Viva The Las Vegas I Remember

“I would never go there,” the group’s leader said––the person with all the religious status. His remark silenced comments from others. 

“If I now recognize evil in other people, is it not because I have become evil too? If I see someone has a suspicious nose, have I not smelled the same bad things?”

Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

I had told coworkers that for my birthday my husband surprised me with tickets to fly to Las Vegas to see Celine Dion. This guy’s comment made me think how easy it is to make wide verbal swipes against people and places. What made him think he knew anything about the lives of people who live in Las Vegas? Then or now?

First let me say, I wish he hadn’t made such a snide remark. Then I wished I had responded, had presence of mind to say what I thought when he spoke against Las Vegas. For I have seen, experienced, and remember firsthand real people who lived there. 

His self-righteous comment reminded me of Jonah’s attitude toward Nineveh. Jonah didn’t want to go to Ninevah. Judgmental. Condescending. Smug. Defiant, prideful, and dismissive. The view of anyone who stands on self-referential religious high ground readily finds someone or something to disdain.

Before I had a camera …

This conversation resurrected memories of growing up in Las Vegas. During my childhood, I lived in Las Vegas, Nevada longer than anywhere else until I married. I recall a remote twinkling façade swimming in desert dirt. 

The Flamingo resort was not the first hotel built in Las Vegas to lure travelers, movie stars, crooks, and gamblers, but Bugsy Siegel’s dream hotel and casino laid a foundation, helping to create the image of a luxury oasis in the Nevada desert only 266 miles from L.A. True, Las Vegas early on gained the reputation as a haven for gangsters––a place where people could hide in plain sight.

From a distance, the city appeared like a mirage. That wavy scene might evaporate in scorching heat hot enough to fry more than skin-deep those foolish enough to bake in the sun too long. The sun could turn a seatbelt buckle into a branding iron (which it did to my friend’s mother) or blister paint off buildings. Atomic blasts from the Nevada Test Site could have wiped Las Vegas off every map, and despite the local warnings, most people living beyond Clark County would not have felt the blip. Since that distant time, I have wondered whether Las Vegas would even exist if it weren’t for air conditioning. 

By the time I was a preteen, the Las Vegas I remember seemed glamorous. Neon lights flashed and flickered, and hotels rose from the desert floor like plastered castles, designed to attract attention and impress. Marquees larger than drive-in movie screens headlined the names of celebrity performers on the main stage and lesser knowns who played in the lounge.

In elementary school, I walked the streets of Las Vegas without caution or fear until in seventh grade, the P.E. (Physical Education) class showed a film about heroin addiction. Vivid portrayals on the screen caused me to imagine that while walking home from school some junkie would drive by, jump out of his car, and he would inject me with heroin, and instantly I would turn into an addict. Recurring nightmares of the woman shown lying on the floor in her filthy apartment––her oily black hair half-covering her face, senseless and dirty, she jerked from spasms––and I trembled at the thought of becoming like her. The film showed close-ups of needles, syringes, matches, and spoons with handles bent backwards, and bloody pin-marks on the woman’s arms. I could almost smell the stench and the floor looked sticky, like someone had spilled beer.

The Cold War, battles between political factions, power-wielders of wickedness and vice, as well as image-shapers and criminals, these adult concerns went unnoticed by me. I didn’t read the newspaper. School was a haven––the best place and the best part of every day.

When I tried to imagine my mother Loretta coming to Las Vegas at age 18, ripe with prospects, I wondered what prospects? A fastidious dresser, my aunt told me that at one time my mother had wanted to design clothes. In 1949, the man she would later marry had sent fifty dollars to alleviate her poverty. She then used most of that money to buy a wide-brimmed orange satin hat with feathers, a la Audrey Hepburn. My mom returned to Vegas in time for me to start second grade. By then, she no longer concerned herself with glamour or materialism or stability.

The resort destination itself materialized only a few years before I was born. This timeline baffled me because a child imagines the world to have existed as he first encounters place. I bet there are a lot of kids who live in Las Vegas now whose parents have jobs, work to provide for those kids, and many who take their children to church. Las Vegas boasts more than 500 churches today.

As a young girl, I tried lots of different churches, including Catholic, LDS (Latter Day Saints), Presbyterian, Pentecostal, most churches within walking distance of where I lived. No one took me to church. Often I went to church where a friend from school and her family attended. My friend Claire Pugh and her family moved to Las Vegas from Kanab, Utah. They were Mormons. I liked sitting with Claire on the Pugh pew.

More Recent Thoughts

I don’t know anyone from Las Vegas, a person who was born there. A geographical oddity, I suppose, for when my husband and I lived in Charlotte, NC for four years, the people we went to church with could not imagine why we left wherever we came from (Austin, Texas). As I listened to people talk, most lived within fifty miles of where they were born. “We go to the beach in the summer and the mountains in the winter,” one woman said to me. “Why did you ever leave where you were born?”

Though she couldn’t imagine how or why my husband and I had moved to Charlotte, I couldn’t comprehend such a narrow view of the world. Our shared humanity makes us more alike than different.

I was born in Prescott, Arizona and in the intervening years I have visited almost every state and lived in a number of those different states. My observation, once you get to know people as individuals, people are pretty much the same wherever you go.

Unless of course, you don’t want to go to that much trouble. It’s much easier to stereotype people based on what you think you know.