by Matt Weiland
On December 30, 1993, the Review-Journal had a story about the fact that, because of a gang fight and shooting the previous year, the fireworks show on Fremont Street had been cancelled. Instead, fireworks would be shot off on the Strip, from Wynn’s Treasure Island. Some city officials had called all the small downtown businesses, promising that even without the fireworks, there would still be crowds, and my dad had convinced himself this was true. Brimming with anticipatory energy, he spent that afternoon directing traffic like he always did. And like always, the postcard stands were cleared, the sodas replaced, the tubs filled with ice and alcohol. I see him passing out the party hats. I see him looking at the store’s entrance, waiting for the celebration to begin. I cannot spend too much time thinking about this, because, eventually, I’ll get to his mouth slowly going slack, those brown eyes going fluid, my dad looking old, shocked, realizing just what was about to happen.
The Horseshoe, its million dollars on display, its liquor and magazine store in the rear, is now gone. The Mint is gone. Most of the famous neon signs that I grew up with—the Dunes, the Sands, that giant Golden Nugget façade—rest in something called the Neon Boneyard; if you want to see them, you can arrange a special tour. And the echo of coins falling on steel is absent from all the casinos now, replaced by weird electric tones and computerized tickets that track your winnings.
As far as downtown is concerned, well, one of the new plans for its renovation involves turning a few streets into a bar and nightclub district. There are also rumblings from a scene of artists and hipsters who have discovered the dilapidated grandeur of this historic neighborhood. And there’s a crazy plan involving some sort of massive stadium. What I know for sure: the city just paid $3,600 a pop for twenty-two bronze medallions to commemorate historic facts about “old” Vegas, which were set up along the east end of Fremont Street. Somehow, a number of the facts were wrong. When the mayor was told about it, he told reporters, “I’m hoping people on the Fremont East are half-lit, and could care less what the markers say.”
That tells you what you need to know about downtown. Except for this.
In 2007, the owner of the land beneath John’s Loan apologized to my dad, as if by selling the property and getting out he’d given up the fight. We still had ten years on the lease, but it was a moot point. Turns out, the newest owners of the Golden Nugget—the third, I believe, since Steve Wynn sold the place—were actually decent and agreeable. The first time their lawyers visited, my dad, seventy-two and sporting a pair of unreliable hearing aids, charmed them with a few jokes.
These days, that giant gorilla from the clothing store is perched in the living room of the house where I grew up, sitting on the plastic-covered sofa that was once my grandmother’s. Half of the liquor store stock is three blocks north of Fremont, in the back of my grandfather’s old store, which my mom still runs. The pawnshop my dad built, the place I once knew as well as I knew anything on this planet, has been bulldozed. Now it’s the construction site for a convention center.
As for Vegas, well, Las Vegas—by which I mean the collective residential area, not what’s inside the city limits—has exploded in all directions, suburbs now reaching beyond the confines of the Vegas Valley and into the surrounding mountains. The latest trend is luxury high-rises; even as the housing market takes its epic dive, a real estate web page shows fifty different projects—condos and apartments—springing up on the Strip and in other prime locations, with some one-bedrooms going for a million dollars. Vegas’s former combination of populism, individualism, and good dirty fun, which had once been the city’s bedrock, is long gone. Instead so many people come here merely to take part in—to play roles in—the spectacle. Sex and sin for high rollers and well-dressed frat kids, the snobbish pretension that masquerades as status, name droppers and VIP champagne table service and whatever billion-dollar resort is opening this year—that’s what matters. Media reports commonly point out that Vegas makes more revenue nowadays through service than through gambling. Steve Wynn ends up being a visionary.
And there’s no point in complaining. We all know this is where things are heading, not just in this city, not just in this state; nobody who matters would keep things stagnant, even if they could. Still, each time I return to my hometown, I am amazed anew. The sprawl. The scope. I guess that officially makes me an old fuck. Fine. But it’s still overwhelming. Whenever I am back here, I spend a fair amount of time driving around, and while I’m flipping between shitty rock radio stations, I’ll catch myself recognizing a few stores that are still in the same places they were in my childhood: the McDonald’s where my brother’s best friend from high school worked; the KFC that went up when I was in eighth grade. Fast food restaurants are marks of permanence in this place.
But people in Vegas still sometimes need cash in a hurry. And it can still be found on the Strip, at its northernmost point, across the street from the Sahara Hotel & Casino in a large shopping plaza. If you visit, you’ll find a stand-alone McDonald’s, a sports memorabilia store, Chinese and Indian restaurants, and a massage parlor. And you’ll also discover that John’s Loan and Jewelry is still going strong. My brothers handle most of the business nowadays. But if you stop in, ask for my dad. Tell him Charlie sent you.
NEW HAMPSHIRE
CAPITAL Concord
ENTERED UNION 1788 (9th)
ORIGIN OF NAME From the English county of Hampshire
MOTTO “Live Free or Die”
NICKNAME Granite State
RESIDENTS New Hampshirite
U.S. REPRESENTATIVES 2
STATE BIRD purple finch
STATE FLOWER purple lilac
STATE TREE white birch
STATE SONG “Old New Hampshire” and “New Hampshire, My New Hampshire”
LAND AREA 8,968sq. mi.
GEOGRAPHIC CENTER In Belknap Co., 3 mi. E of Ashland
POPULATION 1,309,940
WHITE 96.0%
BLACK 0.7%
AMERICAN INDIAN 0.2%
ASIAN 1.3%
HISPANIC/LATINO 1.7%
UNDER 18 25.0%
65 AND OVER 12.0%
MEDIAN AGE 37.1
NEW HAMPSHIRE
Will Blythe
This journey to New Hampshire starts in my hometown of New York City on a gray, winter day when, adrift in an ocean of narcissism, I am in an increasingly churlish mood. For instance, everyone I know has their own blog. They list their favorite books, movies, songs, friends, bowel movements. One person has 363 friends!
By comparison, I am friendless, and in this epoch, at least, a misanthrope. Though perhaps a drifting, dreamy one, prone to staring at maps and wondering if there might be some other place more conducive to a snaggle-toothed cur. A place where the residents enjoy a sort of bemused relation with themselves. Where they have souls rather than psyches, vegetable gardens rather than blogs. Where they look askance at the act of self-promotion. Where they are sly, tough bastards, undaunted by bad weather.
As for these blog people … they groom their sites as intently as suburbanites (or their Mexican yardmen) whack the weeds that grow hard against their curbsides. They post videos of themselves, pictures worthy of a magazine. They tint their skin tones, adjust the background colors, and project themselves into a glamour that everyone can achieve these days. So now—thank you, Photoshop!—we have another democratic anxiety that technology has gifted us.
Not only am I misanthropic, I’m too lazy and despairing for such image-maintenace. The blog people … advertising themselves as if they were cans of soup. … I like cans of soup, but people who advertise themselves like cans of soup unsettle me. What do they want?
For all I know, I am probably a narcissist myself. The evidence (first person confession) suggests as much. And hell is one narcissist having to listen to another; worse—many others! If Montaigne had been alive today, would he have been a blogger?
And yet, I am tired, tired, tired, sick to death of myself. Sick to death of self in general,
sick of all your cute, yapping selves, too. Bored with my stories. Disheartened by my voice. Disgusted even with the sly, tactical self-deprecation that I use to cover my tracks. So much self, so little time. … The clamor of Me, Me, Me All the Doodah Day. In the words of a former boss, I am living alone in bad company.
I want a richer silence. I want to be away from my ordinary self. Older remedies, even fear … all the antidotes to the small self. I want to disappear into history. Instead, I go to New Hampshire.
As a traveler here, I have no lineage from which to be descended, no stories of family and local customs. I am passing through. And at this moment what I have is that familiar American sensation produced as you drive a stretch of new highway and the roadside blurs by at top speed. I drive fastest when I have nowhere in particular to go. The gnarled New Hampshire landscape—beat-up hills, homely third- and fourth-growth trees, and rocks, so many rocks that it looks as if the clouds above the state opened up and rained stones for thousands of years—thrums past me. Ah, the stony soil of New England, metaphorical stock of preachers and writers. In the winter, anyway, there’s something dirge-like about this country. But I understand … the sense of a grudging landscape … resistant to man’s designs in the same way the soul refuses to submit, whip it though you may. … I really do understand this … just because it’s an old, unoriginal metaphor doesn’t make it wrong.
I had gone to New Hampshire once before, on assignment for Playboy in the spring of 2007 to cover the haphazard presidential campaign of John Edwards. To the North Country I went, into the White Mountains. In theory, it was spring. But the trees were still bare. Snow clung to woodlots, mountainsides, road margins. Ice sharded the streams.
After winding past grand hotels from the nineteenth century and pop-and-pop bed-and-breakfasts run by gay couples from the twenty-first, I came to the Grand Summit Hotel in Bartlett, where the Carroll County Democrats were hosting their annual Grover Cleveland Dinner, with John Edwards scheduled to speak that night in the White Tail Deer Room. A man dressed as the former president Grover Cleveland (who turned out to be Cleveland’s grandson, and a radio personality) waited outside the banquet, chewing on a cigar, and asked, “Is my fly open?” No one answered.
His name was George Cleveland. He told me that he was an Obama man because Obama had Hawaiian roots and that his grandfather had been very popular in Hawaii for having supported the monarchy there.
When they found out I was writing for Playboy, the Edwards staffers—anxious young functionaries, swelled with pride at their proximity to a potential President—treated me as if I were suffering from the Ebola virus, giving me wide berth.
The Democrats of Carroll County reacted in one of three ways to my affiliation. They either laughed in embarrassment, told me I was a lucky guy and asked which of the Playmates I had met, or winced and moved quickly across the ballroom, where they eyed me warily the rest of the night. When I moved toward them, notebook in hand, they moved away—a game of hide-and-seek in plain view.
One local politician with whom I had enjoyed an earlier conversation steered his wife my way. “This is the writer from Playboy,” he told her. To me, he said, “She says I can buy Playboy if I’m in it.”
“As long as he’s not nude,” his wife said.
“Oh, I don’t think your readers are ready for that,” he said.
Apparently, you can learn a lot about the citizens of a state by their attitude toward Playboy. In New York, I was just a magazine writer. In New Hampshire, I was—perversely and glamorously—a belated representative of the Sexual Revolution. I have always suspected that people who find nudity an incitement of any sort probably have the best sex lives (conservative Baptist preachers, for instance) but there are some things that even an inadvertent scholar of New Hampshire does not need to know about its citizens.
Good People of New Hampshire, keep at least a few of your secrets to yourselves.
Like the candidates for President, the Devil, too, has apparently spent a lot of time barnstorming in New Hampshire, to mixed effect. They drove him out of Massachusetts, those prigs, and he had to go somewhere and New Hampshire was just next door and it was wilder and there were new businesses cropping up and wherever there is money, there is the Devil who has started up more franchises than Ray Kroc.
In 1692, the Puritan minister Cotton Mather looked out from his pulpit in the Second Church in Boston and saw a New England being overrun by the Devil. He delivered a fast-day sermon called “The horatory and necessary address to a Country now Extraordinarily Alarum’d by the Wrath of the Devil,” which was later published in his collection, The Wonders of the Invisible World.
“Let us now make a Good and a Right use, of the Prodigious Descent, which the Devil, in Great Wrath, is at this day making upon our Land,” Mather told his congregation. “The Walls of the whole World are broken down!”
That February, the first accusations of witchcraft had emerged out of Salem, Massachusetts. The trials were finally suspended in October by command of the royal governor. In the following months, nineteen men and women had gone to the gallows for witchcraft. One man who refused to plea had been put to death under heavy stones. Mather had cautiously endorsed the actions of the court trying the accused.
Having whipped New England into a witch-hunting frenzy, Mather eventually suffered second thoughts, although as is so often the case, they arrived too late—five years too late. In his diary, Mather divulged his anxiety that God would find him lacking “for my not appearing with Vigor enough to stop the proceedings of the Judges, when the Inextricable Storm from the Invisible World assaulted the Country.”
As I drive into the New Hampshire night, I feel as if I am penetrating into this Invisible World. I relate to the witches going to their doom, to the preachers sending them. I imagine being pressed to death under heavy stones. In this year of our Lord, 2008, the Walls of the whole World are still broken down. What else is new?
The trees, the broken farms, the rocky land whirr past. There are terrors greater than anonymity, that quicken one … the stone descending, the bones cracking … blogs, ha!
As Cotton Mather’s belatedly vexed conscience suggests, a seventeenth-century woman accused of witchcraft in Massachusetts or Connecticut stood an excellent chance of being executed. Nearly fifty women were hanged. Anne Hibbens was hanged in Boston after a neighbor had accused her of knowing that people were talking about her. Mary Parsons of Springfield went to the gallows after the Devil climbed into bed with her in the form of her dead child, whom she so wanted to see again. She received it into her bed that night and so entered into convenant with Satan.
But in New Hampshire, or what now constitutes that state, only one woman was ever convicted of witchcraft—Goody Cole. (The Goody stands for Goodwife, which along with Goodhusband, was a common form of address among Puritans at the time, and to the extent that the Puritans were social levelers of a sort, the New England equivalent of Comrade.) In 1656, Cole was accused of bewitching her neighbor’s children and cattle. Local residents reported that she had appeared as a dog, a cat, and an eagle. She had also been seen sitting at the table with the Devil, who manifested himself as a black dwarf with a red cap. Cole was also blamed for the loss of a fishing vessel with all hands aboard at Rivermouth.
Found guilty of witchcraft, she was whipped and thrown into jail in Boston, where she endured fifteen years of imprisonment before being allowed to return to Hampton, where she lived in a kind of banishment in a hut provided for her by the town and continued to be regarded as a witch.
At the public library in Hampton where I discover these facts, the kids, wearing their polar fleece, text-messaging, and doing their homework, call each other “dude.” Do they call each other “dude” in the Invisible World?
I ask the waitress at nearby Lamie’s Inn (fireplace, old couples eating at three o’clock in the afternoon) what she knows about Goody Cole.
“She’s the witch, right? We have a room named after her. When the s
ilverware is crossed, we joke around, ‘Oh, she’s here.’”
Down the menu, there’s a Goody Cole Chicken Sandwich. This strikes me as a tragic, possibly emblematic fall—from a feared witch to a chicken sandwich.
Hanging outside the bar is the front page of the Manchester Union of August 26, 1938, announcing a ceremony that occurred the day before in Hampton, vindicating the memory of Goody Cole. The town’s selectmen burned copies of the accusations made against her at the trial and mixed them with soil from land she was said to have inhabited.
Attending the ceremony from Hollywood, California, was Mrs. Harry Houdini, the magician’s widow. She said that she believed Harry would thank everyone for this and proposed that Halloween be devoted to the exoneration of other falsely accused witches.
I’m looking for ghost-traces. … Back on the road I go, heading north from the coast. The highway is my conduit into some other world, and like a dime-store medium, I pick up vibrations from the surrounding landscape. Or maybe the vibrations are from tires that haven’t been rotated in a long time. I take inspiration from the words of the poet Donald Hall, a New Hampshire resident who lives at Eagle Pond Farm under the shadow of Mt. Kearsage. He writes that “we do not require ancestors in order to connect, joyously, with a place and a culture.” He sees all around him “emigrants from other places who belong more preciously to this place than most old-timers do.” Maybe as a traveler, I’m like the mistress to a great man; my nocturnal privileges allow me to know things the good wife can only dream.
In 1904, after twenty years in Europe, Henry James returned to America and went to Chocorua, New Hampshire, to visit his brother, William, who owned a summer place in the White Mountains. William had discouraged his brother’s return to the States, warning him of American “vocalization,” “the Shocks in general,” and the citizenry’s propensity to eat boiled eggs with butter for breakfast. But Henry wrote to William that he wanted to see the eggs. “I want to see everything,” he added.