Mourning in Vegas

Travel Stories: Surrounded by the decadence of yet another nightclub opening, Kevin Capp must come to terms with the death of his grandfather

12.18.08 | 10:06 AM ET

vegasPhoto by pocheco via Flickr (Creative Commons).

Three years ago, I published “The Wow Factor,” an article about the grand opening of the nightclub and restaurant, Tao, inside Las Vegas’ Venetian hotel-casino. The story, like most of the clubland dispatches I filed at the time for CityLife, Vegas’ alternative weekly paper, was unremarkable—another metaphor-laden, borderline-turgid essay describing another new venue—save for the circumstances under which I wrote it.

Hidden behind my enthusiastic detailing of Tao’s gaudy “wow factors”—44,000 square feet of nightclub decadence including a 20-foot tall statue of Buddha and naked women lying in bathtubs sprinkled with floating rose petals—was a grandson mourning the death of his grandfather.

I learned of his passing on the second day of Tao’s opening festivities, flew back home to Tampa the following morning and filed the story just hours before attending his funeral. You wouldn’t know it from reading my ebullient, if tortured, descriptions such as, “It had a blue-north cool breeze rushing through,” but I felt the loss deep in the unnamable as I wrote.

I also felt a dizzying mix of pride and guilt at filing this story in the shadow of my grandfather’s departure.

Pride because Holmes Alexander worked as an editorial writer and lead book reviewer at the Tampa Tribune for 49 years and, as a result, knew a thing or two about the sweaty imperative of deadlines.

And guilt because Holmes Alexander was a cantankerous intellectual who wrote about important topics—Sandinistas and encyclopedias—for a major daily imbued with public esteem, whereas I wrote about meaningless topics—faux Buddhas and supine go-go girls—for a weekly newspaper funded by sex ads.

When I finally sat down at the kitchen table at my mother’s house in Tampa the morning of the funeral to write about Tao, I at first tried to romanticize the situation. My mother once told me that my grandfather, a devout liberal, was forced by his editors to write an endorsement for Nixon. This comforted me for a time. Like my grandfather, I was writing under duress by banging out a story I had nothing invested in, because that was the assignment.

But, as I wrote, I knew our situations were incomparable. The politics of the nightclub industry and the politics of a presidential campaign were worlds apart. And I knew that my generally positive feelings about the nightclub beat and Vegas didn’t match the dislike my grandfather would want me to feel. This disconnect would have bothered me almost as much as his death, were it not for an unlikely revelation spawned by his advice.

My grandfather often told me of the time he realized that journalism was his calling. One evening he was walking back to his dorm room at the University of Florida after covering some long-forgotten story while working as a student correspondent for the Tampa Tribune, when he overheard a conversation two people were having. They were seated on their front porch, and as he came within earshot, he could hear that they were talking about an article he’d written. That was it: He was hooked.

He liked to tell me this story, I think, not only because he was a natural storyteller who craved an audience, but also because it showed the connection between experience and happiness. As he liked to say, “Life isn’t about having things, it’s about doing things,” which is perhaps the only piece of advice I’ve ever memorized.

So, when the escalators on the casino floor of the Venetian spit me out near Tao’s entrance on the second day of its grand opening, the cacophony of would-be clubbers clambering for a glimpse of the celebs on-hand, like Paris Hilton, summoned within me a craven dread. By writing about Tao and Vegas’ countless other celeb-crazed clubs, was I contributing to people wanting to have things—in this case, the lives of wealthy strangers—instead of doing things?

The first night of Tao’s opening I had snacked on free hors d’oeuvres of a vaguely Asian origin and downed free cocktails, ogled cosmetically-enhanced women with just enough attitude to make a man feel the right kind of bad, and preened in the access my job gave me to multi-million dollar nightclubs such as Tao.

By the second day of the festivities, however, the assignment had devolved into a pitiless exercise in making it through the night, one born of the reflection my grandfather’s death had dropped on me.

The story had changed in my mind from a piece about an enjoyable, if routine, introductory soiree at the latest addition to Vegas’ burgeoning nightlife scene into one about a grandson saddled with grief and the creeping professional disillusionment it had spawned. In short, I was no longer having any fun.

After I made my way through the mob that had formed near the entrance and found my way in, a red-hot disgust bubbled inside me like lava. Vodka tonic in hand, I wandered the darkened halls, playing bumper-cars with hordes of people rushing about, taking notes in a vain search for a way into the story—a way back to how I’d felt before I learned of my grandfather’s death—while hoping like hell to get out of there. Not even the vodka soothed my anguish.

The bass rattled my brain. My heartbeat intensified. My hands started shaking. My stomach emptied. That was it: My night was over.

To avoid any more contact with the seething throng outside of the club snapping cell phone photos of anyone emitting even the faintest whiff of celebrity, I took a side route that led me down to the front of the casino.

There, I encountered a row of what I discovered were actors dressed like monks. The rubber caps they wore in order to make their heads look bald were no longer smooth but wrinkled with time. It seemed they’d assembled near the valet area for the arrival of the celebrity guests and performed a show in tandem with the opening, but it was over now. All that was left were their misshapen caps and boredom-laced silence.

As I passed by the last “monk,” I realized how my grandfather would’ve perceived the clubs that were spreading disease-like all over this neon-spangled metropolis, and, as a result, how he would have viewed my job writing about them. How could I not? He would’ve hated this blasphemy with the same passion, and for the same reasons Nathaniel West hated Hollywood. It was fake and meaningless and, worst of all, served no purpose except to generate money for people who already had too much of it.

Moreover, the world didn’t need me to justify this paean to conspicuous consumption by writing an article about it in, of all things, the pages of an American newspaper, which, no matter that it was funded by ads for transgender hookers named Donna, was a sacred institution. The profession, in this age of collapsing readership, didn’t need me to demean it any further, he would’ve said.

He wouldn’t have hated me for what I was doing, of course, and he might have even understood, however grudgingly, that, as a neophyte, I had to take what assignments they gave me. But he would’ve hated it all the same.

The thing those shabby monks showed me amid the crepuscular gloom of grief, however, I already knew: I liked this Vegas scene precisely because it was so obviously fake and meaningless. Tao wasn’t pretending to be a house of worship—it was striving to be a house of ill repute. That was its purpose. Hell, that was the whole damn city’s purpose, and I appreciated that about the nightclubs in particular and Vegas in general.

Everything came as advertised. If you visited the Luxor to see what the pyramids looked like, or if you stepped inside a club hoping for a religious experience, then you deserved your supreme disappointment and sense of betrayal.

I had taken my grandfather’s advice after all: My life wasn’t about fooling myself into thinking that Vegas and its nightclubs were important and that I needed a piece of them to be happy; rather, my life was about knowing they were meaningless by experiencing them first-hand night after long night—and that had made me happy. I was doing it, not coveting it.

Trying to process this epiphany, I stopped walking toward the parking garage and turned around to take one last look at that sorry bunch of guys milling around in their robes. I fired up a cigarette, took a deep drag, and smiled for the first time in a day. I wasn’t my grandfather any more than those guys looked like monks, and that was more than okay—that was the way it was supposed to be.