Sin City

Part 1
ZACK RIORDAN
1
IN THE BEGINNING, GOD SAID, "LET THERE BE LIGHT."
The first time I saw the Strip I thought God lived there. I was twelve years old in 1966, when Betty and me came down on a Greyhound from northern Nevada. We'd left Mina that morning, a little alkali mudflat town with Highway 95 for a main street--the kind of dry-rotted little desert town that even rattlesnakes shied away from. When we got off the bus in Las Vegas, we put our bags in a dime locker and walked from the bus depot to the Strip. I hadn't had anything to eat except a Baby Ruth candy bar since Tonopah and my stomach was growling. Along the way Betty had dropped the three-day's pay she collected before we left Mina, plunking it into slots, a quarter at a time, whenever the bus made a stop. She only had a dollar left when we arrived in Vegas but she was sure she could get a job waitressing right away. Just walk in and go to work--Vegas was that kind of town. By the end of her shift, she'd have enough tips and maybe even an advance on her wages to get us a room and something to eat.
While Betty went into a restaurant to ask for work, I wandered up the Strip alone. It sounds corny, but I got stardust in my eyes the first time I saw the boulevard. It was Times Square, the Arabian Nights, a hundred carnivals, all thrown together and lit up at the same time--the Dunes, Aladdin, Sahara, Caesar's Palace. The lights struck me first, a brilliant neon collage, rocking on the Silver Slipper, blazing at the Stardust, beaming to the heavens from the giant searchlights atop the new Aladdin hotel.
And the people--holy mackerel, it was the first time I saw guys in those monkey suits they call tuxes and women in slinky dresses that sparkled. In Mina women smelled of talcum powder and wore loose-fitting flowery dresses Betty called flour sacks, and men had mud on their boots and sweat under their arms. These women in Vegas had dresses that molded to their bodies and exposed the luscious curvesof their breasts. They smelled like expensive sex, Chanel No. 5, and Fleur de Rocaille. Even the men had an expensive smell, not like the Old Spice lotion that miners splashed on after showering.
Flesh and glitter, that was Vegas--flesh and glitter and the song of money. I had never heard the song before, not this loud at least. Nickels and dimes dropping in slot cups were the money sounds in places like Mina and Tonopah, but on the Strip the music was numbing, seductive, putting you in a dream state and robbing your senses, the forbidden tune played by Lorelei to lure Rhine sailors to their doom, the beckoning of the Sirens to tempt Odysseus. It filled your ears all the way down the boulevard--the rattle of dice and cries at the craps, cards being shuffled at the blackjack tables, the clatter of a roulette ball bouncing around the wheel, the hum of thousands of slot reels spinning, silver flushing from them.
Something spiritual entered my body and glowed inside me that night. I guess it was like the religious experiences that Holy Rollers in Mina talked about, when they woke up in the middle of the night and heard Jesus speaking to them. I only went to the Holy Roller church once and it scared the hell out of me, all that shouting and hysterical laughing, people talking in tongues. That's what it was like on the Strip, too, people shrieking and laughing and shouting mysterious utterances. "Bless these bones!" "Holy Mother, com'on six, gimme a six." "Jesus H. Christ, I hit the big one!" "Oh my God, my God, my God!"
Whenever I asked Betty about God, she always told me that God was a bright light that shined through the universe. I figured out that night, when I saw the Strip for the first time, that God lived on the Strip and lit it all up.
I also figured out something else that day. As soon as I was old enough, I knew I'd have to make something for Betty and me, otherwise we'd be migrants for the rest of our lives. I loved my mother, but as a neighbor once told me, Betty would always be hopping around on one foot, trying to keep her balance. If we were ever going to have something, I'd have to be the one to get it for us. Instead of pressing our noses against the plateglass windows separating the people with tuxes and slinky dresses from us streeters, someday we'd have the limos, the jewels, the fancy clothes.
I wanted everything for Betty and me.
Copyright © 2002 by Jann Robbins