There’s a new marketing slogan for Las Vegas: “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”. I was a little worried the first time I heard it, as my grandparents live there and I thought that I might never hear from them again.
My fears weren’t completely unfounded - there were a couple of years where I didn’t stay in very good touch with them. They stopped traveling and my travel money and time went to other trips. I keep in touch with my friends and family mainly by email and avoid the phone when I can. Since my grandparents have a deeper understanding of transmissions and gearboxes than routers and modems, I sort of lost touch with them in that time period.
It’s something I’ve tried to change, and I flew to Vegas last night to visit them. It’s a familiar flight – my parents used to ship my brother and I down here for a week or two every summer when we were in grade school. Both my parents grew up here and a ton of my relatives still live in the area. I have a second cousin who is, ironically enough, a crime scene investigator (I think she uses the term analyst). Because of her, I found myself in the soft leather seat of a cab last night. When I told my family I was planning on having an adventure by taking the public bus from the airport at midnight (and walking the last mile), I was soundly overruled.
“Your cousin told me that they shot a kid just to watch him die,” my mom told me when I told her about my bus plan. She wasn’t sure who “they” were and since I couldn’t rule out the bus drivers union or Johnny Cash, I gave in and caught a cab.
Visiting my grandparents is always a bit of a surreal experience. They both grew up in Oklahoma and despite moving to Nevada in the 1941, they speak with a very soft Southern drawl. They are only about fifty years older than me, but the difference in the world for those born in the Roaring Twenties and those in the Polyester Seventies can be staggering, I think.
Tonight we sat on their couch and talked. There are all sorts of things that I wanted to ask them about – the war, Vegas in the old days, my Dad at my age, working in a titanium plant, and what being married for 58 years and living for 83 feels like. Mostly, though we talked about the weather and the crime and their health and how my aunts, uncles, and cousins are doing.
Their TV is an ever present noise in the background. Local television in Las Vegas and Henderson seems to feature nonstop ads for cars, lawyers, and furniture. If I wasn’t slightly aware that there’s a whole gaming and tourist zone somewhere around here, I would think that there were only lawyers, car salesmen, and carpenters living in this city. Well - and strippers.
Every hour tonight the local Fox channel news team did a breaking update about the opening of a new gigantic strip bar that is somehow involved in a scandal. Sometimes, though, it was hard to tell what was a commercial and what was a news update. My grandparents are deeply religious and watching these sorts of things with them can make me squirm.
After one of news updates/commercial that featured scantily clad women spinning around a pole of pulsing neon, my grandma turned to me:
“Ugh, I aint never gonna wear one of those. Do you wear a thong?”
I’ve been to enough beaches in Europe to know that it is theoretically possible for a man to wear something like that but I always sort of figured they were illegal or banned here.
I paused and squirmed when I realized what my grandma just asked me.
“Not even if I lived in Las Vegas," I told her.
