Viva, Uh, Laughlin!

Whenever I thought about Laughlin, Nev., my synapses released a convoluted image involving a neon-clotted Gomorrah overrun by gamblers so low-brow they were welcome neither in Vegas nor Reno, and an endless asphalt bake-off of RV parks. Not that I thought about Laughlin that often. But recently, I met my Steady’s aunt and uncle. During the course of conversation, they mentioned that they had been going to Laughlin for years and that they always had “a perfectly lovely time.” Frankly, I was a bit taken aback. I glanced surreptitiously out the window at their car. No, they did not own a vehicle that contained a flush toilet, just a Chevy Lumina. Both were delightful people all around. Laughlin, I thought. Who knew?

So the Steady and I are sneaking out of town via the San Bernardino Freeway early on a Friday afternoon, with finger-crossed plans of beating the traffic, on our way to what we hope is a perfectly lovely time.

Before we know it, we’re on Interstate 15 north, headed to Barstow, blessing the new state speed limit (70) and watching the landscape slither out of its false skin of strip malls and uber-Spanish developments to reveal the gritty, dun-colored beauty of high desert and mountains.

Wired on caffeine and the fact that the Steady has kindly cleaned my car so I can see out of the windshield for the first time in months, I generously tell him everything I have read about Laughlin. How the original “town” was merely a dusty cluster of cafes, bars and a few gas pumps that tended the needs of the men constructing the Davis Dam, establishments that basically dried up in 1953 when the dam was complete. Then in 1966, casino entrepreneur Don Laughlin spied this ghost burg hanging on the lip of the Colorado River, where the California desert paused for just a few moments in Nevada before pushing on its forbidding, bone-dry way into Arizona. The region was then known as South Pointe, and he bought the whole kit and caboodle for pert near a song, turned the Riverside Bait Shop into the Riverside Resort Hotel and Casino, added a few stacks of hotel rooms, got the town named after him and the rest is history. History being nine more casinos providing enough prime rib and neon to feed and light all the nations represented in the new Visa Olympics ads.

The light of my life says all he knows about Laughlin is that some of his buddies go there when they absolutely need to finish a script because a) everything is so cheap and b) the place is so awful there is nothing to do but sit in your $25-a-night hotel room and write. I fill the ensuing silence by turning on the radio. Loud.

After a brief but necessary stop at the huge outlet mall just outside of Barstow, we pick up Interstate 40 east and settle in for some serious desert driving. As in the Mojave Desert. Yellow and blue silence, bristling with chaparral and scatterings of red and black volcanic rock, all stretching for mile upon empty mile and trimmed in the distance by mountains now sloping, now scraping against the deepening sky. Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous. We hop on Route 66 for a while, but in the interest of speed and the preservation of my axles, we hop back off.

Just as we’re certain we will be spending the rest of our lives on I-40, we hit U.S. Highway 95, take it north for a few miles, notice we have hardly any gas left and start to panic. Important Travel Tip #1: Fill ‘er up in Barstow; there are very few stations between it and Laughlin. By now it is dark and I don’t mean L.A. dark. I mean we are in the middle of a billion acres of federal land and the nearest civilization is Needles. Forty miles away. The thought of this leaves me quite breathless. And we are both breathless when we take a right onto Nevada Highway 163 and head up a series of long hills, since we are powering the car basically through prayer and sheer force of will.

Then we see it. In the distance, steady and true, a column of light bifurcating the desert night. It is amazing. It is otherworldly. It is Spielbergian--I expect to hear the five tones from “Close Encounters” at any time. And there below us, skittering across the desert floor like a spilled bag of 5,000-watt Easter candy, like the decorations on a crazy birthday cake for a Brobdingnagian prince--Laughlin, city of lights.

We coast down toward the business loop--Casino Drive--and have just enough fumage to push into the first gas station we see. When we get out of the car, the party lights rain down on us. After hours in the dark and silence, we walk around like Texans greeting a drought-ending cloudburst--hands out, heads tilted back, laughing. Refueled, we drive along the strip, still laughing--at the Hilton’s wildly pink Flamingo, the twirling lights of the Colorado Belle’s enormous paddle wheel, the winking, waving cowboy beckoning us into the faux log cabins of the Pioneer. We’re staying at Harrah’s, at the suggestion of the Steady’s aunt, which is at the very end of the strip. As we pass under hacienda-style arches, the three towers--18 stories each, honeycombed with 1,600 rooms--push against the sky, bathed in golden light, with only the word Harrah’s and the smallest bit of tastefully blinking green trim worked out in neon. “Understated elegance,” observes the Steady.

We leave our car with a lad in an inexplicably Hawaiian print shirt and enter the door marked Hotel.

Well.

Rattle bing bang clash clatter clang whoop whoop rattle bing bang clash clatter whoop whoop . . . so goes the lullaby of Laughlin. Everywhere lights are flashing, coins are glinting and hundreds of people are milling about in lots of straining-at-the-rivets denim. I turn to the Steady, who is looking anything but, and say, “This isn’t going to work.”

I have only been to Vegas once, and suddenly and with stunning clarity I remember the reason why. The noise level is so intense I am afraid it will rearrange my cardiopulmonary rhythms. And I won’t even get into the lighting. We behold folks right out of “You Have Seen Their Faces” connected as if by biology and certainly by their Visa cards to slot machines, crap tables and other giant steps on the road to the poor farm. “The room,” the Steady says a bit shakily, “let’s see the room.”

A mere half hour and several computer problems later, we are directed past the Cantina and the “Pearl in Every Oyster” stand to the elevator to the central tower. Our room, number 201256 (it says so right on the door), is actually quite nice. It is big and quiet, overlooks the Colorado, and has minimal tacky art and no slot machine in evidence. “OK,” I say. “I can work with this.”

And work with it we do. There is something undeniably sexy about casinos (hey, Gomorrah had its good points) and by the time we mosey back to the ground floor, we are calm and ready for adventure. I dump two quarters into the nearest slot machine and win five bucks. Suddenly the world is my oyster (with a Pearl in Every One).

But something is off, there is something uncasino-like in the air. We check out the folks. It isn’t exactly Vegas--this is not a silk tie and stiletto crowd. After all, the major draw of Laughlin is its extreme “affordability.” Rooms top out at about $109 for riverfront views on non-holiday weekends but can be had for as little as $12 midweek in the blistering summer. And the gambling includes nickel slots and $5 blackjack, making it a natural for those of us whose pin money is harvested from loose change rather than stock options. But while the stakes are lower, the passion is not: gamblers’ familiar, hypnotized gaze and steady tapping of multiple spin buttons are there as well as the muffled staccato of index fingers on felt, and chips placed and replaced against each other. No, it’s something else that’s missing.

We move on, past the Colorado Cafe, toward Margaritaville (Harrah’s has a Southwest motif that might go unnoticed by the legally blind) and into the main casino. After a shared bout of mild hacking, it all becomes clear. We had been in the nonsmoking casino, the only one in Laughlin, and that explains our previous feeling of displacement.

I quickly lose my hard-earned fiver, and after watching with much appreciation a cocktail waitress in a requisitely ugly, pelvic bone-revealing uniform successfully deliver five margaritas the size of fish bowls, it’s time for dinner. While the Del Rio Buffet, with its promise of fried chicken, barbecued ribs, roast beef and 5,000 other items hostile to the goals of the American Heart Assn., is tempting, we decide to try the William Fisk Steakhouse, the only restaurant listed in the two AAA guides we could find that covered Laughlin. (Two diamonds.)

Travel Tip #2: If you are not in the habit of consuming vast quantities of salt and fat, food is a bit of a problem in Laughlin. Everywhere, signs hawk such commodities as “One-pound Prime Rib, $4.99” in a most threatening manner. The casinos are almost identical in their dining alternatives: Each has at least one family-type restaurant, which offers salads, pasta, chicken and other relatively health-conscious fare, but we found the lines prohibitively long (think Splash Mountain mid-July). The alternatives--stuff-’em-up buffet situations, snack bars with tired-looking boardwalk fare and “swellegant” restaurants with overpriced T-bones and ahi with rice pilaf--are less than alluring.

But, but, BUT, our meal at William Fisk is really quite nice. Overlooking the river, dimly lit and intimate with attentive service (our waiter is 85 if he is a day, but sweet and swift and genuinely concerned about our welfare; he should hold workshops for the waitfolk of L.A.), the restaurant is completely divorced from the din of the casino just yards away. It would have been nice if the gentleman seated at the table across from ours removed his baseball hat, as it clashed severely with his Pittsburgh Steelers T-shirt. And our waiter seemed thrown when we declined cocktails or wine (Travel Tip #3: Laughlin is not the ideal place for anyone who has just taken the Pledge) but he recovered nicely and we leave full of goodwill.

The next morning, we watch the sun rise over the Black Mountains without raising our heads from the pillow, comment on its gloriousness and promptly fall back asleep. Later, we make our way toward the boat landing, our path inevitably winding through much of the casino. The Steady notes that all casinos make it difficult for anyone to enter or exit without passing a multitude of gaming opportunities, but I am too busy feeding quarters into an uncharitable slot machine to really listen. Tapped out, I find an obliging cash machine, which only discharges $100 a pop. Confronted with Mr. Franklin, my soul quails and I tuck him in my pocket.

The small beach outside is empty, but the river buzzes with jet-skiers, motorboats full of fishermen and the river taxis that shuttle visitors from casino to casino (Laughlin’s main drag is less than 20 blocks long) for the reasonable fee of $3 round trip.

We board the Del Rio, a yacht that makes tours down to Davis Dam every two hours or so. For an hour and a half, the captain, Pete Roberts, reels off an impressive history of the town, complete with a litany of facts and figures that basically add up to one thing: Laughlin is an amazingly lucrative town that draws hundreds of thousands of people each year to its wealth of gaming and outdoor activities. Swimming, sailing, water skiing, hiking, golfing, fishing, history--Laughlin’s got it all.

I am more impressed by the fact that the Colorado’s course through town offers an almost caricaturistic contrast between the works of God and the works of man. On the Nevada side of the river stand the casinos, blowzy and tawdry as all casinos are in the unforgiving morning light; on the Arizona side, the peaks and mesas, the valleys and staggered hills seem bemused by the childish attempts to echo them.

One of the many side trips that Captain Pete recommends is Oatman, a former gold mining town 30 miles outside of Laughlin. So after we dock, the Steady and I cross the bridge into Arizona and head east on U.S. 95 into country that is still wrenched, raw and slightly annoyed by the Ice Age.

But the desert offers an odd comfort. It is impersonal, vast, timeless and thus endlessly forgiving. We two fall toward silence, contemplating sorrows and endings. We are far from the clatter of commerce and prepackaged “fun.” For more than a few moments, the trip becomes a journey. Then the landscape is broken, by a shack, a car and, around the bend, a town that seems teleported from the Old West, if the Old West contained “rattlesnake burgers,” motor homes and candles in the shape of cacti.

Oatman is a tourist town. It is famous for the herd of “wild” burros, long-lashed descendants of miners’ beasts of burden, that now roam the town’s one main, and approximately three-block-long, street. The burros are dusty, well-fed and much loved; several hand-printed signs offer a $1,000 reward for the return of Baby Sally, who was apparently stolen several weeks previous by a blackguard or blackguards unknown.

Oatman is where Mr. Clark Gable and Miss Carole Lombard, after their secret wedding in nearby Kingman, spent their nuptial night in the still-operating, creakily charming Oatman Hotel. Their room, of course, is on display (the Steady sagely points out that the huge portraits of the happy couple hanging over the bed probably weren’t part of the original decor) and copies of their wedding license are for sale in the hotel gift shop for $2.

Oatman is also famous for its gunfights, held at 12:30 and 3 p.m. on weekends in the center of town. A group of dedicated and unnervingly convincing gunslingers, with monikers like Muleskinner and Mr. Snake, wander through town grimy and grizzled, drinking beer at the several bar/cafes. At the appointed hours they emerge looking, acting and indeed smelling like denizens of the early West, and shoot it out in an ever-changing and vastly entertaining story line.

The scene in Oatman may be slightly weird--girls in midriffs with pierced navels mingle with retired couples in matching nylon running suits and men with wraparound sunglasses who look like they’ve done time--but everyone is as friendly as can be and the eatin’ is good. The Oatman Mining Company offers first-rate chili, tangy lasagna and a Philly Cheese steak sandwich that brings tears of joy to this Easterner’s eyes. It’s not a town for those allergic to cigarette smoke or live country music--ashtrays are on every table and each eating establishment includes a dance floor and a live band.

Heading back to Laughlin, we stop at a store with a sign advertising sunglasses and beef jerky with an arrow pointing to a sandy yard full of plaster statues of the Blessed Virgin, Indian chiefs and anthropomorphized barnyard animals. It is run by a woman and her grandson. We buy some fabulous peanut brittle and a pair of sunglasses. The Steady asks the young man for the name of the store. He hesitates, shooting a glance to the nearby trailer, where his grandmother is painting a rather lurid water color of the Colorado River, then says, “Well, I guess the Corner Store. I guess.”

Saturday night, and the neon lights are bright on Casino Drive. We jump on a river taxi and take it all the way to the end to the primogeniture of Don Laughlin’s desert dream--the Riverside casino. No theme here, just acres of clanging, chattering, chittering, ringing madness awash in smoke and the leather-worn breath of 7,000 wallets being opened. Dazed, we wander up a floor and push through the swinging doors of the Western Ballroom. There we are treated to yet another reason a non-gambler might come to Laughlin--the abundance of fair-to-good C&W; bands. Plus, the sight of middle-aged and elderly couples who really know how to two-step and have obviously been doing it with each other for years is incredibly romantic. For the nine millionth time, I resolve to learn how to really dance (a sign just outside the swinging doors informs me that free polka lessons are available in this very hotel, but this is not what I had in mind).

All the casinos, except Harrah’s, are connected like charms on an unlatched bracelet by a river walk. The Colorado Belle is the prettiest, with huge multitiered chandeliers and a comfortably brothelesque red, white and gold color scheme. The Flamingo Hilton is the most overwhelming--a sort of Price Club of casinos, bigger, taller, moremoremore. I am forced to pump several dollars worth of quarters into the nearest slot machine just to steady myself. The Pioneer is the corniest (I keep expecting to see Miss Barbara Stanwyck leaning against a doorway in those swell “Big Valley” gauchos). The Gold Nugget has a foliage-heavy atrium, complete with waterfall and a dance floor filled with young women sporting too much makeup and way-tall hair and men without a clue. (It is not the Y chromosome that differentiates the genders, it is their timeless drinks of choice--frozen strawberry daiquiris for the ladies, tall-necked Buds for the guys.)

We pass on the various shows offered by these fine establishments; see, when we pulled into town, one of the first signs we saw said, quite distinctly, “Saturday Night, Wayne Newton.” Well, you can imagine our delight and excitement, propelled to even giddier heights when the Steady pointed out that Neil Diamond and Vince Gill were apparently also in town. Then we see “the Beatles” spelled out in flashing electricity and begin to get suspicious. Sure enough, closer inspection reveals that “Wayne” is really Rusty; “Neil” played by Barrie, and “Vince” by Scott. The thought of another human being devoting his life to perfecting the song stylings of Neil Diamond, let alone Vince Gill, is simply too depressing, so we water-taxi back to Harrah’s and the pleasures of room 201256.

The next morning we check out, and the only reason I go back into the casino while the Steady waits for the car is to change that pesky $100, that’s all. And while I’m in line at the cashier’s, I think, “Wouldn’t it be nice to have a Harrah’s coin as a souvenir?” They seem to come in packs of five, but we only need one each, so I figure I’ll dump the remaining three into this lonely little slot machine that no one seems to care about. I win $25 and suddenly the whole enormous room seems so friendly and full of promise that I can’t remember why exactly we are leaving.

I hurry outside and suggest to the Steady that perhaps we’re being a trifle hasty; then I notice it is a cloudless butter-bright day--why on earth do I want to waste another minute inside?

So off we go, back to the desert. For a moment, we consider picking up U.S. 95 on the Arizona side and taking a gander at the London Bridge, which spans Lake Havasu, 65 miles south of Laughlin. (The story of how the buyer of the bridge brought it to the States bit by bit, supposedly thinking it was the fabulously elaborate Tower Bridge, is much beloved by London tour guides.) Instead we head back the way we came, stopping on Nevada 163 to investigate a trail through Grapevine Canyon that leads to some ancient petroglyphs. By the time we return to the car, the day is burning past noon, and we think, if only we had another day, or two . . . why, we could have a perfectly lovely time.

Laughlin. Who knew?

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GUIDEBOOK

Laughlin All the Way

Telephone numbers and prices: The area code for Laughlin is 702; the area code for Oatman is 520. Hotel rates are for a double room for one night. Restaurant prices are for two, food only.

Getting there: United Express and AmericaWest Airlines offer connecting flights from Los Angeles to the Laughlin/Bullhead City Airport. The drive from Los Angeles is about five hours via Interstate 10 east past Ontario, then I-15 north to Barstow. At Barstow, take I-40 east; about 10 miles east of Needles, Ariz., take U.S. 95 north for 24 miles, then Nevada Highway 163 about 18 miles to Casino Drive.

Where to stay: There are nine hotels in Laughlin, among them are Harrah’s Laughlin Casino Hotel, (800) 447-8700 or 298-4600. Rooms $18-$28 weekdays, $55-$65 weekends. The Flamingo Hilton Laughlin, (800) FLAMINGO or 298-5111, $21-$36 weeknights, $39-$109 weekends. The Colorado Belle Hotel and Casino, (800) 47-RIVER or 298-4000, $18-$33 weeknights, $35-$50 weekends. Don Laughlin’s Riverside Resort Hotel and Casino, (800) 227-3849 or 298-2535, $16-$28 weekdays, $49-$69 weekends.

Where to eat: William Fisk Steakhouse, in Harrah’s. American cuisine; $35-$50. Oatman Mining Company, 768-8308. Chili and cheese steak sandwiches; $20.

For more information: Laughlin Chamber of Commerce, P.O. Box 77777, Laughlin, Nev., 89028; (702) 298-2214. Laughlin Visitors’ Bureau, P.O. Box 502, Laughlin, Nev., 89029; (702) 298-3321.