William Vollmann - The Royal Family

All right, Tyler said, now show me the worst neighborhood there is.

Oh, I’m not doing that. There’s some streets, their domain is so established, they’ll just block off the street and take all your money. But I can find some crummy places if that’s what you want. Not far away at all.

Maybe Tyler halfway expected to see what Brady had shown his brother on that special tour of Feminine Circus’s service areas: a vast hall called Cleopatra Road, another called Ozma Ave with stacks of empty computer boxes; forkloads of beer and diapers somewhere under the South Tower, the bakeshop so fragrant with rolls on wheeled trays with long dips for the subway; the room service prep hangar in which people in white assembled blue napkins folded into Alps on white-garbed wheeled tables, fleets of which stretched all the way to the concrete horizon; that is how the bad parts of Las Vegas should have been, just the ventricles of paradise. Past the Moulin Rouge it got darker and darker, then much too dark, with fences, greyish hedges and pulled down steel shutters.

Does the Mafia still run this town? Tyler asked.

Big business has replaced the Mob with organized legal crime, he said bitterly.

What do you mean by that?

Oh, nothing. That new Jonas Brady, he’s just one of many. Now you see the opening in this alley? Right here where the car is, this is where the guy took off on me. I ran, but I couldn’t catch him. I’d dropped off his girlfriend, so I knew where she was. I staked her out for a week or two, but never caught her. At this point, anytime someone opens the car door before he pays me, I unstrap my seat belt and get ready to run.

How long have you lived in Vegas? Tyler asked.

I’ve been here for seven years, and in that time Vegas has grown from four hundred to eight hundred thousand.

How’s the crime generally?

We’ve only had two cab drivers murdered in Vegas this year, as compared to New York, where it’s is almost forty, he said, rolling past low clubhouses and occasional streetlamps.

Well, with all the development, with the doubling in size, with new casinos opening all the time, has the crime gotten better or worse?

The cab driver just laughed.

They now rolled between Gerson Park’s low pale cubes close together, the roofs reminiscent of those toys they make by hand in Madagascar out of insecticide tins; here and there a few Christmas trees; calm and vacant, fences in place. Alienated by many nights of light, Tyler nonetheless did not find this darkness restful. It was ugly, monotonous, and dangerous. The ugly realness of the night crouched chillingly around him. He saw Grace Temple with its Biblical murals, then another brick cube: PAWN with some letters missing; and it occurred to him that a pawnshop is really the same as a casino. — Yeah, the owner of the Nugget lost a lot of money on his boxers… the driver was saying, almost to himself. As for Robinson Crusoe’s, this guy’s on a lucky streak…

On the corner stood some kids who looked as evil as the brass skulls on the Treasure Island’s doors.

We have a police substation here now, and walking police, the driver said. Now, over that way is Nucleus Plaza. That place got burned during the Rodney King copycat riots.

But on the Strip it’s pretty safe?

Casinos have got such a strong security force that they’ve eliminated crime in their area, but as a result of getting that security, they can also keep crime from getting to press. Every now and then there’s violence, but they hush it up. That’s what I say, but course you’ll never be able to prove it.

Vacant lots that smelled like piss, a bar, a dry cleaner and laundromat, these were all good clues as Mr. Private Eye Tyler might have said, but although Tyler and the driver kept looking for the good stuff (the driver half-heartedly) they could not find any crackhouse that was open. Tyler didn’t really care.

The driver was telling him a story about a fare who wanted crack:

I picked ’im up at a nudie place and he asked me to take him downtown, and he pulled over in one of those light industrial places. I said, look, I don’t want you doing that business in my cab. He throws me a ten (it was like a four dollar fare) and he says to me: Drive around the block, and if you don’t get another fare come back and pick me up. Well, so I came back and got ’im, and boy was he hopping mad! Man, but they’d sold him some rock — real rock! He’d paid for crack cocaine and what he got was a quartz crystal.

That was Las Vegas ersatz for you, Tyler thought. Casinos and the crackhouses, it was all the same.

Feminine Circus is a product of Circus-Circus and Excalibur, the driver was saying. They know everything there is to know about making money. They only operate out of cash flow. They do everything reasonably well…

Yeah, that applies to crack dealers, too, said Tyler.

The driver chuckled.

So you think Brady’s pretty smart, huh?

He’s the man of the hour. He’s the great American untouchable. And Feminine Circus, well, I’m just amazed no one ever thought of it before. It sums up the national mood, you could almost say. It’s brilliant. It’s as real as you want it to be. It’s…

Have you been there? asked Tyler.

Hey, man, you getting nosy on me? What are you, some kind of cop?

I didn’t mean it like that. I was just wondering if Feminine Circus is worth going to, that’s all.

Well, it’s pretty wild in there, the driver said. Everybody tries it once. I guess I don’t mind telling you I’ve tried it. You go in, and they have all these ugly girls who stink, and they drool all over you. That Brady, I have to say, I respect his balls, when everything else in Vegas is so pretty-pretty, to come up with something that looks like where we are now…

So those girls of his, those virtualettes—

Oh, that’s a standing joke, said the driver. Don’t tell me you believe those girls aren’t real…

They were swinging back in to town again, passing the Satin Saddle, a topless place, and the Palomino, which was bottomless, and the driver said: The Palomino has a cover of ten bucks and a two drink minimum at six bucks apiece, and Tyler thought: why, that’s a step ahead of the crack dealers! I never met a crack dealer who charged a cover.

You think Feminine Circus will do well? he said idly.

You mean, will they get raided?

Well, if they’re real girls…

See, that’s Brady’s genius, said the driver. Nobody cares about retarded girls. But sooner or later some feminist will bust his balls. If he’s smart he’ll make his bundle and leave the country…

You build a new one and it’ll always be full, the driver went on. Whether that’s going to be enough to make the whole city go, I don’t know. I don’t see that the owners care, either. If Brady’s new seven thousand bed fuckhouse creates seven thousand vacancies someplace else, Brady won’t care. But you have to believe that the stock market will keep going up in the long run, and Vegas will keep growing, and people will keep spending money on products no one’s even thought of yet. Me, I’m working on a certain kind of virtual pet. If I can just unkink one glitch, then you won’t see me driving this cab anymore…

On Larkin and McAllister just past the old library rose another grimy granite mausoleum, whose neoclassical statues on high were speckled and pitted by polluted air so that they now resembled the flesh of a Capp Street girl, and beneath these poxed entities rose from a sleeping bag, not unlike those of a priest elevating the host, a pair of arms. The arms embraced a dog, which opened its mouth and softly panted, while the hair of homeless outcasts blew in the wind. The dog was tied to the left arm with a length of clothesline because he sometimes liked to wander beyond his own good. He almost never barked. When he was a puppy, the biker he’d then belonged to had trained him in the ways of silence by biting his ear whenever he uttered any sound, even a whimper. The biker had moved to Ohio, abandoning this dog now skilled in silence. It was evening, and the arms were both tired. Their owner was a man named Crutches, who whispered: They tried to gimme a ticket for littering. Can you believe it? Yeah, well, I be rollin’ it up so quick so they don’t see… Well, I be movin’ so fast…