The Royal Family

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Across the street from Feminine Circus a Canadian consortium had just opened the Parthenon, so there was a press conference and the C.E.O. was saying: Tomorrow there’ll be close to a hundred and forty thousand people in this town who are going to say: What do you want to do today?

Get a whore, mumbled the newsman next to Tyler. Get a whore at Feminine Circus.

So it’s pretty good over there? said Tyler.

Fantastic, man. You get all your feelings out. And it’s not real, so there are no repercussions. You know what I did? I got me this virtual retard bitch and I—

The C.E.O. raised his voice. — And we’re hoping that they’ll say: Let’s check out the Parthenon.

The Sphinx and Robinson Crusoe’s were hoping the same thing — vainly, perhaps, because the Parthenon was going to serve more beer than any place in the world; but on the other hand the Luxor did possess the Sphinx, under whose hollow stuccoed whiteness you could park your car; everywhere was nowhere, and the vista outside was but another show. Bags of money wriggled in the neon sign below the Mirage (this was the owner’s wet dream, whereas the gambler’s wet dream had to do with the long brass bird-neck handle with the black ball on it, inviting you to pull it when you put your money in — thirty-five hundred of those in the MGM Grand). Money was water like those granularly frosted bathroom doors; money was puffs of fire shooting up at the edge of the long Strip that straightarrowed down past the Sands and Harrah’s to the luminescent pink breasts of Feminine Circus, where Tyler saw the cars on the roof of a tall wide garage; and as he watched, one car’s headlights come on, and it turned down into the chucklehole that led it to the Strip’s lights so separate from the Las Vegas skyline whose lights shimmered so quickly and crazily, unlike the steady white lights at the base of palm trees; then Tyler saw a huge coconut palm hung with skulls below Robinson Crusoe’s sign: the effect was all light, an ugly, disposable magic that glowed and sucked the desert’s soul. That was why he decided to go in the opposite direction.

All his cab drivers liked Las Vegas. The economy was good, and they could afford to buy homes there.

I’ve been blowing a ten-dollar roll of quarters a day, to see if Santa would give me something, but so far no good, the driver said.

You mind taking me downtown, just to see what things look like?

That’s all I do anyways, go round and round and round and round.

(Fremont Street was incredibly bright, Binion’s Horseshoe a blue block of wriggling lights.)

Now, the California here, they cater primarily to the Hawaiians, the cab driver said. But these are all locals’ casinos, that put a few rooms out just for tourists, but they’re more diverse, the service is better, the plays are looser, the covers are cheaper — only five bucks at Arizona Charlie’s. The big hotels? We usually stay clear of them.

Downtown, everything’s straight up instead of spread out, he went on a moment later. This here’s the railway station; that’s what formed downtown in the first place. Now they’re uprooting the whole railroad, putting it on the outskirts to develop this part. Right now they’re purifying the soil by cooking it to eight thousand degrees. They’re going thirty-forty feet deep.

All right, Tyler said, now show me the worst neighborhood there is.

Oh, I’m not doing that. There’s some streets, their domain is so established, they’ll just block off the street and take all your money. But I can find some crummy places if that’s what you want. Not far away at all.

Maybe Tyler halfway expected to see what Brady had shown his brother on that special tour of Feminine Circus’s service areas: a vast hall called Cleopatra Road, another called Ozma Ave with stacks of empty computer boxes; forkloads of beer and diapers somewhere under the South Tower, the bakeshop so fragrant with rolls on wheeled trays with long dips for the subway; the room service prep hangar in which people in white assembled blue napkins folded into Alps on white-garbed wheeled tables, fleets of which stretched all the way to the concrete horizon; that is how the bad parts of Las Vegas should have been, just the ventricles of paradise. Past the Moulin Rouge it got darker and darker, then much too dark, with fences, greyish hedges and pulled down steel shutters.

Does the Mafia still run this town? Tyler asked.

Big business has replaced the Mob with organized legal crime, he said bitterly.

What do you mean by that?

Oh, nothing. That new Jonas Brady, he’s just one of many. Now you see the opening in this alley? Right here where the car is, this is where the guy took off on me. I ran, but I couldn’t catch him. I’d dropped off his girlfriend, so I knew where she was. I staked her out for a week or two, but never caught her. At this point, anytime someone opens the car door before he pays me, I unstrap my seat belt and get ready to run.

How long have you lived in Vegas? Tyler asked.

I’ve been here for seven years, and in that time Vegas has grown from four hundred to eight hundred thousand.

How’s the crime generally?

We’ve only had two cab drivers murdered in Vegas this year, as compared to New York, where it’s is almost forty, he said, rolling past low clubhouses and occasional streetlamps.

Well, with all the development, with the doubling in size, with new casinos opening all the time, has the crime gotten better or worse?

The cab driver just laughed.

They now rolled between Gerson Park’s low pale cubes close together, the roofs reminiscent of those toys they make by hand in Madagascar out of insecticide tins; here and there a few Christmas trees; calm and vacant, fences in place. Alienated by many nights of light, Tyler nonetheless did not find this darkness restful. It was ugly, monotonous, and dangerous. The ugly realness of the night crouched chillingly around him. He saw Grace Temple with its Biblical murals, then another brick cube: PAWN with some letters missing; and it occurred to him that a pawnshop is really the same as a casino. — Yeah, the owner of the Nugget lost a lot of money on his boxers… the driver was saying, almost to himself. As for Robinson Crusoe’s, this guy’s on a lucky streak…

On the corner stood some kids who looked as evil as the brass skulls on the Treasure Island’s doors.

We have a police substation here now, and walking police, the driver said. Now, over that way is Nucleus Plaza. That place got burned during the Rodney King copycat riots.

But on the Strip it’s pretty safe?

Casinos have got such a strong security force that they’ve eliminated crime in their area, but as a result of getting that security, they can also keep crime from getting to press. Every now and then there’s violence, but they hush it up. That’s what I say, but course you’ll never be able to prove it.

Vacant lots that smelled like piss, a bar, a dry cleaner and laundromat, these were all good clues as Mr. Private Eye Tyler might have said, but although Tyler and the driver kept looking for the good stuff (the driver half-heartedly) they could not find any crackhouse that was open. Tyler didn’t really care.

The driver was telling him a story about a fare who wanted crack:

I picked ’im up at a nudie place and he asked me to take him downtown, and he pulled over in one of those light industrial places. I said, look, I don’t want you doing that business in my cab. He throws me a ten (it was like a four dollar fare) and he says to me: Drive around the block, and if you don’t get another fare come back and pick me up. Well, so I came back and got ’im, and boy was he hopping mad! Man, but they’d sold him some rock — real rock! He’d paid for crack cocaine and what he got was a quartz crystal.

That was Las Vegas ersatz for you, Tyler thought. Casinos and the crackhouses, it was all the same.

Feminine Circus is a product of Circus-Circus and Excalibur, the driver was saying. They know everything there is to know about making money. They only operate out of cash flow. They do everything reasonably well…

Yeah, that applies to crack dealers, too, said Tyler.

The driver chuckled.

So you think Brady’s pretty smart, huh?

He’s the man of the hour. He’s the great American untouchable. And Feminine Circus, well, I’m just amazed no one ever thought of it before. It sums up the national mood, you could almost say. It’s brilliant. It’s as real as you want it to be. It’s…

Have you been there? asked Tyler.

Hey, man, you getting nosy on me? What are you, some kind of cop?

I didn’t mean it like that. I was just wondering if Feminine Circus is worth going to, that’s all.

Well, it’s pretty wild in there, the driver said. Everybody tries it once. I guess I don’t mind telling you I’ve tried it. You go in, and they have all these ugly girls who stink, and they drool all over you. That Brady, I have to say, I respect his balls, when everything else in Vegas is so pretty-pretty, to come up with something that looks like where we are now…

So those girls of his, those virtualettes—

Oh, that’s a standing joke, said the driver. Don’t tell me you believe those girls aren’t real…

They were swinging back in to town again, passing the Satin Saddle, a topless place, and the Palomino, which was bottomless, and the driver said: The Palomino has a cover of ten bucks and a two drink minimum at six bucks apiece, and Tyler thought: why, that’s a step ahead of the crack dealers! I never met a crack dealer who charged a cover.

You think Feminine Circus will do well? he said idly.

You mean, will they get raided?

Well, if they’re real girls…

See, that’s Brady’s genius, said the driver. Nobody cares about retarded girls. But sooner or later some feminist will bust his balls. If he’s smart he’ll make his bundle and leave the country…

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You build a new one and it’ll always be full, the driver went on. Whether that’s going to be enough to make the whole city go, I don’t know. I don’t see that the owners care, either. If Brady’s new seven thousand bed fuckhouse creates seven thousand vacancies someplace else, Brady won’t care. But you have to believe that the stock market will keep going up in the long run, and Vegas will keep growing, and people will keep spending money on products no one’s even thought of yet. Me, I’m working on a certain kind of virtual pet. If I can just unkink one glitch, then you won’t see me driving this cab anymore…