The Men on the Las Vegas Strip

How this city ruins men.

Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty. — Image Created by ChatGPT

“I just said I’m broke, okay? What the fuck do you want me to do? I’m fucking broke!”

It was unsettling to witness.

I could feel it building for the last five minutes.

“There’s nothing I can do! What the fuck do you expect!”

Now it’s more than unsettling.

Terrifying.

He’s ten feet away from me.

I was alone at a diner in Las Vegas, about to head back to Phoenix. Didn’t take long as a sex worker to realize I could make a lot more money in Vegas.

“I’M! FUCKING! BROKE!”

I’m the closest person to him.

And I have a huge wad of cash in my purse.

He doesn’t know that, though. But I’m thinking he does.

Another outburst. I can’t even remember what he said this time, but it was vulgar.

Casino-adjacent, fluorescent, vinyl. Late morning. A diner.

He was alone. A local. Not dressed up. Not put together. Needed a shave and a haircut. A man can grow stubble in a week. Needing a haircut takes months. He had not had a calm enough week to sit in a barber chair for twenty minutes in a long time.

He had his phone in his hand.

He wasn’t talking to this woman. He was yelling at her.

I’m broke, okay? What the fuck do you want me to do? I’m fucking broke!

He hung up.

He dialed again.

His voice changed.

In control now. Alpha male energy. Competent. He was a man with a system.

Now he’s talking about lines and college basketball and tonight’s spreads to another man on the other end.

The man on the other end was the bookie. You could tell because the conversation had the rhythm of two men who knew each other and were doing business. The whole thing took maybe thirty seconds. Three seconds between the hang-up and the second dial.

By the time he was talking about Saturday’s game he was a different man wearing the same disheveled body.

He put the phone down. He stirred his coffee. He looked normal again.

I paid my check and got out as fast as I could without making a scene.

I thought about him for years.

Well now, our luck may have died, and our love may be cold But with you forever I’ll stay — Image Created by ChatGPT

Sometimes I feel things sitting deep in my gut. A greasy fear/rage hybrid.

I am not sure what it is, but whatever it is, he felt it in him that day too.

He could not be civil to his wife or girlfriend or whatever that poor woman called their relationship. He could be charming to his bookie. The difference was who was on the other end of the line.

He couldn’t hide from her. She knew what he was. She had watched him become the man with the unshorn hair and the perpetually empty bank account.

She had a record of his actual behavior.

With her, the performance failed. With her, the performance had been failing for years.

The yelling was what came out after the performance failed.

The bookie did not know what he was. The bookie thought he was a guy with a system. The bookie was not a witness to his ruined life.

So he could be a player on that call. He could be a high roller. He could be the person he wanted to be. A man with an abundance of money to play with.

He wasn’t a cruel man. Nor a weak man. He was just a man whose body could not bear the truth of who he was before the person who knew it.

So he saved his energy for an audience that didn’t.

I have a regular.

He works in enterprise software sales for a company whose products you will use today. Seven-figure commissions sometimes. He comes to Vegas a few times a year.

He pays me more than anyone else. It started at $10,000 a night. Then got a bit bigger.

When we first met he knew $3,000 would easily close the deal. He knew $1,000 would’ve likely closed the deal as well.

He has known for years. He pays way more anyway. He’s probably bought me half a condo so far.

He is kind to me. He asks how I am. He remembers things I told him eighteen months ago. We have been doing this for five years. The relationship is as real as any other.

But he gets something from the overpayment that has nothing to do with me.

The hunter who killed the antelope did not keep the antelope. He gave it away. His brain paid him in chemistry for the gift. That circuit is hundreds of thousands of years old. It is in all of us. It rewards the man who can distribute his surplus to a face he has chosen.

The antelope had to be distributed. There wasn’t any way to keep it for oneself. There was no freezer to put it in and consume it slowly for the next month. So evolution built a system to distribute the scarce resource efficiently.

My regular cannot fire that circuit anywhere else in his life. Money arrives on schedule en masse and his body has stopped registering it. His charity disappears into nonprofits where there is no recipient he can see. His wife is the household economy. She is not a gift event. She used to be, years ago. Now bestowing diamond rings, Range Rovers, and Louis Vuittons on her is just the baseline.

The chimp in him does not understand Venmo either. But the chimp loves handing over a big fat envelope to a specific woman in a suite at The Wynn.

He is not buying me. He’s not even buying sex. He is buying the feeling of being the man who pays ten when three would do. The overpayment is the ritual, and I am the witness it requires.

And he is kind. The kindness is not a cover, it’s genuine. The kindness is also chemistry. The two things are not separable in his body, and they don’t need to be separable for me.

He could not tell you any of this. He has a simpler story. He likes me, end of story. He is right, but he is also doing something our species has been doing for a very long time, and he doesn’t know it.

Down here it’s just winners and losers And don’t get caught on the wrong side of that line. — Image Created by ChatGPT

I have another regular.

He is wealthy but not like the other guy. He comes to Vegas a few times a year. I get dressed to the nines. We get a fancy steak dinner. He takes me to a show. Cirque de Soleil or something. Jerry Seinfeld once.

We do some gambling. We go upstairs. What happens upstairs is amazing for him. I make sure he has a great time. The pattern is the pattern.

Then one night, he hit.

$15,000 on a slot machine. Once in a lifetime. The kind of hit you tell your friends about, with the picture of the screen.

But I bet he makes $15,000 a week sometimes. Fifteen thousand is not going to move the needle in a meaningful way.

But the casino designed that moment. The bells were louder than the spin. Loud and shrill. The lights were brighter than they needed to be. But the bells and lights were not for him. They were for the rest of the floor, so that everyone else on the casino floor got a small dose of his win and stayed at their own machines.

The bell is marketing. But the bell is also pharmacology, and he was the patient.

His salary cannot give him that feeling. His paycheck arrives every other Friday, and the body has discounted the schedule. The body wants the surprise. Vegas sells him the chemistry his salary cannot.

He’s ecstatic. He grabbed a fistful of chips and gave them to the cocktail waitress. He didn’t count them. The not-counting was the display. The waitress caught the chips. I am going to guess $500. She flashed me a split second knowing smirk as if to say, “I know what all three of us are here, too.”

He did not.

He was generous for the rest of the night. A Blackjack dealer got tipped heavily. The maitre d’ got fifty. I got a bump on a rate that did not need one. He bought a round at the bar for strangers.

He was warm to everyone. He bro-hugged another man who won at the blackjack tables later. He laughed loudly with people he did not know. He was a thousand-watt floodlight.

On a normal night he is here with me. On this night he was there with everyone.

We went upstairs.

The two hours slow sensual lovemaking he wanted were going to have a problem. His nervous system was juiced to the gills. His sympathetic nervous system was fully in charge.

I tried to relax him by giving him a back massage first, but it was like fighting a brush fire with a tin cup and a teaspoon.

He won fifteen thousand dollars and it ruined the night.

He had paid for the win in a currency he did not know he had. The casino paid him in dopamine. The casino charged him with adrenaline.

For everything Vegas gives, it exacts a price in return.

He had to settle for a 30-second jackrabbit-style handjob with half a hard on that he could have gotten downtown for $50.

On the Las Vegas strip, the house always wins.

People call it fight-or-flight, but that’s wrong. The body doesn’t fire that chemistry only when something bad happens. It fires it whenever something big and unexpected happens.

Something salient.

The bell goes off. The screen lights up. The crowd turns to look. The amygdala does not know it’s just a number on a slot machine. The amygdala screams, “Huge surprise! Mobilize now!”

For three hundred thousand years, that mobilization was useful. The hunter who killed the antelope had to drag it three miles home. The gatherer who found the honeycomb had to climb the tree and get to work. The forager who found the blueberry patch had to run home to tell the others before the other band of humans on the other side of the ridge could find it.

The body’s alarm fired and the body discharged the alarm through physical action. By the time you were back to camp for the night the chemistry had run its course and you could sit by the fire and eat and hold your mate.

Sex is the opposite chemistry. Sex needs the body slow, parasympathetic, the breath low, the pulse settled. You can be ready to fight a saber-tooth tiger at the cave entrance, or you can make slow sensual love to a woman. You cannot do both. The body cannot have both circuits open at once.

That was the chemistry I was working against. He had won fifteen thousand dollars and his body thought something salient had happened. His body was primed for hard physical work. It did not want to be touched gently in a quiet room.

We’re going out where the sand’s turning to gold. — Image Created by ChatGPT

The casino was the first to figure this out.

The variable-ratio reinforcement schedule was perfected on the casino floor in the seventies and eighties, decades before anyone in Silicon Valley had heard of it. The near-miss rate was calibrated. The bells and whistles were tuned. The carpet was designed to be slightly disorienting so you would keep walking. The clocks were removed. The drinks were free. The chips were designed not to feel like money.

In the 1970’s, math wizards sat in an office building up in Reno and figured this out. 20 years ago, their intellectual descendants sat in cubicles in Silicon Valley and copied their work.

The notification is the bell. The like is the small win. The pull-to-refresh is the slot machine pull. The variable-ratio reinforcement schedule that took the casino fifty years to perfect is now in everyone’s pocket.

Vegas at least posted the math on the wall. Vegas at least told you the house always wins. Vegas was the honest version of the chemistry trade. Vegas put up the neon and the bells and the warnings and the cocktail waitresses in little slinky outfits and announced itself as a chemistry trade.

The casino used to be only in Las Vegas. Now it’s ubiquitous.

The exchange rate is the same in both places. Dopamine in. Oxytocin out. Every notification is a payout. The cost is in the column you cannot see.

The cost is the bedroom at eleven, where you cannot put it down. The cost is the conversation at dinner you only half-heard. The cost is the friend you have not called back because the chemistry of a text is enough to satisfy the circuit. The cost is the accumulated absence in every relationship that requires patience and presence.

The gambler in the diner yelled at his wife. You don’t yell at her. You just don’t look up anymore.

The chemistry is the same. The chimpanzee brain is the same.

The phone in your hand is your bookie now.

You have been kind to your phone and short with the person across the table. You have come home from the screen unable to be present. You have failed someone you love because your nervous system was occupied elsewhere, thinking whatever happened on that stupid app mattered. That it was salient.

You may have even settled for a half-assed handjob from your wife because you were just in a fight in the comment section of a Trump meme some dude you went to high school with posted on Facebook.

That’s if you’re lucky.

More than likely, you just jerked off in the shower at 6:45 the next morning before work.

I live in Las Vegas.

I’ve seen what this lopsided chemistry trade does to men.

And it’s not just Vegas. You can see it everywhere there is a lopsided chemistry trade.

For the last 15 years we’ve all been carrying it around with us in our hands.

We are all living on the Las Vegas Strip now.