Read Online America, You Sexy Bitch by Michael Black Meghan McCain - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Michael Black Meghan McCain
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Mafiosi first crossed six-shooters to build a desert oasis.
The old Strip has really gone to pot. All the classic casinos are still there: the Four Queens, the Golden Nugget, Binion’s, and Fitzgerald’s. But whatever magic and glamour may have been there in 1963 is long gone. The only connection to those days are the cocktail waitresses; most of whom look as if they never left. This is the home of the three-dollar blackjack table and the ninety-nine-cent shrimp cocktail. This is where Lady Luck went to kill herself.
Old Vegas is so much more exciting to me than new Vegas because it is the truer face of the city. It’s scrappier and hungrier. Old Vegas is the gambler who lost everything but just knows he’ll make it back if he can just catch a couple lucky breaks. Who knows, maybe old Vegas can get lucky again; just across the street from the seedy casinos, there is a new downtown revitalization movement happening, an entrepreneurial revival unnoticed by the tourists sucking down giant frozen drinks out of enormous plastic hookahs.
Stop number one on our tour is the Downtown Cocktail Room, or “DCR,” as it’s known to its hipster clientele. Yes, even Vegas has hipsters. Whether or not there are enough of them to turn around this grungy neighborhood I do not know, but they are definitely giving it a try. The bar was opened by Michael and Jennifer, who agree to have fancy drinks with us. The cocktail room is dark and luxe, radically different from the garishness just outside their door.
This is a place for serious libation. There are, for example, eight different varieties of absinthe on the offering, and concoctions with names like “Persephone’s Pomme” and “Satan’s Whiskers.” Our waitress is dressed, inexplicably, like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange, complete with bowler hat and fake eyelash . I order something fruity, as is my nature, and we get to chatting with Michael and Jennifer.
They’re a great couple, the kind of young, practical, industrious people that America is rumored to be filled with. For whatever reason, they’ve decided to make downtown Las Vegas their mission. They’re making Brooklyn in the desert here. Not only do they run the DCR, they’ve also got Emergency Arts, a coffee shop/art collective housed in an old medical center. Friends of theirs own a bar-arcade called Insert Coin, where we play video games and drink bubblegum-flavored vodka.
There’s a lot going on here, but the entire downtown restoration only extends a couple of blocks. For every new bar or art gallery, there are ten vacant buildings. When the economy fried, Vegas was the first place to get zapped. The whole town has a kind of jittery vibe to it, the way people get when they’ve been up too late partying. Las Vegas looks like a girl who stayed out all night and now her dress is crumpled, she’s lost a heel, and her mascara is all over her face. Las Vegas is a hot mess. No wonder Meghan loves it so.
We spend the rest of the night walking around Freemont Street, a long outdoor plaza covered by an enormous electronic canopy. The canopy stretches for about three city blocks and is illuminated with millions of LED lights flashing messages, advertisements, and the occasional patriotic light show. The effect is to make it feel as though you are living underneath a football stadium scoreboard.
The street is mobbed with badly dressed, lumpy, drunken tourists, sipping from novelty plastic grenades and beer bongs. Attractions abound. A zip line system runs just above our heads. There are multiple Elvis impersonators and people dressed as SpongeBob SquarePants. A local ’80s cover band is set up at the end of the street. They all have identical black plastic hair wigs and
skinny jeans, skinny ties. They look miserable bopping around up there, exhorting the audience to “Wang Chung tonight.” The crowd looks equally miserable half-heartedly stumbling along in something that looks like, but definitely is not,
The old Strip has really gone to pot. All the classic casinos are still there: the Four Queens, the Golden Nugget, Binion’s, and Fitzgerald’s. But whatever magic and glamour may have been there in 1963 is long gone. The only connection to those days are the cocktail waitresses; most of whom look as if they never left. This is the home of the three-dollar blackjack table and the ninety-nine-cent shrimp cocktail. This is where Lady Luck went to kill herself.
Old Vegas is so much more exciting to me than new Vegas because it is the truer face of the city. It’s scrappier and hungrier. Old Vegas is the gambler who lost everything but just knows he’ll make it back if he can just catch a couple lucky breaks. Who knows, maybe old Vegas can get lucky again; just across the street from the seedy casinos, there is a new downtown revitalization movement happening, an entrepreneurial revival unnoticed by the tourists sucking down giant frozen drinks out of enormous plastic hookahs.
Stop number one on our tour is the Downtown Cocktail Room, or “DCR,” as it’s known to its hipster clientele. Yes, even Vegas has hipsters. Whether or not there are enough of them to turn around this grungy neighborhood I do not know, but they are definitely giving it a try. The bar was opened by Michael and Jennifer, who agree to have fancy drinks with us. The cocktail room is dark and luxe, radically different from the garishness just outside their door.
This is a place for serious libation. There are, for example, eight different varieties of absinthe on the offering, and concoctions with names like “Persephone’s Pomme” and “Satan’s Whiskers.” Our waitress is dressed, inexplicably, like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange, complete with bowler hat and fake eyelash . I order something fruity, as is my nature, and we get to chatting with Michael and Jennifer.
They’re a great couple, the kind of young, practical, industrious people that America is rumored to be filled with. For whatever reason, they’ve decided to make downtown Las Vegas their mission. They’re making Brooklyn in the desert here. Not only do they run the DCR, they’ve also got Emergency Arts, a coffee shop/art collective housed in an old medical center. Friends of theirs own a bar-arcade called Insert Coin, where we play video games and drink bubblegum-flavored vodka.
There’s a lot going on here, but the entire downtown restoration only extends a couple of blocks. For every new bar or art gallery, there are ten vacant buildings. When the economy fried, Vegas was the first place to get zapped. The whole town has a kind of jittery vibe to it, the way people get when they’ve been up too late partying. Las Vegas looks like a girl who stayed out all night and now her dress is crumpled, she’s lost a heel, and her mascara is all over her face. Las Vegas is a hot mess. No wonder Meghan loves it so.
We spend the rest of the night walking around Freemont Street, a long outdoor plaza covered by an enormous electronic canopy. The canopy stretches for about three city blocks and is illuminated with millions of LED lights flashing messages, advertisements, and the occasional patriotic light show. The effect is to make it feel as though you are living underneath a football stadium scoreboard.
The street is mobbed with badly dressed, lumpy, drunken tourists, sipping from novelty plastic grenades and beer bongs. Attractions abound. A zip line system runs just above our heads. There are multiple Elvis impersonators and people dressed as SpongeBob SquarePants. A local ’80s cover band is set up at the end of the street. They all have identical black plastic hair wigs and
skinny jeans, skinny ties. They look miserable bopping around up there, exhorting the audience to “Wang Chung tonight.” The crowd looks equally miserable half-heartedly stumbling along in something that looks like, but definitely is not,
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