I was here long before I arrived—a specter buried in the back rooms of after-hours clubs and gambling dens, a haint hidden at the table of steak joints and shake dance spots. I was the last card in the shoe shuffled across the felt in smokey, small-time casinos. Counted among the bodies stashed in the desert, the shape of me, the bones, are only now emerging as the waters of Lake Mead begin to recede.
Like so many Las Vegas tales, this one begins with a father ironically in search of greener pastures. On the heels of the Great Migration, he’d moved his family from the red soil of a small college town in Georgia to parts not much farther north in Virginia, still not quite over the Mason-Dixon. Life was good until the comforts he found—growing business, suburban living, bowling league nights, sandy beach picnics—became as tight about the neck as the many nooses he’d escaped. To slip this yoke meant leaving behind a wife, two stepdaughters, and four-year-old me.
It was 1972. Raquel Welch opened for Elvis at the Las Vegas Hilton. The starlet vamped and shimmied with a cast of Syd and Marty Krofft puppets in a cabaret-style production meant to redeem her reputation after she’d violated her public’s trust amid accusations of TV lip-synching. Tricky Dick was president. And Bill Coulthard, a local attorney, was killed by car bomb in a Las Vegas parking garage, allegedly after having refused to renew the lease on Benny Binion’s Horseshoe Casino.
I can see my father as he was then, a deep-eyed, deep-skinned, welterweight of a man—broad-shouldered and slim in the waist. At least this is how my four-year-old eyes remember and reenact him, sailing Las Vegas Boulevard, the nose of his ’69 Charger cutting through neon, the clamor of sudden jackpots and cocktails a’ripple in his wake. A few years after my father’s arrival, Aaron Spelling would canonize the Strip via Robert Urich in a sexy, detective series local pundits even now credit with…
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