by Peter Millar
When they say ‘complex’ they mean downright confusing. Turn the wrong way at lobby level and you find yourself staring at a sushi bar or a Caribbean-themed rum pub. Or a designer shirt shop. Or a handbag emporium. Move a few feet in the other direction and there is a pizza joint next to a ‘surf-and-turf’ restaurant offering modestly priced steak with lobster tail. Then there are the signs beckoning to the night club, to the ballroom, to the circus acts, to the microbrewery (I was tempted), to the Aura martini lounge which advertises ‘sophisticated sexy waitresses’ (and for which a two-for-one voucher had been pressed into your hand with your room key – I assumed it related to the martinis, that is, not the waitresses). And so on, and so on, seemingly ad infinitum.
What the American ‘resort casino’ concept really is – and I am sure there are devotees out there who will point out that Reno is a pale shadow of Vegas, but it was enough to blow my novice mind – is Disneyland with an ‘over-21s only’ label. Not that under-21s are excluded. They’re offered ice-cream parlours, cuddly-toy shops, circus rides, games arcades which all seem just perfect for families with 10–14 year olds. It’s scarcely enough though – what is? – to improve the mood of the clutches of older teenage boys in huge baggy jeans lurking sullenly on their side of the ‘over-21s only’ demarcation line. This is nothing more than a yellow line on the floor, but it is a barrier between virtual worlds. For ‘their own protection’, not just teenagers, but young adults up to the age of 21, including young men who may have fought for their country in Iraq or Afghanistan, are forced to stand on the wrong side of the line and watch those who are older and therefore supposed to know better pour alcohol down their throats and dollars into slot machines.
They can also watch them smoke. Whereas not so long ago American anti-smoking laws seemed draconian to Europeans, now that we have caught up, the US situation seems more chaotic than anything else, not least because each state has its own variation. The Nevada Clean Air act, for example, forbids smoking in enclosed public spaces – other than those which cater mainly for adults and specifically permit it. Such as casinos and bars which don’t opt to ban it. The practical upshot of this is that on one side of the yellow line painted on the floor – in the over-21 gaming and drinking area, smoking is allowed, but no more than a foot or two away, on the other side of the line, it is banned. Even though the whole lot is under one roof and if anyone has told the smoke not to cross the yellow line, it seems blissfully unaware of it. The weirdly perverse effect of this is that it feels, within the topsy-turvy logic of this confined ecosystem, as if you can smoke ‘indoors’ but not ‘outdoors’.
When I say the whole thing is under ‘one roof’ of course, that too, is a deception. I’ve been gradually discovering this for half an hour now, in my search for an escape. There is what Doctor Who fans would immediately call a TARDIS effect here – and that as we all know stands for ‘Time And Relative Distance In Space’ – the inside appears hugely bigger than the outside. The secret is that it actually is. Because the hotel lobby level is on the upper floor you easily forget that the shape of the building at street level is irrelevant. Ground-floor Reno is in a different dimension to the world one storey up. On the higher plane, as it were, the Silver Legacy is linked to two other equally humongous casino resorts by walkways that don’t look or feel like walkways because they’re avenues filled with shops or bars. I didn’t know it, while I had been wandering in a vague and self-deluding search for the exit from the Silver Legacy, I had in fact been exploring a substantial area of Eldorado and Circus Circus as well.
You not only lose track of space but of time too. Which is of course what the designers intended. There are no windows, no indication of daylight. This is a world in which time is measured by the revolution of digitally generated wheels on electronic slot machines and the dealing of hands at virtual poker tables. It’s only after 40 minutes of hopeless wandering that I find myself back in the Silver Legacy hotel lobby which is when it finally dawns on me that to find my way out of this seemingly subterranean labyrinth back into the sunshine, I have to go down, what seems like further underground, but is actually the way out.
Downstairs the world is pretty much the same, an artificially lit environment of smoke and drink and gaming. Girls in slinky thigh-slit skirts deliver drinks to the slot-machine players who are as oblivious to them as they are to the news-ticker style slogans running above the rotating wheels they stare at: ‘Welcome to Silver Legacy Resort and Casino, United we stand, God Bless America, We support our troops.’ These are of course the same troops, who if they were still under 21 – as many of them are – would not be allowed to have a beer or play the slots, no matter how heroic their exploits on the field of battle.
There is a crowd around one roulette wheel, a rare intrusion of old-fashioned physical gaming in this electronic-dominated world, through there are also poker, blackjack and craps tables, all of which are relatively quiet. And then I remember why. It is still the middle of the afternoon. And the reason I know is that there is a subtle difference down here: in a far corner I can see a light that is neither neon nor fluorescent, a light that reminds me of the time of day and the fact that somewhere out there the sun is shining. I push it and fall out of the singularity into what I dimly remember as reality.
It’s pretty quiet out here. The odd pickup truck cruises by, down Virginia Avenue and through the Reno arch, the city’s landmark emblazoned with its neon ‘little big town’ slogan in the neon-trashing bright desert sunlight. Following the faded photocopy map acquired from the Legacy’s bemused bellhops who were obviously not familiar with the concept of ‘outside’, let alone ‘on foot’, I head towards the edge of the town centre to see if the beautiful babbling clear waters of the Truckee River have, like Amtrak, been sunk in a concrete canal.
It hasn’t. Just a few hundred yards from the Silver Legacy, the strip is suddenly brought to an abrupt halt by a bridge across a river that is every bit as brightly bubbling and indomitably fresh and clear as it was a hundred miles or so back in the mountains. There is another Reno ‘beyond-the-Truckee’, a green civic space with grey granite municipal buildings – post office, town hall – while the riverfront itself is a peaceful oasis of rippling water, calm and coffee shops.
But in Reno terms this is suburbia. The real town is the strip, so I head back along it, unsurprised to note that Reno is competing with Vegas in another of Nevada’s state specialities: quickie weddings and divorces. I’m just not sure they’ve quite got the hang of it yet. Is the Antique Angel wedding chapel sure they’re sending out quite the right message, unless of course it specialises in second marriages. The sign on the door read ‘closed’, but the window dressing advertises: ‘Hispanic ceremonies available.’ And matching white ‘bride’ and ‘groom’ sun visors. But then maybe Reno has something of a blind spot when it comes to naming its facilities. Mountain View may seem a romantic customer-attracting name for most businesses, but a mortuary?
But Reno looks on the bright side. Traffic bollards on street corners are brightly painted to look like piles of casino chips. On the corner of E Commerce the effect is spoiled by a hobo asleep on the pavement next to them. A passing ambulance truck halts and two paramedics pile out and take a look at him, pulling on plastic gloves before they consider actually touching him. One of them gives him an investigative kick. He sits up, clearly wondering what time of day it is, which if he has just emerged from a casino I can understand, and stares wildly at them. They get him on his feet but rather than help him into the ambulance, tell him to move along. This is a no-loitering zone. He’s not keen on loitering anyhow, and hurls a lungful of obscenities at them as he shambles off. Disconcertingly, they respond in kind.
A few minutes later, two tough-looking blokes wearing black helmets, black T-shirts, black Lycra shorts and dark glasses jump off mountain bikes next to him and demand his identity papers. It’s only when they turn their backs to me that I recognise the words ‘Reno Police’. It’s not exactly t
he ‘bobby on a bicycle’ of English mythology, but then in my experience that always was just mythology. I assume they’re genuine, though the souvenir shops along Virginia Avenue will print just about anything on a T-shirt. One of a group of less than sylph-like young women in their twenties heading for the Eldorado casino is wearing a T-shirt that reads, ‘Lord, if I can’t be skinny, please let my friends be fat’. The Lord has clearly answered her prayers.
The three casino resorts that dominate central Reno compete for the take with a couple on the outskirts, a city centre branch of the bland national casino chain Hannah’s, the Woolworth’s of the gambling world. And then there’s Fitzgerald’s.
The name is a clue, but any doubts I might have had about which particular theme Fitzgerald’s hopes will pull in the punters, are blown away by the thick layers of old green paint and, standing near the end of a grubby rainbow near the door, the life-size plastic leprechaun (possibly larger than life-size depending on your personal experience of leprechauns). Yep, Fitzgerald’s is playing the Irish card. From the bottom of the deck. And if I were the Irish government’s public relations adviser, I’d sue.
The lettering on the sign above the door is done in stick-on letters against a white neon background, like cinemas from the 1960s, except that it isn’t retro, it’s just left over. While advertising hundreds of five-cent and one-cent slots suggests it is really scraping the barrel to pull in the punters. I wander inside and immediately regret it. The bottom of the barrel is the summit of most of Fitzgerald’s punters’ ambitions. The green carpets are faded to the colour of putrid moss, the slot machines still have mechanical arms: you know, the ones you have to pull, unknown anywhere else in Reno. The drinks brought to the sad souls doubling a lifetime’s exercise limit by pulling them are served by dumpy Chinese blokes or women who no longer care to know that the days when they might have looked good in tights and skimpy leprechaun costumes are long gone. Too little Tai Chi, too much Mah Jong. The only exception, as far as age goes, is one young woman who looks as if she might be in danger of producing a whole litter of little leprechauns any minute. The drinks that aren’t free are cheap, as is the food. But I just do not want to know what the ‘House Special 99 Cent Prawn Cocktail’ even looks like. Ah, the luck of the Irish! A sign opposite proclaims ‘Jewellery and Pawn Store’; not exactly an advertisement for big payouts.
I hurry out, back to the comforting mahogany veneer of the Silver Legacy complex, although it is only now that my jaded eye takes in the obvious: that the outside is a crude trompe l’oeil. It has been decorated – if it was meant to be a disguise it is signally unsuccessful – to look like the nineteenth-century street front that was presumably pulled down to erect it. There is even the date 1895 inscribed on the pediment of one of the series of pseudo-terraces, one of which is a phoney grocer’s, the next a mock-up ‘Sierra Pacific’ railway office, and another – with almost a nice touch of irony, the Silver Legacy Casino and Saloon – although pushing the fake doors will get you nowhere.
The real doors on the end, however, are always open, 24 hours a day. I wander back in, with the vague intention of cashing in my two-for-one cocktail voucher with the ‘sophisticated sexy waitresses’ in the Aura bar. The two-for-one deal turns out to apply exclusively to a range of brand new house martinis, ‘each designed to reflect the aura made up by your personality and chakras’, a bit of New Age mumbo-jumbo obliquely intended to imply you can open spiritual energy channels by getting wasted on sweet spirits. It’s what the ‘sophisticated sexy waitresses’ are supposed to sell. But they’re all on a cigarette break, and the male bartenders are having none of it.
‘It’s either those or well drinks,’ says Eric, the one nearest me. Unfortunately this doesn’t help. It’s another of those linguistic things. ‘You mean like fruit juice, or energy drinks?’ I ask, assuming – not too stupidly it seems to me at the time – that a ‘well drink’ is something akin to a ‘wellness drink’, which doesn’t make a lot of sense either but back in Europe I would assume to be some sort of vaguely ‘healthy’ alternative to alcohol.
Eric gives me one of those ‘You from Mars?’ looks, and says, ‘Nope, I mean a drink out of the well,’ indicating the sunken reservoir of bottles set into the lower part of the bar on his side.
‘So that would include, say, a vodka martini?’ I suggest hesitantly, off the top of my head.
‘Sure thing,’ he says, taking me at my word, and nonchalantly throwing a half full vodka bottle some four feet into the air, catching it behind his back in between flicking a slice of lime into a cocktail shaker, adding ice, a dash of the vodka followed by a splash of vermouth from another bottle which miraculously appears in a third hand that is obviously his cheating secret, before hurling the vodka bottle back into the air, catching it in the lid of the shaker and putting it back on the shelf, while another previously unsuspected appendage has put the lid on the shaker, shaken it and is now pouring the drink. A vodka martini, shaken, stirred and taken on a day trip to Alton Towers all in less time than it takes to say, ‘The name’s Bond, James Bond.’
‘How do you learn to do stuff like that?’ I asked.
‘Not having a life for the past two years,’ he replied with refreshing honesty.
I sit down next to the bar, mostly it’s there, and so am I, and so’s the drink. But also because I’m more than a little in awe of what Eric might perform next. His bartending pyrotechnics are far more riveting than anything I expect the two rather bored-looking females to put on display. Of course, when I say ‘pyrotechnics’ here, I’m speaking figuratively. At least I thought I was. Impressed by having such an impressionable audience, Eric decides to show me one of his specials. This consists of dowsing a chunk of paper towels in something seriously alcoholic, stuffing them into the necks of a couple of bottles, and setting them on fire. Before proceeding to juggle with them, leaving trails of flame in the air, like a kid with a sparkler on Bonfire Night.
I watch this with some amazement, about five steps back from the bar. Up until now it had never occurred to me that a Molotov cocktail was something you could actually order at a bar. It’s only a little disappointing therefore when he explains the bottles were in fact empty and made of reinforced plastic, kept specifically for tricks rather than the dispensing of alcohol: ‘Even so, you have to be careful, sometimes the plastic can melt.’
Yeah, right. I’m just (in)digesting that little nugget when Eric gets called off to mix a drink for someone at the other end of the bar. A tipple for which only he, it seems, knows the recipe. An Amateur Arsonist perhaps or a Napalm Nightcap.
With that efficiency that sums up the American casino industry, however, his place is immediately taken by Sean, who turns out to be a South Korean called Sung, who changed his name because the Americans had trouble with it, ‘and I like Sean Connery’. Sean tells me he’s been working in Reno for six years, moving up the casino league to the Silver Legacy which according to him is unquestionably the best. Having seen the Fitzgerald, I’m not about to argue.
At 36, Sean clearly considers himself something of a veteran on the bartending scene, even if he takes his metaphorical hat off to talented ‘flair’ jugglers like Eric. But in his eyes, Eric’s still a kid, a lad in his twenties who may juggle bottles like a genius but hasn’t even had to think about the far more difficult business of juggling money. Sean’s main concern is to stay on the upward escalator in the casino business, while still earning enough money to service a large mortgage on a ‘three-bedroom, two-bathroom house’ in the valley.
His home is clearly his pride and joy, his mark of success as an immigrant, but it is also his biggest headache. Bartenders, like most people in the service industry in America, rely heavily on tips, which means they don’t have a high guaranteed salary when it comes to applying for things like mortgages. Polishing a glass with a rueful look in his eye, Sean admits to having been enticed into the housing market at its height by a shark broker who secured him a large loan at an affordable i
ntroductory rate. But the rate had run out and he was now struggling to pay a whopping eight per cent interest on a property which thanks to the general crisis in the mortgage market, provoked by people less prudent than him defaulting on overpriced loans, was deteriorating in value. This, at last is the mother lode! Here in Reno, I have unearthed the root of all evil: it was guys like the mortgage shark who conned Sean that started the whole global meltdown from which, nursed and fertilised by the greed and stupidity of our own bankers, the world is now suffering.
Supposedly bright-boy traders bought ‘securitised financial instruments’, that were nothing more than a repackaged share in the debt owed by a blue-collar worker who’d been conned by a shark on a percentage into taking a bigger loan than he could afford which quickly reverted to an interest rate he couldn’t repay. All over America in recent years, people who thought they were getting a rung on the ladder to middle-class respectability have had it pulled out from under them and as a result have walked away from the financial system leaving the men who sell the ladders with no customers and barely a leg to stand on.
Sean was by no means an obvious bad debt, with a steady job and a decent credit history, but the mortgage rate he’d been lured into paying was barely sustainable and the costs of rearranging formidable. So far at least he still has his house.
‘Do you ever have a flutter here?’ I asked, considering the temptation he must be under and almost dreading the answer.