Mirages in Las Vegas

The flight attendant reached out to stop me: not so fast. I looked up in fear. He asked me to pay for my drinks. Here I was, thinking he brought me the second one to celebrate my first trip to Fabulous Las Vegas.

The House always wins, I thought, he knew I was a sucker. No such thing as a free lunch.

Aphorisms define Las Vegas, a place where many have tried but few have succeeded. From an age still young enough to believe secret secrets are no fun, we learn what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

This makes sense because Vegas grants American travelers the most distilled versions of vacation. A family might pose in front of the Eiffel Tower so that their holiday card can read "We went to Paris. Our children engaged in the world beyond their screens." Weeks or months later, friends and acquaintances can remember these photos and make conversation: "Ahh, I see you went to Paris. The cafés, eh?"

At this point, the friend and acquaintance have established common ground. After walking in circles through a combination of the Venetian, Caesar's Palace, and the Bellagio, I surmised I had seen enough to hold a defensible conversation with a stranger about a made-up trip to Italy.

The Coliseum! The Prima Porta Augustus! The Doge's Palace! At one point, our meanderings took us so far that I looked up at the partially cloudy sky-blue ceiling and briefly believed it was real. A gondola ride in Vegas is cheaper than in Venice, and all of the Italian fashion houses have at least one shop here. And did I mention the pasta!?

In a world where nobody knows what they're talking about, going to Vegas for the spark notes on a trip to Europe is a low-risk, low-cost way to have a basically educated conversation about something.

As I sat in the sun at Caesar's Spanish Steps Bar, I thought about how Rome recently outlawed sitting on its version of the Spanish Steps. Sometimes, maybe the spark notes are even better.

The aphorisms, therefore, are as much about broader travel and life in general as they are about Vegas. A person could successfully avoid a great many failures by approaching life skeptically, thinking the house always wins.

On Saturday, we ate at a cafe that was an imitation of a Chicago restaurant that is itself an imitation of a Parisian Café. It's owned by the Chicago restaurant conglomerate Lettuce Entertain You, and we got loyalty points for going there. After spending over 1000$, we'll get a $10 gift card. I cannot wait.

The café had a Parisian metal-and-glass ceiling, the chairs were too small, it was crowded, and the staff was rude. It was an authentic experience. The bread tended more towards the Subway Italian than a true Baguette, but at least there were no mimes.

While eating omelettes with dijon mustard, one of my friends suggested that there were probably two or more other groups of eight exactly like us floating around the city. I discovered the truth in this when we passed a group as a tallish, unshaven brunet with poor posture pompously explained to his friends "You know, they make the casinos purposely labyrinthine, that way you'll get lost and spend more money" as though it were an original thought. I looked in the mirror and shuddered.

We continued to be lost until we found a row of penny slots between us and the door. I put in a dollar, and I discovered the true meaning of 100. Each of the 100 times I pulled the lever, the wheels spun. I should note that I avoided the digital, non-mechanical slots because I reasoned that those seemed impossible to win. 100 fruitless lever pulls took some 15 minutes. Every few pulls, I would try a new ritual and technique, supposing that I might just win.

Later, we went to do our serious gambling at the Mirage, taking a liking to the tropical island turn that its desert theme had taken. Dolphins? Shouldn't it be camels? As we sat down for $10 Blackjack, I felt excited. Another friend told me what I had overheard earlier and learned long ago: they pump extra oxygen into the casinos to promote a false euphoria and increase willingness to spend. Also, blackjack and craps pay the best odds, but everybody already knew this.

After losing $60 in four consecutive hands at the Caesar's the day before, I felt like I had won the lottery when the dealer busted to my 17 on my first hand. I kept playing a while, cresting at $40 up on the day and -$35 on the weekend after an ill advised roulette bet on a few lucky numbers. Words cannot express how happy winning just $10 made me. I soon lost two straight hands and decided to quit, feeling like the lowest guy in town.

The person who took my place hit blackjack twice consecutively. Later, I would put money down on a hot craps table, win once and lose on the next roll. Everybody would leave but me, so I would roll again and lose my last $15.

This town has a short memory. It can be reassuring to see so many people have their emotions so tightly connected to present events, the spin of the roulette wheel or the roll of the craps dice. For somebody who's spent their life playing the long game, however, I discovered that Vegas and its short memory are not for me.

At the club, those who get favor are those who pay for personal space and a table to dance on, not those who can snarkily observe that this was their third favorite DJ in 10th grade and that, no, it appears he has not discovered any new music in the intervening eight years. This is not to say I had no fun; I had a blast, it was just the type of fun where you still want to grab everybody by the lapels and scream, "don't you get it! This is what they expect you to do!"

Everybody else looks back at me and offers When in Rome, do as the Romans.

When those better than us threw singles into the crowd, the clubgoers did as plebs demanding bread and circuses and cast aside revolution in favor of floor scraps, collecting upwards of $50. I hope that, should I ever discover myself to be the type of person to literally throw money at the common people, I'll at least throw fivers.

Living as the Romans do creates fortune and misfortune alike. Everybody has their ideas about how to behave Roman, and I began behaving as soon as I had landed.

The airport Liquor Library greater me just before the baggage claim. There's never a "Don't Touch the Wildlife" sign until somebody's lost a finger, so there's never a liquor store until irate groups of tourists band together to clamber for their right to Canadian Club, America's favorite plastic-bottle whiskey.

So it was that I found a plastic pint of Canadian Club less than full in the inside of my jacket. All I had to give them was $11.99. No free lunch. Pshaw! In Vegas, open containers are legal, but glass containers are not. This propels Canadian Club forward in the Whiskey Rankings ahead of such favorites as the Balvenie, Johnnie Walker Blue Label, and Crown Royal Regal Apple.

On our way to the hotel, I repeated to myself the question everybody had asked me before I came down here: how far off the strip were we staying?

Everything not on the strip would try to claim it sits just off the strip. We saw the Hard Rock Hotel farther away than us, and I reminded myself not for the last time: You can always be farther off the strip.

And so I woke up Sunday morning, $100 down, excluding per diems and sundries, and out of Canadian Club. Unwilling to visit another country for brunch, I walked out of the hotel, looked towards the Pyramid of Luxor to the left, turned to the right, and started strolling to somewhere farther off the strip.

Know when to hold em, know when to fold em. I'll go to Egypt another time.

Something big is always just about to happen