hour. The public bought it—of course they bought it. Morons. So the law passed, banning smoking in any establishment that served food. All that ended up happening was that the neighborhood bars—all eight hundred or more of them—now had to decide if they were going to ban smoking or close their kitchens. Smokers were gamblers, as it went—addicts being addicts. The food was only a convenience for the gamblers, not an income for the pubs. Thus many kitchens closed, kitchen and wait-staff lost jobs—the very people those commercials were purporting to protect from the evils of secondhand smoke.
If a gambler could sit on a barstool, drink, order a steak, smoke a cigarette, and play video poker, well he wasn’t likely to move except to take a piss, now was he? But if he had to leave point A to go to point B to get something to eat, well that was inconvenient. Might as well just go to the casino where you can eat and drink and gamble and smoke and take a leak all under the same roof, if not at the same time. So now, on top of the closed kitchens, the neighborhood bars were less busy than before and many of the bartenders lost their jobs too.
And the casinos were happy.
By some miracle, the law was adjusted several years later to allow smoking in freestanding bars but leave the ban in place on smoking in restaurants, but the damage was done. Lots of taverns and pubs had closed, those jobs lost forever. Many of the former customers of the remaining taverns had gotten in the habit of going to the casinos, so those bars still suffered the effects, even now, six years later.
But the casinos were happy.
“What’s got you scowling over there?” Melanie asked.
James shook his head and laughed. “Just work stuff,” he lied. “I forget to turn it off sometimes.” He set his glass down on the coffee table and leaned in, resting his elbows on his knees and clasping his hands beneath his chin. “So tell me,” he said, “what brought you out here from… where did you say you came from again?”
Melanie told him that her parents and her older sister Sarah had moved to Las Vegas in 1975, just before Melanie was born. They had come from a suburb of Chicago and her parents wanted to get away from the cold winters. As a real estate agent, her mother had seen the ground-floor potential of Las Vegas as a blossoming residential market rather than just a vacation destination. Her father was a college professor and UNLV’s enrollment was booming as the valley’s population grew.
James was skeptical about the kind of people who would uproot themselves to raise children in this city, of all places. Even in the late seventies, Vegas certainly wasn’t on the list of safest cities, best schools or nicest parks. In fact, it was kind of an armpit. The smells of defeat and despair were as pungent as piss, and the burgeoning homeless population just added to the paradoxical atmosphere of decay in a city that was only just being built.
“So you were here in the eighties,” he said.
“Yeah.” She shook her head as though dislodging a bad memory. “The eighties were a bit weird for everyone I think. All that bad fashion and big hair.”
James nodded and smiled, but he cringed inwardly at her focus on the fads of the time rather than the city itself. Las Vegas was a living, breathing, growing organism, and, much like an absent parent, he’d missed the city’s adolescence entirely. Although through no fault of his own.
But Melanie had been here through the eighties and James felt a pang of jealousy over that. Vegas locals were harder and harder to come by, to the point that transplants started referring to themselves as locals after only a decade or two of monsoons and dust devils and floods, of slicing cold wind every winter and half a foot of snow on the ground every fourth one. Damn right it gets that cold here, they’d say, as though they hadn’t been as surprised as anyone the first time they had to brush snow off a
If a gambler could sit on a barstool, drink, order a steak, smoke a cigarette, and play video poker, well he wasn’t likely to move except to take a piss, now was he? But if he had to leave point A to go to point B to get something to eat, well that was inconvenient. Might as well just go to the casino where you can eat and drink and gamble and smoke and take a leak all under the same roof, if not at the same time. So now, on top of the closed kitchens, the neighborhood bars were less busy than before and many of the bartenders lost their jobs too.
And the casinos were happy.
By some miracle, the law was adjusted several years later to allow smoking in freestanding bars but leave the ban in place on smoking in restaurants, but the damage was done. Lots of taverns and pubs had closed, those jobs lost forever. Many of the former customers of the remaining taverns had gotten in the habit of going to the casinos, so those bars still suffered the effects, even now, six years later.
But the casinos were happy.
“What’s got you scowling over there?” Melanie asked.
James shook his head and laughed. “Just work stuff,” he lied. “I forget to turn it off sometimes.” He set his glass down on the coffee table and leaned in, resting his elbows on his knees and clasping his hands beneath his chin. “So tell me,” he said, “what brought you out here from… where did you say you came from again?”
Melanie told him that her parents and her older sister Sarah had moved to Las Vegas in 1975, just before Melanie was born. They had come from a suburb of Chicago and her parents wanted to get away from the cold winters. As a real estate agent, her mother had seen the ground-floor potential of Las Vegas as a blossoming residential market rather than just a vacation destination. Her father was a college professor and UNLV’s enrollment was booming as the valley’s population grew.
James was skeptical about the kind of people who would uproot themselves to raise children in this city, of all places. Even in the late seventies, Vegas certainly wasn’t on the list of safest cities, best schools or nicest parks. In fact, it was kind of an armpit. The smells of defeat and despair were as pungent as piss, and the burgeoning homeless population just added to the paradoxical atmosphere of decay in a city that was only just being built.
“So you were here in the eighties,” he said.
“Yeah.” She shook her head as though dislodging a bad memory. “The eighties were a bit weird for everyone I think. All that bad fashion and big hair.”
James nodded and smiled, but he cringed inwardly at her focus on the fads of the time rather than the city itself. Las Vegas was a living, breathing, growing organism, and, much like an absent parent, he’d missed the city’s adolescence entirely. Although through no fault of his own.
But Melanie had been here through the eighties and James felt a pang of jealousy over that. Vegas locals were harder and harder to come by, to the point that transplants started referring to themselves as locals after only a decade or two of monsoons and dust devils and floods, of slicing cold wind every winter and half a foot of snow on the ground every fourth one. Damn right it gets that cold here, they’d say, as though they hadn’t been as surprised as anyone the first time they had to brush snow off a
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