As a writer, I spend hours a day inside my fantasies. Staring at my laptop screen—or more often at the floor—I’m fantasizing 19^th century Egypt, Charles Dickens walking the streets of London, an Ontario commune in the 1970s or mayhem in a Mississauga chop shop during a police raid. (Novel, novel, short story, film script that’s based on a true story.)

As I wrote last time, I was just in Las Vegas for a hockey tournament, but what struck me most strongly about the visit was seeing other peoples’ fantasies acted out in public. I felt as if I were looking in a funhouse mirror, or maybe a hall of mirrors, and filled the notebook I carry with weird things I overheard or saw. Sometimes I jot down snatches of dialogue in my notebooks in the moment. Sometimes I go around the corner or into a washroom to write up thoughts and paragraphs and scenes. Sometimes I write it all up at night.

My notebooks are diamond mines, or maybe secondhand stores. I go back to them and pull out stories, images, minor characters when I’m writing.

Here are some moments from Las Vegas.

***

Leaving my hotel room for our first game earlier today, stick over my shoulder, I watched the elevator door open and a schlubby man walk out. He looked like the Comic Book Guy on The Simpsons. The gut, the limp tee-shirt, the sagging jeans. There was also an expression of befuddled ecstasy on his face as turned back to check on the two sex workers following him out of the elevator. One was Black and tall, one was white and short. Both had enormous and remarkably smooth bosoms like trussed-up Victorian ladies, or maybe the rounded bows of ships breaking a heavy sea.

“My room’s this way,” he said, and there was his fantasy on display: sex with a Black chick and a white one at 4 o’clock in the afternoon. I hope he paid them well for it.

***

Before every game, I walk my hockey bag through a casino with ranks of slot machines and roulette tables, passing a huge number of people hitting buttons or tossing down chips, many of them smoking, most of them dressed in cheap casual clothes that looked as if they’ve been washed too often.

They must be animated by a fantasy of winning, beating the odds, but usually you don’t see it. Most people look bored as they hit the button on the slot machines, hit the button, hit the button, hit the button, although occasionally I hear a triumphant yowl an acre of carpet away. Someone has won.

A couple of times, I happened to pass by as they did.

Today it was a guy playing roulette. A small man, pale skin, black hair. He already had an impressive pile of chips in front of him, and the croupier was pushing an even bigger pile across the table.

I tried to beam a thought into his head: Cash out, buddy. Cash out now. Take your winnings and go home. If you keep playing, you’ll lose it all and end up back where you started. Worse.

Fact: the average tourist in Las Vegas loses $500 gambling.

The black-haired man placed a new series of bets before the croupier had even finished shovelling over his winnings. The avid look on his face astonished me. I won. I’m a winner. I’m gonna win again, make my fortune, change my life. Everything will be better, I’m that guy, starting right NOW!

***

I’ve often thought that when we travel to all-inclusive resorts in Mexico or the Caribbean, we’re travelling in class. We’re not working, someone makes our beds, cooks our meals, cleans up after us, minds our children if we want them to. We’re no longer middle class. We’re rich, certainly in comparison to local people.

In Vegas, I get the impression of tourists travelling not in class, but outside morality and prudence, two quintessentially American religious values.

I know it’s naïve of me, but I’ve been appalled by the sketchiness on display throughout the city. With prostitution legal in Nevada, the streets are patrolled by trucks carrying mobile billboards that feature backlit pictures of topless young blondes, GIRLS TO GO written across their nipples, a phone number to dial up an escort. (“Yummy!”) People push strollers through casinos, children and grandchildren navigated through nasty, smoky air and left stranded beside slot machines as Mom or Gramps gambles. One kid I saw today whimpered for a very long time in his stroller and Mom paid absolutely no attention to him.

***

I photographed a glittering pair of men’s shoes in a Christian Louboutin window a couple of days ago. Roller-boat Pik Pik, I think they’re called. Just now I saw them again outside the boutique on a middle-aged man’s feet. The young woman on his arm wore red-soled Louboutin four-inch spike heels that made her tower over him, and the two of them leaned against one another, probably unable to walk, both looking stunned by their extravagant purchases.

***

Overheard: One young woman saying to another in a little girl’s candied voice, “Today I feel so joyous. He finally promised me everything I’ve wished for.”

It sounded like a line of dialogue from a bad script. No wonder, with so many of the casinos looking like giant film sets: the fake pyramid fronting the Luxor, the New York casino with its double-sized Statue of Liberty and its squashed-together Gotham skyline, the half-sized Eiffel Tower not quite towering over the Paris resort. Nothing real. Nothing lasting, given how often the casinos are rebuilt. Break down the set, guys. Time to build us a new theme.

***

A couple of hours at The Mob Museum gives some context. Signs tell me that as life in the eastern U.S. grew more staid during the 19^th century, the chancers headed west. Oddballs, gamblers, criminals and prostitutes ended up in Las Vegas, which curators have translated from Spanish as “the meadows,” but which I think means something more like “the lowlands.” Here they’ve built an industry of continual escape. And, as the museum makes clear, institutionalized crime.

***

As we drove through the suburbs earlier today, heading for an arena, we looked out at the scrolling developments where more than half a million people now live. One of my teammates: “I guess most of them work for the casinos, one way or another. It’s like a whole town of people working for Big Tobacco.”

***

Sketchiness, fakery, immorality. The fantastical lack of prudence and restraint turn the city into a circus. It’s not the sort of thing I write about, not really. One of the reasons I’m passing along this notebook downloads is that I’m very unlikely to use the material in any of my writing.

But here’s the thing: I loved it.

Bruce Springsteen:

As the Ferris wheel turns and turns like it ain’t ever gonna stop
And the circus boss leans over and whispers into the little boy’s ear
“Hey, son, you want to try the big top?”

***

The novel I mentioned at the top is Mad Richard, available here.

The short story, “Back to the Land”, is included in my short story collection, The Necessary Havoc of Love.

Like most scripts, the one I was writing never got made into a film. But the development fees paid for the trip to Las Vegas, and other good things for most of a year, like food.