I saw my first dead body in the parking lot of Ben Siegel’s Flamingo Hotel. Bugsy himself had been history for the better part of a year by then, and so now was the anonymous young woman who’d come to rest in the spot in which my stepfather had been planning to park. It was early enough to take the kids to dinner at the hotel restaurant, so by implication far too early to be murdered only yards from where patrons were coming and going through the main doors of the casino. I was far too young to grasp the horror of it; I mostly remember thinking how small she seemed lying there.
Las Vegas was that kind of town. Mickey Cohen and Johnny Stompanato and scores of the less-infamous walked and cruised the streets of my childhood. And celebrities came and went because they were playing the Strip or their friends were. Not a few of them had second homes in town, or out of it in then-trendy suburban Paradise Valley. At any moment you could be sharing the desert air with Frank Sinatra and crew; he owed an old debt to Sam Giancana and played Vegas several weeks a year, bringing Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. and Joey Bishop along in his wake. I was in High School while they were shooting the original Ocean’s Eleven, with all Frank’s buddies in the starring roles, including a certain future president’s brother-in-law. Only a couple of years before that, Eddie Fisher had married Elizabeth Taylor in the same synagogue where I’d attended my first bar mitzvah as a Catholic eighth-grader, uncertain of my welcome or the etiquette required. “Being a Jew is a lot like being a Catholic,” an old man told me. “Lots of ritual. Stay! Nosh!”
But celebrity is a by-product of the real business of Las Vegas: parting suckers from their money. When I was a kid it was not at all uncommon to see, on your way out of town, a couple in nice clothes hitchhiking back to L.A. next to their suitcases while their car was being turned over on a used-car lot somewhere in town. It was like leaving smack lying out in the open, that town. People came to gamble and stayed and got jobs so they wouldn’t have to leave the sweet pheromone scent of probabilities. My stepfather was a cab driver until some fare murdered him at the end of a shift for his cash in 1963. But if his killer had picked another victim he’d have gone straight to the nearest Keno game with it. And he was one of thousands so afflicted.
The Las Vegas of my childhood was the one that Tim Powers accurately and eerily portrayed in his wonderful fantasy novel (and World Fantasy Award winner) Last Call, published in 1993. Opening that book, I walked down streets I hadn’t seen in decades, and entered a shadow reality that could have existed under the one I knew, even if it did not. As is always the case with Tim’s books, it immersed me in its reality so wonderfully that getting back to my own was a slow process.
Tim had been in Vegas for a Writers of the Future bash at the same time I’d been a couple of years before Last Call was published, soaking up history and geography. Among other places, he had visited the old Flamingo around which the new Flamingo had been built. The new hotel was a big hollow square with a pool and patio inside. Just behind that was the original hotel building, to which I also made a pilgrimage that weekend, leaving behind the brightness of the open pool area to walk in corridors of black cinderblock, remembering.
Only a few years later I returned to find both Flamingos obliterated and covered over by a new and implausibly more garish super-Flamingo. I told a cab driver of my distress at finding the original hotel gone. “That was history!” I protested. “Yeah, but it’s the kind of history they don’t want anyone to remember now,” he said, giving me a sympathetic look in the rear-view mirror. “Nobody talks about Bugsy Siegel and all those guys anymore. They want people to bring their kids now.”
And they do. At some point it became obvious to someone that just a whole lot of people were taking the kids to spend a week with The Mouse when they could be dropping their cash (and jewelry, and cars…) in the relentless neon alleys of the Strip and Fremont Street. So they began making the town more family-friendly, first with places like Circus Circus, where trapeze artists flew in a cage surrounded by arcade machines, themselves surrounded by a casino. Later they brought in a real circus, the biggest and best in the world. And built a hotel dedicated to The Wizard of Oz, and lots of others pretending to be family theme parks, where one can pretend one actually went on holiday in Paris, the French Quarter, or the bridge of the starship Enterprise.
But all the hotel owners and local politicians have done is to lay down a thin crust of “Isn’t this fun, kids?” over a seething volcano of the same old greed and corruption. It goes off in front of the Mirage every hour on the hour from 6 pm until midnight, if you’d like to see it. And somewhere Bugsy is laughing hysterically.
Las Vegas was that kind of town. Mickey Cohen and Johnny Stompanato and scores of the less-infamous walked and cruised the streets of my childhood. And celebrities came and went because they were playing the Strip or their friends were. Not a few of them had second homes in town, or out of it in then-trendy suburban Paradise Valley. At any moment you could be sharing the desert air with Frank Sinatra and crew; he owed an old debt to Sam Giancana and played Vegas several weeks a year, bringing Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. and Joey Bishop along in his wake. I was in High School while they were shooting the original Ocean’s Eleven, with all Frank’s buddies in the starring roles, including a certain future president’s brother-in-law. Only a couple of years before that, Eddie Fisher had married Elizabeth Taylor in the same synagogue where I’d attended my first bar mitzvah as a Catholic eighth-grader, uncertain of my welcome or the etiquette required. “Being a Jew is a lot like being a Catholic,” an old man told me. “Lots of ritual. Stay! Nosh!”
But celebrity is a by-product of the real business of Las Vegas: parting suckers from their money. When I was a kid it was not at all uncommon to see, on your way out of town, a couple in nice clothes hitchhiking back to L.A. next to their suitcases while their car was being turned over on a used-car lot somewhere in town. It was like leaving smack lying out in the open, that town. People came to gamble and stayed and got jobs so they wouldn’t have to leave the sweet pheromone scent of probabilities. My stepfather was a cab driver until some fare murdered him at the end of a shift for his cash in 1963. But if his killer had picked another victim he’d have gone straight to the nearest Keno game with it. And he was one of thousands so afflicted.
The Las Vegas of my childhood was the one that Tim Powers accurately and eerily portrayed in his wonderful fantasy novel (and World Fantasy Award winner) Last Call, published in 1993. Opening that book, I walked down streets I hadn’t seen in decades, and entered a shadow reality that could have existed under the one I knew, even if it did not. As is always the case with Tim’s books, it immersed me in its reality so wonderfully that getting back to my own was a slow process.
Tim had been in Vegas for a Writers of the Future bash at the same time I’d been a couple of years before Last Call was published, soaking up history and geography. Among other places, he had visited the old Flamingo around which the new Flamingo had been built. The new hotel was a big hollow square with a pool and patio inside. Just behind that was the original hotel building, to which I also made a pilgrimage that weekend, leaving behind the brightness of the open pool area to walk in corridors of black cinderblock, remembering.
Only a few years later I returned to find both Flamingos obliterated and covered over by a new and implausibly more garish super-Flamingo. I told a cab driver of my distress at finding the original hotel gone. “That was history!” I protested. “Yeah, but it’s the kind of history they don’t want anyone to remember now,” he said, giving me a sympathetic look in the rear-view mirror. “Nobody talks about Bugsy Siegel and all those guys anymore. They want people to bring their kids now.”
And they do. At some point it became obvious to someone that just a whole lot of people were taking the kids to spend a week with The Mouse when they could be dropping their cash (and jewelry, and cars…) in the relentless neon alleys of the Strip and Fremont Street. So they began making the town more family-friendly, first with places like Circus Circus, where trapeze artists flew in a cage surrounded by arcade machines, themselves surrounded by a casino. Later they brought in a real circus, the biggest and best in the world. And built a hotel dedicated to The Wizard of Oz, and lots of others pretending to be family theme parks, where one can pretend one actually went on holiday in Paris, the French Quarter, or the bridge of the starship Enterprise.
But all the hotel owners and local politicians have done is to lay down a thin crust of “Isn’t this fun, kids?” over a seething volcano of the same old greed and corruption. It goes off in front of the Mirage every hour on the hour from 6 pm until midnight, if you’d like to see it. And somewhere Bugsy is laughing hysterically.
