Chemistry of Fire

by Laurence Gonzales

  Amid low yucca and sage brush, I headed into the Moapa Valley against a perfect blue sky. An hour later in Logandale I rolled past a cattle ranch that abuts the town’s main street. Strange sights there to see: tumbledown grain silos very like the ones back home in the corn-growing Midwest. What history bestowed such monolithic reliquaries of rime-leeched masonry on this desert?

  I stopped at the Lost City Museum, with its thirty miles of ruins from 1150 AD. The houses lay crumbling in the scorpion’s northernmost habitat. From the asphalt parking lot, I crossed a small wooden footbridge over a narrow muddy stream and walked up the hill past the museum to look through an adobe ruin out back by the highway. It had been restored to its original conformation. I climbed into its rooms, none larger than a modern bathroom, some smaller. The Anasazi had vanished hundreds of years before, leaving only shards and pictograms. No one, so the sign said, knows why they went away.

  It was eight in the morning when the old park ranger with a goatee arrived in a white pickup truck and got out in his army-green windbreaker and hard cotton slacks that were shiny from wear. He opened the museum house and stood outside smoking a Winston cigarette in the morning air. I said good morning and then asked him why there were grain silos out there in the desert. He snorted and laughed. “Ohhhh,” he said, as if he’d been waiting for someone to ask that very question. “That’s from the days when this whole valley was rich in corn and alfalfa and dairy farms.”

  “Corn?” I asked. “Out here?”

  “Buddy,” he said, “it was all irrigated off the Muddy River and the Virgin River.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “It’s these ditches you see everywhere,” he said. “You walked over one right back there by the parking lot.” His complexion was pale and wind blotched, and he wore black plastic spectacles. “In 1962 when I came here, this valley was green. I mean green. They grew cotton down there,” he said, pointing east. “We grew all the tomato plants for the state of California right here. Had dairy farms with hundreds of cows and grew our own feed. And all of it irrigated from those ditches, just like the Pueblo Indians did a thousand years ago.” (Las Vegas is Spanish for “The Meadows.”)

  He smoked and fell silent, and we both looked around. We were on a slight rise above the two-lane highway I’d taken here, standing in the middle of a vast desert surrounded by the shattered peaks of the Mormon Mountains and the Sheep Range. “What happened?” I asked.

  “Doctors and city people bought the dairies and closed them down. They wanted the farms for a place to live, but they didn’t want to work them. And their heirs don’t want to work them, either. Buddy, kids won’t work a ranch today. They’re subdividing and selling off. When I came here, bottomland was five hundred dollars an acre. Now you’d pay forty thousand dollars for two and a half acres of sand up in them hills just to build a house on.” He paused and took one last pull from his cigarette and then field-stripped it and crushed the burning ember with his toe as it dropped. “Buddy, you can grow anything in this valley.”

  Signs all over the museum said what a mystery it was that the Pueblo and Anasazi had vanished from this amazing miracle of fertility, which they had wrought from the sterile desert. But the park ranger knew the answer. For all the anthropology and geology and paleontology going on under fluorescent lights in glass vitrines in that building, the chips of flint, the stone tools, and the shards of pottery, there was no explanation of that culture quite as succinct as his. They should have put the park ranger on video and let him say, “Buddy, those Pueblo Indians vanished not because it was too poor but because it was too rich. They raised a generation of hip-hop kids who wouldn’t lift a finger and who left for better things they imagined were right on the other side of these mountains. The Anasazi vanished in 1150 because they had other plans.”

  In human history, written and unwritten, that gold-rush mentality, the idea that you can get something without working, has made more than one culture vanish.

  My friend, the award-winning Watergate reporter Larry “Butch” DuBois, came in from Mormon country the next day like the Road Runner on a column of dust. He’s the one who got us to the MGM Grand, with its theme park that rivaled Disney World and paid homage to the success of the Universal Studios Studio Tour. He’s the one who insisted on riding the bumper cars. Jan joined us, and we were probably the only three adults participating, certainly the only journalists intrepid enough for this adventure, racing and screaming across the rusty metal floor in a shower of sparks. The game seemed somehow ancient, both because of its character as a kind of motorized jousting and because of the unsophisticated and clearly hazardous machinery that propelled us. Butch and I finally crashed head on into each other seconds before the power was shut off amid our kamikaze scream.

  “I was a fourteen-year-old kid again!” Butch shouted, as dozens of children departed in ranks, with their heads downcast in solemn contemplation. Butch, a tall half-bald man with a slash of white in his beard, leaped and gesticulated with excitement and cackled with glee. He wanted to go again. He begged us to go on the roller coaster water ride with him, but neither Jan nor Don, who had watched us from a bench among the swarms of families going to and fro in the great amusement park, wanted to get wet.

  I had been in Las Vegas in the early eighties. I recall seeing a lot of old men with teenage girlfriends. Guys in shiny suits who’d never been to a health club. A few dismembered cadavers were still turning up in the desert with comforting regularity then. The only child I saw on that trip was Wayne Newton’s daughter, who happened to be playing on the floor while Wayne’s housekeeper made us hamburgers in his kitchen. Wayne. Good old Wayne. I was writing a profile of Wayne, and he let me fly his Bell Jet Ranger helicopter up the canyon to Lake Mead. Wayne was The Man back then. Wayne was a Las Vegas tradition. You went to Las Vegas, you went to see Wayne at his Aladdin hotel. But that year his show closed early because no one came. I remember hanging out in Wayne’s dressing room before the show with Redd Foxx and the mafia bigwigs from the Teamsters Union eating Cuban pork and rice and telling tall tales. Red Foxx kept everyone in stitches with horribly off-color and racist jokes that wouldn’t have been possible if he had not been black. These were the jokes he could not tell on TV or on stage. But that was another era.

  Today Perego strollers made traffic jams on the strip. The Luxor was a Raiders of the Lost Ark virtual-reality world with a descent into the pyramid and families riding a river barge down an indoor Nile with real banana trees growing on the ersatz banks. For chutzpah, the Luxor the was the winner with its giant sphinx entryway and its 357-foot-tall glass pyramid. For pure size, the MGM Grand was king with its stupendous and dizzying Land of the Lost casino and its thirty-three-acre amusement park out back.

  That night Butch and I prowled Circus Circus. We walked in the back entrance by the Sega R360 fighter plane simulator, and he grabbed my arm, halting our progress, transfixed by the sight of the silver machine with cries of pleasure and alarm issuing from inside the tumbling drum. Butch turned his grave countenance upon me and growled, “Who goes first, you or me?”

  You have to picture him in his tweedy jacket with leather elbows like some Ivy League Graham Greene good-soldier type, lately retired from secret Cold War duty. He strapped into the fighter plane simulator with his sport coat on. I had to hold all the stuff from his pockets while he fought off the enemy planes. Spook turned fighter pilot. When he came out, grinning and sweating, his eyes rolling in their sockets even more than they usually do, he said, breathlessly, “I knew I had to hit more than six fighters, because that’s what those kids were hitting. I had twelve kills in three minutes. Twelve kills!”

  We wandered the vast and seamy reaches of Circus Circus that night. Circus Circus has a huge carnival arcade where no gambling is allowed, and at eleven at night, it was populated by abandoned children, feral Lord of the Flies savages who raped the electronic games with focused concentration and went wild at the old fashioned carnival setups—the china
pitch, the teddy bear pitch, simulated horse races, and my favorite, a game in which the player used a sledgehammer to operate a catapult that launched a stuffed animal on a high trajectory toward a variety of aluminum cooking pots. The floor shook from the action. Ritalin-crazed kids on Sega motorcycles tilted into a virtual green landscape of road and forest, while hormone-powered girls in Indy motorcars raced to quadraphonic symphonies of Zulu drums, and desert tanks clashed in mimicry of the perpetual wars of the Middle East that had formed the backdrop of the children’s entire lives.

  Butch and I pushed through a distinctly blue-collar crowd down to the dark and sweaty circus level. A tawdry net hung beneath the grease-worn trapeze. Coke cups and gum wrappers littered the sticky floor. This then was the embodiment of who we are. Here was that empty-calorie, carny, white-trash world, the slack-jawed indolence of bad afternoon television, all come to suppurating life. It was the underlying spiritual and sociological arc of the middle American living room vomited onto a mammoth slab of roasted limestone concrete for mass consumption in the flesh.

  After a while a man and woman in tights who spoke no English came out and performed quasi-sexual acts while dangling from a trapeze held high enough off the floor that it would hurt them pretty badly if they fell. Their lean and carnal strength was clear in spandex close and tight enough that they could have given anatomy lessons with their bodies, while the sexuality was subsurface enough that the kids, agape in horrified wonder, could see it, but their parents could not. The animal scent of the trapeze artists’ twisting undulations hung in the humid, motionless air. Glistening with sweat, they coupled in the air like high-colored insects, hanging from each other’s ankles and wrists and prehensile toes and finally teeth, squirming and dropping and catching each other with a trust few of us ever achieve with our partners for life. A quartet of secondhand musicians played from the orchestra pit. The drummer, a bald and bearded man in black glasses and a black turtleneck, thrashed at the snare as if trying to kill a rat, while the organist, in a sweat-stained golf shirt, rocked his head back blindly and groped the shattered keyboard of a scarred old Hammond B-3. Their shuffle beat echoed, hollow and forlorn, in the cavernous coliseum over the far-off din of screaming children.

  We wandered down the strip toward the Mirage volcano, where 150,000 gallons of water cascaded every minute in foaming white spray, while gas jets spewed fire, and steam drifted across a crowd of families. “This is the fastest-growing city in America,” Butch said. “And it’s in the middle of the desert. Look at this. Water is everywhere. How can they sustain it? What are we doing to the ecology of the desert?” I say the answer is simple. We can’t keep this up indefinitely. Because Las Vegas gets its water from the Colorado River and aquifers beneath the ground. Both are drying up. And when the water runs out, which it will, the desert will reassert its sovereignty in about four heartbeats.

  Walking the strip at night, we found ourselves at the center of a cold and holy fire. The neon vagina of the Flamingo throbbed and pulsed with soft and lambent tentacles of pubic lightning. I turned back one last time to watch the volcano explode with luminous belchings of propane, great bubbles rising from submerged pipes and billowing into gaseous clouds of fire, while speakers blasted volcano noise, and crowds of people surged against the steel railing, and a cortege of cars crept past.

  Steve Wynn thought up the thirty-two-million-dollar volcano and Treasure Island next door, which displayed pirate ships in combat. Cannons fired, pirates dived from the rigging, and in the end, a British frigate actually sank. If anyone doubts the power of the house advantage, that little 1.414 percent in craps, let them consider the fact that all this entertainment was free. This most amazing show on earth is what they give you just for parking your car. When the archeological record of our civilization is finally read, perhaps it will show a sudden mad nomadic evisceration as mysterious as the disappearance of the Anasazi.

  I went back to the craps table the second night, while Jan was playing roulette and Don was playing blackjack. I like craps, the fast atrial fibrillation of the game. The wicked whiplash ups and downs of fate. I had about $160 in chips in my pocket. I played as I had that first night, placing a red $5 chip on the pass line and betting double odds on any point. I lost approximately $5 a minute until I found myself hitting the leather for another $100 bill, which vanished down the rabbit hole. The twenty red chips the dealer gave me began vanishing, too, at the same brisk pace, despite my assiduously sensible strategy for betting.

  I could feel a cold stone growing in my stomach as my heart grew sick with fear and desperation. I recall one time being deep in the woods, high on a mountain in Glacier National Park, and stumbling upon a cascade of grizzly bear scat, a great, huge steaming pile of it, laden with berries, square in the middle of the path. I was about seventeen miles on foot from the nearest help, and I remembered feeling this sick sensation of my own feeble stupidity at being there at all as my guts turned to liquid. Well, there I was again, staring at a big tumbling pile of grizzly bear scat square in the middle of my path and even farther from help. Don told me, “Your best friend will lay down his life for you, but don’t ask him for five thousand dollars.” He’s right. No matter how bad it gets, when it comes to money, you’re on your own.

  And suddenly, standing at that craps table, I jerked awake in a sweat: standard deviation was the bear that was eating me alive. The tide I’d ridden in on the day before was going back out, and I’d neglected to get off the bongo board. I quickly gathered my remaining red chips, too ashamed even to count them, and jammed them in my pockets, and with black absorption, I slid off into the surging crowds of people jerking the slots.

  I believe there are two schools of gambling. One is the school of fate, in which wild bets are placed on unlikely outcomes. The lottery is such a bet. The other is the school of control, which attempts to understand the rules and odds and to overcome them by skill and clever strategy and a Talmudic adherence to the rules. Losing the second kind of bet always hits harder. Don’s method of playing blackjack was of the control school. He studied blackjack the way an accountant would study the tax code: for loopholes. He practiced at home with a special computer program designed for counting cards. He did not like to talk at the table, the better to keep score. While all around the constant stars wheeled in their random trajectories.

  The other school was exemplified by one of my agents, Howie Sanders, who had come from Los Angeles with his partner, Rich Green. One afternoon Rich and I chased Howie all over the casino as he went wild playing craps and roulette. For him, it seemed, gambling was like the casting of a shamanic spell. The craps table was too mean and serious for him. It simply took his money faster than he could comprehend. He said it was like getting rolled. The roulette wheel really fixed his zoom lens, though. With a hundred dollars in one-dollar chips and thirty-eight places to put them, he could cast his spell. “Five and nine,” he’d call. “Five and nine, and you’re on the nine with me,” he’d say, placing bets by way of a tip for the dealer. “And split the eight there on the corner, gimme two on the twenty-five.” On and on he went in heedless exultation, like Toad of Toad Hall in his brand-new motorcar in The Wind in the Willows.

  Amazingly, against the rotten 5.26 percent house advantage, Howie won for a while, hitting the magic five-and-nine combo that seemed to be his mantra that December afternoon. It was a great stunt, like that guy who tied helium balloons to a lawn chair and was seen some time later by an airline captain as he drifted by at ten thousand feet. But how long could he keep it up? I lay back on the sidelines and kept my powder dry. This was their day in Las Vegas. My original $500 stake was getting light. The craps table had given me third-degree burns, and I’d had a few sessions at the electronic poker machines that I’m ashamed to admit to. So I was feeling the need to conserve my gambling budget.

  I was content to watch and to ponder my strategy, as Howie made wild excursions into the dizzying wonderland of randomness. Of all the people who came to
play, Howie was the most fun. It was like watching rodeo. A small, compact, and gleefully humorous man, he would hang on for dear life until the bronco threw him, and then he’d get up and hang on again, whooping for joy. And when the money was gone, all he had to say was that it had been a hell of a great ride. A man of style and grace, Howie was not about to whimper. He paid for his entertainment even when his entertainment didn’t pay him.

  I was not as hale and hearty by any means. Trying to catch my breath, I grimly whispered to myself, “This is fun, this is fun, this is fun . . .” I pushed through colorful multitudes, the wall of sound and light, a clever effect achieved by the lavish and indiscriminate use of mirrors, synthetic reflecting materials, prismatic lights, and chromatic shifts of shadow and marble. I found Don at a five-dollar blackjack table. I crawled up behind him, gasping, “Help me . . .” and he turned and laughed. I remembered his own experience our first night out. It was late, and we were tired, so Jan and I went to bed, leaving Don deep in concentration at the tables. The next morning, we met in the mall at the New York Stage Deli for breakfast, and Don filed this report. “I broke my cardinal rule,” he said. “I was down three hundred dollars, and I got stubborn. I decided I wasn’t getting up until I had won it back. It’s the worst kind of decision. I was tired, I was discouraged, and I was losing. But I stayed, and I played until I won it all back. Then I got up from the table and went to bed. About 2:00 a.m.” He was tired but seemed satisfied that he had beaten the odds. “The only right thing I did was getting up from the table.”