My first look at Las Vegas was from the back of a Volkswagen camper van in the waning 1960s, on a road trip with my family that had lately exited Iowa onto the Lincoln Highway, where from behind the wheel of the van my father, a crew‐cut Korean War veteran then still coming to terms with the Second Vatican Council, exchanged peace sign hand gestures with the oncoming drivers of Volkswagen vans hauling their occupants away from the Human Be‐In back through the campestral landscapes of Middle America. As a child, I know I was impressed by the neon and much too naive to interpret its seedy reflections. In the many decades since, I had returned to Las Vegas once, primarily from curiosity, and left only with little inclination to repeat myself.

I spent last weekend in Las Vegas catching up with a friend who had flown from across the country on business and stayed so that we could visit. After the obligatory time passed losing a few bucks and cruising Las Vegas Boulevard in a rented Lamborghini, I became seriously interested in sitting in the hotel lobby and watching the parade. Despite the winking permissiveness that one is expected to believe is the Las Vegas zeitgeist being simply an advertising gimmick, there are those for whom such blandishments work, supposing vulgarity to be a conventional ethos. They were on display in the corridors. My years are not unblemished by poor choices and woeful behavior, often informed by hubris, so I could not fail to recognize the impulse to let the freak fly, but in context, the irony of getting one’s tits out is that doing so has been conferred an imprimatur of respectability, robbing the gesture of political consequence. The opprobrium supposed to be attaching itself to tawdry exhibits could topple governments, but it does not obtain inside an edifice where such conduct has been solicited and is fastidiously inventoried. I wanted to encourage people to get drunk and piss on the shoes of a Las Vegas cop and get back to me about how the Chamber of Commerce felt about it.

Hunter S. Thompson wrote one of the definitive reports on America from the post‐’60s era, and, as my own narrative of Las Vegas began in the 1960s, it is impossible to avoid quoting his roman à clef after a weekend acquainting myself once again. Now off the escalator and into the casino, big crowds still tight around the crap tables. Who are these people? These faces! Where do they come from? They look like caricatures of used‐car dealers from Dallas, wrote Thompson. But they’re real. And, sweet Jesus, there are a hell of a lot of them — still screaming around these desert‐city crap tables at four‐thirty on a Sunday morning. Still humping the American Dream, that vision of the Big Winner somehow emerging from the last‐minute pre‐dawn chaos of a stale Vegas casino.¹ Standing in line Sunday morning in the hotel with two dozen other tourists waiting to be served from the caffeine trough, I peered up into one of the surveillance cameras mounted to the ceiling and lifted my chin in a half‐nodded gesture, unafraid to acknowledge that I was not the biggest voyeur in the building. Behind me on the casino floor were the same people about whom Thompson had written, or, if not them, their offspring, clamoring in a post‐truth world for a tug of the lever that would make it all clear, give it meaning, banish doubt. Half a century later the windowless room preserves the illusion that it is never too late.

Whither Las Vegas? Its growth and popularity as a travel destination suggest continued prosperity. It is desert meadows and fresh water springs buried beneath Googie relics obliterated by the excavations of decorated sheds, the neon having been consigned to museums illuminated by colossal video screens, overlooking the great endorheic basin of North America. The predominant features of the landscape are monuments to consumption, but from the street, the storefronts of Sin City look quite like those in every commercial zone in America. The only novelty on offer is that of scale. The faces on the sidewalk must be studied at length to catch a glimpse of one who aspires only to live well, unnoticed. The ‘secret of Vegas’ is that there are no secrets, Dave Hickey once wrote. What is hidden elsewhere exists here in quotidian visibility.² Beyond the last suburban outpost a yellow‐billed cuckoo (coccyzus americanus) might be seen foraging, but one is meant to remain indoors. I stood in my hotel room looking out the window to the hills enclosing the valley, feeling out of place, nostalgic for the quondam days of being driven around the country in the back of a Volkswagen, mixing powdered Kool‐Aid into a Coleman dispenser with ice, hoping to see the Milky Way from beneath whichever trees were overhead that night where we had stopped for sleep. Unlikely to linger until it seemed wrong to leave, when my flight home was announced, I was ready to go.