Driving through the California desert west of Las Vegas, one wonders how anything could live here for a sustained period of time without turning all Kalifornia on its nearest neighbor. But then you crest The Spring Mountains and there she is, Las Vegas, Nevada. A megalopolis of sprawl and glitz that has absolutely no business being there. The need to Sin away from one’s own backyard spawned this desert outpost in the thirties, and for a good forty years it seemed that Vegas had found its rightful place in Americana.

But something happened when Sinatra left town. The impeccable stylings of the original sins have have been replaced by the boorish celebration of all that is painfully obvious in America. This town may be a good place to spend 36 hours trying to erase a painful memory, but it’s no longer a place to shoot the cuffs and hang regal. I think The Rig and I are twenty years too late.

The isn’t my father’s Vegas. Five thousand roomed theme hotels and four story Applebee’s. Endless strip malls and video poker banks in the 7-Elevens. Twenty foot plasma screens provide most of today’s entertainment, and the weathered skeletons of past glory have been put to pasture in the neon museums of Old Town. But thank Lady Luck for Old Town. Here you can still find the occasional dealer named Lucky and the cocktail waitress who served Kennedy at The Sands and knows how Sammy Davis liked his Rob Roy.

In pursuit of the last great Vegas t-shirts, I spent a good afternoon at The Downtown Lounge with a man named Shady Earl. For the price of a Bourbon he told me pretty much anything I needed to know about any topic, as long as it had to do with human weakness. He’d been in Vegas 47 years after leaving a man bleeding on the floor in a roadhouse in Houston. He pointed me to a place called The Bunkhouse, which I promptly brought into the Destee-Nation family. Vegas will always have it’s use in this America, but as far as I’m concerned, Sin City has become a three t-shirt town. I’ll be coming back another time for the other two.

From somewhere out there,
Viva Las Gabas