A colleague reckons that Vegas is his idea of hell, and couldn’t begin to understand why I’d take my family there. ‘It’s all the shit in the world, packed into one place,’ he says. ‘Why would you want to swim in your own excrement?’.
Bit strong, maybe, but he has a point. In the last five days, I’ve seen a dead bum being loaded onto an ambulance trolley (underneath a freeway – is there no more inauspicious way of dying?). I’ve seen creatures that can be no more than 10 per cent original woman parading the corridors of Caesar’s Palace, and I’ve watched drunken college crowds get a little too close to lynch mob.
But its dark side has nothing to do with the drunken crowd that invades the city on a Friday night – you’ll find that mob in any urban centre anywhere in the world, and they’re as harmless as a pack of over-enthusiastic puppies. Same goes for the sex and gambling. Both are, on the whole, cartoon funnies for the aforementioned puppies.
No, you’ll find Vegas sinister for more subtle reasons, like the millimetre-thin gap separating smiling American bonhomie from sudden aggression that’s a thoughtless word away from heavy violence.
Try it yourself. A waiter will be smiles and Hi’s one second, and a sullen-faced heavy robot the next. You can flick the switch by handing over a credit card that’s rejected on the first swipe, or asking a question that isn’t on the script. They Cannot Compute, and you’re instantly made to feel as uncomfortable as possible. Same trick works in a store or a hotel reception desk. Anywhere at any time, in fact.
The real head-woozer is how close all this sits to paradise. To see it for the first time, drive to Vegas from Los Angeles. Hour upon hour of desert and mountains, with only the occasional fake town, and then… a city. You hit a crest on I15, and there’s The Strip, complete with a volcano, The Eiffel Tower, The Statue of Liberty and a forum from Rome.
Cab drivers are educated, and incredibly well informed when it comes to city affairs. You can sit in any bar and strike up a conversation that may go on all night. You cannot eat badly, even if you tried. There are more jobs than people, so much so that 6000 newcomers arrive to handle the work every month.
The Strip is a parade of genres that would otherwise never share a pavement. Look at the faces and guess the origin: Seoul, Compton, Berlin, Addis Ababa. The guys from Kansas University swig beers alongside a conference group from Kenya. It’s all there, round the clock, and no-one is controlling it, or not that you can see, anyway.
I’ve been coming to Vegas every year for the last five or six, and I leave tomorrow for the Red Eye back to Heathrow. An hour after I saw the dead bum being loaded into the back of an Ambulance under a freeway at noon, and a crowd of locals gathered to help my wife after she tripped and fell just two hours later. As I said, squalor and paradise.
