The Lost Continent (34 page)

On the way out my attention was caught by a machine making a lot of noise. A woman had just won $600. For ninety seconds the machine just poured out money, a waterfall of silver. When it stopped, the woman regarded the pile without pleasure and began feeding it back into the machine. I felt sorry for her. It was going to take her all night to get rid of that kind of money.

I wandered through room after room trying to find my way out, but the place was clearly designed to leave you disoriented. There were no windows, no exit signs, just endless rooms, all with subdued lighting and with carpet that looked as if some executive had barked into a telephone, “Gimme twenty thousand yards of the ugliest carpet you got.” It was like woven vomit. I wandered for ages without knowing whether I was getting closer to or farther from an exit. I passed a little shopping center, restaurants, a buffet, cabarets, dark and silent bars where people brooded, bars with live music and astonishingly untalented entertainers (“And gimme some astonishingly untalented entertainers while you’re at it”) and one large room in which the walls were covered with giant TV screens showing live sporting events—major league baseball, NBA basketball, boxing matches, a horse race. A whole wallful of athletes were silently playing their hearts out for the benefit of the room’s lone spectator, and he was asleep.

I don’t know how many gaming rooms there were, but there were many. It was often hard to tell whether I was seeing a new room or an old room from another angle. In each one it was the same—long ranks of people dully, mechanically losing money. It was as if they had been hypnotized. None of them seemed to see that everything was stacked against them. It is all such an incredible con. Some of the casinos make profits of $100 million a year—that’s the kind of money many large corporations make—and without having to do anything but open their doors. It takes almost no skills, no intelligence, no class to run a casino. I read in
Newsweek
that the guy who owns the Horseshoe casino downtown has never learned how to read and write. Can you believe that? That gives you some idea of the sort of levels of intellectual attainment you need to be a success in Vegas. Suddenly, I hated the place. I was annoyed with myself for having been taken in by it all, the noise and sparkle, for having so quickly and mindlessly lost thirty dollars. For that kind of money I could have bought a baseball cap with a plastic turd on the brim
and
an ashtray in the shape of a toilet saying, P
LACE
Y
OUR
B
UTT
H
ERE
. S
OUVENIR
OF
L
AS
V
EGAS
, N
EVADA
. This made me deeply gloomy.

I went and ate in the Caesar’s Palace buffet, hoping that some food would improve my outlook. The buffet cost eight dollars, but you could eat all you wanted, so I took a huge amount of everything, determined to recoup some of my loss. The resultant plate was such a mixture of foods, gravies, barbecue sauces and salad creams that it was really just a heap of tasteless goo. But I shoveled it all down and then had an outsized platter of chocolate goo for dessert. And then I felt very ill. I felt as if I had eaten a beanbag. Clutching my distended abdomen, I found my way to an exit. There was no moving sidewalk to return me to the street—there’s no place in Las Vegas for losers and quitters—so I had to make a long weaving walk down the floodlit driveway to the Strip. The fresh air helped a little, but only a little. I limped through the crowds along the Strip, looking like a man doing a poor imitation of Quasimodo, and went into a couple of other casinos, hoping they would re-excite my greed and make me forget my swollen belly. But they were practically identical to Caesar’s Palace—the same noise, the same stupid people losing all their money, the same hideous carpets. It all just gave me a headache. After a while, I gave up altogether. I plodded back to my motel and fell heavily onto the bed and watched TV with that kind of glazed immobility that overcomes you when your stomach is grossly overloaded and there’s no remote control device and you can’t quite reach the channel switch with your big toe.

So I watched the local news. Principally this consisted of a rundown of the day’s murders in Las Vegas accompanied by film from the various murder scenes. These always showed a house with the front door open, some police detectives shuffling around and a group of neighborhood children standing on the fringes, waving happily at the camera and saying hi to their moms. In between each report the anchorman and anchorwoman would trade witless quips and then say in a breezy tone something like, “A mother and her three young children were hacked to death by a crazed axman at Boulder City today. We’ll have a filmed report after these words.” Then there would be many long minutes of commercials, mostly for products to keep one’s bowels sleek, followed by filmed reports on regional murders, house fires, light airplane crashes, multiple car pileups on the Boulder Highway and other bits of local carnage, always with film of mangled vehicles, charred houses, bodies under blankets and a group of children standing on the fringes, waving happily at the cameras and saying hi to their moms. It may only have been my imagination, but I would almost swear that it was the same children in every report. Perhaps American violence had bred a new kind of person—the serial witness.

Finally there was a special report about a man awaiting release from prison who ten years before had raped a young woman and then, for reasons of obscure gratification, had sawed off her arms at the elbows. No kidding. This was so shocking even to the hardened sensibilities of Nevadans that a mob was expected to be waiting for the man when he was released at 6
A
.
M
. the next day, according to the TV reporter, who then gave all the details necessary to enable viewers to go down and join in. The police, the reporter added with a discernible trace of pleasure, were refusing to guarantee the man’s safety. The report concluded with a shot of the reporter talking to camera in front of the prison gate. Behind her a group of children were jumping up and down and waving hellos to their moms. This was all becoming too bizarre for me. I got up heavily and switched the TV to “Mr. Ed.” At least you know where you are with Mr. Ed.

In the morning I took Interstate 15 south out of Las Vegas, a long, straight drive through the desert. It’s the main route between Las Vegas and Los Angeles, 272 miles away, and it’s like driving across the top of an oven. After about an hour I passed over into California, into a shimmering landscape of bleached earth and patchy creosote bushes called the Devils Playground. The sunlight glared. The far-off Soda Mountains quivered and distant cars coming towards me looked like balls of fire, so brilliant was their reflection, and always ahead on the road there was a slick smear of mirage that disappeared as I drew near and reappeared further on. Along the shoulder of the road, sometimes out on the desert itself, were cars that had failed to complete the journey. Some of them looked to have been there for a long time. What an awful place to break down. In the summer, this was one of the hottest spots on earth. Off to the right, over the parched Avawatz Mountains, was Death Valley, where the highest temperature ever recorded in America, 134 degrees Fahrenheit, was logged in 1913 (the world record, in 1922 in Libya, is just 2 degrees higher). But that was the shade temperature. A thermometer lying on the ground in the sun has gone over 200 degrees. Even now in April the temperature was nudging 90 and it was very unpleasant. It was impossible to imagine it almost half as hot again. And yet people live out there, in awful little towns like Baker and Barstow, where the temperature often stays over 90 degrees for 100 days in a row and where they can go ten years without a drop of rain. I pressed on, longing for clear water and green hills.

One good thing about California is that it doesn’t take long to find a complete contrast. The state has the strangest geography. At Death Valley you have the lowest point in America—282 feet below sea level—and yet practically overlooking it is the highest point in the country (not counting Alaska)—Mount Whitney, at 14,495 feet. You could, if you wished, fry an egg on the roof of your car in Death Valley, then drive thirty miles into the mountains and quick-freeze it in a snowbank. My original intention was to cross the Sierra Nevadas by way of Death Valley (breaking off from time to time to perform experiments with eggs), but a weather lady on the radio informed me that the mountain passes were all still closed on account of the recent nasty weather. So I had to make a long and unrewarding detour across the Mojave Desert, on old Highway 58. This took me past Edwards Air Force Base, which runs for almost forty miles along the highway behind a seemingly endless stretch of chain-link fence. The Space Shuttle lands at Edwards, and Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier there, so it’s really quite a hotshot place, but from the highway I couldn’t see anything at all—no planes, no hangars, just mile after mile of tall chain-link fence.

Beyond the little town of Mojave, the desert ended and the landscape erupted in smooth hills and citrus groves. I crossed the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which carries water from northern California to Los Angeles, fifty miles to the south. Even out here the city’s smog was threaded through the hills. Visibility was no more than a mile. Beyond that there was just a wall of brownish-gray haze. On the other side of it the sun was a bleary disk of light. Everything seemed to be bled of color. Even the hills looked jaundiced. They were round and covered with boulders and low-growing trees. There was something strangely familiar about them—and then I realized what it was. These were the hills that the Lone Ranger and Zorro and Roy Rogers and the Cisco Kid used to ride around on in the TV shows of the 1950s. I had never noticed until now that the West of the movies and the West of television were two quite different places. Movie crews had obviously gone out into the real West—the West of buttes and bluffs and red river valleys—while television companies, being cheap, had only just driven a few miles into the hills north of Hollywood and filmed on the edges of orange groves.

Here clearly were the very boulders that Tonto, the Lone Ranger’s faithful sidekick, used to creep around on. Every week the Lone Ranger would send Tonto off to creep around on some boulders in order to spy on an encampment of bad guys and every week Tonto would get captured. He was hopeless. Every week the Lone Ranger would have to ride in and save Tonto, but he didn’t mind doing that because he and Tonto were very close. You could see it in the way they looked at each other.

Those were the days all right. Now children sit and watch people having their vitals sprayed around the room with a chain saw and think nothing of it. I know that makes me sound very old and crotchety to all you youngsters out there, but I think it’s a pity that we can’t have some good wholesome entertainment like we had when I was a boy, when the heroes wore masks and capes, and carried whips, and liked other men a whole bunch. Seriously, have you ever stopped to think what strange role models we were given when we were children? Like Superman. Here’s a guy who changes his clothes in public. Or Davy Crockett, a man who conquered the frontier, fought valiantly at the Alamo and yet never noticed that he had a dead squirrel on his head. It’s no wonder people my age grew up confused and got heavily involved with drugs. My favorite hero of all was Zorro, who whenever he was peeved with someone would whip out his sword and with three deft strokes carve a
Z
in the offending party’s shirt. Wouldn’t you just love to be able to do that?

“Waiter, I specifically asked for this steak rare.”

Slash, slash, slash!

“Excuse me, but I believe I was here before you.”

Slash, slash, slash!

“What do you mean you don’t have it in my size?”

Slash, slash, slash!

For weeks, my friend Robert Swanson and I tried to master this useful trick by practicing with his mother’s kitchen knives, but all we had to show for it were some torn shirts and ragged wounds across our chests, and after a time we gave it up as both painful and impossible, a decision that even now I rue from time to time.

As I was so close to Los Angeles, I toyed with the idea of driving on in, but I was put off by the smog and the traffic and above all by the thought that in Los Angeles someone might come up to me and carve a
Z
in my chest for real. I think it’s only right that crazy people should have their own city, but I cannot for the life of me see why a sane person would want to go there. Besides, Los Angeles is passé. It has no surprises. My plan was to drive up through the hidden heart of California, through the fertile San Joaquin Valley. Nobody ever goes there. There is a simple reason for this, as I was about to discover. It is really boring.

25

I
woke up quietly excited. It was a bright clear morning and in an hour or two I was going to go to Sequoia National Park and drive through a tree. This excited me, in a calm, unshowy sort of way. When I was five, my Uncle Frank and Aunt Fern from Winfield went to California on vacation—this was, of course, before it turned out that Frank was a homosexual, the old devil, and ran off to Key West, Florida, with his barber, which rather shocked and upset a lot of people in Winfield, especially when they realized that from now on they would have to drive all the way to Mount Pleasant to get their hair cut—and they sent us a postcard showing a redwood tree of such enormous girth that a road had been cut right through the base of it. The postcard pictured a handsome young couple in a green Studebaker convertible driving through the tree and looking as if they were having something approximating a wholesome orgasm. It made an immediate impression on me. I went to my dad and asked him if we could go to California on our next vacation and drive through a tree and he looked at the card and said, “Well . . . maybe one day,” and I knew then that I had about as much chance of seeing the road through the tree as I had of sprouting pubic hair.