Bunker busters at a Vegas pool party
A roadtrip into the desert to find new meaning in Trump's words
This week is a bit of a travelogue that now feels a world away, even if the feeling still lingers. Cancer-lite, but it’s a lifestyle. As always, this is a reader-supported newsletter so thanks for reading, supporting, and sharing. Hope you enjoy.
Las Vegas is a litmus test, a colored Rorschach inkblot, a roll of the die. To many it is fun incarnate, to others it is a destination for self abuse. To show my hand a bit, I will say that I was shocked to find myself optimistic as I took off on the fated drive from Los Angeles to Vegas on a Saturday morning. Maybe it was because Google Maps said it would only take four hours, a merciful amount of time compared to the sometimes six hour slog that can take the air out of even the most optimistic party animals (see: Swingers). Perhaps my lightened mood was because I was going for more sentimental reasons. I was en route to see a former Angeleno friend’s play that he was putting on for Vegas’s Fringe Festival while also saying goodbye before he left for London.
Inspired by a recent movie trailer in which the solemn chef from The Bear will portray Bruce Springsteen during the time in which he recorded Nebraska… I decided to spin Springsteen’s 1984 follow-up Born In the USA and see what feelings emerged from the desert. With my trusty Mazda 3 lodged in 5th gear, I descended out of the San Gabriel Mountains into the hot, endless expanse as I blazed down one of those highways The Boss loves chasing.
As the staccato snare of “Born in the U.S.A.” beat out, I let the romance of the open road take me, unable to stop myself from trying to squeeze meaning out of the of jagged red and brown vistas that were admittedly a sight to see. A thirst for adventure and tramp-like spontaneity had me coyly eying exits for Barstow and Yermo, where I debated pulling over for lunch at Peggy Sue’s 50’s Diner or maybe snapping a couple pictures at the Liberty Sculpture Park where art oddities stand next to a parade of tanks replicating the Tiananmen Square Massacre — some desert artist’s all-American nod to those anti-Communists across the ocean, as if acknowledging the born rebellion we believe runs through our blood. Maybe I’d stop on the way back.
But “Born in the U.S.A.” is not the song that we feel it is and I well knew the cynical story it spun under its blaring synths. All of that open road was an escape, and so many of the characters on that album end up tangled up in the red, white, and blue — run down or cynically wondering if anything will ever get better, pulled into elliptical endings like on “I’m Going Down,” even as the hand claps and keys might keep you dancing.
Sometimes the meaning and the feeling aren’t the same.
Just outside of Las Vegas is a solar farm with monolithic mirrors that catch the sun and redirect its blinding light down onto fields of glowing panels. They look like lighthouses dotting the desert, as if warning the stream of cars of the city ahead. I’ll show my hand — I maintain that Vegas is a mirage of a good time. It is an oasis of opulence that functions off the same principle — there is enough drink to drink to make you forget that you are still in an inhospitable place. The daylight reveals a city besieged by the sun and to my estimation, overly optimistic construction. Who would put down roots here? A place battered weekly by the tides of thrill-seeking adults with agendas on their mind, the casino workers, strippers, and magicians existing as the exhausted barnacles that cling when the crowds rush out.
But my friend and his wife are not your typical “Vegas people.” Whatever that means I’m not sure— though preconceived ideas of vice-chasers, burnouts, and party-seekers turned parents come to mind. No, they were a pair in transition, temporary residents who enjoyed their time as Vegas locals, perhaps more a measure of feeling something different than LA’s treadmill of career mobility than their desire to pick up any late life bad habits. But he had quickly made friends by joining an improv group and I admittedly held smug thoughts about what Vegas improv could or would be like.
Upon pulling into town, I met them at a local’s casino where I proceeded to eat a cheeseburger and a chili dog because the dog was only fifty cents more than chili cheese fries. I applauded my ability to be both fiscally responsible while embracing the gluttony of the place.
Within hours we were beating back the (luckily very tolerable) heat by dipping in their complex’s pool. As I crocodile-walked through the water, exactly 3.75 milligrams of edible began to settle in and everything started to feel a little lighter. The late 50’s couple with the young guy who were dead ringers for swingers, the mix of of OnlyFans and/or Influencers who networked in the hot tub, the far away DJ blaring EDM for all twenty of us… Somewhere I began to walk back my Sin City slander.
After all, off the strip and away from its namesake reputation was a city full of people just trying to live. They may have had odd jobs or strange and interesting stories of how they wound up there, or maybe it just happened to be their home. As low dose THC enveloped my brain into pithy thoughts of oneness, I let the thudding bass of the sound system beat away the preconceived notions that I had about the place. It may have had a shaggy image, but perhaps I owed humanity writ large a little more latitude. Maybe the name of a place and its reputation didn’t define it.
I floated out of the pool feeling good as my friend looked up from his phone and told me that we had bombed Iran.
My friend Rohit’s play was called “Knives, Knives, Knives” and was created by him poring over transcripts of Donald Trump’s speeches to compose a silly bedroom drama in which all the characters’ lines were made up of real things Trump had said. Telling the story of woman caught in an affair, the the format lent a psuedo-Shakespearean layer as I deciphered one man’s mouth mush into narrative momentum, all the while astonished at just how much nonsense an actual American president can say.
Twenty-four hours earlier we had listened to him add to his tally as we gathered in front of the television to watch Trump praise his excellent, powerful blah blah bombing of three Iranian nuclear sites. My brain recoiled at the puckered way he pronounced “bunker busters.” We made stark jokes about adding a last minute addendum to my friend’s show based on America’s newest foray into conflict in the Middle East, but he decided it felt neither funny nor necessary.
Despite the looming context, the show played well. The audience laughed and groaned, every person on their own journey of memory recall as we placed where we were or what was going on in the world when any string of words rang a bell. Soon I found myself at a strange crossroads. As the character in the affair tried to level with her heartbroken spouse, I found myself sympathizing with a story created from Trump’s words. Here was a woman wanting more, a man wanting his wife back, another man living his ribald truth, and eventually a couple reunited — an arc of empathy Frankenstein’d from a man who has offered little in real life.
After curtains, the night went long as my friend and his cast celebrated, welcoming me in with open arms and proving me dead wrong about the people of Vegas. I watched them cannonball into the pool and ceremonially burn their scripts, even sageing all participants who were eager to get the big orange idiot (as he was credited in the playbill) out of their heads. I kept an even keel since I had to drive home the next day, preferring to smile at their exorcism as I dogeared the existential dilemma I had enjoyed. The words of a tyrant had been reconfigured for a night of farce, the entertainment provided by an ineloquent man whose (limited, slurred, childlike) words will only do more damage. The words were temporarily defanged, like a fever dream that we could wake up from. But the mixing of meaning and intent was a sideways reminder of how little regard some give to either.
On the way home we stopped at Taco Bell and my friend convinced me to sub a beefy five layer burrito for my usual crunchwrap supreme. After a bite, I had to admit, mostly the same ingredients reconfigured into a different shape did actually taste better.
I said goodbye to my friends and wished them well on their journey to foggy London Town. He had been a foundational LA friend, a screenwriting collaborator, a videogame compatriot, and now him and his wife would be free of this country all together. This time I left Vegas with a clear head and without losing any significant money or dignity, as the mirage disappeared behind me as easily as it had arrived. I didn’t stop at any of the places I had thought about on the way in. I have never been to Iran but the satellite imagery of the bombing sites felt akin to the passing scenery and I just wanted to get home to my wife and cats.
Instead of The Boss, I cycled through podcasts and news. Journalists had scrambled for updates to piece it all together. Was this war, how much damage had we done, how would Iran respond, were we playing seven dimensional chess or seeking adulation — I turned it off as another pundit listed off all the ways bad or good or ok things might happen. The spike in my and our country’s nervous system began to feel meaningless.
I stopped for gas and lunch in Victorville. I had been having a craving for Chipotle for two years and figured it was finally time to scratch the itch. As every person in front of me ordered a burrito bowl (Instagram has taught me that this is the best way to maximize your portions while lowering your carbs), I got a carnitas burrito with the exact specifications as my high-caloric gut bomb from high school. With the news making me feel existentially heavy, I thought it might help me find some meaning in the lifetime I had lived since then. That order was something like college, cancer, marriage, extra cancer, pandemic, no guacamole — who knows. The internet had also told me that the quality at Chipotle had taken a dive, so I was pleasantly surprised to find every bite, down to the sloppy sour cream burrito-butt finish, tasted exactly as I remembered.
I made a mental note to text my high school friends the good news, as I pinned down 2003 as the height of my Chipotle burrito consumption. I slipped down memory lane as my AC got up to speed, triangulating the person I was back then. It felt like a small win amidst so much uncertainty to discover that some perceived good still remained the same. Then a thought made me pause. I googled and sighed and read that 2003 was the same year that we invaded Iraq.