Chapter Nineteen
Choose your inn before dark, get back on the road before dawn.
(Chinese proverb)
Imagine you’ve never been to Vegas. Could be you haven’t, but unless you’ve been stuck in a cave or a submarine or a run-down cottage in the drizzly north-west of England all your days, you probably have some idea of how it looks. And sounds. Even how it smells.
Now imagine you’re Noreen Millburn: first time in an airport, first time in a plane, first time in a US cab (or, indeed, any sort of cab).
Come on, work with me. Suddenly, just a few heady hours after you woke up at home in your animal refuge-cum-hovel, you’re driving past the shiny black pyramid of the Luxor, the white soaring towers of the Excalibur, moving with all the other traffic past the MGM Grand and the Bellagio, with its magnificent fountains, and Paris with its mini Eiffel, which almost makes you believe you’re really there, if you’re an idiot, even though you’re nowhere near.
Caesar’s Palace in all its decadent splendour, the Mirage with its erupting volcano.
The Flamingo. The Venetian. The Jerusalem with its Wailing Wall (I made that one up, but trust me, there’s a lot of people in Vegas wailing).
All around town, billboards encourage you to shop, gamble, eat and enjoy stellar performances by people you never heard of in your life.
“It doesn’t look that dull, Arnie,” says Noreen perceptively, resisting all attempts by Arnie to block her views out of the cab window.
Arnie is forced to agree. “You are right, Noreen!” he says in surprise.
“They musta built it up a bit. And here was I, planning a restful few days just communing with the spirits and being closer to God’s own earth.
” He offers up a sigh of deep regret. “I prefer how it used to be. Mile after mile of sand and tumbleweed, clear blue skies, Mother Nature in the raw. Just a man and his maker in perfect harmony in the sweltering desert. You know, like Moses and Jesus and – and Priscilla.”
“I don’t know Saint Priscilla. But look over there; you can still see the mountains. They’re so beautiful.”
“Maybe we can see them from our hotel room.”
“Room?”
“Rooms! I meant rooms. That kinda adjoin. If…”
Arnie Garth looks around for help. For me, even. And then at his watch. There are no clocks in Vegas, supposedly so that gamblers don’t know the time and we can all stay awake 24/7. But Arnie Garth knows, even without checking, that his own clock is ticking and that his ticker is talking.
He gazes across at Our Lady of the Cardigans, whose eyes are almost popping out of her head.
In that failing heart of his, Arnie is by this time pretty certain that someone like her, someone so relentlessly, helplessly, painfully good and unworldly, nice even, could never in a million decades fall for someone possibly not quite so nice, such as, for example, him.
They never have and they never will. Especially not here, in this not so nice city.
And, try as he might, dear God has he tried, he is most surely not falling for this intensely decent, not unlikeable but curiously pitiful creature, which apparently is a major part of the whole deal.
Not even when she turns to him, her pale but luminous blue eyes suffused with innocent wonder and her bobbly head so full and reeling that she is unable to speak, only to shake her head and sigh.
He notices that they are leaving the more lavish part of town to enter what even he might call the scuzzy section.
And Arnie Garth knows from scuzzy. Strip joints, fast food outlets, sex shops.
He wonders for a moment what Noreen will make of this descent and why the hell I, good old reliable Ambrose, am being such a cheapskate.
Unless, of course, I’m on a budget. (Trust me, I am.
I have to account for every heaven cent.)
The cab suddenly veers down an alley and parks beside a dingy entrance.
“Here we are,” says the cab driver, as if he is equally miffed to be directed way off his normal classy track. “The Dime After Dime Motel. Livin’ the dream.”
“Enough already,” says Arnie.
“Is this where we are staying, Arnie?” asks Noreen, her interest clearly piqued but not yet, at least so far as he can ascertain, utterly soured by disappointment. But it’s early days.
“Reckon so, sweetheart.” He taps her woolly-mittened hand. Probably the only such extremity in Nevada, which is itself a state of extremes. “It’s where Mother Teresa would stay whenever she was in town. And Gandhi. I thought that would mean something to you.”
“Oh yes. The minister at our church has talked about Mother Teresa. But I never knew she came here.”
“It’s where she did her best work.”
***
The first thing Arnie Garth notices when he enters the grim motel lobby – well, the first thing after the fug and the flickering light and the stench of bitter disappointment – is a large and vivid poster on the notice board.
It reads, LAS VEGAS WELCOMES THE NATIONAL EROTIC CINEMA AWARDS.
A bright-red banner stripped across it, covering some of the more explicit artwork, screams, TONITE!
The first thing Arnie Garth does, after he pushes Noreen Millburn out of the way and towards the small reception desk, is to rip said poster off the wall, muttering something about a violent antipathy to lazy spelling.
“Thanks a friggin’ bunch, Ambrose,” he mutters into the dusty air.
Wondering, perhaps not for the first time, whether I truly am on his side.
(You don’t have to tell me about unreliable narrators – my place is full of them.
Sometimes they don’t even rock up.) Yet to whom else is he going to turn? He hasn’t a soul in the world.
Arnie swiftly realises that even Noreen may be drawing comparisons between the Dime After Dime and that exquisite country-house hotel to which he had fruitlessly treated her just a couple of nights earlier.
Or perhaps she has already spotted the glaring differences.
It is, to be frank, the distance between a red carpet and something you just trod in.
But if his guest has indeed entertained such thoughts, she is certainly not airing them or passing judgment and still simply appears overawed.
Yet Arnie finds himself cursing Melisande for depriving him of his usual suite at the Tropicana.
The guy at reception graciously takes time out from the twin demands of picking his teeth and wiping his hands on a fraying string vest to greet the new arrivals.
Whilst most hotel receptionists, especially in Las Vegas, are trained to take every registering guest, however striking, bizarre or unsettling, in their professional stride, Arnie can feel the man’s eyes swivelling between himself and Noreen as if these two are part of a human story he would for once, even with all his experience, be at a total loss to deconstruct.
And, of course, the guy would be absolutely correct in this assumption.
“So, how many hours d’you want?” he asks, eyeing their lack of luggage.
Arnie looks at a curious Noreen. “It’s an American thing.” He taps the desk. “We’re staying until Sunday.”
“What happens Sunday, Arnie?” asks Noreen.
You don’t wanna know, he thinks, but says, softly, “Everything shuts down. For church.”
“Double room?” asks the man, working really hard not to picture anything.
“Sure,” tries Arnie.
“No, thank you, sir,” says Noreen. “We’re cousins.”
“I’ve seen worse,” says the man, who undoubtedly has.