The Noble Hustle

by Colson Whitehead

  Much more upbeat, although I apologize if some readers were tricked into thinking the city is dedicated to Karl Marx’s book. I think we were just trying to get fancy with “Capital.”

  Some of the classic joints we wrote about are gone now, and we captured a time before Las Vegas made a science of demography, but most of the basic observations in our Let’s Go entry remain solid. In between games of Risk (board-game version), we cut up the previous year’s text, discarded what we disliked, and glued (more glue) what remained onto white paper alongside our revisions and additions. “But remember that casinos function on the basis of most tourists leaving considerably closer to the poverty line than when they arrived; don’t bring more than you’re prepared to lose cheerfully” became “But always remember: in the long run, chances are you’re going to lose money. Don’t bring more than you’re prepared to lose cheerfully.” No, casinos are not out to destroy you. The destroyed do not return to redeem reward-card perks and lose more money. No one forces doom upon you, folks. You need to seek it out.

  We kept “Drinks in most casinos cost 75¢–$1, free to those who look like they’re playing,” but added “Look like you’re gambling; acting skills will stretch your wallet, but don’t forget to tip that cocktail waitress in the interesting get-up.” Out with the general tsk-tsking and upper-middle-class disdain, and in with “For best results, put on your favorite loud outfit, bust out the cigar and pinkie rings, and begin.” You have been granted a few days’ reprieve from who you are. Celebrate the gift of a place that allows you to be someone else for a time.

  I don’t know who wrote that the Excalibur “has a medieval theme that will make you nostalgic for the Black Plague,” but it wasn’t me. Pretty sure.

  California. Pretentious pseudo-intellectual or no, I was not immune to the Western dream of reinvention. All that cultural programming about the freedom of the frontier had stuck, even if I pictured myself more in the Day of the Locust version. The entire trip I thought I was going to stay in California. I had nothing to go back to. No job. No bed but my parents’ couch. No nice girlfriend waiting for me, or even a mean one. We smoked weed, played Risk, time passed. One day we got word there was going to be a riot in People’s Park, at 1:00 p.m. sharp. They scheduled riots there. It gave order to our lives.

  We dropped one by one. Darren wigged out and caught a plane home. He still had his childhood room. Dan was going to drive back east in August, maybe get a Eurail pass that autumn and check out some fucking castles or whatever. I was out of money when Dan set off, and I asked if he had any room in the car, as the guy we’d been crashing with, the cat-sitter, was bailing out of California, too, and bringing all his stuff. After all, I was a good navigator. As luck would have it, they intended to stop off in Vegas on the way back.

  No one laid a hand on the Museum when we were on the road. Odd, moonfaced kids—a motel owner’s brood—gawked at them when we stopped at night but dared not touch. A cop pulled us over for speeding in Massachusetts the last day of our return trip. “What’s all this?” We shrugged. What to say? He wrote us a ticket. The Museum lasted a few days in Cambridge before teenagers or disaffected housewives or whoever stripped everything. We’d made it home, and the spell had worn off.

  We grew up. Our generational symptoms faded bit by bit. I got a job working for the book section of a newspaper. We ran fiction sometimes, mixed in with reviews. When the writing teacher who’d rejected my work in college submitted a story, I passed on it. Not out of revenge, it just wasn’t up to snuff. As in cards, it was business, not personal. I badgered one editor for an assignment, that assignment led to another, and somehow I was paying my bills freelancing. Played poker at Dan’s house every Sunday for a couple of years, and one day we picked up Hold’em. Dan got into computers and founded a visual-effects company, rendering CGI for movies such as Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan, which Darren directed. We waited for cards, and then we played them.

  And here I was, writing about Vegas again.

  “This wasn’t here the last time I came,” I said.

  “Yes, and look at it,” Jon said. “It is shit.”

  My first night in town. Tumbling into the new CityCenter array, a virtual money sink, a highly evolved specimen of the Leisure Industrial Complex that seemed almost self-aware once you entered its nimbus, bristling with enchantments 24/7.

  “Wow,” I said. The highway lifted and aimed us into the CityCenter’s black, glass heart. The dark buildings of the complex surrounded us, sheer residential towers and curvilinear hotels. Pure fury made concrete, shot through with rebar.

  It was Jon’s car. He was the first person to take me to a casino, one of the AC Trumps, back in ’96. My college roommate, currently a kind of nightlife broker in Vegas, managing a stable of video DJs, and flitting around the city at night as “Director of Programming” for hot spots that sounded like an erotic tasting menu: Blush, Surrender, Encore. Showing me around and explaining the rules once more.

  Jon worked under the handle “Shecky Green,” the latest incarnation of his ongoing character, Mr. Entertainment. Mr. Entertainment stepped onstage during Jon’s teens. After his stint as one half of white rap duo B.M.O.C., he launched the legendary music mag The Source (“The Magazine of Hip-Hop Music, Culture & Politics”) in his dorm room. I lived with him the following year. Long before I tangled with collection agencies, rooming with Shecky introduced me to answering-machine dread. You never knew when you might be pummeled by a string of cussing by Luther Campbell, frustrated over a mixed review of “We Want Some Pussy,” or his inability to think up interesting choruses.

  After cashing out of The Source, Shecky cast himself in a series of entrepreneurial roles—publisher of a Gen-X Playboy, manager of a record label—before making bank with his bestselling Hip Hop Honeys DVDs, a single-minded hopscotch around the world in search of booty-enabled beauties: Hip Hop Honeys: Brazil Boom Boom, Hip Hop Honeys: Blazin’ Asians. Hip Hop Honeys: Las Vegas, natch. He even ventured in front of the camera as the on-air commentator for a late-night poker show called Hip Hop Hold’em, which ran for a while in 2006 when all sorts of poker shows weaseled themselves into America’s programming grids. Method Man and Ed Lover playing loose, quite a sight, and Shecky spieling on the sidelines. “The 8 has arrived, and Biz Markie makes a straight!” No matter the arena, nobody beats the Biz.

  Shecky took me along as he made his nightly rounds of restaurants and clubs. First up: CityCenter. Despite its $9 billion price tag and 1.5 million square feet of space, the CityCenter (“Capital of the New World”) had not turned out to be the flaneur-friendly wonderland promised in the brochures. Shecky lived in one of the residential towers. I put my nose to the window: pretty tony from the outside. The recession derailed things, though. Busto sales, cascading foreclosures, squatters taking over the empty units. Gruesome machete fights in the laundry rooms over who’s next up on the driers, just like Brooklyn.

  “They said it would look like Central Park,” Shecky said. “Look, those are the trees.” He gestured toward a lonesome half dozen slouching out of the cement. I didn’t see any street retail on our approach, no inviting boulevards, no place to wander except into the entrances of the casinos. But what casinos! They were the magnificent embodiment of scientifically derived LIC principles: gargantuan in scale, single-minded in execution. A pure expression of consumer will. The old days were gone, like the Dunes, the Sands, all the Rat Pack warrens imploded by dynamite charges, dust. In their places these beautiful monsters emerged from the rubble: the Bellagio, the Venetian.

  And the Cosmopolitan. Shecky led me there, into this ebony monolith whose name was bolted in huge letters across the top floor, more fitting for a corporate headquarters than a hotel. I appreciated the honesty. The developers had hoped for a nice crop of condos, but after the downturn the soil was exhausted. Deutsche Bank took over, apartments became hotel rooms, and the first floor a hypermodern casino. In the Vegas war of gambling versus places for people to live, the money
wins out, I imagine.

  Windows were scarce, per standard casino style, the mammoth footprint of the building creating the illusion of a banquet room without walls. All you can eat—this is the Land of Fabled Buffets, after all—you walked on and on, never satiated. Trudging through the main floor of the Cosmo on a weekend night, you were one of tens of thousands of hungry souls. Addled. Cortexes popping. Prey to sundry appetites. What’s next? Where’s next? One of your party was sucked into an eddy of diversion over there and had to be rescued by texted coordinates: Let’s reconnoiter over by the Pai Gow or the chanteuse who’s just mounted the platform by the crystal stairs. Microentertainments popped up here and there like brief sun-showers, suddenly somebody’s singing on a tiny stage for a couple of old standards, and then they split. Poof, into nightlife vapor.

  The Cosmopolitan’s nightclub was called Marquee, up on the terrace. It was quite splendid. Hotel clubs like Marquee had a dependable schedule of colada-soaked pool parties during the day, followed by quiet time for disco naps and “What’s up? Oh, nothing” calls home at dusk, and then another hard skid of partying until dawn. I wanted to stay, I wanted to live there. I’d scoop the hair-balls and condoms from the drains in the pool, whatever. Shecky did business. At every new venue he’d say, “I have to talk to this guy for a minute,” yelling so I could hear him above the electro music, and then confer with his opposite number at this establishment. Nodding, yes, yes.

  Mr. Entertainment had found a home. Vegas hadn’t changed him—he had always been Vegas, now he was more so. Why shouldn’t an enterprising white guy from Philadelphia create a landmark rap magazine, assemble an empire of honeys, ringmaster the billion-dollar nightlife of a hungry city? Follow his dream. Not the American dream but the desert dream of finding your oasis in the wasteland. To everyone else it is a mirage, a trick of the eyes in the infernal heat. Until you lead them to it, and they taste the waters for themselves.

  These were his people, dancing. Seventy-two hours in another city, to try on a new self, this table image. Since the disco was grafted onto a residential structure, access came by way of unadorned fire stairwells, which at peak traffic were inundated with wobbly bachelorettes on stilettos, Jager-blind groomsmen, and leather-skinned jetsetters creaking in crisp designer duds who passed each other up and down the stairs with a delirious urgency. A scene from the inferior American remake of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, or lost footage from The Towering Inferno. I still recognized myself here. Monster places for monster people. Like I said, I wanted to move in.

  Speaking of Brazil. The Rio had been the home of the WSOP the past couple of years. Like a teenager rolling her eyes at her parents’ cornpone ways, the place rejected the architectural kitsch of old-school Vegas—the miniature cityscape of New York–New York, the Paris’s Eiffel Tower replication—to run the streets with the slab architecture of the new megacasinos. But really, what could the Rio have been shaped like? A twenty-story toucan? I’m sure they thought about it.

  The lightly enforced Brazilian theme disappeared altogether once you got to the convention hall, where the World Series had been chugging along for six weeks with a host of lower-stakes Hold’em events, Seven Card Razz, and the like. The declivity of the Hall of Legends was festooned with huge banners featuring the blown-up faces of game greats—devilish Scotty Nguyen, a grim-looking Erick Lindgren, last year’s champ Jonathan Duhamel. Then it was into the rotunda, where you could buy snacks, beef jerky, and WSOP merch. Smack in the middle of the rotunda was a WSOP display, featuring a TV monitor that replayed last year’s Final Table on a loop day and night. When I tried to register the morning of my start, at 6:00 a.m. (I hadn’t been sleeping well, I had been sleeping quite poorly), the announcer’s voice echoed in the empty halls. Nobody there at that hour. Everybody’d seen it already anyway.

  The afternoon of my arrival, the hallways brimmed with desperados, the Pavilion and Amazon Rooms awhir. I stepped into the Pavilion. The first thing I noticed—this was before the size of the room assaulted my brain—was the crickets. The chips clicked and clicked, thousands of players fiddled with their chips, stacking them, tossing them into the pot, scooping them up, dealers counting off All Ins, click click click. Cricket symphony.

  There were more than two hundred tables, ten-seated, which meant they could shoehorn in a lot of runners. It was Day 1B, and the Main Event was under way in the Green Section, the Black Section, etc., while in one corner players ground through satellite games, still hoping to win a seat in the World Series. The buy-in was ten grand, but pay five-hundred-something bucks in a satellite, make it into the top of the field, and you won a ticket to the Big Game. So while Main Event players were washing out just beyond the velvet rope, these bruisers slugged it out for the opportunity. Some of them had been here for weeks. The clock was ticking. If they got bounced, there was time to enter another one, one more last chance. You can play as many as you like, satellite after satellite. Same principle as slot machines, just a lot slower.

  The Amazon Room was smaller, around the corner past the vendors peddling poker primers and arcane table spectacles (“Hide Your Eyes”), the registration areas, and the Poker Kitchen, where you could grab a quick sub or a salad. I assume the name of the joint depended on the current occupants of the convention hall. “Hot Grub” for the entomologists’ annual get-together, and something appropriately farm-to-autopsy table for the forensic scientists.

  The Amazon was where the ESPN cameras roosted. The network’s WSOP programming crept up every year to feed the aficionados. They were spitting out unprecedented coverage this year, on cable and multiple internet streams, so the room was exuberantly branded by the sports channel and the World Series’s main sponsor, Jack Link’s Beef Jerky. What, you don’t like beef jerky? You got your Peppered Beef Jerky, Teriyaki Beef Jerky, it’s a convenient source of protein in an easy-seal pouch. Young correspondents from the trades—Bluff Magazine and Card Player—scooted between the tables, here’s a status report on the big guns, can I snap a pic for the liveblog, something for the fans back home? Portly security guards shuffled between the velvet ropes. You’d almost think there was real money on the felt.

  TV cameras snipered down on the two Feature Tables, which were situated apart from the regular sections, percolating under garish blue and crimson lights. On Day 1C Brad Garrett from Everybody Loves Raymond did his time at one. He was known for his poker acumen, striking a menacing glare from the cover of Bluff, which was blown up and perched on easels throughout the halls. Headline news: “Black Friday: The D.O.J. Shuts Down the Big 3,” referring to the online sites Full Tilt Poker, Absolute Poker, and PokerStars. Brad and his TV brother, Ray Romano, yukked it up while playing, their TV bond no act and still going strong these long years into undead syndication. We should be so lucky.

  Celebrities of various wattage. Jason Alexander, staked by PokerStars, who were keeping up a brave front despite the Feds. Paul Pierce of the Celtics. The rapper Nelly, or so I was told, and Shannon Elizabeth, who was a celebrity, or so I was told. The poker luminaries in their firmament, the guys who wrote the books and cranked out the instructional videos, recognizable from the poker TV shows you may have watched at home or endured in a hotel bar. They were being overthrown, these kings. Was this the Main Event or the Deadliest Game? Doyle Brunson, a.k.a. Texas Dolly (after his collection of vintage Barbies, most of them still in the original packaging), da Godfather, went out two hours into Day 1A. Greg Raymer and Jerry Yang, two former world champions, hit the rails, and Matt Affleck, too. What are you going to do?

  Michael “The Grinder” Mizrachi, whose madcappery had livened last year’s TV coverage, was strafed to bits while crawling on his knees and elbows toward a straight draw. His farewell Saving Private Ryan tweet to his three brothers, who also played: “Officially out of the Main Event!! Sour start to the day!! Good Lucky my brothers!! Sorry left you guys behind!!” If they were going out, what chance a wretch like me? About 1,400 runners atomized by the time I p
layed on Day 1D.

  I railed for two days, watching, trying to get accustomed to the ebb and flow of the place. Listening to the crickets.

  Reward cards and rejuvenating foot massages. Look for sawdust on the floors, and you will not find it. We were not at Binion’s Horseshoe, home of the inaugural World Series. Downtown Vegas, 1970, before TV rights, trade-marked merch, bleached teeth. Only forty-odd years ago, but let’s picture it in sepia, for kicks. There were seven bare-knuckle entrants, cronies of casino owner Benny Binion, and no official prize money. The players voted on the winner, Johnny Moss, who received an engraved silver cup. This year there were 6,856 entrants, and the top 10 percent got paid off, with the champion paying taxes on $8,715,638 in winnings.

  Al Alvarez immortalized the early days of the spectacle in The Biggest Game in Town. That book, and James McManus’s Positively Fifth Street: Murderers, Cheetahs, and Binion’s World Series of Poker, are lively, bravura accounts of the Main Event before Chris Moneymaker’s inspirational fable destroyed the old paradigm. Alvarez—a poet, editor, and essayist—attended the 1981 festivities, which had ticked up to a field of seventy-three warriors. The cowboys still reigned, charging through the sagebrush in a romantic fable of colorful personalities, savage talent, once-in-a-lifetime convergences. “Romance,” Alvarez writes, “because that’s how the poker pros saw themselves: as the last of the gunslingers, ready to showdown with any stranger who dared to take them on.” Pew pew.

  Call me a dandy, sure, but Alvarez’s outlaws with their “Stetsons, embroidered shirts, and bolo ties” were no slackers in the sartorial department. Yosemite Sam and his rootin’-tootin’ glamour are deep in the chromosomes of the game, gunfight lingo permeating the vernacular. Chips are ammo, bullets a pair of Aces. A shootout is a tourney where you advance only when everyone else at your table is exterminated, and in a bounty you grabbed bonuses for cutting down certain players. Polish the chaps and saddle up, boys and girls.