Peter walked in.
He wants to sit in the chair, Jimmy said helplessly.
Peter snapped off the air-conditioning. He loves that chair, Peter said. All right, come on old man, Peter said. He easily transferred Luther into the recliner. Has he eaten? To Luther: Have you eaten?
Luther shook his head slowly. Smiled.
All on a summer’s day.
• • •
Though I found no school in town or library or government building named in his honor, my vote for the founding father of today’s Las Vegas would go to Herbert Clark Hoover, the thirty-first president of the United States. Hoover signed the bill funding the construction of the great dam that today bears his name.
In 1928 Hoover won the presidential election by a wide margin. A year later, the stock market crashed, leading to the Great Depression. Americans blamed Hoover for a financial collapse he did not cause but could not cure. Thus did Hoover, a superabundantly competent man, become a byword for incompetence. “Hoovervilles”—encampments of destitute Americans—sprang up across the country.
After President Hoover authorized the construction of the dam at Black Canyon, the state of Nevada revoked its ban on gambling. Las Vegas did not feel the brunt of the Depression, in part because as many as five thousand men found work, albeit dangerous work, building the dam. Las Vegas conspired with human nature to provide the laborers with weekend entertainments that would separate them from their pay.
In the winter of 1933, President Hoover was obliged to travel from the White House to the Capitol in the backseat of an open limousine alongside Franklin D. Roosevelt, the patrician president-elect. In a flickering news clip, we see the two men exchanging a few words as the car moves up Pennsylvania Avenue. Roosevelt spontaneously raises his hat to the crowd. Hoover’s face is constrained with discomfort; he resembles W. C. Fields, the comic tragedian.
Two years later, in 1935, President Roosevelt passed through Las Vegas on his way to dedicate the new dam; he called it Boulder Dam, as did other members of his administration, and so it was called for fourteen years. Only a motion by a later Republican Congress would cement Hoover’s name to the project that changed the West.
By whichever name, Hoover Dam was evidence that Nature could be harnessed: that the unruly Colorado River could be made to water the dry land of several western states, that the power generated from the controlled flow of water could light up the night.
• • •
Good Friday. Yellow tulips, closed and as thumpable as drumsticks, are massed at the entrance of the coffee shop at the Bellagio. They remind me of those phalanxes of acid-yellow flowers from behind which desert tyrants address the world with frown, and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command.
In Percy Bysshe Shelley’s burlesque of royal pride, “Ozymandias,” a desert traveler comes upon two vast and trunkless legs of stone, beside which, half buried in the sand, lies a toppled royal visage. Some long-dead artisan has incised on the monument’s pedestal a deathless boast:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Over millennia, rulers of desert kingdoms, and not only rulers but prophets, and not only prophets but shepherds, but slaves, but women, have brooded on impermanence. There is not another ecology that so bewilders human vanity. Thus must palace engineers and the slaves from foreign lands be pressed into raising Pharaoh’s pyramid over and against all, withstanding dynasties of sand and wind. It is a testament to the leveling humor of Las Vegas that Pharaoh’s dream of eternity is mocked by the pyramid of the Luxor Hotel. The Luxor’s pyramid is not made of limestone blocks but of rectangles of smoked glass that reflect and appear to change density according to the constant fluctuations of the desert sky.
In 1972 Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour published an architectural monograph, Learning from Las Vegas, in which they celebrated the disregard for history, for propriety, for landscape in the architecture of suburban sprawl—Wienerschnitzel Chalets, Roundtable Castles, Golden Arches—an attitude best exemplified, they wrote, by the Las Vegas Strip. Their homage came at a time when East Coast architectural schools were in thrall to postwar European brutalism and city planners disregarded any necessity for delight.
In the years following the sensational Venturi–Scott Brown–Izenour essay, “old” low-rise casinos along the Strip were replaced, one by one, by grandiose hotel towers that, nevertheless, at ground level, invited tourists to inhabit cinemascopic fantasies: Rome. Egypt. Venice. Las Vegas was constructing an elaborate jest against the instinctive human fear of impermanence. Las Vegas cajoled its visitors to be amused at what the Romantic poet and the ancient prophet regard as the desert’s morbid conclusion. The Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building, Caesars Palace—nothing in the world is rooted, nothing is permanent, nothing sacred, nothing authentic; architectural conceits are merely that.
Herbert Hoover died of a massive hemorrhage on October 20, 1964, in Suite 31-A at the Waldorf Towers in New York City. He is buried at the Herbert Hoover Library in West Branch, Iowa—the town where he was born.
• • •
No truer daughter does Las Vegas have than Dubai on the Persian Gulf, with its penthouse views of the void, its racetrack, its randy princes, its underwater hotel. Dubai and the oil-rich Arab kingdoms have purchased an architecture of mirage that is incongruous, and, therefore, defiant of the desert. Dubai has water slides, an ice palace, an archipelago of artificial islands in the shape of palm trees. The geometry that springs from the desert’s plane is an assertion of human inanity in the face of natural monotony.
Even the sacred city of Mecca has taken some calibration from Las Vegas. Within the precincts of the Grand Mosque in Mecca stands the holiest site in Islam—a stone building without windows that was built in ancient days by Abraham and Ishmael. The Gate of Heaven is located directly above the cubical structure called the Kaaba. The Kaaba, covered with black silk draperies, represents the fixed point where the eternal and the temporal intersect, and around which the tide of living humanity circumambulates, counterclockwise.
For the infidel—for me—the Kaaba represents what is ancient beyond recall, but for the faithful, the Kaaba is a touchstone: affixed to a corner of the Kaaba is the Black Stone of Heaven, a stone given to Abraham by the Angel Gabriel.
Today looming over the tiny black cube is the Makkah Clock Royal Tower, a tower reminiscent of Big Ben—a much bigger Ben—taller than the World Trade Center, with a golden crescent as its finial. Within the Makkah Clock Royal Tower is the eight-hundred-room Fairmont hotel. At its base there is a mall with four thousand shops. The Bin Laden Group, the engineering firm founded by the father of Osama bin Laden, is responsible for the overscale buildings set down upon Mecca.
Percy Bysshe Shelley died by drowning at the age of twenty-nine on July 8, 1822, when a small schooner was lost in a storm off the coast of Italy. Shelley’s body was recovered from the sea and burned in a funeral pyre on the beach, after the ancient Greek fashion. Shelley’s heart was not consumed by the flames and was buried under a motto devised by his friend Leigh Hunt—Cor Cordium (“Heart of Hearts”)—in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome.
• • •
The Bellagio Conservatory and Botanical Gardens occupies a volume of cubic space reminiscent of a nineteenth-century train station. People come and go. There are hundreds of tulips and bluebells and daffodils, foxgloves, hollyhocks; there is a dense, loamy smell. There are false flora and fauna among the real—bees, ants, ladybugs, butterflies, giant poppies, toadstools. Georgic implements of gigantic scale (flowerpots, watering cans, hoes) are strewn among the flora as if abandoned by a race of giants. Most wonderful are leaping, flashing jets of water that materialize and disappear in midair. These I watch for many minutes, knowing the water or fluid must be encased in a translucent conduit, like Luther’s oxygen tube, but I c
annot see the tubes, cannot detect how it is done.
The Bellagio’s floral exposition is a celebration of spring and does not attach itself semantically or symbolically to Easter.
On Good Friday afternoon I am stalled on Interstate 95; I am on my way to the hospice. The commuters surrounding me are headed out of town for the weekend or into town for the weekend, so there is that much of pending Easter, but nothing of Good Friday, beyond my own lonely sense of appropriate Good Friday weather (overcast, as in the Sacramento Valley of my childhood). The van ahead of me has a sign in Spanish on its bumper: ONLY GOD KNOWS IF YOU WILL RETURN. I try to recollect the Russian novel or memoir; I think it is one of the childhood reminiscences of Gorky, but the scene memory serves is too dimly lit for me to recognize the woman who stands at the window in pale, pinkish light. In fact, I do recognize her, but she is the wrong woman at the wrong window, the wrong light and season; she is a woman from a Pre-Raphaelite painting—Mariana by Millais—whose back is fatigued. Everything in the provincial Russian room behind the wrong woman is in readiness—the spoons, the linen, the breakfast breads, the samovar; she has stayed behind; the others have gone to midnight Mass, miles away. It is the dawn of Easter. The woman imagines the vibration of cathedral bells through the frozen air and the cracking of ice beneath the blades of the sled. Only God knows if they will return.
Luther is in bed; the head of the bed is raised. Jimmy is sitting in a chair beside the bed. Peter has gone to the airport to pick up Andrew and John. The oxygen prong is out of Luther’s nose; the tube snakes under the pillow. Do you want the oxygen tube? Jimmy asks.
Luther nods.
What difference does it make? OK, something to do, I think to myself as Jimmy hooks the loop behind Luther’s ears. Within two minutes Luther has torn the prong away. His breath is clotted with phlegm, like Maya Lin’s Silver River.
Luther’s eyes slide toward Jimmy on a slow tide of consciousness. Light, he says. You want the light on? Jimmy asks. Light, Luther says again, flicking his hand slightly. Then, summoning all his power: You are in the light. Oh, sorry, says Jimmy; he moves his chair toward the foot of the bed. Luther flicks his hand again: More. Jimmy moves farther away. Luther seems momentarily delighted by the power of his wrist. I don’t know if he means he can’t see Jimmy because Jimmy is sitting in front of the window or if Jimmy is blocking light that is precious. After Jimmy makes one further move, Luther nods, smiles, sleeps. Either way.
• • •
Entr’acte
On YouTube: The lights dim. A kettledrum rumbles through the pit as the silver limousine drives forward onto the stage’s reflecting surface. Light pours from the proscenium like rainbow melt. The chauffeur hops to; he crosses in front of the limousine to stand at attention, his hand poised on the handle of the downstage door. The strafing beams fuse into a single column of preternaturally white light as the chauffeur opens the door.
Liberace emerges; Liberace unfolds; Liberace pops; his arms open wide—O glory! He wears a sequined Prince Regent suit and a white fur coat with silver lamé lining and a Queen Isabella collar as high as a wingback chair. The chauffeur kneels—knighthood is in flower—and adjusts his Master’s train, twenty paces of fur carpet. Somehow Liberace now holds a microphone (diamonds on his fingers); the chauffeur must have passed it to him when we were looking elsewhere.
Liberace questions the audience: “Do you know what kind of car this is?”
Golly.
“It is a silver Rolls-Royce. I bought it in England and brought it back here.”
We bid farewell to the chauffeur. We give him a hand. His name is Thorn. Or Thor; we didn’t quite . . . “We’ll see more of Thor later,” Liberace promises with lupine relish. Thor drives the limousine off, stage left. Another round of applause for Thor. For Rolls-Royce. For England!
Liberace addresses us as the Big Bad Wolf might address an infant or a canary or a little lamb lost—a petting voice, not unkind. Necessarily, he supplies all the answers to his petit catechism. It is exactly the cadence and the Socratic method of Mister Rogers. He tugs the tonnage of his train along the lip of the stage. To some women seated in the first row: “Yes, you can feel it. Do you want to feel it? It’s nice, isn’t it? Do you know what it is?”
Golly.
“It is virgin fox! I had this made for a command performance I gave for Her Majesty, the Queen of England.”
Press PAUSE.
Regard the rapacious eye the Wolf casts over his audience; he wets his lips as the women in the first row reach forth gingerly to pat his plush. An invitation to pull the fox’s tail is an example of Las Vegas’s complicated negotiation with the middle class. The middle-class tourist is invited to approach luxury on a budget, as long as she loses money. Your AARP membership card will get you an upgrade; hotcakes come with the room; parking is free. On his side of the footlights, Liberace is permitted to play the last sissy in America as long as the women in the front row agree to pretend to believe that Liberace is a great friend of the Queen of England; that Liberace is a sleeping prince who just hasn’t found the right woman; that Thor has a chauffeur’s license.
Liberace died on February 4, 1987, in Palm Springs, California. He is entombed in Forest Lawn Memorial Park (Hollywood Hills), Los Angeles.
• • •
The only time I hear Peter—or any of the staff at the hospice—refer to the Strip hotels, it is with reference to parking. Peter likes to park at the Flamingo; he says the exits are easy and some of the hotel’s vintage modernist fixtures interest him. An aide at the hospice asks me where I am staying. “I used to park at the Bellagio,” she says, “but now I park at the Renaissance.” (As far as I can tell from my precious few conversations with the citizens of the real Las Vegas, the Strip is a free parking lot.)
The last time I was in Las Vegas it was to give a speech on public education. An emissary of the association I was to address picked me up at a small hotel I can’t remember and drove me to a vast Greco-Gonzo extravaganza along the Strip I can’t remember.
The next morning, the same emissary took me on a tour of the city before my plane departed. The Angel Moroni blew a summons eastward atop the Mormon Cathedral. Many miles of stucco; miles and miles of sky. At a café, I expressed surprise at the façade normalcy of domestic Las Vegas.
“But that’s just what Las Vegas is,” my companion replied. “The real Las Vegas is normal. An air force town, a university town. We are forming a symphony orchestra.”
A normal American city does not have hundreds of hotels whose headliners are stitched-up gods and goddesses, whose entertainments are plumed masques, parodies of human sacrifice.
• • •
All week I have been puzzling how a city as defiant of death as Las Vegas can provide a hospice on North Buffalo Drive that is as morally and functionally serious as the one that harbors Luther.
Solo Dios sabe si volverá. Henry David Thoreau schoolmarmed his nineteenth-century countrymen with the assertion that one could not be a true traveler unless one left one’s gate with no certainty of return. The art of walking involves an ability to saunter—the word derives from a French expression for people who have no homeland (sans terre), or from the French word for Holy Land—Sainte Terre—which became the noun used to identify religious pilgrims, sainte-terres. They have no particular home, Thoreau writes, but they are “equally at home everywhere.”
Family trips of my childhood always began with a prayer. I suppose when one goes on vacation, one is courting death in some fashion, tying the morgue tags onto one’s suitcase. But then, too, vacations are respites from death, from thoughts of death. I have sometimes wondered why friends under medical death sentences have undertaken arduous trips or undertaken arduous labors. To put some distance between themselves and death—the obvious answer.
Once, at Westminster Abbey, I paused to read the epitaph of Edmund Spencer:
; HEARE LYES (EXPECTING THE SECOND
COMMINGE OF OVR SAVIOVR CHRIST
IESVS) THE BODY OF EDMOND SPENCER,
THE PRINCE OF POETS IN HIS TYME
WHOSE DIVINE SPIRRIT NEEDS NOE
OTHIR WITNESSE THEN THE WORKS
WHICH HE LEFT BEHINDE HIM.
HE WAS BORNE IN LONDON IN
THE YEARE 1553 AND
DIED IN THE YEARE
1598.
The expressed hope of dust, pronounced in a present tense, dizzied me. Westminster Abbey might crumble—must crumble—Spencer’s vigil will continue until the end of time. I was leaving London that afternoon. A storm was forecast. I imagined an airplane spiraling upward into a black sky.
One can become overwhelmed on vacation—I have become so—by thinking thoughts that are too large. There is a condition identified in psychology textbooks as the Stendhal syndrome, also called, or related to, the Jerusalem syndrome, that describes a tourist’s overwhelmed response to great works of art or to a sudden apprehension of scale, antiquity, multitude, death—the accompanying fear is of one’s insignificance, but also of squandered opportunity.
Of course, a vacation city must be defiant of death, a desert city like Las Vegas doubly so, for it is a city built on a desolate landscape. My predicament is that I am here for death and the city of distraction is in my way.
• • •
Never had I seen blacker hair or whiter skin or a being more made for limelight. Elvis Presley appeared within a ten-thousand-watt corolla—The Messiah of Memphis. He was romantic, agile, potent. He wore a chest-baring Prince Charming jumpsuit—the “Burning Flame of Love” costume, designed by Bill Belew. Presley was already, that night in 1969, playing to the midnight sun—both feet planted in the Liberace–Peggy Lee weird. He stood very still. His nostrils dilated as though he smelled the crowd in a feral way.
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