Fear and Self-Loathing in Las Vegas

In 1971, Hunter Thompson first published ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ in Rolling Stone. Forty years later, The Daily’s Zach Baron revisits the piece and the town in which it was born, chasing Thompson¹s ghost through crazy desert car races, a dying local economy and a massive and menacing hacker convention known as DEFCON.  Here are parts one and two of a four-part series. Click here for parts three and four.

PART I: EVERY DAY I’M SHUFFLIN’

In late July, I flew to Las Vegas with a woman I will call Fleur, in service of a story idea so doomed and ill-conceived I hesitate to even tell you what it was. You will have your suspicions. Writers only go to Las Vegas for one reason, really. It is our World Series of Poker, except more pretentious. But the process is not dissimilar. You train, get your weight up. A semi-competent feature here, a not-totally-botched essay there, and then, one day, when your editor is particularly distracted, downtrodden or simply in need of something to believe in, you push your meager pile of chips to the center of the table. You look your mark in the eye and bluff. “It is the 40th anniversary of Hunter S. Thompson’s ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,’” you say, your face calm, confident, “and I want to go there, to write a piece on the book, and the American Dream.”

You don’t expect him to say yes. Pitching stories on the American Dream is what writers do when their hearts are empty, their minds blank. It is the equivalent of stalling for more time, throwing a Hail Mary down eight with time expiring, a way to mark your commitment and plucky optimism before admitting defeat and moving on to something with an actual chance of success.

Plus Las Vegas is an awful place — particularly in high summer, when hackers converge on it for their annual conference, DEFCON, and the heat is powerful overhead. The city’s overpowering forces of boredom bear down. Loitering out in the desert with people inclined to regard you and your chosen profession with hostility, attending their off-road races, chasing the ghost of Hunter Thompson around casinos that have done everything in their power to efface any historical context or nostalgia — this is not something you actually want to do.

He says yes.

***

The subtitle of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” is “A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream.” The book is a semi-fictional account of a drug-fueled rampage undertaken by Thompson and an accomplice over five or so days in Las Vegas. Having been sent to cover the Mint 400, “the richest off-the-road race for motorcycles and dune-buggies in the history of organized sport,” Thompson, who took the alias Raoul Duke, and his lawyer friend, a Samoan named Dr. Gonzo (a nod to Thompson’s favored style of prose), proceed instead to ingest heroic doses of intoxicants, dragging up and down the Las Vegas in a red Chevrolet convertible. By the end of the book, the men have destroyed two hotel rooms; kidnapped, drugged and possibly sexually assaulted a young folk artist from Montana named Lucy; and robbed a North Las Vegas diner at knifepoint. As a finale, the duo attend a National District Attorneys Association’s Conference on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.

“If the Pigs were gathering in Vegas for a top-level Drug Conference,” Thompson wrote, “we felt the drug culture should be represented.”

“Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” condensed two distinct reporting trips into one continuous, deeply unreliable narrative. The first, in March 1971, was an assignment to write captions for a Sports Illustrated piece about the Mint 400; the second was in April, after Thompson was sent to cover the drug conference for Rolling Stone. Combining them was triage: According to his biographer, William McKeen, Thompson had first filed to Sports Illustrated “a straight account of the race,” leaving out the narcotics but including “lucid reportage about gambling history and the story of how Las Vegas sprung from the desert.” The piece was “aggressively rejected.” It was not what the magazine had asked for.

Thompson brought Dr. Gonzo along because he was working on another piece for Rolling Stone that year about Rubén Salazar, a Mexican-American journalist who had been slain in Los Angeles during the National Chicano Moratorium March in August 1970. Gonzo’s real name was Oscar Zeta Acosta, a flamboyant, gun-brandishing attorney, Chicano activist and friend of Thompson’s who shared the writer’s penchant for terrifying defenseless strangers. Thompson hoped to use Acosta as a source on (and, eventually, subject in) the Salazar story. Taking him to Vegas was an excuse to get him alone, and away from the tense and violent vibe that had descended on Mexican-American radicals and their police counterparts back in L.A. Plus the two men liked to do drugs together.

In addition to his double- and triple-dealing with Acosta, Sports Illustrated and Rolling Stone, Thompson had a book contract to fulfill. In the triumphant aftermath of his first book, 1967’s “Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs,” a yearlong account of riding with the gang, Random House signed Thompson to write about the death, or the life, or the savage heart, or something, anything, of the American Dream.

His letters to his editor, Jim Silberman, from this period are exactly the sort of letters you’d expect from a writer who’d given himself an impossible assignment. The dawning horror is palpable. In one of Thompson’s many attempts to renege on the deal, he wrote to convince Silberman that the manuscript — which by 1971 Thompson had been working on unsuccessfully for more than three years — was “hopelessly inconsistent” in “the context of time, tone & focus.” Thompson suggested “lacing all this bulls*** together chronologically” and publishing it anyway.

“It is a millstone,” he wrote, with equal parts machismo and terror. “It prevents me from focusing seriously on anything else — while at the same time tying me to a project that I’ve never understood or had any real faith in.”

As I read these frantic letters on the plane, cocktail in hand, American Dream-bound, it occurred that the project Thompson was so desperate to jettison in the year he wrote “Fear and Loathing” was pretty much the same one I’d managed to get my editors to assign.

***

“You can’t send a man out in a f***ing Pinto or a VW to seek out the American Dream in Las Vegas.”
— Hunter Thompson, letter to Jim Silberman, May 9, 1971

But can you send him out in a cherry red subcompact Chevy Aveo? Our car sat optimistically on the rental lot, a crimson speed hump. Jigsawed together, our suitcases almost fit in the trunk. I folded myself into the vehicle’s cockpit. A pointed coughing could be heard; outside, Fleur indicated her door was locked. I pulled up the little nubbin.

“Find us some indigenous Las Vegas music,” I shouted. Our windows were manually wound down. Fleur’s blond ringlets were untamed in the highway breeze. The Aveo pushed 45, 50 mph on Interstate 15, engine mewling beneath its tiny hood. “We’re only listening to Sinatra in this town.”

She fiddled with the radio. Quasars sounded rhythmically. Synths fistpumped. Every day I’m shufflin’.

“This is not Sinatra,” I said.

“I think it’s LMFAO,” yelled Fleur, rolling the dial for the next station. The rapping of Berry Gordy’s kin again filled our car’s modest interior. I stabbed at the dashboard in search of an off switch.

Ahead of us our destination glinted, or glared, really — 64 stories of ersatz gold, reflecting down on the Spearmint Rhino strip club in daylight, a Nordstrom’s, acres of vacant lots. The hotel windows were tawny yellow, a patina of polyester substrate sadness. Inside, on glass doors by the shallow swimming pool, a redundant maxim was mounted in massive gilded letters: “As long as you’re going to be thinking anyway, think big.” The quote was attributed to Donald Trump.

“Seven days?” the receptionist at the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas asked, her tone somewhere between incredulity and pity.

“That’s right,” I said.

“That’s, um…” she paused. “Why?”

A valet jimmied our bags out of the Aveo’s trunk.

Inside our suite, the sunlight shone blue through the building’s yellow film. It was like being in the belly of a dying goldfish. Fleur, a nudist whose mystic California spirit, this close to home, was already breaking free of its melancholy East Coast cage, stripped down and headed for the Jacuzzi tub and TV in our bathroom. The heated yarling of MTV’s “Jersey Shore” rose from behind the door.

Our windows looked north, at the dirty white spire of the Circus Circus Hotel and Casino, where Hunter Thompson had once tried to purchase an ape with the help of Bruce Innes, the well-regarded Canadian singer-songwriter. More failed journalism here, hinted at in the pages of “Fear and Loathing”: an aborted section of the book about Jay Sarno, mastermind of Circus Circus and Caesars Palace, who’d supposedly wanted to run away as a child and join the circus. Instead the little magnate ended up building his own.

“It’s pure Horatio Alger,” Thompson wrote in “Fear and Loathing,” “all the way down to his attitude.” But Sarno wouldn’t speak with Thompson. Hence the ape, and the magnificently bent passages in “Fear and Loathing” about following mescaline with ether and watching a “half-naked 14-year-old girl being chased through air by a snarling wolverine” above the Circus Circus blackjack tables — yet another assignment gone wrong and then hastily salvaged through bluffing, alcohol and acid.

Thompson was a savant at this kind of writerly failure. “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved” from 1970, the first instance of Thompson’s soon-to-be-signature “gonzo” style, was the result of a reporting meltdown so total that the writer, way past deadline and unable to manage anything but single, unrelated sentences and “gibberish” at his typewriter, was reduced to mailing random paragraphs pulled from his shaky first draft and drunken diary of the proceedings to Scanlan’s Monthly in lieu of an actual story. The magazine, which would be defunct within a year, ran the piece anyway, to great acclaim.

Fleur had bathrobes sent up. I called down, told them to bring around the Aveo. We had a race to cover.

***

Every day is different … And so it is with the night … Life moves slower and faster at the same time … Spirits of space and energy, hidden in plain sight … While days are fleeting, and quickly pass … Night time allows passions and dreams to roll … This July in the barren deserts of Southern Nevada, it will happen again ... Without daylight there to count the toll … KC HiLites Presents The MIDNIGHT SPECIAL In Primm. Nevada a SNORE 2011 Points Race Two Nights of Racing July 29th-31st
— “SNORE Midnight Race Promo,” YouTube, July 18, 2011

SNORE stands for Southern Nevada Off Road Enthusiasts. On their website, they describe themselves as “a family of off road desert racers helping to promote desert racing in and around the Las Vegas, Nevada area.” “Family” here can be taken literally. The 42-year-old SNORE is made up mostly of a small handful of Las Vegas clans — Bakers, Barretts, Flippins, Freemans — who hold many of SNORE’s administrative positions and sit on its board of directors. In addition to the Midnight Special, the race toward which Fleur and I were bound, SNORE stages around six events a year, including Laughlin’s Rage at the River, in December, and the Battle at Primm, in February. It was SNORE that resurrected the Mint 400 in 2008, after the demise of the race and its namesake hotel two decades earlier.

Once, correspondents from Life, ABC, CBS, Sports Illustrated and so on — “the absolute cream of the national sporting press,” as Thompson described them, perhaps ironically — came to the desert to report on the Mint, in which Steve McQueen, James Garner and Lee Majors are said to have competed and which billed itself, in the old grandiose Vegas style, as “The Great American Desert Race.” Vanna White was a onetime Mint 400 Girl, as was TV “Wonder Woman” Lynda Carter. But desert racing is mostly a subcultural curio in Nevada now, especially in the Las Vegas area, where the concept of “entertainment” has long since been hammered and forged into a far less dusty and more cash-intensive pursuit. In 2011, according to Gene Lund, SNORE’s genial media director, “We can’t even get the local papers to write stuff” about the weird races that take place around the suburbs of the cities they cover.

How to state the folly of our coming here, to Primm, Nevada’s Midnight Special, in a winking attempt to retrace the steps of Hunter Thompson, who 40 years ago badgered the locals at the Fabulous Mint 400 and then drank his way back to the Circus Circus without even bothering to find out who had won? We were too well-behaved, Fleur and I. Our hosts were too earnest and sincere. None of them had heard of the publication for which I was ostensibly covering their race, but they knew that we had come from New York, and the sheer distance and improbability of it all had impressed them, or least triggered their innate politeness. Shortly after we had arrived, one kind buggy driver offered Fleur a ride in his makeshift-looking vehicle, so she could get a feel for what it was like to accelerate at high speeds around the lumpy hills and right-angle turns of the unpaved sand. Gene sat patiently with us in his pickup, answering questions about horsepower and local unemployment and “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.”

“Can’t say I’ve heard of it,” he said, furrowing his brow.

Our ironic pursuit of the pursuit of the American Dream would not go over well here. Nor could we pretend, for the benefit of our friends and family, that these people were scary, or deranged, that we had been in terrible danger and just barely escaped with our lives. These men and women were merely Southern Nevada Off Road Enthusiasts.

“You guys are from New York?” asked one young onlooker as we canvassed our way through the race-side spectators. “Let those people back there know what they’re missing. Sitting out here, watching dirt trucks drive in circles. Meanwhile they’re the ones designing our clothes and s***!”

Someone from a more practical part of the country, however, had likely conceived of the fluorescent yellow safety vests Fleur and I were now wearing. “All Media Personnel must wear safety vest on the course with ‘MEDIA’ on the back,” the online registration form had said. I had not taken the request seriously. We had come in our fancy New York jeans, pushing the Aveo steadily south from Las Vegas to Primm, a dusty gambling town off Exit 1 at the Nevada-California state line. Primm is “the first and last place to spend your money in Nevada,” in Gene’s words, though one doesn’t imagine coked-up packs of Los Angeles bachelorettes screaming up I-15 in the other direction stopping to gamble here of all places, home of a Terrible’s casino complex with hair-scraping Styrofoam drop ceilings and the smell of despair wafting from the carpets.

Our media rendezvous was at the Primm Valley Resort. Above us a lonely trapezoidal monorail, the phrase “Prima Donna” stenciled on its side, passed at an uneven crawl — a failing kinetic sculpture, like something from Epcot Center that had taken a wrong turn 50 years ago and was just now running out of gas. Inside the casino, the press safety briefing had been canceled. The trade photographers — there were no other journalists — had taken to the bar instead, veterans of not getting hit by gigantic out-of-control trucks on the darker and more poorly marked reaches of the course.

We had no such skills, a fact that Gene, a round, bearded bus driver and food service worker with an intimidating look but gentle manner, immediately sussed out. “Just make sure you’re on the inside of the curve,” he said, pointing at a bend in a photocopied map of the course, a jumble of squiggly lines drawn on paper and marked with inscrutable X’s. “When those guys come screaming around, they’re liable to fly right off and at you.” His son, Gene said, averting his eyes from the look of fear dawning on Fleur’s face, would go pick us up a couple of vests at Lowe’s.

We wandered out, abandoned the Aveo in order to detour on foot around Buffalo Bill’s, another beaten-down and jaundiced gambling palace encircled by a winding and unreasonably long roller coaster of a hue that had probably once been describable as yellow. It was out past the rear parking lot of Buffalo Bill’s that the race would be held, and as we came up behind the casino, we began to see it, or rather hear it: Engines revving in the fading light. Tractor-trailers and big semis idled in the lot. Shirtless dudes splayed out in flatbed trucks. The course’s infield was on the far side of a dirt berm crowned with a row of pickups. A black power plant rested in the middle distance, marking the race’s outer boundary.

The Mint 400 is the sport’s crown jewel because it is exceptionally drawn-out and brutal — four 100-mile laps through punishing dust clouds, six to eight hours in a savagely bouncing vehicle without relief or sustenance. (“Did you bring snacks?” Fleur asked one driver we met who’d done the Mint. “No, ma’am,” he said politely.) But because of a conflict with the Nevada Bureau of Land Management, known locally as BLM, involving baby desert tortoises — and, separately, the horrific 2010 accident in the Mojave Desert that left eight racing spectators dead — SNORE and the Midnight Special had been forced off their usual expansive course on Moapa Paiute Indian land and onto an 8.6-mile tangle of winding turns in the back lot of a destitute casino.

How much information can I ask you to tolerate about a subspecies of racing you are never likely to see firsthand, or even on television? Would it help if I told you about the Class 11? The Class 11 is a modded-out but otherwise stock Volkswagen Bug with external shocks in the front and back, a roll cage, and that optimistic swell of a hood up front. It looks like Timothy Leary’s idea of a tank. Gene described the hybrid as “a hard ride,” and SNORE rules protect the Class 11s more than they do the other cars. If, say, a big monster truck is so unchivalrous as to bump a Class 11 mid-race, the larger car is immediately disqualified. This is because the little guys “can’t get out of their own way,” let alone someone else’s, said SNORE “sergeant-at-arms” Mark Bass.

The Class 11s draw crowds in the parking lot, so hypnotic is their mix of cuteness and malevolence. About half the cars here have stock bodies; the rest are buggies and Lilliputian pickup trucks and exoskeletal assemblages of wheels and roll bars. The class of the car mostly refers to the type of body it possesses and how many dollars you’re allowed to put into it. Class 1’s and Trophy Trucks — two classes limited only by “as much money as you think you have to throw away,” said Gene — are thus both the envy and the scorn of the assembled racers, as they are both the finest vehicles on the course and also the ones that require the least hustle and sweat to create. Most of the more expensive cars’ owners supposedly come from wealth: casino magnates, construction company owners, online entrepreneurs, and people who have better-than-average sponsorship connections. Trophy Trucks in particular feature ludicrous upgrades like Ferrari paddle shifters, $800 LED light bar lamps and $50,000 suspensions, and are said to be able to fly hundreds of yards through the air off the course’s bigger jumps.

Most of this information came from a lengthy and lucid monologue delivered by Gene as he drove us, pell-mell, across a muddy, bumpy field strewn with rocks and puddles brightened by light towers. The best point from which to see the competition, he said, was right in the middle of it. We climbed in his truck and parked ourselves on a strip of land no wider than 15 feet between two switchbacks. Across the dirt, a man with a checkered flag lined up the cars in the first heat. It was around 9 at night — race time. (The Midnight Special is the most nighttime-centric race on the SNORE circuit. Though it looked cool, this is less a gimmick than a concession to Nevada high summer, which is brutal all the way up to 8 p.m. or so. In July or August at noon, a steel car might as well be the inside of the sun.)

The flag dropped. We watched the first fleet of cars shoot forward one by one, disappear, then careen back into sight as they passed 10 yards in front of our windshield. Their tires threw up big gouts of spotlit dirt, and you could see the crunch as they landed after going aerial over a little salvo of humps directly ahead of our truck. Another turn and the racers were behind us, accelerating up a hill, hurtling through the air past the truck’s bed, and landing in a fishtail that sent them off to points unseen.

The radio crackled, and Gene said he was needed farther up and out on the course. It had rained the night before and during the day as well, which meant that the course guides — black arrows on bright orange cardstock nailed to wooden markers — had come down in spots. This had become a particular problem at the track’s southeast corner, where racers were improvising their way around a 90-degree turn in a way that was giving some of them unfair advantage, and sending others hurtling out onto forbidden BLM land.

Gene screamed down the dirt, dodging racecars, bouncing through neon pools like we were on a military raid, dirt and noise and dim, shadowy figures hurtling by the windows.

The turn in question was indeed poorly lit and sudden. Fleur and I remained in the cab as Gene conferred with Robert Gross, the race steward, whose strong resemblance to the John C. Reilly of “Talladega Nights” only added to the unreal feeling of being this far out on the sand. The two men decided to rope off the offending shortcut. Fleur and I looked on from the safety of Gene’s truck as they began hammering matching pairs of posts into the ground about 10 yards apart, stringing up pink tape between the wooden stakes. As they marched their makeshift corridor up toward the bend, one buggy spotted Gene in the dark so belatedly that the churn of the truck’s tires showered dirt on our guide as he oléd out of the way. Gross, beside him, didn’t stop hammering, even as he was forced to dodge yet another car, his arms windmilling for balance, 40- or 50-mph contact missed by 6 inches or so.

“I was worried about your life there,” I told Gene back in the pickup, my voice maybe cracking a little.

“That’s what it’s all about,” he said. He shrugged.

Afterward, Fleur and I walked through Buffalo Bill’s dazed, still in our safety vests. From the casino’s front lot, the traffic jam back to Las Vegas was a solid red line tracing the road up from the border. We joined the procession of cars with California license plates in silence. We made it perhaps a half-mile up the interstate, then waited, unmoving, as the thing metastasized. Cars took to both shoulders and then, incredibly, piled up there, too. Even off in the scrub — where we watched the distant taillights of fed-up pickups freestyling their way home across the desert — you could see the off-road traffic halt, and then back up into the darkness.

One car took a hard right, perpendicular to traffic, and then just sort of stopped for a while, blocking two lanes. People were hanging listlessly out of car windows. They were walking around. I felt deep pity for the poor Los Angelinos who five hours ago had said, “Vegas, baby!” and hopped in a car, bound for neon. Now the drugs had run out and the traffic was at a standstill.

“Maybe they gassed the monorail, like in Japan,” Fleur said, as if Vegas was already gone, wiped off the map before we could locate the American Dream in some poetically deserted suburban subdivision or casino subbasement. No southbound cars could be seen. Off on the gravel of the shoulder I noticed a guy in shorts just sort of grinning, his legs spread in the dirt. “Would we go off the grid?” Fleur asked.

My friend, who does not smoke, reached into her bag and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, lighting one. In her version of the Apocalypse, “Nobody takes.”

“It’s all barter,” she said. I disagreed — we would die out in the desert. Or we would survive, covered in blood. But we would not be bartering our water and cigarettes for food and mercy. That would not be the way it ended.


PART II: TOPLESS AT THE SAHARA

Ten miles and three hours later, we crept by the twisted and burned husk of a van.

Our traffic jam merited a small article in the Las Vegas Review-Journal the next day:

NEW MEXICO MAN DIES IN I-15 ACCIDENT NEAR JEAN
By Lawrence Mower

A New Mexico man died in a roll-over accident Friday night on Interstate 15 near Jean.

Nevada Highway Patrol trooper Loy Hixson said a man in his mid-30s was thrown from the vehicle and died after the accident at mile marker 11.

The Dodge van he was driving struck a concrete barrier in the median and overturned about 8 p.m. The cause of the crash was unknown. Authorities did not release the man’s name.

Nobody else was injured in the crash, which closed down two lanes of the three-lane highway for hours.

***

In “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” Raoul Duke is forever stumbling onto a newspaper or turning on the television and finding bad news. This was a literary tic of the era. Joan Didion, too, was always opening the paper in her essays from the 1960s and ’70s and reading something implausible and horrible that nevertheless contained some special personal psychic resonance. “Fear and Loathing” contains newspaper stories — some perhaps real, others surely not — on heroin overdoses and unlawful executions in Vietnam, scenes of PCP addicts clawing their own eyes out and Muhammad Ali in prison. One of the more outlandish and obviously made-up wire stories in the book bears the dateline “Aboard the U.S.S. Crazy Horse: Somewhere in the Pacific (Sept. 25)” and the headline SHIP COMMANDER BUTCHERED BY NATIVES AFTER “ACCIDENTAL” ASSAULT ON GUAM. It begins: “The entire 3465-man crew of this newest American aircraft carrier is in violent mourning today, after five crewmen including the Captain were diced up like pineapple meat in a brawl with the Heroin Police at the neutral port of Hong See …”

Part of this is performative self-loathing, a journalist expressing distaste for himself and his own kind. “Why bother with newspapers, if this is all they offer?” Thompson wrote. “Journalism is not a profession or trade. It is a cheap catch-all for f***offs and misfits.” One thing lost on me as a teenager, reading “Fear and Loathing,” my head alive with drugs and laughter at Gonzo and Duke’s antics, is the pervasive deadline panic that shadows Duke throughout the book. Maybe you have to be a writer yourself to understand it. At one point, with his attorney having fled back to Los Angeles, his expense account drawn down, his hotel room full of 600 bars of translucent Neutrogena soap and the dregs of a once-mighty drug stash, the Mint 400 long since concluded, its winner still (to him) unknown, Duke looks up in the air to see “a big silver smoke-trailing DC-8 taking off.”

“Was Lacerda aboard?” Duke wonders, naming his photographer on the Sports Illustrated job. “The man from Life? Did they have all the photos they needed? All the facts? Had they fulfilled their responsibilities?” This professional torment was a feeling I knew well and would come to know even better in my seven days of wandering the Las Vegas in search of the punchline to a joke I had made several weeks before, high in News Corp headquarters. Had the American Dream been in that traffic jam? Should I ingest illegal drugs for the sake of realism?

It was only day two and my confident façade was cracking.

“Like, how can I help?” asked Fleur, wrapped contentedly in a bathrobe on our couch. “I feel so relaxed right now!”

I left her to her room service and went looking for my photographer. Let’s say his name was Ramon. We’d first encountered him at 4 a.m. the night before in the Trump lobby, wild-eyed and trembling. Ramon had been told the rough outlines of his assignment, and so on the JFK runway had ingested a natural supplement to get him in the proper state of mind. His plane proceeded to taxi for three hours on the ground in New York, then retreated to the gate. Finally the air traffic controllers brought our experience-enhanced photographer and his fellow travelers back out onto the tarmac, where they waited another two hours before departure. Ramon showed us masterfully shot videos of the small fly, trapped in his seat’s window, that had been his only companion for those claustrophobic and vision-intense five hours.

Since then, Ramon, whose specialty at home is the artful photographing of nude women and drunken intelligentsia at New York parties, had only been subject to more abuse. There was the second day of the Midnight Special, back in Primm, where Fleur and I had watched him reluctantly scale a chain-link fence and crawl out onto the rocky sand below the course’s mighty dike jump. Ramon prostrated himself, shooting up at the cars flying directly above his head. He waded into the crowd of spectators on the hill overlooking the race and began taking portraits. “Ayo Bam Bam,” a shirtless dude called to another shirtless dude, slicking back his hair for Ramon’s camera. “Come get in this sh*t!”

Then there was the ghost town of the Desert Mesa subdivision, out in a sweltering corner of North Las Vegas, where city-subsidized housing had been initiated in 2004 and subsequently abandoned, half-built. It’s a manifestation of the 21st-century Vegas that never was. Historically built on credit, Las Vegas, long the fastest-growing city in the nation, was leveled when the credit dried up. At 13.4 percent, Nevada’s unemployment rate is the highest in the country. More houses are foreclosed upon in the metropolitan Las Vegas area than in any other comparable city. All along the modern Vegas Strip are eyesores and burgeoning eyesores like the $2.9 billion-and-counting Fontainebleau, three-quarters built and then abandoned in bankruptcy proceedings, a turgid blue thing of glass and steel situated on an empty lot. At the other end of Las Vegas Boulevard is the two-year-old CityCenter, said to be the most expensive private development ever attempted in this country, whose structurally flawed Harmon Tower remains vacant, a 26-story billboard for a project too unsafe for human occupancy and too costly to tear down.

Ramon fired gamely away at the skeletal edifices of Desert Mesa, their walls bashed in for the wiring, the heat unbelievable overhead. We traversed empty sandy lots, each leveled off at a precise interval. One ruin had the street address of #444, despite having no street. Chain-link fences and barbed wire surrounded the last outpost of houses left to be demolished. Plywood covered the windows. On the ground nearby was an open manhole with a rock wedged into it. Dead palm trees made mounds of debris with white trellis fences, discarded plastic lawn chairs, ripped-out carpet and toilets, car tires. One house was entirely burned out, its roof collapsed. Blackened bits of steel and insulation made a mound inside. Yellow fire hydrants stood impotently on the perimeter. Across the street, the Aloha Vegas trailer park advertised houses for sale. As we walked listlessly back to our car, a salvage truck drove by with a refrigerator and scraps of tar roof lashed to its bed.

A visit to Las Vegas in 2011 can easily degenerate into an orgy of disaster porn, and this one immediately had. A local tipped us off that the Sahara, that old Rat Pack redoubt, which closed in May after its owner declared its operation “no longer economically viable,” was holding a fire sale. “Everything Goes!” advertised the sign outside, including the furniture from the casino’s 1,720 guest rooms and suites. Any civilian was allowed to come in and bid, so we went there, too.

It was eerie, walking around in the dimly lit Sahara, the tables quiet but still there, tagged for sale. A roulette station, “no wheel,” was being sold for $2,200. Garish $6,500 beaded chandeliers mingled with $325 armoires and red striped sofas, stained mattresses, a green mesh children’s playpen, chip sorters, cash counters, old desks with inlaid leather, fake plants. Heaps of pillows and bedding, signs for valet pick-up and drop-off. The gaming floor smelled poignant, or maybe just dusty.

“Do they have glassware here?” Fleur asked.

“They got everything!” said Mike, the security guard. Mike’s job was, he confided, “boring as sh*t.”

“I want to work in a normal casino,” he said, “with people drinking and gambling, the noise and all that.” He gestured around, indicated how quiet it was. We were the only scavengers in there, give or take a few others wandering in and out. Most people would never have the opportunity to walk into one of the greatest gambling temples the world has ever known and finger inexpensive vases, walk the carpet Dean Martin had walked, sit heedlessly on the Thirsty Camel’s tattered barstools, maybe even take one home ($85). But there is no tourism in Las Vegas for the weak or the failed, no will to look behind the curtain.

Were we even behind the curtain?

“The ‘secret of Vegas’ is that there are no secrets,” Dave Hickey once wrote. “What is hidden elsewhere exists here in quotidian visibility.” Writers seek the American Dream in Las Vegas because our country’s blind enthusiasm and unceasing avarice and tacky ambition and failure to take care of its own people are on full display here. Then we go running around in bankrupt casinos looking for some kind of secret clue, like the depressing truth isn’t obvious to everyone the moment they step off the plane. The only thing we would find in the Sahara would be the opportunity to hang out in a historic penthouse suite.

Spending time in the Sahara’s famous Alexandria top-floor suite, Mike said, was the one perk of the gig. And it was amazing up there, the view stretching off from the narrow concrete balcony to the north and east, dead-ending at the mountains. The suite’s four-tier chandelier was still in place, as was its vintage fuzzy green carpet and musty drapes. Mirrors dotted the ceilings above the outlines of where the beds used to be. In the master bedroom there was still a control panel with an analog radio dial embedded in it. Sinatra had spent time with dozens of willing women here at the Sahara, maybe even in this exact room, the mirrored ceilings alive with the sound of room service waitresses slipping in, sliding their metal carts over to bar the door.

Ramon was so taken with the place that he brought back an 18-year-old girl with him the next day for a topless photo shoot, making the disaster-porn analogy baldly literal. “I’m going to be in Vegas for the next 5 days,” he had posted on his Twitter account the night he arrived. “Looking for sexy & strange exhibitionists to photograph.” A young woman had gotten in touch — Ramon said the first thing he did when he saw her was check her ID. She brought her boyfriend along, a small man whose protective abilities Ramon dismissed. But even that kid couldn’t resist the penthouse.

How this particular desolation binge ended is not a proud thing to relate. Fleur had gotten some bad news from back home. We had seen a lot of sublime and symbolic deterioration, done some firsthand reportage in the cradle of the American recession. But Thompson had not spent his time in Las Vegas suburbs sifting through the debris of failed construction projects. He had not whiled away his mornings looking up employment statistics online. Our debauchery quotient thus far was low. We had a few drinks, Fleur and I, while Ramon headed back to the hotel to check and see if his social media solicitations had drawn any further replies.

We started, I guess, at the Cosmopolitan, the only casino in Las Vegas to open in 2010 (slogan: “Just the right amount of wrong”), born of a storm of lawsuits and defaults that left the steely and self-consciously modern edifice in the hands of its primary investor, Deutsche Bank. Neither Fleur nor I had the will at this point to think grand thoughts about the implications of this fact — a bank running a gambling operation when it was precisely this behavior that had sowed such deep chaos in the first place.

As with CityCenter, the Cosmopolitan’s planned condos had become hotel rooms instead, but its aggressive and subtly anti-Old Vegas aspirations nevertheless lived on in the casino’s nightclub, Marquee, transplanted to the from New York’s throbbing Meatpacking district. The club looked happier here, less embarrassed in its high-heeled, bare-ass fervor. Bridge-and-tunnel is not a concept in Las Vegas. You’re either about to get thrown into a hole in the desert, or you’re surrounded by people who look pretty much like those on line at Marquee, drowned in cologne and packed into mini-dresses and stilettos, the men in box-toed footwear, billowing button-ups tucked into jeans.

The entrance line was furious, so we took up positions at the bar opposite the club, watching women wobble into its black gate on high heels, and then emerge, hours later, barefoot. They were a lesson in the imperfection of the human form, I thought, the tequila working its sage magic. Here were these women who so desperately wanted to wear these pumps and yet couldn’t, their steely commitment undermined by alcohol and balance issues.

After midnight on any given evening on the , you can witness a steady stream of shoeless girls being flung into cabs waiting in patient lines outside, driven by drivers so defiantly resigned that they make New York City cabbies look like punks. These are the sort of men who can watch a woman projectile vomit over the side of their cab for 20 minutes straight or listen to a busted-out gambler heedlessly weep in their backseat and still maintain a kind of optimism about humanity, their city and their prospects. “You’re my last customer of the night,” your driver might say, as you frantically try to revive your comatose date. “The Palms is a good place to pick up fares!”

It was one of these guys who betrayed us, in the end. We had been drinking tequila, gabbing with some home furnishings conventioneers at the blackjack tables. But these casinos are like padded rooms. “In this town they love a drunk,” Thompson wrote. “Fresh meat.” Intoxication in Las Vegas is a form of conformity. All we had done was find another way to fall in line. Fleur placed wagers for her mother, a New Age woman who’d called earlier that day and asked Fleur to put down a few dollars on 6, 7, 10 and 14 at the roulette table. We watched the dealer sweep the chips away.

“Let’s go to the strip club,” Fleur said. It was on our way home. Why not?

“Spearmint Rhino,” I told the cab driver.

It was a classic swindle, so old-school I almost didn’t mind. Hurtling north down Industrial Road, you could see all the casinos from the back, their true hulking size and malevolence revealed. Our Ethiopian driver made friendly conversation.

“You ever heard of the Diamond?” he asked. “Totally nude!”

But what about the Spearmint Rhino — wasn’t that the place to go, the most venerable strip club in these parts, not to mention just blocks from the golden Trump?

“Totally nude!” he insisted. The Diamond was all nothing. It was a true locals’ spot, he said. He did not inform us that it cost $50 each to get in, or that they do not serve alcohol in the bottomless strip clubs of Las Vegas, but in the end I respected the dude for his hustle. I hoped his commission was significant. A hostess seated us in the black depths of the Diamond, served us seltzer and lime.

I have not been to many strip clubs in my life, but I’ve been to a few, and I can say for certain that I’d never before seen the rag — gnarled, white, nubby, mute in repose. There was a spray bottle too. What the dancers at the Diamond would do is hold the rag in one hand and the bottle in the other, and sort of hit the rag a few times with whatever fluid was inside before carefully wiping down the pole at the center of the stage. Only then would they begin their act. We sat through a Bush song, and one from Staind. White Zombie. Nine Inch Nails’ “Head Like a Hole.”

Finally one dancer got up to the beginnings of a familiar melody, though in my rubble-and-agave-induced fog, it took me a while to place it. It was only after the woman onstage took her thong off, wrapping the garment around her wrist like a child’s scrunchie, that I figured it out. Every day I’m shufflin’, the speakers boomed. I was on my feet before Fleur even knew what was happening.

“C’mon,” I said. “We’re going home.”

Continue to Parts III and IV

zach.baron@thedaily.com