The Meadows
By David Ince
He steps off the travelator bag-less and tired while excitable tourists surge around him out through the doors into the white Nevada sunshine. He stares at a freestanding billboard next to the doors: FIRE A MACHINE GUN! CALL TODAY! The last time he was here it was adverts for gambling and girls. That’s going back some now and he turns towards the doors and through the polarised tint of his aviator glasses he looks at the outline of Las Vegas a couple miles distant, soft and hazy above the heat shimmer. He walks out into the glare and climbs into the shuttle bus that will take him to the rental place. He looks back at McCarran International. It’s the last airport he’ll ever see.
At the Alamo rental counter some kid in a green uniform checks his driver’s license while he stands with fingers crossed hoping for the payment to go through. The flight out here almost maxed his last credit card and although he could have a smaller car he’s opted for a Dodge Charger instead. Might as well blow the last of his fortune on the same American gems that he spent the rest of it on. Not too long ago he could have bought a thousand of these cars but now simply hiring one for a few days seems like a big deal and when the kid presents the lease he signs with a flourish and hates himself for the grin that cracks his face below the aviator glasses. How the meek shall inherit the earth. He strolls down the escalator towards the parking lot with his shoulders squared. He has no intentions of being meek. The Dodge is white and the sun flares off the polished alloys and when he sinks into the bucket seat and thumps the door shut he grins and guns the engine and roars out into Las Vegas.
Back in 74 a grifter with nothing but a sharp suit and instincts honed to a razor’s edge swept through the Flamingo and the MGM Grand. He blew town less than 48hrs later with close to a million bucks and over the next thirty years built an empire and indulged in every sin the Bible had a name for. He called himself Garret Texas after the place where he grew up and in 74 he was like a streak of piss in the moonlight except for blue eyes so intense they intimidated the dealers. Now those eyes are lost behind the ridiculous aviator glasses and after parking the Dodge in a lot behind Denny’s on Tropicana he strolls down the Strip, sweating under the desert sun. Back then all he saw was money and lights. Now the extravagance is greater but somehow thin. Fake grass out front of new hotels like the Manderlay and Wyn, fake because Lake Mead is drying up. The endless clicking of walnut Mexicans festooned over the sidewalks in their day-glo shirts, announcing a girl to your door in twenty minutes. They brandish prostitute calling cards, flicking the back with bitten fingernails to grab attention and sounding like an army of cicadas competing against the continuous music from the hotels, shop-fronts and bars. He takes a handful of cards – a variety of big titty girls, glamorous and unreachable. As if an hour really costs 40 bucks and tomorrow you get her friend for free. An outdoor escalator carries him up to a glassed-in walkway so he can cross from Caesar’s Palace to The Mirage. Sprawled homeless with empty eyes and blank faces clutch cardboard signs declaring why lie, I need beer. A graffiti artist imprisoned in a make-shift booth uses spray cans to create a portrait of the Strip. The type of picture only tourists would buy and he realises that this whole circus is as real as that picture, created almost as easily with the sole purpose of generating revenue. Las Vegas is just a smear of color on the desert floor. A streak of gold over a shallow heart.
Hours later he sits behind the tinted windows of the Dodge Charger in the lot behind Denny’s and in his usual spirit of self-indulgence he laments all the glitter and glamour that has gone from his life. Imagining some discreet or voyeuristic audience he lets a tear escape and roll from beneath his aviator glasses.
He drives out of the city and the lights fall behind as numerous and fading like the zeros in his bank accounts until he is alone on the interstate speeding towards Boulder City. He slows for crossing the Hoover Dam and over the state line into Arizona and then accelerates up the hill into the desert. As he drives he begins to feel lighter as if his return to nothingness is far from the last act of a broken mogul and more the considered response of a philosopher attempting to find peace in a chaotic world. Brown ridges and sporadic yellow scrub grass rise away steeply from either side of the highway as it cuts through the desert and he looks through the tinted windows at that harsh and brutal landscape and for a moment he imagines a voice calling to him. But romantic notions have never been part of his internal landscape and practicality reasserts itself and like the beginning of that year in 74 he is penniless and all alone, while the desert is just empty stone and fierce heat. – Like my heart, he whispers and swings the Dodge off the asphalt and comes to a dust-billowing halt.
He walks away from the car leaving the door open and the warning beep follows him into the rocks and the sand and the scrub grass. He walks and climbs while the Arizona heat like a solid blanket slowly smothers the life from him until he collapses somewhere in a deep valley between two steeply rising abutments. He lies with the flies and the lizards and remembers the towering insanity of his success, equalled only by the sudden and brutal speed with which it was torn away. He wonders how something seemingly so bright and vast could be so fragile. He dies still wearing his aviator glasses.
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