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I’d only been there once before for a few hours on my way to someplace else, and I wasn’t ready for the full Las Vegas experience.

This may be old news to some of you, but EVERY SINGLE THING IN LAS VEGAS IS DESIGNED TO SEPARATE YOU FROM YOUR MONEY.

We stayed at a pretty ritzy place, The Bellagio, in the center of The Strip. Ferraris out front, beautiful people everywhere, jewels, liquor, money, excess everywhere you look. Just walking around gave me a sort of Biblical dread in that you just knew that at any moment Divine Wrath was going to come down and wipe away the place. But then it began to grow on me a little, because I began to see past the glitter and the breast implants and the hair plugs and the nice suits and started to sort of keep my eye on the artifice of it all. When Steve Gerber’s Nevada first came out, I wrote to him: "Las Vegas is too much lipstick on a girl who's pretty already. Vegas is a bag of marsh mallows when you really want a steak. Vegas is somebody playing Billy Idol upstairs when you're trying to sleep. Vegas is not having studied for that Anthropology final. Las Vegas is a magician trying to make an easy trick look hard."

My opinion of it hasn’t really changed that much, although I did start to see some of the magician’s sleights-of-hand.

For example, everything there is done in a manner to manipulate the envi ronment.

I’m a pretty light sleeper, and once I’m awake in the morning, I can’t get back to sleep. So I like to ease in to the day a little by reading the paper and drinking some coffee. It doesn’t matter how good the coffee is; I actu ally prefer diner swill over chi-chi roast, so hotel coffee is just fine. I drink it black, because coffee tastes like shit; if you put cream and sugar in it, it tastes like creamed-and-sugared shit. So, The Bellagio, oo la la, I figure I’ll have a paper at the doorstep and one of those dinky little two-cup Mister Coffee makers in the room to ease me into my day.

No.

No coffee maker. No paper.

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