Christmas in Las Vegas

I've Lived in Vegas about a year. I still own an apartment a rifle shot from Times Square, but I'm mostly here now. It doesn't matter--Disney is filing dull the razor edge of New Jack as quickly as Walt wanna-bes build "family hotels" in Sin City.

Treasure Island and Excaliber are just Pirates of the Caribbean and Sleeping Beauty's Castle, respectively. I don't care how much money it makes, it's just wrong. Deeply, artistically wrong. Kids don't belong here--scorpions belong here.

Not having a stinger on my tail, there's only one reason that I'm here: showgirls. I'm 6'6", and the prettiest words in the English language are "Ooh, I could wear heels with you."

"That's right, baby, I could eat off your head." I'm a smooth-talking bastard, but I don't need to be. If a six-foot-tall dancer wants to get decked out with makeup and heels for a night on the town without looking like a drag queen towering over a soon-to-be-stunned John, well, she needs a guy like me. I'm just 263 pounds of public service.

Tony Fitzpatrick is over 263. Tony is the best artist who ever lived, and if you don't believe me, take a long look at these pictures. If you still don't believe me, don't you ever say it in front of me, motherfucker, or we'll have trouble. Tony is from Chicago and looks it. Playboy editors told Tone they wanted an Xmas in Las Vegas feature to be written by me and drawn by Tony.

Tony was down for it. It didn't bother him that the deadline was before Xmas and that neither one of us had ever been in Vegas at Xmas.

Tony, as I said, is from Chicago, and he wanted to dick around in some dry heat. Research.

I picked up Tony in my truck, Pink Death. It's a big stab-your-wife-and-a-homo Bronco, painted innerlabia pink, with 50 CD changers, a kachillion watts of power, purple pimp ground neon, pinstripes and the license plate 6SIX6. I'm not fucking around, I live in Vegas. Tony hadn't been to Vegas since he boxed here in 1981. It has changed a lot. We had to drive by the stupid giant MGM fairy lion, but I didn't take Tony in. I wanted him to love Vegas, and there was no need to bum him out with the attempts at making a perfect evil paradise into a cheesy family trap. We walk through the casino at Ballys to do research. Two atheists looking for Xmas in July. "I'm sketching a wild burro, a desert donkey, an ass--a wild ass, a crazy ass, stubborn, mean, dangerous. That's all Vegas is, man, ass." He shows me a sketch. "They live in the desert, man. I saw them in this book. Wild ass, look at it." He points to a poster on the wall for the show Jubilee. It features a showgirl showing a lot of A with her spangled Ts. "You see, man, wild ass. It's all just ass here."

Tony had been in Vegas a couple of hours. He had started the sketch on the airplane. Tony doesn't even need to see Vegas to draw its soul.

We walk by a croupier who recognizes me and calls me over.

They all know me here. The Penn & Teller show plays Ballys ten weeks a year, and my picture is on one side of the five-dollar chip.

All day long, dealers watch half-dollar-size pictures of me move from patron to patron until they end up back in the till, ready for the next sucker. Of course, if someone wants to keep one as a souvenir, then the house just sold a small piece of wood and a print job for five bucks. With chip collecting getting to be a big thing, the casino's license to print money becomes literal.

Tony can't believe that people are really gambling with "my" chips. "Do you like seeing yourself on chips? Huh? You should be dead to be on money. You've become like Washington or something."

I start our research with the croupier: "Hey, listen, we're doing this article for Playboy on Xmas in Vegas. This is my brother, Tony, from Chicago. He's an artist. We're doing this article and we've never been to Vegas at Xmas. What's it like?"

He shrugs, but one of the other craps workers starts to talk.

She's a tall, dark woman. She's wearing her dealer's tux shirt.

She has a bone-deep awareness of all the ways two positive integers can sum to seven. "It's like July 18th, it's like September 3rd, it's like February 21st. It's always the same here, no change.

"You can't tell that it's Xmas here. There's a few more decorations on the streets, even more lights. But in here, nothing.

"Nothing changes in here, ever."

"Maybe some drunken hillbilly with a mistletoe belt?"

Tony is rolling.

"Maybe," she says, and then decides to hang tough. "No, not even that. It's always the same in here."

"It's like a wild donkey, a wild burro, wild ass. It's like that, isn't it?" They don't know what Tony is talking about. I don't know what Tony is talking about.

I'm being a reporter. "All the games are open? The shows are on?"

"24, 7, 365."

"That's great, Tony. It's always the same, always the same."

Time can't get in here. I'm quoting the Doc Pomus classic: "Viva Las Vegas . . . turning day into nighttime, turning night into daytime." Vegas turns day into nighttime, night into daytime, and after a week, no one notices. You've accomplished nothing.

No, Vegas has done more than that. Doc wrote Viva 28 years before he even set wheelchair in Vegas. Time doesn't matter. Dates don't matter. No wimpy Xtian solstice rip-off can get through those doors. Is that what you mean, time and dates mean nothing to a crazy desert ass?

We're back in Pink Death. We're playing Viva Las Vegas and we're playing it stupid loud. Really stupid loud. A kind of stupid loud that only middle-aged, slightly deaf guys can tolerate stone-cold sober. Kids need to be fucked up for this volume. It's Elvis singing. We don't like Elvis, but both of us love Vegas. Then it's ZZ Top rocking Viva Las Vegas.

Then the Residents interpreting Viva Las Vegas. Then the Dead Kennedys ripping Viva Las Vegas. Did I mention that I have five ten-CD changers stacked in the back of Pink Death?

I drive Tony up and down the strip. All that technology, all that pure human thought in light-wave-particle form. Nature gives you jack shit out here, so we did it ourselves. Hoover Dam is pumping power into walls and ceilings of little man-made stars.

It's not sloppy, fractal nature; it's a pure, orderly beauty that only little kids and middle-aged geeks really love. It puts Apollo 13 tears in my eyes that humans have created this kind of pure beauty. It's like the pyramids. Hell, it is the pyramids!

We have our own Vegas pyramid, the Luxor, with a light shining out of the top that the shuttle astronauts can read by when they pass over. It's the brightest light in the goddamn world. Vegas does not fuck around. Vegas is flashing, chasing, dancing, atheist Xmas lights hung on the desert-dried bones of Georgia O'Keeffe.

Xmas in Vegas would be stupid. Xmas isn't cool enough to dare set its superstitious foot here. Its God-loving, human-hating original sin is not welcome here. Lose 200 clams gambling on the spin of a wheel if you must, but don't waste your life gambling on a fairy-tale heaven and hell. We don't want a crèche. We have a volcano. It's there, spewing fire. Pirate boats are fighting safely on man-made seas. Lights everywhere in the middle of nowhere. It may be stupid, it may be decadent, it may be overdone--the whole goddamn city may be built on the stupid, weak, bad math of gambling--but boy is it built.

Vegas is beautiful. Viva.

Tony is riding and going nuts. He has a Polaroid he scammed off some friends. He has never used a camera before. I load the film while steering Pink Death with my knee and snap a picture of his bald hoodlum head. He starts snapping, first me in my Team Satan 666 T-shirt and then through the windshield with a flash. Elvis slept here says one sign. Joan Collins was married here says another. Tony is taking pictures of a flash reflecting in the windshield. Tony doesn't know, he's not looking at the pictures. Tony doesn't care. He doesn't need to draw from pictures. He'll draw from his heart.

"What is it you say about the Siegfried and Roy show?"

"I say it's a glitzy tractor pull."

"Yeah, I'm going over there tomorrow to see the tigers. Can you see the tigers without seeing the show?"

"Yup."

"I'm going to draw mutant white tigers. . . ."

"They're all mutant. White tigers don't exist in the wild. They have to be fucked with to come out like that."

"They're all cross-eyed, yeah. I'm going to draw the tigers but no Germans, no S&R. Maybe a little bit of Siegfried meat hanging out of one tiger's mouth. Some plastic-surgery-altered flesh just hanging out of the mouth. Are you going to write about Siegfried and Roy?"

"I'll write about you talking about them. I don't have much to say about them, myself. They've always been fine to me."

I call Georgie on the cell phone. She's one of the principal dancers in Jubilee and she's a buddy. I want Tony to see a little of Jubilee. It's a real Vegas show. Variety acts and the Titanic being sunk to music with topless women running around. Naval disasters and tits--Vegas!

There are all types of showbiz women working in Vegas, from the over-six-foot-tall, classy, no-kidding-ballet-trained-and-everything women of the take-your-mother-to-titty-shows-because-they-have-singing-and-sets-and-plate-spinners-and-stuff like Georgie to friction dancers with denim burns on their asses and wet stoner eyes like a house cat with a head cold. Lots of show folk in this burg. We'll start with Jubilee. Georgie sends out a friend to sneak us in halfway through the show.

I'm giving Tony the show folk POV. "It's great to be backstage right before the curtain goes up. They all have to get their nipples hard, and it's great. I mean Georgie just thinks chilly and it (continued on page 189)X mas in Las Vegas (continued from page 84) happens, but some of the tough chicks, they're back there twisting their knobs with a wrench. They don't like you to watch that."

Tony loves the women and the costumes. I want him to see the transition. I want him to see Georgie change from the tall, perfect, headdressed, back-packed figment of someone else's imagination (to quote the living Elvis) into the real woman she is--young, wild Kurt Cobain hair and a face full of life without her huge glued-on eyelashes. He can't recognize her. She has been dancing lead for ten years, since she turned 17, and no one has ever recognized her out of all that drag. Even Tony can't make show-Georgie and Georgie-Georgie be the same person.

Bruce Wayne should be this good. Tony doesn't know which Georgie to draw--wild ass Georgie or genetically engineered white tiger Georgie. They are both Vegas.

The next day the whole town does its Georgie act for Tony.

I drive him out to my house. It's way southwest of the middle of nowhere. I'm doubling the size of my house and there's a lot of construction going on, construction in nowhere. There are rabbits and ground squirrels and snakes and scorpions and scorpion spiders. (Scorpion spider--that's the real name of this thing. It's the two creepiest bad things rolled up into one butt-ugly bug. It's like a Don Johnson-Kreskin--how much bad can be in one critter?)

This is also real Vegas. It's hot, really hot, 114, and we're walking around in the dirt of construction looking at all the tough-ass vegetation just beyond the mounds of topsoil.

This is shit that is so tough, it can live here. It chooses to live here. Man, it's beautiful. It isn't lush. It's the desert. It's tough, and built on top of it is a modern city of lights.

It's not God's land, goddamn it, it's Satan's land. Nothing green can live here. I flourish.

"I've got to draw a cactus flower, man, a bad-assed one."

That night it's time for titty bars. Even Vegas thinks that the major purpose of government is to regulate how women use their bodies. Here's how goofy it gets: If a club serves alcohol, the women have to leave their G-strings on (if booze touches pussy--man, it's worse than the A-bombs they used to test here).

Also, women under 21 can't "dance" where alcohol is served.

So there are all these clubs with just soda pop that are full of dancers under 21. These juice-bar clubs don't serve alcohol, so the performers can be nude. It ends up, for the most part, that if you can see pussy, she's under 21. It's really creepy.

It almost seems that it would be better to let adults decide for themselves. But this isn't a political article. We're here to learn about Xmas in Vegas.

We spend five hours at the Palomino drinking cranberry juice and Seven-Up. (The Palomino was grandfathered in, so it can have alcohol and bottomless women. We don't drink, but we're more comfortable with naked women over 21.) One of the features, a sultry dark-haired woman with long golden fingernails, talks with us all night. Her name is Samina. She and Tony compare tattoos and I get a lap dance from her. I ask her if the Palomino is open on Xmas. It is. That research is done.

The next night, Tony goes to see Lance Burton, the magician who buys me dinner every time I mention him in the press. He kills Tony dead. Tony can't stop talking about the hillbilly with the birds. Lance is good. I tell Tony that it used to be that when Lance rose into the air with the woman riding on top of him, she was topless and in the female-dominant pose as they floated out of this world.

"Why did he change?"

"Lance got pimp-slapped by the Vegas-as-family-city thing. He cleaned up and got a $100 million contract."

"It's not worth it, man."

"I know, but to Lance it is. He's a great magician, but he's from Kentucky. He'll have a really big dressing room, really big. He'll be happy and he'll do great magic. He just won't be fucked out of this world."

I'm telling Lance this to his face. We're all out at the Peppermill Coffee Shop in the middle of the night, where they have gas jets underwater in the fountain so the water seems to burn. It's man-made, future water, burning pretty. Lance is good-natured. He knows that we love him and his act, so he'll take our endless shit.

He's carrying around four white parakeets in the pocket of his suit jacket (Vegas loves mutant white wildlife) so they'll get used to him.

"What's Xmas in Vegas like, Lance? You've been here."

"Xmas in Vegas is kind of like Xmas on a cruise ship--it's all the people whose families hate them."

It takes a while to persuade him to let me quote him. A lot of people expressed that idea, but Lance said it best. Vegas is a vacation from Xmas. The phony Xtian vibe of Xmas can't live here. I don't gamble and I don't drink and I don't smoke and I've never even paid for sex (not with money, anyway. With every fiber of my fucking soul? Yes). I'm from Massachusetts. I'm a puritan at heart, a puritan as only an atheist can be: pure, hard, unbending. And my heart is in Vegas. I love my family and they love me. I love them whenever Vegas is open--24, 7, 365. Tony loves his family the same way. Love is human. Vegas is human.

But Vegas is also man-made. There is no spirituality. I wish it weren't built on bad math. I wish the bright-light celebration of technology could go all the way through. I want lower taxes, but I don't like my taxes being subsidized by people who think that big, dumb, unstoppable statistics don't apply to them. I hate all the liquor and the sadness. But Vegas is so beautiful. Tony suggested we say "every day is Xmas in Vegas" and I talked him out of that.

It's better than that in Vegas--it's never Xmas. It's just so goddamn beautiful, 24, 7, 365. It's sad and it's dangerous. It's a cheap holiday in other people's misery, and, well, it's a wild ass. It's just a wild ass--look at the pictures.

We sent two atheists into the heart of darkness--and they had a really good time

At the juice bars the performers can be nude. If you can see pussy, she's under 21. It's really creepy.