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)