The Visitor

Testy Lesbiana shot through the night.

Imagine lightning bolts. Picture jet engines. Envision rockets and blastoffs and those atomic explosions rearranging the desert. She ripped at high speed through the desert darkness, going from nowhere to nowhere, exulting in the trip without destination, thrilling in power and gasoline waste. She drove a pop-top road yacht, one of those cruisers whose hood could have held a putting green, a refugees from the glory days of shamelessness in Motor City, set free now in this promised land of emptiness and open asphalt.

She wore a wig and more makeup than a whole line of showgirls. She sported sequins to make Liberace drool, and that’s a whole lotta sparkle, kiddies. Her teased and sprayed-stiff updo, born of half a dozen sweet innocent heads in South Korea but now fulfilling a potential they could not have imagined, fluttered wildly. Her eyelashes flapped and waved, hanging on desperately and only because they were partially protected behind big, black sunglasses. At 2:00 am. After work one Wednesday at Extravaganza!, biggest tits and feathers show in the world.

Sometimes, a queen just has to get out, Testy told people. Sometimes, she had to forego the lights and the glamour of the stage – or of backstage, or the bars – for the bare expanse of the wild world. She had to trade cocktail lighting for a wash of stars flung across the curtain of sky, Klieg lights for God’s own shining spotlight, the moon.

Testy cackled, grabbed an eight-track from the pile beside her, and cranked up the music.
Yes, children, an eight-track. What else would a self-respecting throwback auto to a stupider era contain? The retro stereo did limit her choices of entertainment, but that seemed only right. Tonight, she’d started off with the Carpenters, crooning on about Rainy Days, which had seemed appropriate given the wet spring, but bored La Lesbiana quickly. That Karen girl knew nothing about glamour. Testy had moved on to Tina Turner, who was as of this moment burning up scorpion ears for miles around with Proud Mary. The scorpions were jiggling their little see-through asses and high stepping as if all the desert were their stage and all the sagebrush their audience. Testy laughed, and sang louder.

Off in the distance, coming toward her, was a pair of lights. She blinked and paused in the song while Tina went on. She was surprised to see another car out so late, and so remotely. She was not on any major highway, but burning up a two-land road that headed vaguely toward the mountains south and west of town. She didn't know where it went, precisely. Nobody ever came here, that she’d ever known. Nobody had a reason to.

The lights grew quickly, revealing themselves as the glaring eyes of a well-known Vegas beast. Gold paint surrounded their glow, and a long, boxy body followed. Along its sides blared words in pink and orange and green. Totally! Nude! Showgirls!!! they said, exclamations included for free.

“Ha! You go, girls!” Testy yelled out, and toasted the limo with her empty hand. Inside, giggles and champagne glasses, and probably no notice at all of her. “Have a good night!”

And the red butt of the limo cruised off into her rear-view mirror, heading toward the city and its sparkling brethren and whatever parties waited. What mogul hermit had called it out to fetch him, or what flush winner had hired it for a desert cruise in the wee small hours? Testy waved a hand while her wig flailed and her lashes cowered, and Tina screamed of dignity and incendiary ladies, and lizards and scorpions wondered what the hell was up tonight.

Now a change of scene.

Picture, if you will, a man. A gentleman, shall we say, of a certain age. Odd, how that phrase is almost always applied to women. “A certain age” generally means “more than they’ll admit to”, although in Venus’ case it could have referred to several ages. Historical ones. This gentleman was not young, but not decrepit. He sat quietly in his limo, considering.

What did he consider? So glad you asked, and so sorry to disappoint, but who knows? He kept his private thoughts private, and watched his ride-mates sip their drinks and giggle, and said barely a word on the long ride into Vegas.

He’d called, or someone had, for a pickup at a vague spot not near anything. A limo, please, one of the extra long ones. And some girls to share the ride. The operator who’d taken the call had wondered what the hell anyone would be doing out so far, particularly on a night like this when rain had fallen off and on and there was nothing, nothing out there. But the credit card number paid off, and maybe the guy had been stranded by a pissed-off lover. The operator knew how that worked. So, round three girls up, send ‘em out. Give the driver a map and tell him don’t search too long if the guy’s not where he promised. But he had been, and the Champagne was waiting, and although he didn’t drink any, he poured for his companions and held a glass to tap against theirs, and the ride went smoothly, and the limo company made a fat profit.

“Where you going, sir?” asked the driver. “We’ll be getting into town in another ten minutes. Where would you like me to take you?”

Limo drivers in Las Vegas know to pin these things down. They cater to a rare species, the one-night wonder, gambling's answer to Motown's singular single one-hitters. These are not men of means, not men accustomed to drivers or vehicles longer than suburban driveways. They are frat boys with too much cash, guys out to impress their girls or girls in packs meaning to live like the big boys for a few hours. The light of dawn threatens and destroys them all, so their drivers know how to soothe and steer them through the dark hours. They build them up, play their games and support their silly fantasies. That’s what a limo’s for, isn’t it?

“Give us the grand tour,” the man in the back said. The driver saw him smile slightly, saw the craggy eyes crinkle. He was a tall man, commanding even sunk into the cushy leather. The driver’s view of his great, shaggy, gray head shifted as he leaned forward to pour more Champagne. The reflection of his shoulders fell off the mirror’s sides, too broad to be held there. “Let’s get my money’s worth. Show the young ladies the town.” Some giggling, happy sounds came in answer.

Smooth as oil. Charming as a movie actor determined to get into your movie or, if he has to settle, your pants.

“Yes, sir,” said the driver.

“Then take the girls home,” the voice came. “And drop me at the Olympus.”

NEXT UP: STRIP DOINGS (Monday 8/3)

An Interlude...

Far to the north of Las Vegas, miles away from all the city’s neon tin pan alleys, in a back corner of the Mojave so forgotten even the moon hadn’t bothered to show up there, a lone figure lurked.
He might have been natty, but he was only a wisp, a mere sketch of a man in the shadowy night. The hint of a hat brim pulled a pitch-black slash of shadow across his face. A suggestion of wingtips flicked in and out of sight as sagebrush limbs tossed shadows at the sands around his feet.

He stood still, much more still than anything else in that breezy, balmy night air. He stared across the miles of empty ground in front of him at a glow so bright it was nearly solid. It obstructed the starlight for miles around.

He sighed.

There was a chorus of sighs in the Mojave that night. A plethora of sighs, a symphony.

Or at least a sigh convention.

Venus’ sighs were orgiastic, Sphinx’s solemn and reverent. This see-through figure’s were small. They were sad. They got shredded and kidnapped by the wind as soon as they escaped his lips. They were not even tissue paper thick; they were so gossamer that they melted in his own mouth and barely made it to his lips. He might have swallowed them back again, without even knowing.

In the days when Benjamin Siegel lay newly dead in L.A., ripped out of earthly life by a fusillade of anonymous bullets, Vegas was just being born. His Ghost came into being later, when the city had forgotten Ben enough to start getting sentimental over his legend. It hadn’t taken long, in this city where history was measured in months, and tradition came and went with each generation.

Back when the Ghost had first arrived, the glory days still held sway. Glamour and deals, gleaming white dice and laughing, beehived girls were the rule. He had happily inhabited the smoke and nicotine-stained mirrors, reveling in the great after-dark glee of it. He had spent night after night drifting through velvet casino wombs, sliding past plate glass windows, staring out at Technicolor nighttime pools where starlets did their private shows for men who could give them literally everything they’d ever dreamed of. In that generation, dreams were still a tradable commodity, and they came in sizes more easily available. Now... the girls in the pools had bigger dreams, and they probably wouldn’t go into the water, anyway. Getting wet would ruin their nails, or their make-up, or their astronomically-priced bikinis. They’d stand around next to the pools, at most, posing and sipping retro cocktails. Liquor still held some allure these days, but fun and frolic had become declassé.

What the ghost missed most, he’d decided, was the girls. Showgirls– the real, statuesque, perfectly beautiful kind– were a species known only to Vegas. They were perfect foils in the old days for the opera-worthy epics of the Bosses, the Wiseguys, the Families. Showgirls were the casinos’ flashing crystal chandeliers made flesh, the smoke-filled, eternal party nights and flocked wallpaper in a shapely, smiling package. You saw them from a distance, onstage or across the bar after the show, and they were always more wonderful in person than you’d dared believe– more beautiful, more charming, more fun up close. Their hair would be swept up and teased to heaven, their lashes glued tight and mascara-ed, their arms dripping with bracelets. And they’d be laughing, always laughing as they hung over the card tables alongside Dean and Frank and Sammy through endless hands of blackjack and cigarettes and whiskey.

Real showgirls had gone out of fashion. Now any female onstage was a dancer, or else a circus acrobat. There were girls who called themselves “showgirls”, but this brand placed yellow page ads next to the ones for escorts and masseuses. Their pictures got handed out by the thousand on every street corner, and then thrown into the gutters like pornographic autumn leaves. They did arrive at the hotels, when called, in limousines that were painted gold and pink and orange, which had some style, some panache. Vegas’ best sins were always stark and unapologetic. But the girls who came out of those glowing doors were just cheap imitations, not to be compared to real showgirls.

The place had moved on, grown up and become a city. It hatched new Shangri-las each month – nothing like the real Shangri-la, to be sure, but no one remembered that old hotel. These days the lights hurt his non-eyes and their heat disturbed his cool pond surface of a shadow. He still wore the shape of his outdated suit and his fedora, out here in the desert, where the glaring computerized lights were just a glow. His eyes, what there was of them, were shaded by the brim of his hat.

He sighed. Far above his head, the wind made an answering sound. More an atmospheric snort than a sigh. The sky would have rolled its eyes at him, if it had had them. As for the city, massive golden Jell-o mold trembling and towering into the atmosphere, it ignored him utterly. If it ever knew its debt, it had forgotten now. Prodigal that it was, it had lost all interest years ago.

NEXT POST: A NEW ARRIVAL (Friday 7/31)

Miss Honore Makes Her Entrance

Honoré Jerques stood backstage and smoked, leaning against the doorjamb to the loading dock behind the Extrav! stage in the only nine square feet of space where smoking was still allowed. Her high heel skewered the white tape that defined her prison, shredding it as her pointy toe swung left and right, left and right while she inhaled and glowered.

Vegas had been better when the Boys ran it, before all these corporations with their ticking computers and their per-square-foot-income-breakdowns and their policies had invaded. She took a deep drag, reducing the stick to a glowing nub, and enjoyed the feeling of the smoke roiling around through her lungs.

Secondhand smoke was not a danger around Honoré. Expelling clouds of smoke was lazy, she would have told you, and a waste besides. Why bother to light up, if you’re just going to spit it all out? With her smokes, as in everything else she did, Honoré was a professional.

She scowled at the backs of her dancers as they ran past. One group of covered girls hurried from an exit on stage left to an entrance on stage right. Some boys trooped down the stairs to the dressing rooms while the male singers hurried to change costumes. Honoré caught shreds of talk, the endless, nightly bitching about the pace, or the choreography, or the audience, or her. She glared at them and ground the white tape with her sharp heel and sucked in smoke.

Spoiled children. Every one.

She watched as a rustling herd of tall nude girls went by. She looked them over critically. Heddy: she drove Honoré crazy with that stupid accent, but she looked dynamite on stage. Nadja and Ellen: young still, might be good, might fizzle and never grow into themselves. Sharon: annoying, but a good dancer with a great body who never changed, never gained or lost an ounce, was utterly reliable. Linda: a bitch, steel-plated and unrepentant. That, Honoré didn’t mind, but Linda was also lazy, schlepping her way through every number with barely enough energy to get from one side of the stage to the other. She’d be gone next contract. She’d more than worn out her bitchy charm.

Rachel. Honoré Jerques looked at Rachel Ferguson through slitted eyes, watching her fishnet-wrapped ass retreat behind a curtain in the direction of the stairs. She’d noticed Rachel watching back recently when she looked her over. Noticing her boss’ notice, clearly. Rachel knew the contract was more than half over. She knew that she was at an age, now, when each new contract might be her last. Not that she sagged, yet. Not that she had crow’s feet, or her hips had spread, or anything obvious had changed at all. She was still a woman in her prime, to any other eyes. But a woman who had reached her prime, Miss Honoré Jerques knew, was a woman who had nowhere left to go but down.

Miss Honoré, herself, had retired from her days on stage long before she’d passed her prime. Before she’d even reached it, some said. In those days, you didn’t have a baby, then get to come back as if nothing had happened.

Although, officially, in Honoré’s case, nothing had. Her child had come and gone from her life quite efficiently. Only the father had wanted it at all, and by the time it arrived, he was long gone. So Honoré had retired, decently and quietly, and now she had no patience for girls who refused to go when their time came.

And no mercy, when those girls fought and argued at auditions. All Miss Honoré’s dancers had to attend auditions for each new contract, no matter how long or how hard they’d worked for her. Those were infamous scenes of tears, begging, thrown dance bags, screaming exits, and desperate dancer vitriol, all aimed at her. Just to think of it made her smile. Honoré hadn’t raised her voice in decades. She just told the truth, brutal and unwelcome as it might be. Dancers weren’t known for their intelligence, she’d said so more than once. And why should they be? She was here to be their brains. She was here to tell them all the things they didn’t want to hear. Someone had to do it, and Miss Honoré was gifted.

Rachel. Was Rachel’s time up? Honoré’s cigarette might have whimpered, she sucked in its lifesmoke so aggressively as she considered. It glowed hopelessly and succumbed to her, and got just a little revenge when she sucked down the last of it and burned her fingers.

“Shit,” Miss Honoré exclaimed, expelling more smoke than usual. She dashed the stub down and ground it into the hoary floorboards with the toe of her pump, shredding it to its molecules and taking out a good chunk of the white tape with it. Then she idly tapped her fingers against each other while she watched another swarm of cast members go by. The Space number was halfway through now, and there was no reason why she had to stick around in this godforsaken taped-in prison.

Miss Honoré stomped after her dancers. Time to rattle a few cages and wake the babies from their stupor, she thought. The corners of her lipsticked mouth lifted, as if the thick red sheathing were expressing a pleasure of its own.

But a second later, Miss Honoré took control again. She straightened her mouth, licked the lips just to remind them who was boss, and stalked off through the basements and hallways toward her office, where a full pack and her nearly-useless assistant, Gina, waited in fear and trembling. Her fingers twitched, eager to asphyxiate her next cigarette. She could already feel the throbbing power of her Zippo in her palm.

Testy Lesbiana looked over her shoulder. “The Dragon Lady’s on the warpath tonight.”

“What the hell else is new?” Sharon demanded. She dropped her wig on the floor and bumped
Nadja as she bent over to grab her new shoes. “Watch it!”

Rachel’s line of nudes was in the middle of a their quickest change of the show. Moments earlier, they had captured and enslaved all the boy dancers, who were costumed fetchingly as disco spacemen. The spacemen were now busy being mesmerized by the Space Queen and her coterie of demur ladies in waiting (the chorus singers and covered dancers) while the topless girls stripped ten feet off-stage and dressed for their next dance. In less than a minute, they’d be onstage again to seduce the boys and thus propagate the Space Cowgirl species. The number ended in a cataclysm, as usual, when the spacemen turned on their captors and broke free, and the entire Space Cowgirl world, in the form of a three-level disco set complete with waterfalls and two story slides spewing a nude a second, collapsed. “Now, now, ladies,” Testy soothed them. “Hey, Rachel, here’s a question. You ever think about the future?”

Rachel was busily peeling off her silver lame opera gloves, exchanging them for identical pink ones. Her silver Afro, chrome pillbox and thigh-high boots went next, all replaced by pink versions with glittery jewels.

“What?” she asked Testy, tugging at her boots and getting one finger of her left glove caught in its zipper. “Damn. What, Testy?”

“Yrga who-ah kentter stu,” Heddy said.

“Yeah, right,” Rachel nodded. “Test?”

Testy Lesbiana reached under Heddy’s chin and did something with her hat strap. “There it is, honey,” she said reassuringly. “Just like you asked me to do last night.”

“Urffda.”

Heddy turned and led the way back toward the stage. “What are you talking about?” Rachel demanded as she followed Heddy and bumped into Linda.

“Watch it.”

“Sorry.”

Testy hovered near the girls as they formed up, waiting to step out one-by-one and join their partners for the big propagation adagio. She brushed, dusted, tugged, and double-checked that everything was connected, secured, covered or exposed as necessary.

“Just wondering, sweetie-pie,” she hummed.

“Well, what the hell does that mean?” The first boy in line was just rounding the corner and reaching a hand to lead Heddy out. The rest of the girls all took one step forward. “And what are you doing asking something like that in the middle of a number, Test?” Sharon left, and they stepped forward again.

Testy Lesbiana shrugged. “Too chicken to ask when you’ve got time to really answer, probably. Oh, honey, wait a sec–” she reached up to pop a loose jewel off Rachel’s spangled epaulet. “Gotcha! Bring that costume to me when you’re finished, I’ll sew it back on.”

“Of course. But are you saying–”

“Rachel!” Nadja hissed from behind her, and Rachel realized her cue had come. Her partner, Ralph, was pausing, sticking his hand so far past the edge of the curtain that he could have picked her nose if he’d wanted. He’d probably slap her if she didn’t grab it.

“Aren’t there better things you’d like to do?” Testy asked, “besides just parade your exquisite tits all up and down this stage till they kick you out?”

“You think my tits are exquisite?” Rachel asked. She made her entrance, allowing Ralph to lead her downstage center for the pas de deux.

She heard a heavy sigh from behind her. “Showgirls,” Testy Lesbiana exclaimed.

NEXT POST: Vegas' Own Guardian Angel (Monday 7/27)

Hello, Beautiful!

On warm spring evenings in Las Vegas, when the empty desert sky fades into darkness and becomes no more than a backdrop to the largest and longest-running floor show in the world; when the outlying desert disappears into the distance to lick its wounds, and its individual sand grains stop surfing the breeze into tourists’ eyes; when the traffic lights and the headlights up and down the Strip pale into obscurity and get flooded away by the nuclear blast of neon and chasers from the big hotels; then strange figures come out to play, personages unknown to the gamblers and remarkably unexploited by the Tourist Bureau.

At the Strip’s south end, a brand new hotel lurked. Its shiny, geometric facade glinted. Inside, its cards practically rustled in their eagerness to be shucked free of their cellophane and let out for their first time.

Out front, an ersatz, Cairo-copying monolith crouched, doing duty as sign, tourist bait, and porte cochere all at once. He gleamed with new paint and sported the rhinoplasty of which his original could only dream. He bulked one third larger than the old model, and much brighter blue and gold than it remembered ever being. Currently he glimmered with the night’s rain.

The Sphinx stared over the sidewalk and the heads of the tourists to an ineffable point somewhere past the hotel across the street. He sought, somehow, to adore the moon, which his faith told him must be hanging up there somewhere, far above this syrupy haze of signage that had caught him.

The darkness deepened. Brand new, white-hot spot lights shone up the edges of the pyramid, and on Sphinx's paws, face, and haunches. And he heard a giggle, a breathy, teasing come-on of a sound that would have made all the tourists within a mile share the most multiple simultaneous orgasm in history if they could have heard it.

“The night is lovely, Sphinx,” the voice came.

He sighed. “Get off my back,” he responded.

The figure demurred, audibly, and drew her hand across the back of his concrete head. Even through the concrete headpiece he wore, painted lurid blue for the presumed pleasure of the future guests in the front rooms, he felt her touch. And he felt what might have been a shiver, if such a thing had been possible in his poured concrete body. Venus had this effect on him. She simultaneously disgusted and titillated him, which made no sense at all for a pious being poured and created expressly for worship and to shade valet parking.

Venus, as far as he could discern, had been happily resident in Vegas for some time – decades, was Sphinx’s best guess, although she either didn’t remember or wouldn’t admit to it. Such girlish reticence was perfectly in keeping with her flirty, uber-feminine, utterly unliberated persona, but it was patently ridiculous for a women who also insisted on being remembered as an Ancient goddess, who boasted of her exploits among Greek and Roman followers and got miffed when no one else remembered. But then, as Sphinx had quickly learned, contradiction was her most accustomed motif, a touchy contrariness the inseparable counterpoint to her supple receptiveness.

Now he tried again to push her away without actually being able to push. “Stop, Venus,” he told her. He hoped, as he always did, that his lack of welcome would stymie or at least bore her. He had not yet learned to conform his own behavior to his understanding. The moon, a notoriously impatient goddess, might have despaired of him. “Just get off.”

A full laugh came floating back to him. “Oh, I intend to,” she trilled.

It took him a moment to understand her. “That’s disgusting,” he announced.

“Oh, Sphinx,” she moaned from what sounded like a lower place along his spine. “Oh, my Sphinx, oh my brother,” she breathed, in an echo from newlywed bedchambers and illicit love nests worldwide.

“I’m not your brother,” he mumbled, but she wasn’t listening.

The sky squeezed out another raindrop. The clouds were gathering, holding a special, smaller, nighttime reprise of their matinee performance, Deluge! Sphinx wished he could look up. Maybe if he got a little water in his eye, that would distract him from the moaning, and the weird rubbings which were growing just behind his headpiece. “Great Goddess above,” he whispered, “please save me from this.”

“Oh my Sphinx!” she rang out. Tourists on the sidewalk, though they couldn’t hear her, turned and looked up.

Venus had always been trouble, even Sphinx had learned that. Her relations with other deities, especially, had never been copacetic. From the first day she’d showed up on the beach in Greece, surfing in on a pile of seafoam as if it were the grandest of sedan chairs borne by nubile, hunky slaves, Olympus had looked down its nose at her. She wasn’t one of theirs. She didn’t play the game right.

Proper gods represented fundamental forces: earth, storms, the sun. Venus embodied Love and War— those two most cheap and human urges. She was an interloper on the mountain of divinity, a white-trash second wife scandalizing the country club.

But humans loved her. Even as they’d forgotten her origins and stopped inviting her to their battlefields, they’d retained the vision of an unspeakably beautiful woman, pleasure embodied. The rest of the old divine pantheon might be discarded, unloved and forgotten, but the Goddess of Love was alive and well.

Especially here. Venus had been perfectly happy to lose her war responsibilities and settle in as humanity’s embodiment of love in Las Vegas. Where else could she be appreciated as she was here? Where else was beauty an end unto itself, simple sexuality so pandered to or lauded? Las Vegas was Venus’ spiritual home, and she was its obvious goddess.

And where else could she have found a confidante as stalwart and, let’s face it, captive as Sphinx? He sighed, and wished he could close his ears to her, if not keep her at bay outright. "Oh, dear goddess," he prayed to the lost moon, "Save me!"

His goddess, as it turned out, had taken a powder.

NEXT POST: MISS HONORE MAKES HER ENTRANCE (Friday 7/24)

The First Round of Pathos

Consider the storm. Ancient peoples thought it was an act of the gods, or that it was a god, itself, badly behaved and running rampant. The Storm God was surely no one’s first choice for dinner guest, but that didn’t matter. If you live, walk, or breathe on this planet, you are the Storm’s subject. Gods of the Sea, of the Heavens, of particular crossroads or holy sites or hearths or what have you may have their little spheres of influence and stay busy enough, but the Storm travels everywhere and bends us all to his will.

In Las Vegas, where there are fewer than ten inches of rain, on average, in a year, the storm appears rarely but makes a bigger splash than in most other places. Sammy and Deano and Juliet Prowse all used to save their best material for Vegas, too, but that was because the town paid them better, and had bigger stages than anywhere else. For the storm, it’s a geological thing.

Consider, if you will, the desert: unaccustomed to outpourings, it is most at home with stillness, with subtlety, with faint movements and slight alterations that take eons to build up into recognizable change.

As far as water is concerned, the desert takes stinginess as its religion. It is utterly unprepared for the deluge. Its air is dry as a bone and its land knows none of the etiquette of absorption. Green lands may seem soft and naïve, but they know enough to cover themselves with shielding turf and trees for when the clouds gather. Plants think they’re the jewelry of a landscape, and some romantically-minded humans may agree. But the land knows they’re its insulation, its meteorological Hazmat suit, its tiny little collection of bodyguards which steal the storm’s thunder and render his pounding powerless.

In the 1950s, the military set off atomic bombs in the desert outside of Vegas. Their clouds boiled up and out, expanding from a single point too small to see into huge mushrooms which spread and diffused until they touched the whole earth. In the year of our story, the exact opposite happened, and it happened over and over. Clouds of water vapor gathered from the far corners of the world. They compacted themselves into huge, dense blankets over the Mojave, crowding tighter and tighter until, like tourist carry-ons after a kleptomaniac convention, they were simply too stuffed full to continue. Then they exploded. And then the water fell. It fell all at once, in huge masses. It fell with the grace of a plummeting anvil. It crashed to earth and ran through the streets and disappeared into the desert to regather its strength, and then it rose up into the air again, joyfully greeted all its vaporous brothers and sisters just in from wherever, and began the whole silly cycle again. It was a wet year.

Las Vegas is not built for wet years. Interestingly, large areas of the city of Las Vegas have no storm drains or sewers, a fact which many residents were discovering for the first time. Why no storm drains? Well, money talks in Vegas, and often what it says is, "This rule doesn't really apply to me, does it?" And thus many daring and fascinating new shortcuts in construction, design, and planning are taken.

Water is the 500 pound gorilla of any desert, though. It goes where it wants, and takes as much of the land as it wants with it as it goes. It sluices anywhere that looks like a channel. It careens around corners, it sheets over dirt lots. It floods sidewalks and swamps parking lots. In the year of our story, there had been six big cloudbursts before Valentine’s Day, and the city was waterlogged. Whole construction sites had been washed away. Four wheel drive trucks whose owners had never navigated anything more challenging than a speed bump in the Kmart parking lot were stranded and abandoned in overflowing intersections. Casinos leaked. Dancers and exotic circus performers dripped as they paraded or contorted or hung from trapezes high above the crowds.

“When do you think this’ll stop?” Rachel moaned to Testy. “All my feathers are getting moldy.”

“I don’t know, babe,” Testy told her, “But it’s making me claustrophobic. I came here for the wide open spaces, and the only space I’m seeing these days looks like a giant public swimming pool full of tourists and pee.”

“Testy! Yuck,” said Rachel.

NEXT POST: COME HERE OFTEN, BEAUTIFUL? (Monday 7/20)

Testy Does Vegas

Testy Lesbiana cruised down the Strip in stately fashion, negligently steering her pop-top Caddy with one hand and ogling tourists as they outpaced her on the sidewalk. The Caddy, dubbed the Drag Racer but hardly living up to its name in this 2 am traffic, took up twice the space of any of the tiny rolling boxes around her.

If she’d been sitting up on its back deck and waving instead of slumping in the front seat and steering, she could have been a county fair teen queen in a parade down Main Street U.S.A.

If she’d been in drag, that is, and teenaged, and within striking distance of anything like the heartland.

She should have thrown a wig on, she lamented, before she left work to begin this eternal slog down Las Vegas Boulevard. The Strip’s traffic had gotten slower and slower each year, especially as more new hotels went up and more new tourists came to gawk.

Of course, tourists paid Testy’s salary, and gawking was practically her religion, both as object and participant. But this traffic was a pain. And she hadn’t even thought to make the most of it by gussying up, throwing on a little rouge and mascara, piling up the hair and wearing some sequins home. She revved the Racer and rolled five more feet forward and sighed. She really must be losing her touch.

Testy Lesbiana was as old as dirt, she claimed, but a whole lot more glamorous. When she’d rolled into town lo these many years ago (more years ago than any lady would admit to, but not so many that she was a positive relic quite yet) she’d known no one and had no prospects at all. But she did have a saddle bag full of lashes and bugle beads, an indefatigable sense of the fabulous, and enough chutzpah to take on every Mob boss in town. And those gifts turned out to be just what Vegas needed.

She’d pitched what she had, which was herself, and the city was buying. She’d become an actual local celebrity for some years, the creator and star of her own drag revue, Wonder?Boys!, which against all odds became a Vegas fixture. Wonder?Boys! first appeared in a dusty 100 seat cabaret at Cactus Jack’s Downtown Casino. In that version, Testy and two other queens sang and danced along to records of Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe. The costumes were cheap but showy, and the audiences walked out happy.

After a couple years, Jack got run out of the state by the IRS and the place was annexed by the Gold Stake next door, which had no interest in, as Testy put it, “supporting the arts.” So the show moved to the Strip, where the Royale Hotel & Casino’s decrepit old theatre had been sitting empty for a decade, and where the owner, a crusty old scam artist named Billy B, was more than happy to try any scheme that drew a customer as long as it didn’t cost him a nickel. Wonder?Boys! fit the bill on both counts, so Testy hired a few more ladies and played the Royale for a generation, convulsing the gamblers’ girlfriends and enlightening more than a few redneck wranglers into the wonders of a very particular flavor of fantasy.

The gimmick of Wonder?Boys! was all there in the title. Testy and four other drag queens, as well as one real woman, lip-synched to current hits, changing the lineup from Judy to Barbra to Cher to Madonna as the years went on. The audience was invited to test themselves, see if they could spot the real girl. Given the sensory tumult of false eyelashes and glittery gowns and more fake hair than any single production had used since King Kong nuzzled up to Faye Wray, the odds were against them. And at the end of the show, when all the ladies tore off their wigs and lashes, the jig was up, and the audience members got to point and gasp and argue as they all claimed to have known, from the first moment, who had the estrogen up there.

They were always lying, of course. The girl Testy most often employed, Cheryl, was a two-hundred-fifty pound blonde who played Totie Fields and Mama Cass and was never picked by anyone as the show’s sole legitimate owner of a vagina. Testy Lesbiana, herself, was more often accused of being physiologically feminine, especially at the bar by drunken patrons who’d just embarrassed themselves by getting hot over the wrong gender. Her strategy at those moments was always the same: she’d buy the schmo a beer, wave grandly at her own richly bejeweled nether regions and say, in her gruff baritone, “Nothin’ going on down there, boys!” It was her signature quip, and the fact that it wasn’t funny didn’t matter as long as the patrons were drunk enough, and it was said with enough style. Style, obviously, was Testy's stock-in-trade. She would take a florid bow and then make her exit, disappearing out of the bar in a cloud of applause and cheap perfume.

So Wonder?Boys! kept Testy comfortably in wigs and sequins for more years than she would have dared hope when she started it. And it established for her a small but definitive place among Las Vegas’ entertainment pantheon. She was the Doyenne of Drag, the Queen of the Crossdressers, and the gatekeeper who stood between any number of wannabe boys in dresses and a paying career that just might justify their fetish to their parents. It was a good life.

But all good things must end, and mediocre things, too, although sometimes they last longer. Testy Lesbiana came in one night to learn that Billy B had sold the Royale, lock, stock, and cabaret, and it was scheduled for demolition exactly one month later. Wonder?Boys! was homeless again.

And drag queens, Testy was told in meeting after meeting as she shopped the show around town, had seen their day, and it was over. The Royale was destined to make room for the Strip’s very first themed mega-resort, marking a new era in Vegas’ history. The city was going legit, it was going to appeal to families, and a bunch of aging, paunchy men in bugle beads was not what those customers wanted.

“So that’s it, then,” she told her cast one night. “In two more weeks, we play our last show, and then the wrecking ball hits. I’m sorry it’s all happening so quickly. I’d love to go out with some sort of bang, but at this point I think we’ll be lucky just to get all our lipsticks packed.”

“I don’t know how you can be so casual,” Cheryl accused her. “This show is important to some of us.”

“Hey, it’s important to me, too,” Testy retorted. “What else do you think I’m going to do now? I’ll probably end up sewing rhinestones in some sweatshop somewhere, for god’s sake. But no one wants our tired old asses, honey.”

Cheryl sniffed. “Well, I’m not giving up.”

“Fine,” Testy told her. “I heard a rumor that some freaky French circus is coming to play the Oasis next summer. If you can figure out how to work yourself into that, let me know.” Testy knew Cheryl had bills to pay and no particular talents, but she’d done what she could. Cheryl stomped off, and Testy watched her, sighed, and then went to get her mascara back from Big John, who played Grace Jones and Diana Ross and was an inveterate stealer of other ladies’ makeup.

Two weeks later on the night the show closed, Testy Lesbiana stayed up all night packing her favorite beaded gowns and make-up for the last time. And as the sun was rising over the Royale parking lot, she loaded them into the Drag Racer, saluted smartly, and drove directly to the Grand Hotel's employee entrance. She marched into their HR office and filled out thirty-seven pages of paperwork to apply for a job as dresser at Extravaganza! That was a production, she figured, that could use a little talent with a needle, not to mention some style. Of course they snapped her up immediately.

And thus, my children, we end up where we started, at what I guess will have to be the beginning of our story. Now we’re to the point where the really exciting stuff starts to happen. The complications, the entanglements, and of course, the Entry of the Bad Guy. All the stuff a story depends on.

Ready?

NEXT UP: THE DROWNED & THE FURY (Friday 7/17)

Rachel

Rachel Ferguson had been dancing topless for nearly twenty years, and she loved it. She was currently working in Las Vegas’ largest, longest running, most over-the-top tits and feathers production ever. It featured 120 dancers, a dozen acrobats, assorted jugglers and plate spinners, a magician, and a real blimp that came in for a landing upstage center. The sets were bigger than apartment houses. The stage was big enough to house a baseball diamond. Complete with outfield. And bleachers. The show was called, with stunning clarity, Extravaganza!

“Have any of you seen that table far stage left?” Rachel asked her dressing roommates between Opening and the Big Bow parade. The six of them more or less appeared together throughout the show. They might go nights or weeks without seeing the dancers around the corner, but they dressed next to each other, trooped on- and off-stage together, showered and fixed their makeup side-by-side from 7:00 till 2:00 six nights a week. “It’s a bunch of tourists. Their mouths were hanging open when the curtain went up. But now they’re grinning and waving at us every time we come on – they’re cute.”

“I saw one cute guy stage right. Up in the second row of booths,” Nadja, the youngest girl, put in as she brushed on more mascara.

“He’s sitting with his wife, and she hasn’t let go of his hand once since the curtain went up and she saw the wall of boobs staring back at her,” said Sharon, who’d spent twelve years staring out at Vegas audiences and could diagnose age, weight, marital status, shoe size, and chances for faithfulness in a single glance. She screwed on her hairpiece and inspected her reflection. “Maybe I should go blond again,” she said.

“Still, he’s cute.”

Ellen, the sweet girl next to Nadja who never said a word, nodded wordlessly.

“Oof,” Heddy, a Norwegian Amazon with an impenetrable accent, said to herself in the mirror.

“You said it sister,” Linda agreed. She spent her days studying pre-law and arrived backstage each night with piles of books in her arms and dark rings under her eyes. She troweled her way through gallons of concealer and was known for her professional onstage sneer, honed for a decade in shows from Vegas to Madrid to Tokyo and now preparing to make its debut in the courts. “This crowd is awful. It’s like performing for dead fish out there.”

“Did anybody hear about a new show down at the Louisiana Purchase?” Rachel changed the subject.

“They’re doing a show?” Sharon retorted. “For who? Who goes to that place? They don’t even have a theater – are they doing it on that dinky little bandstand in the middle of the casino? Jee-zus, that’ll be classy. Testy, where’s my scarf?”

Their dresser, Testy Lesbiana, whose talents were legend and whose presence as their sartorial den mother made this line of girls the envy of every other dancer in Vegas, stuck her head around the costume rack at the end of the room. “On your hanger, where I told you. Who’s ready?”

Rachel hurried over.

“God help me, Test,” she muttered. “Every time I think I’ve come up with a safe topic of conversation in here, Linda or Sharon find a way to get all steamed about it.”

“Just get out, fast,” Testy advised. “Suck in, I relined this thing before the show.” She wrapped a sash around Rachel’s waist and hooked it, fastening a six foot blue and orange bow to her hips like the wrapping of the Birthday Present That Ate Fremont Street. Rachel wiggled it back and forth a bit.

“Nice work, Test,” she nodded. “It barely rustles. You are so good to me.” She blew an air kiss.

“Yeah, yeah. Now just get outta here.”

“Javol!” Rachel swirled the bow around and started making her way out through the opposite end of the wardrobe room. “Coming through!” she yelled as a startled dresser scrambled backward into a rack of costumes to save herself. “Wide load, wide load!”

She grinned, making her way through the racks, tables, and doorways, past the other dancers and the crew and the stored, stacked sets for other numbers. Another night at Extravaganza! the biggest show in the history of Las Vegas. Another audience of twelve hundred people, eager for the sight of her. Another number, another notch in her metaphorical g-string, which had so many notches in it now that it was falling into metaphorical ribbons.

That last part worried her a bit these days. How many notches could she carve before the powers that be decreed she’d been notching too long? How many more shows before she got booted, dumped, kicked out on her ass in the alley outside the stage door, sequin-stripped and de-lashed forever?

Better not to think about it. Now was time for Big Bows! Extravaganza! The grandeur! The spectacle and beauty! The bigger-than-life thrills!

NEXT: TESTY LESBIANA (Monday 7/13)

Prologue

Every story must have a beginning, a middle, and an end, in spite of the fact that these things are fictions. The beginning can be anything: How I Was Born, or Where I Met Her. The end is the story. The beginning and middle are just ways to get there.

But let’s start with origins. Where we are and who we’re talking about. This is like dealing out the cards to start a game of poker. You see an ace, a queen… and hold your breath to see what comes next. And that’s an apt analogy, because everything in this story is about a gamble. As, well, what in this life isn’t?

So, origins. The place: Las Vegas. In the beginning was the dirt. And the dirt was just fine as far as the desert tortoises and the sagebrush and the scorpions were concerned, but people like to build things. Even more, they like to fill up empty space, and lay out highways and establish trading posts. So very quickly there were humans, and some time after that, there was neon and green felt and lights and action and showgirls (the showgirls are important.) And that was Vegas, and it grew, baby. Those tortoises and lizards never knew what hit them.

Our leading lady, Rachel Ferguson: We’ll get to Rachel in a little while. For now, think leggy redhead. Weirdly unsure of herself under normal lighting, but ready to take on the world when the spotlight hits her. A major player.

The other players: will become obvious. There’s a blonde, a brunette, a ghost, and a few others. You’ll get to know them.

The storm: Storms are important, in the desert. In books, they’re usually a sad attempt to skip steps. It rains when the hero’s sad, the sun shines during the falling-in-love phase, and so on. This is officially known as the Pathetic Fallacy. Pathetic is a technical term having to do with pathos, feelings, but it’s a pretty pathetic substitution for good writing, too. This story may turn pathetic. Watch for it.

Limos: They hold secrets. Like a box onstage when a magician’s doing his finale, a limo in Las Vegas might hold anything. If a lady steps in, a tiger might step out, or vice versa. Everyone from big name entertainers to hapless Midwest boys on a jackpot-fueled bachelor party tear use limos, and the bigger and flashier, the better. Big and flashy are important, in Vegas. And limos mean things, they bring things. Who knows what might emerge when that smoked-glass door gets opened?

And now it’s time for a beginning. The entrance of our first big leading character onto the bare stage. What a stage it is, and what bareness (bare is also big, in Vegas, although, as Rachel’s mother noticed, it is amazing how much fabric a girl can be wearing and still be naked.) The desert north of Vegas is desolate as few other places on earth would dare aspire. Emptiness there is professional emptiness, Olympic caliber lack-of-anything, the kind of blank dirt and sagebrush scene that pushes the horizons so far away you swear the earth is flat after all, and that Columbus guy was the biggest hustler in history. Maybe we’re all still just living out his con.

Roaring through this colossal empty stage one evening a few years or decades or lifetimes ago came Testy Lesbiana, fab drag queen and biker chick, suited up in black leather from her inch-long eyelashes to her spike-heeled, studded black boots. And as she chewed up the miles of Highway 95, having come west from Manhattan and turned left at Reno, she marveled at the sheer eternal nothingness all around her. She noted the stunning lack of people or habitations or even the stray electrical outlet, and she wondered where the hell the city was hiding until she saw it, plopped without warning or fathomable reason right in the middle of nowhere, and gearing up to flash and dazzle and spin itself into a frenzy as the sun went down and the sky turned to navy and the lights, the lights, the lights all came on in force.

She slowed, pulled over, stopped, and stared at it. A few desert crickets, or maybe scorpions with violin pretensions, were tuning up behind the tumbleweeds. Testy waited as the evening darkened and the city brightened into its full gold and red and hot white glory.

“We’ve got a future, you and me,” she told it.

And then a rushing sounded, a low purring rumble throaty as the voice of a fallen woman in movieland. It crested the low hill where the highway dipped just ahead of Testy and revealed itself as Southern Nevada’s own answer to the chariot, the carriage, and the first horse of the Apocalypse all rolled into one, a shiny gold Caddy with a glandular condition limoing its way away from town and off into who knew where in the empty desert. Maybe there was a secret hideaway on a mountain nearby and a casino owner spiriting his favorite girl there. Maybe some high roller had experienced a sudden craving for fried frog legs in Tonopah. Maybe a big name entertainer had just closed his last show and was heading to Tahoe for a second weekend. Who knew?

Testy stood and watched the car head toward her, and felt its wake pull at her lashes as it went past. “Happy trails," she told it, and whoever was inside. And then she cackled like a wicked witch in a fairy tale. “Who knows what's up in that place?” she asked the scorpions. “Who the hell knows?”

And she slung her leathered leg back across her saddle, revved the bike up, and tore off down where the limo had come from, an adventurer ready-made for the Desert Mecca.

And that, children, is our beginning. Stay tuned.

NEXT POST: Sunday, July 12

The Author's Confession

I was a dancer in Las Vegas off and on for almost fifteen years. In between times, I worked in Reno and Tahoe, in South Africa twice, and around Northern Europe on a cruise ship. But Vegas kept pulling me back with easy work and cheap apartment rentals, no matter how many times I tried to escape the asphalt-liquifying summers.

Those years were the very end of a golden era. Dancers in Nevada then could pick the kind of career they wanted, and work without pause. All the big hotels – MGM, Stardust, the Dunes – produced enormous topless extravaganzas, with dozens if not hundreds of performers on stage. If you signed those contracts you got insurance coverage a free food in the cafeteria, and lots of time during the day to raise a family or go back to school and rack up multiple advanced degrees.

On the other hand, for the dancers who hungered after harder work and greater recognition, there were lots of little cabaret shows. These featured a handful of dancers, a bare minimum of sets and costumes, and some of the most demanding, coolest dancing to be seen on any stage anywhere. When choreographers like Ron Lewis, Cary LaSpina, or (a few years later) Michael Darren or Jaymi Marshall were in control, those shows and those dancers could be breathtaking. I still have a couple of ‘em on video, and aside from being amazed at just how nude we all were, I am still blown away by them.

That whole world is gone now. Cirque du Soleil has become the entertainment flavor of choice in Vegas, and the cabarets have gone the way of the tiny topless dinosaur. The tight community I was a part of has dissipated and disappeared.

This is all, no doubt, good and proper. Times change, and the brilliant production of 1980 becomes the embarrassingly cheesy throwback of 1998. But I still miss that era. I miss the dancing and the fun backstage and the community of performers coming and going. I miss the weird dressing room smell of pancake makeup and Acquanet infused over decades.

All this sentiment and remembered joy gave rise to Totally! Nude! Showgirls!!! several years ago. This story has grown and evolved. I've shared it with friends, discussed it with agents, and, for a short time, given it its own website. Now, as my life goes in new directions, I offer this version as one last tribute. I do love this story, and all its crazy denizens, and I think they deserve a life outside of my head.

One note: none of the characters presented here are meant to be representations of anyone real, in spite of what some of my friends think. A few of these characters were inspired by real people, but they are mine alone, and none of their foibles or faults is meant as any kind of commentary on any flesh-and-blood figure. (In several cases, the real people I knew are so big and entertaining and over-the-top that I would be incompetent to represent them, let alone out-do them for the purposes of a humorous novel.)

These characters live in a city which is Las Vegas and isn’t, in a world which is realistic and which never existed at all. I hope you enjoy. (The characters will certainly be having a fine time.)