Where Are the Clowns?

I awoke one morning last week to the sound of a roller coaster going by and glanced out the window to see a Statue of Liberty towering into an iron gray sky. A rainbow framed its lifted torch.

For a moment I had the odd feeling that I’d died and gone either to hell or to New York, and you can imagine my relief when I decided it was hell.

But then I blinked and rubbed my eyes and knew by the red, blue and yellow peaked towers of the building across the street, the black pyramid to the right and the giant Coca-Cola bottle to the left that I was, alas, in a combination of hell and New York. I was in Las Vegas.

The roller coaster was real, its looping, twisting tracks winding around and through the New York-New York Hotel & Casino, its cars hurtling past my window like a bullet train in a nightmare.

The statue was also real, a 150-foot replica of the lady of liberty, her torch held high over the glittering strip: Give me your poor, your middle class, your greedy masses yearning to be rich. . . .

The rainbow? Well, it had rained the night before and there was a kind of dim sunlight shining through the clouds, so it is possible the rainbow was real, but I wouldn’t give you odds. If I did, I’d probably lose.

Just about everyone loses who comes to the City That Bugsy Built, but that does not for a moment deter its 30 million visitors a year who arrive with bags full of dimes and dreams, yearning for the big hit.

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I had come to this place of $4 dinners and $1-million jackpots because it is the playground of L.A., a Disneyland for adults that beckons in ways that Mickey Mouse never imagined.

You want a volcano spewing lava into the night? Come to Vegas. You want half-naked women and jugglers on the same bill? Come to Vegas. You want to touch the bed where Elvis slept? Come to Vegas.

About 8 million Southern Californians visit the place every year, a quarter of the total number of people who converge on the strip of excess that God had in mind when he said, “Let there be decadence.”

I had not been here since 1984. That was before the New York-New York Hotel & Casino with its garish Manhattan skyline, before the Luxor with its big, black pyramid, before the Mirage with its flaming-red volcano and before the Stratosphere tower that spikes upward from the strip like a middle finger.

Those were the days when the town was oriented toward high rollers but beginning to realize that its future lay not in the few who bet thousands but in the many who would bet quarters.

The birth of gambling in Atlantic City required a tilt toward families if Vegas was to survive as the Gambling Capital of America. A smart young lawyer who was managing the Riviera Hotel at the time called it the Burger King Revolution, and he called it right.

The town is alive now with inducements for kids, whole floors of casinos given over to the kinds of games children play until they’re old enough to play the kinds of games the grown-ups play. Mr. Burger King is everywhere.

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I came to Vegas more to observe than to participate. I played the slots once and saw $100 disappear so fast it was almost a religious experience, like losing one’s leprosy at Lourdes.

“It would save time,” my wife, Cinelli, suggested, “if you simply walked by the machines and threw your quarters on the floor.”

Mostly, I study people, especially those from L.A. I can always spot an Angeleno; I’m not sure how. Not all of them wear baggy pants and rings in their noses. Cinelli thinks it’s the pheromones, a chemical odor emitted by insects to attract other insects. We have a certain smell.

I knew, for instance, that a couple across from us at the Folies Bergere were from L.A. “Culver City,” the man said, gripping my hand like he was strangling a rabbit. “Culver City,” his wife said unnecessarily. “I’m from America,” I said, massaging my hand. “Be nice,” Cinelli whispered.

They come to Vegas every three months, tearing along I-15 for a weekend, hitting the 21 tables, seeing a show then roaring back to good old Culver City. Vegas was their love, their joy, their passion, their obsession.

To each his own. I prefer the starry nights of a quiet hilltop to the false lights of a noisy strip. As a result, I won’t go back again for another dozen years. But I will always carry a mental picture of that view from my hotel window: a roller coaster, a rainbow and a Statue of Liberty. She was holding a torch, but in the transcendent restructuring memory provides, she’ll be clutching a wad of $100 bills.

Send these the dreaming working class to me, I lift my lamp beside the neon door. . . .

Al Martinez can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com