Everything I Need to Know I Learned While Growing Up in Las Vegas
Everything I Need to Know I Learned While Growing Up in Las Vegas
Lesson 1: Things don't always work out as they are planned.
My mother never wanted to live in Las Vegas; she actually never wanted to leave the East Coast. She grew up in a small town right outside of Boston, Massachusetts. Her family had money problems, my grandparent are bad with budgets and have no concept of financial planning. Mom also had a sick sister. My Aunt Debbie had fetal diabetes back when doctors didn't know how to treat it. They gave her horse and pig insulin that made her go blind. It also slowed her body's ability to fight infections. Because of that, she got gangrene in both her legs and had to have them amputated at the knees. First her left, then her right.
The best doctor treating fetal diabetes in the country was in Las Vegas. He had one practice there, one in Los Angeles, and traveled back and forth. LA had a high cost of living, and with my grandparents' lack of fiscal skills, moving there was out of the question. But Vegas was booming at the time. Its growth spurt was just beginning and property was cheap. My grandparents decided to pack everything in two moving trucks and go cross-country.
My mother was going to school at Boston College. She graduated from high school a year and a half early, with honors, and enrolled in BC just before turning seventeen. Not only was she going to school, but she also worked full time. She was the breadwinner of the house after my grandfather lost his military job. Mom felt guilty about letting her family move across the U.S. She didn't think they could survive without her. And her sister was dying; she wanted to be there. In 1975, she dropped out of school and moved to Las Vegas with her family.
The University of Nevada Las Vegas wouldn't accept her. They said she was "too young" and couldn't possibly handle the workload. By 1977, the doctor bills forced my mother to work two jobs, but she planned to go back to college as soon as things slowed down and finish her undergraduate work in veterinary medicine. In 1979, she had me. Now she really couldn't afford to go back to school. Then, six years later, her sister died of "surgical complications." My mom planed to move back to Massachusetts the following year, but money complications, her parents, and the employment opportunities kept her in Vegas. Twenty-six years later, she's married with three kids, two dogs, and a townhouse. Not exactly what she planned.
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Lesson 2: Little boys are not the smartest things this planet has to offer.
Growing up where my friends and I did, we had to be creative when it came to entertainment. I grew up on Las Vegas Boulevard, the Strip, but about ten miles down from where the casinos started. In 1989, this part of Vegas was nothing but desert. The apartment complex we lived in was an old health spa community that had gone bankrupt in the early seventies and was later turned into a housing complex. It was an oasis in the desert, surrounded by endless landscapes of sand and rock. The closest thing to civilization was a 7-11 six miles up the road, much too far for the average nine-year-old to walk, especially in 110 degree weather.
For fun and excitement, my friends and I had to be imaginative. Luckily, the desert presented unlimited possibilities for us. At the library, we got a book on herpetology and learned how to make snake sticks out of a broomstick with a coat hanger hook taped to the end. The book also said to carry a pillowcase for the captive critters. Armed with this new knowledge and our makeshift snake stick, we would catch any kind or reptile we could find. Once we found a sidewinder rattlesnake under an old board. My friend pinned down its head with ...
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For fun and excitement, my friends and I had to be imaginative. Luckily, the desert presented unlimited possibilities for us. At the library, we got a book on herpetology and learned how to make snake sticks out of a broomstick with a coat hanger hook taped to the end. The book also said to carry a pillowcase for the captive critters. Armed with this new knowledge and our makeshift snake stick, we would catch any kind or reptile we could find. Once we found a sidewinder rattlesnake under an old board. My friend pinned down its head with the hook of our snake stick, so it couldn't strike. Then, being the "smartest" in the group, I picked it up, thumb on the head just as the book instructed, and put it in the pillowcase. We brought it to show my mother. She was less than pleased and had my stepfather drive us far out into the desert to release it, lecturing us the whole trip.
My friends and I would ride our bikes to a place we named "Dead Man's Jump," at eleven this sounded really cool. We would hide our bikes in the thorn bushes on the top of these eight-foot cliffs and then jump off the ledges into pools of soft sand. There were never any broken bones, but I landed on rocks hidden beneath the sand and had to be carried home on several occasions. And we had rock fights. That's right, we would run around, diving behind dirt hills, and peg each other with rocks. Miraculously, I only split my friend's head open once, and he didn't even need stitches. My friends and I all came out all right. We had plenty of scars, but we have great stories to tell our grandkids.
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Lesson 3: After growing up in Vegas, anything can seem normal.
On my first trip to California, at the tender age of six, I walked into a 7-11 with my mother and was completely confused. When we went to the counter, I asked the check out woman, "Where are the slots?" Looking back on this childhood scene, I realize that, when you grow up in Vegas, strange things become the norm. I grew up with slot machines in grocery stores, friends with moms who worked as showgirls, and twenty-four hour Taco Bells.
Being brought up in "The Entertainment Capital of the World" I got a great sense of tolerance and acceptance for things I don't understand. I've done things as strange as eating lizard at an Indian reservation right outside Vegas city limits and having my prom in Liberace's Mansion. I don't think I would have such an open mind if I hadn't grown up in a place where a Joan Rivers impersonator named "Mr. Rich" directed my school play. Now, very little shocks or bothers me. I thought nothing about the biggest bouncer at the club I work at in Chapel Hill, North Carolina being bi-sexual or that my apartment is a half mile from the Rail Road Triple X. It just feels like home to me.
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Lesson 4: Nothing will clear a street like a blind man walking.
Walking up and down the Strip on a weekend night can be much more trouble than it is worth. I've had nights where absolutely nothing has happened; and I've had nights where a drunken bachelorette group was asking guys with Calvin Klein underwear to strip for them on the street. My friend made twenty bucks in tips. The only constant is that it's going to be crowded. I spend more time dodging and weaving between tourists than I do watching the happenings of the Strip. I almost didn't notice a limousine of showgirls drive by and flashing the crowd. Who knows what I actually did miss?
That was until a wrestling teammate and I decided to spice up a particularly boring night. We grabbed a pair of sunglasses and a cheap, white "pimpin'" cane from a souvenir store and played blind man. I put on the glasses, grabbed on to his arm, and started tapping the cane on the sidewalk. People parted like the Red Sea. If I hit someone with my cane, s/he apologized profusely. We had to try this act in a casino. I had lived in Vegas for eighteen years and I had never seen people more helpful. Every worker in there asked if I needed anything, or if my friend was looking for anything in particular. We owned the town. Now, whenever we go out, a cane and a pair of sunglasses can be found in the trunk of my car.
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Lesson 5: New things, no matter how simple, can be amazing.
I've always thought anything new was fascinating. My friends laugh at me because I'm so "easily entertained." Growing up in Las Vegas I saw exotic things: casinos, tons of neon, a Gila monster on my front porch. But I missed out on things that are normal in many other places: leafy trees, rich soil, four distinct seasons. Being born and raised in the Las Vegas, the ability to see natural bodies of water didn't present themselves very often. By the age of five, I had seen a lake, a pond, and a puddle, none of which moved. In my mind, there was nothing exciting about natural bodies of water. The ones I had seen were stagnant, dirty, and smelled like old broccoli. You couldn't swim in them because they were contaminated, you couldn't fish in them because the fish would make you sick, and you couldn't push your friend in because you'd be grounded for a week (I learned that one the hard way). In my young opinion, natural water sources were useless and uninviting, but all that changed with my first flash flood.
The desert doesn't get much rain, but when it does, the ground can't soak it up. Within the first hour of a storm in Las Vegas, the water in low-lying parts of town can be two or three feet above street level, turning streets into rivers of fast-moving, sandstone-colored water. A storm in 1985 brought the water right up to my front yard, which was at least four feet above street level. My uncle and I watched cars parked on the street get swallowed up. The high school kids going down the street in an inflatable raft entertained him the most. As for me, I spent more than an hour ripping off little pieces of paper and casting them into the water. Shielded from the rain on our front patio, I watched the paper float out of sight, then sentenced another piece to a watery grave. My grandparents were less than impressed. They grew up by a river in Framingham, Massachusetts. This was nothing new to them. They had also lived in Vegas for ten years by that time. Flash floods were a normal occurrence. But it was one of the most amazing things this five-year-old had ever seen, this strange moving water.
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Lesson 6: Girls make boys act funny.
How many other kids can say they went to the Rio, Caesar's Palace, or the Sahara on the Las Vegas Strip for a class field trip when they were in elementary school? Many of the casinos have attractions that have academic qualities. Caesar's Palace has the Omnimax Theater. It's a huge sphere, and the interior is on big movie screen. The seats rotate so that the moviegoer can swivel to see 360 degrees of movie magic. They play educational films, like Inside the Human Body and The Path of a Comet. The Mandalay Bay has a Van Gogh exhibit, and The Sahara has a botanical garden. And the Rio is the home of the largest and most diverse buffet in Las Vegas, food from all over the world. There's something there for the fussiest kid.
The food and exhibits were great, but there was one thing that called to every prepubescent boy: cocktail waitresses. At eleven years old, girls are yucky. But these weren't girls, these were women, scantily clad, overly painted, wonderfully in-shape women. My friends and my understanding of why we were attracted to these girls was sketchy at best. We knew about the act of sex but didn't really link sex with attraction yet. We knew about marriage but didn't link that with attraction either. All we knew was that something inside us made us want to stare at the ladies serving the free drinks. And that same something made us red faced and embarrassed if anyone caught us staring. And we'd do anything to get their attention. We'd knock things over or make fart noises with our armpits just so they would look in our direction. This was the beginning of my friends and my idiotic behavior when it comes to the opposite sex. A decade later, things haven't gotten much better.
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Lesson 7: There's no place like home.
As my senior year in high school was ending, I decided that I was going to go to college as far away as possible. A change of scenery was in order; I was tired of Vegas. The flashing lights and flash floods had lost their wonder; I was ready to move on. When I got on my plane heading east to Durham, North Carolina, I didn't feel a bit of regret or remorse. It was time for me to trade in sand for trees and towering casinos for a towering chapel.
Three years later, I can't say I'm homesick, but I have a new appreciation for my hometown. I miss waking up in the middle of the night and calling my best friend for a 2a.m. Taco Bell run. I miss going to a Sunday buffet every week with my parents. And I miss playing poker, craps or three-card monte with my eleven and twelve year old little brothers. And Vegas is full of options. There are mountains, with snow in the winter, forty minutes northwest of town. There's a lake and man-made beach thirty minutes southeast. There's California an hour west and Arizona an hour east. For something more exotic, I can go to the Strip where New York, Italy, Paris, Spain, and Egypt are within a twenty-minute drive of each other. I was fortunate to have so many options at my disposal.
Vegas doesn't have everything. My town lacks "culture." There aren't many good public museums. The most popular being the Ripley's Believe It or Not on the north end of Las Vegas Boulevard. And the public school system is horrible. Because Las Vegas is the fastest growing city in the world, the city can't keep up with the demand for schools. I had an average of thirty-five kids in my elementary school classes. My little brother has an average of forty-five in his. My hometown is far from perfect, but the lessons I learned just from growing up in Vegas have given me a great foundation on my new life away from the "City that Never Sleeps."
