Our First Night in Las Vegas

With my wife and our eight-year-old son, our first night in Las Vegas bathed me in bright-lights desperation.  I'm from Los Angeles, another desperate city that is premised on a gamble, but the limitlessness in the Las Vegas air, as well as the sense of imminent loss—it stirred me, frightened me.  Our family walked the Vegas Strip on a warm December night, two days before Christmas, and the bare skin of the young women around us, as well as the gathering sense of celebration, dissolution and recklessness seemed to heighten me, to make me feel like some beset-upon gambler keen for being bled.  Even with my wife and child at my side, I needed to spill out, to lose, to be vacated of everything: money, semen, desire, hope.  Made swollen, I would end up flat, depleted, tapped-out, having completed the fall from plentitude to barrenness in a very short amount of time.  

            In Las Vegas we were embarking on this passage with thousands of others, and there seemed to be no way out for any of us: we were in for the duration, shackled to our oars, as if abducted onto some resplendent but sweat-drenched slave ship of the seas.  Row row row, we were told, with our heads down. 

            Strewn on the Las Vegas sidewalks were the many business cards of escort girls, each card looking exactly like a baseball card, stamped with a photo of an athletic body and a listing of pertinent data.  These cards were littered thick as fallen leaves (which our young son wished to examine), so, despite bringing your eyes down to look away from some sumptuous woman walking toward you on the sidewalk, there she was still, her logos, her stats, replicated on the pavement.  There was no escape from your union with plentitude and loss.  Everything was cheap and ubiquitous: lodging, food, sex, money, laughs.  In my pants my erection teetered as we walked, and I realized that it was the sense of people being spent, emptied wholly and abjectly, that kept me braced in my pants.  My wife's scent and the motion of her limbs as she talked animatedly to our agog, dazed son, this helped too.  "Dear," she would say to him, bending, directing his attention, "do you want to go on a fun ride through the pyramid at Cheops. . ."

            We were surrounded by sumptuous fakery, in addition to the big reality of  desire and dissipation, and her speaking to our son was more for my benefit than his as she laughed and said: "This wonderful pyramid, it's better than the original in Egypt.  Everything is better here.  Look at the fountains, the happy people, look at their smiles. . ."  Her mocking words inspired me, propelled me forward.  We were all in on the joke, yet this was very serious and sad. 

            Many of those around us were foreigners: Euros, Hindus, Muslims, escaping Christ and the laurel here at Christmas, as we all plunged into the winter solstice, jettisoning the Christian god to find the first god: the looming, spring-wet ground, the hope for bounty.  Maybe the escort girls' cards were only planted seeds, I kept telling myself.  No Christ in a church, only the furrow to plough.  There was something basic here in Vegas: the three purple plums in a row, aligning in  magically in the buzzing, lit-up slot machine. A plentiful harvest and the kind eye of the gods. 

            And inside this larger public event, everyone seemed to be preparing for their own restored private event: their own eventual nakedness and luscious ablation here in the American desert, in this harsh dry land that could never support limitlessness—and yet now, for our brief visit—it would.  For we were all Americans here, everyone of us, and we know the soil is very forth-coming, though this might be ending soon and we could be rendered barren, as the vengeful world begins to rescind our fearsome and foolish revelry.

            Later in our hotel suite, my wife and I were involved like everyone else, spilling our-selves on each other, splashing out like silver coins tumbling from a slot machine.  With our son having fallen quickly asleep, we were busily engaged—no birth control for us, for the first time in years, both of us age 44.  We were done with children, yet taking a risk here, tempting fate, which demanded she gasp ever-more loudly as I emptied her, as I promised her nothing else.  She wished only to duplicate what was happening next door to us, and down the halls, with all of us full of fear and revenge against the demanding and ruthless world.  This was just as it had been when she was young and engaged in her first fervors in bed with other men, wondering if she had taken her birth control pills, and if she herself could—at some happy and future date— end with the pills and be granted the soft wet ground in which to gamble on propagating another.  

            And now, years later, when she had indeed been granted another to give to the world, a young son, she was here in Vegas with her husband, where there was only parched ground and timed fountains full of poached desert water.  Maybe, with the gambling all around us, she realized it was all over, with no more children to produce—and maybe, who knows, the terrible future would only provide us with bad luck: our softly sleeping son might die before it was his turn.  Catastrophe could engulf us all, in our rife nation as we ravaged the land in celebration of ourselves.  Yes, retribution would be close at hand.  All the more reason to thrash and cry out this evening. 

            From my wife I pulled orgasms like rich wet fruit from the mouth of a starving woman.  Each orgasm would enervate us further, frenzy all of us in Las Vegas as we discovered we kept nothing, wished for nothing, and hoped only to be abandoned in the desert.  There was no end to our being consumed, drained away—for our guilt was high, here with our opulence.  And so when she was done with herself, it was my turn, and I found myself strenuously beset by her, her nose in my belly, demanding her share of me, of everything all of us in Vegas had to provide as we were plunged repeatedly, and brought up empty, clear and free.  Shockingly, I was bounding out of me, my electric Vegas sperm splattering on her cheeks and breasts; here was the feast of joining, the joy in pouring out, in soon being without, and in wanting ever more sustenance in the land of the deep stomach and the deep evacuation.  

            Later, naked, glistening, my wife was standing over our son's bed, adjusting his covers, and then walking back to me, holding an escort girl's card in her hand, smiling: "Look what he found.  It was next to his pillow." 

            And I was ready again as she tossed the card aside and fell, all arms and legs and laughter, on the mattress.  I was feeling full again, now knowing what it is to be always packed, just as everyone believes in Las Vegas, in the desert, with your starving wife and your resources spent.  "He'll collect them, like Pokemon cards," I teased as I pulled her to me. 

            And the next morning, nine AM, when I awoke, the halls were loud with departure—doors slamming, bags dragging.  I discovered I was lying with a sleeping, pillowless, acquiescent woman spooned into me.  I listened to them leaving outside, fleeing, just as we would do soon.  I stumbled to the bathroom to pee, waiting for my erection to subside, wondering if I should return to her and be emptied again, as I was the night before.  In leaving this camp, moving on, saying goodbye, I was afraid, as my wife had been last night, that the end had come, that there would be no more to take in, that we were emptied out, finished up, finally. 

            So I gave up on my task in the bathroom and returned to her, still stiff, to see if there would always be more for her, always more for me to give to her, to Las Vegas, to the strewn sheets, which would soon be taken up by the fleets of Hispanic maids and their big housekeeping carts and dumped in the hotel's basement for cleaning. 

            And later that day, in our drive in our rental car, we listened to the new teen sensation, named Pink, shout on the radio, here at the end of the year, "I can go for miles, if you know what I mean. . ." 

            My wife reached over and lay her hand on my thigh while our son played in the back seat.  She said, "We will have to return to Vegas on our way home."  This had not been in our plans, but we promised to let it happen, for everyone will be made fat again, with sex and money and loss in Las Vegas. 

            And on the road we discovered a country more and more hurried and brutal on the wide highway, in grotesque cars at grotesque speed.  In Lake Havasu City, Arizona—in the desert, we found London Bridge, reconstructed in the desert sand along the Colorado river, with a plaque

on the bridge celebrating "2000 years of Christianity and British-American friendship."  The distortion and fear and beleaguerment in these words was astonishing.  Was the ship plank being pulled up in America, at least in the Southwest?  Was the ship sailing for new and strange lands? All the young white men in Arizona had shaven, shiny white heads.  It seemed they were climb-ing on board for the coming fight, proclaiming: "We're white, Aryan, and proud.  We are besieged."  And all the old white people were ensconced in the desert in their RV's and in their tax shelters; there were thousands of them on the highways, like hippies going to a festival.  Aryans, and retirees, and then the Mexicans too, all gathering in the desert for a mingling and sorting out—and why not, for it would make everyone work harder, and fear more.  Everything must be fluid, porous, even the borders, to maximize speed and violence and relinquishing.

            And that night, in Phoenix, walking to our restaurant after parking our car, I passed a video arcade where three teenage girls were firing their guns and killing criminals onscreen, spattering their blood in the air.  The girls were shrieking with the rush of it all.  Hopefully their own fine breasts and up-creeping thong underwear would be remembered and feared by every male that passed by, as these girls knocked down  creeps and weirdoes with their bullets.  And all these good men, like me, who witnessed this display, would work hard and focus fiercely on their own women at night, here as they wished for their emptying yet again, thinking of these fallen bullet-riddled bad men.  Once more I was stiff, hoping, as before, to be bring it all to a close, to a resolution, being convinced of my immanent loss.  But here in our restaurant booth, with the oversize portions of food there was more heaping sustenance for me to take in, while our son drew a picture with the crayons and paper provided for him by the waitress.  Was that a naked girl he was drawing?  No, I don't think so. 

            Upon our return a week later, after New Year's, on our second night in Las Vegas, there were fresh hordes at the slots, with plastic cards inserted into the machines, and the lanyards attached to their clothes, joining the people to the machine like umbilical cords.  Distant checking accounts, like my balls, were soon to be depleted.  Numbers were tumbling, bright numbers flashing on retinas, off cocktail glasses, and deep inside bank computers.  In the elevators the drunks were leaning against the walls, and the escort girls' cards littered the walk-ways.  Eighteen floors of rooms, stacked on top of each other, a vast warren of cubbyholes, with us in the middle. 

            Could anyone be joined tonight, in this nest of starvation?  Nourishment will never come, will never even be allowed to be dreamed of  tonight, because none of us have enough—as we splash anyway, as fierce as before, with my wife's throat to the ceiling while she cries out to me: "I can go for miles, if you know what I mean."