Las Vegas, late March, 2026
Las Vegas is the only city I’ve visited where the airplane steward warned us before we left the plane: “Vegas wasn’t built on winners. Make smart choices, guys,” she said over the loudspeaker. Then she threw open the plane door and we filed out into Harry Reid Airport, between walls lined with rows and rows of blinking, ringing, buzzing slot machines.
This was my second trip to Las Vegas, but the first where I was determined to actually experience the various attractions of the city. On an admittedly (very) limited budget, I, my partner, and several friends decided we’d have a real night on the town, dinner and a show on the Strip, followed by the nebulous promise of A Casino.
And indeed. After we’d dined on massive steaks at the Rio, after I’d had one cocktail and failed to finish a second (I am a famous lightweight); after our little group had been dazzled by some truly astonishing magic (the Big Man roared and read minds, the Silent Man drew silver coins from a tank of water and transformed them into swimming, golden fish); after we’d stumbled back into the buttery light of the Rio’s main floor, someone said, "Let's go to the Bellagio."
All casinos around Las Vegas lie somewhere on a graph mapping their expense and spectacle against the exuberance of their clientele. In one distant corner sprout the ubiquitous cheap casinos of outer Vegas: yellow-lit halls of slot machines surrounded by tracts of parking lot, a few cars protectively circling the entrance, advertising one-dollar buy-ins for their card games. In the opposite corner squats the Bellagio, merrily spewing flowers from its open maw, a sort of hypercapitalist hotspot that draws a taxonomic line between itself and the luxury playground-malls of Dubai. You can’t help but marvel even as you smell the blood.
Outside: the stucco walls laden with wisteria, the hypnotic jets of water waving from the fountain, showgirls wearing feathery wings on harnesses loitering beside the doors. Inside: the gilded entrance, scrupulously clean white floors dotted with massive floral arrangements, Hermés and Lamborghini and Prada shops lining the periphery. A live piano player with a rhinestone-studded suit playing on an indoor terrace. The cavernous, plastic photo-op of the "botanical gardens" ahead, studded with animatronic Fabergé eggs; the dim, red-carpeted expanse of the gambling floor to the left, leading on forever into fractally multiplying bars and game rooms.
I think I saw some minor god or demon at the Bellagio, or maybe a forgotten Daredevil villain. As we wandered the labyrinth, we passed one of the infinite drinking lounges, wide leather chairs arranged around little round tables. Seated at the foremost table, legs spread wide, an enormous man looked out over the gambling floor. He was pale white, cheeks and forehead red from sunburn or drink. He wore a black satin durag and little square sunglasses, a pinstriped suit with a cherry-red shirt. He held a cigar that aspired to be a pool cue in one huge paw; of course you must imagine countless golden rings flashing on his fingers. Every now and then he paused to take a vast drag on the cigar, blowing a cloud of curling smoke over his left shoulder before he returned his focus to a little, black-clad man who was down on one knee beside him, speaking into his ear.
I tried to point my companions toward this incredible tableau, but we were swept along in the crowd too quickly. In the end, I almost needn’t have bothered: there were so many more people to see, supplicants at the altar of whichever occult lord of the Strip it was whom I’d caught sight of.
People packed around blackjack tables, bar tables, roulette tables. Patrons wearing dark trousers and buttoned shirts, cowboy hats cradled on knees, club hoppers decked out in their finest aloha shirts and leather halter tops, bikers with mullets and mirrored sunglasses, women in slinky gowns with silver shining in their hair, men wearing flat caps and suspenders, women in white go-go boots and pale eyeshadow. Glamorous and mundane, ghosts of past eras huddled shoulder-to-shoulder around velvet tables, their eyes fixed on the dealer’s hand.
My 1.5 drinks from the Rio had worn off, but the thought of another made my stomach hurt (remember: lightweight). I did not want to wander too far from my party into the morass of Bellagites. In the spirit of the evening, wanting to Have Fun, I decided to risk some cash at some nearby slot machines.
I’d always had the unexamined idea that I might enjoy slots. After all, it’s a kind of video gaming—and I love playing video games. And like most red-blooded adults, I’ve enjoyed a game or two with ten bucks on the line. Surely Las Vegas, the city built on the backs of a billion shlubs like me, would know how to compose these elements into the exact frequency of siren song necessary to draw me in. I picked a nearby slot machine with entertaining animations of golden dragons twining around the screen, hoping for a thrill.
Instead, I was bored and embarrassingly, naïvely indignant. The slot machines weren’t games —they weren’t even as coldly addicting as Candy Crush! And you couldn’t even pull the big lever on the side of the machine anymore! It was just for show! And the ATM charged me $11 in fees! I felt cheated. Realization dawned: I had been cheated. You know, the point of the entire endeavor.
My partner, who’d wisely stuck to blackjack (actual game), came over and confessed exhaustion. We found the rest of our party and headed back to the rental house in a pleasant haze of overstimulation and fatigue, marred only slightly by an Uber driver who insisted on delivering painful “jokes” about our various professions. Outside the tinted window, the signs and buildings blurred together, a slurry of words and symbols potent enough to intoxicate any amateur weird fiction writer. A black pyramid with a spear of light shooting from its peak. The magic circles inset into the ground within which buskers and beggars must practice their craft. A great half-submerged egg, projecting a bright blue sky onto its shell and bleaching the dark night away. And everywhere, horseshoes, shamrocks, golden cats, luck, luck, luck!
Was it gross, how intensely I was ogling the city? Was it wrong how much I loved the raunchy glitz, even as I withdrew from the foundation of suffering holding up the whole affair underfoot? Was it strange that I did feel lucky to simply see the place, to be unceremoniously deprived of $20—no, $31 (damn that stupid ATM fee)?
Is it wrong to appreciate the color of a wasp? Las Vegas is that rare and beautiful thing, an allegory that someone decided to build in the real world; like the Titanic, or Venice, or a movie theater in a small town. Like all good allegories and all the best con men, it’s exactly what it sets out to be, completely unapologetic. It’s your money, and it’s their game. It’s not their fault if you were fooled. You got off the plane, didn’t you?
