise of sun and prosperity. A group of illegal bookmakers whom my dad allowed to set up shop in the living room of our tiny northside Chicago apartment. A near-miss raid. A midnight escape from said angry bookmakers in a station wagon “borrowed” from my dad’s workplace. A cross-country journey with only enough gas money to make it; no more possessions than what were hastily loaded in the car. My uncle Izzy, a year older than my dad, had laid the groundwork in Las Vegas and bought a house a year earlier. The hype of money, glamour, and a new start. A job opportunity for my dad as a card dealer at the Sahara hotel. A cheap one-bedroom apartment for the family behind the Riviera hotel. An easy walk down the street from the Sahara. A future….

Unsurprisingly, I resented my parents for uprooting me from what seemed to my younger self as a much more nurturing environment. A major, storied American city. Chicago. With its long list of accomplished writers, creatives, captains of industry, and the like. Like any “normal” big city where people lived “normal lives.” A city where both my parents and even grandparents were born. Where long-gone relatives had legitimate professions. Where there was once a bakery under the family name. (Though no trace of it, or the proceeds of its sale, has lasted past our move to Las Vegas). Where my smart and accomplished cousins and a half-sister lived. Where I thought I could thrive in ways I had only begun to aspire. Chicago was a place I had pegged through my observations, and understanding was filled with substance, at least compared to how I cynically viewed Las Vegas at the time.

Las Vegas is, and as far as I know has always been, a city full of folly and unbridled hype. A flashy artifice where hometown kids, especially inquisitive and ambitious ones like me, were patently unwelcome or, at best, tolerated. That the casino kids were all merely an annoying, but inevitable, product of the vital worker base. Where locals were either somehow really rich or, like us, super poor, but how everyone was ultimately on a path to being important in the city. Also, valued by their contribution to the machine on a mission to get the tourists to come, spend, get spit out to spread the word of wonder to wherever normal place they came from, and then lure them and their friends back to repeat the experience. In perpetuity, if possible. The number of kids going on to be a worldly hero disproportionately low given the population. Of course, there were exceptions. There are always exceptions. Some kids “made it.” Not me. I’m still trying to figure out, and I’m no kid anymore. I’m a bitter old man. Hi.

And yet, to make sense of who I am, my connection to my hometown has been the recurring thread of most of my thoughts and pontifications, and then, what Las Vegas had to offer anyone who lived here. And so I asked, “Why Las Vegas?” I was relentless in asking my parents this question. It has become an early question for anyone I meet in a casual setting who has decided to live here. I haven’t found a particularly satisfying, let alone comprehensive answer. Usually, it’s for a job, or taking care of family, or following a mate (that lasted 6 months), or hearing there was opportunity, or now and again, “drawn to the vortex” without explaining what even that means in persuasive terms. Most of those folks will express a degree of regret or disappointment in the choice. Some will say, “we’ve done pretty good for ourselves here.” But what is it about Las Vegas that makes you want to be in Las Vegas? That’s the tough one; it needs more discourse.

And while Mom and Dad never fully answered the question, they would agree, through raucous laughter, that our move to Las Vegas was, at its core, a compulsive return to the “scene of the crime.”

* * *

How people wind up in Las Vegas, whether passing through or staying, is nonetheless likely the start of an interesting story if they’d dig deeper or at all. I think my story is interesting.