The body on the bed slowly turns. Bares its teeth. Luther is smiling. Luther wants to tell Jimmy something right away. He motions with his hand: Mama came to me a few days ago. She said it wasn’t time yet.
• • •
One time, Luther’s Mama woke up in the middle of the night and there was this old man sitting on her bed. You go away, she said to the old man.
Weren’t you scared, Mama?
No, not especially, but I didn’t like it.
Maybe you were asleep.
No, sir, I wasn’t.
Well, what’d he do?
He just sat there staring at the floor like he was waiting for further instructions. You go away right now, I told him; I clapped my hands at him like I was a cross little schoolteacher, and I pulled the covers up over my head and said my prayers.
Who was it, Mama?
I don’t know who it was; I pulled up the covers and said my prayers. He went away and he never came back.
Mama died more than ten years ago.
• • •
The desk clerk at the Bellagio upgrades us to a suite—large, but not as commodious as Luther’s room at the Nathan Adelson Hospice on North Buffalo Drive. The view from Luther’s room is of the parking lot of a small business park. A placard on the wall next to the window cautions hospice visitors to park only in designated slots.
At the Bellagio, our room overlooks the hotel’s six-acre lake, an allusion to Lago di Como. The Bellagio’s lake has an advantage over its inspiration: At fifteen-minute intervals, jets of water are witched up into the air by a Frank Sinatra–Billy May rendition of Frank Loesser’s “Luck Be a Lady.” The jets shimmy, they fan, they collapse with a splat when the hydraulic pressure deserts them. Beyond Lago di Como, we can just see the tip of the Eiffel Tower.
• • •
In 1955 the management of Wilbur Clark’s Desert Inn invited Nöel Coward, the British playwright and composer, to perform a cabaret act in Las Vegas.
Coward rather imagined he might end up tap-dancing to tommy-gun fire, so prevalent was the Vegas association with gangland. But he was agog at the money offered—thirty grand a week—at a time when his career was in a slump. (Coward had been superseded on the London stage by a new generation of playwrights; there wasn’t much call in the West End or on Broadway for brittle drollery.) But then, Nöel Coward was a legend, and Las Vegas, because it was on the make, preferred legends.
Stars who might be on the downward slope of Hollywood or New York can achieve tenure in Las Vegas if they deliver what is remembered. Coward fit the bill. Frank Sinatra, Wayne Newton, Liberace, Cher, Debbie Reynolds, Tom Jones, Charo, Mitzi Gaynor, Céline Dion, Bette Midler, Patti Page—the golden legends of the Strip are as odd as you please, but Las Vegas audiences (as used to be the case in London and Paris, and perhaps still is) have long, fond memories.
Upon his arrival, Coward wrote colleagues in London: “The gangsters who run the places are all urbane and charming.” During the course of Coward’s run, Life magazine photographer Loomis Dean rented a Cadillac limousine, stocked it with ice and liquor, and drove Coward fifteen miles into the desert to photograph him taking a cup of tea in the wilderness, attired in what Coward described as “deep evening dress.” The photographer used the desert as the geographical equivalent of a straight man. The famous photographs perfectly captured the incongruous equipoise that describes the Vegas aesthetic.
• • •
Forty years ago, more than forty years, my friend Marilyn announced she was going to Las Vegas to see Elvis Presley. “Come,” she said. “You have to see Las Vegas at least once before you die,” she said.
We drove through a summer night. Sheet lightning blinked in the eastern sky. I listened as Marilyn described her father’s gambling addiction—how he never lost a gentleman’s amiability at the gaming table, how he had squandered most of his mother’s fortune.
The Las Vegas hospitality industry is understandably respectful of losers. Marilyn’s father never paid for a hotel room in Las Vegas, or for a meal or a drink. The city’s generosity extended to the good loser’s next of kin. All Marilyn needed to do was to phone her father, who, in turn, phoned the general manager of the Flamingo Hotel. The Flamingo comped us in what I guess you would call the wink of an eye.
In the morning, Marilyn passed her name to the Flamingo concierge, declaring we had come to see Elvis at the International. Elvis at the International was sold-out for the entire run. The concierge picked up the phone, called a uniformed officer of comparable rank at the International. And it was done. The only question that devolved to Marilyn and me was how much to tip the headwaiter at the International.
Elvis Presley first came to Las Vegas in 1956, when he was twenty-one years old. Middle-aged audiences in Las Vegas heard him with interested puzzlement at that time. Elvis was fresh—he was certainly famous—but he displayed none of that finger-snapping, syringe-in-the-toilet, up-tempo flash that Vegas found so inebriating. In 1969, on his return, Presley was nearer in age to the women in the audience, and he had learned the Vegas sell.
• • •
The messenger room at the law firm in San Francisco was like a prison movie—time measured in poker games, crossword puzzles, knives, novels. A never-neatened splatter of Playboy magazines on a junked conference table. Perpetual “Proud Mary.” One corner of the room supported a mountain of legal briefcases. Another corner was a parking lot for dollies. There were fifteen messengers who sat on fifteen oaken office chairs facing the dispatcher, as in a minstrel show. When a messenger returned from a hike, his name was added to the bottom of the list; he sat down. (Messengers must be male. No experience necessary.) When a messenger took a hike, his name was crossed off the top of the list.
Luther got into the habit of stopping by a senior partner’s office every afternoon for a chat, as if they were two free citizens of Athens. Luther found the Old Man interesting—his stories of growing up in turn-of-the-century California, of riding his pony over golden hills, of boarding a train that took him away to Harvard College, of homesickness, of scarlet fever. “Well, that’s how I learned self-reliance,” the Old Man said.
The Old Man was interested in Luther, too. Luther had gumption. Luther had learned self-reliance from his mother, who worked in a chicken-processing plant, who raised ten children, whose husband left.
Where’s Luther? The dispatcher ran his finger down the list of scratched-out names. Proud Mary, unh, unh. Luther was in the Old Man’s office, everyone knew.
One day, after Luther had been working for the law firm for a year, he told the Old Man he figured it was about time he tried something else.
Like what?
Like working for the phone company. The Old Man grabbed up his telephone and barked “TelCo” to his secretary, which was short for: Please get me the president of the telephone company.
Once the president of the telephone company had been procured for him (the firm represented every major California utility), the Old Man hollered into the receiver, as if from the bridge of his yacht: “Look, F., I have a young man here desirous of a career change. I’m going to send him over. Whom should he ask for? Sears as in catalog? Good-o! Love to Dotty.”
Luther went for his appointment at the phone company. He wore the black suit that he and Andrew and Jimmy shared. The suit belonged to Luther, but they all wore it—Andrew to be a pallbearer, Jimmy to be best man, Andrew to the opera, Luther to apply for a job at the phone company.
Right off, the employment manager offered Luther a job as a messenger. Luther pivoted on his heel, walked back to the law firm, elevator to the nineteenth, straight into the Old Man’s office. Messengers didn’t have to knock. Luther stood facing the Old Man. With a shamed and thumping heart, Luther said: If I wanted to be a messenger, I could have stayed right here.
The Old Man didn’t get it right away, that Luther had b
een offered the job he already had. Once he did understand, the Old Man seized the phone with relish, catching the scent of hare. “Now look here,” the Old Man’s voice rolled like thunder over Mr. Sears’s salutation. “I meant for the kid I sent to get a leg up. He’s already a messenger. Why would you offer him a job as a messenger? I’m going to send him back, and I expect you to offer him a decent job.”
The Old Man slammed down the telephone and winked at Luther: “Off you go, kid.”
The following week, Luther began training in the switch room of the telephone company. Over the years, he worked himself into the highest classification of every job he was assigned; he moved from switchman to trunk man to optical-fiber cable work. (The Old Man died.) To something so specialized he was one of only two or three technicians who knew how to do whatever it was he did.
The joke among the three friends was: Who gets to be buried in the black suit? And what will the mourners wear?
• • •
We establish a little routine. Twice a day I commute between the hospice on North Buffalo and the Bellagio on Las Vegas Boulevard South. Drop Jimmy off in the morning, spend a couple of hours at the hospice, pick Jimmy up in the late afternoon. In between, I look around. There is a street in town named Virgil. The famous hotels on the Strip are not actually located in Las Vegas, but in an unincorporated entity called Paradise.
In the nineteenth century, Rafael Rivera, a Spanish scout—a teenager—joined a trading exploration party out of New Mexico that sought to establish a new trail to Los Angeles. Their hope was to find fresh water along the way. The party left Abiquiú in November of 1829. Rivera separated from the group at the Colorado River junction. He was, as far as anyone knows, the first European to enter the valley, to find the two lucky springs there, or, at any rate, to infer water from the vegetation of the valley. Rivera named the oasis Las Vegas—“the Meadows.”
The main street downtown is named for John Charles Frémont. In 1844 Frémont led a surveying expedition that followed the San Joaquin River south, through the long Central Valley of California. At the Mojave River, Frémont’s party veered eastward, crossed the Sierra, then followed the Old Spanish Trail for a time. Las Vegas was already a place of refreshment along the Spanish Trail, a trail that had been blazed more than a decade earlier by Rafael Rivera. Frémont recorded two streams of clear water: “The taste of the water is good, but rather warm to be agreeable.” The streams, however, “afforded a delightful bathing place.”
John Frémont died of peritonitis in a boardinghouse in New York City on July 13, 1890. No one I talk to can tell me what happened to Rafael Rivera; whether he returned to New Mexico or Old Mexico or Spain; whether he married; where he lies buried.
Recently, a complex of hotels and condos and offices in a sober international style has opened on the Strip under the mundane designation CityCenter. Its owners obviously intend a kind of restraint Las Vegas normally does not engage—gray exteriors, dark atriums. The visitor could be in São Paulo or Seoul or wherever the money flies. A cab driver tells me the new complex will not draw because there is no craziness to it. Here, you gotta be crazy, he says. Togas. Tigers. Tits.
In the lobby of the Aria hotel, part of the CityCenter complex, an eighty-four-foot-long sculpture, Silver River, by Maya Lin, is suspended behind the registration desk like a bough. Credit cards click across the marble counter as hotel guests check in or out. Maya Lin’s sculpture is a trace-image of the Colorado River; it was cast from thirty-seven hundred pounds of “reclaimed” silver—sauceboats and Saint Christopher medals. The sculpture resembles artery, lightning, umbilicus, statistical graph.
During the week we are in town, there is a competition in Las Vegas among investors who are interested in developing a gangland museum. (And, two years later—Valentine’s Day, 2012—the $42 million Mob Museum has opened.)
Other American cities might prefer to forget a criminal past. Las Vegas foresees profit in promoting its dark legend as an invitation to middle-class visitors to risk a little carelessness—to gamble more than they should, to tip the topless waitress more than necessary. Compared with Berlin in the thirties, compared with Ciudad Juárez today, compared with nineteenth-century America of the robber barons, compared with Chicago of the twenties, compared with Wall Street, “Sin City” must seem a wader’s pool of wickedness. The sin on show is not what would be unimaginable in Indianapolis. Rather, it is precisely what Indianapolis would come up with if Indianapolis were charged with imagining Sin City.
On the grounds of the Flamingo Hotel, over by the wedding chapel, stands a monument to the mobster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel. Hollywood mythmakers credit Siegel with the idea of Las Vegas. Siegel’s idea of Las Vegas was the idea of luxury and chance in a landscape where there was no chance of luxury.
Benjamin Siegel was born in 1906 to Russian immigrant parents in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York. He constructed his sense of glamour—of class, I think he would have said—against the meanness of the streets of his childhood and the distant Manhattan skyline. According to Bugsy, the 1991 Barry Levinson movie, Las Vegas was a sandlot prior to Siegel’s coming. In truth, by the time Siegel conceived the potential for money in Las Vegas, there were already hotels and gambling parlors downtown, along Fremont Street. And the El Rancho Vegas had opened in 1941 on the two-lane highway that would later become the Strip—six years before Siegel’s Flamingo.
What Siegel conceived was an aesthetic, and a pretty good one: He intended to build a resort in a desert-moderne style—something along the lines of Frank Lloyd Wright, something along the lines of Palm Springs—a lure for the best class of people, by which Siegel meant Hollywood. L.A. likes to think of Las Vegas as the populuxe mirage of Hollywood, a place where middle-class tourists look like movie stars but aren’t, spend like millionaires but aren’t.
Siegel went overbudget constructing his dream and the fancy people didn’t show. Mobsters were looking at a loss. Benjamin Siegel was shot in the head in Beverly Hills, California, on June 20, 1947. He is buried in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, Hollywood, California.
• • •
No sooner had Peter left to make some phone calls and to try to take a nap than Luther turned his head toward Jimmy: Bathroom.
I’ll tell the nurse, said Jimmy.
Hurry, Luther said.
Jimmy hurried. The nurse was at her station. Mr. Thomas needs to make a bowel movement, Jimmy reported. The nurse turned from her computer, paused, as if she were about to say something wonderfully unhelpful. Instead, she said: OK, I’ll talk to him.
Mr. Thomas, the nurse said, coming into his room.
Bathroom, said Luther. (Bambi.)
You are too weak to get to the bathroom, Mr. Thomas. There is a plastic towel underneath you—she gave the towel a tug. You can have a bowel movement right where you are. Press the buzzer if you need me. The nurse placed another half-plastic, half-paper sheet over Luther’s midriff. She glanced at the thermostat. She left the room.
Luther turned toward Jimmy, removed the sheet, smiled. Bandage, said Luther.
There is no way Jimmy is afraid of Luther—Morphine Luther, Luther Demented, Luther with one foot in the grave. But this, Jimmy saw, was play.
Bandage? Jimmy said.
Luther grabbed the aluminum bed gate and rolled himself onto his right shoulder. Now Jimmy could see Luther’s backside was papered over with a disc of green latex.
Off, said Luther.
Jimmy examined the bandage. (Probably a bedsore.) What’s that for?
Off, said Luther. (The Red Queen.) Luther came late to the literature of childhood. In his thirties he read nursery classics. He loved them. The Alice books. The Rescuers. Winnie-the-Pooh.
I’ll ask the nurse, said Jimmy.
Excuse me, he said. Again. I’m sorry but Mr. Thomas cannot have a bowel movement because there is a bandage covering his bottom,
Jimmy reported to the nurse at her station.
If you press the button, someone will come, said the nurse at her station. The bandage will not hinder Mr. Thomas, she added.
Jimmy returned to the room to tell Luther he could have a bowel movement with a green latex waffle pasted to his behind. The game had progressed in his absence.
Chair, smiled Luther, his purse-arm extended vaguely. (Mrs. Miniver.)
You want to sit for a while?
Down. Luther indicated the bed gate. Jimmy crouched to examine the lever of the bed gate, then finally succeeded in lowering it.
Pull, Luther said; he proffered his hand.
Jimmy pulled Luther to a sitting position; he put his arm around Luther’s shoulder to support him. Luther was already fishing for the floor with one bare foot.
Let me pull the chair up to the bed. I’ll have to lay you back down for just a minute, Jimmy said.
Pull! (Red Queen.)
Jimmy pressed the button.
Within seconds, the nurse.
He wants to sit in the chair, Jimmy importuned.
Who turned off the air-conditioning?
I don’t know, Jimmy said. (He had watched Peter turn off the air-conditioning before he left. Luther gets too cold, Peter said.)
The nurse switched the air-conditioning on. It’s easier for him to breathe if the room is cool, the nurse said. To Luther: When the aides have finished what they’re doing, we’ll put you in the chair.
I think I can manage it, Jimmy said.
It takes three people, the nurse said; it won’t be long. She raised the bed gate and covered Luther with a sheet. Luther smiled. (Harpo Marx.) The nurse left. Luther plucked the sheet away, grasped the bed gate.
Down.
Well, let’s just wait. . . .
Down, said Luther. (Red Queen.) Jimmy put down the gate and sat on the edge of the bed; he put his arm around Luther’s waist to prevent Luther from slipping to the floor. Luther did not acknowledge the counterforce; he grunted forward in medicated slow motion; he now had both feet on the floor.
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