Pretty Much Just the Agony of Defeat: Introducing My Son to the World of Sports

It’s probably cliché – but for people like me, pretty much a badge of honor – to admit to being one of those kids always picked last when picking teams to play sports at recess. And it’s also cliché, but cliché grafted from years and years of experience, that Those Picked Last in recess games hope against hope that just one of those times, that they might be picked not-quite-last. You don’t hope for much in those instances – just having your name called when there are three or four other kids left standing in line. But when you’re the shortest, slowest, least coordinated kid in your class, that never happens. The Law of Averages is always trumped by the Laws of the Playground.

And I think there’s a special sort of pain when Those Picked Last grow up to witness their sons following in their ignoble footsteps, standing against the fence, watching the jocks, and then the moderately coordinated, and then the obese, the scrawny, the inevitable kid with the thick glasses, all being deemed somehow more worthy by playground captains (pretty much always jocks) than Those Picked Last. It’s the kind of pain I’m beginning to feel right now – and no matter how successful your child is other arenas, you wish that somehow, you could do something about those pesky genetics that have doomed your son to your fate a generation ago. It has that weird Old Testament miscarried justice about it – the sins of the father being passed down to the son for no good reason at all really.

My failure in sports is – and forgive me if I’m overstating, but I don’t think I am – epic. My first organized sport was T-ball; my first time up to bat, I hit the ball off the tee and ran excitedly, the wrong way, toward third base. Thirty years later, my mom still relishes telling the story, undoubtedly because it combines physical humor, which she loves, and a droll story about my failure, which she probably relishes a little more than she should.

I played baseball in fifth grade – it was my one foray into real baseball, once the memories of T-Ball had been sufficiently repressed. Because we were sponsored by the local Burger King, we were called the Whoppers, and our uniforms were an aggressive, stick-it-to-Ronald McDonald shade of yellow. This is one of the most vivid details of the season for me.
I had 19 plate appearances and didn’t get a single hit all season. Of course, because my small stature made my strike zone impossible for a fifth-grade pitcher to target, I walked 15 times – including three hit-by-pitches (twice in the head, once in the shoulder) – giving me an incredible .789 on-base percentage.

But this was 1980, before anyone actually knew what an on-based percentage was, a simpler time in which success was measured strictly by putting bat on ball. Not an easy thing to do when you’re afraid of the ball.
What this meant for my baseball career in 5th grade was, based on my batting average (and my woeful fielding), I was the least of the Whoppers.

I played two years of soccer in which I practiced in the rain and spent hours in the unholy outdoors – time that might have better been spent on reading and Top 40-radio listening – only to get stuck playing defense (read: in the back, where I’d be least likely to touch the ball) in game after game. Highlights of my soccer career were few: I once scored a goal making a penalty kick in a blowout against a goalie who might have been a worse athlete than I was, I once got to play a game on Astroturf, and I once got to call a time-out and stop play when a bee stung me. (I did not see action the rest of that afternoon, to the relief of my soccer coaches.)

My wife is cut from similar cloth. We’re the type of people who feared the Presidential Physical Fitness Test in elementary school, and still sort of fear it today. She still doesn’t know how to ride a bike. When I’ve attempted forays into organized sports over the last few years, I usually end up demoralized a few games into whatever season it might be, confirming that I am still not possessing enough natural athletic ability to be insisting on competing against people half my age. And this includes really insane endeavors, like lacrosse.

So, when my son’s school called, asking for three and four-year-olds to help round out the CYO Toddler Basketball roster, you figured we might be the least likely candidates to offer our son up. “It’s sports,” we might have said. “That always tends to end pretty badly.”

They sold it to us by telling us that the goals were shorter, that all the kids at this age tend to play at about the same level, and, the selling point that hits all parents of toddlers where they live, that the kids look really cute playing out there. And indeed, we got visions of four-foot basketball hoops, short courts, and loveable tykes (but none more loveable than our own, of course) playing together for the St. Peter Prince of the Apostles Tigers under the unifying banner of the Catholic Youth Organization.

I have to tell you some things about my son Noah before we proceed. It’s clear that Noah, at age 3 1/2 (though we’ve known this about him for several years now) is on the fast track to drama club. He’s a ham. A total performer. He’s already practicing fronting a band. His favorite song is the Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop,” though the first time he heard Guns ‘N Roses’ “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” he jumped up and down non-stop in the living room, yelling, “Rock and roll rocks! Rock and roll rocks!” So I’d say “Sweet Child O’ Mine” is a close second.

He was an octopus this last Halloween – that’s what he proclaimed he wanted to be, and with $50, trips to two fabric stores, and his mother and grandfather working some costuming magic, we were able to give him a fabulous costume complete with $20-a-yard pink fabric with little raised circles all across it which looked uncannily like the underside of real octopus tentacles.

He pretends to be, on any given day, a T-Rex (he even holds his arms in front of him in dead-on mockery of a T-Rex’s puny arms), a dog (he barks, crawls on the floor, and, to our horror, takes his food and places it on the floor so he can eat there), or a robot (he talks in a mechanical voice and calls us “Mommy Robot” and “Daddy Robot.”) He also loves Christmas for decorations and the Sunday paper for its advertising circulars.

Noah is all these things, but it is also becoming evident he’s a second-generation underachiever in anything involving athletics.

Basketball is a challenge for toddlers because it involves hand-eye coordination skills that are still beyond most of them. Dribbling a basketball while running stupifies nearly all of them. The toddler basket our CYO league usese for the three and four-year-olds is actually a backboard and hoop that fits over the gym’s existing regulation 10-foot hoop, so they’re shooting at an eight-foot-hoop instead, which is still daunting for kids who are barely three feet tall. On the backboard, it actually says, “No Dunking,” though we’re clearly in no danger of that. The teams play 32-minute games, 4 quarters of 8 minutes each, and it’s not unusual to have games end by a score of 2-0. Scoring a basket is toddler basketball is tantamount to scoring a goal in soccer – there’s a lot of tension building up to the actual score, near-misses are mourned as missed opportunities, and the ball actually finding net dramatically changes the complexion of a game.

Essentially, unless you’re a parent of one of the kids playing, toddler basketball is not quite a riveting brand of the sport.
Noah’s first three games went like this:

Game 1. This game became a “practice game” when the opposing team from Our Lady of Grace didn’t dress enough players to qualify for the game. The coaches somehow neglected to get Noah into the game. He ran around in the pre-game, and didn’t even take a shot during shooting drills because running around was a lot more fun. He and one of his classmates from his K-3 class spent much of the second half sitting on the bench pretending to be fish. We thought he might get into the game late, as one of the girls assigned to play the second half had drifted completely off the court to play with friends, but the false alarm just allowed him the chance to get accustomed to his regulation kneepads. In many cases with the players, the kneepads’ primary function are not to protect the players’ knees, but to keep their CYO-issue Youth XS shorts from falling to their ankles.

Game 2: This was at Mount Sacred Heart, a Catholic school across the street from a seminary and down the street from the Madonna Apartments, which are not as glamorous as they might sound. This game was a disaster before it started – we had to rouse Noah from a nap, and by the time he got to the game, he was still cranky and having none of this whole basketball thing. Because of the Game 1 failure of justice, the coaches decided Noah would start to make it up to him, but he was pointedly not in the mood. For the entire eight-minute quarter, he stood in one spot on the court and cried, pitifully. When the crowd noise got to be too much, he put his hands over his ears and cried more insistently.

This took us back to a particularly bad parenting moment. We took Noah to a San Antonio Spurs game for which we’d won free tickets, when he was barely a year old, and learned that taking extremely small children to an event in which 20,000 people will stand up and yell unexpectedly and inexplicably is a Bad Move.

Though this was two years later and there were about 19,960 less people than at that fateful Spurs game, Noah was still having none of the screaming. I tried to bribe him after his initial exit at the end of the first quater, knowing he was due to get back into the game, with the promise of McDonald’s, if he would just run and somehow become engaged with the action. He did not engage, but demanded McDonald’s after the game was over, and had a Level Four tantrum on the court as I struggled to wrest his oversized loaner kneepads from his flailing legs.

Game 3: As Noah didn’t cry on the court during this one, it was a marked improvement over Game 2. I was still the most involved parent there, actually clambering onto the court repeatedly to pull up Noah’s shorts and kneepads, encouraging him to run and get the ball. He did, at one point in the game, demonstrate an awareness that he was actually playing basketball. A girl from the other team had the ball, and Noah ran over to try to get the ball, right at the moment she was attempting to get rid of it. He ended up changing the trajectory of the pass, it went off another player on the other team, and our team ended up with the ball. I don’t think you’d technically call that a steal, as he didn’t end up with possession of the ball, but it was a moment in which Noah actually looked like he knew what he was doing. I still have a personal highlight reel in my head, comprised of sports moments through the years in which I look like I know what I’m doing. They usually don’t follow each other very closely, and they’re usually the result of dumb luck and the Law of Averages that dictates if you’re out on the court or the field long enough, you manage to do something right. Still, though, I cheered it like any proud parent would. Maybe more so, since I know how hard those moments are to come by.

By the way, we lost this game – the other team scored the game’s only basket at the start of the second half, and as it was my turn to work concessions, I spent much of the fourth quarter pouring nacho cheese over inferior tortilla chips and pulling suspiciously neon shades of Gatorade out of coolers.

Those three games are turning out to be a telling microcosm of the season. Noah missed Game 4 because we were out Christmas shopping and he was more transfixed with the wrapping paper at Target than the prospect of actually having to go play a game. Game 5 was an intrasquad scrimmage because the team from Blessed Sacrament failed to show up. Noah was engaged in the first half, in large part because his grandparents showed up for the game, but in the second half, abandoned all pretense of basketball as he suddenly decided he was a dinosaur, and chased a classmate around the court for the remainder of the game, turning the 5-on-5 into a 4-on-4 with wacky dinosaur antics as a sideshow.

So, why do we insist? It’s clear that Noah lacks the acumen, the attention, the height, and the coordination to excel on the basketball court. The four-year-olds, who aren’t in the same classroom with Noah and therefore don’t have a daily front row to the Noah Show, are perplexed. One of the more serious athletes on the team has dubbed Noah as “silly,” and when he’s decided to be a robot or a maniac chewing on his sleeve during practice, it’s hard to disagree.

Part of the reason we all insist on sports, I think, has something to do with the desire to teach teamwork. It’s drilled into us throughout our school years. We’re supposed to learn cooperation and sharing, and at some point in the K-12 trajectory, this manifests as an ill-fated group project in which two overachievers do all the work and the rest of the group goofs off. Team sports are supposed to teach those all-important skills of sharing and depending on others, while also emphasizing individual athletic prowess. Team sports, while bringing a group of kids together under the same banner with ostensibly the same goals, divides the world into stars and role players.

To our coaches’ credit, they don’t take themselves as seriously as coaches might. The head coach has a whistle, but he rarely uses it. The coaching style, necessitated by the attention span of their young charges, is basically what you would call “shepherding.” I think, however, as the kids get older, the coaches get more serious – at one of the games featuring five and six-year-olds, I witnessed four coaches from the St. Mark’s team adorned in matching St. Mark’s CYO shirts and caps.

At the toddler level, winning and losing isn’t so important, because most of the kids aren’t quite yet tapped into the concept of winning and losing. But when we’re in the stands imploring Noah to pass the ball to one of the few kids with the upper-body strength needed to hoist the ball in the general vicinity of the 8-foot rim, we’re already internalizing the difference between stars and role players, and are making an effort to ascribe them to the players.

Part of it, also, is an attempt to teach our toddlers the importance of sports. In our culture, sports is a language. Learning the language is a necessary male rite of passage, and being able to hold your own in a discussion about sports is as important to American men as proper table manners and mastering a firm handshake.

Of course, it’s possible to get along with it – there are certain subsets for whom a lack of sports knowledge is a credibility-maker – but sports has two distinct advantages for bringing us together: it ties into civic pride (the team represents our city) and provides a convenient common ground for small-talky conversations (“Hey, co-worker, did you see the game last night?”). And really, there’s something non-verbally electrifying about seeing a dunk or a touchdown catch or a home run that makes sports so appealing. There’s probably some deep-seated sociological explanation that goes back to Og throwing the spear that felled a saber-tooth tiger 20,000 years ago, and involuntary stirrings in reaction to such feats hard-wired into our DNA, and our bizarre efforts to replicate that brand of human triumph in our ever-antiseptic modern society today.

If we didn’t respond to sports on such a primal level, I don’t think there’d be the culture that has come up around sports, in which we wax poetic about exploits on the field and fret about the status of their multi-million dollar contracts and keeping certain favorite athletes in our home cities. We make them heroes – despite athletes asking us not to do that –because it’s so hard to find them in other aspects of our lives. Firemen saving babies from burning buildings – well, that’s an abstract heroism that doesn’t reach us on a personal level as much as we’d like it to. Political leaders are rarely heroic, due to rampant partisanship and an increased cynicism about politicians that started with Watergate and has just gotten more fierce and jaundiced since. For instance, I have a co-worker who maintains, in all seriousness, that Clinton spoiled the integrity of the Presidency when he played the saxophone on national TV. So, no, we’re probably not going to be treating our leaders as heroes anytime soon, no matter how many votes they get.

That’s not to say we entirely lionize athletes. Thanks to the rise of ESPN and Jim Rome, we’ve entered a new era of sports-watching which is refreshingly post-modern. The new era of sports commentary reveres athletes at it always has, but also isn’t afraid to poke fun at them in a more sophisticated manner than sports blooper video reels ever could. It’s essentially celebrity gossip, with all the snarkiness and thinly-veiled jealousy, but at the same time, it’s a celebration of ourselves as fans that are perhaps more discerning than the fans of a generation ago. It’s not enough to root for favorite teams anymore – we’re in an age where information permeates our lives, opinions pour out of us, and we’re expanding the capacity of sports to entertain. Though we react in very fundamentally unsophisticated ways to a dunk or a home run, we are much more sophisticated in what we say during time-outs and in between pitches.

Even at the low-stakes levels of toddler basketball, we’re a group of fans who see sports as not just a quest to put a ball through a hoop, but as a conglomeration of personalities that are expressed on the stage of a Catholic school’s gym. And while Noah’s not the most gifted athlete on the court – clearly, he’s far from it – he’s one of the best-defined personalities out there. His unpredictability – namely, his ability to morph from imperfect athlete to prehistoric creature in a flash – has made him a crowd favorite among the St. Peter’s parents set.

So while Noah may never score the winning basket – or any basket, for that matter – we feel like we’re doing a good thing by cheering him on.

We know and accept his potential limitations already – we’re not going to impose Todd Marinovich-levels of expectation on him, and not only because Marinovich totally cracked under the pressure of being groomed to NFL superstardom from the cradle, making it to the NFL but burning out and picking up a drug habit along the way and generally becoming a Cautionary Tale centering around not only the dangers of a parent’s inflated expectations but never being allowed to eat a Big Mac.

But that’s not to say that he’s not going to blossom into an athlete on some level later. A friend of mine who works in PR points out that she did have an inclination toward sports in her youth. You’d never guess it today -- she does a spot-on impersonation of Velma from Scooby Doo and collects snowglobes – but she played basketball, volleyball, ran track during her school years, and also branched out into cheerleading.

She wrote to me in an e-mail, “I think it's good to let children be whatever they envision themselves to be at whatever age they are without the threat of siblings or parents saying, ‘You're bookish’ or ‘You're pretty’ or whatever. I gave up on being athletic when it was drilled into me that short people shouldn't be dancers and my sisters were prettier than me. It didn't take a whole lot to sink back into a comfort zone of ‘I'm not athletic,’ even though at one point, I did get good at it.”

A great point here, to be sure: You don’t want to set up your child for the pitfalls of the self-fulfilling prophecy. For all the signs that Noah is something different – just last night, he combed tangles into his mother’s hair and called himself Fancy the Hairdresser – we feel duty-bound as parents to throw normalizing experiences in his path and see what he’ll do with them. And as ludicrous as basketball for Noah might seem now, he’s undoubtedly richer for the experience. It sure beats plopping him down in front of the TV and letting him absorb commercials telling him what to buy. (Which is why we favor Noggin over the insidious Disney Channel, but that’s a whole other essay.)

And I have to admit, although I see definite limitations in his athletic development, I’m proud that even a setting like a basketball court just appears to him, most of the time, to be a big stage. In an atmosphere resplendent with tennis shoes and whistles, we might be getting a preview of his drama club days, or his onstage rock persona, or an amusing story to tell when he’s a star point guard on his high school basketball team.

A toddler is not quite the tabula rasa that a newborn is. You already begin to see definite signs of a personality, and despite the developmental eddies of Oedipal Complex and Mine and Let’s Test Boundaries, it’s the natural inclination of the parent of a toddler to want to project to adulthood. Maybe, in some way, toddler basketball has become a piece of that in our lives, which remaining, paradoxically, at the same time, a reminder that a toddler still has a lot of discovery and a lot of growing up to do before becoming an adult. And we, as parents, have to both be tuned in to what will serve our children best and what unforeseen potential there might be in any given arena our children wander into.

Give Me a Frozen Sex on the Beach and a 75-Minute Poetry Show

How the 2004 National Poetry Slam Allowed Us to Bring Our Poems to People Who Just Might Need Them, and to People Who Definitely Don’t Want Them

You can get a sense of what a National Poetry Slam is going to be like even before the competition starts. If you arrive on Tuesday, the day before the first events, and you go to the host hotel, and you follow some of the poets around, you’re likely to happen upon that NPS’s particular zeitgeist, even though you might not be able to discern what it is until after the week is over, when you find yourself recuperating and contextualizing.

Sometimes baseball figures in. On the eve of the ’99 NPS in Chicago, for instance, a longtime poet who doubles as a Wrigley Field beer jockey reserved a block of tickets for poets along the first base line, and some of the organizers attended the game, looking far more relaxed and in control than any NPS organizer has a right to look the day the poets get to town. That NPS was arguably the best-run edition of the event in its history.

This year in St. Louis, there was also baseball – a game that the St. Louis Post-Dispatch would later call the first game ever played in tropical rain forest conditions. Temperatures were in the high 80s, with humidity in the high 90s. If you looked out across the expanse of Busch Stadium, you could literally see the air coalesce and glisten and refuse to move. Even with the sticky conditions, it was a compelling game, with ample drama and a handful of home runs, including one to tie the game and send it into extra innings. But it took either superhuman stamina, or a contractual obligation to be there, to gut it out to the final out of the 12th inning.

The game provided a grim foreshadowing for the 2004 National Poetry Slam. What could be said of the baseball game could be said of the Nationals experience: From the outside, conditions looked right, but once inside, it was much more challenging to just get through it than anyone anticipated. Alcohol helped, but only for a while, as you realized that, ultimately, nothing could significantly change the conditions – the unpleasantness in the air was not just going to go away. Yet, if you stuck around and endured, you saw some art within the arena that reminded you why you loved the game.

Having been to nine National Poetry Slams in a ten-year span, I’ve seen some that have run smoothly, some that have been cursed with problems from the get-go, and I’ve even been a co-director of one myself.

As a competitor, I’ve read at a range of venues. At the most extreme poles, I’ve performed on a massive stage in a sleek, immaculate performing arts center in the heart of downtown Portland, with 1,000 people watching and documentary crews rolling tape – and I’ve read in a bagel shop in Middletown, Connecticut, under fluorescent lights, straining to be heard over a milk steamer.

This year, one veteran poet advanced the argument that, as the National Poetry Slam becomes bigger and involves more and more teams each year, we should only be doing this event in the three or four cities that have the infrastructure to best support it.

I see the wisdom in this, and yet, I would miss the opportunity to walk into a city I’ve never visited, with the mission of delivering a four-day poetry spectacular to them. There’s a certain beauty in the attitude that enables slam poets to enter strange venues in strange towns, size up the positives and negatives of the particular room he or she is reading in, and then attempt to own that room on the strength of content and performance.

The real mission of slam, one could argue, is not to make the librarian who goes to three open mike readings a week stand up and take notice of one’s poem, but to reach the blue-collar worker or white-collar professional with no notion of how poetry might speak to his or her condition. Slam’s mission, from the outset, was to show people with no idea that poetry could impact them just how profoundly it could speak to them. Rather than preach to the converted, slammers, in a sense, seek to convert.

So, in the spirit of fulfilling our mission, it made sense for us to try St. Louis. But the esoteric project of attempting to reach new audiences is compromised when those new audiences stay home.

The bulk of the NPS events were held in Laclede’s Landing, an enclave of bars and restaurants at the edge of downtown St. Louis, bordered by three of the city’s most recognizable landmarks – the Edward Jones Dome, the Gateway Arch, and the Mississippi River.

From a logistics standpoint, it was ideal – the city’s Metrolink commuter train ran from the airport directly to Laclede’s Landing, depositing poets a mere two blocks from the host hotel. In fact, the Arch/Laclede’s Landing stop emptied out onto 2nd Street, on which most of the NPS venues were located.

But from a poetry standpoint, it was what we’ll euphemistically label “challenging.” Even before we arrived, some poets wondered if the Fat Tuesday alluded to in the list of venues was part of the Fat Tuesday chain of frozen daiquiri bars – and indeed it was. That led to the inevitable question of whether we could really expect audience members to order a frozen Sex on the Beach and then settle in for a 75-minute poetry show.

Even more alarming was the report on Club Buca. Several weeks before Nationals, one savvy slammer found and circulated an October 2003 article, in the online version of the University of Missouri-St. Louis’s student newspaper, The Current, detailing a female reporter’s night at Club Buca. The writer, painting a scene of sordid debauchery that would receive the Caligula Stamp of Approval, advised, “Leave coats, shyness and inactivity at the door of this club. You will be touched. You will be groped. You will not sit down. You will not be able to have intellectual conversations with other wallflowers.”

Clearly, that’s not a good sign.

Yet, because teams work hard all summer, and set their expectations high about what the National Poetry Slam will be and mean and do, we figure that people will turn out to see them, the best performance poets in North America, out of sheer curiosity and an inborn desire to be moved by a poem. We picture the bars and restaurants to be transformable by the sheer mass of poets who move, like a nomadic tribe, from city to city each year. We expect everyday people to be caught in the crest of the wave and dragged to our shores. We expect the opportunity to convert, and we expect conversion.

Not this year.

Though the slam community provided a mass of nearly 500 competitors, coaches and organizers traveling en masse to some of the larger events, they were spread out amongst seven venues on Wednesday or Thursday, and attendance from the general public for the first two nights was thin if not anemic. The team I coached, from San Antonio, found themselves in a bout with two perennial finalist teams, from Seattle and from New York’s Louder Arts collective – yet with barely enough people in attendance to scare up five judges.

The owner of the venue, a delightfully kitschy medieval-themed dinner theater called the Royal Dumpe, was conscripted to judge both Wednesday bouts. A slammaster from Southern Indiana was brought into the mix to judge out bout after 45 minutes of waiting for spectators who proved as elusive as Godot.

The St. Louis organizers managed to place small articles in the Post-Dispatch (one of the 30 largest daily newspapers in the country, by circulation numbers) and the city’s alt-weekly, the Riverfront Times. They also brokered a media partnership agreement with three local stations owned by the Clear Channel conglomerate, resulting in an alleged $100,000 worth of radio advertising promoting the event. They even managed to secure some local TV prior to the event, to let the people of St. Louis know that the poets were here.

Clearly, though, the efforts weren’t enough. One friend of mine from Chicago, knowing a bit about the St. Louis arts community, was puzzled at the absence of flyers, noting that flyers are particularly effective for getting audience out in St. Louis, and questioned the insistence of staging NPS at Laclede’s rather than the far more arts-friendly Delmar Loop.

Here, as best as I can gather, is a summation of how the relationship between clubs and organizers devolved over the course of the week:

1. Organizers promised clubs massive audiences who would come to see poetry and buy drinks.
2. Massive audiences did not materialize.
3. Poetry got in the way of the typical drinking/dancing/mating ritual behavior of the clubs’ regulars.
4. Clubs grew increasingly weary of poets and poetry.
5. Tempers flared.
6. Thursday night.

Thursday night was historic, featuring two unprecedented events in NPS history. At Fat Tuesday, where I was bout managing, and this year’s Spirit of the Slam Award winner Danny Solis was hosting, a member of the Miami entourage was kicked out of the club by bouncers for (initially) trying to shush patrons, and in the ensuing ugliness to follow, a member of the Miami team was kicked out of the venue before getting a chance to read.

The ensuing ugliness involved the initial ejectee trying to re-enter the club. Apparently, pushing was involved, and out of nowhere, poets and entourage members from inside the club rushed the front door – exploding past the poet from Salt Lake City halfway through a raw, emotional piece – and one of the bouncers announced, immediately upon the interruption, that the show was over and we were all kicked out of the club.

Tense moments followed, a St. Louis organizer who witnessed everything made calls to a district manager or some such, and we were able to continue the bout after a ten-minute caesura, albeit in an even more highly charged atmosphere than before. To their credit, the judges stayed with us, the audience (still mostly poets, with some club regulars in the back of the room) stayed with us, and much of the poetry in the bout was stellar.

Over at Club Buca, they were not so lucky. One of the judges left three poets into the bout, after giving nothing but 10s; the people staffing the bout decided to plug 10s into her spot the rest of the way. Three poets from the end of the bout, an overzealous DJ decided he had had enough of the poetry, and cranked up the dance music in the middle of a poem. Later, at the host hotel, after conferencing with the teams involved in that bout, the tournament officials decided – because the bout was run with four judges, and because it was not allowed to actually finish – to redo the entire bout the next afternoon.

What’s admirable here is the resilience of the poets involved, and their willingness to get back on the horse again the next day after surviving a fairly scathing performance experience barely 12 hours before.

But you would expect that of slam poets. Actors in a play have an unbreachable contract with their audience, based in decorum and the rules of theater. Audience members simply do not interrupt performers, and indeed are coaxed into appropriate responses, starting with the hushed anticipation as the house lights dim and Act One starts. Comics who are heckled are expected to fire back a scathing rejoinder at the heckler – in other words, they’re allowed the space and the mechanism to recuperate the order of their show. Musicians can simply turn up their amps and incorporate an air of disdain into their on-stage personae.

But poets competing in slams have no such protections. The audience at a slam, after all, is encouraged to respond to the poem when the mood strikes them. The audience at a slam isn’t necessarily willing to sit intently and discuss what they liked and didn’t like, as a theater crowd might, over a post-show glass of wine or cup of coffee. They let the performer know immediately, sometimes forcefully, sometimes obnoxiously.

The National Poetry Slam has its special rules of decorum that insulate the competitors from the worst brands of heckling. There are even specific guidelines in the rulebook, as well as a Code of Honour, to ensure that poets don’t heckle other poets. The event is predicated on the notion that these poets are the best that slam has to offer, culled from competitions in cities across North America, and thus have earned more of a right to the audience’s attention than at a typical neighborhood slam event.

But to a drunken patron of a dance club or daiquiri bar, the person in front of the mike is merely, at that moment, an annoying poet. The decorum afforded to most performers falls away, and in this climate, even the assumed sanctity of the competition is stripped away from the event, dropping the poet and audience member into the Petri dish of Marc Smith’s original experiment. The hypothesis being tested, in this trip to the lab, is that a poet, given a microphone and three minutes, can make someone with no personal attachment to poetry listen to a poem.

But for this to work, the venue has to be conducive to performance, and the audience has to have a sense that performance might break out in the room. At the Pageant, where team finals was held, and Mississippi Nights, where indie finals and a team semis were held, those in attendance understood performers might appear on the stage. Even the Royal Dumpe, in its Ren Fair-ocity, was adequately configured and acculturated for performance.

Clubs like Crazy Louie and the Drink, by contrast, were bars and dance clubs first, pulled into service as poetry venues by virtue of their proximity to the host hotel and the optimistic notion that promotional efforts would be enough to cancel out architecture and reputation. The very configurations of the rooms – large, vacuous spaces with comically narrow stages and few places to sit – were enough to signal disconnect between event and venue.

Slam was birthed in a pair of Chicago dive bars in what were then rough neighborhoods. The patrons were sometimes unruly and disruptive, but because the bars were established jazz clubs, and because slam came out of an avant-garde, performance art aesthetic, they were also attuned to sometimes difficult art.

The Laclede’s Landing set, by contrast, didn’t want anything difficult. They wanted to escape what they perceived to be the difficulty of their daily lives. You could see it in their faces, and in their demeanors: I want alcohol. I want to dance with abandon. I see my baseball team on the television above the bar, and I want to root for them. I want a temporary pair of arms around me. I want to feel appreciably attractive in this altered slur of hours. I want to change the channel on my life until I wake up the next morning.

As poets, we like to think this is where we’re most needed. Perhaps the most resonant moment of this year’s Slam Family meeting came from Team Urbana’s Rachel McKibbens, who asserted that the people of St. Louis missed out on what we had to offer because of the example we set with our work. To paraphrase, we model an outlet for self-expression, a cathartic release of emotions, which provides a healthy alternative to physically hurting others or ourselves.

To some poets, the call to poetry is that basic and that life affirming. To others, it’s a vehicle to potential success, to an appearance on Def Poetry, to a possible career as a performance poet – viable to only a select few, but much less improbable than it was even ten years ago.

Because there were somewhere in the neighborhood of 250 poets competing this year, it’s difficult for even the most dedicated audience member to hear more than a fraction of those. And while it’s likely that the bell curve of poet talent has remained fairly consistent over the years, the sheer size of the event makes it harder to recognize the patterns.

For the participants, the failure to attract appreciable audience to the preliminary bouts arguably placed more focus on poet as community member rather than poet as entertainer. This might be good, actually – allowing us to recognize the shared ideals in our mission while, at the same time, acknowledging the shades of difference in our writing and performance aesthetics.

Yet there’s a certain humility that can’t be helped when poets in competition are, for the most part, reading for each other. St. Louis showed that poets sometimes find themselves in arenas that will only reluctantly have them.

Some of us can adapt and make any room our own, be it an audience of three or an audience of 3,000. Stay in performance poetry for any length of time, and you will read to small and large audiences, to rooms devoid of energy and full of jagged energy, and to people who will love you simply because you are a poet. The St. Louis experience reminded me, no matter how any one show goes, the most important quality for a poet, particularly one in our particular arena, is perseverance. It’s crucial to keep writing, to keep reading, to keep performing, and to keep listening to others performing.

The sheer numbers of poets at this year’s Nationals shows how much work we’ve done since Marc Smith hatched his improbable concept for a poetry show in 1986. This year’s Nationals illustrates, perhaps more than any other, that the work has no end, and is sometimes incalculably hard.

In Praise of Animated Food

When it opened in April 1994, the San Antonio baseball park now known as Nelson Wolff Stadium was called “the Jewel of the Texas League,” and Mickey Holt, Public Relations Director for the San Antonio Missions, still likes to call it that. It’s a definite upgrade from the former home of the Missions, V. J. Keefe Memorial Stadium – an old, primarily wooden structure still in use by the St. Mary’s University Rattlers, which looks, sadly, on first impression, like sufficiently combustible kindling for a one-match fire. When compared to the newest parks in the league, including Round Rock’s immaculate Dell Diamond and the currently-under-construction Whataburger Field in Corpus Christi, Nelson Wolff Stadium looks as if it’s from another epoch, and even though it arrived two years after Camden Yards in Baltimore revolutionized our present-day conceptions of what a baseball stadium should be, it seems a relic from the days, not so long ago, when utility trumped charm.

Holt calls it a pitcher’s park, noting that there’s an almost-constant 15 mph wind blowing in from right-center field. They’re not looking to replace it anytime soon, as it is still clean and serviceable and relatively new, but when thinking about upgrades that are realistic and might inch them closer to Dell Diamond status, Holt notes that they’d really like to get a scoreboard with a video screen, to replace the Alamo-shaped one in right field. Holt also think they should be drawing more than the 4400 a game they average, not only because San Antonio is the eighth largest city in the nation and boasts a healthy number of sports fans, but because the Missions are downright good, having won Texas League championships in 2002 and 2003. Certainly, it doesn’t escape you, if you attend a game in the 2004 season, that they’re back-to-back champions – their marketing campaign is built around this phrase, appearing on the scoreboard, and on shirts, and on the jersey of their official mascot, an anthropomorphic jalapeño pepper with googly eyes named Ballapeño.

Riding out in the middle of the first inning on a motorized scooter, the Ballapeño indulges in the sort of fun, wacky mascot antics you’d expect of a mascot playing to 4400 a night who’ve come to watch Double A players with big league aspirations. He rides in the back of a truck around the perimeter of the field and shoots rolled-up T-shirts into the crowd as the truck loops its way past the infield seats. He dances on top of the dugout. He wanders into the crowd, pulls caps off children’s heads playfully, and slaps hands with adults who cannot resist the pull of a giant jalapeño pepper with googly eyes.

But at the end of the sixth inning, another, more mysterious mascot heads to second base, to the instant recognition and obvious delight of the crowd. This is the Missions’ unofficial mascot, who has been with the team since a local restaurant sponsored him to come out to V. J. Keefe back in 1988 for a series of promotional appearances. Two years ago, Newsweek named him the minor league mascot of the year (even though Ballapeño has been the official Missions mascot since Opening Day of the 2000 Season) and one look at him is all it really takes to understand why.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: Henry the Puffy Taco.

The Puffy Taco very nearly defies conventional mascot wisdom. Typically, mascots are cartoonish depictions of people or animals or even objects, yet they wear distinctive human features like eyes and a mouth. It’s for the same reasons that babies and baby animals come into the world cute – to start the process of attachment, to allow the parents to want to care for it. Even the Corpus Christi Hooks, who will begin Texas League play in 2005, have started their marketing campaign by floating out a logo which appears to be a giant fishing hook with eyes and a mouth, and it wouldn’t at all be surprising if this gets committed to fabric and is set in motion to wander the stands next spring.

But the Puffy Taco doesn’t even try for recognizable facial features. It is, simply, resplendently, without pretense, a taco. More precisely, the costume is an open shell facing forward and standing on its end, with holes for the arms and legs to protrude from the shell. Because there’s no better way to describe this, vulva-like folds of lettuce and cheese protrude slightly from behind the open folds of the shell, all but enveloping the dark-red cylinder at the center of the taco, which is clearly where the actor’s head and torso fit, and which has to be meant to represent the meat at the center of the taco, although this would make the costume more of a hot-dog taco than a ground beef taco. “Henry the Puffy Taco” is stitched along the back of the taco shell at its bottom edge, for the four or five people in the audience on any given night who need clarification on who this is.

The Puffy Taco’s act is simple yet effective, and is a thirty-second case study in everything that is glorious yet low-rent about minor league baseball – that, indeed, is glorious precisely because it is so low-rent. The Puffy Taco starts at second base, and runs for home plate by way of third. A child is selected from the audience; it is his or her job to tackle the Puffy Taco before he reaches home. There’s a Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote certainty to the act; it always concludes with the child tackling the Taco, and the show has evolved to incorporate an additional moment of triumph in which the child is allowed to clamber on top of the Taco and lift his or her hands skyward to make the “raise the roof” gesture. I think you can probably figure out what the crowd does in response.

Then, the Taco gets up and does a dance, and circulates through the stands for another half-inning or so, slapping hands and greeting the kids who flock around him, before giving the stage over to the Ballapeño for the rest of the evening.

The Taco’s act has evolved on its own over time. Initially, there was no tackling – as Holt explains, the first tackle was actually an accident born of some overzealous kid bumping into the Taco during a race. What was ordained from the beginning was that the kid was always supposed to win. Holt recalls that on the one occasion the Taco won the race, when the Taco’s act was still in its early stages of development, the crowd reacted with enough booing and general displeasure to assure that that wouldn’t ever be happening again. . Over time, the two concepts – kid always triumphs, kid triumphs by tackling the Taco before he reaches home plate – merged into what is now the standard nightly ritual.

As mascot theater goes, the Taco’s act is simple and slapstick and interactive and allows a child to emerge triumphant in a situation that is not quite man v. beast but is similar enough to evoke feelings of top-of-the-food-chain superiority and the resultant joy that comes with that. For San Antonians, there’s an additional level to why the victory over the Puffy Taco works as a gimmick, and that has a lot to do with the fact that people in San Antonio really like their food.

The current mayor of San Antonio, Ed Garza, who is still in his early thirties yet was reelected to a second term in 2003, has been moved by a series of Men’s Fitness polls perennially listing San Antonio as one of the fattest cities in the nation to push something called the Fit City Initiative. But there’s a larger, easier, more informal movement that Fit City is pushing against, which will probably emerge triumphant at the end of the day, and that’s the citywide drive to eat a lot of fattening food, often in public.

Every April, the city essentially shuts down for a 10-day conglomeration of festivals and parades called Fiesta. At the heart of the 100-plus Fiesta events are two major parades which draw as many as half a million spectators and are serviced by a staggering number of makeshift festival food stands. The Night in Old San Antonio event, which runs four days in the city’s La Villita and is another major Fiesta draw, allows its thousands upon thousands of annual attendees a chance to eat and drink with abandon. There’s music and dancing and street festival frivolity to be had here, but ask any attendee, and they’re more likely than not to tell you they are there for the variegated meats on a stick or the gorditas or the fresh handmade tortillas or the bratwurst or crepes or frog legs or potato skins or any number of the other foods on display.

The night before the first Krispy Kreme franchise opened in San Antonio, a line began forming outside its doors; by morning, 500 people had gathered, having camped out all night for access to the first hot, sticky, rings of fried dough to roll off the assembly lines and into their waiting mouths.

And every year in late January, right before the annual San Antonio Stock Show and Rodeo, a loose coalition of organizers host a Friday morning Cowboy Breakfast. Even though it has moved from location to location in the last few years, the annual Cowboy Breakfast always draws in the neighborhood of 40 to 50 thousand, no matter what the conditions outside, to gather in the early morning hours for food that is, in a particularly important calling card to the people of San Antonio, free. The San Antonio Express-News article on the 2004 Cowboy Breakfast, with reporter Lisa Marie Gomez following in the well-worn path of previous reporters’ stories on the event, begins this way:
The drizzle, patchy fog and 49-degree weather at 5 a.m. Friday were quickly forgotten when the bands blared their tunes and hot coffee and food were served. The Cowboy Breakfast was in full swing at Crossroads of San Antonio mall two hours before the sun made its debut for the day, and traffic piled up as if it were the evening rush hour. Despite the morning darkness and the cool weather, families came out in droves. One family piled into a van, with children, cousins, and even grandparents. “We’re here for the free food,” Wicho Guerra said as he munched on a slice of white bread drowned in gravy. “I have no idea what I’m eating, but it’s good.”

So it is clear that the Fit City Initiative has a way to go. Tourism, after all, is one of the city’s largest industries, and food is at the backbone of San Antonio’s allure for locals and visitors alike.

The Puffy Taco mascot gets its name from a Tex-Mex innovation that has been adopted by a number of the city’s vast array of Mexican restaurants. Specifically, it was Jamie Lopez, the son of the Henry’s Puffy Tacos owner, who came up with the idea for the Puffy Taco mascot in 1988 as a way to further associate the puffy taco dish with his dad’s restaurant. Henry’s Puffy Tacos, a Westside restaurant which opened in 1978 and relocated to a former Luby’s cafeteria around the corner in 1996, naturally lays claim to its title dish despite having many other offerings on the menu.

The puffy taco is a crispy taco with a shell that puffs up in the deep-frying process, filled to bursting with meat, lettuce, tomatoes, and cheese. A Citysearch review of Henry’s noted, “The shell of Henry’s signature dish is what newly fallen snow would feel like in your mouth – if it was fried.”

If you’re wise, and if you’re throwing caloric caution to the wind as you should be when you order the puffy taco, you’ll want to top it with sour cream and guacamole and salsa. Eating it is a messy affair, and is not so much a meal as it is a mainlining of fatty, spicy goodness. It’s a safe bet that Wicho Guerra and his clan have sprung for a dinner here at some point in their gastronomical journeys. And though they may not know exactly what they’re eating when they plunge into their puffy tacos, it’s safe to say they will determine it is, indeed, good.

But because Henry’s is far from the well-trafficked tourist haunts of the city, on a major arterial that cuts through a working-class, predominantly Mexican-American neighborhood, the Puffy Taco is a bit of a mystery to those tourists who find themselves taking in a Missions game at Nelson Wolff. A writer for minorleagueballparks.com, writing a review of the stadium in 1999, wrote, “I didn’t like the fact that the ‘Puffy Taco’ mascot was actually an advertisement for a fast-food chain,” and a scribe for ballparkreviews.com expressed disappointment that the Puffy Taco only makes his one appearance, despite “hearing much hype” about him.

Wesley Ratliff understands the tradition, though. At just 24 years old, Ratliff is the community outreach director for the Missions, which is an official way of saying that he is a professional mascot. He pulls double duty during each Missions home game, portraying both the Puffy Taco and Ballapeño, which is why they rarely appear in the same place at the same time.

Ratliff personifies the duality of San Antonio’s version of Generation Y perfectly – he sports a goatee and a tongue piercing that suggests a straight-from-MTV mainstream edginess, yet he’s unfailingly polite, responding to a number of questions from my interview with him with a demure and polite, “Yes, sir.”

Ratliff already has a long, impressive resume as a mascot. He started out as Eloc, the cougar mascot for Cole Junior/Senior High School, located on the Fort Sam Houston U.S. Army base, and best known as the alma mater of Shaquille O’Neal. Ratliff then moved on to serve as a mascot for the University of the Incarnate Word, one of San Antonio’s four-year Catholic universities, wearing one of the nation’s first inflatable costumes. He later moved on to professional mascothood at two of San Antonio’s prime theme parks, Sea World and Six Flags Fiesta Texas, and later realized a lifelong dream of performing at Walt Disney World, taking a whirlwind tour in which he was allowed to portray Tigger, Eeyore, Gepetto, Tweedledee, Tweedledum, and Miss Piggy over the course of several weeks.

His new lifelong dream, fed by his two full-time years and six part-time years with the Missions, is to make it into the big league mascot ranks; last year, he was in the running to take over as Raymond, the mascot for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, which he describes somewhat perplexedly as “a sort of hairy troll thing.” He was one of two final candidates, and was ultimately the odd man out, but it’s clear that missing out on the chance to depict a hairy troll for one of MLB’s most moribund franchises might be a blessing in disguise. Ratliff graciously opines that it was an honor just to be in the running.

He’s also suffered for his art, having two surgeries on his knee for a torn meniscus – the first was the result of being tackled while portraying the Taco, the second came after a car accident aggravated the fragile ligament. The first actor playing the Puffy Taco also suffered a similar knee injury, leading one to believe that what a fifty-pound-child lacks in mass and force in tackling the Taco, he or she more than makes up for it in questionable technique, and is perhaps the prime occupational hazard for those with the calling to be a mascot.

Ratliff, despite the trick knee, is fortunate in that he is able to carve out a living as a professional mascot – a number of his colleagues on the Texas League circuit are actually salespeople within their respective organizations, moonlighting as the mascot in the sort of double-duty that isn’t at all surprising given the limited budgets of many minor-league teams.

And unlike a number of the other minor-league mascots toiling away in obscurity, Ratliff has at least enjoyed a fleeting yet memorable taste of the bigs. Last year, for fan appreciation day for the Missions’ parent organization, the Seattle Mariners, Ratliff was invited to Safeco Field where he performed as both the Ballapeño and Puffy Taco alongside the Moose, the Mariners’ lovable yet improbable mascot. The Moose, a land animal representing a team with a decidedly nautical theme, is the one enduring remnant from the team’s former owner Jeff Smulyan of Indianapolis-based Emmis Communications – a chapter of Seattle baseball history that many Mariners fans would just as soon forget.

Ratliff recalls his reception as nothing short of rock star. As the Taco, he accompanied the Moose for a G-rated version of running the gauntlet – being doused with water by Mariners players in a ritualized procession across the field. He reports that the crowd responded instantly when he came out, and later, he signed autographs for a crowd of fans waiting as long as 45 minutes in line to meet him.

He also learned, on this trip, that he has it pretty good in the minor leagues. Mascots in the majors are bound by a longer list of rules than he’s bound by. The Colorado Rockies mascot, also on hand at Safeco for Fan Appreciation Day is bound to stricter rules than the Moose – or, for that matter, Ratliff himself. The Rockies’ mascot can’t be on the field after the ceremonial first pitch, and can’t be on the dugout ever. Ratliff, by contrast, pretty much has license to go whenever he wants wherever he wants, allowed to read the crowd and create his moments as he pleases.

For all the love the Puffy Taco and Ballapeño receive, San Antonio’s heart belongs to another mascot, basically because its heart belongs to another team.

Despite the century-plus history of minor league baseball in San Antonio, and despite having one of the most rabid high school football fan bases in football-obsessed Texas, San Antonio is a basketball town, and every other sport is thus relegated to being not-basketball. The Spurs have only been around since 1973, but because the team is the city’s highest-profile professional sports franchise, it enjoys a unique and revered position among San Antonians, and this extends to mascots, as none is more recognizable or more beloved than the Coyote.

Tim Derk, who debuted The Coyote in 1983, suffered a stroke this past March and has had to turn the job of playing the Coyote to understudies while he undergoes rehabilitation -- ending a 21-year run of donning a coyote mask with bulging bright green eyes and an easy-going, yet slightly maniacal, permanent grin.

The stroke not only sidelined Derk – it led him, his family, and the Spurs organization to do the unprecedented thing and reveal The Coyote’s identity to the public. For many, it was the first time they’d learned who Tim Derk was, and was also the first time they’d learned to separate Derk as someone distinct from The Coyote.

Derk’s condition was major news in San Antonio, dominating headlines and local newscasts for several days. The reaction showed that San Antonio, for all its aspirations to be a big city, is still a small town, in the good sense, at its core. Though we generally like our mascots anonymous in day-to-day life, and transformed into the lovable character when safely encased in the costume, there was no question of Derk’s family and the Spurs organization going public with the information. There was an overwhelming need to know, evinced by the media barrage and the remarkable groundswell of public support once Derk’s condition was made public, which easily overrode the typical willingness of a fan base to buy into the suspension of disbelief manifest in engaging with a mascot.

The Coyote has remained a fixture at Spurs games even while Derk continues rehab, and now, Derk’s legacy and years of service adds an additional layer of legend to The Coyote. It wouldn’t at all be surprising if his number (the cryptic “2!” – standing for “too excited”) is retired should Derk decide not to resume his role as The Coyote – though he’s not ruling out a return to the court, depending on how his physical therapy sessions go.

What the situation with The Coyote reveals, aside from the connection that fans have with a mascot, is the importance of the mascot in articulating the team’s identity, even beyond the role it might have had in years past. If you’re looking to point fingers as why it’s harder for teams to bank on the marketability of its star players, look no further than the era of free agency.

As a fan in his mid-30s, I might just be part of the last generation to know what it’s like to see a favorite player remain with a favorite team for the entirety of his career.

As a Mariners fan, I have seen Ken Griffey, Jr. go from Seattle fan favorite to trade-me malcontent, and now, I’m more likely to remember his statistical disappearing act as an oft-injured Cincinnati Red than as part of the Mariners’ feel-good father-son duo that once hit back-to-back home runs in a game on (and this is so terribly fitting) Father’s Day.

As a Mariners fan, I have seen Randy Johnson develop from wild-man anomaly to one of the most feared left-handed power pitchers in the history of the game – and then saw him help deliver a World Series to the Arizona Diamondbacks, a team that entered the majors as an expansion team long after the Mariners. (Note: it is not lost on me that the Mariners are closing in on three full decades of futility.) In July 2004, the Diamondbacks publicly contemplated trading him, and Johnson hinted, not so subtly at all, that he’d like to become a Yankee. This was particularly cruel for Mariners fans who still remember his role in defeating the Yankees in a five-game divisional series in the ’95 playoffs, a series which was not only deliciously epic, but pretty much allowed Mariners fans to hate the Yankees with a blend of loathing and jealousy only surpassed by Red Sox fans.

And I have seen the worst free-agency jump of all, for Mariners fans or otherwise, in Alex Rodriguez. A-Rod was drafted by the Mariners, came up quickly through the team’s farm system, was a wide-eyed September call-up in uniform for the ’95 playoffs, became the team’s most crucial player during its high-water mark as an organization, and then left for a $252 million contract (from a division rival, no less) that could be characterized by any reasonable observer as either obscene or insane. After several years of insisting money was not the motivating factor, even though he toiled for the Texas Rangers through several moribund seasons, he was jettisoned to the only team that could take his monstrous contract – the hated Yankees.

For minor league fans, inconstancy in the roster is a heartbreak that comes with the territory. It’s no accident that the minor leagues are referred to as the farm system – players are nurtured and then harvested, the wheat is separated from the chaff, and the cycle repeats itself annually.

But for major league fans, the free agent market has brought on an inconstancy that they assumed (correctly, up until now) they were immune from. Which makes the mascot more than just a sideshow to fill time and amuse the kids between innings – the mascot has become, more than any individual player, the face of the franchise, the one personality guaranteed to return year after year. The most dedicated baseball fans, addicted to statistics and the hope that comes with spring training, have turned to rotisserie leagues to insure that they can be in control of players maintaining their allegiance to teams – even if those teams are mere constructs in infinite variations among thousands upon thousands of makeshift coalitions around the nation.

But, paradoxically, in the real world, the most enduring representative of what the team embodies is not a five-tool outfielder with a distinctive batting stance, or a pitcher with enough guile and raw talent to change the outcome of a game with his multi-million dollar arm, but a moose with a comically-large head, or an electric-blue marlin, or a non-descript green monster with a nose that vaguely resembles a trumpet. The pitcher and the outfielder might be dealt for prospects in the closing days of July, or might bolt to a contender at the first opportunity that MLB’s free agency rules afford them. The mascots, though, save for a conscious redirection of the team’s marketing people, are there to stay.

San Antonio is a city where people tend to settle in and grow old, and indeed, where multiple generations spend entire lifetimes. It’s a city where traditions are taken very seriously, where the two biggest institutional influences are the military and the Catholic Church. What this means, even with the rise of the Ballapeño, even with the rare convergence of animated jalapeño and animated taco in the same space, is that the Puffy Taco isn’t going anywhere. It’s perhaps no accident that Mickey Holt notes, “If we ever got rid of the Puffy Taco, we’d be crucified.

Yet, in talking to Wesley Ratliff, you get the sense that he will inevitably move on. He’s just entered his mid-20s and has already been a mascot for almost a decade. He’s come agonizingly close to toiling for Tampa Bay fans this year as a non-descript troll. He’s already had a glimpse of life as a big-league mascot, and he likes it. If anyone is cut out for the mascot’s life, Wesley is that person.

When Wesley moves on, the costumes will remain behind – a jalapeño with googly eyes, and a taco with no eyes – waiting to be worn by someone who remain, if all goes to plan, anonymous. Though a different person will embody the role, the bio info on the team’s official website will remain the same, in the jokey tone and cadence that is common to mascot bios at all levels of the game.

And it’s a safe bet that years from now, between the 6th and 7th inning of future Missions games, the Puffy Taco will take his place at second base, and a child currently not yet born will take his or her place alongside the Taco. They will run around the bases. The Taco will not make it to home plate, being tackled along the way. It will be someone else’s knees taking the torque, enduring another child’s zeal. And as the Taco lies on the ground, to the cheers of the crowd for another in a chain of consecutive nights, the Taco will know his place is secure. In a city where traditions rule all, and in which the Taco has become a quirky and enduring tradition, no one will let the Taco escape this mortal coil. Even today, between the 6th and 7th inning as the Taco makes his entrance, underneath the cheers, you can hear a handful of people quickly explaining to those who don’t yet know – the children, the visitors, the neophytes – the answer to the inevitable question, the variations on the theme of What the Hell Is That.

Beat Me in St. Louis: A Journey Through the Worst National Poetry Slam Ever, As Revealed In Livejournal Entries

Wednesday, August 4, 12:21 am
Journal Entry Title: St. Louis, Day Zero

So far, I have seen/felt/heard/experienced:

* 89 degree heat, plus 140 degree humidity, in Busch Stadium watching the Cardinals play in front of thousands of sweaty fans, pretty much all wearing red.

* Free Metro Link rides. I think you're supposed to pay, but we couldn't get the machine at the airport to take our money, and no one seems to be monitoring. So, okay, thanks for the free rides.

* Dinner at Show-Me's, which is the St. Louis version of Hooters. This sounds bad, but we actually had a good time, because Alvin Lau was with us ordering a drink so totally gay (with Malibu spiced rum, pineapple juice, and cranberry juice) that I had to dub it "the studded leather thong of drinks." We later got into a conversation with the waitress about the mixological content of a drink called the Red-Headed Slut. Apparently, this exists, and this led to a hilarious exchange which managed to embarrass both the Show-Me waitresses and Big Poppa E. Which is good.

* There's a freaky poet who's a perennial rep for Arkansas at the College Nationals named Russell, with multiple face piercings. He met a woman named Lacy in Oklahoma City, who can swallow her own tongue. She demonstrates, often, to whoever will ask. Mike's film crew got it on tape, and got her to sign the release pronto. You know, just typical weirdness at Nationals, but here's the kicker -- they HITCHHIKED to St. Louis from Oklahoma. People picked them up. In their cars.

So far, I've kept the Scrabble to poetry ratio to a fine balance. As in, lots of Scrabble, and no poetry yet. Skipped the smooth jazz open mike -- apparently a good move from all accounts.

More later.

Wednesday, August 4, 7:38 am
Journal Title Entry: Forgot the Best Anedcote of Nationals So Far

So, we're at the ballgame, and Adriana goes to the bathroom, where she runs into a woman who says, I kid you not, "Your skin is so amazing -- how did you get so tan?" When Adri replied that she's naturally that way, the woman responds ... "Wow ... you don't look black."

I predict la raza poetry is not going to do so well here this week.

Thursday, August 5, 3:21 am
St. Louis, Day One

Worst. Nationals. Ever.

That, and I miss my family.

Thursday, August 5, 8:19 am
Journal Title Entry: Furious Invective, Go!

So, I'm typing this from the Hampton Inn's business center, because my team took our room's computer chair across the hall last night, and are dead to the world, as I should be right now. My hangover is hideous and well-deserved, and I didn't really drink that much at all last night, which only leads me to conclude that I'm sick from what might be the worst Nationals ever. Worse than Connecticut. Worse than Seattle. Allow me to elaborate.

I hosted a bout and coached a bout last night. The bout I hosted started 45 minutes late because the sound guys failed to show up to assemble the microphones until 8:35, when I think they were supposed to be there at, oh, around seven. We had to use two volunteers as judges and beg three reluctant audience members (part of entourages) to judge as well. As it turns out, we were lucky in that we had people we could ask. I'm not sure if there was a single paying customer from the outside world in the venue when we started. We got the bout in at 65 minutes, which is lightning quick for 16 poets, and Deb Marsh thanked me by challenging our math and delaying us another ten minutes after the bout, when I was thinking, oh my God, our bout is the only one that's late, and I have to get to my team down the street, and oh my God, I hope they don't start without me. Turns out, of course, that my math was fucking perfect, and she wrote scores down wrong. I also had Logic from their team challenging the scores. Guess what? Your team got a 5? How do ya like my deductive reasoning now, Logic? *busts a kung fu move*

So, I get to my bout, and it's ... an intimate audience. As in, the teams. And the entourages. And about three poet-affiliated people. For a bout featuring two perennial finalist teams. It took 45 minutes for us to dredge up the judges we needed, including the owner of the club (who had to be deliriously happy with what was going on) and one of the Slammasters from Random, Indiana.

In all, here's a quick rundown of other highlights:

* After being told that venues would be 18 and over no-problem, the doorman at Fat Tuesday (and yes, indeed, it is part of the frozen daiquiri bar chain) wouldn't let Adri into coach Houston because she's 20, and after much begging, their 19-year-old poet was only let in to perform. The "stage" was actually an unlit patch of floor at the front of the club. Adri coached Houston to a 0.1 win sitting at the club's entryway next to the doorman.

* Jared Paul became NPS's first arrest because Providence decided it would be in good taste to help market NPS by doing their Abu Ghraib piece outside on a public street (site of opening ceremonies) at 2 pm, and his balls fell out of his loincloth (now there's a disturbing clause to type) and he got arrested for indecent exposure. Providence almost got kicked out of the tournament, but now, they're just on double secret probation. Gee, this isn't going to be make Jared Paul feel any more self-righteous or oppressed, will it?

* I asked Kevin McCameron, one of the organizers, "What is going on here? Where are all the people?" He just bewilderedly replied, "I don't know. I don't know."

* There was, to be fair, a tiny calendar mention in their entertainment section yesterday, and an article in their alt-weekly, tiny-but-grayboxed, written by a former slammer now living here. But it failed to get any audience out. I think maybe, if you count everyone who paid last night, in all the venues, you might have 50 paying people.

* Oh, and it's impossible to get to the late-night event unless you take a cab from the hotel ($10). Metro Link doesn't run that late, and it's not walking distance. Luckily, the LIVEJOURNAL READING tonight is at the hotel.

* Oh, and Austin got the 4 in their bout last night, so currently, our largely unrehearsed, just-glad-to-be-here team is above them in the rankings. 34 out of 69. Middle of the pack, third in our bout last night -- which, given our draw, is the best we could hope for.

I think I knew this was going to happen, and told people who refused to believe me, for two solid years. Though I feel like I can now do the I-told-you-so dance, I'd much rather do the hey-they-pulled-this-off dance.

Ugh.

Current Mood: Bad Nationals

Thursday, August 5, 5:19 pm
Journal Title Entry: The Bright Ray of Light

Nerd slam.

Oh. My. God.

I didn't even get to read (J. Bradley beat me in a livejournal trivia-off for a spot on the roster; how lame is that?), but Cristin's hosting was drop-dead funny, and there was community, and there was joy, and there was David Hendler against Paulie Lippman in an anagram-off, and then I had to leave early because I had to fix my computer through some weird place I found downtown at random. The U was falling off. It's better now.

Just waiting for the rest of the team members to get back to set strategy. My strategy tonight ... is for us to win. Brilliant, huh?

Friday, August 6, 1:46 am
Journal Title Entry: And Now, More on Travesty

First off, apologies to all expecting the Livejournal reading tonight -- postponed, not cancelled, we'll get it rescheduled as soon as everything blows over.

Believe me, many things are blowing right now.

My night went this way: team bout at Crazy Louie's, bar with a jaunty nautical theme, stage was small and looked more appropriate for puppets than poets. We took the 4, did some dice rolling in the second round which didn't work out, and by the end of the evening, all that was left was beating Corpus, after realizing that we probably couldn't get the 34 or so we needed in the final round.

I was ready to give PSI the benefit of the doubt though -- issues were getting addressed today from yesterday. Sound equipment was in the venues on times. More volunteers showed. Audience was still thin, but not anemic like yesterday's. It looked, early on, like the ship was getting righted.

Then, I bout managed at Fat Tuesday's on the Austin - Miami - Montclair - Norfolk - Salt Lake City bout, with Danny hosting. A Miami poet got kicked out by aggressive Fat Tuesday security staff at the start of the bout, there was some melee involving the poet (I think, still not sure) trying to rush the door three poems in. We had a ten-minute delay that started with the bouncers yelling that we were kicked out, and ended with us settling the place back down and letting poor Schuyler from Salt Lake (you know, the one we thought was dead last Slammasters) start over. We got our bout in. We even avoided a protest at the end, and the poet who raised the stink thought I needed a massage, and offered me a naked message. I am reasonably sure that she was just kidding, but I politely thanked her, and showed her my wedding ring to eliminate all doubt. Danny, predictably, God bless him, took the baton from me at that point. I hope it works out -- we worked our asses off to get that bout in as cleanly as we did.

But wait, it gets better.

For the first time in Nationals history (I believe), a bout didn't finish. Three poems from the end, in the middle of the leading team's third round poem, the DJ started spinning techno music, because the dance club wanted to honor its regular patrons (and thereby dis its out-of-town guests). There were rumors that the bout finished on the street, but indeed, it did not finish, and the result affects semis. Stay tuned, sports fans.

What's becoming markedly apparent in all this is that the relationships between the St. Louis organizers and club owners are not rock solid. I imagine there was a promise of a lot of money and excitement coming through these club's doors, which is not happening. The clubs are oriented toward drinking, and the poets are being regarded as a nuisance by the clubs and the hotel staff. As the mood gets uglier, I fear that the poets will act out at the hotel, and the hotel will start booting poets, and then we'll have a whole other layer of crisis on top of what we have now.

I don't imagine this will happen in Austin, since we'll have a much better core audience, much better relationships with the clubs, and much better relationships with the host hotels and the cities, but if we don't do something to cap teams at a managable number (and I think that's 64), PSI is in serious trouble. This can't continue this way -- something more grave than a bout not finishing will go down if we continue down this circus-y path.

I am utterly frightened at the prospect of a semis bout at Fat Tuesday. But, as Daniel Brewster told me tonight, with word about the fuckery of tonight going around (note: fuckery is my word), no other club is going to want to touch this.

On the bright spot, you can order a frozen Sex on the Beach at this club, if you so desire.

Beau Paul once proclaimed, "St. Louis is the only city that built a monument to getting the hell out of it."

I say: Westward Ho.

Current Mood: Horrified, Really

Friday, August 6, 5:31 pm
Journal Title Entry: It Just Keeps Getting Better and Better: The Group Piece Showcase

So, the group piece showcase at NPS this year was in something called the Art Lofts district on the edge of downtown, on something billed in our program as the Outdoor Mainstage. The Outdoor Mainstage turned out to be two microphones and a box in a courtyard off the sidewalk. To get us ready, we had to move the box (which only had room for two people to stand on) and get three mikes from the coffee place four blocks down the street, where the makeup bout from last night was held. (This is the bout that was shut down by Overzealous Techno DJ.)

But wait, it gets better.

So, a few poems into the group piece showcase, we hear sirens. And then fire engines and cops show up. Guess what? Hazardous materials situation. Hydrochloric acid spill about a block from where we're at. Apparently, we're fine -- as long as the wind doesn't shift. The reading continues, and it's going well -- the T.O.F.U. piece (Shane Koyczan/Mike McGee/CR Avery project) wrecks shop in particular. Helicopters appear. I notice that the local Fox station has sent a van over, which pulled right up to where we were doing the reading, so I quip to Mike, "Hey, we finally got the media out!" Sometimes, I crack me up.

In the meantime, the poets are swearing a-plenty, 'cause, you know, slam poets. About 2/3 of the way through, Daniel Brewster pulls me aside and says, "I don't know how to tell you this delicately," so I say, "Just tell me." Turns out a cop has told him to tell us to control the profanity, because there are parents picking up their kids. This mystifies me a bit, but I make an announcement to please be more PG. The poets, being a responsible lot, ignore the request.

Then, we figure out a few poems later what the hell he's talking about -- the courtyard is right next to, and I mean right next to, the Downtown Children's Center. We've had four hours of poems and rants and multiple f-bombs next to a daycare. Though Wicker Park had a piece near and dear to my heart, about the frustrations of growing up short, I missed part of it because a mustachioed, Tom of Finland cop who is probably not voting Kerry/Edwards in '04, dressed us down. "Those are little kids in there," he said emphatically. "Little kids." Mike said, non-plussed, "I heard you the first time," and again, I issued a request for PG mindfulness. Mike actually had to stop Andy and Kari from Vegas, up right after that second warning, blissfully unaware that their patently vulgar duet was not very PG. We ended with one other poem, despite Daniel's urging to have us pull the plug right then and there. Gee, that wouldn't have made things end on a sour note or anything.

Punchline: when we commented to Daniel on the lack of foresight evinced by putting an outdoor reading next to a daycare, his response was, "We weren't expecting the cops to show up. We didn't know there was going to be a chemical spill."

Really? I thought I'd seen "Chemical Spill Friday" in the NPS program.

By the way, more fuckery: there's a tie for 20th, so we're going to have a six-team bout tonight. Don't worry, fans of slam integrity: I'm already working on a play-in rule for a tie for the last semis slot for April.

Also, in other news, my committee's corporate sponsorship policy passed.

And: Livejournal reading will be 4-6 tomorrow. It'll be indoors, so you pottymouths can go to town.

Current mood: Hydrochloric Acid Exposure

Saturday, August 7, 10:13 am
Journal Title Entry: Firewood

Today's slam family meeting will possibly involve a sterling new issue on the table -- one of last night's indie finalists, Will Da Real One, only read one of the two preliminary nights. In fact, he was the poet who was kicked out of Fat Tuesday in the Thursday night debacle. The rumor is that a poet brought it up to one of the indie finals hosts before the bout, the host asked the poet, and the poet said, "Yeah, I spit on Thursday." So, I guess "Da Real One" is sort of a misnomer now. [Update: This rumor has since been refuted, but there still seems to be some kind of questions around communication of this information to the people who needed it. The bout officials didn't know that Will hadn't read Thursday until the third and final round of indie finals.]

Apparently, it was a data entering error from the tournament director that put him into the mix, and it was the departure from making sure every poet was represented once in a bout that allowed this to happen in the first place. As bout manager for that bout, I would have brought something up if I'd scanned the list for the indie finalists, but stuff was posted so late on Friday that I didn't get the chance to comb it -- I only checked to see that San Anto finished 45th in the nation. And I didn't really clue in to his presence on stage, because Hilary and Greg and I were having way too much fun, and, you know, vodka tonics.

Wow, it didn't take long for that innovation to bite PSI in the ass.

Hey, are those locusts I see in the sky?

Current Mood: Pre-Ritual Flaggelation

Saturday, August 7, 10:13 am
Journal Title Entry: Ow, My Life Hurts: Saturday Afternoon at Nationals

Just finished hosting the Little Reading That Could, aka the Livejournal/Blogger reading. Special thanks to all the participants: natawn84, hallawayjoe, karinotvery, fengi, poetryslam, loudgirl, auralfiend, dokuritsu, spentpenny, zadriana, jbradley, Bad Andy Neely, and neuraleyes for the use of his wireless laptop. I was thinking about doing an entry on the reading during the reading, but that would have been too dorky and too meta.

Slam family meeting was basically an evisceration of the St. Louis organizers, our corporate sponsorship committee election -- and with Jared Paul getting elected, this is a great opportunity for him to serve the community on an issue he clearly cares deeply about. I'll be watching his participation with interest.

The Miami indie finals situation went like this: tournament director explained and apologized, EC asked the committee to let them know if they see discrepancies, no one ever really demanded an explanation from Miami as to why they didn't say anything before Will actually got up on stage for indie finals. It can't be that they didn't realize he didn't read both Wednesday and Thursday. I know this for a fact. Also, later in the meeting, the person who initially got thrown out (starting the chain of events leading to Will getting thrown out) stood up to complain about how the bout officials handled it. Given that we nearly had a riot on our hands and diffused it, I find his perspective deeply unsatisfying.

But the focus of the meeting was on St. Louis. Michael and Kevin stayed to take the beating, Daniel wasn't there. Everything was covered, and I'm sure it had to be the worst couple of hours in Michael and Kevin's lives. It was horribly sad and excruciating.

Speaking of: only 45 tickets sold for the finals as of noon today. Let's just say I don't feel compelled to get there early to get good seats.

Current Mood: Sick of St. Louis

Sunday, August 8, 7:38 am
Journal Title Entry: Would Prefer a Transporter; A Plane Would Do

Nationals is over, except for the hotel checkout and the tearful goodbyes. I'm glad so many people managed to have a good time despite the monumental fuckups, but to me, that just underscores that this event is turning more and more into a navel-gazing, self-congratulatory, poetry summer camp. Poets should have an expectation that an audience will come to see them, but the overall package we're offering, with an increasing number of mediocre-at-best writers and performers not filtered out through a regionals system that would allow the hardest-working and most accomplished teams to be at a Nationals, gives little impetus to bring audience back night after night. And at the risk of sounding like Grumpy Old Man, I'm sick of poets not being able to edit out their profanity when they find themselves on an outdoor stage in front of restaurants at Opening Ceremonies or at an outdoor stage which has been placed right next to a daycare center. Slam, at its core, is supposed to be about adjusting your performance of a poem to your situation to best suit it and to best reach the audience.

Also, if I hear anyone say they are "spitting" a poem one more time, I will throw up.

The absolute best thing about last night's finals was Team Normal's piece during the showcase. Not only was it cleverly written, and brilliantly meta, but it was creative and utterly innovative. It showed that there are other options despite the standard tropes so many of the poets are relying on. Finals, overall, was better than last year's: the hosting was crisper, and the poetry covered a wider range of the palette (though things skewed heavily toward X is Good/X is Bad, as opposed to the barrage of I Am A Real Poet poems that bloated last year's finals).

Hollywood won, opening with Rives doing "Deaf Poetry Slam," then doing two skit-like group pieces (one opened with mikes used as guns, with two black poets enacting an armed robbery -- only they demanded that you give up your poetry rather than your wallets; the other was a conversation between Mr. White and Mr. Black about race relations and whatnot), and finishing with Javon the Golden Child (that's what he calls himself). Denver finished second, and I really like them as people, but of their three team pieces, one borrowed heavily from "Prayer," a 1998 poem written by Matthew John Conley, and their piece about suburbia (suburbia is bad) was a bizarro-world version of "Tube," the television-themed piece that Hilary, Wammo, Danny and I did in the Hindenburgian '96 Finals. It felt like "I Love the 90s" had suddenly crept in.

St. Louis claims we had 1200 total in the theater; I'm guessing it was more like 750, which means there were 300-400 paying customers in the audience. With the kickback they're getting from the hotel, they may actually break even, though I know they're raw about the registration money going to PSI rather than to the host city.

I talked to EC members about the Miami situation. The way they tell it, it was more of a comedy of errors where Will was shepherded along to indie finals an hour before it started, with Miami's slammaster assuming some concession had been made to Will for being thrown out of the Thursday night venue. They seem totally at ease with their decision, claiming it to be the tournament director's honest-to-goodness mistake, and since he's a nice, sweet guy that works hard, they might even be assuming that most of us will look the other way. Of course, if we hadn't adopted a system that now makes it optional rather than mandatory for a poet to perform each night, we wouldn't have even opened up to this possibility. Will there be improvements made to how we process information from the bouts, or will we continue to put four different people's scoresheets in a plastic tub and have a single person inputting the data in a hotel conference room at 1 in the morning?

It probably also helps that the 11th-place poet kept out of the competition, rather than being someone well-established in the community, is a first-year poet from Lexington who, at the slam family meeting, in a classy move destined for Slam Family Low Moment Annals, compared his not getting into finals to "child molestation." Um, no. That's not figurative language you're allowed to use. Of course, he got to read in the showcase, to make up for Friday's blunder.

Ultimately, I feel more like I have endured than enjoyed.

Current Mood: Utterly Defeated, Yet Willing to Buy a Souvenir Snowglobe, So Long As It's Ugly

Viva: The Socially-Condoned and Yet Still Mildly Transgressive Art of Loving Las Vegas

The sunrise in Las Vegas is not like sunrise in the rest of the world. Which is quite fortunate for the rest of the world.

You see, for most of the world, sunrise is the most purposeful time of day. For most of the world, save for the poor souls working night shift, morning is get-at-it time. The first few lemon-yellow rays appear in the east, the twittering machine of birds starts up, lights click off as punctuation. They're all signals to get moving, to start a new day, to brew coffee and read the paper and embark on whatever rituals we've adopted in the dubious but crucial goal of getting from a prone position on a bed to an upright position in an office.

If you've been to Las Vegas, you know that sunrise is the one time of day Las Vegas looks completely out of synch with itself. Yes, if you look hard at the hotels along the Strip, you can still see signs that life exists in the way we'd expect it to in Vegas. Cab drivers are moving tourists out of the hotels, with the implicit promise they'll be moving more in later in the day. A few stragglers, presumably placing their faith in a law of averages that rewards their tenacity, are seated at slot machines in windowless and massive hotel lobby casinos. You can even see a few people who have taken it upon themselves to honor some unspoken code of Vegas, literally partying all night, retreating to their hotel rooms. Some of them even manage to not look bleary and shaky doing so.

For a city that prides itself on nightlife and makes its fortune on gambling and is awash in thousands upon thousands of electric lights, sunrise is a caesura more than an event. It's when Vegas is least like Vegas, and is more like any other decent-sized American city in which people struggle with their alarm clocks, fumble their way to consciousness, and fill the air with smog on their way from the house to the job.

Of course, to most of those who visit Vegas each year -- the literal millions of them -- they're not likely to see sunrise. This is probably one of the few times in their lives they not only get to sleep in, but feel they are expected to.

Even if you tell yourself you're merely in observation mode, and you're driving around Vegas at sunrise with the resolve to not get sucked in by Vegas's temptations (and the resultant smugness that comes with it), know that Vegas is aiming one of its sequined arrows at your heart. It knows you have a weakness -- that there is something base and carnal within you that cries out for fulfillment. The billboards will seek you out. There are seven deadly sins. If it's not a high-level vice like sex or gambling, maybe it's something on the order of hobnobbing with Klingons at the Hilton's Star Trek: The Experience or eating a sushi dinner.

At nightfall, Vegas truly becomes Vegas, blotter-thick with images that either find their way onto postcards or are judiciously airbrushed from postcards: the lights, the buffets, the rows of street urchins clicking their escort services ad cards in the hopes you will make eye contact with them (which pretty much dooms you to taking one, and you only make that mistake once), the come-hither enticement of rows of slot machines, and come to think of it, the slippery-voweled double entendre of "loose slots."

At nightfall, Vegas becomes the full manifestation of Vegas. Vegas the city becomes Vegas the archetype. At sunrise, Vegas is something else entirely, but it's still not nearly as dormant as the majority of its tourists are.

Vegas at sunrise, you see, is not resting. It's reloading.

I’m sure this is not a novel thesis, but it’s one that bears repeating and reinforcing, so we can better understand our nation’s love affair with Las Vegas – the love that makes the little desert outpost that is McCarran International Airport the eighth busiest airport in the world. Las Vegas, even without a major sports franchise [1], even though it is currently ranked between Louisville and Jacksonville as the 51st largest media market in the nation, is the ultimate American city. New York might have the history and the melting pot, Los Angeles may have the most fertile climate for rags-to-riches ascent, Washington D.C. is the seat of power, and a number of cities would lay claim to being the most representative of the current America or the new, burgeoning America, depending on what thesis on America circa 2004 you’re trying to forward. But nowhere is the drive to consume, defended to the death as the pursuit of happiness, more evident than in Las Vegas – which makes Las Vegas, to me at least, the ultimate American city.

Vegas is where countless Americans come to play, and though there's not the sense that you can find everything you want in Vegas, like there is New York, there's definitely the sense that you can have your pleasure sensors suitably sated and diverted by its range of offerings. Chances are, you're not going to find that obscure album you've been scouring the bins of your mid-American record stores for in Las Vegas, but that same desire to be entertained will be filled by a stage show which will attempt to justify its ticket price in a sheer display of over-the-topness.

Go down the list of the fancier Strip hotels, and you can tick down the fantasy locations of a broad cross-section of Americans, depositing them in their choice of comfortable, dangerless recreations of where they'd most like to be. The Paris, the Monte Carlo, and the Venetian all conjure up images of a well-to-do, come-on-in-Americans version of Europe which may not be so welcoming in the George W. Bush era. The Mirage is a mélange of tropical settings which, through a name suggesting the windows of the imagination, isn't bound by any sort of geographical assignation whatsoever. The Excalibur, Caesars Palace and the Luxor opt for taking the guest back to a time in which their setting was the most desirous location to the people of that epoch -- certainly similar to how Americans view the United States of today. The Bellagio, though it hints at an Italian theme, seems to shoot for an aesthetic based on pure wealth.

If you look closely at the signs in front of what will become Wynn's, the newest and shiniest of the Strip hotels, you can see construction permit signs that read "La Reve." According to the Vegas native who served as my de facto tour guide for my last trip to the city, La Reve was too obscure and too hard to pronounce for most everyone, so developer Steve Wynn, the force behind Bellagio, Mirage, and Treasure Island, in a move hinting at both frustration with our plebeian ways and a Napoleonic ego, slapped his own name on the project and left it at that.

Steve Wynn is responsible for maybe my favorite juxtaposition of highbrow and lowbrow in the city -- the Wynn Collection. The museum, on the site of the former Desert Inn, features a dozen or so works by the likes of Picasso[2], Gauguin, and Matisse. You'd know this, even if you weren't an art aficionado, because the jumbotronic LED sign out front, which looks like it wouldn't be at all out of place fronting a suburban strip mall, scrolls through a series of messages:

Works by
Pablo Picasso (flash, flash)
Paul Gauguin (flash, flash)
Henri Matisse (flash, flash)

Here, on a giant tacky sign on a street resplendent with giant tacky signs, in a city resplendent with giant tacky signs that all ache to be giant tacky signs with Las Vegas Boulevard addresses, some of the most admired painters of the 20th Century are relegated to the same mode of advertising as $5.99 dinner specials and "loose slots." The sign would not look out of place at the aptly-named Terrible's Casino, as a matter of fact.

But the giant sign reminds you that it is, in fact, Steve Wynn's ragingly expensive art collection housed here, and even though the gallery exterior is slight on ambience, he does lord over works by some of the undisputed masters of 20th Century Art. And you're not likely to forget it. After all, Wynn Collection.

If you're in the mood for more aptly-curated, ragingly expensive art, you can wander over to the Venetian, walk under its very pink, very garish, very frescoed and not-quite-authentic-looking ceilings, and go to the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum, which boasts collections that wouldn't at all be out of place at the Whitney or MOMA. And then, in the spirit of having it all, you can walk for three minutes and plop down at a Wheel of Fortune slot machine, letting the lights and the hysteria and the promise of a magic, jingly pull suck you in.

--

It wasn’t always like this, of course. Las Vegas was connected to railway by 1905, and what became known as Glitter Gulch, the downtown enclave of casinos now firmly entrenched as the Strip’s tacky, embarrassing older brother, sprang up in the following decades. The hotel-casino concept started in Las Vegas with the Rancho El Vegas in 1940. The Flamingo, the first of the Strip hotels still around today, opened in 1946. The Riviera was the first of the Strip high-rises, built in 1955. Before that, the relatively squat Desert Inn, with a third-floor “skyroom,” was considered the place to go for a panoramic view of the city and the surrounding valley. The Rancho El Vegas began booking stars in 1941 to begin entertaining guests, and topless showgirls made their debut in 1957. A century earlier, Mormons settled in the area, later abandoning their modest adobe homes due to Indian raids. There’s still a sizable Mormon population in Las Vegas, even though there may be no worse place on Earth to be Mormon. [3]

When I announced to acquaintances living in Vegas that I was writing an essay about Vegas as the ultimate American city, even though I was doing so online, I could see the dramatic eye rolling and hear the expelled sighs that accompanied their online responses. The message could be summed up to say, "Here we go again," and indeed, they want to point out something that was clearly evident from driving off the Strip and into its residential clusters -- Vegas is not a 24/7 party for most of its residents.

There are not showgirls hanging out on every corner waiting to do a lavish musical number when the light changes from red to green. They wanted to make clear that Vegas is full of normal people having normal lives, in the same way that people from Dallas want to clarify that not everyone in Dallas wears a cowboy hat and lives on a ranch, in much the same way that people from Detroit want to point out that not everyone in Detroit lives in crumbling tenements and get around by stealing other peoples' cars.

Indeed, if you drive east of the Strip, past the airport, for about 10 or 15 minutes, you pass Henderson and then go into the heart of Green Valley, a 13,000-acre master planned community that is as lush and green and SUV-compatible as any other upscale suburban enclave you can picture in your part of the country.

Its primarily tourist attraction is the Ethel M. Chocolate Factory and Cactus Garden, which is exactly as advertised. You can tour the chocolate factory in a brisk ten-minute walk, browse in the gift shop (where the tour ends up, naturally), and then stroll outside to the cactus garden on the grounds, which allows you to learn more about indigenous desert plants than you ever thought possible with a box of chocolate tucked under your arm.

Green Valley, perhaps more than anything else in Vegas, hints at a normalcy along the lines of, say, a suburb in Phoenix, which might be as staidly normal as America gets. But this being Vegas, the normalcy feels worn more than owned -- an Epcot version of normal, a normal that looks as thematic and carefully contrived as anything on the Strip.

There are, after all, slot machines in the grocery stores in Vegas, newspaper vending machines full of escort services publications lining arterials well off the Strip, and fanciful backdrops of the Strip skyline behind the anchors delivering the local news. Many of Vegas's residents want to be thought of as normal people living in a normal city, but there's only so much of a case you can make for it before you say, "Yeah, but" and demand a local takes you to see Wayne Newton's house. Though some might refuse, others will invariably oblige, a little proud that they can lay claim to something that, while kitschy, is actually oddly iconic. [4]

Incidentally, the Wayne Newton house, which is really an estate called Shenandoah, is on that drive between the Strip and Green Valley at the corner of Sunset Road, a major east-west arterial connecting the Strip and the freeway to the eastern reaches of the Vegas Valley, and Pecos Road.

Shenandoah is in that uniquely conflicted realm between tasteful and tasteless that seems to be quintessentially Vegas and not really anything else. It wants to invoke the majesty of a Kentucky thoroughbred ranch, and at the same time, it wants its gilded golden gates and its placard-bearing public art.

To give you some indication of the sort of world we're in, Mike Tyson's house is about a block down Pecos, and it's infinitely more tasteful, the sort of house that gives me house envy (and my tastes run toward the clean and uncomplicated, just so you know). The only thing that even began to reveal the eccentricities of the owner inside was the rows of portable outdoor heaters along the walkways, strategically placed so Tyson could theoretically walk around the grounds of his house without experiencing a moment of cold; I can't say that's a particularly bad thing at all.

And we're not even in Vegas here -- we're in Henderson, where Vegas tries hardest to assert its normalcy, its just-like-youness, its anonymity. And yet, in this unassuming part of the metropolis, an instantly recognizable pop icon could call out "Hi, neighbor" and wave to one of the most notorious public figures of the last quarter-century, and then go back into his walled estate in preparation for another night of entertaining tourists from all over the world in a theater that bears his name.

With me, at least, the "we're just like you" argument isn't flying.


--

In a city where most of the tourist activity focuses on a single street, it's not surprising that so many of the Strip hotels want to control the vertical as well as the horizontal. The Bellagio has an elaborate series of motorized fountains in its massive pool fronting the Strip sidewalk. Every fifteen minutes, the Bellagio puts the fountains to work in a show marrying a song (could be Sinatra, could be Celine Dion, could be the National Anthem, could be anything emblematic and in broad brushstrokes really) with a synchronized dance of water jets. From across the street, at the Paris, one can see the show from the outdoor café terraces or from the air in the half-scale Eiffel Tower model.

The Stratosphere Tower, at 1,149 feet, is the tallest observation tower in the United States. Because it wouldn't be enough to have the tallest building in Vegas, the observation deck, at over 900 feet, boasts a roller coaster, a ride called the X Scream which basically dangles its riders over the side of the tower and then -- perversely -- stops there to let you peer at a potential death-by-falling, It also features a ride called the Big Shot which takes you 160 feet above the observation deck at a force of 4 Gs. It would seem that sadists got together to decide what attractions would be placed at the Stratosphere, though you can already see that someone in some marketing Gulag assigned to promote these rides would refer to fans of this sort of thing as "ultimate thrill-seekers."

And finally, the winner of the Sky Sweepstakes may be the Luxor -- built as a giant pyramid with a replica of the Sphinx of Gaza out front -- which projects a toxically-bright beam of light from its top triangular windows to the heavens once night falls. I'm no physics major, so I have no idea if there's a point where the light just dissipates to nothingness. I assume it does. Maybe it does go to infinity. I feel I should know this, and I feel like a failure for not being able to conclusively state where the Luxor's light stops. All that really matters from a Vegas standpoint, though, is it reaches higher than anything else on the Strip, and if you're out on the eastern edges of town, past the airport, toward the fringes of Ostensibly Just Like You-land, you can see it. It sure as hell reaches higher than the Stratosphere Tower does.

--

The hotels themselves, from personal experience and reports from other friends, shape up this way: opulent, grandiose lobbies that give way to hotel rooms with sumptuous bathtubs and views resplendent with neon streaking. Which sounds good, except Vegas hotels also tend toward bed-pillow ensembles that don't so much beckon you to sleep a languid sleep as they do forcibly recharge you for another day of gambling. They also fuel you in the form of in-house restaurants that carboload you to absurd levels of satiation for considerable prices. Cheap buffets can be found if you look hard enough, though it's clearly in the spirit of getting what you pay for.

Your idea of romance has to encompass an ability to laugh at kitsch together; fortunately, this works out quite well for my wife and me. But Vegas, at some point in the proceedings, would really rather have you peel off from one another, perch you side by side at slot machines, and let you have at it. After all, Vegas is not built on letting you hole up in a hotel room that can be had for as little as $79 a night.

There's also shopping to be had, with the two best examples being the Forum at Caesars Palace and the Grand Canal Shoppes (sic) in the Venetian Hotel.

The Forum, though it has a wide assortment of stores housed under a fake Roman setting complete with columns and a vast, ice-blue sky filled with puffy cumulus clouds, doesn't necessarily have to be walked through to get the full effect -- you can do that just as well by watching what might be the consummate Vegas movie, Showgirls. There's a critical scene in which Elizabeth Berkley's Nomi Malone character bonds with Gina Gershon's Cristal Connors character while enjoying a ridiculously indulgent lunch at a "patio" table on the Forum walkway, contrasting their good fortune with the particular brand of dog food they both favored in considerably leaner times, to make the rags-to-riches nature of their story just that much more blatant.

The movie casts Vegas as a sort of purgatory, and at the end of the movie, when Nomi leaves Vegas behind after committing a horrible-but-justified (in this setting, at least) crime, hitching a ride to Los Angeles, L.A. becomes cast as heaven. No, scratch that. Vegas is cast as sort of a reverse purgatory, where, once you've adequately blackened your soul, you are expelled into the bowels of hell -- here, Los Angeles in all its plastic, money-grubbing horror. The subtle undercurrent message of the movie (if such a thing can be said for the movie that put Joe Eszterhas on the map) is that Vegas is able to tart up the grit enough to keep it from being a Boschian landscape of soot-encrusted hard luck stories. The Forum at Caesars Palace is one of these freshly-painted tableaus hoisted up to hide the treachery and inevitable fall from grace that L.A. is notorious for. But then again, I'm not a big L.A. fan.

The Grand Canal Shoppes, on the other hand, demand to be walked through -- or better yet, demand to be journeyed through in a gondola steered by some minimum-wage lackey in a festive striped shirt, to get the full effect. Yet there is one on-screen moment that allows one to get the sense of the onslaught that is the GCS without actually setting foot (or splashing down) inside it.

Through some odd coincidence in which televisual life synchs up with your lived life, my wife and I saw the Regis Galerie segment of the Michael Jackson BBC special only several hours after walking though the real Regis Galerie ourselves. If you recall, there's a scene in which Jackson takes now-notorious documentarian Martin Bashir through Regis Galerie. Jackson proclaims the store, located in the Grand Canal Shoppes, as his favorite place to shop.

Regis Galerie specializes in Hideous and Overpriced Art -- a lot of bronze, a lot of splashy paintings -- the type of place where they don't mind throwing around terms like "giclees." You do not want to break anything in this store, and unless you tend toward the gem-encrusted or the ornate, you probably do not want to buy anything in this store. It's like Versailles without the necessary spacing -- everything is clumped together in rows, with aisles far too narrow to be reasonably sure you won't catch your foot on the corner of something that will cost you $10,000 in a dangerous game of You Break, You Buy.

You can see why Michael Jackson would like a place like this. Remember, this is a man who tends toward sequins and gold trim and get-ups that make him look like a general in the Army of Oz. Even with his current legal troubles, he still strikes me as the celebrity most likely to wear a crown in public. So I can't imagine why he wouldn't find Regis Galerie attractive.

Is it too reductive to reduce the entire shopping complex into what might arguably be its most narrowly specialized store? Perhaps. Yet when it comes to crystallizing the horrors of more-money-than-taste that can be had at the GCS, I keep flashing back to that scene in the Bashir movie, brilliant in its ability to catch Michael Jackson in a swoon over art that, despite its hundreds of hours to make and thousands of dollars to buy, would set any good normal American, even those who make the pilgrimage to Vegas to nibble from Eve's apple, into icy recoil.

--

Of course, there's a whole other route to excess in Vegas that doesn't require a continual hemorrhaging of money, but rather, one hefty payment upfront, and that's the Vegas show. The stage shows, as you might expect, are elaborate affairs that try to dazzle and overwhelm. Any attempt to connect on an earnest level seem doomed for failure, though Rita Rudner has carved out a niche for herself at New York New York that I imagine few could have predicted. Celine Dion, on the other hand, was probably on a trajectory for her own Vegas show from the time her emotive-yet-manly flexing moves entered her onstage repertoire.

With Siegfried and Roy on permanent hiatus, an impressionist/singer named Danny Gans (who shared face time with S&R in Mirage's full-court-press billboard campaign) is now ruling the Mirage [5], and the Amazing Jonathan, who appears to be a rougher, more plebian version of Gans, features at the Flamingo. You can, reductively, still group most of the Vegas show set into three categories: B and C-List Stars In Freefall, Multi-Taskers You've Never Heard Of, and Elaborate Stage Shows With Complete Unknowns (Featuring Breasts). But then you have to also figure in Cirque de Soleil, and that has completely changed the landscape of Strip hotel entertainment, thank God.

Currently, Cirque de Soleil is ruling the roost in Vegas, show-wise, and that's really not a bad thing. There are three official CdS shows currently running -- Mystere, at Treasure Island, which appears to be the most run-of-the-mill of the three; Zumanity, at New York New York, which is adult and racy and apparently so pointedly ribald that Paris Hilton walked out on it, according to Local Tour Guide after one of the troupe members pointed to her table and said, "Here's where all the prostitutes sit;" and O, at the Bellagio, which is of such a startling scale that it probably merits an essay all to itself.

Cirque de Soleil does not translate to TV, although the Bravo cable channel certainly tries by airing CdS specials whenever it's not airing Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. This is especially true of O, a show involving 81 performers, a deluxe theater at the Bellagio with a 1.5 million gallon tank of water with moving sections of floor, constantly shifting from pool to stage to stage with sections of pool. The whole show is stunning, and given that our tickets were $150 each (when my wife and I went), it's a good thing that it is so stunning. Even the opening unfurling of the curtain is orchestrated to be stunning. There are some vague themes and emotional tones in the piece, but if you broke it down and analyzed it, I think you would only make yourself sick, so really you should just watch it and enjoy it for the eye candy it is. And at the risk of sounding like a bourgeois consumer that can't quite make it to highbrow, you need to see this show when you're in Vegas -- yes, you, dear reader -- than for no other reason but to have this remain at one end of your theater spectrum. For the other, you should see a single actor perform Wallace Shawn's The Fever. Those are probably the most extreme theater poles you could seek out. [6]

Of course, you don't have to spend a Benjamin or more to see Vegas at its most over-the-topability. If you're going to see one schlocky, free piece-of-crap production, I heartily suggest The Sirens of TI, an elaborate 20-minute stage show designed for public consumption (sort of) which also doubled as the opening PR gambit in Treasure Island's transformation into TI.

Back when Treasure Island was Treasure Island, they'd do a show out in front of the hotel where the pirate ship sinks the British ship. The show was predictably thematic, full of yo-ho-hoing and appropriately festooned with skull-and-crossbone flags and eyepatches. Treasure Island is now -- avast! -- trying to remake itself into something younger and sultrier, in order to compete with the other hotels. Ergo, TI. But unfortunately for them, the TI logo has arrived on its giant light-up sign out front looking vaguely like the opening card on a children's video, and the calling card for TI has turned into a show that strives to be, above all else, babelicious.

There's still a pirate ship in The Sirens of TI, but it's placed in more of an adversarial role. Indeed, the show is essentially a chance to get away with as many clumsy sexual allusions as possible and sink a boat in the process. We start with voice over announcing that it's the 69th day at sea for the pirates (see, not subtle), and a cabin boy alights upon the deck of the Sirens' boat. The Sirens establish themselves early on, through dancing and costumes in the opening number, for lack of a better term, as hotties.

They establish their characters, and the character of the show, early on. The leader of the Sirens, Cinnamon, asserts that you can call her "Cin" (wink, nudge), and makes it a point to inform the audience about all the "seamen" she's brought into her "cove." (I wish I were kidding.)

It goes on from there to feature babe dancing, the emergence of the pirate ship, babe boasting, babe dancing, some pyrotechnics, the sinking of the pirate boat, and pirates boarding the deck of the siren boat for pornographic cavorting about. The music's horrible, too -- a collision of rock and schlock, truly outrageous in the cartoonish way that Jem (obscure '80s reference) was truly, truly outrageous.

It's as if the producers said, "Okay, here's a concept: let's make a show that's reeaaaally bad ... but we'll say it's good!" Clearly, though, there's something great about the show, if I can give you a cursory "Go see O" without describing a single scene, and yet painstakingly break down the Sirens show plot point by plot point. What's great about Sirens is this: people stay through the whole thing. Stunningly, some video tape it. As in record. The whole thing. I joked to my wife, in the post-show, shaking-our-heads analysis, that if I was recording it, I'd be a few minutes into it and go, "Ohhh, okay ... never mind," and pull the camera down.

But not these people. They were dutifully filming the whole thing. You would think that's nothing special, since, you know, Vegas, tourist, videocameras. Yet this phenomenon is rarer than you'd think in Vegas. I didn't see a lot of the compulsive videotaping people you'd expect at other tourist destinations.

I'm guessing that, other than the fact that a spinning slot machine doesn't translate well to the small screen, especially if it's spinning for several hours at a stretch, it's because people are indulging in behaviors they might not want recorded. The new motto for Vegas (this is the official motto, mind you, from their CVB) is "What Happens Here, Stays Here." By that line of reasoning, if you record it, it goes with you.

And I think, really, Vegas resists recording. It has to be experiential. You can't adequately film the adrenaline roller coaster that accompanies slot machine reverie or blackjack gaming or the tense, sinister-looking game called Pai Gow Poker, which involves some cryptic mix of cards and dominos, played by some of the most focused people in the casino, who also happen to be the people who look most like bit players in Bond movies.

And I'm pretty sure you can't just take a video camera into one of the many strip clubs in Vegas, speaking of what happens here stays here. Someone was telling me there's something like 28 strip clubs in Vegas, and though I don't know it empirically, I'm willing to guess that there's a whole other archetype in Vegas -- namely, the archetype that sports radio talk show host Jim Rome likes to call the This Stripper Really Likes Me Guy.

During my last stay in Las Vegas, there was a news story about a hearing involving Dennis Rodman, who got a DUI for wrecking a motorcycle in front of a strip club called Treasures. I saw enough billboards and alt-weeklies and heard enough sports talk radio during the trip to get a sense that the This Stripper Really Likes Me Guy is well taken care of in Vegas.

Again, it makes sense -- a sort of deductive reasoning sense -- in Vegas. In our society, sex is still largely in the realm of the forbidden, and strip clubs effectively make sex commerce, put a price tag on human contact, and in the relatively brief interchanges in which dancers and customers, meet, talk, carve out what appears to be a temporary, mutual semblance of love, and consummate the illusion via lapdance, the feeling like love becomes a commodity itself. And then, with relative tidiness, the dancer moves on to create similar connections with other customers, and the customer can walk out of the establishment and back to his life again, wearing the cloak of anonymity most of us wear.

(Or, if you're not anonymous, like Dennis Rodman is not, you can just wreck your motorcycle in front of the strip club and add to your already inflated and even tired bad-boy lore with maximum effectiveness, for what in our culture says bad boy more than hangs out at strip clubs, sports tattoos, and rides a motorcycle?)

The strip club makes sense in Vegas, more so than it does in Oklahoma City or Indianapolis, or in my hometown of San Antonio, which has recently passed a new set of rules banning dancer-customer contact as part of a moralist campaign that has also placed new regulations on one of the other permissible evils of our day and age: smoking. San Antonio isn't alone in setting up special rules around strip clubs, and in any other American city but Vegas, rules set up to regulate strip clubs is not a particularly shocking development.

But Vegas reasons that there's nothing wrong with it. In a world where everything is reduced to crass commerce, why not the courtship ritual and a grinding intimacy, too? I imagine, that if our technology ever produces a marketable, consumable virtual sex arcade, Vegas will become the place to test drive it. Like the indoor skydiving room just off the Strip, like the jousting tournaments at Excalibur, like the close encounters with Klingons at the Hilton's Star Trek: The Experience, Vegas wants to take what might reside in the more fantasy-laden realms of your imagination and vivify them into glaring Technicolor reality. Not even decorum need be an obstacle, the 28 gentlemen's establishments of Vegas seem to tell you in one throaty voice, as long as you create a culture of permission. After all, as even the CVB tells you, what happens here, stays here.

--

But Vegas is not just a magnet for degenerates looking to escape their lives, to exchange their gritty existences for elaborate fantasies. I would say that a majority of the millions of tourists who come through each year are here to, mechanically and with purpose, play games of chance in the hopes of making money. And so, we can't really talk about Vegas without mentioning the Octogenerian Slot Machine Players.

They're an archetype unto themselves, and as with other Vegas archetypes, they only become archetypical in the rarefied air of Vegas. In their normal, day-to-day lives, they're pleasant, retired people, many of them fussing over grandchildren and living humble but comfortable lives on savings accumulated through years of hard work, aided by buying into a real estate market more conducive to creating a nest egg and building for one's future than today's double-income, debt-happy economy. My septuagenarian in-laws are perhaps the prototype for this brand of Vegas tourist. [7]

Several times a year, something stirs within the souls of the OSMPs, they make the pilgrimage to Vegas, collect a bucket with quarters (or, for the ultra-spendthrifty, nickels), find a favorable machine, and pull away. Some slot machines don't even have levers anymore -- you just push a button and watch yourself lose money/win money/break even, for hours at a stretch. Some smoke. Some drink. All achieve a glassy reverie at some point in the proceedings. Eventually, they return home, doing helpful things on the plane ride home like waking up Your Correspondent to see if he wants anything from the stewardess, even though he's clearly asleep, even though there's nothing in his slumping, snoring figure to suggest he thirsts.

Whereas there's a certain level of intimidation to the games of chance controlled by a hotel employee -- perhaps reminiscent of hollow-eyed carneys who preside over carnival midway games you know are stacked against you -- there's something about the rows of slot machines that are inviting by contrast. By telling someone to deal you in, or that you want to put a chip down on your lucky number in roulette, or that you want a turn at the dice, you're having to admit to another person (no matter how professional a countenance or no matter how neutral an expression that person is able to maintain) that you gamble.

Though your inner devil might say, "Of course you do, you're in Vegas, that's what you're here for," your inner angel might feed you full of Puritan messages about the evils of gambling. Vocalizing your desire to gamble to another human being, even one in the employ of a casino, might be enough to push that debate front and center.

But slot machines don't talk. They don't have to fight to maintain a poker face whenever you do something brilliant or do something stupid at one of the tables. They don't remind you of your pastor back home. They just sit there, rows and rows of them, with the latent promise that one of them is going to deliver.

Despite being set to randomly deliver jackpots at unpredictable intervals, OSMPs like my mother-in-law will claim there's a system to playing the slots. My father-in-law goes as far as to talk about how playing the slots successfully is "a lot of work." I tend to believe him, and because he's the type of man who will look forward to his home improvement projects and stretch them out over multiple days, puttering and fussing under the guise of "getting things just right" in order to make them last and even savor them, I think that he probably actually enjoys the "hard work" of playing slots.

So they work. They scout out machines that have been recently abandoned by players who spent interminable amounts of time pulling or pushing with no results. They themselves sit for hours, mechanically feeding coins into the face of the machine, hoping for the release of coins that you would hope could fend off orgasm metaphors yet really can't, especially when you see a jackpot winner's reaction, an outpouring of joy that derails a personal sense of modesty en route to unfiltered bliss.

Of course, it's not all work -- as I said earlier, some drink, which is a simple way of saying that gambling and drinking are helplessly intertwined. That's another reason I believe slot machines are so popular -- it dawns on you at some point in the proceedings at the blackjack table or the poker table or even the roulette wheel that alcohol may cloud your judgment and cause you to lose more money that you would while sober. But in front of the slot machine, you're not losing more money with every pull so much as you're investing the time necessary to work the law of averages to your advantage and win that money back. And then some.

Clearly, though, the mission of Vegas is to get you to drink while gambling -- hence, the scantily-clad cocktail waitress, who in most of the hotels look decidedly like a paean to a dying age: the Playboy Club Epoch. Though seemingly engineered to salve the various hurts of middle-aged men, the costumes, I think that maybe, perversely, the Greatest Generation set, now spending their golden years on Vegas vacations, might be the real target of the scantily-clad cocktail waitress outfit.

You see, the outfit is evoking the nostalgia of a bygone era, and by wearing the outfit as rendered during the time where today's septuagenarians and octogenarians were first middle-aged men in need of spiritual/sexual balm, it's reflecting that reassuring reminder of "the way things used to be, back when they were good." Note, though, that is still has the same effect on a certain percentage of today's middle-agers. For today's hipper, snottier generations, it has a different appeal, predicated on the same kind of anti-cool cool that explains a predilection toward trucker caps and Pabst Blue Ribbon.

In any case, it's not so much what the cocktail waitress is or isn't wearing, but rather, what they're parading around on their trays.

Alcohol is pretty much inescapable in Vegas. Though it's not quite a situation where you're handed a drink as you get off the plane [8], drinks can be had pretty much anywhere you please. On our recent trip, we went up to the observation deck of the Eiffel Tower at the Paris, a half-scale model of the real thing that allowed you to, among other sightseeing endeavors, see the Bellagio fountain show from overhead. One fellow tourist glibly noted, to whoever would hear him, that this was the only place in Vegas without a bar attached to it. In other words, pretty much everyone notices there's a lot to drink.

This brings me to another of my favorite Vegas archetypes, the I Can't Believe They're Letting Me Drink On The Street Guy, who is either carrying a can of crappy domestic beer from a second-rate hotel for $1 or is carrying a large drink in a tall souvenir receptacle. [9] I saw at least three plastic Eiffel Towers being consumed on my walks up and down the Strip, and saw none in my two nights inside the Paris. Why not? The only reasonable explanation is that I Can't Believe They're Letting Me Drink On The Street Guy migrates. Any chump can drink from a sitting position -- it takes the professional acumen of I Can't Believe They're Letting Me Drink On The Street Guy to drink while walking. Besides, it's no fun to advertise that you've actually been inside the Paris while sitting in the middle of the Paris. It's better to let the throngs gathered on LVB know where you've stayed. [10]

The funny thing is, you don't have to have that level of professional drinking acumen to pick up your drink and walk. The latent permissiveness of Vegas allows unsuspecting candidates to walk around brandishing a drink like a trophy. It's a way of saying to the world, "I work hard and fit in the vast majority of my life; I've earned this moment of unbridled hedonism." And, in our world, by safe and conservative middle-American rules, this is just the kind of thing that passes for unbridled hedonism. We're perfectly willing to let this slide under these circumstances. We even welcome it. None of us have probably ever witnessed the amiable drunk at a party actually don a lampshade and start dancing, but if one did, we would recognize the trope, and we would laugh about it (provided, of course, that we took his keys and called him a cab at the end of the night).

What the Vegas pilgrims have done, essentially, is made this former little desert outpost a place to absorb and hold an ever-increasing number of mildly transgressive behaviors. It's no accident, for instance, that the Las Vegas season of MTV's seminal reality show The Real World was a running soap opera of sex, bad choices and aberrant behavior, all set against the tableau of the Palms, an off-Strip casino which has become the home base of choice for twentysomething enfants terribles.

Forget, for a moment, that the show was later surpassed in sex and sordidness by the cast of Real World San Diego -- they merely had to answer the call put forth by the Vegas cast. [11] And it was Vegas itself that incited the cast to riot, to such ludicrous extremes that Trishelle Cannatella, the central figure of the RW Vegas season, became something of a professional reality show cast member, later assigned to drink on camera and titillate fellow cast member Ron Jeremy on the WB's aptly-named Surreal Life. Trishelle, as you might expect, morphed into such a quasi-celebrity that she never donned her last name for her subsequent reality show appearances. She became a mononym, a sure sign as any of disposable pop icon status.

--

Though Real World Las Vegas is a prime indication of how Vegas is trying to market to a new generation of people with a healthy disposable income, the Vegas metro area is no longer merely a nice place to visit.

Between 1990 and 2000, the largest metro area growth in the nation, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, was easily Las Vegas. Its population spiked an incredible 83% percent in that ten-year period; the next biggest jump was Naples, Florida, with 65%, and Yuma, Ariz., at just under 50%. This is not just a one-time spike. Since 1960, Vegas has grown from just under 140,000 people to its current 1.5 million plus, at astounding growth intervals. The population more than doubled in the 1960s and has been above 60% growth in each subsequent decade.

And the people just keep coming. The city's official site claims that the Vegas Valley could reach the two million mark by next year. Last month, the Las Vegas Sun reported that another million people are expected to be added to the city's rolls in the next two decades. The article glosses over why this growth is continuing, instead focusing on some of the concerns a massive growth explosion brings to the metropolis, such as the hard-to-overlook fact that Las Vegas sits in the middle of a desert, and that might make water a contentious issue as more people flock to the city to take advantage of what gets euphemized as "favorable business conditions."

What I can surmise, after trolling business development agency websites and various newspaper articles, is that Vegas is a great place to do business because the burden of taxation in Clark County falls largely on the millions of tourists who come through McCarran each year. The weather is nice. You're never at a loss for how to entertain your clients, and though you may grow weary of it, and mutter to yourself, "Yeah, yeah, Wayne Newton's house" as you drive first-timers past Shenandoah yet again, there's always someone who's going to be wide-eyed and appreciative, who will actually be impressed that he Lives Among Us, that you are so seemingly well-connected.

At the risk of being reductive yet again, businessmen like sun, they like golf, and they like being able to get a drink after work. Ergo, Las Vegas. And while the tourism industry remains the major engine driving Clark County (and by extension, Nevada, since Clark Country makes up a good 70 percent of the state population), there are people living in Vegas that have nothing to do, occupation-wise, with the hotels and the hordes of tourist who come to Vegas each year seeking several days' escape from the rules that normally corral them into stagnant routine.

And you can tell that even at sunrise: a desert sunrise in the first week of Advent in the Christian calendar, where the air is tingly with cold -- where it is crisp, invigorating, all those things you say about a cold that you welcome, a cold you want to believe was delivered to your vacation destination expressly for your enjoyment. You can look around and notice subtle hints of Christmas if you try, but it's different from other cities, where the march toward Christmas is relentless, where wreaths and ads and glad tidings come in battalions.

At sunrise, in the outer reaches of North Las Vegas, of Henderson, of picture-perfect Green Valley, in the parts of Vegas that don't look like our postcard-ready images of Vegas, it's showers and cereal as part of this complete, nutritious breakfast and commutes to work. But on the Strip, where the nerve endings of Vegas crackle and sing, there's a temporary stillness that seems unnervingly quiet and disarmingly out-of-character. The jingling and whirring in the hotel lobby casinos is at an off-kilter staccato, and hotel employees see it fit to break out vacuum cleaners and bottles of cleaning solutions.

In hours, these places will be readily transformed again, with people from Iowa, from Massachusetts, from Europe and Japan. Throughout the lobby, in enough myriad languages to remind you that this is now, for all intents and purposes, an international city, it will essentially be the same message. It will be tourists, the lifeblood of the city with all that that entails, here for the express purpose of shedding their inhibitions for a few precious days, trying to figure out which compulsory layer they'd like to peel off first.

###

Footnotes:

[1] The closest thing to a major professional sports team in Vegas is the Las Vegas 51s, a Triple-A baseball franchise which used to have the more mundane moniker of the Las Vegas Stars. The 51s is a play on Area 51, the rumored military-controlled alien research center. The team's mascot is one of those almond-headed, big-eyed alien prototypes, which, in a shocking development for new parents, is precisely what your child looks like through the ultrasound at three months -- pretty much the first time you can actually view what looks like a face.

[2] Wynn owns a Picasso piece named "La Reve," incidentally.

[3] The above historical information comes from Las Vegas Online Entertainment Guide's history page, which delves much farther into the role of the casino and the Strip hotel in Vegas's development than the city's official site does, although the city's official site does note that Spainards traveling through the Vegas valley in the 1700s referred to the trip as a "journey of death," which can't be good for tourism even if it is historically accurate.

[4] Like my tour guide for the trip, a food stylist who hosts a nationally-syndicated radio show, moonlights as a UNLV instructor, and is clearly in a gustatory, golf-playing love with Vegas.

[5] That's not to suggest that Gans was in cahoots with that white tiger or anything.

[6] Okay, so maybe now I look highbrow.

[7] Though, actually, they can stave off the siren song of Vegas by going on a lower-rent version of the Vegas pilgrimage -- the Louisiana pilgrimage. Louisiana, which is also a den of sin, features casinos in a number of the towns (Lake Charles, Kinder, Bossier City) bordering Texas. Native American-run casinos, even closer than the Louisiana border, also serve as a sort of morphine to the heroin of Vegas. But, somehow, Vegas always beckons.

[8] A la the '70s ABC drama Fantasy Island, which used the "give the guests their Mai Tais" scene as a regular device, showing them happy and relaxed just before they started their fantasy vacations, which (like a Faustian bargain) had specific intents and aims that would always go horribly awry.

[9] Though you're actually more likely to see I Can't Believe They're Letting Me Drink On The Street Guy in New Orleans. Or, at least, you'll see him there more exuberantly.

[10] And, really, when all is said and done, and you factor in the breakfast buffet and the bathtubs and the relative calm in its casino, the Paris is a fine place to stay.

[11] No way do we let San Diego beat Las Vegas in anything.

New Slam Piece: Noon in the Garden of Mostly Evil

It’s 11:15 in the morning, and my stomach and head are at war. It’s Day One of Phase One of the South Beach Diet revisited, which means I’m on a strict, imbibe-no-crap regimen. It’s also the day we take my co-worker to lunch for her birthday. The Birthday Lunch is a ritual that began when people lived in caves. You can see it on the walls at Lascaux – the piercing eyes of stick figure cavemen imploring, asking the birthday caveman how his mastodon tastes. He responds with a tentative grunt, self-conscious, polite. They make small talk and navigate uncomfortable pauses by taking keen interest in their food. Later, there’s cake.

Apparently, we have not progressed. The co-worker assigned to round up the troops lets us know the Birthday Lady has decided on Olive Garden.

Olive Garden.

Olive Garden, where I can eat exactly one thing on the menu, the Chicken Caesar Salad, and watch the rest of my table feed on sumptuous-smelling breadsticks. Olive Garden, where they serve you salad family style before bringing your meal, which means I will eat redundantly, salad followed by salad. Olive Garden, where the A/C is cranked to nipple-hardening, lip-numbing temperatures, where they bring you full glasses of iced tea rather than just fill your half-filled glass, leading you to feel a contractual obligation to drink more tea, where you are indeed a pawn in some waiter’s kill-the-lunchtime-boredom game of Customer Iced Tea Drinking Races, where the waiter will mention I look tired at lunch when, really, I look ripped-off and petulant, the result of being dragged, not exactly against my will but not exactly out of instinctual, let’s-eat-there impulse, to Olive Garden.

They seat seven of us at a ten-top and won’t seat us at the eight-top the next table over because that’s the “training section.” This means we are assuredly in the hands of professionals. Our professional waiter saunters over, suggestive-sells us drinks (we decline), suggestive-sells us appetizers (we decline), and hands us menus, thinking us cheap and unfestive, which is not altogether inaccurate.

I look at the menu, scan the items, confirming the worst. Carboload. Carbomax. Carblicious. Carbohydrate Surprise. Carb To My Lou. Carbeteria. Chicken Caesar Salad. Defeatedly, I place my order, and settle into a randomly-firing conversation about negligent boyfriends, mundane vacation spots, and death.

No matter how witty your co-workers, no matter how much lemon butter is drizzled over the main course chicken, no matter how quick and efficient your waiter, Birthday Lunch is the Hindenburg of lunch dates. If you live in an office with politics, they will edge the bare spots in conversation and poke through like weeds to sidewalks. If you cannot speak frankly and openly under the flourescent lights of your office, you are doomed to fail under the non-descript light of a chain restaurant.

Tempers will flare. Envy will lick its lips and look for a hand mirror. Ennui will take a silent roll through the gates in a giant wooden horse. Birthday Lunch will make you pine for other discomforting engagements, like College Reunion Karaoke Night, or Acquaintance Strip Club Bachelor Party, or Obscure Relative Closed-Casket Funeral.

And then, later, there’s cake.

If you are dieting, cake means watching other people eat cake. It means singing-in-public punishment and then declining cake reward. It means wearing a forced smile and drinking from a comically-oversized glass of water in a valiant effort to feel full, compliments on your willpower, tsk-tsk chiding from those who can’t resist pointing out, “You don’t know what you’re missing,” when, in fact, you do. It means 15 minutes of conversation with the entire office as difficult to predict as roulette. Could be boredom, could be agitation, could be earnestly funny and the highlight of the work day, could be harrowing cryptic precursor to layoffs and reassignments and general work-related doom.

At the point in the proceedings you wish your parents were there, so you could ask to be excused from the table, you may beg off and return your cubicle and let your email and your homepage of choice and your personalized screensaver soothe you back into the space that is no longer shared, to the refreshing consolation that though no man is an island, sometimes, you get to be relatively close to an island – perhaps, an isthmus.

And, if you are like me, you know that sometime in the next 364 days, the discomfort of the Birthday Lunch will be on your behalf. And if you are like me, you can’t predict the level of angst or boredom or restless fuss that will tether itself to your day. But you will know, at least, that you will have your pick of restaurants, and one guess as to where you won’t be dragging the rest of the office.

Stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before

(cross posted to The Symposium:)

I remember it all too well. Several days before the tension-filled Election Day 2000, in which conservatives feared the Gore hydra head would sprout from the Clinton neck, and liberals feared the return-to-fascism movement sure to result from electing Bush II: Electric Boogaloo, one of my friends sent me a blog link that laid out just how the election could end in a tie.

Preposterous, I thought, until I actually squinted at the numbers and saw just how such a break was within the realm of possibilities. The states in play could have, with just the right nudges here and there, dispensed the 538 electoral votes evenly, 269 for each side.

Of course, we ended up with something far worse: the limbo in Florida, which effectively put the election into the hands of the nine Supreme Court justices. In other words, when Bush the Elder was effectively able to imbue the Clarence Thomas hearings with an innocent-until-proven-guilty climate more suitable for a courtroom (which it felt like) rather than a job interview (which it actually was), he was setting the table for the deciding vote that would, about a decade later, allow his son to take over the ultimate family business.

The country, for better or for worse, healed from the mess of the elections, and Bush was inaugurated with no more glee from the winning side or bitterness from the losing side as in past elections – the losing side invoked more robbery motifs this time around, but do you really think the left hated GWB any less than the Bush with four initials or Reagan or Nixon? The continuum of jealousy and hate for the losing side just transfers from elected candidate to elected candidate. The fact that GWB couldn’t even muster a popular majority made it a little worse, but in the end, he was our president, and it wasn’t like any buildings had collapsed or anything.

Actually, that came eight months after the inauguration, and in the crumbling ruins of the World Trade Center and the damaged wall of the Pentagon came the purpose of the Bush presidency. He went from ineffectual gee-whiz boy king to aggressive ideologue with conviction in several epoch-defining hours. Somehow, along the way, Bush has invaded and invoked a successful regime change in Afghanistan without finding the one person we wanted to find in the invasion, and has attempted and is currently floundering with regime change in larger, more advanced, and infinitely more complex Iraq.

That, in conjunction with a foundering economy that is only now, arguably, beginning to find its way again after two years of recession and three years of negative job growth, makes the 2004 election a referendum on Bush. As a staunch liberal, I’d like to think that this truly is a choice between Bush and Kerry, except Kerry has become something of a non-entity so far – merely a “not Bush” box to x or not x.

Kerry, to make a crass analogy, became the most convenient Democrat for the party faithful to bed, after we realized that Dean was too “hot,” as the pundits have labeled him, or as we like to call him post-scream post-Iowa, “totally crazy.” If this campaign was a night out on the town, Kerry was the one we started dancing with about 1 a.m. (Iowa), went home with for the night at closing time (Super Tuesday), and have now woken up next to at 9 a.m. on Sunday morning (mid-May polls, showing Bush and Kerry in a statistical dead heat), not quite sure if we should go out to breakfast with him or let him sleep, stuff our panties in our purse, and take the walk of shame back to our apartment. But we haven’t just had a one-night stand with him; we’ve pinned our hopes on him to somehow become the 44th President of the United States. We recognize his shortcomings, and yet, we’re stuck with him.

And now, we're just plain stuck -- the AP-Ipsos poll released last week show that there's a deadlock in electoral votes at this juncture, six months before the election. 205 votes seem to have been locked up by the incumbent, and 205 seem to have been locked up by the challenger. What we have left is 128 electoral votes, dispersed among 12 states, to be divvied up between the two people left, in a nation of 250 million, who have a realistic shot of seeing us through the next four years.

And no, Nader’s not a viable option. To the left, Nader is a galling presence, an egomaniac who is going to suck votes from the disenchanted left – votes that would otherwise have nowhere else to turn but to Kerry as the anti-Bush.

This is perhaps not a shocking revelation, but once again, the election might boil down to what happens in Florida. Other states are up for grabs, of course, and some of them, including the Pacific Northwest states and the Rust Belt states, seem like they might swing Kerry’s way. Arkansas, despite the Clinton residue, seems like it’s ultimately Bush territory, and even though Missouri and Iowa proved key states in Kerry’s walk to the nomination, they’re still so surrounded by Red America states that the peer pressure might swing at least one of them Bush’s way.

What we might see, ironically, for the second time in four years, is the winner of the popular vote losing the electoral vote. Unless something dramatic happens in the next six months (the capture of Osama Bin Laden, a drastic change of fortunes in Iraq, a dramatic spike in jobs gained or economic numbers), I’m seeing the American public remain polarized, and I’m seeing Nader’s possible jump to the Reform Party (which gives him access to the ballot in Florida, Michigan, and five other states) having a decisive effect on the total electoral ballots.

As we look to see polling numbers for New Mexico and Nevada in the coming months, as we bite our nails over the numbers coming out of Ohio and Florida, and as we’re ignoring three-fourths of the states under the assumption they are foregone conclusions, we’ll have plenty of opportunity to wring our hands about the electoral college system – particularly one set up for a 269-269 tie. On one hand, it’s brilliant, in that it forces candidates to go state-by-state, addressing myriad issues in a variety of American landscapes. But for voters like me, in perhaps the reddest of Red America states, in a city where we just voted down giving our mayor and city council members a livable wage by a 2-1 margin, in a Congressional district recently reconfigured at the behest of Tom DeLay, it feels as futile to cast my ballot for John Kerry in 2004 as it did for Al Gore in 2000.

In Florida and New Mexico, in the 2000 election, a college auditorium’s worth of itinerant drifters voting as a block could have shifted the presidency to Gore or shored up Bush’s numbers. I’m not saying voter turnout should include buses and cheap apartments for adventurous post-college wayfarers willing to live in Ohio long enough to punch a ballot a particular way, but if you live in Texas, California, the South, or New England, don’t expect many Bush/Cheney commercials to get in the way of your summer reruns.

If you live in the handful of states that will actually matter, though, steady yourself for the barrage. Kerry made a point throughout the primaries to talk about how much he loved Iowa. As one of the battleground states for ’04, he’s going to love it so much you’ll think he wants to marry it. And in the non-battleground states, we’ll get to hear every rhapsodic word from Bush and Kerry, and be jealous.

And as long as we don’t cheat on either of them with a Nader vote, they won’t care.