Learning the House Rules
Everything costs too much and everything is farther away than it looks.
The Strip teaches quickly, and the first lesson is distance. Every building on it is enormous, which makes every building look close. Bill and Bob set out on foot for a casino that appeared to be across the street and arrived fifty minutes later, damp.
The second lesson is price. Bill had budgeted for the trip in the same notebook he uses to track his home game results, and by the afternoon of day one the notebook had a new column headed Incidentals. It filled faster than the other columns.
They ended the day at the famous fountain, the one that goes off every half hour in front of a hotel the size of a small town, and stood at the rail to watch it. Hundreds of jets of water went up in formation and came down again, lit gold by the setting sun.
Bill watched the whole show and said that was expensive water.
Bob, who had bought a bottle of water from a kiosk on the way over, told him to wait until he bought a bottle.
By day two Bill had formed a working theory that the entire city was a single large trap, designed with great care to separate visitors from money by making every individual decision seem slightly reasonable. He laid this out over breakfast in some detail. It was the most accurate piece of analysis he produced all trip.
Bob listened to the whole thing, nodded, and said that was what he loved about the place. He calls it atmosphere. Bill calls it the rake.
All of Chapter 1: The Vegas Trip →