Oddly displaced

LAS VEGAS, NV—Vegas, baby!

What a weird place. And, ironically, I feel strangely out of place. There are no real clowns here, not even in the Circus-Circus casino, nor is there any actual clown college—just an abandoned Post Office box belonging to some kind of Clown-College diploma mill. My dream of becoming a Ph.D'd Wizard of Wit has disappeared like white face-paint in the path of a cold-cream dipped cotton ball. Who is there to pick up the pieces when a clown cries, I wonder?

I hear only silence from an empty theater.

I guess there's always alcohol. And there seems to be plenty in this town. All you have to do is pretend to be feeding a slot machine, and women with boobs heaving out over the tops of their blouses thrust a drink in your hand. This is the American Dream, I suppose.

A few days ago we were driving monotonously through the backroads of Utah under gray watery skies on our way to Kanab, the gateway to Zion National Park. The day was dim, but despite the bad lighting, the colorful rocks and sands lit the way along Highway 89 like flourescent paint on a blacklight poster in downtown Haight-Ashbury during the height of the Summer of Love. Okay, so maybe that's a little bit of hyperbole, but after spending 24 hours in Vegas, everything seems a little large than life.

Out on the road to Kanab we passed a literal hole in the rock known as Moqui Cave. Sadly, this classic tourist trap was closed when we passed by (nowadays the "New Morality" of our nation apparently has kept even hardened Gyp-Joint owners from fleecing travelers out of 12 bucks on a Sunday).

Disappointed by our luck, we got back on the highway toward Kanab when something caught our eye across the road. An abandoned Tourist Trap cave dating back to the Golden Days of Travel in the 1950s sat overgrown and unused in the pouring rain. At the now-closed entrance stood an authentic looking Aztec rock-carved totem. A grown-over sign at the top of the cliff said something about Moctezuma, as if the place had been called Moctezuma's Cave or something like that.

In fact, here in Johnson Canyon, some people apparently believe Montezuma's treasure lies buried. Had I known that this might have been the resting place of the fiersome warrior-King's golden booty, I might have gone diving in the pond next to the carving; I certainly wouldn't have gotten any wetter than I did just standing outside in the rain snapping a photo.

The stone carving seemed strangely incongrous to the rest of the Anglo landscape nearby, and here in Las Vegas, I am that statue—big, ungainly and out-of-place. Yesterday we wandered around the Venetian for about an hour looking for a place to eat, getting pecked at by tuxedo-clad sales geese urging us to purchase nights of free entertainment from them at kiosks that had been erected around every bend.

I grabbed one such sweet old woman by the cheeks, pulled her close to me, planted a kiss on her kindly wrinkled face and said, "can't you just help me find a place to eat? I'm about to collapse into a diabetic low!"

We found ourselves at Wolfgang Puck's restaurant nearly immediately. Three thoughts about this place: Good food, tiny portions, huge prices. That's Vegas, baby!

Later that evening we watched the fountains at the Bellagio and prowled around. I watched the dumpiest looking man I had ever seen win $60,000 with the single roll of the dice.

Where did this man get the stakes to wager money for that kind of payoff in the first place, I wondered? But I didn't pursue that answer very far; its logic can only take a person down the kind of unsavory road of possibilities that even I'm hesitant to travel. That's Vegas, baby!

They have nice plants and things at the Bellagio, and I hate to admit that I was actually somewhat taken by this modern-day Tourist Trap. I guess in a town dominated by facades and fakery, actual vegetation held a strange calming appeal for me. They had even planted real pine trees on the walkway next to Las Vegas Boulevard at the fountain-viewing area. The trees all looked healthy, except for one, which seemed to be showing signs of drought stress, despite its location next to an artificial oasis of dancing water.

I read this morning that President George W. Bush didn't attend a United Nations Conference on Global Warming, and that only The Govinator, California's Arnold Schwartzenegger, was left to show the world that maybe someone in the United States is concerned about the future of the planet's climate.

Here in Las Vegas people seem unconcerned about such things, and you can bet there won't be any clamor to do anything about Global Warming until places like the Bellagio or the Venetian start to see its effects on their bottom lines. Then you can place a chip on the Pass Line that someone will start lobbying our national leaders to do something.

As the old saying goes, "What's good for business" ...

Send in the clowns.