Get Real
On ill-conceived attempts to understand Las Vegas
The 1990s saw Las Vegas become the fastest growing city in America. As it surged past the likes of Cleveland and Nashville in terms of population, the wider world woke up to the fact that Las Vegas was maturing from a quixotic tourist destination to a real-deal metropolis. In response, a new substrate of literature sprung up to study what the University of California, Berkeley journalism professor David Littlejohn dubbed The Real Las Vegas in an anthology of student reporting about the city.
In the book’s introduction, Littlejohn wrote, “Once you peel off the Strip and Downtown from a map or bird’s eye view of Las Vegas, what you are left with is basically a rectangular grid of boulevards spaced at one-mile intervals.” The streets closest to the Strip were occupied with what Littlejohn dismissed as, “its spillover: parking lots and garages; lesser restaurants, casinos, and motels; the sprawling convention center; the Las Vegas Hilton; and a fair amount of urban dreck” (read: gentleman’s clubs). As for areas further afield, Littlejohn quoted a local attorney’s assessment that “in the suburban neighborhoods it may as well be Phoenix, Tucson, Albuquerque, or any other Southwest city.”
Littlejohn ignored this sense of shared regional identity and rejected the contention of many residents that the city is no more interesting than any other western metropolis, as articulated by a man the British essayist Jenny Diski once described meeting on a train. When she learned he was from Las Vegas and said, “I thought people went on holiday to Las Vegas, not from it,” he responded: “People think Las Vegas is just casinos. But that’s just the Strip, like Broadway’s got theaters. No, there are real people living real lives beyond the Strip… It's a real city, and growing. We have families, suburbs, everything, just like a regular town.”
Amanda Fortini was bewitched by the regular-ness of the city when she first arrived there with her husband Walter Kirn, a fellow writer who had been offered a fellowship at UNLV’s Black Mountain Institute. In a 2020 essay for The Believer (then housed at the university) titled “The People of Las Vegas,” Fortini marveled that said people “live like much of America does: going to church, to work, to school, to bars, to buy garbage bags, to get their teeth cleaned.” Fortini was as mesmerized by the “mundane shit” one had to do to live in Las Vegas, like getting a new pair of eyeglasses at the mall, as the more eccentric sights particular to the city, like “a woman on the sidewalk outside my apartment, bathing her legs in beer.” In the end, though, Fortini had little to say about the people of Las Vegas — what makes them or their home distinct — other than to remark on their being “overlooked and ignored.” It was enough to merely reflect on their existence.
The population of Clark County doubled between the release of The Real Las Vegas and the publication of Fortini’s essay, to over 2.3 million people — still, the reportage of Littlejohn’s students holds up as perhaps the most well-rounded portrait of the city’s soul. One entry by Lisa Moskowitz profiled a realtor named Barbara Reed who claimed to have sold more than a hundred houses in 1995, enough to pocket more than $500,000 in commissions. Moskowitz wrote that Reed preferred to go by “Barbie” and had a photo posted in her office that featured her standing next to a pool and wearing cowboy boots and “a heart-shaped, sterling-silver belt buckle,” under a sign that read, “Poverty sucks.” When Moskowitz visited, Reed was wearing “an oversized pink cotton T-shirt and stretch pants, with a gold pony-tailed Barbie Doll head pendant swinging from her neck.”
One of the collection’s most eye-opening chapters is “Skin City,” wherein Maia Hansen profiles the sex workers able to eke out a decent living in Las Vegas. “I like what I do. I chose it as my profession,” a dancer at Little Darlins told Hansen. Seated next to her in the club’s dressing room backstage, a friend chimed in, “I will not work in Ohio. The dance clubs there are basically whorehouses.” An hour west in Pahrump, the town just across the Nye County Line, a brothel worker named Amy told Hansen she made about $200,000 a year, half of which went to management. “Not bad,” Hansen wrote, “for a twenty-five-year-old without a high-school diploma.”
Despite the chapter’s most prominent voices, Hansen acknowledges that the bizarre, semi-legal status of sex work in Las Vegas has made the city an international center of human trafficking. It’s a problem that has only grown more salient as the city has grown. After a teenager named Bekah Charleston ran away from her parents in Texas, she ended up being held in what she described as “virtual captivity” at a legal brothel. “I was actually trafficked through the legal system,” Charleston said on a 2020 webinar hosted by the National Center on Sexual Exploitation. “My trafficker would use the brothels as a form of punishment…. If you weren’t making enough money, if you were getting arrested too often, he would send you to the brothels. Because then he had other pimps watching over you, and he knew that you’d be forced to get off your butt and make money because the brothels aren’t going to let you sit around and say no all the time.” Angela Delgado-Williams, a former employee of a sanctioned escort service, added, “They’re making loopholes and allowing escort services to pay taxes and get licenses… to sell women. And it’s understood, when the women go to get hired into these escort services that they’re going to go to a hotel room and service a sex buyer.”
To really understand Las Vegas, it’s necessary to contend with how such a cruel and dehumanizing system came to be a tacitly sanctioned component of the same city that also touts “family friendly” roller coasters at its casinos and where it’s possible to buy a house through a realtor who goes by Barbie. All are “real” experiences, even if their reality beguiles practically every outsider who tries to immerse themself in the city.
David Littlejohn, for his part, reacted to the contradictions of Vegas by cordoning off the city from the rest of society. Because “gambling has been the raison d’être of Las Vegas for two-thirds of a century,” he wrote, the city “is unique, and may therefore have no lessons — economic, social, or ethical — to pass on to the rest of the country.” Two and a half decades later, with casinos having sprouted up in practically every state and sports gambling now a national obsession, it’s clear that, far from an exception, Las Vegas may instead be the city that most vividly evokes the nervous, inconstant energy of contemporary America.
This month I’m back in The Nation, with a long-simmering essay on the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Superhero movies have dominated Hollywood since the 1990s, with Marvel’s incredible run of success — the studio raked in $26 billion over the course of 16 years — setting a template that practically every film exec has sought to replicate, even if it’s left the casual moviegoer frustrated by a lack of any stories being told that don’t involve latex tights. Suddenly, though, there’s hope that Marvel’s dominance has come to an abrupt end. The studio’s most recent films crashed so badly at the box office that 2024’s release schedule has been scrubbed of big-name heroes. In the essay, I consider whether a year off from Marvel movies will open the door for a superhero revenge tour next summer, or if the reign of the MCU has already come to an end.
If you’re the type who starts every morning by jamming through the games on the New York Times’ app — Wordle, Connections, the Mini crossword, etc. — you need to add Cardinal to your daily rotation. The brainchild of Seth Scott, Cardinal is an engrossing little game where you arrange exquisitely designed tiles into a satisfying pattern. Fun as it is to play on the phone, Seth is also in the process of bringing a physical version of the game into the world via Kickstarter. Head on over to his page to check out the great artwork and learn about the game, then kick in a couple bucks before the campaign ends on Friday!
That’s all for now. Thanks, as always, for reading — here’s the link to preorder American Oasis: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest. You can find me on my website, or rolling up to a trailhead in Acadia first thing in the morning to lug some dirt up four miles of trail to a summit in dire need of rewilding.
Your pal,
Kyle
I am so excited for your book!