I Don’t Drink. Smoke or Gamble: I Had The Best Ten Days of My Life In Vegas!

by Brenda Ann Kenneally

The summer of 2010 was the first I spent without my father. After he died, I amped-up the mission to visit more of the “places I always wanted to see”. My son Simon and I had a day in Las Vegas before picking up the car to drive to breathtaking Zion Canyon and the other surrounding amazing canyons; they are Wonders of the World. No cellphones or texting, no Internet or TV, these are usually the rules of our adventures. The plan was to limit distractions so our small family of two can reconnect to the sacredness of real life, to allow us to be awed by nature and not fall into the haze of lethargy that increases in opacity as the landscape of America becomes homogenized.

Simon was 16, and each year it was becoming more difficult. Even sentences like what I just wrote were harder for him to hear. I became more frightened that he would lose his soul, as he became more convinced that I was paranoid and old. I worried more as technology began to make fun efficient and sanitary. Real is difficult, messy and unpredictable. A person who has the heart for the real is of good character: this was the moral battlefield upon which I fought for the soul of my only child. My dad was our patron saint of the real, and when he passed, it was another enormously sad reminder that the age of the real is nearing its end.

My father, who nicknamed himself Fast Eddie, was a beautiful fatalist who, instead of reliving past glory days, told tales of being the last one picked when sides were being divvied up for dodge ball and of being terrified of barracks inspections because he was “all thumbs” when it came to squaring his sea bag. His mother, a strict Irish Catholic, lulled him to sleep with the threat of Hellfire and woke him to the promise of redemption at 7:00 A.M. Mass. By the time Fast Eddie quit high school to join the Coast Guard, he was already a full-blown manic-depressive with an addictive personality.

“Drinkin’, gamblin’ and chasin’ “—Catholicism made Eddie a compulsive gambler of the fiercest variety. He figured out early on that even when you win, there is no staying on top, as every day alive is one closer to cashing in your chips for eternity. Eddie had the beginning and the end figured out and this freed him to play by his rules, since the in-between, Eddie said, “is the only thing you have control over”. Playing by his own rules was the guiding force in his life up until the end.

He may have lived a little longer if he had stayed at the adult home, not sneaked cigarettes next to his oxygen tank and did what his doctors determined was best for him. But he left, got his own apartment, went on manic binges and tried to lure the night nurse from the home to come and party. Eddie had always said that he would be terrified if he won big, because it might make him go crazy. “This time for real,“ he would say. But win or not, he needed the action of just being in the game.

I inherited my work ethic and capacity for long suffering from my mother’s side of the family. I got my emotional aesthetics from my dad. I’ve tried to pass both of these on to my son.

I grew restless a couple of hours into our big night in Vegas. I felt that the replicas of tourist attractions were patronizing, and wanted my son to add Nevada to our ongoing survey of the Fifty States. I was directed downtown, and told that the Old Vegas maybe had a leftover bit of the spirit of individuality that lured folks West in the early days. Fremont Street used to be just that, a street with sidewalks for people, not the sprawling highways with pedestrian overpasses that herd tourists through mega-lobbies from The Bellagio to MGM Grand. Fremont was a 30-minute bus ride down the Strip and each block seemed to take us back a couple of years in time as the buildings appeared to be renovated according to their proximity to big name hotels.

We reached Fremont Street and found that it had become a “tourist-friendly” promenade mall with piped-in Classic Rock music and laser light shows on what the announcer boasted was “the world’s largest outdoor canopy”. Disappointed, I kept walking and as the music faded, I took a seat at a picnic table next to a lone truck selling tacos. I finally felt like I was somewhere. Across the street in a landscape where everything had been leveled, sat a huge box of a building that took up a city block. The Western Hotel and Casino was the most intriguing place I had seen since I arrived in town. I wanted to go in but was afraid of becoming obsessed. I am a photographer, but I never take my camera on vacation. When a guy from The Western came over for a taco and asked to share the table with us, I was thrilled.

He kept apologizing for himself, not for anything in particular, but mainly, it seemed, just for his existence. He said that The Western was dead that night. But that tomorrow, it would be crazy as it would be the 3rd of the month—government check day—Social Security, Disability, Public Assistance. I knew that I had to visit The Western if only to pay homage to my dad. Our dinner companion took us in through the back door and I immediately recognized everyone in the place. Their fatal flaws openly and refreshingly displayed, there was no small talk. Just like with my dad, the conversations cut right to the chase. It was as if by walking in through the doors of The Western, you were acknowledging that you were hip to the fact that no one in life gets out alive. The question of what it all means hangs in the air and the repetition and the numbers are comforting answers, open to interpretation by mystics and skeptics alike. And the answer “absolutely nothing” is perfectly acceptable to both. I did become obsessed, and somehow I got me and my camera invited back.

After hiking the big canyons, I spent ten days photographing and filming at The Western Hotel and Casino, previously also the world’s largest bingo hall. I was a guest of the new owners, The Tamares Group, and in exchange for photographing the renovations at one of their sister hotels, I was given free rein to document The Western as I wished. They said there were no plans to close the place. The faithful still came to suspend the long hours of their retirement inside deep pockets of hope and anticipation. The jackpot itself is another day done. Even though it was said that the Western still turned a profit, there was an uneasy feeling that the score would have to be settled soon for cheating time.

I took what I had and vowed to go back. My pictures of The Western remain a souvenir of a place that was comforting, like curling up in my daddy’s lap. But my daddy is gone and now so is The Western. It closed on January 16th, 2012. So now it is a news item, it can signify the struggling economy, or perennial issues like nutrition, public health, alcoholism or addiction. Now there is another metaphor for our failed social contract. The patrons poured money into The Western’s slots in the hopes that it would be there in the future when there was no place else for them to go.

Now it is all gone.

TEXT and PHOTOGRAPHS by Brenda Ann Kenneally