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United States: Lost in Las Vegas by April Thompson

It's the old chicken-and-egg question: Are people fat because they come to Las Vegas, or do they come to Vegas because they're fat? The other conundrum that plagues me in Sin City: Why am I here? More precisely, why am I -- who does not like to drink Bud or eat steak; watch TV or vaudeville; marry, divorce or pick up hookers; work on the perfect sunburn; or throw money into a hole, never to be retrieved -- here?

To answer the first engima, I approached the Vegas altar: the Buffet. Eschewing the 99-cent shrimp cocktail, I "splurged" an unlucky $13 on the stylish luncheon at the new Bellagio hotel. Its supermarket of dishes could easily give an eater an anxiety attack and put her in a diabetic coma. Bowls of mixed chocolates and baskets of focaccia, cow and pig killed and cured two dozen ways, seven varieties of seafood salad, five kinds of pickle and everything else edible, short of a partridge in a pear tree.

It was clear that people were fat here because they ate too much chicken *and* eggs. The second engima didn't surrender an answer so easily, so I set out on the town to discover why Vegas had lured me here.

The tourist's Vegas boils down to the Strip, four miles of casinos and their bewildering mazes of hotel towers, restaurants, theaters, shops, rides and chapels. At north end is the "Fremont Street Experience". This is casino skid row, the white-trash roots of modern Vegas. These joints use gimmicks like free popcorn and champagne cocktails (i.e., wine coolers) to get cheapskates to part with a few nickels.

From Rome to Rio, ancient Egypt to medieval England, every Strip hotel has a theme that recurs like a nightmare. The rooms at the Luxor (itself a glass pyramid) feature obelisk-shaped shampoo bottles and papyrus-column wardrobes. Treasure Island stages a live pirate battle in its Buccaneer Bay. Excalibur's moving walkway says, "Keep to the right in case a knight comes by to rescue a damsel in distress!" Paris!, the newest city on the block, has a rather large Eiffel Tower out front. You get it.

The constant in the Vegas equation? The soothing hum of slot machines being played en masse. From the second you step off the plane, it summons you leave time and join the trance. The lights are dim; there are no windows. Slot players are tao masters of ash. They smoke without the cigarette ever leaving their mouth. (What's not often heard is the payoff, a lovely tambourine of quarters tapping tray. )

Back in daylight, the Strip offers the best free show in town. Its soundtrack is eighties music cranked from casinos. Its sidewalks are a grotesque spectacle of rouge and hair dye, varicose and celluose. Tons of pasty flesh, splotched desert red and clad in neon, clump up at the Strip's eternal stoplights. Gals and guys, often Latino immigrants desperate for work, accost them with flyers for stripper studs and girls girls girls.

Wide roads, long lights, big people -- everything on the Strip is exponentially larger than in the normal world. At last count, the town boasted nine out of the world's ten largest hotels; its total number of rooms recently topped 100,000.

Some 50,000 people move to Vegas a year. Still, ask locals what's so great about the place and they'll answer the weather. That's like saying a blind date has a nice personality. An ex-co-worker living here gave me a tour of strip malls and subdivisions. "There is no street for window shopping," she said darkly. She left me her bicycle to explore Vegas further, if I didn't believe her.

We visited another friend's 'hood, a quiet version of Hell involving communism and Martha Stuart. She showed off her lawn, explaining the laborious process of creating green squares in a wasteland. The driest spot on the continent, Las Vegas uses more water than any other place in America -- some 300 gallons per person per day!

During my visit, Park Place announced plans to acquire Caesar's World for $3 billion in cash. AA and the FBI recently held conferences here. The area's first white settlers were Mormons.

But no one else laughed. This is the Vegas terror: no sense of the irony in this Grimm fairy tale, set in the desert; no sense of anything but what's designed to charm the eye. People buy "Rehab is for Quitters" t-shirts and ashtrays for Pat's Butts -- and mean it.

Vegas is such an easy target that I got tired of picking on it. Why was I here? Maybe to see that Sin City could bring out my worst vices, too -- judgmentalism and hypocracy. Maybe to strip away my cynicism long enough to see the beauty in the beast.

At sunset, just before the night neon takes over the sky, Vegas is gentle. Mirrored casinos catch gold clouds in their facades. Everyone holds hands and gazes at the moon, rising above the Eiffel Tower.

I peddle into the night, crickets chirping and warm wind on my face. Neon jewels -- the Flamingo's pink, feathered lotus, the Stardust's retro diamonds -- sparkle against black velvet sky. It's a new night, a fresh chance to win big. For a moment, I'm not smiling at them, I'm smiling with them.
 

Narrative by April Thomson.  April is a prolific writer and has been published in multiple books and magazines.  Her website is  www.aprilwrites.com

United States: Shunpiked By Jessica Johnson

The first time I shunpiked I had no idea what it was. All I knew was that I liked the jingle of change in my pocket rather than a toll basket, and preferred winding two-lanes freckled with shade to glaring halogen street lamps and the roar of eighteen wheelers. Since then I have learned the "official term" for sticking to the backroads: literally "shunning the turnpike". Shunpike.

A young girl, a stick shift and miles of solitary road can be a magnificent thing. Since that day, I have shunpiked solo through twenty-six of the United States, one more than my number of years. I can tell you what the mid-May sun looks like on the back of a cottony lamb in Maine. I could tell you how the fog clings to the trees at the bottom of Buffalo Canyon in the Ozarks. I have driven enough to be able to say, "Yes, there are steep hills in Kansas." But no experience so far could compare to a slow drive on a tawny August morning, heading west on farming service roads through South Dakota.

I had camped the night before in Palisades State Park on the outskirts of Garretson, in Minnehaha County. My small car was becoming used to main thoroughfares made of gravel and I had a healthy layer of dust to prove it. Pulling out of the park, the morning dew was just beginning to burn off the tall grass in the ditches. I headed due north on County Road 115, a farming service road; twenty miles of crisp, green landscape later, I turned left onto Route 34. 34 passes through Madison, which is considered a large town in South Dakota because it has a McDonald's. Past Madison are the farming towns of Junius, Vilas, Fedora, Artesian and Woonsocket. It is not uncommon to pass muddy tractors meandering between fields on this road, inching along at 9 miles an hour.

On the pristine honeycomb meadows north of the interstate, my heart quickened its pace as I crested the steep hill about six miles north of Rt. 281. I didn't know what I'd see, but it was the furthest I'd ever been from home. To some people it may have just been "The Midwest", but to me it was the height of exoticism. I held my breath and took my foot off the gas pedal, slowing down just to try to gobble up the whole view at once.

It was impossible. Miles of buttery plainsland spread out before me, shaped in golden mounds like a thousand loaves of bread rising slowly under the warmth of the summer sun. The thin wild hay blew in trademark waves across each hill, sometimes kicking up at a crazy angle like a child's stubborn cowlick. The hills rushed up to meet the sky, a shade of technicolor blue I'd never seen. A guttural sound, half-singing and half-choking, rose from me. I descended that hill with tears in my eyes, overjoyed at the sheer, unsullied beauty and saddened that I had no one to share it with. Alison Kraus' voice, sweet as sun-ripened cherries, wafted out my open windows and blew across the plains, becoming part of those amber waves of grain.

The landscape blissfully stayed the same all the way up 281, criss-crossed only by the winding Cain Creek on the edge of Beadle County, shining between the hills like a silver necklace. I hopped on Route 14 and headed west, taking note of just how many miles of open land were not staked by rusty barbed-wire fencing, as though they belonged to anyone who happened to be there. That day they belonged to me, and I shared them only with a dozen or so languid steer cattle, resting like molded chocolates against the butterscotch hills.

I sang at the top of my lungs, a cacophony aria with no recognizable words. I may as well have been the first person to set foot or tires to that part of the world. I was an adventurer. I was Sir Francis Drake. I was Merriweather Lewis. I was anyone I wanted to be on those tiny roads, surrounded by a landscape that is still more precious in my memory than some homes I've had. I never wanted to reach Pierre. I was a twenty-five year-old woman, an adventuress, a shunpiker, with pigtail braids and a dirty car who, for the first time, was witnessing Nature's alchemy as she turned grass to spun gold.

By Jessica Johnson 

Jessica spends a lot of time driving around in a Honda Civic.  Stories of her adventures can be found at www.myspace.com/spangledangel

9 Hours (Don't Sit Next to the Potty) by Julie Elefante

It costs $30 to run away

from yet another place I don’t wanna be—

to see if these bus wheels

will roll me outta this sticky patch of anxiety …

this time it’s 2 days, 2 nights straight on the go,

final destination, Chicago--

and this first stretch? 9 hours to El Paso.

Last thing I hear is

“Don’t sit next to the potty!”

“Or another smoker” I think when the

first thing I see, assaulting me is a sign--

“No Smoking.”

But I climb, smell the rank of the lower 48

and hundreds of bodies, past and present,

in which I start to marinade.

I feel and wade my way through

encroaching delirium in 90-degree March Phoenix heat

back to the only open seat

next to this wide-eyed, wild-haired,

leather-wearing cat

right next to the john in the back …

He smells like smoke--*sniiiiff* …Camel Lights …

and I hope, “Maybe these next 9 hours

won’t go so slow, you know …”

They don’t. I

sit next to the shit pit piss pot

next to crazy cool in the hot back,

talking 'bout UFOs and subliminals,

patriots and criminals,

dreams, demands, philosophies,

angels, demons, monstrosities--

we exchange autobiographies!

It goes by so quick

in the back of this slow silver bullet

trying to find targets through night’s blindness

after dreams gone MIA

or to fix ripping seams before something crucial falls away for good.

We got all sorts of different stories, kinda,

but man, no matter where you go,

lights out the window all look alike at 70 miles per hour,

and faces, too, can look the same

between each depot

and from front row to back row,

but for miles at a time,

I inevitably cling to the string of life’s itinerary,

plotting dot-to-dot, my future philosophy

by way of the people put in my path

as we see how we survive in the aftermath of our meeting.

It’s miraculous … take my 9-hour friend:

He’s 5 days in smokers’ hell

by the urine smell

all the way to south Texas.

He'll try to get his job back

as a cook at the Marriott

after he quit to make it

in fast-paced L.A.,

but couldn't fit in--

he side-tracked to Seattle along the way,

tried to get lost, but couldn’t stay,

so he thought, “Maybe … I just belong at home

where I didn’t have answers,

but no questions, anyway.

Time’s been pinching at my heels

with the dust I’ve been kicking up

lining all my wrinkles,

but now that I’m facing this direction

the barbs aren’t digging in anymore …

Guess ultimately and in the end,

all most folks ever wanna do

is to go home.”

(Never figured me and this stranger

would possibly wear the same size hope.)

We part and depart

in El Paso—

me to a Dallas transfer

he to his little city he ended up missing

more than he ever thought he would--

he escaped,

but couldn't stay away.

Now I know he's shakin'

in the back, bakin', waitin' for

the next break when

he can have a smoke,

but by tonight, he'll be safe, home …

I'll still be on the road,

goin' to Chicago

with more answers

than I thought I would ever need,

but still wonderin' what his name is …

Julie Elefante is a writer and editor.  Many of her current projects can be found at www.rockscissorspaper.org