From Las Vegas

It is 106 degrees and the wind coming off the desert does not cool you down it only makes you hotter. It is after midnight and the sky was expansive and black overhead but not where you are, not anymore, not now and how the fuck can it be this hot? Sweat marks shirtbacks and you have not seen this before, not at night. And then a girl dressed in a black jumpsuit and wearing a black bob wig throws a towel in your car while you drive past her down the Strip and then you notice there are hundreds of that girl. And you pull into your hotel and cannot find check-in because casino hotels in Las Vegas are deliberately disorientating. While you are checking in there are people everywhere plugging quarters into machines that hiss and tap and beep and whirr and the people are glamourous young couples or misanthrope-gamblers or Texan cowboys or Mexican cowboys or girl's-night's-outs or football teams or degenerates who know nothing else (want nothing else). So you dump your belongings in a room lit by the fluoresence of the sign outside which is advertising Dirty Girls and Cold Beers and Cheap Cocktails and you are out onto the Strip where the alerting excess of Vegas is inescapable. The size of the buildings is asphyxiating: the Venetian towers in stories over you and Caesar's must take up 4 city blocks. The Luxor, an obsidisan pyramid, blasts an intense, focused beam of light forever into the night sky: this spectacular but unnecessary measure is Las Vegas manifest. People drink cocktails from diminutive clear statues of the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, a Mayan idol or from exaggerated cups. You buy a drink there but you can take it here, or here, or there. Mexican kids thwack cards against their hands and jam them in your face, advertising Actual Girls for $49 an hour. Gold-clad overtanned hedonists cruise by in convertibles and The Deuce constantly unloads passengers on to The Strip. They are thrilled to be in Vegas Vegas Vegas. Some beers cut The Hot but the constant, inevitable, unavoidable, exhausting gambling continues everywhere and the agitation goes from arousing to nauseating. Then you wake up late and you do the same thing and in the morning-the-late-morning you will go to bed maybe after breakfast maybe but sometime because you have to wake up late again. You are staying on the Strip and everything is right-there and right, there. Everything you want, or could want. And you go out and saturate yourself again in the Indulgence, and again it is correct. So by that afternoon you find yourself drinking frozen margaritas in the pool and feeling like it is the least-unhealthy, least-decadent option in this city. Maybe it is. But it does not last long because just through those doors and past the restaurant and past the tables and past the machines and out the door is The Strip and you know this and you know what this promises. And then you drive out some days or weeks or months later, convincing yourself that you are ready to leave, but looking over your shoulder until she disappears, wanting, because you know that that city never stops.