L'Americaine

Las Vegas at 2:00 in the morning is everyone, is women in Chanel suits and guys in button-downs and five o’clock shadows. It is sorority girls with too much gel in their hair and honeymooning couples and lonely old men and suburban women lazily hitting the SPIN button on the penny slot machines again and again and again. It is black and white and teenaged and geriatric and high roller and bankrupt. It is the world come to gawk at itself in the only place that’s protracted and unreal enough to support them all at once in its airless, flashing ecosystem.

In my luggage, there is a black dress and heels, but my luggage is checked somewhere, sitting on a tarmac or stowed in a closet in Oakland or still in New York or maybe even in Las Vegas, sitting in the belly of the plane. I am the worst dressed girl on the Strip, the college girl who doesn’t know how to put on makeup. I wonder if this is ultimately good, if a pretty costume would have given me the opportunity to do things I know I shouldn’t do: Drink, lose money, tell people lies about who I am. Even in jeans, I feel the temptation when a slovenly boy asks me my name. The name “Mona” is suddenly on the tip of my tongue, a whole story about being shipwreked, running away from home, but I’m too tired to make it convincing. The dress would have given me the permission I thought I needed. Instead, a wind around the endless taxi line in front of the Bellagio and go into the lobby. The first thing I see makes me laugh and takes my breath away at the same time, as though some strange finger of fate keeps nudging me into exactly the right corner.

The lobby ceiling is covered from end to end with a glass sculpture — Dale Chihuly’s famous Seaforms. Working in the tradition of the great Venetian glass blowers, his work is loaded with color and sparkle — the things I always love in art. The rest of the lobby, however, looks as though a Danielle Steele novel threw up on it. Faux marble. Faux fountains. Faux flowers. Faux statues of faux goddesses. I am tempted to knock on pillars, to expose the hollow insides.

The casino is teeming and cloudy with cigarette smoke. Bells ring everywhere. People cheer and boo and the cocktail waitresses strut around in their heels. I read an article once about how you can make an amazingly good living as a cocktail waitress in Vegas if you’re willing to deal with the catcalls and gropes and supershort skirts. It doesn’t seem entirely terrible to me, or entirely inaccessible, especially when I see the waitresses faces. They aren’t as young or as pretty as I imagined. Their thighs look more or less like mine. I try not to think of depressing Sheryl Crow songs and make my way past the blackjack and craps tables.

This is where I want to stay. The minimum buy-in at some of the tables is $300. That could translate into a limited but totally satisfying win, the kind that would make you yell, buy a round of drinks, hit the Versace store — mispronounced a la Elizabeth Berkley & mdash; in the lobby. The people at these tables are the people to watch, the guys who are down on their luck, the addicts, the women in spangles with skyscraper hair. The dice rolls; the roulette wheel clicks. I want to approach, to gawk, but my outfit won’t let me. I feed dollar bills into the penny slot machines instead.

I have no idea how the machine works. I have no idea, really, how gambling works. I hit buttons. I cash out way too early. Twice. The lights flash. The machine buzzes and sings to me. I find one — pirate themed — on which I begin to have fun, so I keep feeding it dollar bills. The whole thing seems completely rigged to me, as though it knows, through a simple programming trick, when you’re losing, and gives you results that are designed to make you keep losing. I’m a little shocked, frankly, when I win.

The machine makes a lot of noise. A lot. I am embarrassed. The pirates on the screen dance and throw gold coins around. The number at the top of the screen ticks up and for a minute I become immensely hopeful. I imagine a new pair of shoes. The Delman flats I was looking at in Harper’s, and then, when the number continues to rise, a pair of Christian Louboutin heels. The machine quiets. I have won seven dollars. That I have lost at least six seems completely irrelevant. I am elated. Feeling hopeful, I keep playing, but I immediately lose four more. It occurs to me that I am very, very tired.

The casino is designed to get you lost, to walk you through room after room of glittering temptation, of Celine Dion tickets and spangly jewelry that will look awful the minute you get off the plane, of themed bars and more and more slot machines.

I finally find the lobby and walk along the famous lake. The wind feels dry, like it’s rolling in from very far away. There is dust in my contacts. The water shows stop at midnight, which surprises me. Everywhere but New York, I go searching for cities that never sleep, where there is pizza to be had at 4:00 am and people to chat with on the stoop at 3:00. Where the show begins, not ends, at midnight. I have never found it. I add Vegas to the list of disappointments. The water in the lake is churning and dark and unlit, the ghost shadow at the feet of the hotel that looms behind it. Everyone who is out is drunk. People carry beers and hurricane glasses on the street and lean on each other, stumbling a little. I miss my friends. I want to talk B______ into a girls weekend in Vegas, where I can use the Mona story, where I can unpack my dress.

The smaller, seedier casinos draw me to them, but I don’t go in. The idea of losing another ten dollars seems irresponsible, as does the knowledge that I probably wouldn’t stop at ten. I continue to Caesar’s Palace. The steps are teeming with boys wearing gold chains on platinum chains on more gold chains. They look cooler and tougher than I have ever looked in my life. The girls grab bottles of champagne by the neck, teeter on their stilettos.

Inside, it is exactly like the Bellagio but Greek and not Roman, gleaming white instead of cream. It is just more people losing more money. Once I realize this, I give myself permission to say I’ve seen it, to hail a cab back to the airport. I take some more pictures and loop around back to Paris, which is ludicrous in a bad way — half-size replicas of L’Opera and the Eiffel Tower, all spotless and fiberglass. I pause below the latter to snap a picture, the same one I took last November of the real thing.

In college, I started writing a story about a girl who ends up stripping in Vegas, a dancer gone astray. I never finished it — ultimately because it was a goofy idea — but also because I could never get the setting right. I could not conjure the colors, the height, the emptiness that seems to surround the city, the dessert closing in around it. In Las Vegas, there is nowhere to stay. There is just a street to walk and money to lose and beer to drink. I didn’t know that, and I didn’t know what sort of modern day noncatastrophe could strand my protagonist there, could leave someone in the middle of the most deeply fake city in the world against her will and judgement. And now I know. All you need to do, just once, is miss the plane.