Mr. and Mrs. Mulligan Play Vegas

Las Vegas is probably the fastest growing city in the United States. With 2.5 million people in the immediate area, the town continues to spread across the desert like an unchecked canker. They build 14 new schools a year in the Vegas environs, and the growth rate doesn’t seem to be slowing one bit. In addition Vegas is striving to become the number one tourist destination in the world. And it probably has succeeded.

The Las Vegas Strip is teeming with fat, sunburned drunks who drift from one casino to another, holding out hope that they will be the one and only person in the horde to beat the odds with a lucky slot-machine pull that will enable them to return home a millionaire or the owner of a fancy new Hummer or recreational vehicle. Inside the Vegas casinos, a thousand sloppily dressed nicotine addicts slump paralyzed in front of slot machines, hands thrust out for “free” drinks, feeding quarter after quarter into a bottomless pit of unfulfilled hopes and unholy desires. At the game tables, chips representing 10 dollar bills are confiscated by the handful every minute from the suckers. For some strange reason millions of people each year haven’t figured out that the odds are overwhelmingly in favor of the House and that sitting at a table longer does not, in fact, increase a person’s odds of winning.

It drove my mother crazy when I told her several times that we had not deposited anything—not a thin dime—into a slot machine anywhere in Vegas. She was equally distressed to learn that we did not haunt the gaming tables. I told her that I would be just as successful and probably have just as much fun if I were to break a fifty-dollar bill into ones and run through a casino throwing the loot freely into the air for anyone to grab. In greed-soaked Vegas, the chaos that such an act would create probably could qualify for prosecution under the Patriot Act. Tempted as I was, Caroline’s good sense and strong biceps prevented me from following through with my plan.

Instead of Gambling, Caroline and I hit the fairways of two of Vegas’ fine golf courses. Like everything else in Las Vegas, the courses were particularly pricey, though I did manage to score a deal on one of them, thanks to the Internet. In exchange for a $100 discount, I unwittingly signed up for a lifetime of SPAM e-mail and junkmail at my home. Amortized over 40 years, I think the golf club came out on the better end of that deal.

In brochures and on their website, they call Desert Pines Golf Club “The Pinehurst of Vegas.” While it was true they did have plenty of pine trees, I have to imagine in my heart of hearts that Pinehurst, unlike Desert Pines, has grass on its fairways that does not resemble a badly botched hair-plug job on a steroid-addled, middle-aged ectomorph. Worse than the condition of the grass, however, was the roar of the freeway, which ran right through the heart of the course. We had missed rush hours in Las Vegas before while driving, but we experienced them full strength at Desert Pines.

“NICE SHOT, HONEY!” I would holler from the cart each time Caroline smacked one 200 yards straight down the fairway.

“WHAT?!” she would holler.

“NOTHING!”

Perhaps Desert Freeway Pines’ most stunning asset was its billboards. Nothing inspires a shot more than a set of 50-foot tall boobies peaking out the top of a T-shirt worn by a billboard model hawking Live Vegas Sex Shows.

Desert Pines' beverage cart beauty was the highlight of my game. Each time she showed up I would hammer a long, straight drive into the perfect fairway position, or I would sink a thirty-foot double-breaking putt. I nicknamed her Lady Luck and tipped her even when I didn’t buy anything. Nevertheless, Caroline managed to beat me handily on the front nine, despite my three mulligans and a foot wedge play near the green of Number Eight. Her luck didn’t hold out on the back nine, though.

On Sunday, before fleeing town, Caroline and I hit the links at Aliante—Vegas’ newest 18-hole course. The course had recently been built on Vegas’ burgeoning North side, where housing developments appeared out of nowhere, like the rapidly spreading athlete’s foot fungus infection I got from the Bootleg Canyon showers. But we couldn’t have been paired with a nicer couple: Norm and Susan, who had moved to the area from Florida just before the building boom had really begun to explode. Although a nice course, Aliante was so densely surrounded by houses that it was like playing golf down the middle of an inner-city street. Along every fairway, around every green, developers had crammed in zero-lot-line houses, each one looking like a clone of the one next door—from the color of the stucco and tile roof to the gravel-and-yucca landscaping. I asked Susan, a real-estate broker, how much one of the beauties would cost.

“That one there,” she pondered, “oh, it’s about $350,000.” She spit ruefully. “But those are only 900 square feet, and the two car garage, well, that’s gotta eat into the living space.”

“Dang,” is all I could come up with in terms of a reply.

Like the rest of Vegas, people buying into “exclusive” gated communities like the ones that ruined the ambiance of Aliante were gambling that the already ridiculous prices for a modern-day shotgun shack would rise even higher in the future. Maybe they will, and God bless ‘em if it pays off. But I wonder how much the place will be worth once all the water has been sucked up out of the ground and the whole valley is socked in with smog so thick that it would be impossible to come out of your home without SCUBA gear. That eventuality lies just around the corner, I’m afraid. But here in Greed Central—Fabulous Las Vegas—the future is only as far ahead as the next roll of the dice. For most people here, the long-term plan is just to get to the next casino without passing out or spilling a drink.

See you on down the road.