Lonely Boys Gambling
Fascism, isolation, and those fucking betting apps.
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My first love for Las Vegas was an ironic love, rooted in the removed cynicism of a twentysomething hipster-wannabe snob. I remember packing for my first trip there—18-ish years ago, for a friend-of-a-friend’s sky-dive (!) wedding—with a kind of Mad Men-era maximalism in mind: screaming-loud vintage tropical patterns and the jingliest, jangliest costume jewelry I owned. I expected to step off the plane and into a Rat Packy wonderland.
Perhaps you have been to, or live in, Las Vegas. If so, you can imagine what happened next: I sweated fully through my parrot-print tube dress on the hotel shuttle. At 10 p.m. I dripped into the Stratosphere hotel and stood in an impossibly long check-in line full of exhausted parents wrangling even-more-exhausted kids. When I finally grabbed a cocktail and joined my friends at the casino bar, we sat amid the neon-glow of a bank of “Kitty Glitter” slot machines holding the rapt attention of chain-smoking Memaws. The weekend passed in a drinky blur devoid of Bogarts, Sinatras, or Davis Jr.’s, but while the Las Vegas of my imagination never appeared, something more interesting took its place. I had come looking for Viva Las Vegas and Ocean’s 11, but instead I found a not-so-secret third thing: an aging tourist destination desperately trying to be everything to everyone, surrounded by a city full of regular-ass people living their regular-ass lives.
Goofy, grimy, glamorous, and so full of self-conscious artifice that the faux of it all felt realer to me than anything else, Vegas captured my heart immediately. I’ve been back a dozen or so times since that original trip, on each occasion finding delicious meals on and off the Strip, marveling at fabulously gaudy Christmas and Lunar New Year decor, and making one-night-only best friends at dive bars and blackjack tables. I don’t pretend that the dangerously addictive vices Vegas has historically offered through drink and dice are without their destructive qualities now or in the past; a place that’s been easy for me to love is also a place where—by design—it is easy to lose everything. But never has that dichotomy been clearer to me than during my last trip to the city, during the recent rise of online gambling and polymarket betting platforms.
We live in an age of halted and stilted and zig-zagging progress and regression; two steps forward, three steps sideways, one step back, and four leaps into the stratosphere.