Las Vegas smells.
Not "stinks," mind you, or "reeks," or any other verb that conveys a purely foul odor.
But it definitely smells.
It first hit me upon stepping into the small casino at the Gold Spike, the hotel in downtown Vegas where I spent a week overlapping the end of October and the beginning of this month.
You can't limit it to any one of the strong scents with which most of us are all too familiar -- stale cigarette smoke, untreated body odor, various bodily excretions, rotting meat, food favored by assorted ethnicities, or the refineries near the South Grand Island Bridge.
And it certainly isn't flowers.
At first, I thought it might just be "the Spike," as the primarily local crowd that plays the $2 blackjack tables and variety of inexpensive slots housed there shorthands it.
But I picked it up, in varying degrees, on the cement walkways and in the casinos and souvenir shops that make up the downtown tourist area known as the Fremont Street Experience, even in spots on the far-newer, much-glitzier and more-renowned Vegas Strip.
On our last night in town, while discussing its ingredients over dinner with my brother-in-law, Adam, I theorized that The Smell was part cigarette smoke, which is still legal in public -- more like mandated -- throughout Nevada, and part very old carpeting imbued with evaporated beer and whiskey, the requisite floor covering in almost every facility you enter, blended with a hint of long-since-eaten shrimp cocktail and a touch of urinal puck.
"Nah," Adam said. "That's the smell of decaying humanity."
"I'll have to use that," I said, pointing at him with a rib bone stripped of its tender pork seconds earlier.
After six days in the self-proclaimed Sin City, such cynicism was pretty easy to embrace.
Since neither of us had been to Vegas before, we spent the first 48 hours in town wandering aimlessly around the Fremont Street Experience, probably looking like the clueless tourists we were, while trying to figure out how best to contribute our cash to the local economy.
Huge neon signs dominate, including the immense grinning, blinking cowboy that's in nearly every movie that includes even one Vegas scene. He's still in front of the Pioneer, an early casino that's now a T-shirt emporium.
We stopped and talked to a 60-ish security guard, who wore a beige uniform, a hefty paunch and a gun, outside one casino. He advised us where to find a good breakfast, as well as which directions not to venture, particularly after dark, before launching into a lamentation about the good old days of Vegas, before control shifted from murderous crime syndicates to bloodthirsty corporations.
"Yeah, everything was better when the Mob ran it," I commiserated, offering a tongue-in-cheek variation on the myth that still permeates Niagara Falls.
"Damn right -- if the Mob still ran things, I'd have a lot more money, a lot more women and," he said, raising and casting a nostalgic look at a meaty fist, "some pretty sore knuckles."
Then he told us the Golden Gate had a real good breakfast.
The city's various shows didn't hold much allure for either of us, since most involved celebrity impersonation of one form or another. It also seems there are more performers claiming the title of "Comedian of the Year" than there are years since the United States was founded, much less Vegas. So that left gambling and its natural companion --drinking.
Since neither Adam nor I knew much about games involving cards or dice, nor wanted to embarrass ourselves during the learning process, we decided the bulk of our wagering would involve something we did know -- football.
We settled on the sports book at Fitzgerald's, a Fremont casino and hotel, in no small part because of the name. Adam's best friend, Tim Fitzgerald, whom I had the good fortune to get to know in the years since meeting Adam's sister, died in a car crash about a year before our journey west. Fitzy would have made a great third man on this trip and we figured placing our bets in a joint bearing his name might bring us luck.
Well, yes and no, as it turned out.
Blackjack seemed like the easiest game to get the hang of, or at least not look like an idiot while playing, so we settled in at a table with a friendly dealer named Desdemona. Unlike the mostly stoic card dispensers encountered thereafter, she freely offered pointers to the rookies at the table, as did several of the more experienced players.
I wound up winning a few dollars, while Adam lost a few, starting a bit of a trend.
On Saturday afternoon, I began believing firmly in the Fitzy karma, as I won every bet I'd made on college football. Adam, however, did not.
Never having gambled much before, other than buying the odd square in one of the numbers pools you find in almost every bar in North America, which barely qualifies as gambling, I'd soon learn that we were experiencing the two ways Vegas sucks you in.
We both qualified as pretty low rollers. But being up even a couple hundred dollars, it's pretty easy to start thinking the whole gambling thing isn't that tough. And starting off cold convinces you that the law of averages has to catch up with you eventually.
It certainly does. Particularly if you win early.
But we both had brought only as much cash as we were willing to leave in southwestern Nevada, and ultimately, we would both leave with some. So as far as I'm concerned, we each won in that regard, even if our closing bankroll was a fairly small percentage of what we'd started with.
Saturday night, we took a cab to the place most people think of as the real Vegas -- the Strip.
Visually impressive, to be sure, the Strip blasts the senses with grandiose architecture and swirling constellations of every color, while blaring music blended with the constant chatter of every imaginable language invades the ears.
And that's before you walk into a casino.
Inside, at least to this observer, the gambling joints all kind of look and sound the same. High ceilings, a lot of pillars, and the clang-clang-clang of a slot machine paying off.
Both inside and out, the Strip is generally glitzier, newer and cleaner than downtown. That doesn't mean, however, that you don't occasionally get a whiff of that smell.
It seemed particularly pungent when one of the dozens of people purveying what amount to prostitute trading cards approached, offering a glossy photo of a scantily clad young woman on one side, with a phone number and a promise that she'd be "in your room in 20 minutes" on the other.
The proliferation of these cards was one of the features of the Strip that made the multitude of families wandering around, even at 10 p.m. on a Saturday, rather stunning.
Confused 10-year-old: "Dad, what does this girl do when she gets to your room? Clean it? Play PlayStation with you?"
Dad (snatching the card away): "Well, son, some women who are addicted to drugs or don't have much self-esteem or an education have to, um, uh ... hey, look at that half-size recreation of the Eiffel Tower!"
There were a couple of encouraging signs involved with the hooker-promotion business, though.
For one thing, pushing pieces of mini-porn on tourists seems to be becoming an equal-opportunity enterprise, with a number of women also doling them out. A number of the cards also indicated that some of the lingerie-clad young ladies are not only "HOT," but enrolled at a local university. Good for them.
Another notable feature of the Strip is the obsession with mimicking elements that have nothing to do with Las Vegas.
There's the New York, New York complex, which offers a multi-colored architectural imitation of Manhattan, minus the squeegee guys.
Across Las Vegas Boulevard sits Paris, which boasts the aforementioned mini-Eiffel Tower and a scaled-down Arc de Triomphe.
Then there's one of the most famous casino/hotels, Caesar's Palace, which, well, you can probably figure out what that looks like.
For me, it doesn't work. After a few hours of walking around and paying $10 for a drink at Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville, a hypocritical sell-out if ever there was one, Adam and I headed back downtown, never to return. Western New York may be a veritable Third World country compared to the perpetual economic boom of Vegas, but there's more soul in a single Niagara Street gin mill than in all the Strip's billion-dollar monuments to excess combined.
Downtown, though, I like. A lot.
Maybe that's because there's barely any divide between illusion and reality.
Pawn shops, massage parlors and very low-rent motels exist a few blocks from the Strip, but the massive casinos and freeways that surround them create an artificial barrier that keeps tourists from ever noticing them.
There's no such disconnect downtown, though. A stroll a few blocks from Fremont Street, certainly not advisable after dusk or before dawn, places the downside of gambling's glitz in stark relief.
One morning, after an all-night blackjack marathon that left me with almost exactly the amount of cash with which I started the evening, I took a walk from the Spike to the El Cortez, another aging casino/hotel, best known as the first place Bugsy Siegel invested in after arriving in Vegas in the mid-1940s. (It's not the place he famously got his eye shot out over, though -- that was the Flamingo, one of the first resorts on the Strip, where he badly overspent the investment of some very impatient fellow mobsters.)
After a few hands at the El Cortez, I journeyed a couple more blocks to the Western. Dark carpeting and darker paneling quickly extracted any sense of the brightening day outside. The Smell was the strongest I'd experienced it anywhere.
About 30 people, mostly looking to be in their 40s and 50s, and roughly half of them women, sat silently at penny slot machines and the only $1 blackjack tables I encountered during the week. From the looks of them, not only were none of them having what most people would consider fun at that precise moment, not one looked like he or she had experienced anything approximating fun -- at least in the traditional sense -- in a very, very long time.
The view underscored a couple of statistics you won't see in any of the gushing travel pieces you read about Vegas, such as the one published in last Sunday's Buffalo News: Las Vegas traditionally has one of the highest suicide rates in the country, while an average of one visitor per month comes to town for the sole purpose of killing himself.
Of course, other people move to Vegas seeking a fresh start, whether or not the authorities are involved, one possible reason so many refugees from Buffalo and Niagara Falls wind up there.
Late Wednesday, Adam turned in to rest up for his pre-dawn flight back home to Maui and I headed out for one last walk around Fremont Street and a few more hands of blackjack.
After getting back to the Spike, I discovered I still had $15 in chips and decided losing them at a $2 table would complete the week perfectly.
I sat down next to a man who looked to be in his 60s, with thick white hair and wire-rimmed glasses. We started talking after a few hands (one reason I think I favor the game, aside from its simplicity and relatively inexpensive nature, is that, unlike the slots or video variations of casino games, it encourages you to interact with other humans), and it turned out Joe was from Queens, having moved to Vegas six years earlier.
He said he lived about half a mile away and when I asked why he chose the Spike for his recreational gambling instead of the posher places a couple of blocks away, he quickly answered.
"The $2 blackjack," he said. "You can play as long as you want and not get hurt too bad."
His girlfriend, whom he'd moved to Vegas with, wouldn't come to the Spike.
"I like to get out," he said. "Some people like to stay home, watch TV, read a book. But a lot of us want that little bit of action."
Joe asked where I was from and raised his eyebrows a bit when I told him.
"What are you doing there?" he asked, familiar with the region's downward economic spiral. "Not much happening."
I told him I love where I live, despite the flaws. Or maybe because of them.
We played a few more hands, drank a couple more beers. Joe explained his personal system for when to hit and when to stay, depending on which cards he and the dealer were showing. He produced a hand-written index card breaking it all down and gave it to me for future reference.
It got to be 3 a.m., and with the flight home looming, I played one last hand. Can't really explain why, but when I hit at 14 and the dealer issued a queen, it was weirdly satisfying to end on a losing note. I thanked Joe and wished him good luck.
"I'm just going to play a couple more, then I'm going home, too," he said, shaking my hand.
About five hours and one shower later, I walked through the casino on the way out to get breakfast and pick up a couple last-minute souvenirs. There was Joe, in the same seat as when I left.
"Thought you were heading home," I said.
"What can I say -- I got hot. But this is my last bet," he said, pointing to two $5 chips in front of him.
I gave him a coupon for a complimentary breakfast at the Spike's diner I'd been given a couple nights earlier, and headed out.
When I got back an hour later, he was gone.
Riding the shuttle back to the airport at about noon, I saw a small park a block from the Spike, next to the federal building and post office, with about a dozen people sleeping on the ground or sitting on benches staring down.
It occurred to me that Adam was partially right about The Smell. It was humanity, all right. Decaying? Guess it depends how you look at it.
I wound up buying a few keepsakes for friends and family, but only kept two for myself. A $1 chip from Fitzgerald's. And Joe's homemade blackjack card.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | Nov. 8 2005 |