Skipping Towards Gomorrah Read Online Free PDF Page A

sparked. And, irony of ironies, I returned to Las Vegas to prove to a friend that it was just as bad as I’d told him. After listening to me complain, my best friend wanted to see this American Gomorrah for himself, and so I tagged along on his first trip to Vegas. I wanted to make sure he had just as bad a time in Las Vegas as I did. This time, I wasn’t going for work—and I wasn’t going for three days, either, just overnight. This time I was slumming in Las Vegas, and I planned to spend the day making snide remarks at the expense (and the expanse) of all the other visitors to the city.
    But a funny thing happened on the way to making sure my best friend hated Las Vegas just as much as I did. Maybe it was staying in a hotel that was clown-free (MGM Grand), or maybe it was my best friend’s infectious enthusiasm, or the fact that we stayed one night instead of three. But by the time we wound up strapped to the Big Shot ride atop the Stratosphere Hotel and Tower—imagine sitting in a chair on top of the Empire State Building and being shot a hundred feet into the air, and then free-falling back down to the roof—I had to admit that I was having a . . . good time. I was having a great time, actually, in Las Vegas. And it wasn’t a coincidence.
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    W hen Las Vegas was just a gleam in the eye of America’s organized crime families, the lure of legalized gambling was enough to attract hordes of none-too-demanding gamblers and tourists. As there weren’t any places to gamble legally outside of Nevada, Las Vegas’s first wave of hotels didn’t have to offer much beyond slots and cheap drinks and the occasional sleazy floor shows to lure the suckers into the building. Today, of course, things are very different. First of all, Americans no longer have to travel far to gamble. The first legal casino in the United States may have opened in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, in 1931, but by the end of the 1990s, there were lotteries in thirty-seven states and some kind of legalized gambling in forty-seven states. Today only the residents of Hawaii, Tennessee, and Utah are unable to gamble in their home states. Even people who live in these holdout states, except Hawaii, don’t have to roam far afield to gamble; chances are, wherever an American lives, a riverboat or a Native American casino is only a short drive away. Cities that used to be punch lines to jokes about towns with nothing going on—Biloxi, Mississippi; Dubuque, Iowa; Gary, Indiana—have become regional gambling meccas, petite Las Vegas knockoffs. And with the advent of on-line gambling, there’s really no such thing as a gambling-free state anymore. We can place bets on our computers in our bedrooms, dens, and offices. Even in Hawaii.
    Around the same time gambling was being transformed from a sinful and largely illegal activity to America’s pastime—which was around the same time gambling got a new name: gaming—resort owners in Las Vegas realized that they had to offer something more than just slots and craps and cards to keep people coming to a strip of hotels in the middle of a friggin’ desert. Most Americans live within a forty-minute drive of legal craps tables, card games, and slot machines. To keep pulling in gamblers, Las Vegas had to offer us things smaller casinos could not. In the early 1990s, Las Vegas transformed itself into a “family friendly” destination spot, with amusement parks for the kids, floor shows suitable for children, and, of course, casino gambling for the parents. Family-friendly Las Vegas is lately giving way to adults-only Las Vegas, with bare-breasted showgirls making a comeback at otherwise “respectable” hotels. But family-friendly or bare-breasted, Las Vegas knows it has to wow us to keep us coming back. Gambling isn’t enough anymore.
    My first trip to Vegas, as it turns out, was poorly timed. Most of the big, new resorts were still under