Preston Allen - Las Vegas Noir

He drew his Vegas street map from his satchel — a satchel made of Moroccan leather, yet old and worn enough to be worthy of an academic — and smoothed it over his steering wheel. He liked studying things when he was driving long stretches — maps, articles, even books. He played a sort of game in which he kept his eyes on the text as long as he dared before snapping them back to the road. He found that while the danger often prevented him from immediately comprehending what he was reading, it had the strange effect of stamping the information photographically in his mind, and afterwards he could recall, in what psychologists called anamnesis , whole passages verbatim: a nifty trick for impressing colleagues.

The way to ¡Viva! was simple enough: Continue along I-15, then hang a right on Tropicana and keep going east to the Boulder Highway. ¡Viva! stood midway between Sam’s Town and the Lucky Cuss. Sam’s Town had an Old West theme, complete with something called a Western Emporium and a nightly laser show called the “Sunset Stampede.” Vegas! No wonder the American Culture Association loved meeting here.

He followed the directions he’d memorized and headed east on Tropicana, surprised at how run-down some of the neighborhoods became, jumbles of low-slung bungalows and mobile homes faded in the sun. Obviously not everybody in Vegas was a lucky cuss.

Curious about a particularly shabby-looking neighborhood, he hung a right onto a street with a paintball store on one corner and a liquor store on the other. He followed the winding street past some more trailers and a dried-up park. Going slow now — the street was full of potholes — he opened his window. The warm air carried odors of raw sewage, boiling corn, and burning rubbish. Farther along, a truly foul scent hit his nostrils and he saw a dead Chihuahua in the gutter, bloated to the size of a dachshund. He rolled his window up fast.

The street turned gravelly and petered out at a hodgepodge of trailers and cinder-block huts. In one area, the dwellings were arranged around a kind of courtyard, bare earth save for a dusty elm tree. A compact man dressed entirely in white squatted beneath the tree, hewing, with quick strokes of his machete, a length of wood. The blade of the machete was worn to a wicked thinness: It looked like a long dagger. Behind the man, half-hidden in a doorway, stood a young woman in a white dress colorfully embroidered at the square neckline, biting her knuckles, her black eyes following Ortiz. Two other men, also dressed in white, ducked ghostlike into a squalid alley and disappeared.

The squatting man looked up. Ortiz waved hesitantly, and the man raised his machete in an aggressive salute. Ortiz followed the line of the machete to its tip, and there, as if speared by the blade, he beheld ¡Viva!’s red neon sign, its letters curved into the shape of a chili pepper.

There didn’t seem to be any direct way through the wretched little neighborhood to the casino, so Ortiz headed back the way he’d come. But somehow he got turned around in the maze of dirt roads, and found himself driving in a circle. Once again he passed by the dusty square, and once again the young woman’s eyes followed him, and the man with the machete watched him too, this time without greeting. Ortiz clutched the steering wheel with both hands, and noticed that the hair on his arms had risen on end. The stench of the dead dog, and the heat, and the pounding brightness of the light made him want to puke.

He finally found his way out, and merged with relief into Tropicana’s fast traffic. A few minutes later he arrived at ¡Viva! where the noise and bustle swallowed him up. He followed the ACA signs up the wide staircase to the mezzanine and registered for the conference. A harried fellow graduate student gave him a canvas bag containing a name tag, a pen, a refrigerator magnet in the shape of a horseshoe, and a book-length schedule of presentations and events. The letters of his last name stood impressively large on the name tag. It was the first time he’d ever had a name tag. He pinned it carefully on his guayabera, above his heart.

Professor Talon wasn’t listed among the presenters, but this came as no surprise; when Talon left campus, it was to penetrate little-known parts of the world and encounter their peoples, not attend academic conferences. Talon was the real thing: the utterly fearless ethnographer who knew that fieldwork was everything.

Ortiz headed to a panel on masculinities. Masculinities Studies was hot; there were six masculinities panels at that year’s conference. The one about to start was called “All About Balls” and it offered three presentations: “‘You’re Not a Eunuch, Are You?’ Pirates of the Caribbean ’s Postcolonial Masculinities;” “The Leisured Testes: White Ball-Breaking as Surplus Machismo in Jackass ”; and “ Huevos and Balls: The (Fr)agilities of Maleness in Latino/a Discourse.”

“All About Balls” was held, fittingly enough, in the Pancho Villa Salon. The audience was well-represented by what Ortiz had come to identify as the various academic types: the jovial older male professor, silver-bearded and bearlike, comfortable in his tenured professorship; the anxious junior faculty member, needing that next book to clinch tenure, building her CV by sponsoring panels at the conference while realizing that all this conferencing was cutting into her writing time; fellow graduate students dressed in solid black, ironic and cool, prepared to declare the whole scene a fraud if they found they couldn’t finish their dissertations. During the presentations, the older male professors laughed a lot, the assistant professors listened intently, and the grad students feigned jadedness. Afterwards, a few people from the audience, including Ortiz, went up to the front to introduce themselves and chat with the speakers, all professors from various institutions.

“That took some balls,” Ortiz told the huevos -and-balls man. He was a pint-sized Chicano in a sports jacket and tie. Trim mustache. Ortiz had to stoop to meet the humorless gaze behind the man’s rimless glasses.

“I’m not sure I follow you,” said the professor, eyeing Ortiz’s name tag.

There were certain people who took an immediate dislike to Ortiz, and this guy was evidently one of them. They didn’t care for Ortiz’s lustrous hair or his height or his colorful guayabera shirts or his authentic huaraches . They took him for a poser. Ortiz, in turn, pegged the guy for a former Chicano activist turned academic. Those types were always bitter and hyper-critical. They could never take a joke.

“I mean, like, all of it,” Ortiz stammered. “The panel.”

“Well, it’s all about balls, right?” the man said dryly.

There was nothing on Ortiz’s name tag to identify him as a lowly graduate student and thereby unworthy of such animosity. The name tags gave only the bearer’s name — sans title — and school. The professor hailed from a college Ortiz had never heard of. Perhaps, Ortiz thought, he felt threatened by Ortiz’s far more prestigious university.

“What’s your work on, Dr. Ortiz? Mr . Ortiz?” said the professor.

“Mr.,” Ortiz said. “Oh, different things.” It was flattering to be taken as having a doctorate and “working on” something.

“Ah, different things.”

“I work with Philippe Talon,” said Ortiz.

“Never heard of him,” said the assistant professor, turning away.

Heat rose on Ortiz’s face as his testicles rose to his body. He stalked from the room and tromped down the stairs. That was bullshit! Everyone knew of Dr. Talon.

Down in the gaming area, Ortiz bought a bucket of nickels and played an old-fashioned one-armed bandit, depositing the coins and pulling the lever fiercely, looking up occasionally to observe the dealers at the card tables absurdly done up in spangled matador’s jackets. Weren’t the players aware of the irony of being dealt to by “bullfighters”? Didn’t they know, stupid bovines, that in the end, the matador always wins? Some people just didn’t get irony. Wasn’t it incredibly ironic that a professor who had just given a talk on the follies of machismo should act so macho?