Lethe Bashar’s Novel of Life

Beyond the scintillating lights of the famous Las Vegas Strip was the city itself—a mass of empty storefronts, rundown casinos, liquor stores and 7/11s.  The colossal casino-hotels stood out in the distance from the East and West sides, as if in a separate sphere, like the emerald city of Oz.  The barren landscape receded from Boulevard’s yellow-brick road and became the makeshift construction of low-income housing, grimy enclaves, and rows of dilapidated houses falling into the ground.       

The people on the street had a red-eyed sleep-deprived anxiety.  Occasionally you saw them swatting imaginary flies and mumbling to themselves.  Some carried bottles of malt liquor as they stumbled past stop signs and street corners.  The seediness of Las Vegas was the part of the very fabric of its society.  It didn’t show up self-consciously as in other cities like a festered sore.  Nor did it flaunt itself on the periphery.  The seediness made up the living core of the population.  Commercial ventures, even in the downtown area, suffered rapidly.  Grocery stores couldn’t thrive because there weren’t any neighborhoods to support them.  All you saw were strip malls, cheap casinos, faded motels, haggard streets, and rundown apartments.  And yet there was this power-source in the distance, this effulgent city of Oz that sent a trickle of plunder every once in a while down the gutters of the East and West sides.  And so the urban camps of Vegas somehow survived, though heavily and haphazardly dependent on their rich grandfather. 

At 11 o’clock in the morning on a working day, a fancy-clad black man strutted along the street with a swing in his legs and a bunch of crack rocks in his pocket.  He blended in perfectly with the street.  Nobody turned their heads.  The underbelly of Vegas was reversed, inverted, made to seem natural, normal, part of a functioning society.  Prostitutes gathered to exchange wigs in an empty parking lot.  Schoolchildren kicked around a ball and played tag.  A tall, stern-looking black preacher stood at the bus stop, overshadowing the concrete with his dark suit.  An old Mexican lady was hunched over her pushcart. Two teenagers with reddish skin and nappy hair snickered like pesky weasels.  A single mother uncovered her breast to give her baby some milk.  She noticed the teenagers ogling her exposed nipple and turned away.

The streets were blazoned with the red-gold Nevada sun.  A film of soft black dust settled over everything, rooftops, curbsides, windshields.  The people on the street didn’t wear a lot of clothing, especially the children who ran around in tank tops and short shorts.  They rode swift little bicycles up and down the alleys with a rattling noise like empty coke cans.  Little black girls did dance numbers on the sidewalks, grinding their hips and pumping their shoulders with intensity. 

The older, unemployed lot loitered outside the storefronts, hissing and wheezing from years of two packs a day.  Their skin was tanned like dried orange peel; their nervous, twitching eyes were hidden under bags of swollen flesh.  You saw a glint of jaundice in their faces, or glaucoma in the cloudy whites of their eyeballs.  They were the elderly, the semi-disabled.  They wandered into cigarette shops and liquor stores to play the slots with the last of their social security checks.  Five of them were hunched over the machines in a servile stupor, cigarettes burning into twigs of long ash.  The chimes rang endlessly with short jingles in between.  Coins fell into the silvery trough every once in awhile with a tune altogether different from the endless, funeral chiming.

To read Lethe’s adventures in Spain:

www.lethebashar.blogspot.com