The Great American Divide

Women are purposeful in Reno. The lovely blonde critter strolling the lobby of the Hotel Mapes, with a mole on her cheek accented by make-up as if she were Alice Faye miraculously preserved into 1961, did not come all the way to Reno in order to stake out uranium claims. She did not pack her kit bag to examine the Pelicans and fossils of Pyramid Lake, where, during more idyllic days, Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe quietly strolled and waited for legal technicalities to be arranged. Nor is she a cultural anthropologist studying the Paiute Indians or the sheepherding Basques who gather at the Santa Fe Hotel in downtown Reno to eat and drink in French, Spanish and Basque. She may sample all these incidental lures, but primarily she has come to Reno for one of two purposes: either to gamble (and also to find a man) or to shed a man (and also to gamble). When she pauses in her slow amble across the lobby, straightening her stocking – she bends, and harken! – we have time to examine her third finger, left hand.

We find the circle of the abandoned wedding ring, sunburned a bright red. She is a member of the Six Week Club. She is a joyous Jill, with her tanned face hit by a vision of the good life, her rump constricted by her new magenta Western pants and poutingly pressing for freedom. She wears heavy Indian jewelry and the stunned, goofy look of imminent divorce. She is in the molting phase, resentful but cute, ready for fun and making with rotating eyes. There are lots of women. They are waiting and bored, waiting and anxious, waiting and numerous.

Perhaps she is even one of the ladies who follow the apocryphal tradition of dropping her wedding band into the Truckee River near the Washoe County Courthouse, but more likely, our friend in the lobby of the Mapes has pawned her slender gold band in order to increase her capital at the gaming tables. Reno visitors are idealists – and practical; people of action – and people who wait. They have come to Reno after much deep thought, quiet analysis and broken crockery. Now they busy themselves with making the most of their decision.

Helping them in this task is a permanent cadre composed of several types of specialized workers, including lawyers, gamblers and a local brand of cowboy who is not often home, home on the range. There are other classical Reno types, including the obedient judges (trained to say "Granted" without hesitation), landladies and ranch proprietors (trained to bear witness to the continuous residence of the plaintiffs in divorce actions), laborers all in the vineyard of marital afterthought.

• • •

Reno, "The Biggest Little City in the World," has constituted itself the Great American Divide – a man from his money, a wife from her husband. Lady Luck and Legal Liberty. There is also sex. In Reno, this is slightly more complicated than buying a drink in a saloon, but if you wait about five minutes, and smile, or scowl, or do something, anything, someone will surely come along.

A few years ago, they closed the Stockade, Reno's alley of legalized prostitution, but that was not a very lively place anyway. It was guarded by a policeman and the girls behaved as dully as minor bureaucrats. You transacted your business without shilly-shallying and then skedaddled, making room for the next in line – a little like getting a haircut or paying a parking ticket. Other towns in Nevada still exercise local option on the matter of commercial sackplay, and in Reno many fine citizens fought the passing of the Stockade. They felt that this was a step away from the right to free assembly guaranteed by the Constitution. It also put their innercent dotters in terrible danger from desert rats and those crazed tourists from San Francisco and the East. It abolished a reliable money-making and tax-paying business. But what with a steady influx of divorce-seekers, plus the legion of cooperative ladies who patrol the lobbies of the hotels, the passing of the old Stockade deprived only the most boorishly impatient and the most stubborn admirers of Nevada frontier tradition.

In all fairness to Reno's hospitality, it must be insisted that divorce, gambling, drinking and sex do not provide a complete summary of its services to the visitor. There is also marriage. Five times as many marriages as divorces are performed along the banks of the Truckee. Of course, these marriages have a tendency to return to Reno a few years later in the form of divorces; but still, the Park Wedding Chapel, festooned in neon ("Ring Bell for Service at Any Hour"), is the scene of a rapid marital drone and congratulation. The children of such marriages turn out to be complex creatures, often with curiously interrelated parents. ("My previous stepfather's brothers was the uncle of my present stepfather's second wife...")

"We're not backward," declared one proud Reno cosmopolite, "we've got our Beat Generation, too, and it's doing a production of Guys and Dolls." The cast meets after rehearsals at The in, spelled with a lower-case (or hungry) "i," where a little group discusses Samuel Beckett and Sam Cooke; Kafka and Sinatra. Reno is perhaps the unhippest and zippiest town in all the fifty states. The women, clicked silly by the keno tabulator, puffy from grief and alcohol, play femme fatale in the gambling clubs, with shades jutting out over their sunglasses. This is the promisory land where the oppressed are liberated and the hopeful stream by on South Virginia Street. The chippies compete with the divorcettes in all the clubs, casinos and hotel lobbies.

• • •

Our lady of the Mapes is called a divorcette in Reno. She is a prospective divorcee. She is still legally bound to a man hereinafter referred to as Defendant. Defendant has a job someplace and sends her money. She is a Permanent Resident, which is not to be confused with an Old Inhabitant. A Permanent Resident is someone in the final convulsions of marriage who plans to stay for six weeks and a day, and can prove it with witnesses. (Appropriately enough, Reno was named after a General Reno, Killed in the Civil War back East, who never once set foot in Nevada. The founding fathers were looking for a convenient short name and drew the General's out of a Stetson. A practical, unsentimental people.)

Mrs. Permanent Resident may pass her six weeks weeping her eyes out, or she may spend her time in a patio discussing philosophy with other Permanent Residents ("Beneath that rough exterior, girls, beats the heart of a wife-beater"), or she may hit the slots or the tables or the bars, or she may shyly peek around for a cowboy or a fresh future Defendant. Itchily she seeks to revenge herself on the flunkout back home in Chicago or New York. She is the made-to-order prey for the opportunists, con men and brutal rancheros who hang around Reno. She blinks her eyes into cool desert space as they park the Hertz car off one of the roads winding into the vacant hills. Sliding across the seat, she murmurs, "Oh, Mr. What's-Your-Name, he was so mean to me." Bright desert stars wink above them.

"Call me Slim," says the wrangler, and takes a firm hold. A new groom sweeps clean.

The specialized Reno cowboy is a local representative of one of the most curious professions in contemporary America. He is known in all the great centers; his granddaddy, the gigolo, wore evening attire and a silken mustache; his unacknowledged ancestor was the simpering Greek Ganymede. Now, in New York and other urban centers, he may occupy himself with tennis or modeling or claim to be an actor while he waits to be chosen by some joy-hunting, moneyed lady. In Reno he manifests himself as a dude cowboy, based on a ranch, watching the air terminal, scouting in the better bars and gambling clubs.

Slim is a subtle, part-male creature who probably has not wrangled a fourlegged cow since Reno last housed a WCTU convention. He is a shill of love, faking high stakes of passion for a small profit, just as a gambling shill pretends to gamble in order to make the house look sharp and busy. A skinny chap in chaps and a duckass haircut, he keeps busy holding hands with the blue-haired, fifty-year-old lady in the TV room of the Holiday Motel; the Trap has gleaming white teeth and the Victim has a subscription to The Wall Street Journal; they will make beautiful moolah together, he hopes.

Like other professional dude cowhands, Slim dwells in a series of six-week liaisons, looking always for the Big Strike – the woman who will either take him home in order to goad Defendant or perhaps will move her bank account to sunny, tax-free Nevada. When he uses rodeo language, he is thinking of stock on the wobbly high heel. A "re-run" is a cow that has been tuckered out by much use, "generally easier to wrestle and tie." "Snuffy" describes stock that is wild, ready to go. A "twister" is himself – a cow twister, suffering from scaly elbows and nocturnal premonitions.

In sad fact, he is not a happy wrangler. He sits with his aging broad, his water-slicked hair growing low down his neck, his creased, tended tan, his bland, pleased, angry, hurt, princely, bored clasp of lips; he turns his ankle anxiously in its fancy-worked Western boot. It is costly after all, making out this way. Hard to give up joy in sex and work; it's hard to give up being human. "But what is man," his neurotic ankle seems to ask, quoting Scripture in its dismay of soul, "that thou art mindful of him?"

"Nothing doing," answers the silence between his ears, the creak of his leather.

Cool, professional, a freckled desert hipster, he is tired and wants to go to bed, but there is no mama to cradle him, only this rich bitch whose particular mattress needs he tries to predict as they watch the Jack Paar show together. Well, maybe he is neither man nor woman, but our bored buckaroo with his corseted prey is in business, and doing pretty well.

• • •

There are fine hotels in Reno, the Riverside, the Mapes, and the usual glorious motels with swimming pools and round-the-clock boozing. There are also the guest "ranches" (a horse or two) or houses that cater to economical divorcettes. "Bonny Bode Inn – Divorcees Welcome," hints the newspaper advertisement; "Join the Happy Crowd at Harmony House," another chimes in winsomely; "Liberty Rooms – Free Coffee At Any Hour – Make Your Stay a Memorable One."

The proprietors of these permanent residences for permanent six-week residents also serve as cheer-mongers to the sad, introducers for the solitary, and witnesses in court to swear that the plaintiff was really there for six weeks. (Efforts to shorten the time of legal residence are met by the practical objection that Reno needs the money spent here in ransom after matrimonial jags; conversely, greedy ideas about lengthening the stay are met by prudent commercial warnings of the threat from sordid, rapid Alabama and immoral, speedy Mexico.)

Life in these guest houses generally follows a simple, healthful routine. The marital convalescents share place at table, space in the laundry room, and stories about the rat, jackal, hoot owl, dog, porcupine, hyena, or stercoricolous beetle in Washington, D.C., or San Francisco, Dallas, Bangor, or wherever. Nevada law in its majesty almost always agrees that the One Back Home is some (continued on page 134)american divide(continued from page 92) sort of jungle beastie; those in Reno, men and women, are wronged angels. Many a joyous conversation in a Guest House patio concerns ways to settle his/her hash, which badly needs settling. For current news of what he/she is up to, you can always get word from detective agencies or crystal ball snoops who do a thriving business:

Phychic Ruth – Card Reader and Counselor 17th Successful Year in Reno. $3.00. "Phychic" is probably a combination word, meaning fidgety and fishy, and it characterizes the stories to which poor, long-suffering, three-dollar Ruth has had to lend an ear. "My husband, listen, he used to..." "That wife of mine, by God, I wanted to..."

Some, of course, have untraceable spouses who, for all they know, might be working for the Post Office; she lies dead in a schoolteacher's closet in Tulsa; he is producing a movie entitled Teenagers at the SEATO Conference; Phychic Ruth cannot see him clear. He has disappeared from the ken of mortal and gypsy, and will be symbolically reached only by that final invocation published in a legal advertisement:

The State of Nevada sends you greetings! Not having cohabited with the plaintiff...

And he'll never know what was said about him before the Reno judge. The judge probably won't know, either. He has heard too many stories that all have the same ending. He turns off the hearing aid and pores over his copy of Poker – a Gentleman's Pastime.

The garrulous camaraderie of the boarding house gives wounds a chance to heal under the gentle urging of that famous law – misery loves company of the opposite sex. One should always describe one's trouble to those who cannot check for accuracy: sympathy begets sympathy in return; and listen, pal, it sure is good to get away after what I been through. "I know, I know, and how about making a tour of the clubs?"

There are plenty of shaky stomachs and trembling lower lips, plenty of secret tears in narrow beds, but there is also the lovely resilient chick who comments, "I learned a great deal from my marriage. I don't regret anything. I learned how to give big parties and how to keep the maid from stealing."

• • •

Most things that you do furtively in other places you can do without shame in Reno. This is to Reno's credit: honesty is one of the good policies. The popular acceptance of gambling is indicated by a recent debate in the City Council. Should the city get out of the slot machine business at the Municipal Airport? Of course. Why? Declared the mayor: "We don't want to compete with private enterprise."

The private enterprise includes Harold's Club (in addition to The Nevada, The Golden, Harrah's Club and other secondary institutions), a giant seven-floor department store of luck, with blackjack, craps, roulette and eight hundred slot machines grinding up money twenty-four hours a day. The customers pull, wait and stare like the distraught heroes of horror movies who look at their monster and say, "I think it's trying to tell us something." (It is trying to tell them: "The grind is against you, buddy – bell, cherry and orange.") Some slots are "humanized," being built into gorgeous female bodies, with the coins, when you hit, emerging from a dismally appropriate place.

"We build slot machines," stated one manufacturer, "but we don't build machines to force people to play." Nevertheless, the mechanism seems to be built into most of us. Jean-Paul Sartre once committed a famous remark: "Hell is other people." This is an easy epigram, since any definition of hell with such an outrageous and dogmatic format will take us by surprise and sound briefly, pretentiously true. For example: Hell is oneself; Hell is nobody. But those hip-to-hip rows of cattle before the slot machines, blind to anything but the rolling fruit, suggest some particular dramatic sense to the French philosopher's remark. Hell is other people playing slot machines.

This repetitive, ritualistic, manual game recalls fantasies in which the child defies logic – he is all-powerful; he controls his fate simply by force of will. (Dylan Thomas made fun of this primitive dream when he wrote about a rocky transatlantic flight, "Only my iron will will keep the great bird aloft.") The gambler's iron will commands a jackpot when he wants it – right now – and refuses to admit failure until he wakes from his dreams of omnipotence to find his pockets empty. Perhaps – while we are walking on these psychological waters – there is another factor at work: in his heart of hearts the gambler wants to lose, a stubborn guilty child asking to be punished for trying to stand outside the laws of chance.

One of the saddest, most instructive sights in the world is that of a gambling creep shuffling out of a room on South Virginia Street and over to the Western Union office on Center Street, there to mouth his stub of pencil and try to transform himself into a poet with a new way of saying Send money quick. Going from club to club you see the System Players, clutching their notebooks, grinning hard, with harassed eyes and chewed lips, sure that next time the laws of statistics, which they have invented, will take hold. Next time.

The Smith family, owners of Harold's Club, are respected leaders of community life in Reno. They endow concerts and the Harold's Club Scholarships at the University of Nevada. (One condition: The Scholar must not cross the threshold of Harold's Club during his college enrollment.) Legalized gambling is an important industry. The high desert skies are clear of industrial smoke; the fume and fuss of gambling leave little mark on the Nevada landscape.

• • •

Reno and environs display a distinct physical charm and diversity of terrain. Besides the gambling/divorcing Reno, there is also the typical Western town in which people live much as they do in a thousand similar places, blessed by lovely homes and mortgages, spacious lawns and chickweed, happy youngsters thronging to school, church and drag-strip. This ignored Reno boasts magnificent surrounding mountains, the snow-fed Truckee making green the center of the city, skiing in winter and healthful dry desert air in summer – plus the University of Nevada, "finest institution of higher learning in the state." (It is also the only institution of higher learning in the state.)

But it is not for these advantages in culture and climate that Reno is so much better known than, say, Ottumwa, Iowa, or Bellingham, Washington, both towns of comparable size. Reno is a rambunctious, brawling Mickey Rooney among cities. The workaday Reno grudgingly harbors its wild, permissive twin, without which, of course, any renowned Reno at all would be impossible. The two Renos are joined by common elements of the picturesque and the bizarre: the traditional rodeo, the splendors of desert sage and mountain pine, the romantic outcroppings of silver-bearing rock in nearby, antique Virginia City, where ragtime is the rule, the hot mineral springs for swimming, the general morality of No Speed Limit in Nevada.

The true churchly, cultural Reno, of which some old residents defensively prattle, also has some basis in fact, once you leave Virginia Street (the major casinos), Commercial Row (pawn shops, Indian bars, prodding policemen), and Lake Street (Chinese and Negro gambling clubs – Reno is covertly Jim Crow). But it's hard to keep the wistful visitor in church once he has found the Mint Club, where Rosemarie has been Held Over by Popular Demand – and by popular demand she holds it over the drinkers at the bar on which she prances. The place of the great rose window of the cathedral of Notre Dame is taken by the grandiose outdoor mural of an Indian massacre which is the entrance to Harold's Club, the dominating structure in town.

Over this cathedral of chance shines a beacon; within it the multitude throngs. The slot machines whir, the process servers knock, the courts do their work. A woman sniffles, a woman laughs, a dude moves in. Someone asks for change of a paper twenty in silver dollars. A spur jangles. Six weeks begin for someone; six weeks are over for another.