My stomach hurts. It's 7 A.M., and somehow person after person after person has persuaded me to pull an all-nighter so they can show me their little slice of Vegas--their glossy strip club, their late-night pool-cabana scene, their Studio 54, their swank ultralounge. And now, at an after-hours nightclub, the bass pumping, my eyes jolted open every few seconds by the shock of manufactured cleavage, they are offering me a beer. Not even a light beer. All I wanted was to see a nice Cirque du Soleil show, work my expense account at Le Cirque with my only famous friend, Robert Goulet, and crash at the new hotel at Mandalay Bay, where my standard room has two bathrooms and three flat-screen TVs. But New Vegas won't let me be. It needs to show me what a great time it's having, with its supersized, sanitized, non-intimidating version of the same sins I don't want when I'm at home. I am deeply considering taking the beer so I can finally get sick and get the nurse to send me home.
This New Vegas, this stomach-churning Vegas, was built from a scrap heap of roller coasters. When gambling popped up at every racetrack and lottery counter and on every riverboat and square foot where a
Native American once lived, Las Vegas had an identity crisis. It built theme parks, believing that if its vices had become acceptable, it might as well be a peddler of family-friendly activities. And it stumbled. Because what Vegas hadn't understood is that, compared with even the most worn-out vices, like keno and showgirls, roller coasters bite. So now Vegas has reinvented itself again, returning to vice but sanitizing it by creating the biggest, nicest place to sin ever imagined, a Sodom and Gomorrah without the guilt. People come to Vegas not to do what they can't do at home but to do it bigger and brassier. The town's logo, "What happens here, stays here," is complete camp. What happens in Vegas, in fact, is bragged about at home for months afterward.
All this feels strange, but not nearly as strange as talking to Robert Goulet about it, especially on three hours of sleep. "You beggar, it's not Sin City," he says. "It's Fun City." He has a point. It's a Vegas where the average tourist gambles only four hours in his four-day stay. That's fine with the casinos, since today they make more on rooms, drinks, food, shopping and entertainment--the stuff they used to give away to get you to gamble.