by Stephen Fry
It’s a magnificent flight: the thrum of those four engines, the clear blue of the sky, the sagebrush and sand of the desert racing beneath us. How lucky I am. Lucky to be doing this at all, especially lucky to be doing it in a heritage flight, not as a bombardier in a shooting war.
Approaching Tucson people look up and wave as American history roars above them, and then…we are on it! I see it! There it is! Row after row after row of aircraft glinting in the sun: jet fighters, stealth bombers, surveillance planes, spy planes, transport planes, helicopters. All so neatly arranged on grass and tarmac, more aeroplanes than are in the air forces of just about every country you can think of, combined. An astounding arsenal. Silent. Sinister. Asleep.
Why are they there? What are they doing? Well, this is Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, once the largest municipal airport in the world, and now the home of the United States government’s Boneyard, the place where decommissioned aircraft come to lie down. The low humidity, infrequent rainfall, and alkaline soil of Tucson make this the perfect place to keep all that metal from rusting.
We land and I say goodbye to Sentimental Journey. The taxi has cleverly arrived here ahead of me and I get in and drive up and down the rows, goggling in amazement. 707s, Phantoms, B-52s and B-1s. There are four and a half thousand aircraft here, I am told, worth around $30 billion.
Each one, on arrival, has its guns, ejection seat charges and all ‘pilferable and classified objects’ removed. The fuel system is drained, refilled with lightweight oil and then drained again. This protects the tanks and lines with a film of oil. The whole plane is then shielded from dust, UV and scorching temperatures by spraying it with a kind of synthetic latex vinyl compound called ‘spraylat’, or, in less dignified cases, it is dressed in a garbage sack, what we would call a bin-liner. For some aircraft this is the end of the line, their spare parts will be cannibalised and sold on. They say this is the only air force base in America that makes a profit. For other aircraft, however, this is not death but a kind of sleep. Once every four years their ignition keys will be turned and engines fired. For one day, one day, my guide assures me, these slumbering dragons may be called upon to serve their country again.
Cactus and Cowboys
This is one of the most beautiful parts of the world I have ever visited. I want to stay here. I want to build a house here and live here for the rest of my life. I dare say the feeling will pass, for I am fickle as flame, but for the moment I find myself to be hopelessly in love. You may think a desert would be too hot for comfort, but the heat here is so dry that the atmosphere is entirely pleasant, you can move around easily in temperatures close to 100º without sweating. Very different from the swampy, sultry south in Louisiana and Alabama or the humid summers of New York and Chicago.
Tucson’s Mountain Park. The Sonora desert. Cactus. The saguaro, pronounced ‘sa-uaro’, is the iconic, tall, comically limbed giant beloved of cartoonists. They often have holes in them where dedicated woodpeckers, finches and a bird called the Golden Flicker make their homes. Their stunning blossom is the state flower of Arizona and produces millions and millions of seeds, one of which, if it is lucky, will sprout in the summer rain and, over fifty to eighty years, grow a side arm and be tall enough to hit a ceiling. They have been known to live for a hundred and seventy-five years and achieve heights above forty feet. They are funny and noble and beautiful and silly and grand all at the same time. Rather like America, come to think of it.
Cowboy Fry bruises his thumb attempting to cock a pistol.
Three Amigos!
If you see a saguaro in a western then the chances are that western was made in the Old Tucson Studios, ‘Arizona’s Hollywood in the desert’. Saguaros don’t grow in Texas, or California or anywhere else really. Just around here and in parts of Mexico.
I am introduced to an actor named Travis, for I have been invited to take part in a shoot-out with some of the team who daily put on Wild West shows. I had expected to be slightly embarrassed by naffness and tackiness. I should have known better. Travis and his colleagues are smart, committed, clever and funny performers. We devise and play out a small and absurd scenario. I bite the dust, pick myself up and mosey over to the old Mexican church where, after a pause for costume changes, my erstwhile colleagues all emerge and perform a show based on the Steve Martin, Chevy Chase, Martin Short comedy classic ¡Three Amigos! It is delightfully funny and filled with physically terrifying stunts and dreadful jokes exquisitely performed.
I suck down a bottle of suds. Yep, this really could be it. This could be the place where I spend the evening of my life. Not the studios, but somewhere near the Saguaro Park, somewhere west of Tuscon within sight of the mountains and the cactus.
NEVADA
‘Where are the representations of casinos, lowlifes, strippers, losers, Elvis impersonators and hookers?’
They have tried to cram into Nevada’s state seal just about as much imagery as it can take. Trains, silver-mining, a quartz mill, snow-capped peaks, telegraph poles, a wheat sheaf, a sickle and a plough in the foreground. Mineral resources, agriculture, natural beauty, transportation and communications. Sounds like quite a state. Hang on. This is Nevada. Where are the representations of casinos, lowlifes, strippers, losers, Elvis impersonators and hookers?
Early settlers on the Old Spanish Trail from Santa Fe to California liked to stop off at a pleasant area in Nevada, a kind of oasis, naturally greened by its underground artesian wells. The Meadows, they called it, Las Vegas. And what is it now?
The extremity of Sin City, as it used proudly to call itself, is itself extreme. A symbol of human kind’s perverse and remorseless will, a symbol of cupidity exploiting stupidity, of capitalism taken to it its furthest limits, of gullibility, fallibility, optimism, cruelty, vulgarity and greed. Some find themselves so grossed out, so appalled and frightened by what Las Vegas is that they turn tail and run, never to return. Some are so instantly grossed in, so entranced and seduced, that they dive headfirst into it all, never to leave. Most, like me, are in more or less equal turns amused, repelled, outraged and enraptured.
A phrase that Europeans and Americans alike were fond of using in the early days of the twentieth century was ‘the Can Do spirit’. America’s ability to solve problems of civil engineering by designing bridges, roads and tunnels bigger and better than any seen before, its habit of throwing up enormous skyscrapers, inventing new gadgets, building whole new cities, devising new ways to serve food, to entertain, to sell, to charm…this brand of energy, optimism, drive and ingenuity was something quite new in the world. It is a quality still alive and nowhere more so than in Las Vegas, where they prove every year that they Can Do just about anything.
Apparently the Venetians have shamelessly copied this traditional Las Vegas canal style.
Vegas depends for its survival on the new, on ever more preposterous and eye-popping achievements in resort-building. They have had no compunction, for instance, in pulling down such historic landmarks as the Sands and the Desert Inn: in fact almost all the great casinos and hotels of the Rat Pack days of the fifties and sixties are now rubble in the foundations of the new. The craze a few years ago was for building cities: New York, Paris and Venice–with all the boring bits left out and all the famous attractions conveniently close to each other. We laugh, of course we do, but most of us cannot but suck in a secret whistle of admiration too. If only all this ingenuity, energy, determination, vision and courage were aimed at something a little less screwy, a little less nakedly concupiscent, a little less pervertedly bogus.
Spy Games
I sit in my slate grey and chromium hotel suite fretting about the fact that I haven’t found a way to turn off its real-flame fireplace, but European eco-guilt has as much place in Las Vegas as a stripper at a synod. Less.
Trixie unfolds the narrative.
The doorbell rings and within seconds I am embroiled in a nightmare of identity, treachery and betrayal. She calls herself Trixie. She wears a raincoat and a
fedora. She tells me that I have been selected to act as a double-agent, a mole: my mission is to infiltrate myself within…well, to be perfectly honest with you, quite what I have to infiltrate myself into is for the moment beyond me. Dark powers working against the common good have conspired, that much is clear. What they have conspired to do is less apparent. The forces of good must be marshalled and the marshalling place is somewhere, it seems, on Howard Hughes Parkway. I have five minutes to get there. Your country needs you.
‘Britain?’
‘America!’ whispers Trixie.
‘Ah.’
‘Remember. At each place you visit there will be a contact. You must give them each one of these tokens. The others cannot know. You must keep your double-agent status secret from them.’
‘The others?’
Trixie and I zip down to the rendezvous in the taxi. I have to let her out before I meet the others, for they must not know that I have been contacted by her. The others, it turns out, are the Chippendales. Yes, the bow-tied male-stripping combo that has for years delighted hen nights and Christmas parties the world over.
I am soon plunged into the guts of this ‘Spy Game’. From first to last I have no idea what is going on, but some quality of American-ness seems to allow the Chippendales to be absolutely clear about the whole proceeding. They accept the spy packs, cell phones and cameras handed to them as if they do this every day.
Spy games have become all the rage in Las Vegas. They are a structured, if expensive, way of seeing the town, and companies also use them for team-building exercises and the like. The players are sent from venue to venue, mostly via the city’s monorail. From Caesar’s Palace to the Mirage, from the MGM Grand to the Flamingo we flit, meeting ‘contacts’–who turn out to be obvious rain-coated, sun-glassed spooks. I manage to offload two of my mole-tokens before the smartest and most mouthy Chippendale, the ‘team-leader’, stops me, bids me empty my pockets and exposes me to all as the mole. Naturally I change sides immediately and am now a triple-agent.
It is all most confusing, but by the end of the afternoon I at least know Las Vegas better than I ever could have done otherwise.
Mormon Calendar Boys
The unique moral outlook of Las Vegas seem somehow to have penetrated even the fastnesses of the Church of Latter Day Saints. The morning after my adventures in espionage, I arrive at a photo studio somewhere off the Strip to find myself surrounded by semi-naked young men whose more than ordinarily sparkling eyes, unblemished skin, gleaming teeth and air of sexless perfection tell me that they are Mormons, members of a church that forswears sex before marriage and stimulants or narcotics of any kind, from caffeine to nicotine and cocaine. These are all good Mormon boys who have done their ‘missionary work’, in other words they have travelled within America, or beyond, wearing white shirts and dark suits and spreading the word of Mormon. This is the second year of their (strictly topless and genital-free) calendar. It raises money for charity and seems to have won the reluctant acceptance of the Church Elders back in Salt Lake City.
I chat to Cody, a personable nineteen-year-old who is happy to discuss any part of his religion to me. He is surprised and pleased, I think, to learn that I do not find his faith particularly absurd, in the way many mainstream Christians do. I forbear telling him that the reason I do not find Mormonism especially ridiculous is because I find all pretend invisible friends, Special Books and their rules equally ridiculous. Mormon ideas about realms of crystal rebirthing and special underpants are no weirder than the enforcing of wigs and woollen tights on orthodox Jewish women or laws and dogmas about burkhas and Virgin Births. The religion of the Latter Day Saints is not deserving of especial contempt simply because it is newer. It is as barmy as the rest and I cheerfully treat it as such. It has the same impertinent views concerning women and gays, of course, but Cody is clearly embarrassed about this and says with a touch of defensiveness, ‘We aren’t as bigoted as some fundamental Christians.’ Mm. Yes. Well. I bid my farewells and head for Reno and some good old-fashioned hookers.
A Mormon missionary poses for a calendar shoot.
Stop press: apparently the man who arranged this calendar shoot, himself a devout Mormon, has been excommunicated, or whatever the saintly Latter Day equivalent is, for bringing the church into disrepute. Seems to me the elders have done that by making arses of themselves once again.
Susan showing off the Italian premium suite at the Wild Horse Ranch.
The Wild Horse Ranch
All my large, lazy, liberal contempt for religious codes of behaviour seeps away from me as I approach the town of Sparks, NV and face the prospect of hanging around a brothel. Suddenly I am a model of moral disapproval and prudish distaste. Must I really do this?
The first legalised brothel in Nevada was opened by one Joe Conforte in the 1950s. The Mustang Ranch became famous the world over. Conforte ran into trouble over taxes however and skipped the country. The federal government, as a way of ‘garnishing’ and reclaiming moneys, ran the outfit themselves. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the feds didn’t have the first idea how to run a cat house so they closed the Mustang and sold it, I kid you not, on e-Bay. There’s a film there, surely?
We fast forward to the present day: the Mustang has been bought and moved, brick by brick and beam by beam, to the compound where the Wild Horse Ranch stands, both now owned and run by Susan Austin. In honour of Joe Conforte she has redecorated the lobby of the Mustang in an Italian villa style.
Working girls relaxing between clients.
Susan was herself a working girl before she met and fell for Lance Gilman, a local businessman. His money and her experience in the field have propelled the Wild Horse and Mustang to the forefront. I sit and lunch with her in the ‘viewing room’ of the Wild Horse. This is a place where clients come to pick out the girl of their choice from a line-up.
Susan is a passionate advocate for legalised prostitution. As a working Madam, she believes that a safe, pimp-free environment where drugs are not tolerated and safe sexual practices are obligatory is infinitely preferable to the predatory, dangerous, disease and drug-ridden world Out There.
When she was a ‘working girl’, Susan had a great time, she says. She loved sex, so she loved her work. She inculcates the same enthusiasm in her girls. Doctors and shoulders to cry on are always available. The girls are healthy and happy.
Hm. I agree with her that this legalised situation is infinitely preferable to prostitution on the streets, where there is no licensing and there are no safeguards. But none of that makes it a pleasant or attractive profession in my eyes. I am shocked at how old-fashioned I am. More shocks are to come.
Susan shows me a room where the girls ride a vibrating toy. She claims that they gush and splash so much at their moment of climax that the watching men get soaked. This is of course all a way of trying to persuade me (and the BBC audience of potential customers) that the girls enjoy themselves and that their orgasms are not only genuine, but overpowering and spectacular. I am not so innocent that I do not know that believing this is, for some reason, important to many men. I believe it slightly less than I believe good Mormons are rebirthed in crystal realms.
Another room is used for DCs. The men and their chosen girl/s go in there to negotiate. Once practices and pricing are agreed the man has to submit his penis to health inspection. DC stands for Dick Check. Mandy, one of the girls, is wheeled out to tell me how much she enjoys her work, how much she loves the sex. Hm.
Next I am shown the ‘premium’ suites, which are decorated in Italian, Hawaiian and Chinese style, all very faux, but to be fair no faux-er than most three or four star hotels. Tantric chairs are a feature of all the suites. I can’t help observing how gleamingly clean everything is. Susan tells me that the girls know that they absolutely must lay down sheets, so that the expensive furniture and decorations in the suites are protected from the smears and skid marks of juiced-up and lubricated love-makers. Ah. Of course. How romantic.
Part
of my living is made by doing a TV show that is often adult (in other words childish) in its content, but I have to confess that after four hours in the Wild Horse and Mustang ranches I feel like lying in a bath and listening to a Noddy tape.
Susan is right. I have no business to disapprove. Sex is real. Men want it. Operating a brothel should be no weirder than running a restaurant, where the most outré appetites can also be attended to for money. And yet…
Virginia City
Susan sits in the back of the cab and directs me up the mountain to Virginia City, an old silver-mining town that has kept its character better than most. This is where the famous Comstock Lode was worked, a massive silver mine that yielded, in today’s values, upwards of $600 billion of ore.
I sip a sarsaparilla at the bar, still taking in the shocks of the morning and afternoon. All around me men and women with beards and accents that seem to come right out of a western fling down their whiskeys and sip their beers. A man called Zeke rides into the saloon on a horse. Virginia is that kind of a roughty-toughty place.
I feel perhaps I have had it with Nevada. Charming as she is, her main features are all too much for an innocent East Anglian.
Happily, my final memories of the state are destined to be of dramatic and overwhelming beauty. I say goodbye to Susan and drive further up the mountain, descending at Lake Tahoe. The state line is not far now.
Sometimes clichés are unavoidable so I forgive myself for yelling…‘California, here I come…’