Dymitri Haraszewski
Blog # 1660

[Photograph of a young Dymitri Haraszewski]

Fuck Las Vegas: A Meditation on Love, Loss, and a Bit of Neurochemistry Just for Fun

11-10-24
1 of 6

As much as I hate to say what I'm about to say, I still have to say it: Fuck Las Vegas. That may not seem like a radical statement, but for me it really is. See, I'm a lifelong superfan of the City of Decadence, and when I say "lifelong", I'm talking about my earliest memory there, when I was five years old and just completely enthralled by the magic of a brightly colored cartoon metropolis springing up from the middle of a barren desert. It was dreamlike and thrilling, and the exquisite enchantment of that place never wore thin for me through hundreds of visits over the next 20 years. I was in love with Las Vegas. Maybe even literally in love, sitting at my elementary school desk, daydreaming as I stared deep into the glossy details of postcards from my favorite hotels or sketching out meticulous depictions of iconic Las Vegas symbols from memory alone/ I loved everything about the city: the lights, the summer heat, the buffets, the cacophony of casino noise at 1:00 AM... every little thing, except for the fact that they insisted I was too young to gamble, myself. By the time I was ten, I'd read dozens of books to learn the rules and strategies for every casino game, and I owned miniature layouts for craps, roulette, and blackjack tables, plus all the cards and dice and toy wheels a kid could ever want. Truly, that town was my first crush, my first great love.

At fourteen, however, Las Vegas became more than just a metaphorical love... it became the place where I first fell in romantic love with another human being and understood it as such. Oh sure, I'd had crushes, maybe even more than just crushes, going back at least to eight years old, in third grade, when I was so smitten with my friend Josh Cottrell that I believed I just envied him and wanted everything he had - his shoes, his hair, his attitude, and even his girlfriend, Jessica Alvarez. It was many years later that I finally realized what I'd REALLY wanted was Josh himself. But I don't count that or any other early infatuations, because I only recognized them for what they were in distant hindsight. But in Las Vegas, at fourteen... that time was different.

His name was Mikey, and we met in the arcade at the Mirage. For three breathlessly exhilarating days I walked to the Mirage from our hotel a few blocks away, just hoping Mikey would be there. And each glorious day, there he was. I'd gone to the Mirage originally on that trip because it was one of my primary Las Vegas obsessions, a hotel I'd explored every nook and cranny of on previous trips, learning all its hidden treasures and memorizing the floor plan as well as the names and specialties of every restaurant and shop throughout the resort. I'd have walked miles beyond what I actual had just to spend the day there, and though my family only stayed at the hotel once, I continued to visit the Mirage faithfully for many years, for no reason other than that I simply loved being there. But of the many great memories that place holds for me (and there are hundreds), the most significant of all is certainly that fateful December day when Mikey and I met, bonding over a multiplayer car game I can no longer recall the name of (Sprint GT?), then spending every available minute together from the Tuesday morning when we met to the Thursday night before Dad and I went home. I didn't understand the elation I felt when I was with him at the time, though I was very conscious of how attractive he was to me, and of course I didn't care what, exactly, was behind it at the time: I'd simply never felt so electrifyingly close, so connected, to someone I'd been physically attracted to, prior to meeting Mikey. I could've stared at him endlessly, without a single bite to eat or even twitching a muscle as I just watched him move, watched him exist; and I now realize that what I was experiencing was my first pubertal cascade of a dopamine and norepinephrine cocktail that saturated my youthful neurons to produce a focussed euphoria I'd never known before. We spent countless hours playing video games and, when the quarters ran out, just hang around, sitting smushed together, the two of us shoulder to shoulder in a single player machine and talking animatedly about where we were from (he was a Michigander, like half my family) and what we liked to do (he played guitar, and his brother raced dirtbikes like me, so we shared that culture, too), all while I bathed in the glow of oxytocin and vasopressin that coursed through my blood and lodged in my brain on account of this beautiful human being's sustained physical contact with me. I subconsciously memorized his every detail (not unlike I'd done with with the details of my beloved Las Vegas landmarks in 4th and 5th grade), from his shoes - a popular white, orange and black Nike model - to his various shirt & pants ensembles, to his blond and stylishly feathered haircut. Later, I would write down every detail I could recall in what would eventually into my journal, but which at first was just one double-sided yellow sheet of paper, crammed tight with my tiny writing. I recounted nearly every movement we made through the resort, right down to which bathrooms and even the individual sinks and water fountains we used, all of which I continued to visit on each trip for many years afterward, almost like a pilgrimage. I detailed the specific indoor trees and waterfalls where we'd stop and stand unnecessarily close together, staring wordlessly at the faux nature for improbably long periods of time (where Mikey's body heat would radiate through me and create this bizarre, unprecedented urge to take his perfect hand into my own stupidly sweaty palm; a thought from which I recoiled immediately, knowing I could never, in a million, billion years, ever act on such a ridiculous impulse). In my one-page journal, I listed all the hidden murals and other little gems we discovered throughout the hotel, and described with all the minutia I could muster our short walk out to the closed pool, where we shivvered and talked about going to see the dolphin exhibit if we met up again during the summer, somehow imagining that such an impossible coincidence might actually be possible. I wrote it all down, everything, as well as I could, while the memories were still crisp and clear and I could think of nothing else. But before all that serotonin-deficiency-induced souvenent, before all that obsessive memorializing and re-living of our 72 magical hours together, there was the actual real-life experience, wherein the many minor splendors of that Mirage Hotel that I'd already seen dozens or hundreds of times before all suddenly seemed brand new and impossibly interesting again, sharing them for the first time with Mickey from Michigan.

On the last day of our trip, I got up early to go find my new friend for one final goodbye. We'd actually said our goodbyes the night before, as his family was leaving the next day, same as we were, but I had to try anyway. I was driven by the primal optimism of my dopamine-saturated neurons. I waited over an hour, but Mikey never came, and when I just couldn't stay any longer, I finally walked out with the heaviest heart. An hour later, when my dad and I were packed up and on our way home, I found I couldn't stop staring back at the Mirage. I'd always watched my favorite city disappear behind us as we left town, but this time the only thing that mattered to me was wherever Mikey might be at that moment, so I didn't take my eyes off the hotel where we'd met until there was nothing but empty desert in the rearview. And then, completely untethered from him at last, I was just numb. Lost. The lump in my throat never dissolved and every song on the radio made me tear up, though I couldn't weep openly with my dad sitting next to me, two feet away. How would I explain it? Really, I couldn't even explain it to myself... I know I'd loved being around Mikey for the past few days, but I'd loved being around lots of people in my life, and no goodbye had ever left me wallowing in such despondency as this. I didn't understand it at all then, and still wouldn't grasp the deeper, brain-based reasons for all that soaring rapture and crashing despair until many years later. On that heartbroken ride home, when Gary Moore's classic blues ballad came on, "Still Got the Blues for You," I couldn't suppress a slight sob any longer, and Dad noticed. Somehow I brushed it off and was more careful after that. That song still puts a lump in my throat, brining Mikey back to mind even to this day, but also two others I'll leave nameless for now - the two Great Losses of my life. I've mentioned both in these pages before.

Back at home, a day passed, then two, and still I couldn't shake the obstinate funk that enshrouded me. One morning I was standing in the kitchen, pondering the spice rack through misty eyes and wondering whether Mikey might prefer tarragon or thyme on his ground beef, which I was aching to cook for us, when it suddenly hit me like a Mike Tyson gut punch: the fact was, O felt so incredibly, intractably, intolerably miserable because... well, this was LOVE. In an instant, it all added up - the queasy stomach, the constant tears, the inability to sleep paired with a desire to do nothing BUT sleep... I'd fallen in love without expecting it, looking for it, or even realizing it had happened. It was exactly what I'd read and heard in songs - love was bliss, but lost love was agony. Torture, even. And just as all the poets had ever written, I was realizing this pain didn't just go away. It lasted, it lingered, it burned and burrowed deep inside my guts, evicting every impulse for hunger or happiness that even on a clear skied, chilly and cheerful Ventura day, crisply sunny just before Christmas Eve, cozily ensconced in my warm home filled with the smell of Mom's freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, all I could feel was the cold world as a soggy old grey blanket lying heavily over my depleted body. But even in such darkness, my unexpected epiphany brought a flicker of light. From the depths of bleak confusion, at least now I understood: I was in love, and although love could hurt - badly - I also felt some relief, some sense that the pain was also part of an exciting new adventure.

Love. I'd thought I'd already known all about love, what to expect from it, yet here it was in all its ferocity, dominating the very core of my own life, and that was pretty cool to recognize. It wasn't cool at all to feel like dogshit left out to dry, but cool to realize I was feeling a genuinely new emotional experience; an important one. I don't recall whether I had the presence of mind to wonder or worry whether this was a torment I'd have to live through again (and god, if I HAD known just how much of that same torment - and worse - actually did lay ahead for me, I doubt I could've faced the future at all; because who ever thinks to weigh one's pains against the joys that made them possible while you're in the midst of despair?). What I do recall wondering was how long it would last. How long before I might feel normal again? Feel happy? I was a pretty happy kid, after all, so I couldn't help fearing that the thick fog of sadness may NEVER lift. I just didn't know what to expect in such unchartered territory as lost love, but at the moment, in my still very raw condition, it was almost comfort enough to finally have some explanation for why I was hurting so damn bad.

And thus we return to this - fuck Las Vegas. It's something I never imagines I could say, but here we are. I just don't see any way around it because there's no escaping the facts: Vegas is a city that has no honor, no compassion, no respect for its own past. See, I recently learned that sometime this year, the Mirage hotel will be closed down. Shuttered. Fin. And then, shortly after pulling the plug on this place that I not only think of as a still relatively new sort - not even 35 years old! - but one which had always seemed as impervious to its knees, reduced to an ignominious pile of rubble in the heart of the Strip to be cleared away and replaced by... a guitar? What the hell, man. It's sickening.

Adding insult to injury, this said indignity comes hot on the heels of the other recent shattering tragedy of pointless Las Vegas change: the disgraceful closing and ruination of the Tropicana hotel, truly one of the city's great classics. It's one of the few remaining holdouts from a much classier Las Vegas before my time, and the first hotel to really achieve mega-resort status, with two stately gold and white towers bookending the city's first seriously extravagant pool and its seemingly endless series of hidden grottoes and secret treasures that truly made it the "Island of Las Vegas". It's fair to say the Tropicana was the hotel that consummated my love affair with Sin City, when I was about 10 or 11 years old and roaming the vast grounds by myself, enjoying the spectacle of the Folies Bergere show with my parents (11 p.m. topless version, of course), and just feeling so worldly and grown up... but now that, too, will soon be nothing but acres of broken concrete and dust to be swept away so some assholes can put in, what... a goddamned baseball field? Yep, a tiny little overpriced stadium for a team that almost no one wants in Nevada and even fewer want removed from its longtime home of Oakland. With no exaggeration, it all makes me nauseous. Literally. It makes me feel sick, but not the sort of existentially meaningful illness that was my first bout of Las Vegas induced love sickness; rather, it's an angry, gross, outraged, sad, and deeply disappointed nausea you might feel from watching someone shoot a broken-shinned racehorse in the forehead, just because its obscenely wealthy owner decides it would be "too much trouble" to continue caring for the creature now that can no longer make any money for him. It's just awful, and with these two completely unpardonable perfidies occurring within a year of each other, these stupidly shallow desecrations now added to the long, sad string of similarly disloyal grovellings over the past three decades at the altar of craven avarice, it's just time now. Time to say it: Fuck Las Vegas.

But still, it hurts. I've never given up on the important ones in my life. Never. I've never abandoned a friend before, not even the ones who've abandoned me, and not in a million years would I have ever imagined I could turn my back on this city, the great love of my youth and earliest memories... but it's turned its back on itself, over and over, for a long time now. I can no longer bear witness to this perpetual, cyclical suicide. So now, Las Vegas, my old but erstwhile friend, I'm sorry. We're done. You've hurt me too much, and I suppose you've already been dead for a long time, anyway. Or maybe all this angst is just a symptom of the neurological melodrama that plays out in brains when our love circuitry is finally forced to give up on that which is unrequited, or stolen away. In either case... adieu, you sinful old desert bastard. Adieu.

Go ahead; contact me.
I dare you. :)
Actually, I promise I'll reply.

Dymitri Haraszewski
AC2622 E-Yard
P.O Box Y09090
Ione, CA 95640

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You can find me on GettingOut.com. Just search my last name and "Mule Creek State Prison"