Las Vegas is a Garden of Desperation

Or, what I thought about while I sat in a swimming pool that was too warm to be refreshing, in a rented house in Las Vegas, wishing I was home.


Damn the gardener that bred Las Vegas out of the dust in the Mojave Desert. Vines that climb the scaffolding of the gaming casinos, blink like cheap rhinestones in the night sky. Straight desert trail paved with blacktop that runs as the boulevard between the monolithic towers. Each one faces the other, across the boulevard, in a posturing of gambling and excess. Within their walls, wander the vapid on vacation, admiring the faux architecture and fabricated restaurants, wander the desperate chasing one last deal, wander the weary, eye-worn zombies, sugar alcohol ice drink in one hand and a twenty dollar bill in the other, seeking the siren of the last table to lay it down upon.

Seeds poured from criminal fingers into the Old Spanish Trail. Hoover built a dam. The workers drank gasoline and breathed hopelessness. The showgirls danced through the night, captivating eyes that were not following the roulette wheel. Atomic cocktails were poured into labelled glasses, as the anguished watched the mushroom clouds gather across the horizon. Each wretched stare a mirror of the next, waiting for the fateful explosion to overtake this evil garden.

Vegas earned a new coat of paint and the agonized keep arriving in droves. The herd walks from the 110 degree habitat into the recycled air provided by Howard Hughes and the gangsters. Pit bosses stare out from behind the tables, waiting for one wrong move. Strippers stare out from around the poles, sizing up their prey.

Vegas is not even Vegas. Residing in Las Vegas are the outcast the casinos employ, spew out, only to be consumed over again. The casinos, magnets for the disheartened, sits in Paradise. Baptized by organized crime, unincorporated. To make sure that gambling towers do not have to contribute revenue to the actual city of Las Vegas. Paradise.

The real Las Vegas is no paradise. It is a desert purgatory, where the wasted wash across wide streets, empty save for liquor stores and gas stations. Liquor and gas. The two things the tormented need to escape the gravity of the strip.