Victims of Vegas: the scars of growing up in the world’s playground

I lived in Las Vegas for two years. It was among the last places I expected to be at that stage of my life, but there I was. I was offered a fellowship, and then stayed on to teach. We bought an old gold Mazda that had been bleached and blistered by the sun and rented an apartment beside a golf course in Henderson.

From the little balcony I watched the unceasing chain of planes bringing tourists to the Strip. “The jewel box,” a great-grandmother once said to a small boy. At night you can see the Strip from anywhere in the valley if you are pointed in the right direction. It’s like a small galaxy throbbing on the desert floor. Las Vegas may like to take away your sense of time and space, but it will always remind you of what you are there for.

One of the things that you are there for is to look at it. It blazes so brightly that it’s hard to refuse. I walked and drove and talked and sat on our little balcony trying to figure it out, not only the Strip, but the city itself that spread through the valley in low lines and pale colours out to the horizon. It’s a global star. It flashes in the eyes.

Mention it anywhere and you will get a response – bedazzlement, envy, a raising of the brow, an avuncular warning. People you know want your report on it if you’re right there in the front row.

But I couldn’t catch it. Not after a month, not even after a year. It seemed always to be receding, like something slipping away in a tide. Houses are behind walls, their windows opaque. Drivers way above you are screened by tinted glass in SUVs the size of fire trucks. Almost no one walks. Buildings seem to take a step backwards behind gigantic parking lots or entrance halls just as you feel you are getting near them.

If you open a door to a bar you meet perpetual night behind blackened windows. The faces looking up from the poker machines are like ramparts. Everything is in order. The lane lines on the roads are painted straight. The hedges are clipped. But there is an absence of the human, except for a lurking sense of furtiveness and anger and dissatisfaction. It’s like a Twilight Zone episode without a plot.

People had arrived in Gold Rush style in the 1990s in search of valet parking and card dealing jobs of $100,000 per year, and in my second year I found myself teaching their children. They were different, I found, from students I’d taught elsewhere.

I asked a class of 26 how many worked and found that all but one did, full time, mostly in casinos. One occasionally missed class because of a conflict with his shift as a stripper. Some worked through the night, or did double shifts at weekends. All had full course loads. When did they read, or write essays?

I found too that they carried debts, some up around $40,000, for being educated in a state university. They lived with their parents, they were legally considered dependents. But it seemed that economically they were on their own.

One day, unprompted, they began to speak of their lives.

“Our parents want us to get good grades so we’ll keep our scholarships and they won’t be asked to pay for anything,” said a young man with an unusual degree of bitterness, especially for him.

“They go through our pockets and steal our money,” said a young woman beside him.

I thought I’d misheard and asked her to repeat what she’d said.

“They’re still drunk when they wake up,” said another. “I have to get them to work and my brothers and sisters fed and to school.’

“My mom stole my sister’s wedding money,” said someone in the front row. A young woman at the back said her father was addicted to video poker machines in bars and had stolen her paycheques, student loans and holiday money and had stolen her identity and got all he could from a credit card he’d taken out in her name.

We had an hour and a quarter and I let it run. It seemed to feed on its own momentum, like testimonials of revelation in a church. They spoke of routinely losing their homes and of raising themselves. There were overdoses, desert shoot-outs, suicides. I’d never heard anything like it in a single room. Nearly everyone spoke. The pitch was at its highest when the class ended. It was as if a jail door had opened for a time.

The next time I had a class I asked a few of them if they’d be willing to be interviewed, named and photographed for a book about their city. If anything could get me closer to understanding it, I thought, it would be them.

This strange celebrity of a city had been happening to them all their lives. They were its silent witnesses. They’d watched it in a way that adults or visitors or, of course, writers, could not. I assumed they’d refuse. How could they not? It would lay bare not only themselves, but their families.

Each of them said they would do it, however. They seemed to have a need to do so. I was led by the people I’d met to some others – a marathon runner/businessman whose father had entered him into a drinking contest when he was eight, a casino owner’s son, an erudite contortionist turned stripper, a woman who’d fled a sequence of exploiters until she found herself living in the storm drains under the casinos. In the end I had 10, but if I’d kept looking I’d have had hundreds more.

I feel readers would miss an opportunity if they would take their testimonies as hard-luck stories about a strange provincial city. Las Vegas is not a freak but is, instead, deeply integrated with the rest of the country, and the world beyond.

It is symptom, mirror, metaphor. It reads human wishes and incarnates them on the desert floor. Is it not the intention of its most famous promotional slogan “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” to send waves of excitement and moral relief coursing through the psyche? Is this not recognisable to all of us? The city’s story is more the story of these secret human wishes than it is of its ecology or industries or its sequence of mayors.

What happens in Vegas happens above all to those holding the lowest status there, the residents. They’ve grown up with a sickness that is general and chronic, they’ve lived in the shadows of a city of lights, as one of them says.

The colonised tend to know their colonisers far better than the other way around and it is the same, it would seem, with the people in this book and their city.

I thought their stories were for everyone because the place had been made in the image of what it believed all of us wanted. It seemed to me that what they described was a very unusual emergency.

They were victims not of war or pestilence or sexual predators or economic breakdown or their own foibles, but rather of a peculiar version of fun. To be with them had nothing of bleakness about it.

They were sharp, funny, eloquent. They struggled for, and in large part attained, transcendence. They arrived one by one at our home by the golf course. Their words came down on me as we sat at our table through the hours. They’d get up then, unaccountably say “thank you” and go.

If they were students they’d likely go to some job at a discount store or casino or fast-food place, and then to school again in the morning. It cost them sometimes to say what they did. And they took some risk, for people close to them may come to hate them for it. They knew that and did it anyway. They would like to be heard, and they hope, I think, for something more than pity.

Here are a few of the things they said.

Alesha Beauchamp

“I was six when they divorced. I was the youngest. From that point on she was out all the time, either at work or with her friends. These were people who were into cocaine and gambling and drinking. There were dishes piled up in the sink for weeks. We’d throw apple cores behind the television. We were in a middle-class neighbourhood and ours was the house with the dirt front yard. We had to wear these hand-me-down clothes to school, which meant we were teased mercilessly through grammar school and junior high. It wasn’t that there wasn’t money coming in. She worked and my dad always sent child support payments. But there was never any food in the house. We’d go days eating peanut butter out of a jar with a spoon. She’d eat in casino restaurants. One day she came back with a bag of leftovers and we were hungry and asked her if we could have some. ‘No,’ she said. ‘That’s mine’.”

Nevada Stupak

I came back from college and got an intern job as a craps dealer at the El Cortez. I figured my grandfather and dad had done it. I had no idea how miserable it would be. I went on to being a casino host for high-end players. I was at the Hard Rock, and Caesar’s. That involved getting them in, keeping them there, making them feel good, issuing their complimentaries. In this town how much you gamble dictates who you are – what types of room you get, the seats you get at the prize fights and shows, who acknowledges you and who doesn’t, whether or not you’re introduced to the celebrities in the show rooms. I worked on that for the casino. I also had to deal with their requests for extra credit. You eat a lot of shit with these people. They’re high demand. They’re negotiators by trade and they want to get every inch out of you, just on principle, just for fun. They were people who made it in property, mortgages, things like flooring. They could be New York traders, IPO experts. There were pimps, drug dealers, conmen with years of jail time. But green is green. Vegas isn’t picky. They don’t care how you get it, as long as you lose it.

Cindi Robinson

It’s difficult to live in a place you can’t stand. It’s normal to get bored. That could happen anywhere. But this is something else. This feels like some disease that’s on your skin. They say, “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.” But it’s not true. I think it’s going to stay with me forever, wherever I go. I have this friend, she went to Kansas. I may be stuck here at the University of Never Leaving Vegas, but she got away. She writes to me, “Cindi, you wouldn’t believe it. There are humans here! They don’t binge, or at least not much. They smile, they’re nice to you!“

This essay is adapted from the book Children of Las Vegas by Timothy O'Grady, with photographs by Steve Pyke, is published by Unbound. You can read more about it here