Colson Whitehead - The Noble Hustle - Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death

We kept “Drinks in most casinos cost 75¢—$1, free to those who look like they’re playing,” but added “Look like you’re gambling; acting skills will stretch your wallet, but don’t forget to tip that cocktail waitress in the interesting get-up.” Out with the general tsk-tsking and upper-middle-class disdain, and in with “For best results, put on your favorite loud outfit, bust out the cigar and pinkie rings, and begin.” You have been granted a few days’ reprieve from who you are. Celebrate the gift of a place that allows you to be someone else for a time.

I don’t know who wrote that the Excalibur “has a medieval theme that will make you nostalgic for the Black Plague,” but it wasn’t me. Pretty sure.

California. Pretentious pseudo-intellectual or no, I was not immune to the Western dream of reinvention. All that cultural programming about the freedom of the frontier had stuck, even if I pictured myself more in the Day of the Locust version. The entire trip I thought I was going to stay in California. I had nothing to go back to. No job. No bed but my parents’ couch. No nice girlfriend waiting for me, or even a mean one. We smoked weed, played Risk, time passed. One day we got word there was going to be a riot in People’s Park, at 1:00 p.m. sharp. They scheduled riots there. It gave order to our lives.

We dropped one by one. Darren wigged out and caught a plane home. He still had his childhood room. Dan was going to drive back east in August, maybe get a Eurail pass that autumn and check out some fucking castles or whatever. I was out of money when Dan set off, and I asked if he had any room in the car, as the guy we’d been crashing with, the cat-sitter, was bailing out of California, too, and bringing all his stuff. After all, I was a good navigator. As luck would have it, they intended to stop off in Vegas on the way back.

No one laid a hand on the Museum when we were on the road. Odd, moonfaced kids — a motel owner’s brood — gawked at them when we stopped at night but dared not touch. A cop pulled us over for speeding in Massachusetts the last day of our return trip. “What’s all this?” We shrugged. What to say? He wrote us a ticket. The Museum lasted a few days in Cambridge before teenagers or disaffected housewives or whoever stripped everything. We’d made it home, and the spell had worn off.

We grew up. Our generational symptoms faded bit by bit. I got a job working for the book section of a newspaper. We ran fiction sometimes, mixed in with reviews. When the writing teacher who’d rejected my work in college submitted a story, I passed on it. Not out of revenge, it just wasn’t up to snuff. As in cards, it was business, not personal. I badgered one editor for an assignment, that assignment led to another, and somehow I was paying my bills freelancing. Played poker at Dan’s house every Sunday for a couple of years, and one day we picked up Hold’em. Dan got into computers and founded a visual-effects company, rendering CGI for movies such as Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan , which Darren directed. We waited for cards, and then we played them.

And here I was, writing about Vegas again.

“This wasn’t here the last time I came,” I said.

“Yes, and look at it,” Jon said. “It is shit.”

My first night in town. Tumbling into the new CityCenter array, a virtual money sink, a highly evolved specimen of the Leisure Industrial Complex that seemed almost self-aware once you entered its nimbus, bristling with enchantments 24/7.

“Wow,” I said. The highway lifted and aimed us into the CityCenter’s black, glass heart. The dark buildings of the complex surrounded us, sheer residential towers and curvilinear hotels. Pure fury made concrete, shot through with rebar.

It was Jon’s car. He was the first person to take me to a casino, one of the AC Trumps, back in ’96. My college roommate, currently a kind of nightlife broker in Vegas, managing a stable of video DJs, and flitting around the city at night as “Director of Programming” for hot spots that sounded like an erotic tasting menu: Blush, Surrender, Encore. Showing me around and explaining the rules once more.

Jon worked under the handle “Shecky Green,” the latest incarnation of his ongoing character, Mr. Entertainment. Mr. Entertainment stepped onstage during Jon’s teens. After his stint as one half of white rap duo B.M.O.C., he launched the legendary music mag The Source (“The Magazine of Hip-Hop Music, Culture & Politics”) in his dorm room. I lived with him the following year. Long before I tangled with collection agencies, rooming with Shecky introduced me to answering-machine dread. You never knew when you might be pummeled by a string of cussing by Luther Campbell, frustrated over a mixed review of “We Want Some Pussy,” or his inability to think up interesting choruses.

After cashing out of The Source , Shecky cast himself in a series of entrepreneurial roles — publisher of a Gen-X Playboy , manager of a record label — before making bank with his bestselling Hip Hop Honeys DVDs, a single-minded hopscotch around the world in search of booty-enabled beauties: Hip Hop Honeys: Brazil Boom Boom, Hip Hop Honeys: Blazin’ Asians. Hip Hop Honeys: Las Vegas , natch. He even ventured in front of the camera as the on-air commentator for a late-night poker show called Hip Hop Hold’em , which ran for a while in 2006 when all sorts of poker shows weaseled themselves into America’s programming grids. Method Man and Ed Lover playing loose, quite a sight, and Shecky spieling on the sidelines. “The 8 has arrived, and Biz Markie makes a straight!” No matter the arena, nobody beats the Biz.

Shecky took me along as he made his nightly rounds of restaurants and clubs. First up: CityCenter. Despite its $9 billion price tag and 1.5 million square feet of space, the CityCenter (“Capital of the New World”) had not turned out to be the flaneur-friendly wonderland promised in the brochures. Shecky lived in one of the residential towers. I put my nose to the window: pretty tony from the outside. The recession derailed things, though. Busto sales, cascading foreclosures, squatters taking over the empty units. Gruesome machete fights in the laundry rooms over who’s next up on the driers, just like Brooklyn.

“They said it would look like Central Park,” Shecky said. “Look, those are the trees.” He gestured toward a lonesome half dozen slouching out of the cement. I didn’t see any street retail on our approach, no inviting boulevards, no place to wander except into the entrances of the casinos. But what casinos! They were the magnificent embodiment of scientifically derived LIC principles: gargantuan in scale, single-minded in execution. A pure expression of consumer will. The old days were gone, like the Dunes, the Sands, all the Rat Pack warrens imploded by dynamite charges, dust. In their places these beautiful monsters emerged from the rubble: the Bellagio, the Venetian.

And the Cosmopolitan. Shecky led me there, into this ebony monolith whose name was bolted in huge letters across the top floor, more fitting for a corporate headquarters than a hotel. I appreciated the honesty. The developers had hoped for a nice crop of condos, but after the downturn the soil was exhausted. Deutsche Bank took over, apartments became hotel rooms, and the first floor a hypermodern casino. In the Vegas war of gambling versus places for people to live, the money wins out, I imagine.

Windows were scarce, per standard casino style, the mammoth footprint of the building creating the illusion of a banquet room without walls. All you can eat — this is the Land of Fabled Buffets, after all — you walked on and on, never satiated. Trudging through the main floor of the Cosmo on a weekend night, you were one of tens of thousands of hungry souls. Addled. Cortexes popping. Prey to sundry appetites. What’s next? Where’s next? One of your party was sucked into an eddy of diversion over there and had to be rescued by texted coordinates: Let’s reconnoiter over by the Pai Gow or the chanteuse who’s just mounted the platform by the crystal stairs. Microentertainments popped up here and there like brief sun-showers, suddenly somebody’s singing on a tiny stage for a couple of old standards, and then they split. Poof, into nightlife vapor.