This time two years ago I first landed in Vegas. I went to the Strip and Facetimed home to tell everyone how much fun I was having. They nodded and smiled and pretended they could hear me over the cacophony of cars and yelling and buskers-or-beggars with boom boxes. Days before I left, Melbourne had entered a week long circuit-breaker lockdown, which would turn into months. No one wanted to see me out and about.
I can’t hear a word you’re saying, said Mum. I showed her the Statue of Liberty, the cartoon castle across the street.
It’s so cool, I said. I’m having so much fun.
I was not having much fun. I was alone. I felt supremely uncool for wanting to go to the Strip and hadn’t asked anyone to come with. The Strip was for tourists. I was supposed to become local. The Strip was trashy, predictable: a cliché of husbands disappointing wives. I was desperate to see it, to be disappointed by it.
I went to New York, New York, put a dollar in a machine that cried Buffalooooooo! and waited for free drinks. It was barely enough money to spin the machine once, but the servers didn’t check. A man sat down beside me to charge his phone at the pokie machine (they come with USB-ports), then asked me to watch this phone while he grabbed some food. When he returned, his lock screen was a mess of messages and missed calls.
Eight percent, he sighed, then turned it off. I’ll give it ‘til twenty.
I asked him if it was urgent, and did he need to use my phone. He told me no, shaking his head like I was being ridiculous.
My girlfriend was supposed to give birth next weekend, he said. Guess it came early.
Oh?
A waitress in a miniskirt came back with our complimentary drinks. They were smaller than I expected: disappointing. I asked the man why he was in Vegas—expecting the worst—and he said that he came from Arizona for work: construction.
Later, I’d learn that Vegas is a city built on construction. First the construction of Hoover Dam, which brought workers to the small railway town, then the construction of the strip by mobsters. Old timers say the city was better back the mob ran it. Now there’s construction on every street: new casinos, new carparks, roadwork for kilometres. The new Vegas Sphere seems to have emerged from the ground in half the time it takes to pave a road.
Historically, construction has led the city to skew male. Showgirls and gambling were a means to entertain the workers at Hoover Dam. Since the 1900s, Vegas’ population has doubled every eleven years. The gender divide isn’t as strong anymore, but I still feel it. I feel it when I’m catcalled for the first time since highschool. I feel it when I’m followed at the grocery store. I feel it when I’m walking home and man with a truck pulls up and tells me to get in. When a woman at a neighbourhood pool tells me she’ll pay me $200 to film my friend licking my belly.
The man checked his phone again—eleven percent—then turned it back off. I’d finished my free drink and didn’t want to be disappointed by another. As I left, I congratulated him on his new kid. He looked at me blankly, almost confused, then touched his phone and thanked me.