It's Just Like You're Two Rubber Titties. Hello!

How it happens that I am lying naked on a carpet in a warehouse in Las Vegas along with 25 other similarly naked people, 15 of whom are terrific-looking showgirls, is this: We are all posing for the illustration to an article I have been tricked into writing for Playboy, titled My First Orgy.

Just why this illustration has to be shot in Las Vegas as opposed to, say, Chicago--where Playboy has its headquarters and where, presumably, hundreds of Bunny types and fun-loving editorial staff members would cheerfully shed their duds to appear in a two-page color spread in the magazine--is not entirely Rubber Titties(continued) clear to me. I am told it is because models cost a lot less in Vegas. Although this is not a logically satisfying answer to my question, I am as eager as the next guy to get a free trip somewhere, and I drop my counterproductive line of questioning.

So, one balmy day in August 1972, with the temperature standing pat at 110 degrees, inside a warehouse that is supposed to be air conditioned but isn't, I am lying on this carpet, intertwined with these 25 naked people for two successive afternoons, all of us perspiring freely onto one another's bodies; and, although it is probably even hotter than 110 degrees down on the carpet, what with the lights and the close proximity of all that warm flesh, it is not really such a terrible way to kill a couple of days.

What you do when you are lying intertwined with a lot of naked people on a carpet, while an art director and a photographer on an overhead balcony keep calling out minor adjustments in position ("OK now, Greenburg, you put your left hand on the right breast of the girl on your left, and ..."), is that you get to talking.

Here is the first actual conversation I had with one of my co-models, a young woman with enormous breasts, the right one of which I was holding, as instructed, with my left hand. The young lady asked me what this photo was going to be used for and I said, "Oh, it's for this article I wrote about this orgy I went to." The young lady didn't seem to be perceptibly impressed, so I said, "I suppose you've been to quite a few orgies yourself, have you?"

"I don't know," she said, "does four people count?" I said I thought it probably counted. She seemed relieved. "Oh, well," she said, "then I guess I've been to orgies. In fact, I guess I've done it just about every way you can do it with four people. I've done it with two men and two women, I've done it with three men and me, I've done it with three women and me----"

"Tell me about three women and you," I said.

"Well," she said, "first we dropped acid, of course. Then we gave each other baths. We Two Rubber Titties(continued) set each other's hair, we did each other's nails, we----"

"Did you have any sex?" I asked.

"Oh, yeah, we all went down on each other," she said. "You have to understand--our lives here in Vegas are kind of weird. I mean, we all see each other so much, we've used up all the normal stuff and we've gotten sort of kinky. To me, the kinky has become the commonplace. You know the kinkiest thing I could think of doing right now?"

"What?" I asked.

"Have a straight, one-to-one relationship with a man," she said.

I had more chats with my co-models, and the more I heard, the more fascinated I became. I wondered what it was like to be a Las Vegas showgirl. I wondered what it was like to be that beautiful, that sexy, that bored, that kinky. I wondered what it was that had pulled these girls to Vegas, to work nude or seminude on a stage six or seven nights a week, two or three shows a night. I wondered if they ever fell in love or got married or had kids. I wondered what they wanted out of life and I wondered how different their goals were from mine and from the other ordinary humdrum clothed folks I knew in New York.

I decided to find out. Early last January, I found myself back in Vegas.

• • •

When I step off the plane from New York late in the afternoon, I find it is not 110 degrees; it's about 30 degrees and snowing. I walk past a long line of slot machines, which several of my overeager fellow passengers stop to play. I claim my baggage, linger briefly before the counter of Save-Mor Rent-A-Car with its Think Pink signs and its four hostesses clad in pink hotpants, pink sweaters, pink Dynel wigs, and I decide in favor of a cab.

I check into Caesars Palace. I figure if you're doing an article on Taste City, you might as well live right in the red-hot center of the quintessential Vegas taste.

Caesars Palace, you will not be too stunned to hear, is themed in a Roman motif: Roman columns flank the phone booths in the lobby; Roman columns support the slot machines in the casino; Roman columns serve as bases for the lamps in your room, your TV set, and so on. The lady keno runners, who enable you to keep betting on things right through meals and other annoyances, wear minitogas. The men's and ladies' rooms are labeled Caesars and Cleopatras. The snack shop is called The Noshorium. The card that hangs on the knob outside your room says Do Not Disturbus. Almost everything in the hotel that I have failed to mention has a small plaque attached to it with a message in pseudo-Roman lettering that proclaims something or other about the function of whatever it's attached to, beginning with the words "I, Caesar," etc. My favorite is the one on the TV set in my room, which reads: "I, Caesar, list the following local television channels for your viewing pleasure...."

The first showgirl I look up once I am settled is one I'd met at the photo session that August. Her name is Janet. Janet is a large, very good-looking, very well-built girl in her 20s. She stands just under six feet without shoes; when she wears stacked heels, you sort of shout up to her. Whatever color her hair is now is not the color it was the last time.

Janet told me two things in August that I loved a lot. The first was that she had been painted by "the foremost nude painter in the world," a person who turned out to be named Julian Ritter.

"When I was managing editor of Eros magazine some years back," I said, "I had extensive dealings with another well-known painter by the name of Salvador Dali. Have you ever heard of him?"

"Salvador Dali?" she said. "I was his date at Versailles."

"I see," I said, my crude attempt at name-dropping instantly outclassed. "Tell me, what was it like, being the date of Salvador Dali at a place like Versailles?"

(continued on page 230)Two Rubber Titties(continued from page 220)

"Oh, you know," she shrugged. "A lot of people, a lot of mirrors."

I will tell you the other thing that I heard from Janet back in August and then you will see why I had to look her up again and interview her. It seems that a few years ago, Janet's mother, to whom she was extremely devoted, died of cancer. A few days later, Janet went blind. Janet's insurance had somehow lapsed and her first operation cost several thousand dollars. Janet was in the hospital for a year, during which time she had many costly operations. Kids in the shows along the Strip raised a lot of money for Janet and that helped some. Then a contributor who wished to remain anonymous sent her $3000.

At the end of the year, she had an operation that completely restored her eyesight. One of the first things she did upon leaving the hospital was try to track down her anonymous benefactor to thank him. As she turned up more and more people who were unwilling to tell her who'd sent the money, Janet got frightened. Then she learned her benefactor's name and grew even more frightened: He was the boss of one of the biggest casinos in Vegas, a man rumored to be high up in the Mob. By the time Janet burst into his office, she was so worked up with paranoid fear that all she could do was blurt: "How dare you give me three thousand dollars anonymously--how dare you?"

The casino boss looked coolly at the showgirl who had burst into his office, thoughtfully removed his cigar from his mouth and pointed to a chair.

"Sit down," he said. She sat. "Sweetheart," he said, leaning back in his large leather chair, "let me tell you something. Three thousand dollars to you is three dollars to me. Now get out of here."

It was this story that finally hooked me on Las Vegas. This hardened old Mob guy who is such a softy that he sent three grand to a girl in trouble, who was so embarrassed by the sweetness of the gesture that he had to do it anonymously; the poor girl so out of her mind with fear that all she can do is scream at him, and the guy forced to belittle his own generosity and do a Cagney number on her.

After the strange B-movie confrontation, Janet got to be friends with the Mob guy, whose name is Max. They have a relationship that is unsexual, very father-daughterish, very loving.

"I love Max, I really do," says Janet. "He really has been a father to me, much more than my real one. I always knew that if anybody hassled me, Max would take care of him.

"I was nineteen when I first came here to be a showgirl," she says. "I was very naive. Every so often Max would say to me, 'Here's a little something, go buy yourself a new dress,' and he'd peel off a hundred-dollar bill. I was so stupid I thought he really expected me to go out and spend it on a dress, so I'd go to Mag-nin's and take the whole day trying to find a dress for exactly a hundred dollars. Then I'd put it on, go back to him and say, 'Here it is.' He'd look blankly at me and I'd say, 'The dress.' He didn't know what the hell I was talking about. It took me a long time to realize I didn't have to go buy a dress when he said that.

"You know," she says, "I'd heard that Max was in the Mob, but I was so naïve when I first came here I never really believed it. Then I happened to be reading The Green Felt Jungle backstage between shows and right there on the page I see Max's name. I rushed into his office and said, 'You're a gangster--you really are a gangster! I just read about you in The Green Felt Jungle!' He sat back in his chair and he just roared with laughter. Then he said, 'We wined and dined the guy and here he goes writing trash like that about us.' I'd always read about gangsters and seen them in the movies, and here nice old Max turns out to really be one."

Janet, who has been a stripper and nude showgirl for almost six years, has just started in the new Minsky's show as straight woman to a baggy-faced burlesque comedian named Tommy Moe Raft. It is her first clothed onstage job. "I can't stand not being nude in this show," she says.

I go to Minsky's to see Janet's show, which is a dinner thing, and I'm seated at a tiny ringside table across from a pleasant elderly lady who tells me she is left-handed and her grandchildren are left-handed, although her children are right-handed. This oddity is either one that has just struck her, or it is a story she dines out on. I hope for the former. On my right is a good-natured chap named Verne Berkowitz, who asks me what I'm doing taking notes and, when he finds out, insists I put his name into my article. OK, Verne, now what?

"When my son was a little boy," says the elderly lady left-hander, "I used to twist the tie on the cookie bag to close it, and my son, being a righty, would never be able to untwist it."

"Why is that?" I ask, not sure how glad I am to be in this conversation.

"Well, he being a righty and all, he'd always be trying to twist it the opposite way of a lefty, and he'd just get it more twisted instead of untwisted."

"Mmmmm."

By the time dinner is whisked onto our tiny tables, I have managed to ease Verne Berkowitz in to pinch-hit for me with the southpaw granny who is now, as I feared, out of the closet and openly bemoaning the general persecution of lefties by a right-handed establishment, as manifested in the exclusively right-handed desks both she and her grandchildren have had to put up with all through school. I grimly envision myself making out my first check to lefty liberation as, mercifully, the show begins.

Janet is in three burlesque sketches with Tommy Moe Raft, a short, funny person whose face is precisely at Janet's breast level. He talks alternately to each breast. "Hey, watch that hand," says Janet as Tommy snakes a hand around her waist.

"You don't have to worry about that hand," says Tommy. "Here's the hand you gotta worry about."

"Oh, Tommy," says Janet, "I'm too big a woman for you."

"What the hell," says Tommy, with a take to the audience, "I'll make two trips." I don't suppose anybody knows what that means, but the southpaw granny is giggling and Verne Berkowitz is haw-hawing uncontrollably.

"I bought a new Ford."

"You get a Falcon?"

"Oh, no, I got a pretty good deal." Verne Berkowitz is having difficulty catching his breath and the lefty granny seems on the verge of a coronary occlusion.

At the end of the show, Janet comes over to our table and I introduce her around. Verne Berkowitz nearly drops his teeth.

• • •

"You know," says a blonde showgirl named Clarice, "people in the audience think we can't see them or hear them, but we can. They're our audience. We talk about them while we're dancing. Once two ladies were making nasty comments about the show in very loud voices. I swept over them with my heavy cape and knocked a wig off one of their heads."

"I don't mind somebody talking ringside," says a dark-haired girl named Ellie, "but I do resent their putting drinks on my stage. One time in Puerto Rico, I swept a whole row of glasses off into some woman's lap. Then I was really sorry and I never did it again."

"People think it's a one-way mirror out there, but it's not," says a girl named Claudette. "We see lots of things. Audiences don't realize they're entertaining you. They're scratching and picking their noses and making out, and you think to yourself, 'OK, you're assholes and I'm going to permit you to sit out there.' These women in the audience with their boobs in push-out bras sometimes make really nasty comments about our bodies. Then, of course, they go home and take off their bras and their boobs fall down to their ankles."

"Once some dodgy old hooker in the audience went down on a chap at one of the ringside tables," says a girl named Monica with a very upper-class British accent. "In our dance numbers we move on counts: One, two, three, four and you move to the right, five, six, seven, eight and you move to the left--well, we just (continued on page 257)Two Rubber Titties(continued from page 230) stood there, forgetting all about the counts, and girls were crashing into one another all over the place. The fellow himself was just sitting there, watching the show with a big smile on his face like nothing was happening."

We are chatting, these showgirls and I, in a backstage dressing room between shows, and as we chat, they matter-of-factly take off their costumes and put on their street clothes, just as though it's a perfectly ordinary thing to do. And although I've logged two afternoons with some of them naked on a carpet, this clothes-changing thing is still pretty provocative. You know it and they know it and you know they know it, and although you don't feel you have to actually do anything as extreme as avert your eyes ... still, a fixed stare at a nipple or a bush seems somehow in dubious taste.

I ask the girls what brought them to Vegas to be showgirls. Ellie was a swimmer in a water show in San Diego and came to Vegas because there seemed to be more jobs here. "I didn't want to work nude," she says. "I was forced into it." Forced? How? "There were no clothed jobs around," she says.

Claudette was a go-go girl in Phoenix and didn't find out till just before curtain time on her first job in Vegas that she was to be working seminude. "They'd given me this little folded-down bra to wear and I spent about ten minutes trying to fold it back up again," she says. "Then I looked around at the two chicks on either side of me at the dressing table and I said, 'Hey, am I a nude?' They looked at me like 'Where'd they get her?'"

Clarice started as a stripper in the San Fernando Valley, making $75 a week for seven nights' work. She heard there was better money in Vegas. There was. Monica came here from England to be in a show at the age of 16 and had to be chaperoned everywhere. "I had always wanted to see the States," she says, "but when I first came here, I hated it. I got very homesick, so after six months I went back to England and I found that I no longer had anything in common with my chums there. I found myself actually getting homesick for Vegas--for the people I'd met and for the life itself. I came back and I've been here ever since."

"I love this town," says Clarice. "I love the desert. This town has been very good to me. The only disadvantage is I don't meet a good cross section of men. But I can't worry about that now."

"One reason we have such weird relationships with men," says Claudette, "is our image. All showgirls are automatically categorized as know-nothing sex-fiend hookers. You say, 'I'm a fireman,' people say, 'Oh, you put out fires.' You say, 'I'm a showgirl,' they say, 'Oh, you hang your tits out and hook.' They think you've got to be a freak, so they're lewd when they talk to you or, at best, condescending. 'I'm shocked that you're so sweet,' they say. It's just like you're two big rubber titties. Hello!"

"Showgirls are prey," says Clarice. "There are so few guys in town, a girl will take any halfway-decent one. Practically all the girls I know who are married or living with someone are with stagehands, musicians or dealers."

Clarice is unmarried and has had two traumatic affairs with musicians. Monica is seemingly happily married to a dealer and has a ten-year-old daughter. Ellie was married for one year to a dealer and has a 12-year-old son. Claudette was married to a stagehand, was recently divorced and is very bitter.

"Showgirls tend to get hooked up with men who don't like to work," she says. "I supported my husband for three years and then one day I said, 'This is a piece of crap,' and got out. I got married because I was a single female entertainer under twenty-five and I couldn't buy insurance or real estate or get credit. Well, I paid for it. I bought a house while I was married, but I gave it to my husband as a peace offering, and now that I'm not married anymore, I lost my credit rating. The whole thing is a piece of crap."

"What are we going to do after our looks go except marry some dealer or stagehand?" says Clarice. "I'm going to be twenty-five soon. I don't have too many good years left. What am I going to do after that? You've only got about ten years of your life you can be a nude. You don't get bad money while it lasts, but then it's over and what've you got left? Nothing. I'm already panicking."

"Most showgirls," says Ellie, "are really looking to give it up after about five or six years. They've sown their wild oats and they're tired of it. They're ready to settle down and get married. If they're not married by the time they're too old to be showgirls, they become cocktail waitresses. When they're too old to be cocktail waitresses, they become cashiers. God," she says softly to herself, "I hope I don't end up a cashier."

• • •

I am somewhat depressed by the dressing-room revelations and decide to head for my room. I stand disconsolately waiting for the elevator and I note that although there are three elevators in the bank, one is permanently out of order, one is temporarily out of order and the elevator call button is held together with Scotch tape. The only unbroken elevator eventually arrives and takes me to my floor. I note that the mirrored wall between elevators on my floor has been cracked in several places and the cracks repaired with gray Mystik tape.

I enter my room and turn on the lights and find that half the bulbs are burned out. I turn on the TV and switch to one of the local television channels that he, Caesar, has listed for my viewing pleasure, and discover that the TV is broken. It is too warm in the room and I fiddle with the thermostat, only to discover that it has its own ideas about what temperature my room should be and isn't conceding anything. I go into the bathroom to take a shower before bed and note that there is only one bath towel. You know how you are always hearing how hotels in Vegas are so luxurious and so cheap in order to lure people to the gaming tables? Well, guess what? I don't consider gray Mystik tape on a cracked mirror and elevator buttons held together with Scotch tape and a room with half the bulbs burned out and an anti-Semitic thermostat with a mind of its own and a TV set that turns on but does not otherwise function and one lousy bath towel in the bathroom luxurious, and if $43 a day for a room is cheap, then the whole thing is, as my friend Claudette says, a piece of crap, indeed.

I climb into bed, turn off those lights that are not already burned out and go to sleep.

A couple of hours later, I am dredged up through several layers of unconsciousness by the loudest pounding I have ever heard in a hotel room. After a quick check to make sure the pounding is not in my hung-over head but on the actual ceiling of my room, and after a quick check of my watch, which informs me it is seven A.M., I pick up the phone and dial the front desk. Controlling my fury with difficulty, I say, as follows:

"This is Mr. Greenburg in room three seventy-three. There seems to be someone hammering on my ceiling."

"Room three seventy-three," says a sweet female voice. "Oh, yes. They're installing carpeting in four seventy-three."

"Listen," I say, "I only just got to bed about an hour or two ago and I have a really awful hangover. Don't you think you could please get them to stop hammering up there?"

"Oh, my, no," she says, amazed that I would even ask such a thing.

"Why not?" I say.

"Because it's contract work."

There seems to be no further explanation forthcoming, so I hang up the phone. There is no sleeping with the continuing pounding. There isn't really even any lying in bed. So I get up, get dressed and go downstairs to breakfast.

Sometime later I return to my room for a nap. The pounding has stopped, but now there is tapping. Better than pounding, but still not the sort of thing one wants on his ceiling. I pick up the phone to call the manager and find that it has gone dead. I sigh and go back downstairs to make a personal complaint.

One of the things that are happening in the always busy Caesars Palace casino is that there are klieg lights and a movie camera set up, because Alan King is making a TV special here. As I push my way through the crowd, I hear someone loudly, peppily call my name. I turn around to discover it is Alan King himself, who says, "Hi, how are you, how'd you like to write a segment on a TV special I'm putting together soon?" Alan King is a very nice fellow whom I know vaguely and the part about writing the segment on the TV special is, I think, just what Alan King tends to say to folks after he says "Hi, how are you?"--or at least that has been my experience.

I tell him about the pounding on my ceiling and ask whether he knows the manager, whereupon he turns around and yells: "Jerry? Jerry Gordon! Come on over here and meet a good friend of mine, Dan Greenburg--give him anything he wants!"

A man distinguished chiefly by how unimpressed he is with this introduction shuffles over to me. I introduce myself and, pushing things just a wee bit because of my fatigue, say, "Hi, my name is Dan Greenburg and I'm doing a piece for Playboy on Vegas and I was up till about six A.M. doing interviews and at seven on the nose this pounding begins on my ceiling and they tell me they are laying carpeting and what I would like to know is whether this is going to continue."

"What room ya in?" says Jerry Gordon, clearly even less impressed with my being from Playboy and writing a piece about Vegas than he is with the fact that I am best friends with Alan King.

"I'm in three seventy-three."

"Three seventy-three. Oh, yeah. They're laying carpeting in four seventy-three. It'll continue."

"It will? But I have to get some sleep."

"So change rooms."

"Change rooms? But I just got in there yesterday and I unpacked and my stuff is all over the place and I really am not too anxious to get it all packed up again right now."

In response to this unreasonable kvetching from Alan King's demented friend, Jerry Gordon merely sticks out his hand, which, although it is his left hand and not his right, I feel I am obliged to shake, because the audience with the manager of Caesars Palace is clearly at an end. I reach out and limply shake the left hand of Jerry Gordon and, as I do so, realize with the sort of sinking feeling I will get to know rather well in this town in days to come that the left hand was not intended for me to shake. It was merely signaling to someone standing just behind me. I slink back to my phoneless room with the tapping ceiling and start packing.

• • •

"I didn't have any boobs when I first came to town," confides a showgirl by the name of Lola, who very definitely has them now. We are having dinner, Lola and I, in the Ah So Japanese restaurant and we are surrounded by bridges and streams and waterfalls and rivers and ponds and various other bodies of water--as a matter of fact, there is scarcely enough dry land in this restaurant to walk on.

"The producer of this show I was in said, 'I think you ought to have the shots,' so I got them."

"Silicone?"

"Yeah. I got two shots under each boob down here and one on top up around here. Anyway, I had the shots in the afternoon and that night I'm doing a show with little Band-Aids over the shots, and all of a sudden I feel the silicone start dribbling out. Ugh! This French girl I used to work with had a lot of trouble with her shots. She got a bad batch of silicone and at first it made her boobs all red and swollen, then the silicone dropped and it really got messy."

"How far down did it drop?"

"She said it started seeping into her vagina. She can't work anymore. She went back to her family in Paris. Most girls I know have had the shots, but the latest thing now is having sea-water bags put in there surgically. We call them sea-water bags because they sort of sloosh around inside. They look more natural than silicone and they don't feel as hard. Unfortunately, some sea-water-bag jobs turn out terrible, with ugly scars under the nipples."

"Like Georgette's?" I say, referring to a girl she'd introduced me to earlier.

"Oh, you thought Georgette had a bad job? That was a good job. You should see the bad jobs."

As I understand it, Georgette had pretty big boobs to begin with, but she had silicone shots anyway, and when the silicone dropped she had sea-water bags installed. "How come she wanted to be so big-busted?" I say.

Lola looks at me carefully. "She read too many copies of Playboy," she says. "Most women, you know, are naturally an A or B cup, but you see all those big tits in Playboy and you start thinking there must be something wrong with you. I sure did. I used to wear padded bras. They're filled with foam rubber, which makes your boobs sweat a lot. And when you sweat, you lose weight. I'm convinced that with all that sweating, wearing padded bras made me at least one cup size smaller than I was already. Listen, you think Playboy has the guts to print that? What I just said about it?"

"Absolutely."

"Well, anyway, big boobs may be on the way out. In Vegas, I mean. They used to be fine when all you had to do was stand onstage and look glamorous, but now they're making us dance our buns off and it's not so good to have big boobs anymore. They jiggle around so much it hurts. Also, all that jiggling breaks down the tissues and makes them drop faster. I guess we could all get reduction jobs."

"What's that?"

"On a reduction job they cut a lot of fat out from underneath each breast, then they slice off your nipples and put them on again higher up. The sensitivity in your nipples is gone for a while, but then it comes back. If they didn't reset your nipples higher, then when they took the fat from underneath, they would end up down around your waist. A reduction job is a fairly common operation."

Speaking of nipples, I had by this time seen several shows, and hundreds of naked breasts, and every nipple I saw on every breast, both onstage and off, was fully erect. I asked Lola how she accounted for that.

"Some girls touch themselves just before they go onstage. Some rub up against the velvet curtain. We have one stagehand in our show now who's very tall and good-looking. I rub up against him just before I go onstage to make my nipples hard."

"And how does this stagehand react?"

"Oh, he doesn't have time to react--I run right out onstage. Sometimes, you know, it's a very groovy feeling to just rub up against another nude woman, even if you're not gay--to rub up against a soft female chest instead of a hard male one. I mean, if you're nude and you're next to somebody else who's nude, it's very natural to want to touch her. But that doesn't mean we're lesbians, because we're not. Not all of us, I mean."

"Are you?"

"No." Pause. "I mean, I don't think I am." Pause. "I don't really know, to be honest with you. I've never actually done it with another girl, I mean, but there've been times when I've been tempted to try it." Pause. "See, the thing of it is that with all the men I've been to bed with, I've never actually had an orgasm." Pause. "Does that surprise you? The sex-fiend showgirl who never had an orgasm?"

"I guess so. I don't know."

"I told my gynecologist and he didn't believe me at first. Then he realized I was serious. He asked if I had orgasms when I masturbated. Do you know up till that time I hadn't even masturbated? Anyway, I tried it, and that didn't help either. That's when I started thinking maybe I'm gay. I mean, I do find myself occasionally turned on by chicks, so maybe what I am is gay. I'm sort of scared to try and find out for sure."

Pause. Lola giggles. "This guy I knew who worked at one of the casinos here had this one showgirl he was going with in Puerto Rico and this other showgirl he was going with here who was a friend of mine. He brought the girl from Puerto Rico to Vegas, because he thought he could get a threesome going. Anyway, the girls met and really dug each other. They went out for drinks and they forgot about the guy completely. They went to bed together, and then they ran off and got married. The guy was kind of shattered. He'll never try that again."

Another giggle. Then silence.

"You know," says Lola, "I once went to a gay bar here and let myself get picked up." Pause. "I went home with this girl and we started necking and it wasn't too bad, and then she started undressing me and suddenly I knew I couldn't go through with it. I mean, I felt kind of sick, you know? I got up and babbled some kind of apology and left." Pause. "I wonder what it would have been like. If I had stayed."

• • •

I am with my showgirl friend Ellie between shows and we are having a drink in a very gimmicky bar, not because there aren't ungimmicky bars in Vegas but because I have discovered to my chagrin that I tend to like the gimmicky ones.

"Listen," I say, "I've been talking with a number of girls and I am hearing a lot about gayness. I have my own theories about it, but why do you think there's so much gayness and bisexuality in Vegas among the showgirls?"

"I haven't noticed any," says Ellie.

"You haven't?" I say. "Almost every girl I've talked to has spoken about it in some form."

"That's really weird," says Ellie. "I didn't think there was that much of it going on. I've only made it with a couple of chicks, myself." This is said quite matter-of-factly, and I act perfectly unimpressed and wait for her to continue. "I didn't like it with either of them," she says. "I couldn't wait for it to be over. I doubt whether I would ever do it again. I don't say I wouldn't, I just doubt it. It's a lot more fun to fantasize than to actually do, if you ask me. Anyway, I'd much rather have an affair with a man than a woman." Pause. "I guess the main reason I don't have affairs with women is that I find women very devious. I don't trust women. I like men better."

"You can probably control men better," I say gently.

"Yeah, that, too," she says.

• • •

"Listen," I say to Lola, the girl I'd had dinner with the previous night, "I was talking to Ellie and she says she's done it with chicks."

"Oh, we all have," says Lola. "You remember that girl we met at the restaurant? That was my first gay lover."

"Let's take that again from the top," I say. "Last night you told me you'd never made it with a chick at all."

Lola giggles. "Oh, is that what I said?"

Pause. A long sigh.

"You know the story I told you about the girl in the gay bar who picked me up?" she says. "Well, I didn't leave when she started to undress me." Pause. "We sat on the floor in front of her fireplace and we drank wine and talked and giggled and had a pretty good time. And then we started kissing and it was very groovy. And then we made love. The whole experience was a lot tenderer than with a man, and nobody was trying to prove anything. The next day she sent me flowers. God, I really loved that."

• • •

Lola has suggested we see the show at the Stardust lounge, which she says is the best lounge show in Vegas. The lounge is very small and fairly crowded. As we enter, the headwaiter leads us past six empty ringside tables and row after row of filled tables, then seats us at a table against the back wall behind a post.

Lola leans over and whispers that I should give the headwaiter some money to get a better table. How much? I whisper. About three bucks, she whispers. I discover all I have are fives. Lola furtively rummages in her purse, slips me three dollars in a little crumpled ball, which I am just about to smooth out and decide how to gracefully offer the headwaiter, whose back is turned. But he has heard the earsplitting crackle of money, whips around and, like a lizard's tongue around a fly, plucks the ball of bills neatly out of my hand. He bum-rushes us over to a ringside table and disappears.

The show is a dazzling combination of rock music, dance, song, comedy and magic. It is on a small stage and it's the fastest-paced and most brilliantly choreographed thing I have seen in a very long time. From the opening, in which a fast-stepping group of dancers comes out in black-velvet monk's habits and does humorous flashes of tit, to the number where they reappear as huge-headed dwarfs, with heads and shoulders hidden in enormous top hats, with their breasts made up as eyes topped by bushy eyebrows, with long rubber noses stretched from cleavage to pupik and huge goatees around their.... Well, it sounds sexist and awful on paper. You had to be there.

Lola tells me I have to see the main show at the Stardust but that it's always sold out and almost impossible to get tickets. "If you have any juice," she says, "now is the time to use it." Juice, I have learned, is a peculiarly Las Vegas word meaning pull or influence. I tell her I'll see what I can do.

The next evening at the Ah So bar at Caesars Palace, I pick up the phone and ask the operator to connect me with the Stardust. I ask the next operator to put me through to the manager, and when he answers I go into my spiel--well modulated, seemingly assured, carefully rehearsed. It is the Hi-my-name-is-Dan-Greenburg-and-I'm-doing-a-story-on-Las-Vegas-for-Playboy number, following which I say I have tried unsuccessfully to get tickets to the dinner show at the Stardust and was sure he would be able to help me. The manager seems confused. Then I learn that the reason he is confused is that the Nazi operator at Caesars Palace has put me in touch not with the manager of the Stardust but with the manager of Caesars Palace--none other than the unimpressible Jerry Gordon of Alan King-introduction and left-hand-grasping-signaling fame. I hang up and cower under the bar for a moment. I chugalug two quarts of an exotic Japanese fruit-and-rum-with-flowers drink. And then I try again with the operator. I speak to her quite sternly now, indicating that I am on to her plot to humiliate me and will brook no further nonsense. I persuade her to stay on the line until I am personally speaking to the right manager of the right hotel. She is cowed by my new mastery of the situation and in scarcely 20 minutes more I am speaking to the manager of the Stardust. I give him the Playboy-writer number and he smoothly tells me that he is terribly sorry, they're all sold out, have been for months; perhaps if I'd stop by sometime in June----

I cut short this nonsense with my juice. I tell him that such and such a person, who I happen to know is on the Stardust Hotel's board of directors and whose nickname I have just dropped, although I only met the man for 20 seconds the day before, is going to be terribly surprised, since he personally assured me I would have a ringside table any time I wanted one. The Stardust manager is no fool. "I see we have one table left," he says immediately, and I hang up with a smug and, it turns out, wholly inappropriate smile.

Lola and I arrive at the Stardust, stroll past a block-long line of tourists who have been waiting there a minimum of 48 hours and make our way up to the monkey-suited gent at the velvet rope. I say in my suavest voice that the nicknamed board-of-directors man has made a reservation in my name, which is an outrageous lie, and he smiles and bows and lets us through the velvet rope. The headwaiter to whom he has given us over, however, has not been properly briefed, because he leads us past hundreds of perfectly decent tables to one that is roughly a foot from the parking lot. I rather imperiously advise him that Old Nickname has made a reservation in my name and urge him to check his little book. He checks but finds no reservation. He tells me that, in point of fact, he does not remember ever having heard either my name, the name of my magazine nor any of the several aliases of the board-of-directors chap. Lola whispers to me that five bucks ought to be enough. I reach into my pocket, pull out a roll of bills and, with what I hope is an insultingly ostentatious gesture, whip off a five, snarling as I do so: "Perhaps this will refresh your memory."

Alas, I am new to this game and its rhythms. The five-dollar bill rips in two and I am stuck offering half a bill to the bemused headwaiter. It is a terrible moment. It would be a terrible moment even if I had had the presence of mind to quip, "OK, now you meet me ten years from tonight on this very spot and we will fit our two halves back together again." The headwaiter is fortunately not a bloodthirsty man and doesn't let me bleed much longer than I absolutely deserve before pocketing both halves of my five and showing us to a considerably better table. Lola doesn't think much of this table either, but I sense that I am no longer the influential person I used to be and I tell her to shut up. We sit. I become violently homesick for New York, where I am a fellow who knows his way around tough Brooklyn cabdrivers and snotty French sommeliers and where I am not normally found with my fly open in public places.

I wonder aloud if the headwaiter would have been impressed with my five-dollar tip if I had been able to deliver it to him in one piece. "Oh, I doubt it," says my companion. "Once this Texas oilman took me to see Elvis Presley--he slipped the headwaiter a hundred-dollar bill and we only got a little table in the balcony."

The show in the main showroom of the Stardust is as dazzling in its way as was the one in the lounge. In one scene, an ice rink appears and two skaters do a seminude ice ballet; in an Oriental scene, the ice rink is replaced by a huge, sunken, mirrored mountain pool with people swimming around inside it, with waterfalls plashing behind it, while in the background a display of fireworks depicts the eruption of Mount Fuji; in a medieval English scene, two knights in armor riding live horses joust with swords and battle-axes and real doves fly overhead at the end. There is a prison scene, the climax of which involves a prison break of about three dozen female prisoners, and two helicopters appear on a track over our heads with flashing red lights, cops firing tommy guns, and I am too overpowered to know what else.

"Have you ever seen anything like this?" I whisper to Lola in awe.

"Yeah, Frederic Apcar did it three years ago at the Dunes, and so did Donn Arden, and Barry Ashton, and a lot of other guys. It's a fairly common number."

We go next to the Dunes, where a friend of Lola's with much juice comps us to the show. The Dunes' show has no helicopters or pool or ice rink, but it does have a fleet of bare-breasted showgirls driving incredibly loud motorcycles through the audience onto the stage and it does have three wild men from Argentina who do a terrifying act with bolos and it does have four Gauchos on live horses galloping toward the audience on a treadmill surrounded by clouds of dry-ice-produced dust, and it even has an incongruous salute to Israel that features spirited singing of Hava Nagila and film clips from World War Two newsreels that, on opening night I am told, included footage from Nazi death camps--the point of which escapes me, but it must have seemed like a good idea to someone at the time.

• • •

Shortly before arriving here, I happened to read somewhere that Raquel Welch has an act in Vegas, at the climax of which she whips open her gown and gives the audience a fast flash of Everything. I ask a showgirl named Myrna about Raquel's flash.

"She opens up her dress and then closes it again," says Myrna. "Big deal. I thought it was really tacky. Plus she was wearing a G string and Pasties. In Vegas that's a real cop-out. It makes nudity look cheap, which it isn't. Stagenudity-wise, I didn't think she was at all effective."

We are driving down the Strip in a car I have rented and we pass the Flamingo, onetime hangout of Bugsy Siegel. "Hey," says Myrna, "did you hear they discovered a safe in the floor of Bugsy Siegel's old office?"

"Yeah," I say, "I read about that--they spent six hours getting it open and then it turned out to be completely empty."

Myrna laughs. "Oh, is that what you read, that it was empty?" she says.

The Mafia in Las Vegas, which seems to be composed mostly of Jewish gents in their mid-60s, is very definitely on the way out. It is being eased out by giant corporations like Hughes, which now owns five of the major hotels, and like Hilton, which owns a couple more. Everybody I have talked to, including Myrna, is sorry to see the Mafia go.

"The Mafia didn't insist that anything but the casinos make a profit," she explains. "The giant corporations insist that every part of the hotel make a profit--the guest rooms, the restaurants, the showroom, the lounge, whatever--and if it doesn't, they scrap it. When the Mafia ran this town and a gambler lost his whole roll, he always knew he had a free bed and meals and whatever shows he wanted to see as long as he stayed here, and then he had a free plane ticket home. A couple weeks ago, I was with a man at the crap tables who'd just dropped $10,000--he asked the pit boss for a cigarette and the pit boss directed him to the cigarette machine. That never could have happened in a Mafia casino, and that's why the high rollers aren't coming to Vegas anymore.

"I wish there were more Mafia people here now," she says. "God bless 'em, they were a pleasure to do business with. I call them the Good People. You never needed a signed contract with them, just a handshake. You did your job and they did theirs. And if you didn't do your job, they were always fair about it. Let's say a dealer is caught stealing from the house, OK? So what do they do? They take him out and they break both his hands. Now, isn't that fair? He can't steal anymore, right? He was a bad boy and he got his hands broken. This legal-recourse stuff is bullshit. A couple months ago, a Maf attorney gets into his car, turns on the ignition and the whole thing blows to pieces. There was nothing left of the car or the attorney. A very professional job and they never found out who did it. So that's one less member of the Good People here and that's a shame. Since the Mafia lost control here, the crime rate has really risen--muggings, robberies, rapes--all kinds of urban crime. This was a clean town when the Mafia was running it. They were really super. They treated us like princesses."

• • •

"I just couldn't believe when I first came here that men would hand you a hundred dollars just for standing next to them looking beautiful while they gambled," says my tall friend Janet. "There was this one Texan who was trying to hustle me, but I wouldn't ever go out with him, because I'd heard he liked to lock girls up in his room. One night I got to the showroom and there was this security guard waiting for me with a bouquet of a dozen white roses. I didn't know what the security guard was doing there till I looked closely at the roses: Wrapped around each one of the stems was a new hundred-dollar bill. It was from this Texan--twelve hundred-dollar bills! I still wouldn't go out with him, though."

"Did you give the money back?" I ask.

"Well," she says, "I sort of offered to, but he said, 'Oh, I lose that much on the tables every night anyway,' so I kept it."

I ask some other showgirls about the gifts that men have given them. A tough little number named Stevie says: "This one guy I knew gave me a Mustang, a fox stole and a diamond ring. He was in the Maf, but I didn't know that at the time. I didn't even know he had any bread at all till he started laying this stuff on me. I mean, he wasn't even an old dried-up guy, he just felt he had to buy my company. I felt obligated to him and I don't dig that, so I went to bed with him and discharged my obligation." She looks at me coolly. "I don't really like men that much, if you want to know the truth."

"There was this one old dude who used to take about three of us to dinner every so often," says a showgirl named Marcia. "And during dinner he'd slip each of us a hundred-dollar bill. We realized we were being paid just to eat with him, to make him look good. Which is a form of hooking, I guess."

"Are there showgirls who are hookers?" I ask.

"There are showgirls who hook on the side," says Marcia, "and there are secretaries who fuck for the rent, too. I've gotten a lot of gifts from men. I never scored a car or a house, though. One guy I knew gave me a strand of pearls once, but I don't know what it's worth. It's a triple strand, eight-and-a-half-millimeter, opera-length strand of pearls, but I have no idea of what it's worth. And this is from a man I never even made it with.

"I don't take money or gifts from men anymore," says Marcia. "I don't need to. I own three houses and I'm in pretty good shape financially. You know what I'd really love to do the next time some dude propositions me? Lay a hundred dollars on him and say, 'Here, go get yourself a hooker.' I think I might actually do that, as a matter of fact, just to see the look on his face."

Not many girls I talked to had ever really hooked. My friend Janet took one try at it, though, when her mother was dying of cancer and there was no money for cobalt treatments:

"This guy comes up to me after the show and offers me a hundred dollars to come up to his room," Janet recalls. "I figured, well, I go to bed with guys anyway--why not get paid for it and give the bread to mother? So I get up there and in the room are these five middle-aged rough-looking guys. One of them tells me to go into the bedroom. He has a huge potbelly and an old T-shirt and a big cigar--really disgusting. I go into the bathroom to change and all of a sudden I realize what I'm doing and I start to cry. I can't stop crying. Then the guy who'd asked me up there in the first place comes into the bathroom and says to me, 'Is this your first time?' I say, 'Yes, but I'll be OK in a minute.' He says, 'I don't think you will be,' and he asks me why I need the money and I tell him. The next thing I know, he's taken out this huge roll of bills, peeled off a hundred dollars, pressed it into my hand and is shuffling me out a side door. I say, 'What about all those guys in there?' He says, 'Don't worry, I'll get them someone else.' That guy turned out to be another casino boss. Every time I'd see him after that, he'd tease me about the night in his room--'How's your career in hooking going?' he'd say."

Prostitution is, you may be surprised to hear, legal in many parts of Nevada--but not in Las Vegas. No one seems to take this exception very seriously. I talk to a showgirl named Paula, who works at a place called Circus Circus, which happens to be my favorite place in Las Vegas, but more about that later.

I ask Paula if she's ever hooked.

"Sure," she says, "whenever I've needed the bread. But I never have anything to do with pimps. Pimps are very clever. They find out a girl's weakness and they play on that till they get control of you. I won't have anything to do with pimps. I'll dance with them, I mean, or I'll drink with them, and if I'm really in a wild mood I might go to bed with them, but I'll never be soft and cuddly in bed with them like I am with other men, and I'll never show them any weakness.

"I guess I'm kind of disappointed with most men," she says. "When you need them to be the strongest, they're the weakest, so then you have to become the strong one yourself. The younger men I go out with are really like toys."

"What do you mean?"

"I just know I can control them so easily. I think when I finally get married it'll be to an older guy. I'm really drawn to older guys. They're very gentle. And they take care of you. I'm going with an older guy now, a dealer, but it's not working out very well, so I've got another guy warming up in the bull pen. I used to think my luck with men was just a lot of bad breaks, but lately I see it's a pattern."

"Why do you think you have such a pattern?" I say, my closet psychoanalytic tendencies creeping out.

"Because," she says, "my Venus is in Sagittarius."

• • •

That men view showgirls as sexual objects is scarcely news. That showgirls view men the same way came as something of a surprise to me:

"All of us get very turned on looking at a man's body if he's got a good firm body and he's wearing nice tight clothes," says a nude dancer named Rochelle. "The male dancers in our show have fantastic bodies, and I know most of them are gay, but they still turn me on. Like, I'll grab Ron's or Alan's buns sometimes and they're firm and hard and I find myself wondering what his cock must be like. I love to look at a man and mentally undress him, right through all the layers of clothing. I used to get embarrassed talking that way--it was considered unladylike. But if men can talk that way about women, why can't women talk that way about men?

"It's not just showgirls who feel that way," says Rochelle. "You should see how the women in the audience look at our boy dancers. Nice straight little housewives from Akron and they're staring right at those guys' goodies. When somebody like Elvis or Tom Jones is in town, the women in the audience go wild. They throw their room keys up onstage to them and even their panties."

"Why do they do that?" I say.

"Because Elvis and Tom Jones are supposed to have very big cocks."

"I see," I say. "How do we know this?"

"Well, when we hear that some performer is a good lay, we see to it that one of us checks him out and reports back."

We then get into a very specific discussion about the sexual hang-ups of famous people that I wish I could tell you here, because it's the gamiest, most fascinating gossip you've ever heard in your life, but if I did, this would be Playboy's last issue. What I will do is tell you one anecdote and say no more than that the fellow in this story is a famous TV personality you have seen a lot and that the girl who told me this story is a showgirl named Shari, who is known for, among a number of other intriguing qualities, her absolute bone-chilling truthfulness.

Let us tune in to our story shortly after Shari arrives at the TV star's apartment: He shows her a video-tape machine, turns it on, and what he plays back is not his latest TV show but an instant replay of the last lady he made love to. He explains that taping himself in the act is something of a hobby. He then switches the tape machine to Record and starts to work on Shari.

"He was very rough with me," says Shari. "He pulled me around the room by my hair--a lot of it came out. Then he screwed me in the ass, which I really could have done without. I tried to resist it--I cried and screamed and hollered a lot, but it didn't do any good." She pauses to think over the scene she's just described to me. "Actually," she says, "I think I might have been overacting a little bit at the time, because I knew I was oncamera."

• • •

"Showgirls are very direct," says a tall, good-looking stagehand named Burt. "It's like, having already shed their clothes, they've shed the first veil of intimacy or whatever. The first showgirl I ever met came up to me backstage and said, 'Do you think I have a nice ass?' I damn near fell off my chair. I said sure. So then she said, 'You know, I'll bet you have a great big cock.' I've had a showgirl see me from behind only, see that I'm tall and blond and have long hair, and say to somebody, 'I want him.' That's just the way they are, very direct.

"You know," says Burt, "after a while, you get sort of tired looking at all the nudes. It's like looking at your dog. I find myself ignoring the nudes now and trying to sneak peeks at the dancers while they're dressing."

Burt tells me about a showgirl he used to go with who had two pet boa constrictors. "Sheilah really dug snakes," he says.

"Sexually, you mean?"

"That, too. She also dug putting a snake in bed with you while you were making love to her, at which point I dug getting out of bed and going home."

A showgirl named Laura overhears this story and adds a wrinkle of her own. "Sheilah and I bought our snakes together," she says, "only at the time she told me they were worms. When I found out they were boa constrictors, I got rid of mine. Sheilah's are about fifteen feet long now."

I never got around to asking how it was that Sheilah convinced her to buy the snakes in the first place, even under the pretense that they were worms, but I don't think that if I had, the answer would have clarified matters much.

• • •

Now I will tell you about Circus Circus, which, as I said before, is my favorite place in Las Vegas. Circus Circus is a relatively new hotel, the casino of which could comfortably hold Madison Square Garden. Covering the floor of the gargantuan round room is a thick undergrowth of slot machines and gaming tables. Along the perimeter of the casino is a heady array of carnival activities, including shooting galleries, bumper cars, Skee-ball and basketball shooting games, stands selling carnival eats such as hot dogs and cotton candy and ice cream in a host of unnatural flavors, an oyster bed with a Japanese pearl diver who will swim down and trap you an oyster guaranteed to contain a pearl, and a device called the Bunny Bank that holds two live, unhappy-looking rabbits in a cage made up as a miniature bank office that will, upon insertion of a dollar bill into the device, pull a lever that wins you one of eight terrific prizes. "Oh, goody," says a tall fat man, looking at the prize a bunny has just selected for him. "A tiny change purse--just what I needed."

Up above the casino, high in the air, unwatched by the folks playing slots or craps or carny games, is an almost continuous succession of trapeze and high-wire acts. Were an aerialist to miss the bar and plunge to his death, only he and the person he landed on would ever know about it. Everybody else would be too busy gambling.

Alternating with the high-wire acts are other circus attractions on various rings scattered around the upper levels of the casino. As I enter tonight, a troupe of Mexican acrobats called The Palacios is just finishing its unwatched act. The eight-year-old Palacio boy completes two and a half somersaults in the air between trapezes while blindfolded. The gamblers below him have seen as much of this as he has. The Palacios take perfunctory little bows to their nonaudience and trot swiftly off to their dressing rooms, doubtlessly thinking bitter south-of-the-border thoughts about their big break in the land of the gringos, where nobody even watches them except the performer that follows--Tanya the Baby Elephant.

Ranged around the casino at ring level are a number of gift shops catering to the novelty seeker. There is, for example, an item for sale known as "My Yiddeshe Keychain," which turns out to be a key ring with a rectangular piece of plastic attached to it on which is inscribed your choice of the following: "schmuck ... clutz ... momser ... yenta ... fresser ... gonif ... shtunk." As I stand there scribbling notes, a security guard materializes in front of me wearing a cartridge belt, a service revolver and a little badge on his chest reading, Call Me Barney. Here is the peppy menace that epitomizes Las Vegas to me: a loaded pistol and a jolly how-de-do.

The guard demands to know what I am doing taking notes, but I am by now weary of being pushed around by hotel managers and switchboard operators and desk clerks and headwaiters and I decide not to tell him. A man can be pushed only so far.

"What could I be doing that's illegal?" I say.

"I don't know," he says. "You could be a competitor taking down our prices."

"That's illegal?" I say.

"I don't know," he says. "I'd have to check the books."

"Swell," I say, "you do that," and resume my note-taking.

Suddenly, hand drops to butt of gun: It's no more Mr. Nice Guy.

"OK, fella," he says, "you tell me right now what you're doing or there's going to be trouble."

I decide to tell him. A man can be pushed farther than he thought. "I'm taking notes for an article on Vegas for Playboy magazine," I say.

"Let's see your identification," he says.

"My identification! I don't have any identification. Why the hell do I need identification to take notes?"

Finger unsnaps leather strap on holster, hand closes around handle of gun.

"Look," I say, "look. Ok. You want to see identification. OK. I don't have a Playboy press card yet--they said they were sending one to my hotel, but it hasn't come yet. I do have one from Life, though. Remember Life magazine? The one with the pictures? That went out of business?" I am babbling now as I shakily sift through the three dozen or so cards that together make up my identity. I whip out a card and hand it to him. It turns out to be my Chemical Bank Courtesy Card. I apologize and finally find my old Life press card and press it into his hand--the unarmed one. He squints at the picture on the card, then at my face, then back at the card. He decides I'm legit and a big grin breaks across his face.

"You from New York?" he says. "I used to live in New York. But then I come to Vegas. Helluva town, Vegas, I'm not kidding ya."

The crisis is over. I have a new best friend. I chat with him about old times in the Big Apple, I ponder going hunting and drinking and bowling with him, I finally bid him a bittersweet farewell and amble on out of the gift shop.

Next door is another shop featuring novelty items: key chains with adorable little pink polyethylene penises, fake credit cards reading, Intercourse Club ... No Fees, No Dues, Just Come ... Ben Dover, President, and bumper stickers that say, Mafia Staff Car, Keepa You Hands Off! I love having Mafia joke items on sale in a town that is still at least partly Mafia run. I resume my note-taking and a clerk appears to ask what I am doing. I am through playing games. I tell him. I have another intimate friend.

"Have you seen the Talking Toilet?" he says. I say no and he proudly produces a device that you can hook up to your commode and that, when activated by the weight of someone sitting down on the toilet seat, triggers a recorded voice that says: "Hey, I'm working down here!"

"Vegas," says the clerk with a happy sigh, "is my kind of town."

"How's that?" I say.

"Everybody here is a weirdo," he says.

• • •

"You saw Tanya the Baby Elephant?" squeals a showgirl named Priscilla. "I used to be in a show with her."

I tell Priscilla that Tanya seems to be well, if not altogether tickled with the audiences at Circus Circus. We are chatting at the Ah So bar, which has become a sort of home away from home, and I am sipping rum-and-fruit drinks and nibbling the flowers that float around inside them. For some reason, we happen to be talking about birds.

"You know," says Priscilla, "when you're a nude, you have to shave around your bird so your pubic hair doesn't show around the edges of your G string. Some girls just shave the sides of their birds--Mohawks, I call them. Some girls shave off the whole thing. Angelique used to shave hers in the shape of a heart. One night between shows we were bored, so we had a bird contest. To see who had the prettiest bird."

"Who won?" I say.

"Vivian. We all thought she had the prettiest one."

"How come?"

"Oh, hers was blonde and ours were just brown or red."

I swing the subject back to G strings and find out that they are not bought in stores, that the wardrobe women backstage make them up for each of the girls, that some G strings have little pockets in the crotch, where you can keep your money while you're onstage--there are no lockers in the dressing rooms.

"I think a patch is a lot sexier than a G string," says Priscilla, "because when you're wearing a patch and your back is to the audience, it looks like you're completely nude. They started wearing patches in Europe, but I was one of the first girls here to wear a patch instead of a G string. When I first started wearing them, I used to break out in these terrible rashes. See, the edges of the patch are adhesive--it's actually toupee tape that holds it in place--then you put the patch over your bird and it sticks. If the tape isn't sticky enough, you hang the patch over one of the bulbs of your dressing-room mirror. Then when you put it on, it sticks better, plus which it's all warm and sensual. It's hell getting that adhesive off, though. It's all sticky. It can really ruin your sex life.

"Sometimes maintenance men take our patches or our G strings. We found one guy who'd swiped a G string and was just sitting there, sniffing it. Mae West once had a life-size cardboard cutout of herself backstage that she used in her act. It disappeared and they found a maintenance man with it in the basement. He'd cut a hole in the appropriate place and was fucking it. Once we found a workman backstage dressed in just a G string and a big feathered hat. He was standing in front of a mirror, putting pasties on his hairy old chest."

During the day, Priscilla looks a lot different than she does at night. She works in a real-estate office and dresses in demure little suits. She wears no makeup and not even one of the several pairs of false eyelashes she owns. In place of her electric-blue contact lenses, she wears horn-rimmed glasses. A suit and glasses--Great Hera! Shades of Wonder Woman!

Priscilla has earned enough money between real-estate and showgirl jobs to buy herself a $28,000 house, which is impressive even after I learn that all she had to put down on it was $1400. She'd managed to keep her nighttime identity a secret from everybody at the office for quite some time, but then her boss found out and came to her show with a bunch of his cronies. They sat at a ringside table, got drunk and loud and awful. Priscilla decided to teach her boss a lesson. In this show there was a French singer whose routine included going down into the audience, dragging some innocuous-looking gentleman back onstage with her and making an ass of him. Priscilla pointed her boss out to the singer, who promptly got him up onstage and proceeded to make such an ass of him that the next day he left town and never came back.

I find the story a little chilling. I find the destruction of the gentleman onstage sadistic, though wholly justifiable. I find the French girl's routine in general (it is a fairly common routine in Vegas shows, by the way) just as chilling, just as sadistic, just as justifiable. Because that type of routine is one of the few ways that showgirls are able to get back at the men who daily paw and grope and condescend to them--that routine and, of course, systematically relieving these men of an endless stream of $100 bills, fox stoles, diamond rings, opera-length pearls, Mustangs, town houses and what have you.

I was not surprised, really, to have learned that girls so adept at stripping men of money and expensive gifts should themselves be so vulnerable to the dealers and stagehands and other men who, in turn, drain these girls of their very salaries. Tit for tat, you might say. Scratch a sadist and find a masochist, you might say. And, of course, there is nobody quite so gullible as a con man, since con men and con women naively think that their own particular kind of cunning is the only brand in town.

Las Vegas is, I think, an intensification and a parody of the war between the sexes that has been going on with growing passion throughout the country. Las Vegas is also a study of people who are deprived of things such as conventional family constellations, who substitute Mafia bosses for fathers, showgirls for daughters and lovers of their own sex when none of the opposite sex seem suitable or trustable. If one's world is short of appropriate folks to play the necessary roles in life, one remakes that world with what's available. And it's not too surprising that, having done so, one's sense of reality blurs and shifts like the focus in an Antonioni movie, and sometimes it's hard to tell what actually is and what only seems to be.

I found it fascinating to keep interviewing the same showgirls on the same stories on different days, to see how the facts had a way of changing. I honestly don't think they were trying, in most cases, to be deceptive or to sweeten up the stories for dramatic effect--the newer versions of the stories were no better or worse than the old ones, only different. I honestly think that the teller in each case simply never knew which slipping, sliding version of the facts was real.

The time I have spent in Las Vegas has been much like the time I have spent in dreams--always more frightening, more ecstatic, more grotesque, more compelling than the waking world has ever been. And showgirls--who are the most attractive, calculating, vulnerable, poignant, sophisticated, naive women I have ever met--are the perfect citizens of that twilight world.

Toward the end of my stay, I was talking to Ellie again and somehow we drifted into the subject of suicide. Ellie admitted that she had contemplated suicide several times, which surprised me, since she seemed about the smartest and the most successful and the most together showgirl I had met there.

"I would never commit suicide," said Ellie after thinking it over carefully for several moments. "My mother would make such a mess out of my financial affairs after I was dead that it just wouldn't be worth it."

Private Eyes! Hookers! Show Girls! Money!