When Hell Descends Another Layer
I went to Las Vegas this past weekend 🎰
In my last installment of me visiting iconic cities in the desert, I wrote about how Palm Springs is in many ways like heaven on earth, with hints of hell underneath.
This time, I just went straight to hell. Las Vegas, baby! 😎
The occasion? One of my best friends got married!! 💒
I’m so happy for her and her husband. I had a wonderful time celebrating their nuptials with a group of amazing people that included one of my other best friends, Gillian, the brilliant mind behind the iconic Substack series, Gyllenhaalic, that covers every Jake Gyllenhaal movie ever made. I highly recommend you check it out.
But this post is not about the amazing time I had with my friends. It is about how, if Sin City has always kind of been hell on earth, it has most definitely descended to deeper layers of hell over the past several decades.
I used to love Las Vegas. When I was growing up in the 90s, my family would go at least once a year on spring break because my great-grandpa loved to gamble and there was something to do for the whole family. Emphasis on WHOLE FAMILY!
In one of my earliest Vegas memories, I was six years old and my family and I went to the Golden Nugget for dinner. I saw that the menu included “Steak and Eggs". I was floored. Steak and eggs? At the same time?? I ordered it, and everyone laughed at me because I was a little girl ordering steak and eggs. I didn’t understand at the time what was so funny about it.
We always stayed at the Tropicana, which I loved, because it had the most incredible pool I had ever experienced in my little life. I’ve always loved pools.
We would then walk across the street to Excalibur, where I would do my own form of gambling - playing in the arcade. When I was about twelve or thirteen years old, I was newly obsessed with Lord of the Rings, and so I really focused and won like 40,000 tickets1 in a day so I could acquire a life sized hobbit poster, which remains a prized possession to this day.
Once I was finally of a drinking age, I continued to visit Las Vegas regularly, except this time without my family and with the capability of making extremely poor life choices.
On a particularly epic trip in 2013, I got my one and only tattoo.23
Then, my friends and I dressed up as “aliens” and wandered around casinos. We were treated like celebrities, receiving free bottle service in clubs and having random people coming up to us to ask for pictures.
This is all to say, I really truly loved Vegas for a good part of my life.
I’m not sure what happened, but my trips there gradually petered out. The last time I went before this trip was in December of 2015. My friend wanted to see The Temptations perform in some kind of encore tour. The show was canceled for reasons I don’t remember and we saw a drag show instead. This ended up being a blessing, because I witnessed one of the most incredible drag performances I’ve ever seen in my entire life.
You should totally watch it. This recording I found later still gets me even though I’ve seen it a million times now, but the first time I saw it in person I was in tears.
That said, I had a horrible headache the entire time during that last Vegas trip even though I didn’t drink any alcohol. I could tell that something was shifting in the city, and that the Vegas I had once loved was on the decline. I didn’t feel eager to return.
Then, ten years passed.
A lot happened in those ten years.
Notably, a fucking psycho murdered a bunch of people who were just trying to have a good time at the Mandalay Bay in 2017. It was the deadliest mass shooting in US history, with sixty people losing their lives and about 867 injured.
Unfortunately, more incidents happen in Vegas than are even reported. When my parents went to Vegas in 2018, a robbery involving a gun occurred while they were at the blackjack table in the Bellagio. They had to abandon their game and retreat to Caesar’s Palace where they waited for hours before being informed it was safe to return.
Unlike what seems to be most Americans, I don’t forget about shit like this. For example, when I went to Gilroy this past April, I had not forgotten that in 2019 a mass shooting happened at the Gilroy Garlic Festival. It was on my mind the entire time.
Such was the case for me on this Vegas trip. I was very aware that some truly horrible shit could go down at any moment. Sure, terrible things can happen anywhere at any time and I am always a little on edge, but I was especially on high alert during this most recent trip.
While we were visiting Fremont Street, I had a mild panic attack after we had been waiting for a while in a large crowd for a street performer to do… something.4 There were a couple of angry looking guys walking around with their hands in their pockets. Moments earlier I had made the mistake of asking my friend’s cousin if Vegas was “open carry” everywhere. He said, “you mean guns? or did you mean open container?” I meant drinks! My heart raced as I started visualizing the worst case scenario.
Fortunately my friend Gillian was totally unimpressed with this street act so she graciously went inside the Golden Nugget with me to retreat from the hustle and bustle of the crowd. There, I asked a bartender for a glass of water and was informed we had to buy a drink before he could serve water. Gillian then came in for the save again and ordered a $5 club soda so I could get a cup of water. Obviously, we were fine and my anxiety turned out to be unnecessary.
However, later, my friend (the bride) added fuel to the fire when she said staying on the 31st floor of Treasure Island made her envision a plane flying into the building.
On our final night in Vegas, I couldn’t fall asleep and was up at 3:30am trying to stop thinking about being in a Vegas version of 9/11. I tried to keep reminding myself that I was safe, and that actually, Vegas was safer for me now that I’m in my mid to late 30s.
I only had one and a half drinks5 the entire trip this time. In my early 20s, I once drank so much in Vegas I blacked out and momentarily lost my purse. I had the worst hangover I’ve probably ever had in my life on the ride home. Now that was dangerous, but I didn’t think of it that way at the time.
This led me to wonder… has Vegas changed as much as I think it has since the perceived golden days of the 90s and my early 20s? Or have I just become an increasingly anxious person as I’ve aged?
Well, I’ve definitely become more anxious. For example, in my early 20s I didn’t think twice about flying and actually enjoyed it. Now my flying anxiety often makes me physically ill.
While my high-strung nervous system is definitely a factor, once I got home I did some extensive research6 that provided evidence that the former assertion is also true. Vegas really has sunk to a lower level of hell.
This can perhaps best be demonstrated through The Mirage hotel.
In the mid-80s, Vegas was sort of in a slump. A horrible fire that killed 85 guests at the MGM hotel in 1980 started the decade off on the wrong foot. Atlantic City had opened in the late 70s, drawing east coast tourists away from Vegas for a closer gambling destination. Plus, there was some kind of recession.
Meanwhile, some rich asshole named Steve Wynn had momentarily turned his back on Las Vegas. He was known for taking the Golden Nugget in Las Vegas from a seedy casino to a seedy casino and hotel that attracted a lot of new customers. He took that success to Atlantic City, opening a new Golden Nugget Hotel and Casino there.
Then, some kind of gambling restriction laws came to pass in New Jersey that made Steve Wynn sour on the whole enterprise. So he sold the Golden Nugget, Atlantic City Edition, and set his sights back on Las Vegas, but this time with a bigger and better vision.
Because he was7 a typical evil white man, he decided he wanted to create a literal colonization themed hotel called the “Bombay Hotel”
These concepts eventually morphed into what would become The Mirage.
Kind of to his credit, Steve Wynn was inspired by another evil but at least whimsical white man, Walt Disney.8
In an interview about the Mirage project Wynn said-
[This resort] has always been a fantasy. In order to be successful you do have to tap into the same kind of energy that Disney did, which is to take people into the world of imagination and fun and fantasy. Disney does it for children of all ages, Vegas is focused on the adult population. But the message is similar and the mission that the hotel is trying to accomplish is the same. We are broadening our appeal, and we’re not saying we want to make a kiddie park out of a casino and hotel. What we are saying though is that if a family wants to come on vacation and experience a resort, that they can come to Las Vegas and stay at the Mirage because it does have something for everybody. The needs of the entire family have been taken into consideration, which means we have tigers and kids don’t have to go through the casino to see the tigers. I like that idea, I think that’s good business.
I actually totally agree with this. A broken clock is right twice a day and sometimes I do have common ground with psychopathic republican billionaires.
The Mirage concept was that because Vegas is technically a hot as shit hell hole, a resort should exist that gives the patron the feeling of being transported to some kind of magical tropical oasis. The tagline would be, where fantasy meets reality.
The Mirage would grow to include-
and most importantly…
Some assumed the Mirage would immediately go bankrupt upon opening, since it cost $630 million in late 80s money9 to build. Instead, the Mirage was a massive success, raking in upwards of a million dollars a day.
In many ways, the Mirage singlehandedly saved Vegas, and turned it into the relative paradise10 I grew up with in the 90s. Soon after the Mirage debuted, other Vegas developers would follow suit with themed hotels and casinos, leading to the opening of-
Along with other hotels and casinos like the MGM Grand (1993), New York, New York (1997), Bellagio (1998), and Mandalay Bay (1999).
I am so old that I remember when a lot of these were brand new. But that’s not the point. The point is there were THEMES and thoughtful details to support those themes. Vegas just hit different in the 90s.
For example, Treasure Island had a pirate show.
Today, Treasure Island does not bother to have a whimsical pirate show. In fact, it hardly has a theme at all.11 The only vestige of its former glory is the name itself.
It’s formerly unique sign has been replaced with the most soulless logo possible-
But if anything is a sign that Vegas has reached the end of an era, it is once again The Mirage itself, the hotel that started the 90s renaissance.
The property was sold to the Hard Rock Hotel recently for $1.08 billion dollars because MGM, who owned The Mirage, preferred taking the money rather than spending money on needed renovations in the hotel. Yes, just blow up a whole fucking building I guess instead of giving it a little TLC.
In its place, a tacky AF guitar shaped monstrosity will be erected.12
I can’t say for sure what happened to create this decline in Vegas. I have a feeling it all started going downhill when Roy was attacked by one of his tigers on his 59th birthday in 2003.
I’m also not saying Vegas was perfect in the 90s. I’m sure it still had sexual assault,13 drug abuse, and gambling-loss filled desperation. It just also had so much more, like a sense of imagination.
Now, the imagination is all but gone, or at least, has been quarantined to a section off the strip in the form of MeowWolf’s installation, Omega Mart, which you can experience for an additional $72+ dollars.
This is all to say, I know Vegas has always had a dark side, but the dark side just seems a little more prominent in the year of our dark lord 2025. In the early 90s, capitalism brought us a little bit of fantasy and escapism to mitigate its effects, and now it is just going for the jugular and sucking the soul out of everything.
Perhaps this was made even more evident by the looming presence of Trump everywhere. Even if my conspiracy side is at all accurate and there were some shady Musk related dealings in the election results, Vegas made it very loud and clear to me that IT INTENTIONALLY VOTED FOR TRUMP AND IS PROUD OF IT.
This isn’t really a surprise. Trump’s history goes back in Vegas to at least the 80s. And after doing all that Steve Wynn research, I learned Wynn was the Republican National Convention finance chair from 2017 to 2018 until he had to resign because of sexual misconduct allegations.
Ironic, considering Trump is somehow president again. But, maybe Wynn also got away with something since he still has his name on his hotel.
I did have a great trip overall with lots of fun, beautiful memories that I will cherish for the rest of my life. I love my friends. They make me laugh and we have a good time anywhere together.
But like I said, this post wasn’t about that. It’s about how maybe Vegas today serves as an exaggerated example of what has happened in the rest of the country. It was never great and always problematic, but it used to feel a little less painful and more hopeful, like good things were not only possible, but happening.
Gillian and I talked to a sales clerk who told us, “I don’t hear people screaming with joy in the casino like I used to years ago.” I felt that.
I know I’m not alone in lamenting what Vegas used to be. In the most recent season of Hacks, the Vegas crew discuss how Vegas used to be more “gritty and fun”.
Marcus: Damn. It’s the end of an era.
Wilson: I know, it’s so sad, Vegas used to be so gritty and fun, and now every hotel is owned by some mega conglomerate.
Marcus’ mom: Corporate greed, mm. Like Wilson said, Vegas has changed. I mean, there’s no more boutique hotels. There’s chains everywhere. It just feels sterile. You know what I mean? I miss Vegas being dirty.
I’d argue that Vegas is still disgustingly dirty, but certainly not in the fun, charming way she means.
Who knows, maybe Deborah Vance will singlehandedly save Las Vegas in Season 5 of Hacks.
Otherwise, it seems like I might not be back anytime soon, unless I can somehow also travel via a time machine to visit its past.
As far as Vegas descending to deeper levels of hell is concerned, my therapist recommends that I learn how to accept reality as it is, without dwelling on how it should be otherwise. The monumental task to somehow have my mind make a heaven out of hell remains.
Until I figure that out, I’ll conclude my lament with peak Las Vegas nostalgia in the form of Elvis Presley:
I’m not totally sure how much money my mom spent on behalf of my crusade. Maybe $40 or something in 2001 era terms. To my credit, I kept hitting the equivalent of “jackpots” on the games I played because I was super motivated
which is actually based on a club stamp I got on another trip to Vegas - a design I intentionally choice because it has no inherent meaning other than the meaning I give it. I meant for it to be a reminder to enjoy my life. When my sister was a little kid I told her it was like a pokemon badge and then when she was a teen I told her it was just based on a club stamp and she was upset with me lol
I hear the tattoo artist (the sister of a former co-worker) saying “you wanted it!” in my head to this day after I have made a questionable choice
It wasn’t clear what he was going to do, but people kept giving him money to act like he was about to do something. Apparently he finally “levitated” a small table but we missed it because I was freaking out.
alcoholic, of course. I had many overpriced club sodas and a delicious mocktails.
by which I mean, I watched the linked 40 minute YouTube video about the rise and fall of the Mirage
he is still alive as of writing this, but referring to him in the past tense feels right to me
Supposedly Wynn even had a framed letter from Disney in his office or something
roughly $1.6 billion in 2025 terms
Fun Fact: The strip is actually not in Las Vegas, NV proper. It is actually located in a city called “Paradise, Nevada”
Apparently it cost $5 million a year to produce and it wasn’t drawing enough traffic inside to be profitable
pun, of course, intended
Steve Wynn being one such culprit