Sorry for the Group Email

(Via Blip. Music is something or other by Fatboy Slim. It sounds, like Dylan Moran says, like a million ambulances chasing a million fire engines, but in this case that’s quite appropriate.)

Here’s a funny thing about America. You may be familiar with the story but bear with me.

In 2004, a well-known singer called Janet Jackson performed during the Super Bowl. During her performance, she exposed, apparently accidentally, her right breast.

The only thing more unbelievable than her claims of wardrobe malfunction (how many people who wear nipple clamps don’t wish people to see them?) was the number of complaints received after the incident. Ready?

Five hundred and forty thousand.

That’s a pretty big number, even compared to the massive audience that watches the superbowl every year.

From this, you might conclude that Americans (although not any I know, I should hasten to add) are a pretty conservative bunch. But if Americans are repressing their sexuality and bad behaviour into a tiny, spicy, rubberised red ball (I’m thinking specifically of the type in Pulp Fiction), the place it all comes out is Las Vegas. Its catchphrase is “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas”, which should be warning enough.

This is before you actually approach the city. You don’t get this treat if you fly in, as the airport is virtually downtown. But from the road – and specifically the road from Utah – Las Vegas emerges as a mirage from the desert. It is almost literally in the middle of the sand, miles from anywhere.

This is how toxic I am, it seems to be saying. Toxic enough that it has been strategically-placed hundreds of miles from anywhere. At three hundred miles from Los Angeles it’s close enough that you could drive to it in time to lose your savings over a weekend, but far enough away that your misadventures won’t actually turn up on your doorstep.

Even the highway is lined with grungy sex. As we drove in we saw signs from a creatively-named company called Bait n’ Tackle who would, the signs promised, pay you five hundred dollars if you were prepared to masturbate in front of a camera. I am not deducing this from the signs’ careful imagery or clever double entendres, but from the phrase “for a tug”, which leaves sufficiently little to the imagination that I can imagine uncomfortable silences in cars containing inquisitive children.

Our hotel was a bargain, and if you’re in the market for a cheap room in Vegas I recommend the Howard Johnson chain. It was close enough to the Strip that you could walk it or make a cheap taxi ride of it, and the room was huge and air-conditioned. Best of all, alongside the Las Vegas de rigours – a pool, a bar, a restaurant selling cheap, hearty breakfasts – there was, through a set of double doors in the lobby, a small wedding chapel. This was the Vegas I had come to see. A town where fortunes were lost, mistakes were made and absorbed, and where even Britney Spears could find someone to marry her, if only for twenty-four hours.

We slept off our drive from Utah and struck out in the evening.

We walked up the Strip. Sex was everywhere. Everywhere. We saw one billboard, ostensibly advertising some kind of timeshare arrangement, which led with the line “AND A FREE BJ!” I’m not sure what exactly what was on offer (or what was on sale, for that matter), but that’s not really the point.

Vans drive up and down the Strip all night, advertising GIRLS!!! DELIVERED TO YOUR DOOR!!! As if they were obliging pizzas.

Very convenient, I thought. But not very nice.

We ate at a surprisingly cheap burger shack on the Strip, then committed ourselves to wandering. The Strip is a solid collection of hotels and casinos. Some hotels have casinos in them; some casinos have hotels attached, so you could, if you wanted, commit yourself to an entire holiday of never seeing fresh air. I heard a rumour a little while ago that claimed Las Vegas hotels – those with casinos in them, at any rate – actually pump extra oxygen into their rooms, thus keeping their inhabitants awake and more likely to visit the gaming rooms, longer.

We went into some, of course. We tried a few, not least the MGM Grand.

One of my favourite films is Ocean’s Eleven. I had been hoping for Ocean’s Eleven. Rows of beautifully-tailored, smiling people behind every set of revolving doors, cheerfully blowing away chunks of money and, occasionally, every now and then, winning a load back.

There were happy people inside the casinos, but they were drunk and, like us, there to watch, rather than play. Every single person I saw sat down in front of the machines looked as though they’d rather be somewhere else, but were, by eleven o’clock in the evening, in so deep that they may as well keep going. Everyone there looked as though they’d recently made a large, expensive mistake that they fully expected to pay for. As we wandered past one machine, staffed by an octogenarian with purple tints, I caught sight of the amount of money she had remaining before she would need to feed it again.

$327, the machine read. The last digit was ticking down at a rate of one dollar per second. She didn’t look happy either, but then I suppose you wouldn’t if you were almost certainly about to lose three hundred dollars. That much, I reasoned, missing the point a little, would get you nearly seven nights in the Howard Johnson.

No-one seemed to be winning. The machines were making encouraging sorts of noises, but no-one leapt from their seats and shouted “There’s Little Timmy’s college fund sorted out!” or anything like that. Everyone just looked a bit unhappy and both casinos we went into smelled like the kind of provincial nightclub I used to go to when I was eighteen: sugary alcoholic drinks and cigarettes. Las Vegas is one of very few major cities left in the United States that allows smoking inside. Certainly that evening, if everyone holding a cigarette had had to go outside to smoke it, the casinos would have lost far more than I imagine they do in actually paying people who won.

Of course, it was spectacular to look at. There is more neon in Las Vegas than in the rest of the world combined, and if that sounds made up, it’s because it is. It should be true though, if only to lend Vegas one more eye-popping feature. Everything clicked and hummed: we walked past hotels that had their own rollercoasters popping out of the pavement and whirling in death-defying loops and swirls around their host architecture. We saw just-miniaturised versions of Manhattan, the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower.

My favourite was the Bellagio.

Here’s a short story. A few years ago we, as a family, went to the Isle of Wight. I don’t know if this is true for you, but family holidays seem to improve greatly once everyone grows up and moves out. Perhaps it’s because the kids start seeing their parents as normal adults; perhaps it’s vice versa. Perhaps it’s simply that it’s finally acceptable for everyone to drink a lot of alcohol, and who can’t get behind that as a reason to hang out with your siblings and parents?

The Isle of Wight, of course, was as crappy as everyone remembered it. I don’t wish to offend anyone who lives there, or who has a particular affinity for dirty beaches, hit-and-miss food and bad weather, but the fact is that an awful lot of what is on the Isle of Wight exists elsewhere, frequently in sunnier and better-quality forms.

Except the Waltzing Waters. Someone had recommended it to my dad at some point and, given the choice between doing nothing, visiting the Waltzing Waters, and go-karting (which I hate and makes me want to vomit extravagantly), we bought tickets.

Waltzing Waters is quite the strangest thing I have ever paid to watch in my life. Technically, it is the strangest thing my parents have paid for. The thrust of the marketing is that it’s a kind of aquatic fireworks: a complicated and breathtakingly-choreographed set of fountains shoot hundreds of gallons into the air, stunningly-lit and perfectly synchronised to music.

The auditorium itself was the size of a medium cinema. There were six of us, and a confused-looking Japanese family at the back. The auditorium smelled strongly of mildew: the kind of smell you get if you unpack a tent that got wet eons ago and hasn’t been removed from its bag since.

It was crap. The waters themselves worked fairly well, as in no-one got wet, but they shot perhaps ten feet into the air, faintly lit by multi-coloured disco lights. The music reached the point of Abba but no further. We were, by the end of it, in a darkened room watching animatronic hoses dance. It was the kind of crap entertainment that only the British can really do. Show it to any other nationality and they would leave halfway. We watched it through to the end. The Japanese family left looking disappointed and I nodded helplessly at them on the way out.

The fountains at the Bellagio are world famous. In a single performance they use over a thousand “water expressions” (industry-speak for fountains) and four thousand lights. And, instead of multi-coloured disco lights, which lent the Waltzing Waters canons a sort of school-disco feel, they use a classy, white-only number, and pump out deafening music, perfectly in time with the canons. And, because it’s outside, it doesn’t smell terrible, and you get to watch what is, after all, a pretty impressive implementation of waterworks.

It’s also just about the only thing in Las Vegas which is family-friendly. Perhaps Janet Jackson should take her superbowl show there.

Dave lost precisely one dollar in Las Vegas, but still isn’t sure how.

Links

Excellent site by the designers and builders of the Bellagio’s fantastic waterworks.

The UK’s own version. Worth a daytrip, surely? For a real giggle visit the Testimonies page.

Get paid $500 for wanking. Obviously this link isn’t particularly safe for work or the faint-hearted.

The Flickr set.