Fear and Loathing: A Non-Savage Journey to the City of Lost Wages

I am somewhere over Utah, or maybe Arizona, I don't know, when the excitement kicks in. There are more stars than I thought possible. This could be outer space. Searchlight needles mainline the sky. There are clutches of city lights, scattered across a black velvet surface miles below. My university has paid for my flights and accommodation so that I can attend the annual conference of the Association of American Geographers in Nevada, dubbed the Silver State due to the importance of silver to its history and economy.

The air feels hairdryer hot and heavy. During the smooth Yellow Cab ride from McCarran Airport to my hotel, the driver, a talkative Catholic, tells me how his spring-loaded dashboard Jesus brings him salvation on a daily basis. When he clocks that I am not listening, he stomps on the accelerator and takes us closer to Las Vegas Boulevard's (the Strip) casino skyline, which is looming up through the warm desert neon ground haze.

"The Circus-Circus is what the whole world would be doing Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. This is the Sixth Reich. The ground floor is full of gambling tables, like all the other casinos...  but the place is about four stories high, in the style of a circus tent, and all manner of strange County-Fair/Polish Carnival madness is going on up in this space," said Hunter S. Thompson aka. Dr. Gonzo. Now I have just arrived in the city of insanity that inspired his hypnotising narrative and chaotic dialogue in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream. I feel the same immediate sense that all will go according to plan. In failing that, though, I intend to leave with my own version of the American Dream.

The eager plunger into experience that I am sees me up early the next morning feeling wide awake. On the way down to breakfast I see a flying trapeze that would make Jules Léotard proud. I follow the fat lady with the green flag who leads me through a beverage oasis to my allocated oversized table. I discover that I dislike Biscuits and Gravy – drippings of cooked pork sausage, white flour and milk. I remind myself to avoid "savage Lucy" type characters with "...teeth like baseballs, [and] eyes like jellied fire." A granny in Levi's jeans and Nike Air trainers hits a jackpot and spins around in her wheelchair.

On my way across the Strip to The Riviera to pick up my conference pack I see my first Elvis lookalike in a silver glitter suit and thick gold-rimmed greaser shades. As I stand and look south to Mandalay Bay I realise that this city won't bother me with the complexity of a statement. As the Scottish writer William McIlvanney once said, it's just a word: money. The city also dreams of money that it doesn't yet have. It's so easy to lose years of savings in one moment because, as many people told me, the house always wins. I don't get another few metres when Ron calls me over to his wooden box office. He's a chatty sixty five year old sales man with what feels like a standard set of questions for every tourist, a Colgate prosthetic smile and a lizard like face. I promise to come back to him about his offer of a side trip to the Grand Canyon.

I pick up my name badge from the conference registration desk in The Riviera. There is a map with the pack. The map is my enemy. Begone, anything that gives me directions in this city. I hop onto a stretched golf car, which zips me across a sun softened asphalt desert to the Convention Centre – a city within a city – for my first session. It's entitled Organizing Urban Space. The room reeks of plastic palm trees and there is a faint dinging of slot machines in the distance. After a few minutes the person sitting next to me says something like "We're in Vegas man and we're sitting here listening to this." He has a point: the idea of attending another two sessions today seems absurd. Before this session finishes, I have decided that I will be an aimless wanderer for the next two weeks. I grease my face with white tanning butter and saunter south along the Strip, listening to the babble of slot machine rhythms, taking in the suddenness all around me.

By suddenness I mean the pop-up city feel of Vegas, thrown together like a stage set for actors to play out their limitless selves and then, after everyone has gone, it can be conveniently taken down, boxed and buried in a hole in Red Rock Canyon among the Joshua trees that droop helplessly on the burnt ancient sea bed, all darkened by jagged mountains extending their shadows across the valley floor.

Vegas is surrounded by a desert tourniquet but there's no compression, only room for expansion. As the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard observed, there is a secret affinity between gambling and the desert, in that the intensity of gambling is reinforced by the presence of the desert all around the town. This is certainly evident when walking along The Strip: it's as if nothing can rock the casino capitalism and, besides, the gaming industry is hardly about to limp off into the desert to die.

The next two weeks are intense and chock full of Vegas randomness. Bored shoe polishers texting on their mobile phones, groups of rowdy students on Spring Break, petite spaced-out looking emos with cotton candy blue hair and eyes set wide apart like E.T.'s. On the verge of having heart attacks, human hamburgers wobble on rubbery legs and fat kids sweat through baggy perforated American Football tops. Firebrands and bankable show merchants, teenage micro celebrities, who are keen to expose themselves to their cyber stalkers, My Little Pony dolls and space cadets who look like they've been beamed down from other planets. Self-appointed directors of romance and master mystifiers. Kidney shaped swimming pools, motorised wheel chair rentals, Loud 'N' Clear hearing aids that look like mobile phone head sets, sweet candy skulls, apostrophe jumpers and Structure Polos for men and women. I try to take it all in.

I pick up a Diary Queen Mint Oreo Blizzard and head out to Callaway Golf Course to discover that the bunkers look like scorched grass. Pretzel Zone is right next to Mediterranean Delight and Umberto Pizzeria but I stick to low carb wraps for lunch and Lumberjack Slams and Heartland Scrambles in the evenings. I almost get addicted to Avalanche Apples dipped in white chocolate and sugar cinnamon Snickerdoodles. I catch Carrot Top and Fantasy at the Luxor, where hearts in halogen lit cubes are also on display at the Bodies Exhibition. The Lion King is at Mandalay Bay and Phantom of the Opera and the Blue Man Group at the Venetian with its fake sky, under which gondolas, lit by beads of neon, pass by with their own singing gondoliers. I don't get around to seeing the Tournament of the Kings at the Excalibur, Lichtenstein or Warhol and Friends at the Ballagio Gallery of Fine Art but, I accidently discover the comedy, music and impressions of Gordie Brown at the Golden Nugget. I try the indoor skydiving, avoid the gun store rentals and pistol ranges and catch the spectacular show that is the Mirage's erupting volcano when I can. I let myself be seduced by the high tech gadgetry of the Coney Island Emporium and get dwarfed by the camel humps of New York New York's rollercoaster. It's impossible not to be aware of what entertainment is on offer and anytime you wake up it will have already started all over again. Peace and quiet is a luxury in a city that cleverly camouflages time and retards the dawn to the extent that Vegas does. It's exhausting.

I am on my way back to Circus-Circus for the last time when I bump into Ron again. He still has that vaguely reptilian cast to his features.

"Good afternoon to you young sir, are you still wanting this ticket for our superb Grand Canyon tour?" he asks politely. "It's the best offer you'll get."
"Oh hi there Ron, I am sure it is but I fly home tomorrow."
"That's that then. So how did you enjoy our city?"
"I loved it, though the last two weeks flew by like two minutes. There's no sense of time in this city."
He gives me his best Colgate prosthetic smile and bids me what seems like a genuine farewell.

My own version of the American Dream may not have been as savage as Dr. Gonzo's. Perhaps things would have been different if I'd checked into my hotel under a phony name with intent to commit capital fraud and a head full of acid. My trip, however, stands as another affirmation of what is true about the academic conference: it gets to play second fiddle to the magnetism of the host city. Outside it's Las Vegas.