Lovin' Las Vegas

(4 of 4)

And yet strip clubs are such a part of the Vegas mainstream that high-end ones often have tables not only of couples but also groups of women. Japanese tour buses stop at the Palomino Club so the riders can check off a requisite Vegas experience. Strip clubs are so institutionalized that an fbi sting to find Mafia connections instead discovered that two clubs were funding the campaigns of local politicians in exchange for their pushing laws to make it difficult for new clubs to open.

Sapphire, billed as the world's largest strip club at a cavernous 6,600 sq m, opened two years ago with a party attended by Rachel Hunter, Carmen Electra and Tommy Lee. It was a mega-gym until the owners decided to turn it into a club. "In real estate, the land goes to the highest and best use," explains co-owner Peter Feinstein. Now, instead of gym fees, he charges women $60 to $100 a night to sell $20 lap dances, and draws on more profitable revenue streams such as drinks and a $5 atm fee that almost makes usury a sin again. He does not, however, get the $20 cover charge nonlocals pay; as at all Vegas strip clubs, that goes to the taxi driver who dropped his riders off. Driving a cab in Vegas has become less about ferrying passengers than about strip-club promotion.

"To someone from Minnesota we're sluts, but in Vegas this is a respectable job to the locals," says Sami, 33, a Sapphire stripper known as the Fire Bitch because she can light on fire a surprising number of her body parts. She says she's not that good at the gig, except for the fire part, because she's too straight-talking to give guys the doting GFE (girlfriend experience) for which they spend the big money. Sami doesn't drink, likes dogs and just bought a nice house. Toward the end of our chat, she lets me touch her breast to feel the implant. I cannot figure out if this is an intimate form of bonding or just a Vegas handshake.

The new Vegas has upped not only the sex but also the violence. Boxing has been outdrawn by the Ultimate Fighting Championship (U.F.C.), a chain-link-caged, rule-free (unless you count "no biting, no eye-gouging") contest so bloody it has been decried by the American Medical Association, banned by New York and dropped by pay-per-view cable. At a bout last month, spectators included Cindy Crawford and basketball player Shaquille O'Neal — who, the owners say, once asked for the date of a fight to be changed because he had a game. The U.F.C., which seems to involve a lot of submission holds and smeared blood, may surpass both frat-house hazing and Mel Gibson films as the world's most homoerotic event. And while the hooting crowd is clearly loving it, my front-row seats are reminding me just how weak my stomach is.

With all its clean bawdiness, the weirdest part of Vegas is that, for a tourist town, it looks as if it might be growing a real urban center, where people not only party but meet, live and perhaps form the kind of community Vegas has never had — one in which people no longer change cell-phone numbers every six months to escape from debts and exes. Developers are racing to put up 20-story condo towers near the Strip. Retirees and people with second homes like the condos because they are easy to maintain, but a surprising number of locals buy so they can be near what Mayor Goodman calls, without irony, the intellectual center of Vegas. That center is being defined, in true American fashion, not by an ocean or an island but by a stretch of highway. "That's the view," says casino owner Lorenzo Fertitta from the presidential suite at the Green Valley Ranch. "The Strip is the beach and the water."

"We're going through the reverse of what so many cities have suffered through, this flight out of the city," says Jim Murren, president of MGM Mirage and a longtime Vegas resident. Two weeks ago, the city unveiled a $650 million monorail that runs the 6.5 km from the convention center up the Strip to the MGM Grand. Turnberry and CENTRA Properties plan to build a 112,000-sq-m mall near the Mandalay Bay, which will further the invasion of stores such as Saks, Macy's and Nordstrom, now housed at the Fashion Show mall, which is close to finishing a $1 billion renovation. And a giant furniture showroom is being built downtown. Mayor Goodman hopes that in the future people will think of Vegas for gambling, sex and furniture. It's conceivable that in a few decades, Vegas will have completely shed its shame and kitsch, that it will be a multidimensional one-industry town like Los Angeles, only more urban and with better food. Already the young and old come to Vegas without irony, and its faux architecture and grand showmanship are thought of around the globe as simply American. If New Vegas foretells something about America's future, then the culture wars are all but over, and culture lost. The only thing I miss about it is that culture went to bed at a decent hour.