The Shadow Catcher

Whoever this John Wiggins is in cardiac intensive care at Sunrise Hospital, he can’t be my John Wiggins. He must be an artificial version like this city, a Mirage, as the hotel is named, an imitation, like the frescoes and faux marble at Caesar’s Palace, a master illusionist like the headline acts of David Copperfield and Siegfried & Roy, a fake like the Eiffel Tower at the Paris, a con, like Bugsy Siegel, an impersonator like the Elvis, Sammy, Dean and Frank acts working Fremont Street, a fatwa morgana on reality. Because unless he’d lost his mind or undergone some radical surgery on his personality, I can’t imagine John in this milieu — Vegas, old or new, in the 50’s or in the year 2000, would never be my father’s kinda town. I can imagine him doing many things — leaving his rural Pennsylvania farm for the Army, falling goofily in love with my mother’s exoticism and good looks — but I can’t imagine him in Vegas, especially at eighty.

Nevertheless here I am, one hour after midnight, paralleling the Strip, as Mandalay Bay, the Four Seasons, the Luxor, Excalibur, New York-New York and the Monte Carlo sail by on a filmy sheen of megawatt-enhanced reality and the intoxicating shuck of all this human folly filters through my open sunroof in the moonlight.

I exit at Flamingo.

Not the shortest route to the hospital, but Flamingo is a street I know, having driven it in daylight on previous visits and the truth is even though I like to think I talk the talk of a road warrior, I’m really a pansy and driving alone in the West on an unknown road after midnight isn’t a trip that I seek out on purpose. To my way of thinking right now Flamingo feels safer than the Desert Inn exit because Desert Inn winds past the Wynn golf course and the Las Vegas Country Club, both of which might be deserted and spooky at this time of night but who am I kidding. I’m acting like this is Los Angeles, weighing which exit I should take when in fact this is a town where the concept of “night” has no impact on traffic.

But Flamingo is jammed.

There are people, in shorts, mobbing both sides of the Strip like it’s lunchtime on a crowded beach and the air, still hot, smells of automotive exhaust, popcorn, baked cement and beer. You could read, if you needed to, in the ambient light. You could perform vascular surgery.

It takes twenty minutes to thread through the Strip intersection, past Bally’s to Koval, and then the light dims and the flat grid with strip malls and one-and two-story buildings takes over and the Strip’s specificity trails behind me leaving me with the sense that this scene could be Anywhere — Phoenix or Tucson or Bakers-field — any place where the shadows of mountains can’t reach, flat and hot.

I pass the Atomic Testing Museum, spectrally dark, on the right, then the UNLV campus. At Maryland Parkway I make a left and the Stratosphere, tallest structure west of the Mississippi, looms like a giddy launching gantry. All nite carnitas, all nite tattoos, all nite check cashing, all nite drugs — you would think that this part of the city doesn’t exist at all in daytime. All nite pawn and all nite easy credit—Casa de empeños, facilidades de pago. Traffic is light, but the buses are full, transporting kitchen staffs and hotel crews back home to the rundown adobes and cheap seats north of Bonanza in West Las Vegas. I pass the sprawling Boulevard Mall — Dillard’s, Sears, Macy’s — shuttered for the night, the cleanup crews waiting by the bus shelters under the feline green and purple Citizen Area Transit (CAT) logos for their numbered buses to arrive—109, 112, 203, 213—poor man’s roulette. Then, crossing Desert Inn, I see it, high-rise buildings on both sides of Maryland Parkway, Sunrise Hospital, largest public health facility in Nevada. Largest parking lot, too, and for a couple of confused moments I circle, looking for the right entrance until a wailing ambulance turns in from Maryland and highlights the route. I find a space under an orange-burning sulphur lamp and get out and stretch. At the back of the lot, under another lamp, two late-model station wagons are parked back to back, tailgates open. Hospital workers, some smoking, all in pastel scrubs, lounge in lawn chairs. Two of them are camped out in sleeping bags in the back of the station wagons — the scene looks like a pastel-themed NASCAR tailgate party, and I take note that if I need to catch some shuteye in my car tonight, this could be the place.