I remember a blue, summer evening about a week after my wife and I came to town. We were cruising down The Strip listening to loud music on the car radio when, kaboom! this operatic desert thunderstorm exploded all around us. The rain crashed down in sheets, engulfing everything. Light from the setting sun continued to banner in over the mountains, spangling through the plunging water. The Strip seethed and sizzled around us like a neon flash fire, colours bleeding on the windshield. Mile-high lightening trees crackled down the blue-black curve of the southern sky, and then, as if to summon up the dead, this heart-stopping clap of thunder… magically synchronised with the opening chords of Pink Floyd playing ‘The Wall’ on the car radio. That, I can assure you, was pretty apocalyptic and pretty exciting, too, but I didn’t get worried about it. All I though was ‘Home at Last!’
But that’s just me. Other cultural speculators, I’ve found, invariably come to Vegas for a reason other than gambling, dining, drinking, dancing, smoking and, hopefully, wandering through the rose-coloured dawn with a roll of hundreds in one’s shirt pocket and a cocktail in one’s hand. These dudes have documentary projects, research grants, and magazine assignments. That’s what they tell you, although I am virtually certain that each of them fears that this is not the real reason for their pilgrimage - that they are, in truth, being lured into the neon cauldron by some deeper and possibly fatal attraction, as Gladstone was drawn to the whores. They step onto the Strip as Gladstone stepped into brothels - hysterically en garde. They will not gamble and they will not tip, because gambling and tipping are voluntary and, after their first act of volition, well, you know: le deluge! Soon they become annoyed that not-gambling and not-tipping is their responsibility - that they could be gambling and they should be tipping and they would be if only… and this flicker of temptation initiates worry about their money.