THE ROOMS in the Golden Nugget are supposed to remind you of the frontier days. The crimson walls are hung with prints of Wild West scenes, featuring cowboys, gamblers, and ladies of easy virtue; the crimson velvet curtains at the windows and the bedhead are draped with tasseled golden cords; the bed itself, the size of a football field, has an ornate 'GN' embroidered in gold, like Napoleon's coat of arms, at the center of its heavy crimson cover; there are lace curtains behind the velvet at the windows. But the attempted delusion ends there. The view is of parking lots, a shabby back-street hotel for real losers, a couple of shops offering LOANS in letters as big as their storefronts, then railroad tracks and, beyond, the blank buff desert ringed with bluish mountains.
For half an hour each evening, about six, the sunlight floods in from the west, creating an illusion of out-ofÂdoors, although the windows do not open and the hum of the air conditioning rises angrily with the intrusion of natural light.
Downstairs is all polished mahogany and brass, fake Tiffany lamps, and the style of instant friendliness that Westerners have adopted as their own. 'Hi! How are you?' calls the occupant of the room next to mine when the Asian waiter wheels in his breakfast trolley at mid- day. And the waiter answers with an un-Asian 'Hi! How are you?'
So why does the prospect of four weeks in this pleasant hotel seem at times like a prison sentence? Because time has been annihilated in this city without clocks, because there is no fresh air and nowhere to go except the casino. By ten in the morning, the heat is merciless, and in 1981 the Golden Nugget had no pool. When I forced myself to take a walk - five blocks across to Garces, five blocks up to Eighth Street, five blocks across again to Fremont, then back past the souvenir shops to the hotel- I returned sweating, feet swollen, mouth parched, as though I had just spent a bad half hour in a prison recreation yard. After a week in Glitter Gulch, I began to exhibit symptoms of physical deprivation - nervous tension, disorientation, insomnia, loss of appetite - which seemed inappropriate in a town geared exclusively to selfÂindulgence.
Later, I discovered the little swimming pool at the top of the Mint, just across from the Golden Nugget and next door to the Horseshoe. Every afternoon at five, I sneaked up there for an hour and plodded up and down in the overheated water under the giant illuminated figures of the only clock visible anywhere downtown. Afterward, I lay in the harsh sun, listening to the television aerials creak in the wind, or walked the perimeter of the roof and admired the town spread out below, its signs neutralized by the sunlight, and the ring of folded mountains edging the horizon. At that hour, there were rarely more than three or four people around the pool, and often I had the place to myself, except for the sand-colored desert birds hopping about among the aerials and the bored attendant waiting to close the doors at six. Silence, fresh air, physical release, and space: I felt like a prisoner reprieved.
There were people in town who felt the same, though for different reasons. 'Sure, I'm from Texas, but I cain't go back there.' Tony Salinas is a heavily built, handsome man with long black hair and a slightly olive Mexican complexion. He lounged at a poker table in a break between games, very much at his ease. 'I got me into a hassle with the FBI,' he said. 'You see, I've always liked to gamble real high. I got a flair for handicapping football games - in 1980 I won me the World Championship NFL Football Handicapping Contest - and the feds reckoned I was making a book. It warn't true, but they leaned on me all the same. When they found they couldn't hang a charge on me, they tried to get me to snitch on other gamblers down there in San Antonio, and when I wouldn't do that they got mad. They started this case that dragged on for six years. Finally, the judge said, "Mr. Salinas, I don't want you and the FBI playing cops and robbers no more. I'm going to fine you ten thousand dollars and give you five years in prison."
'For gambling?'
'Right. It's a victimless crime, but it ain't legal in Texas. But the judge knew that was the way I made my living, so he made me an offer. "Pay that fine," he said "and I'll give you sixty days to move yourself and your family to Nevada. Gambling is legal out there, and that's where you should be. You do that and I'll change the prison sentence to five years' probation." "Judge," I said, "I've been wanting to go to Nevada for six years, but you ain't let me leave Texas on account of this case." "Well, I'm letting you now," he said. "Just so you don't come back here for five years." I'm no dummy. He knew I'd say yes. An offer I couldn't refuse, right?'
'You mean he sentenced you to five years in Las Vegas?'
'Right. I moved here on July 28, 1978, and everything's been just great for me since then. My first year, I got very lucky and won a million dollars. I ain't never going back.'
Because gambling is officially illegal in so many other states, even the most respectable Nevada professionals often find themselves at odds with the law. On the penultimate evening of the tournament, when all the contests had been settled except the ten-thousand dollar buy-in hold 'em prize, which decides who will be next World Champion, there was a prize-giving in the Sombrero Room. All the previous World Champions were present except Bryan 'Sailor' Roberts, who won the title in 1975. 'Sailor can't be with us this evening,' Jack Binion explained, 'because he's in jail just now.' The audience murmured sympathetically. Binion went on, 'But don't worry. He'll be back tomorrow.' Polite applause.
Cowboy Wolford, another top player, was unable to take part in the tournament at all. Pinned to the back wall of a small annex to the Sombrero Room where poker is played away from the din of the main casino was a message from him expressing his sincerest regrets. Apparently, when Cowboy wins big he tips everyone in sight - the dealers, the cocktail waitresses, the old blacks who sweep the cigarette butts from the floor. The previous year, he took a spectacularly large pot in a side game and, in his elation, tipped the man standing next to him. But the man standing next to him was from the Internal Revenue Service, and he thought he was being offered a bribe. Byron 'Cowboy' Wolford is now serving thirty days.
Few of the poker players, however, are as headlong in their dealings with the law. They usually handle its representatives as subtly as they handle each other during the games. One of the professionals was once called before a grand jury investigating a mobster. 'You know him?' he was asked.
The poker player shrugged and said, 'We've played cards together.'
'Did he talk to you?'
'He talked some.'
'What did he say?'
'The usual things: "Check," "Raise," but mostly "Take 'em."
For those who live on less exalted levels, the advice is simple: 'Don't mess with the heat.' In Las Vegas, the heat comes in many forms and uniforms, and all of it, they say, is 'very heavy.' The Las Vegas Police Department is responsible for Glitter Gulch and the rest of the city; the Strip is Clark County and belongs to the Sheriff's Department; each casino has its own private army of security men, wearing its own special uniform. In their different styles, they all contribute to the spectacle.
One afternoon, for example, there was an LVPD patrol car double-parked at the corner outside the Golden Nugget. An emaciated man with cropped gray hair stood in front of it, stripped to the waist, leaning forward with his hands on the hood. His face was as lipless as a skeleton's, and he had no eyebrows. A dirty red shirt lay on the hood of the car, the contents of his pockets beside it: scraps of paper, a filthy handkerchief, a few coins, a billfold, a green comb. Two huge policemen were searching him methodically and with distaste; a third sat in the car typing information into a small computer between the front seats. All three had mustaches, beer bellies, big revolvers, and a great deal of creaking leather. One of them, grimacing, slid his hand inside the emaciated man's waist band, found something, and then - fastidiously, as though not wishing to soil his fingers - unbuttoned and unzipped his jeans and pulled them down a few inches. Underneath was a second pair of trousers, dirty gray. The emaciated man gave the policeman his lipless grin and shrugged helplessly. The two giants began to empty the pockets of the inner trousers: two battered billfolds and something that looked like an airplane ticket. They laid these on the hood of the patrol car, alongside the other bits and pieces and the red shirt. While this was happening, a crowd of garishly dressed tourists drew slowly closer. 'Got yourself an audience at last,' said one of the policemen. The emaciated man laughed ingratiatingly, ducking his head sidewise, hands still flat on the hood. The policeman inside the patrol car went on punching information into his computer. The gawking crowd closed in.
Whatever his prospects, the emaciated man was lucky not to have been picked up by one of the private armies. A thief who was caught rifling a bedroom in the Horseshoe was hauled by the guards into their special room on the second floor and beaten so severely that his yells, I was told, could be heard not only in the casino but also clear across the street. The Horseshoe does not have a problem with theft.
The other casinos are more philosophical. One afternoon, I left a gold cigarette lighter by the pool at the top of the Mint, and by the time I realized that it was gone the pool was closed. Late that night, I reported the loss to the Mint's security guards, who wrote it all down in laborious detail and did nothing at all. The next day, the young pool attendant returned the lighter to me; he had found it when he was putting the sun chairs away. But he had not bothered to inform security, and they had not bothered to ask him. Tourists come and go but good staff is hard to find.
The previous summer, I spent a weekend at one of the most sedate casinos, with my wife and two children. While I played cards, they sunbathed and swam. On the second afternoon, my wife came back to the bedroom to find all the money gone from her purse. The head of security was overweight and melancholy. 'Nothing we can do about it,' he said.
'It had to be someone with a passkey.'
'You know how many people we got working in this place, lady? Pushing two thousand is how many. You know how many passkeys there are?'
'One of the maids barged in this morning while I was in the shower. When I opened the door, she ran out as if I'd caught her at something.' My wife was so angry she was having difficulty holding back her tears. She blew her nose and said, 'I could recognize her.'
'Wouldn't do no good.' The security man patted the air between them benevolently. 'How you going to prove it's your money she got? Even if you left your purse lying there on the bed and hid in the bathroom while they stole it, you still couldn't nail 'em. They call that entrapment. Ain't nothing no good. I've known guests here, they hide their diamonds in the toilet tank and lose 'em all the same. Anything valuable, you take it with you or deposit it at the front desk.'
My wife blew her nose again. 'It's outrageous.'
'Sure is.' He nodded placidly. 'But you got insurance, right? So let's you and I fill in a report and you claim it all back.'
The guard was unruffled, and not just because he was bored and powerless. He knew that sooner or later everything finds its way back into the gambling economy: jewelry, cameras, lighters, pens as well as money. All of it gets sold or pawned, then comes back as chips or small change in the slots.
'Las Vegas is like a parasite that feeds on money,' said a man from Texas. 'It sits here in the middle of the desert and produces absolutely nothing, yet it supports half a million people. It depends on the rest of the United States to feed it money, which it channels through the casinos to those five hundred thousand people. I guess it's a kind of modern miracle, something like the loaves and the fishes. I see the casinos packed with tourists telling themselves they are having a good time losing their money, and it's beyond my comprehension. Yet they're always full.'
'And you continue to come.'
'Poker is how I make my living. And I approve of the location. The desert cuts Vegas off from the real world. You have to make an effort to come here, you have to have money to lose. If the casinos were in a metropolitan area the people who couldn't afford to lose - construction workers, taxicab drivers, housewives, mail clerks - would gamble because the opportunity was there. In Vegas, suckers are suckers by choice. Without them, there wouldn't be a gambling economy.' He glanced at his watch and rose to his feet. 'Time to play.' He paused, glanced at me quickly, and looked away, as though embarrassed. 'One thing,' he said. 'That stuff about the parasite.'
I waited.
'Don't use my name. I'd hate anyone to think I was badmouthing the old place.'