Mommy, what are bail bonds? page 2

C O N T E N T S

My Favorite Flick
By Don George, Editor

Las Vegas
By Cynthia Gorney
- Books on Las Vegas
- Getting there

D E P A R T M E N T S

Postmark: Bangkok
By Steve Van Beek

Passages:
"Under the Tuscan Sun"
By Frances Mayes
- Books on Tuscany
- Getting there

Table Talk
- Readers' Tips
and Tales

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I L L U S T R A T I O N   B Y   L I N D A   H E L T O N

from the written summaries we judged the Luxor to be the least like any lodging we had ever heard of, or indeed imagined, in our waking hours. This was a difficult call though, what with the "ancient Roman streetscape with immense columns and arches" of Caesars Palace and the "beautiful medieval arena where visitors can watch a show featuring trained dogs" of the Excalibur to choose from. But we went with the Luxor. We were keen to sleep inside a pyramid. And thus it was that having slept inside a pyramid and eaten our pyramid breakfast and finished our pyramid coffee (obelisks also feature prominently at the Luxor, most notably in the football-sized alcoholic-beverage-filled plastic obelisk for which one is invited to shell out nine bucks at the hotel entrance), we considered our first Las Vegas day.

We were located more or less at the southern end of the Strip, where the big hotels line up in multi-storied clumps of peculiar architecture; from a distance the tourist center of Las Vegas appears as an elongated set of hysterical growths upon a vast field of beige. There'll be a stretch of desert vacant lot and then a desultory little T-Shirt-Souvenirs-Psychic-Reader-Indian-Jewelry strip mall, and then a sudden flurry of really exceedingly large Things That Defy Description -- you know, Roman temples and 30-foot gladiators and 20,000-gallon shark aquariums and golden lions the size of the Supreme Court building and of course the sphinx with the lasers in its eyeballs.

We decided, more or less arbitrarily, to start at Caesars Palace. We were under the impression that it had cool video games. We took a taxi from the Luxor to the Palace, not because it was such a long distance, but because the walk looked sort of parched and grim. The driver eyed Aaron and Joanna and said, "You want the Forum Shops, I bet." The Forum Shops turned out to be an indoor mall with some expensive stores and vase-bearing maiden statues beneath a domed roof upon which clouds and blue sky had been painted in Sistine-Chapel-like tones, so that one suddenly appeared to be neither inside nor outside but rather in some mythological netherworld guarded eternally by Guess and Louis Vuitton. We proceeded down the length of the grand faux-marble halls, growing rather more disoriented by the minute, until the halls came to an abrupt end in something called CINEMA RIDE, all in capitals, just like that, and we were given 3-D glasses and placed in small movie-viewing rooms where the seats flung us about while rocks and sharks and nasty-looking watercraft (atomic-powered submarines, I think it was) roared out at us in Technicolor.

I believe I have described this correctly, although my notes are slightly fragmented because when my husband and I emerged we both had the momentary sensation that all our clothing had been ripped off and put back on the wrong way. My husband is also acrophobic and was breathing more rigorously than usual, since part of the underwater submarine chase had involved being dropped into apparently bottomless canyons while the seats lurched beneath us. Aaron waved his hand dismissively and said, "Oh, I've been in better ones," then led his sister into the games arcade and vanished from sight. Bill and I stood in the shopping mall and watched a large statue of Bacchus begin laughing unpleasantly and heaving his wine cup around while the painted skies darkened and lightning flew back and forth. Some dolphins and centaurs and legs without torsos appeared on the ceiling and flew around in circles. Aaron and Joanna used up all their arcade tokens.

Aaron pronounced the video arcade "pretty good," and we went to lunch.

There were golden Corinthian columns surrounding the table, and also what seemed to be high black arches made out of plexiglass, and very nice plastic flowers, and a 20-foot illuminated Fountain of Fortune, and the Keno ladies. I ate a salad that contained some actual lettuce.

"MGM Theme Park next," I said briskly, consulting our itinerary. I had brought along our dispatch from the News Bureau and read aloud to the assembled party. "'The 33-acre movie lot theme park features 10 food and beverage locations, 12 major attractions, theme streets, four theaters and other attractions that feature a Cotton Blossom Riverboat, Ghost Coaster, Journey to the Center of the Earth, which is a motion machine, French Bumper Cars, a haunted silver mine and more.'"

To get to the MGM Theme Park we walked along the sidewalks of the Strip, which is an experience that other urban parents might wish to duplicate by choosing an afternoon of particularly glaring sunshine and taking their children on a stroll through the local red light district. Every 20 feet or so, men who looked in deep need of a bath offered my husband small flyers that I gathered were supposed to be folded for discretion but usually weren't. My husband was holding hands with a 9-year-old girl in a Dutch-boy haircut, but that appeared to make no serious impression on the men with the flyers; they would sort of insinuate them at Bill, as if to say, "Here buddy, just stick it in your pocket and the kid won't notice," and two of them thrust directly into Bill's hand the Las Vegas Entertainment Guide and Forum, featuring color frontal shots of women who come DIRECTLY TO YOU TOTALLY NUDE For Your Personal Pleasure and Entertainment, and the Triple Xpress, whose principal feature was CHEERLEADERS Engaged in PURE NAKED FUN.

"What's in the papers?" Joanna asked.

"Naked ladies," I said.

"Oh," she replied, giving me a sideways look. "They get paid for sex," I said helpfully, and she rolled her eyes, as if for God's sake anybody could figure that out. We went into the MGM Grand to find the Theme Park, which involved walking through the giant golden lion's paws and winding around past about 40,000 slot machines and circling the blackjack tables and sidestepping men and women bent over the craps tables and following the flashing overhead lights down to the very end of the hall, where MGM has plunked its "all ages" amusements into one wing of truly formidable decibel level. My forehead was beginning to make an ominous pulsing noise inside, something like an electric guitar being twanged at precise short intervals, throom, throom, but we pressed on past the giant plastic cheeseburger and the video arcade until finally we arrived at the entrance to the Theme Park.

A large sign explained that it cost $15 to enjoy the many fine attractions of the park -- children were discounted to $10 apiece -- but you could walk around and check it out for free. "We'll be checking it out for free," Bill announced firmly, so we did, and walked around in the sunshine and watched two newly married couples emerge from the Theme Park Wedding Chapel to have their pictures taken on the little bridge by the painted false building fronts that were supposed to look like an MGM movie backdrop of New York. The brides wore lacy wedding dresses and smiled radiantly for the cameras. I was still grappling with the concept of a faux backdrop, which was an idea marginally more complex than my twanging brain could manage at the moment, but Bill pointed out that from where we stood there were no visible slot machines and the air had stopped smelling of Marlboros.

We sat on a faux bench, or perhaps it was a real bench, and drank Coca-Colas, feeling temporarily at peace. Aaron and Joanna spent $10 at a shooting arcade and said it was "hell of fun." Also we studied the water flume ride, which was clearly supposed to be hell of fun but somehow did not seem to have achieved that level, since its entire circuit consisted of one chugging trek around some curving tracks, followed by a brief plunge through splashing water. The haunted silver mine appeared to be attracting no attention whatsoever. The bumper cars were Parisian (MGM humor). One summer a few years ago the four of us killed a few hours on the way to a camping trip by visiting an amusement park outside Coeur d'Alene, Idaho; the Coeur d'Alene park had more things to do, but then in Coeur d'Alene it was not possible to dispose of one's kid while disappearing inside to gamble. The MGM Grand Hotel has gone to the effort of providing a pay-by-the-hour "youth center," sort of an indoor parking lot with supervisors and Nintendo games, although the center's telephone information recording advises that due to certain licensing regulations each five-hour stay at the center must be followed by a "two-hour mandatory break with parents."

Aaron leaned up beside me on the flume ride fence. "I'm hungry," he said. So we went home to our pyramid. On the walk back we passed Tiki gods and a rock that played music at us at the Bally's Casino, whose entrance looks like the inside of a washing machine. At one point I heard bagpipes. The naked-lady-magazine men had stationed themselves at regular intervals all the way down to the hotel, and where they left off, naked-lady-magazine news racks and naked ladies beamed up at us from ripped covers in the gutter. Aaron's face was beginning to look faintly gray. "This is like taking your kids for a vacation to a crack house," he said. "Could we go hiking or something?"

The next morning we got hold of a car and went on a terrific hike. We drove half an hour out of town to a place called Red Rock Canyon, where the desert wildflowers were in bloom and fabulous scarlet rock formations piled up weirdly one atop the other. The kids put their heads in a waterfall, and we breathed sweet dry air. I finally learned what a Joshua tree looks like (gnarled and splendid, with cream-colored plumes in the springtime). Then we drove back into town, past Reliable Bail Bonds, Oasis Motel Adult Movies, Private Lingerie Modeling Naughty But Nice, Graceland Wedding Chapel, Silver Bell Wedding Chapel, Wee Kirk o' the Heather Wedding Chapel and Ray's Beaver Bag.

"What are bail bonds?" Joanna asked.

Her father, who is a lawyer and good at this sort of thing, explained bail bonds. At least she hadn't inquired about Ray's. We went to a show that night, a big, brain-numbing Las Vegas production with Andrew Lloyd Webber music and a lot of people roller-skating furiously all over the theater; and when the show was over we stood outside the Treasure Island Hotel and watched pirates shoot Englishmen and plummet into the water; and when the English ship had sunk we stood outside the Mirage Hotel and watched the volcano blow up and set fire to the hotel fountains; and when the water fountain had stopped flaming we stood outside the Luxor Hotel and watched lasers come out of the Sphinx's eyeballs until the word LUXOR leapt out at us in the air, as though we were still wearing our 3-D glasses.

We went swimming, too. I forgot to mention that (three-foot-deep hotel pool, so you probably couldn't drown in it even after several obelisk drinks), and we sat through some arresting-looking 3-D and special-effects movies with entirely unfathomable plots. We went down to the basement of the Luxor to see the Replica of the Tomb of Tutankhamen, and Aaron and Joanna spent a very great deal of time playing one particular video game that included, and here I quote directly from my son, "ladies in bikinis dancing in cages and guys running around that you blew up, and when you blew them up all these chunks of red blood flew pppffffttt all over and all these skulls and blood and stuff splattered."

I found some quarter slots whose jackpot was supposed to be $430,695.25, which sounded good to me. I lost 20 bucks. It took a little longer than I expected.

We could have gone to the water park, but we have one of those not too far from where we live, so we didn't. We didn't go to Circus Circus, either, or the chocolate factory just 12 miles out of town. We skipped the Royal Lippizaner Horses and probably missed three or four respectable arcades. Aaron won a stuffed bear in a Robin Hood suit. Joanna won a stuffed dog with black ears. Three separate taxi drivers told us that most of the gamblers in Las Vegas didn't want children there in the first place, that the children kept walking around looking like children and giving the real gamblers the creeps. By the time the third cab driver was telling us these stories, on the way to the Las Vegas airport ("Guy turns away from the slot machine, just lost a load of money and trips over a woman changing her baby's diaper on the floor, can you imagine?"), my son and daughter were sitting close to each other and holding their animals rather tightly, as if the bear and the dog together might ward something off.

"Sorry we have to detour here," he said cheerfully, swinging his taxi away from the Strip. "Some kind of a hostage situation down at the Aladdin. Police closed off all the traffic. Jeez, there was an incident at Caesars about a month ago. Guy got shot nine times, after the other guy shot him he danced around the body for a while. Had to be an Indian, I tell you. Danced around the body."

The cab driver chuckled. The sun beat down through the taxicab window. All the other traffic was detouring with us, so that we sat without moving with the Funtazmic on one side and the In-N-Out Burger on the other, but you could still see the black glass pyramid in the distance, and the castle turrets next door.

"What's a hostage situation?" Joanna asked.
April 15, 1997

A former staff writer for the Washington Post, Cynthia Gorney is completing a history of the modern American abortion conflict, to be published in January 1998 by Simon & Schuster. She has written for Vogue, Travel Holiday, Parenting, Harper's Bazaar and Mother Jones.