I was crushed. This must be just about the last genuine drugstore soda fountain in America and the place was closed. I would have given whole dollars to go in and order a Green River or a chocolate soda and send a few straw wrappers wafting about and then challenge the person on the next stool to a twirling contest. My personal best is four full revolutions. I know that doesn't sound much, but it's a lot harder than it looks. Bobby Wintermeyer did five once and then threw up. It's a pretty hairy sport, believe me.
On the corner was a big brick Mormon church, or temple or tabernacle or whatever they call them.
It was dated 1871 and looked big enough to hold the whole town-and indeed it probably often does since absolutely everybody in Utah is a Mormon. This sounds kind of alarming until you realize that it means Utah is the one place on the planet where you never have to worry about young men coming up to you and trying to convert you to Mormonism. They assume you are one of them already. As long as you keep your hair cut fairly short and don't say, 'Oh, shit!' in public when something goes wrong, you may escape detection for years. It makes you feel a little like Kevin McCarthy in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but it is also strangely liberating.
Beyond the Mormon church things became mostly residential. Everything was green and fresh after the recent rains. The town smelled of spring, of lilacs and fresh-mown grass. The evening was creeping in. It was that relaxed time of day when people have finished their dinners and are just pootling about in the yard or garage, not doing much of anything in preparation for shortly doing even less.
The streets were the widest I'd ever seen in any town, even out here in the residential neighborhoods. Mormons sure do love wide streets. I don't know why. Wide streets and lots of wives for bonking, those are the foundation stones of Mormonism. When Brigham Young founded Salt Lake City one of the first things he did was decree that the streets be l00 feet wide, and he must have said something similar to the people of St. George. Young knew the town well-he had his winter home there-so if the townspeople ever tried anything slack with the streets he'd have been onto them right away.
CHAPTER 24
HERE'S A RIDDLE for you. What is the difference between Nevada and a toilet? Answer: You can flush a toilet. Nevada has the highest crime rate of any state, the highest rape rate, the second highest violent crime rate (it's just nosed out by New York), the highest highway fatality rate, the second highest rate of gonorrhea (Alaska is the trophy holder) and the highest proportion of transients-almost 80 percent of the state's residents were born elsewhere. It has more prostitutes than any other state in America. It has a long history of corruption and strong links with organized crime.
And its most popular entertainer is Wayne Newton. So you may understand why I crossed the border from Utah with a certain sense of disquiet.
But then I got to Las Vegas and my unease vanished. I was dazzled. It's impossible not to be. It was late afternoon, the sun was low, the temperature was in the high eighties, and the Strip was already thronged with happy vacationers in nice clean clothes, their pockets visibly bulging with money, strolling along in front of casinos the size of airport terminals. It all looked fun and oddly wholesome. I had expected it to be nothing but hookers and high rollers in stretched Cadillacs, the sort of people who wear white leather shoes and drape their jackets over their shoulders, but these were just ordinary folks like you and me, people who wear a lot of nylon and Velcro.
I got a room in a motel at the cheaper end of the Strip, showered lavishly, danced through a dust storm of talcum powder, pulled on my cleanest T-shirt, and went straight back out, tingling with clean skin and childlike excitation. After days of driving across the desert you are ready for a little stimulus, and Las Vegas certainly provides it. Now, in the oven-dry air of early evening, the casino lights were coming on-millions and millions of them, erupting into walls of bilious color and movement, flashing, darting, rippling, bursting, all of them competing for my attention, for the coins in my pocket. I had never seen such a sight. It is an ocular orgasm, a three- dimensional hallucination, an electrician's wet dream. It was just as I had expected it to be but multiplied by ten.
The names on the hotels and casinos were eerily familiar: Caesar's Palace, the Dunes, the Sands, the Desert Inn. What most surprised me-what most surprises most people-is how many vacant lots there were. Here and there among the throbbing monoliths there were quarter-mile squares of silent desert, little pockets of dark calm, just waiting to be developed. When you have been to one or two casinos and seen how the money just pours into them, like gravel off a dump truck, it is hard to believe that there could be enough spare cash in the world to feed still more of them, yet more are being built all the time. The greed of mankind is practically insatiable, mine included.
I went into Caesar's Palace. It is set well back from the street, but I was conveyed in on a moving sidewalk, which rather impressed me. Inside the air was thick with unreality. The decor was supposed to be like a Roman temple or something. Statues of Roman gladiators and statesmen were scattered around the place and all the cigarette girls and ladies who gave change were dressed in skimpy togas, even if they were old and overweight, which most of them were, so their thighs wobbled as they walked. It was like watching moving Jell-O. I wandered through halls full of people intent on losing money-endlessly, singlemindedly feeding coins into slot machines or watching the clattering dance of a steel ball on a roulette wheel or playing games of blackjack that had no start or finish but were just continuous, like time. It all had a monotonous, yet anxious rhythm. There was no sense of pleasure or fun. I never saw anyone talking to anyone else, except to order a drink or cash some money. The noise was intense-the crank of one-armed bandits, the spinning of thousands of wheels, the din of clattering coins when a machine paid out.
A change lady Jell-O'd past and I got $i0 worth of quarters from her. I put one in a one-armed bandit-I had never done this before; I'm from Iowa-pulled the handle and watched the wheels spin and thunk into place one by one. There was a tiny pause and then the machine spat six quarters into the payout bucket. I was hooked. I fed in more quarters. Sometimes I would lose and I would put in more quarters. Sometimes the machine would spit me back some quarters and I would put those in as well. After about five minutes I had no quarters left. I flagged down another ample-hipped vestal virgin and got $i0 more. This time I won $12 worth of quarters straight off. It made a lot of noise. I looked around proudly, but no one paid any attention to me. Then I won $5 more. Hey, this is all right, I thought. I put all my quarters in a little plastic bucket that said CAESAR'S PALACE on it.
There seemed to be an awful lot of them, gleaming up at me, but in about twenty minutes the bucket was empty. I went and got another $i0 worth of quarters, and started feeding them in. I won some and lost some. I was beginning to realize that there was a certain pattern to it: for every four quarters I put in, I would on average get three back, sometimes in a bunch, sometimes in dribbles. My right arm began to ache a little. It was boring really, pulling the handle over and over, watching the wheels spin and thunk, thunk, thunk, spin and thunk, thunk, thunk. With my last quarter I won $3
worth of quarters, and was mildly disappointed because I had been hoping to go for dinner and now here I had a mittful of quarters again. So I dutifully fed the quarters into the machine and won some more money. This really was getting tiresome. Finally, after about thirty minutes I got rid of the last quarter and was able to go and look for a restaurant.
On the way out my attention was caught by a machine making a lot of noise. A woman had just won $600. For ninety seconds the machine just poured out money, a waterfall of silver. When it stopped, the woman regarded the pile without pleasure and began feeding it back into the machine. I felt sorry for her. It was going to take her all
