Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 2, August 2001 | Page 125

Las Vegas, Las Vegas
Never split fours. Everybody knows this. You don’t have to have memorized one
of those basic strategy tables — the kind they print up as laminated charts to fit
neatly in your wallet like credit cards holding the promise of real credit, real free
money, because now you possess knowledge. It’s just common sense. A deck of
cards has more tens than anything else — so hit and hope for an eighteen; split and
probably get two lousy fourteens. The only exception, I think, is if the dealer is
showing a five and you are keeping a count — a hard thing to do in these six deck
shoe days. Regardless, it would certainly be rare, and unwise, against a dealer
showing six with a probable sixteen total, meaning she will have to hit and hope
fully bust.
But he wasn’t counting. He could barely add up the total of the cards he
was dealt each hand, distracted as he was b y the thonged-behinds of the Rio cock
tail waitresses and the last few drops of the fourth Manhattan that hour which he
insisted on licking from the glass tilted upside-down, resting on the bridge of his
tulip-bulb nose and his thick lower lip. I wouldn’t have cared — let him pay the
dealer’s salary, let him buy new g-strings and other bits of happily outed-underwear for the waitstaff but he was sitting at third base, the last player position at the
table, and he was once again taking cards meant for the dealer. She dealt out a
queen and a jack. The queen should have been Manhattan’s — his only card — a
winning eighteen. The jack would have been the dealer’s; it would have busted her
(of course her hole card was a ten). It was supposed to have been her jack. We all
would have won. And still he sat, not quite straight in his chair, splitting fours,
destroying the order of the deck, generally unaware that he was misaligning the
universe. Here we are. Sin City, Neon City, Glitter City, the City of Lost Wages. It
is, most basically, what Time magazine called it in the early 1990s: “the all-Ameri
can city” — which is not to say that “all-American” and “sin” are mutually exclu
sive, only that there is something about this place that is peculiarly American.
On the South Strip the Luxor pyramid is an anchor. Minutes away are the
Greek columns of Caesars Palace, the canals of the Venetian, the Eiffel Tower of
the Paris Hilton, the volcano of the Mirage, Lake Como of the Bellagio, and the
castle that is Excalibur. Apart from the occasional Mississippi riverboat or New
Orleans-themed facade, New York-New York is the only homage paid to the U.S.
— its miniature Manhattan skyline acelebration of another city rather than another
city’s landmark, an important difference. New York-New York is a collection of
skyscrapers that represent growth due to immigration and urbanization. It is a
monument to business: a corporation’s recreation of buildings owned by other
corporations.