FEATURE:

Adventures of a
middle-aged editor

Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime?

This column plumbs the depths and scales the heights. Last issue, you may remember, I sank to the bottom of the sea with Atlantis Submarines. This month, I soared over the rooftops of Las Vegas. In the process I discovered exactly what that big bad city really offers, and it’s not money, or sex, or neon-lit excitement. It’s something quite unexpected. I’ll come back to this.

We were in Lost Wages, my wife Lilli and I, for her best-friend’s wedding. Annette is the most popular vet on the Big Island and her new husband, Steve, successfully retired from the restaurant business years ago. For their own reasons—after all, most people come to Hawaii for their nuptials rather than leave it—they decided to get married in Sin City. The joke, or the joker, to use an appropriate image, was that the wedding officer was an Elvis impersonator in the Graceland’s Chapel.

Actually, it was a lot of fun, and even brought a small tear to my manly eye. Truth is, I always cry at weddings and romantic movies—funerals leave me cold. The impersonator credibly resembled the King, though his voice, let’s face it, left something to be desired. Nevertheless he led the bride down the aisle singing ‘Love Me Tender’ (or was it ‘Can’t Help Falling In Love’?) and then phrased the Marriage Vows along the lines of ‘Do you Annette promise not to step on Stephen’s blue suede shoes or lead him to the Heartbreak Hotel?’ etc.

You get the idea. At the end he said, to general applause, ‘Thank you. Thank you viry much,’ and then smiled at his little joke. Like the real Elvis, he had his act down pat. After that we went to brunch at a fabulous place with a fabulous buffet and wished the happy couple all the best.

As for Vegas, it was a shock. First, the air was cold, 45-50 degrees, and gray and overcast. The desert wind howled through the gaping streets. My Hawaiian wife shivered miserably each time we ventured out. Inside, however, it was even worse: the hotel lobbies and casinos reeked with cigarette smoke, setting her allergies all a-twitter every time we passed through. And you have to pass through the casinos to go anywhere, of course; they’ve set it up that way.

That said, we had a grand old time. Annette’s and Stephen’s wedding gifts to their party of relatives and friends were tickets to the amazing KA, a Cirque du Soleil spectacular in a specially constructed theater in the MGM Grand (where we stayed). I can’t speak too highly of this extraordinary production, a seamless blend of thrilling acrobatorial agility and technical imagination. Its star—despite the daring and breathtaking skill of the performers—was the proscenium stage itself, hydraulically powered and mounted on rollers allowing it to rise, fall, swivel, angle, glide and plunge. Around, upon and over it the actors/acrobats floated, soared and regularly plummeted perhaps 90 feet into a hidden air bag below the surface.

My own soaring took place the following day when the men, led by Stephen while Annette and the other wives went shopping, visited Vegas’s fabled Stratosphere Hotel. Basically it’s three terrifying carnival rides set atop a structure high almost as the Empire State Building. Their completely appropriate names say it all: Insanity the Ride, XScream and Big Shot. In the first you are dangled over the tower’s edge while the thing spins at 40 mph. XScream is a roller-coaster gondola which plunges downward towards the street 900 feet below. And Big Shot, billed as the highest thrill ride in the world, shoots you up a thousand feet and then even more quickly drops you down again. And again. And again.

My companions loved them all and hopped aboard each ride repeatedly. Not I. Fresh in my mind were press reports of two young women who found themselves suspended over the streets for over three hours when Insanity malfunctioned. It is said that when they were finally retrieved one shook uncontrollably and the other was unable to speak.

Yep, I got plenty of puk-puks and flapping chicken elbows. However, thanks, as the saying goes, but no thanks.

We left Vegas the next day, after the wedding. A tiny silver dime completed the whole experience and left me pondering the Meaning of Life and Vegas and my own small place within the scheme of things.

I’d found the dime in the parking lot at Honolulu Airport the morning we left. I’ll gamble that, I told myself, figuring the universe was sending me a message. It was, though not the one I imagined. All through our stay that little coin burned a small hole in my increasingly anorexic wallet, but remained ungambled until the time came for our return to Hawaii. Then in the Mccarran Airport terminal we had an hour or so to kill before our flight, so I wandered over to the bank of slot machines which you find everywhere, even in the toilets.

A woman of a certain age, as the French say, accosted me, and literally asked if I could spare a dime. She had only 90 cents and these days the machines take one-, five- and ten-dollar bills only. I could see that she was desperate, and realized suddenly that what Las Vegas actually sells is not excitement but Hope. As long as you have a buck to gamble, you have Hope. Hope that this time, finally, finally! you’ll strike it rich and all your troubles will be gone.

So I gave her my dime, my lucky dime, and she took it and cashed in our coins for paper, and headed back to the One-Armed Bandits blinking and shining in their serried rows.

I shrugged with careless cynicism and began to walk away, until I heard the bells go off. There she was, before a fruit machine that hummed and sang while its green digital counter kept running and running. She was hopping up and down and screaming. After what seemed like forever it stopped. She had won over $500.

Open-mouthed I watched—we all watched—as she collected her payout ticket and headed gleefully toward the cashier. The look of sheer relief and joy on her face smoothed out her tired wrinkles. You could almost see the pretty girl she once had been.

She was wise enough not to chance her luck again and began to make her way out. As she did so she caught my eye and smiled and came over. ‘Thank you so much,’ she said, fishing in her wallet. She pressed something into my hand. And then she was gone.

I glanced down although I knew already what I held.

It was my dime.

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