There was a big volleyball tournament in Las Vegas this past weekend, and I thought it would be a good idea to keep a log of the things that happened, or the things I thought of while there. It was a good idea, except for the fact that I stopped after the first day. Oh well...
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| A little something for Everybody |
14 Februrary 2014:
I have been to Vegas many times before. As a young child my famiy would make the long drive up from San Diego twice a year to ski. To ski in out-of-the-way resorts in the mountains outside of Vegas. We stopped going after my father moved to China. It wasn't that long ago, yet the memories are fuzzy, like an old pre-code film.
We drove up, my teammate and I, on the 14th-Valentine's Day-for a tournament. Las Vegas by day is such a strange place. By night it glitters and sparkles and beckons, but by day it is old, and dusty. Even the sunlight is dusty somehow. And everywhere drifts the sickly smell of smoke.
The room I am sharing with two of my teammates is nicer than was expected, with a full-size fridge and a neat kitchenette, equipped with utensils and dishtowels. It is not so shabby as to be dilapidated, yet not grand enough to seem inhospitable. It is clean. The carpet is still green and the curtains unfaded.
We are comfortably installed in the Mariott, just off Dean Martin Drive. It is only fitting, I reasoned, to listen to its namesake. I imagine ole Dino's voice drifting through the windows I forced open, swirling around the weary palm trees, eddying in the pool's artificial waterfall.
"Inamorata..."
The word is sung with a caress. Dean Martin was a great man with a drink, I hear. "Naw, I never touch the stuff," I remember hearing him say "I just freeze it and eat it like a popsicle!" The joke being, of course, that alcohol never freezes.
The sun sets in Vegas the same, I imagine, as in San Diego. But it doesn't feel the same. The air is different. My lungs remember it, though, the way an art collecter remembers an old Camoin, twenty years back.
They say that Vegas is a muddied place, those austere keepers of Puritanical morality. But I think it is grand. It is heavy with excess and human vice, and so it is grand.
Mendacity!
But for the mendacity, Vegas is candid.
Ernest Hemingway once said that it is best to write about a place after having left it for another. But what happens when the memories have faded? Had I waited until I was back in California I would not have remembered the dustiness, nor, probably, the way the windows had stoppers to prevent them from opening all the way. To stop murderers from climbing in from the outside, Nicole informed me sagely.
