Vegas is an amazing place. I've encountered the city countless times in movies, television, magazines, or books, but it's like the Grand Canyon---you can't know 'til you go. All the clichÈs, all the jokes, all the scandals, all the history, all of it is nothing compared to actually being there. If you travel to Vegas with open eyes, you can see all the souls of the living and the dead chasing each other across the glittering marquees, leaping from light bulb to light bulb, illuminating the strip with the weird glow of lives lived under glass.

Religious moralists would say that Vegas is a Godless city. It's the opposite. Vegas is a cathedral to polytheism, a blindingly American altar where all the world's religions have been worked into the stone, a kitsch assembly like the shot glasses from all fifty states you find for sale in dusty roadside tourist traps. The anglo-saxon paganism of Arthur and the Grail meets the jesting spirits of Bali beneath the beams of Shinto pagodas, while the primalism of the animal jungle crashes against the protestant romanticism of the Old West. No culture is ignored, no icon is too sacred, profane, or obscure that it can't be recast in neon and injection-molded plastic or screen-printed onto a shirt.

My first night on the strip, I wandered dazed with my friend Ken Hite and we boggled at the fertile assembly of mystic symbols and the seemingly unconscious relationships their juxtapositions formed. Siegfried and Roy; Siegfried the Hero, Roy the King; Lancelot and Arthur. The long entrance to Bally's made through a glowing birth canal over running water full of silver, copper, and nickel coins dropped in with silent wishes. In the casinos, the everpresent signs over the cashiers: CHANGE / REDEMPTION. Harrah's, spoken as Hera's, the house of the Goddess bound at every door by statues of a fool in yellow motley, the jester who always served the King. A nearby marquee: "The Magic of Dirk Arthur," dirk the sword Excalibur, Excalibur the name of another casino altogether. Elvis, writ large and labeled "The Dream King," his image pierced by a massive shaft that also split in twain an image of cresting waves beneath him, the Fisher King wounded over water. Directly facing him a block away was the image of Lance Burton, the Magician: Lance the heroic, living Lancelot to Elvis's pierced, dead Arthur; Burton, the translator of The Thousand Nights and the One Night as well as the Kama Sutra. Between them lay a casino ensorcelled with identical images of a leering clown, Jocko the jester again, who only revealed his name when you drew close and who gave you the false liege of an Elvis impersonator inside. Outside, two fortune-telling machines spoke apocrypha. Atop the casino was a roller coaster and a ferris wheel, both nonfunctional shams; the ferris wheel was populated with still, silent mannequins, totems that promised fun and excitement but that delivered only a stagnant orbit from which they could find no escape. In this vibrant, living city of life and light carved from a desert, symbols of enforced, manipulated fertility bound by potent male power littered the landscape like cigarette butts. Everywhere you could see the shimmer of T.S. Eliot: "The sound of horns and motors. Fear death by water. A wicked pack of cards."

Eventually it was all too much and we went to a titty bar.

Even this was an accident. We were full from dinner and drunk as lords, weaving through the old downtown strip. There is no night on the old strip. A huge arcing canopy runs over the street for blocks on end, sealing you in from the dark above. Millions of souls trapped under glass coat the canopy, blinking in complex rhythms, slaves to the master, forming images of dice, palm trees, and abstract swirling patterns unseen by our eyes since we were in the womb. The light is like day. The casinos are all open to the promenade, barn doors open but the horses still inside, stamping in their stalls and whinnying. Or losing, as the case may be.

The sign said something like "Vegas Topless Entertainment." Expecting a big floor show choked with feather boas and incrusted with rhinestones, we stumbled inside and were led to seats. Our expectations were far, far off the mark; two topless women were dancing around brass poles before the pale, fleshy faces of men seated on stools just below them. We were informed that there was a two-drink minimum per person, and we placed confused orders while coming to grips with the environment: two gin & tonics, two vodka & tonics. The waitress returned and demanded twenty-seven dollars. We paid, agog, and started gulping our drinks lest they manage to take us for more money. Within moments, attractive women wrapped their arms around our shoulders and suggested lap dances, private booths, and other such delights.

I flashed back on a story a friend of mine once told me. He'd gone with some other friends to a strip club someplace, and one of his buddies went off in a corner for a private dance of some sort. A surprisingly large amount of time went by. My friend went by to check on the guy, and saw him sitting there with a half-naked woman crawling on him. He gave my friend a pleading, helpless look, his eyes genuinely afraid. My friend got him out of the dance and helped him outside, where he confessed he'd already blown almost a thousand dollars via credit card but that he'd been powerless to stop, overwhelmed by the experience and unable to say, "Okay, that's enough."

We managed to resist the pair's appeals, and appeal, and focused on getting our drinks down our gullets as quickly as possible. We weren't quick enough.

More arms around my shoulder---a dancer this time, not dissuaded by the fact that I was looking at another woman elsewhere in the bar. I turned to look at her and promptly found her ample breasts pressed against my face as she ran her fingers through my hair. Higher brain functions ceased. The lizard brain spilled out of my ear and ran rampant through the primeval jungle of instinct. I did the only thing I could do.

I reached for my wallet.

Fortunately, the random piece of paper I produced from it was a five-dollar bill. Sated, the dancer moved on to bigger game.

It was clear who was in charge of this situation. There was an illusion of male control, male power, but its surface rippled and betrayed. There were no motley jesters here keeping the female force restrained; here the tigresses broke free, devoured Lancelot and Arthur alike, turned the hierarchy of the world upside down and shook the money from its pockets. It was overwhelming, enslaving.

We finished our drinks and staggered out onto the strip. Vegas had done for us, slapped us around and showed us power that was naked both figuratively and literally: "I will take from you that which you would normally never surrender."

I will show you a city in a handful of dust.

In a casino bar nearby, we marshaled our forces with more drinks, blinkered from the experience. "Fair warning, guys," the bartender started to say, then glanced over our shoulder. "I'll tell you later."

We should have seen it coming. Vegas wasn't finished with us yet.

A guy in his mid-thirties sat down next to us, wearing an employee jacket from another casino. He looked like a lost Baldwin brother, thick brown hair and a lifetime spent teetering on the edge of a flab explosion. He got a drink and started talking to us.

Forty-five minutes passed by. He was still talking. We were still listening. He was buying the drinks.

His name was Eddie Goodman. Eddie told pointless, elliptical stories, repeating sub-stories and odd details over and over, never answering a question without launching into some tangent.

His father was in the Navy for eight years, got married, had three kids, drove his truck off a cliff, broke his neck and back, got lifetime disability, said he couldn't support a family on that, rented a building, started a business, Eddie swept floors, backpacked for eight and a half months, met three women from Holland in Seattle, went to Bainbridge Island on a ferry with them, they leaned forward on the railing, they had more hair under their arms than Eddie did, he couldn't understand it, it was so strange, why didn't they shave their armpits, they were beautiful, they had blond hair, they had blue eyes, they had a figure he drew in the air, but they had that hair down there, he was so shocked he went "Ah!" and lost his erection, his grandmother owned a liquor store, he worked in aerospace as an inspector, he was used to inspecting little parts, he worked in millionths, they gave him an entire airplane wing, it was as big as this room, he asked how to inspect it, they gave him a tape measure, they marked it off in six-inch segments, they told him to start small and do it all, we were good people, we were smart people, he knew we were good people and smart people, there was a lot of money to be made in Vegas, most dealers treated tourists like crap, they just wanted our money, but Eddie Goodman was a good man and he wasn't like that, he lived in a nice house, it wasn't some two-story five-bedroom mansion with a swimming pool but it was a nice house, he knew we lived in nice houses too, he won fifteen hundred dollars after he got off work tonight, he won thirty dollars more on the way to the crapper, shots of Cuervo for his new friends, gin and tonics for his new friends, vodka and tonics for his new friends.

When he went to the bathroom, the bartender came back. "I tried to warn you," he said.

We fled. Back onto the strip. Drunker than ever.

Outside, it was strangely dim. All the casinos on the strip had turned off the mazes of lights, and a stunning program was underway. The lights of the canopy overhead were running through intricate routines keyed to music that blared from everywhere. It was the music of Vegas, the music of Sinatra. It ended with "Luck be a Lady," but while it played everyone just stood on the strip, gawking up at where the moon was supposed to be, dazzled by the strange constellations that rewrote the sky. Before we'd understood the situation, it looked like Gabriel had sounded his trumpet and the unmoving crowd was watching more-deserving souls fly up to Heaven while they remained behind, God's cast-offs and remaindered goods, half-price souls fit to be imprisoned under glass, the next round of light bulbs for the giant cowboy, the dancing girl, the words and images that melted into one another and embraced all meaning as one idea.

We found the bus. We found the hotel. We found the airport. All we lost was ourselves, trapped within a plastic Bally's MVP card that gave you one free spin a day on the million-dollar slot machine. We gave it a spin, once each.

Ken won a keychain. And then we were gone.