The Best American Travel Writing 2014

by Paul Theroux

  The whole trip out I’d maintained that I wasn’t going to gamble. Gambling was a weakness of the ignorant masses, the suckers inhabiting the Great American Middle we’d just driven through. I was an intellectual, see, could quote Beckett on the topic of the abyss, had a college degree and everything. I can’t remember the name of our hotel—the place was long ago demolished to make way for the Fremont Street Experience. It wasn’t a proper casino, just a grim box with rooms upstairs, but the first floor had rows of low-stakes gambling apparatuses to keep the reception desk company. On our way to check-in, we passed the geriatric zombies in tracksuits installed at the slots, empty coin buckets overturned on their oxygen tanks. These gray-skinned doomed tugged on the levers, blinked, tugged again. Blink. Tug. Blink.

  Grisly. We were about to get our first glimpse of the hurly-burly of downtown Vegas. Before we pushed open the glass doors, what the heck, I dropped a nickel into a one-armed bandit and won $2.

  In a dank utility room deep in the subbasements of my personality, a little man wiped his hands on his overalls and pulled the switch: More. Remembering it now, I hear a sizzling sound, like meat being thrown into a hot skillet. I didn’t do risk, generally. So I thought. But I see now I’d been testing the House Rules the previous few years. I’d always been a goody-goody. Study hard, obey your parents, hut-hut-hut through the training exercises of decent society. Then, in college, now that no one was around, I started to push the boundaries, a little more each semester. I was an empty seat in lecture halls, slept late in a depressive funk, handed in term papers later and later to see how much I could get away with before the House swatted me down.

  Push it some more. We go to casinos to tell the everyday world that we will not submit. There are rules and codes and institutions, yes, but for a few hours in this temple of pure chaos, of random cards and inscrutable dice, we are in control of our fates. My little gambles were a way of pretending that no one was the boss of me. I hadn’t had time for driving lessons before our trip because I’d been too busy cramming a semester of work into exam period. It had been touch-and-go whether I’d graduate, as I’d barely shown up for my final semester’s religion course. The last thing I’d wanted to hear about was some sucker notion of the Divine. There’s a man in the sky who watches over everything you do, as all-seeing as the thousands of security cameras embedded in casino ceilings. So what? Nothing escapes his attention, and nothing will move him to intervene.

  After a few phone calls, the administration released me into the world with a D minus. What was it to them? My passive-aggressive rebellion against the system was meaningless. The House doesn’t care if you piss away your chances, are draining the college fund, letting the plumber’s bill slide until next month. Ruin yourself. The cameras above record it all, but you’re just another sap passing in the night.

  The nickels poured into the basin, sweet music. If it worked once, it will work again.

  We hit the street.

  Before we left town, we bought dozens of tiny plastic slot machines from a trinket shop. Pink, red, lime green. They joined the Museum of Where We’d Been. Everybody’s a walking Museum of Where They’ve Been, but we decided to make it literal. We had serious epoxy. Each place we stopped, we picked up souvenirs and glued them to the Tercel. Two Sears Towers sticking up over the engine, a row of small turquoise stones just above the windshield, toy buffalo stampeding across the great brown plain of the hood. Bull’s horns from Arizona, in case we needed to gore someone at ramming speed, you never know, and four refrigerator magnets with Elvis’s face on the front grille, to repel ghosts. We dotted the hood with glue and stuck the slot machines on, the polyethylene totems marking us as goofball heathens.

  Weeks later, we were in Berkeley, sleeping on a friend’s floor. The friend was cat-sitting for a drug dealer, weed mostly. I didn’t approve of the drug dealer’s lifestyle choices—for vacation, he went camping. We wrote up our time in the land of Circus Circus and the El Cortez, the cheap steaks and watered-down drinks. Let’s Go’s previous correspondent had been a prissy little shit, filling his/her copy with snobby asides. (“But what do you do there?”) He/she wrote:

  Forget Hollywood images of Las Vegas glamor, the city at base is nothing but a desert Disneyland. As a small, small world of mild, middle-aged debauchery, Vegas simply replaces Mickey and Minnie with overbright neon marquees, monolithic hotel/casinos, besequinned Ziegfieldesque [sic] entertainers, quickly marrying them in rococo wedding chapels.

  Percy, where are my smelling salts?

  And what’s wrong with Disneyland? It brings joy to millions of people and tutors children about the corporate, overbranded world they’ve been born into. “It’s a Small World” is a delightful ditty, an ode to that quality of everyday existence by which the soul is crushed, diminished, made entirely small. No need to denigrate it. Better to worry about the lack of a clear antecedent for “them” in that last sentence. I would protect Vegas. How about:

  The magic formula of this oasis of mild, middle-aged debauchery—offer everything but the gambling cheaply, and if you gild it, they will come —was hit upon by Bugsy Siegel in the 1940s. Das Kapital is worshipped here, and sacrifices from all major credit cards are happily accepted.

  Much more upbeat, although I apologize if some readers were tricked into thinking the city is devoted to Karl Marx’s book. I think we were just trying to get fancy with capital.

  Some of the classic joints we wrote about are gone now, and we captured a time before Las Vegas made a science of demography, but most of the basic observations in our Let’s Go entry remain solid. In between games of Risk (board-game version), we cut up the previous year’s text, discarded what we disliked, and glued (more glue) what remained onto white paper alongside our revisions and additions. “But remember that casinos function on the basis of most tourists leaving considerably closer to the poverty line than when they arrived; don’t bring more than you’re prepared to lose cheerfully” became “But always remember: in the long run, chances are you’re going to lose money. Don’t bring more than you’re prepared to lose cheerfully.” No, casinos are not out to destroy you. The destroyed do not return to redeem reward-card perks and lose more money. No one forces doom upon you, folks. You need to seek it out.

  We kept “Drinks in most casinos cost 75¢–$1, free to those who look like they’re playing” but added “Look like you’re gambling; acting skills will stretch your wallet, but don’t forget to tip that cocktail waitress in the interesting get-up.” Out with the general tsk-tsking and upper-middle-class disdain, in with “For best results, put on your favorite loud outfit, bust out the cigar and pinky rings, and begin.” You have been granted a few days’ reprieve from who you are. Celebrate the gift of a place that allows you to be someone else for a time.

  Then Darren wigged out and caught a plane home. He still had his childhood room. Dan was going to drive back east in August, maybe get a Eurail pass that autumn and check out some fucking castles or whatever. I was out of money when Dan set off, and I asked whether he had any room in the car, as the guy we’d been crashing with, the cat-sitter, was bailing out of California, too, and bringing all his stuff. After all, I was a good navigator. As luck would have it, they intended to stop off in Vegas on the way back.

  No one laid a hand on the Museum when we were on the road. Odd, moon-faced kids—a motel owner’s brood—gawked at it when we stopped at night but dared not touch. A cop pulled us over for speeding in Massachusetts the last day of our return trip. “What’s all this?” We shrugged. What to say? He wrote us a ticket. The Museum lasted a few days in Cambridge before teenagers or disaffected housewives or whoever stripped everything. We’d made it home, and the spell had worn off.

  We grew up. Our generational symptoms faded bit by bit. I got a job working for the books section of a newspaper. We ran fiction sometimes, mixed in with reviews. When the writing teacher who had rejected my work in college submitted a story, I passed on it. Not out of revenge; it just wasn�
��t up to snuff. As in cards, it was business, not personal. I badgered one editor for an assignment, that assignment led to another, and soon enough I was paying my bills freelancing. Played poker at Dan’s house every Sunday for a couple years, and one day we picked up hold’em. Dan got into computer animation and founded a visual-effects company, rendering animation for movies such as Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan, which Darren directed. We’d waited for cards, and then we played them.

  SEAN WILSEY

  Open Water

  FROM The New Yorker

  SHORTLY BEFORE DAWN, not so long ago, I stood in the stern of a small boat in the Venetian lagoon. I was rowing with a single oar, facing forward, heading west. Floodlights on the wharves of the mainland chemical plants, six miles away, glowed in front of me. I crossed a mile of shadowed, shallow, open water (dry—secca—is the name for such areas, accessible only by motorless, flat-bottomed boats) and entered a dredged-out channel called Canale Orfano, the Orphan Canal. It took me to the Graces, an island that measured 800 feet by 600 feet and was surrounded by a marble-topped brick wall that plunged into the water. Confined within the wall was a complex of tile-roofed buildings, sculptures, meadows, trees. In the 15th century, it was a monastery. More recently, it served as the site of an infectious-diseases hospital. Now it was abandoned. At the island’s dock, a series of signs declared, WARNING ARMED GUARDS; BEWARE OF DOGS; WARNING VERY DANGEROUS DOGS; WARNING DANGER!!

  I tied up and called, “Ciao?”

  The yellow façade of an administrative building was penetrated by a breezeway leading to the island’s interior. I saw green, wildness. I jumped ashore—silence—and took some tentative steps. Through a dusty window on the right side of the breezeway, a receptionist’s desk held a touchtone telephone and a gray appointment book, covered in dust. Lined up on a low wall were discarded medical instruments: a speculum, a curette, a mysterious metal rod that ended in a nautilus whorl. Paths led off in three directions. A shovel—long, wood-handled, sturdy—sat in a pile of rubble. I grabbed it to ward off the dogs.

  Then I heard a motor. First commuter of the day. I spun and walked back to the dock. A big, fat-bellied, bargelike boat, known as a rat—topo—and used for hauling everything in the city, from trash to melons to cement, three men in it, burbled by. I leaned on my shovel and stared them down. Then I walked back through the breezeway and hooked to the right, down an overgrown path. I found an abandoned boathouse, a 12-person Carrara marble banquet table with a corner knocked off, a vegetable garden going to seed, a delicately carved Renaissance wellhead. An actual rat crossed in front of me, stopped, turned, and gave me a proprietorial glare.

  This was my third day rowing the 212-square-mile Venetian lagoon—at high tide, a crescent-shaped mirror broken by bricks and trees that seem to float; at low tide, a series of multiacre puddles threaded with shipping channels—and camping on a selection of its many abandoned or semiabandoned islands. I’d lived in the city when I was younger, and had seen its identity steadily succumb to tourism. I wanted to find out if it was possible to have an unmediated experience of the place, to discover a Venice that was all my own. And so: the islands. Some are no larger than a gas station, while others contain villages, farms, cathedrals. Venice occupies the center point of its lagoon, which is 8 miles at the widest, and 30 miles long. This center is all that most visitors see today. But when the city was flourishing, between the 9th and the 18th centuries, its islands were used to grow its food, defend against invaders, provide respite for its rulers, and isolate the sick, the insane, the pious, the dead, and the hazardous (gunpowder; glass furnaces; unmarried women). The 19th-century poet and critic Luigi Carrer wrote of the islands, “It could be said that the marvelous city, falling from the sky and splintering apart, had scattered about itself these shards of beauty.”

  Now, on this particular shard, inside a quarantine ward, I wandered through dispensaries carpeted in glass. Rifled-through cabinetry spilled paper onto nurses’ stations. Back outside, the sun was starting to burn off the morning fog. Butterflies—along with rats, the principal inhabitants of Venice’s islands these days—were coming out. Three hundred feet to my left, in a grove of trees, a Doric capital was shining in the sunlight. I made for it, plunging waist-deep into brush and thorns, beating both back with the shovel. I found a large clearing in which two freestanding columns were connected by a rusted iron bar. An open meadow ran like an aisle between them, concluding at the island’s southern perimeter wall, where a marble throne was built into the bricks. A sad, regal, teenage girl was sitting on it. She was opulently dressed, and tiny—three feet tall. Around her neck was a plastic necklace so oversize that it hung to her ankles. A wicked-looking little boy in a beret stood between her knees, tangled in it. He was staring right at me, pointing all his fingers, obviously modeled on some naughty, centuries-old Venetian child. I pulled off the necklace. And I could easily have removed Mary, Jesus, and the throne, and taken them with me. Instead, I put down the rosary and was hit with a strong feeling that I’d had my share of trespasser’s good fortune.

  I sprinted across the island, jumped back into my boat, and rowed off. I had just made it to the island’s northern edge when two launches, bristling with armed police from the Division for the Protection of Cultural Patrimony, roared up to the dock. Men stormed the island, searching, I assumed, for a suspicious man with a shovel, recently sighted by a passing commuter. A Venetian-art expert in New York later described the Madonna as “late fourteenth century, although some parts of it already look forward to the early fifteenth century.” I attempted a nonchalant stroke and did not turn around.

  I first came to Venice as a prisoner. Twenty-one years earlier, a blue Fiat van crossed what was once the longest bridge in the world, over the western lagoon from the mainland, carrying six inmates of a reform school.

  I had committed the ridiculous crime of stealing a Yamaha motor scooter. A potential felony—which wasn’t ridiculous at all. This was in San Francisco, a few months before my 18th birthday. I blamed it on the fact that my wealthy, divorced parents had thrown me out of their homes and I’d had no money for the bus. My father, negotiating with a probation officer, hit upon a novel way to get me out of both jail and the country—a school for troubled youth in Tuscany, supported by Diane Guggenheim, who’d lived much of her life in Europe, like her cousin Peggy. Diane poured her family’s money not into art but into a school that espoused the philosophy, as the headmaster told the International Herald Tribune, that “every child has his own Renaissance.” The State of California agreed to release me. A trip to Venice was part of this rebirthing program.

  Driving had removed the temptation for any of us to make a break for it on the train. Now we were hustled onto the No. 1 vaporetto (the word for ferry or waterbus). An hour later, we disembarked near the sea. It was January, and we were the only guests at our hotel.

  That night, as we walked single file over a bridge, a splash and a creak made me turn. I saw a boy around my age getting into a 20-foot vessel I can now identify as a mascareta. Then a girl came out of the shadows behind him. He took a candle from his jacket pocket, impaled it on a metal spike attached to the bow, and, after a few flicks of a lighter, got it going and set a glass windshield in place. She sat on a crossbar. He picked up a long oar and started rowing—not poling but rowing, standing up and facing forward. His feet were positioned like a skateboarder’s.

  I was a skateboarder. This made stealing a motor scooter not just a crime but a betrayal; what true skateboarder stole something that eliminated the need for skateboarding? Italy, with its cobbled streets, was unskateable—Venice especially so. But as the mascareta moved through the water, the boy’s glide and stance were so familiar that I felt I was looking at myself in some other life.

  Nobody else noticed. The boat was silent as it navigated the dark canal, moving out of sight and then drawing close again, sliding around buildings before turning into the open lagoon.

  Years later, as I prepared
to return to Venice and explore the islands, I dug up a book, bound in marbled paper, entitled “The Private Journal of Sean Wilsey.” It described my first visit: “I bought a gondoliere hat today and I am wearing it constantly. A man walked by me in the street and said, ‘Gondoliere dove va?’”—“Gondolier, where are you going?” The comment was doubly sarcastic, posed, as it was, in the formal tense, but I was too enthralled by the city to notice: “I will never be quite the same after Venice because it has shown me that man can create true beauty and that I believe is Man’s purpose.” I dipped my gondolier’s hat in the Grand Canal “to season it.”

  On the obligatory gondola ride with my school group, out on the open water in front of the Doge’s Palace, I asked to switch places with the gondolier. He shrugged. Standing at the top of the boat’s crescent-shaped hull added two feet to the view. But I could barely keep my footing. This was like riding a skateboard on a sheet of ice. Propulsion and control were arcane verging on impossible. We began to spin in a circle. I looked as far as I could across the water, at islands covered in trees and mysterious buildings, until the gondolier repossessed his oar. An entry in my journal reads, “I made a solemn vow to return to Venice and become a gondolier.”

  Post-reformation, my father called me at school, saying, “Maybe you should try six months as a gondolier. How is your singing in Italian? I’d hire you for a short trip.” He suggested that I look up Gino Macropodio, who’d rowed him on his third honeymoon, with my mother. It seemed that Dad had taken note of my Venetian obsession, and figured out how to use it to avoid extending an invitation home. But this also struck me as a good way of reconciling the seeming irreconcilables of my situation. After two years in reform school, I was a naif who used to be a thief, an uneducated 20-year-old without a high school diploma. In Death in Venice, Thomas Mann described the “roguish solicitude” of a gondolier. This was something I could shoot for.