Skipping Towards Gomorrah Read Online Free Page B

It was a place where topless showgirls in smoky showrooms paraded before fat businessmen, their unhappy wives stewing at their sides. Glued together by greed, tarted up with acres of tinted mirrors, Las Vegas was a throbbing neonscape powered by the Hoover Dam, its acres of grass watered by what’s left of the Colorado River.
    I thought life was seriously out of balance in Las Vegas.
    My impression of Las Vegas wasn’t shaped by personal experience—not even the briefest of visits—but by two films I saw in my formative years: The Godfather: Part II and Koyaanisqatsi . After seeing both movies during my freshman year of college, I made up my mind never to set foot in Las Vegas, certain that both the city and anyone who enjoyed it were beneath me. So sure was I in my judgment, so smug in my superiority, that I dismissed the opinions of people that I knew and respected who had been to Las Vegas and claimed to have enjoyed themselves.
    If the insufferable, clenched-butt snob I was in college could see me now, he’d never stop throwing up. I have to confess that I’ve fallen in love with Las Vegas. In my defense, it wasn’t love at first sight; Las Vegas’s charms where entirely lost on me the first time I visited. In fact, each and every prejudice I held about the city was confirmed on that first trip—even before my Vegas-bound plane could get off the ground.
    I was thirty years old when I first visited Vegas in the flesh, and I went under duress. It was a business trip of sorts, and not one I had been looking forward to. My worst Godfather-Koyaanisqatsi fears about Las Vegas were realized before my plane could push away from the gate. The man who plopped down next to me was so fat he couldn’t put his tray table down, and so pushy that he set his meal—four cherry Danish (!) and a rum and Coke (!!)— on my tray table without asking permission . I had long suspected Las Vegas to be a city larded with pushy, greedy gluttons, and the man sitting next to me was solid—massive!—proof that I was right. I dreaded the idea of spending three days in a hotel filled with people like him: greedy gamblers, fat-assed gluttons, and hopeless drunks.
    But no one had warned me about the clowns.
    All done up in shades of pink and white, Circus Circus Hotel Resort and Casino has—can you guess?—a circus theme. “Circus Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war,” Hunter S. Thompson wrote in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas . “This is the Sixth Reich.” I’m not sure what Hunter means exactly, but Circus Circus is as creepy as any other place filled with clowns; in fact, there isn’t a corner of the hotel’s gigantic lobby or casino that escaped the wrath of Circus Circus’s clown-mad decorators. A twelve-story-high neon clown greeted me out front, bas-relief clowns assaulted me at reception, clowns on slot machines dinged and whistled. Like all sensible adults, I loathe clowns, and being trapped in a clown-themed hotel for three days was not my idea of fun. It wasn’t my idea at all, actually, and I made up my mind to order a horse head put in my travel agent’s bed when I got home. When I found myself alone in my clown-themed hotel room, which I rode to in a clown-themed elevator, I wanted to hide under the clown-themed bedspread and cry.
    Needless to say, my feelings about Las Vegas didn’t change as a result of that first, traumatic visit. Besides eating (at the clown-themed buffet) and gambling (in a clown-themed casino), there was little to do at Circus Circus, and I wasn’t allowed to stray far from the hotel. As I’m not a gambler and only an occasional, guilt-ridden glutton, when I checked out of Circus Circus after three miserable days, I vowed never to return to Las Vegas. But return I did, and it was on my second trip that a love affair that has yet to end was