My first visit to the Grand Canyon was a blip of an experience. I thought I was lucky planning visits to three national parks and a national monument (Grand Canyon, Zion, Canyonland, Red Rocks), in Nevada, Arizona, and Utah, with several tour companies out of Las Vegas, but I soon realized it was all a waste of time and money after the stop and peek at the Grand Canyon’s Skywalk, a horseshoe-shaped bridge with glass walkway on the Canyon’s Western Rim owned and operated by the Cahuilla Native American people living on a reservation in the area. On the drive, the guide, also the driver, constantly reminded ---or threatened--his fifty passengers with wasting time: we could not get distracted with other offerings at the reservations; we had to be back on the bus to Vegas in two hours. My quickie, unprocessed Grand Canyon visit was chalked up to beginner’s error. It would never happen again; I vowed silently to visit the park the right way the next time. Back at the hotel, I cancelled the other tours and settled on spending the rest of my four-day vacation in Las Vegas.
In Vegas, crowds jumped in and out buses, hotels, casinos,
shows, malls, restaurants, bars, clubs as if bad Covid memories required hardcore
forgetting with 24 hours of drinking, clubbing, gambling, eating, shopping, dancing,
and karaoke singing. No masks were worn, and people hunched together forcefully and in large numbers to make up for the years
human contact was not allowed. Vegas’s brazen
reopening would not be deterred by Covid. The desert
city’s life and livelihood depended on the world’s return, and return they did:
German, French, Spanish, Danish, and
accents from states across the country were heard across the small city.
I judged Vegas too harshly, a defense mechanism for frustrations
of original plans going awry. I had never liked the place. Year ago, while there
to celebrate a friend’s birthday, I couldn’t shake the gloom and doom of its cavernous
casino tunnels and rides in cabs with ex-cons drivers who shared stories of
hard lives and harder choices, post jail, that never changed their lives all that
much. Sadder still, Native Americans sold
jewelry on tables strewn around the airport lobby as if eking out a living from
the only space allowed them.
Vegas still reeked of lives lived on the razor’s edge. If you didn’t know when to jump off the ride for
normal, the city stole your life and undressed it, and you, like its addicted homeless
half-crazed from drugs and the dry heat; and young women barely dressed in feathers
and boas making a living from selling pictures with themselves while fighting
hands placed on their bare bums. By midnight, the whole town reeked of next
morning’s hangover with hordes of people dragging themselves to rooms seemingly
as far as the surrounding desert, even though hotels were conveniently located off
the sidewalks on the cordoned-off Strip.
This time I made the best of my impromptu stay, listening to
cover bands playing on open-air stages; gambling in slot machines in hotel casino
lobbies; exploring old downtown Vegas with signs like “Oscar’s Beef, Booze
& Broads in the marquee; watching street performers lauding yesteryear’s
dress, music, and culture; talking with tourists there to marry in Vegas’s famous
chapels or vacationing for the hundredth time; visiting a memorial to the young
victims of the 1994 Harvest Festival massacre; exploring lavish hotel lobbies with themes of
glamorous European cities; watching the waterfall extravaganza at the Mirage; and
attending a magic show.
I had fun. My
unplanned pilgrimage to the world’s pleasure capital was a testament to my reinvigorated
self now singing a new mantra--all events, people, and experiences were neutral
except my thoughts about them. Ready to perceive myself and the world anew, I
made peace with the past. Years of rising
time and again from challenging experiences--violent childhood, difficult divorce,
exhausting single motherhood, demanding three-shift work schedules, crushing bankruptcy, unrelenting chronic fatigue, and caring for an aging parent who eventually died---skilled
me in kneading echoes from the past into a lulling refrain, barely audible
unless I cranked up the volume. To my
surprise, I was in Vegas to celebrate.
On my last night, I danced at a club. While sipping a whiskey
on the rocks, I surveyed the crowd, mostly men drinking, laughing, talking
about wins and losses on gambling tables.
They looked expensive with leather driving shoes, designer jeans, polo
shirts. I recognized their accent, manly
walk, stealthy stare as prototypes of the New York City CEOs, Wall Street brokers,
directors I had dated after my divorce when I was desperate for a pairing,
purpose, salvation, when my self-worth was tied to another half. For the first time on my trip, I winced. The
past was back to haunt me.
Back then, a profile in a New York City online dating site kept me busy and devastated. Date after date, I felt humiliated by my inability to walk away, right away, from bad dates with the city’s power players. Dates never went further than the first meeting, but my inability to speak up against disrespect left me crushed and questioning my self-worth, feeling as if I had just run alongside a rat escaped from a subway tunnel to a sidewalk where it unwittingly terrorized pedestrians.
I had dated powerful men before. My American ex-husband, born and raised in Florida, owned and operated a $40 million jet overhaul company. A Danish boyfriend was high-ranking military in Denmark; a Brazilian ex brought the online shopping of pharmaceuticals to his country; and an Indonesian ex was a diplomat at the United Nations. I craved the powerful man’s mind—his pursuit of balance of power and emotions in complex personal and professional lives; his pillow talk, mixing industry secrets with little boy dreams; his dive into vulnerability if instincts led him to romance, love, and sex, if only for a moment. The New York City power type was a breed apart, a beast with only sex on the mind--size, position, kink-- asked about in the first conversation. No time for charm, niceties, civilities, or romance, much less with women. The city's pace was fast, furious, demanding. Time was the enemy and goals had to be reached, even on a first date. New York City’s psychic energy asked its residents two questions from sunup to sundown, “who are you, really, and what the fuck do you want?”
These men wanted power, money, and sex, in that order, ALL THE TIME. I wanted conversation. Connection. Love, a bit of it. I WANTED YOUR NAME FIRST. Still, my life in the Northeast had been over for two years; California was my new home. Two years later, I was settling into its energetic pace of allowing the past, present, and future to visit, even when the past was haunting, present challenging, and future unknown.
That night in Vegas, I danced, sipped my whiskey, congratulated
the couple standing next to me on their smooth dance moves, and raised my glass
to the woman standing to my right for her slick hip hop gyrations even while her
middle-aged husband looked on disapprovingly. The place was packed, so I secured my dance
spot by the bar in front of a screen playing kaleidoscope colors. The 90s
soundtrack was familiar, fun. I swayed my hips and arms to the beat.
Then I saw him. His stare ravenous, focused, joyless. He
eyed me like a bullseye. I knew what was coming. I shuddered. Still, I danced.
“Not interested,” I said with a stark stare right back at him. Still, he focused on his target, ME. I was being judgmental, but I knew the type. His
friends joined him, said something about his birthday being on that day, so I
could have mercy on his overture. Mercy
was not what I had mind. I recalled Edith
Wharton once said that “singly [New York men] betrayed their inferiority but grouped
together they represented ‘New York.’”
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