Fifteen Elvis Look-a-likes

Well, we’re still here in Las Vegas, been eight days now. We can’t seem to get it together to get back on a Greyhound and move on. Maybe we’re wasting time but I love being here and so does Yasmin.

When we first saw it from the bus it was dark and the lit-up skyline almost scared me – it just seemed to loom up from nowhere – I suppose it is in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the desert anyway. Everything in the States is huge, everything, food, shops, cities and distances. You can’t really take it in, not all at once.

Had a terrible hangover the second night we were here, so bad that I emailed Mum about it and she emailed back saying what could she do so many thousands of miles away? That was when I knew I was not a child any more, really not a child. I mean when I left for Uni in London, Mum was only a train ride away. I was terrified when I said goodbye to Mum and Dad outside Oxford Street tube and they helped me move in and Mum babied me all the way up in the car. I know I sound pathetic and I felt pathetic too. But I was worried about leaving Mum on her own, so it wasn’t just my feelings. Mum and Dad split up years ago and Mum is fine but still, I was her baby and I was moving on. But after that email in the middle of Las Vegas I knew I was pretty much grownup.

I keep trying to look beyond the city to see what’s out there – stupid - as if, by craning my neck and staring out of our window I could see that far but I have this longing to go out there and I looked up Wikipedia to get some history on las Vegas, even though Yasmin called me a boffin. I just keep feeling this kind of trembling under my feet, coming through the pavement (I s’pose I should say sidewalk) and you’d think it would be from all the electricity being generated to keep this whole place lit up like a massive fairground but it’s not that. Anyway, I read about how this was Paiutes land to begin with and I’ve always had a fascination for Native Americans (Mum was told by one of her new-age friends that she had a spirit guide called Blue Feather but I don’t get too involved in all that and Mum is a sceptical though deep down I think she believes it) And how awful what happened to them was – though they’re fighting back now and two guys who own a lot of land here are descendants of Paiutes Indians. Water is like gold here, the most valuable commodity, more valuable than money, and that’s so weird considering the amount of money that pours and in and out this place.

I phoned Mum yesterday and she laughed at the sound of the slot machines in the background and remembered me loving the ‘slots’ as a child. The ‘slots’, as I called them, were just some old fruit machines in the boathouse in Brecon, South Wales where we lived when we were kids, me and my sister, when Dad was still with us. So I had a love of flashing lights and the sound of ‘kerching’ from a young age and once had to have my hands prised from the railings at Chepstow horse races because I didn’t want to leave. Maybe gambling’s in my blood and I’ll become a professional gambler and never leave Las Vegas, ha!

It’s the morning of our tenth day and we still show no signs of leaving – I couldn’t anyway with such a hangover. Last night was the best so far. We were at Caesars palace, one of the original casinos in Vegas, (everyone’s heard of it all over the world of course so that won’t be news to anyone!). It is immense and you get kind of drawn into the fakery of it – the whole city’s like that – fake – but somehow not; what I mean is it’s supposed to be fake, it knows it’s fake so is it fake? I said this to Yasmin and she said it was too early and she was too hung over to consider such ‘existential’ matters – who’s the boffin now, with her big words and philosophy degree? Just joking.
Anyway, we were there and we’d had afew vodkas and we were dancing and in came fifteen Elvis’s; there are loads of Elvis look-alikes here and people who just dress like him in wigs and white suits covered in rhinestones but twelve all at once was something unusual and they were from Liverpool. I found it strange that I’d never been to Liverpool and never thought about it, yet here I am in Las Vegas, thousands of miles from England and had never been there, even though England is so tiny. They took the piss about this but none of them had ever been to Eastbourne (where I live now) but then why would anyone go there unless they had to? So they had a point. Anyway we all danced together, me, Yasmin and fifteen Elvis’s in Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA. Something to tell the grandkids, if I ever have any.

Yasmin’s homesick for Leeds today and her Mum’s lamb biryani which is the best thing for a hangover, or at least as good as a fry-up. I’m OK as far as homesickness goes, I think I had my bout of it when I emailed Mum before about my last hangover. So I went out and got Yasmin a burger and fries and some full-fat coke, then, when she’d had a shower and washed her hair I straightened it for her and she feels a bit better now. I love doing her hair – it’s so black and sleek and long, past her shoulders. She gets a lot of looks here because she’s beautiful and people are fascinated that she’s Asian. And she’s a really good friend to me, I know we’ll always be in touch whatever happens in our future lives.

While she was sleeping off her headache I went to the internet place and looked up some more about Las Vegas. I was looking for a trip out to the desert but couldn’t find anything but I found out about the Picasso Lounge and I really want to go there.

Yasmin was awake when I got back and we decided to go that night. So, after we’d eaten, we dressed up and went. It was amazing, they have real Picassos on the walls and they’re not even covered in glass and it was very strange amongst all this fakeness to see them.

Something else I learned is that Vegas started as a watering place for the Spaniards on the old Spanish Trail and then the railways came because of the mining and gradually it built up. The ‘mob’ started it really as a gambling place and then it just went from there. The mayor used to be the mob’s attorney – how weird is that?

I still want to go ‘out there’ and see the sunrise or sunset over the desert and look back at Vegas from there, try to see it as a whole. I don’t know why, maybe it’s because my life seems to consist of bits and pieces, parts of me still feel like a child and other parts are mature and I don’t know what’s next for me, I mean I know I will have to get a job, my own place and make some sort of mark on the world but how or what it’ll be, I don’t know. And somehow I think the answer’s out there. That’s probably a bit daft though, it wouldn’t be that easy, would it?

On the day before we left I woke up just before dawn, some noise woke me, not sure what it was, and then, in the distance, I could swear I heard a slow drumbeat and chanting like those tapes Mum’s got of Native Americans. Then I remembered how she used to say she heard women singing on the bridge opposite where we lived in Wales. Our house was near an old castle and there was a river running opposite the house. Mum said it was all the dead Welsh women singing for their men lost in Owain Glydywrs war against the English. I always thought she was a bit mad and laughed but now I’m not so sure. The chanting I heard sounded sad – was it for the land they lost? Anyway in the clear light of day I reckoned I’d imagined it but still it stuck in my mind.

We left three days later and I took a picture of the Vegas skyline from the Greyhound hoping I’d get the perspective right and that, in the future, I’d look at it and see something in it that I never saw when I was there. But it didn’t come out, it was one of those blurred ones – just a haze of red and blue. But I keep it in my desk at work and sometimes, when I’m really bored, I look at it in an unfocused way and I can see myself hovering over Las Vegas with a big neon question mark above my head.