Babylon

To be honest, it’s never before occurred to me to visit Las Vegas. Images of cheesy lounge singers and feather-bottomed chorus girls dance before my eyes when I think of that town...and Elvis in his polyester bell bottoms and aviator shades. I’m not a gambler (not even slots), so why bother?

This year, though, summer came ever so reluctantly to Vancouver. Each day I awakened to the same leaden skies, with temperatures as low as 12° Centigrade some mornings, despairing of ever wearing sandals on my feet again. One such grey, damp evening, right before the Canada Day long weekend, I decided I’d had enough. Where could I go to escape the oppressive cloud cover forecast to plague the long weekend? Not Vallarta...thunder and lightning. Not Hawaii (see Vallarta). So I checked out the five day forecast for Vegas and there they were: five little sun symbols, all in a row, accompanied by temperatures of 100° Fahrenheit and above. My mind was made up.

That’s how I ended up going to Las Vegas. It’s possible I may go again, I suppose, but not very likely. The planets may align in such a way as to compel me to escape from the sodden rain forest, yet again. I can accept that this may happen. I kind of hope not, though. I have discovered that Las Vegas is none other than Babylon itself; the very asshole of the Beast and not for the reasons the TV preachers tell you, either. Las Vegas is America’s subconscious. It’s the truth under the thundering sermons and all those imperative Family Values. It is Babylon in the desert; corporate culture laid bare for all to see, if you can see past the lights, the feathers, the bread and the games.

It’s not the gambling, so much, that disturbs. It’s not the drinking (I like to shoot a few back, myself). It’s not the roving packs of early onset alcoholic 20-somethings that stagger about amidst the twinkly lights, or their apparent self-obsession. It’s not even the 24 hour hum of lights that never go out, the roar of Harleys parading the strip as a salve to middle age, or the cackles of the Boschian hordes, celebrating a pile of nickels. There is so much more about Vegas that chills my blood.

Consider that to walk down the Strip, one has to pass dozens and dozens of sparsely compensated men and women, handing out business cards promoting legal prostitution. They wear t-shirts emblazoned with the words “GIRLS TO YOU IN 20 MINUTES” and a 1-800 number. It occurred to me, as I refused card after card offered to me by these people, that many of them might be undocumented. No matter. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Piping hot to your hotel! Fresh chicken, chow mein, sweet n’ sour pork. Girls. Girls. Girls. Fast food to you...in twenty minutes. Just girls, like me. Dumb girls to be consumed and discarded, a wrapper lying in the gutter the only remembrance of the moment another man bought them. Bodies are for sin and this is Sin City.

There were both men and women engaged in the activity. I wonder how much they were paid by the pimps (known to some as businessmen) to commodify women in the streets of Las Vegas. Probably not much in this America where cheap labour is sought out via cross-border solicitation, but no documentation provided. Where people are bid “come”, with one hand and “get out”, with the other.

But the pimping doesn’t even begin to stop there. It continues, poolside. Overheard:

Thirtyish woman: “So, are you gonna fuck Nicole?”

Early twenties male: “What about you?”

Thirtyish woman: “I have a boyfriend. I don’t do that.” (But she will pimp for her pal).

Eyes are razor like, examining the bodies of others. A couple spends the afternoon seeking out a third (a woman, of course), languidly eyeing up possibles. I fall under their gaze and look away, sliced open and exposed to their lascivious hungers; bored with each other to the point of self-destruction. Flesh is cheap here. It’s a fabric, not human, not with blood. We wear it, we tan it, we give it away to someone we don’t know just for the hell of it. We have another drink and put another nickel in the slot machine. Next. Back at the casino, the hunt for satiation continues. Buffet-fattened males in toupees prowl listlessly among the slot machines and roulette wheels, cradling condensation-speckled cocktails, leering after the procession of skirts, booze-addled. A cocktail waitress with a Rose-Marie bow in her hair moves among them, navigating as a ship would around icebergs; wary and vigilant.

People come to Vegas to gamble and gorge. While I know of no actual, functioning Vomitorium in the city, surely there should rightfully be one. There should a place of purging, facilitating an ever-escalating bacchanal of excess in this, the symbolic terminus of Western Civilization’s decline. Imagine all the wandering packs of revellers, barfing into a trough with abandon, only to lurch out into the night for yet another round of gamblin’ n’ gorgin’. I suppose this might be putting too fine a point on it, though, for people come here to forget the banality of their everyday lives. They come to burst open the puritanical shell of propriety they wear to be “nice” and “good”. They come to get their nasty on. Why vomit up all that money you’ve spent to get unconscious? Why vomit up all that fine booze, all that groaning buffet? A waste, to be sure. One doesn’t want to see the evidence of one’s grievous excess swimming in a puddle of vomit, whirling down a drain with that of one’s fellows. Better to hold it in; to toxify, good and proper, than to see it. Turn off your inner voice and keep swilling. Tomorrow, Western Civilization will still be in decline. The day after, perhaps submerged in a sea of tar balls and dead oceans; the corpses removed under cover of night.

I went to Vegas, too. I went for the weather and came home with food poisoning from some room service scampi. That is where I have chosen to locate the source of my nausea. In two and one half hours, I vomited once, twice, a third time. In the great tradition of the privileged (for I count myself among that select group), I went where the weather suited my clothes. I burned across the sky in an airplane, belching fossil fuels, to a city where the lights are never turned off. I descended into the belly of the Beast; the great, leering pimp at the Terminus of Western Civilization and beheld its ugliness: an alien creature, disguised as a facsimile of a grinning, Pagan god. But it was not Bacchus I met there. It was Mammon, it was Mot, it was Ahriman: greed, death and evil. I now know what was keeping me away.

What happens in Vegas is supposed to stay there. It is supposed to be buried under the sands of the desert, concealed and forgotten, as the sinners of Sin City return to their jobs, their wives, their husbands, their children and their properly industrious and upright lives. But I confess. As the waters of chaos close in, all around us, Las Vegas is already a remembrance on the way to a forgetful death, under the sands of the desert, at the foot of those painted hills. I close my eyes and picture it, submerged, people on horseback marvelling at the decadence of the late 21st Century and wondering how it was that such a society could have lasted as long as it did.

I confess that I built Babylon, with my own hands.