Once I woke up in a hotel room on Fremont Street in Las Vegas with a clean, heavy shot glass in each pocket of my coat (which, along with my shoes, I was still wearing), a parting gift, apparently, from the biker chick bartenders at the bar I didn't remember leaving, only arriving at, the husband-to-be launching into an unintentional but instinctive and very effective charm offensive on the ZZ Top-beardy, leather-vested bouncer and the ladies in metallic bikini tops and hot pants, the occasion gleefully immortalised in blurry neon on a phone camera.

I preferred this bar to the previous one, which was a little too polished for my tastes, all slick surfaces, prettier-than-thou clientele, and snoozy downtempo tunes. In that bar I thought of how the husband-to-be would have been a troubadour in another century, roaming the countryside and staying in villas or castles, seducing ladies-in-waiting (ok, maybe not, he isn't a Casanova-type) and telling tall tales about dragons not-yet-slayed. More than a few patrons gravitated to his je ne sais quoi, except for the dude who had sidled up to me, an aura reader allegedly, who said I wasn't supposed to marry this guy. Oh, really?

Anyways what I remember thinking when I woke up in that hotel room was that Las Vegas is the type of city where you habitually wake up in not knowing how you got there. (This is probably not an original thought, but oh well.)

It is also a place to be very bored in: the first night is fine, novelty yadda yadda ya, but how could you stay at those card tables and slot machines, waiting for Lady Fortune to appear, drinking life into a bleary and bedimmed muddle, surrounded by people in the same predicament night after night? The unreality of the city—a city in the middle of the desert, knotted in freeways and teeming with chimeras built by cowboys and mobsters—made it impossible to linger longer than a weekend.

But of course my version is inflected by mythology and cliché. For another version, maybe try The Grit Beneath the Glitter: Tales from the Real Las Vegas, edited by Hal K Rothman and (a favourite) Mike Davis, who call this "a locals' collection". Although published by UC Press 20 years ago, it is probably still cogent now.

Afterword: I very much regret leaving those shot glasses behind in the hotel room.

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