Paradise nevada, p.1
Paradise, Nevada, page 1
CONTENTS
Prologue
PART I: FALL 2014
1. Ray
Interlude I (the story of a hotel)
2. Mary Ann
Interlude II (the story of a neighborhood)
3. Ray
4. Tom
Interlude III (the story of a secret meeting)
5. Tom
6. Mary Ann
PART II: WINTER 2014–2015
7. Lindsay
Interlude IV (the story of a vlog)
8. Ray
Interlude V (the story of a deal)
9. Mary Ann
Interlude VI (the story of a breakfast)
Interlude VII (the story of a day at work)
10. Two Road Trips
11. Two Meetings
PART III: SPRING 2015
12. Tom
13. Lindsay
14. Ray
15. Mary Ann
16. Tom
17. A Fire
Interlude VIII (the story of a victim)
Epilogue
Summer 2015
Fall 2017
Acknowledgments
A Note on the Author
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
—ANTONIO GRAMSCI
And, you know, there’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.
—MARGARET THATCHER
Prologue
Everything was at once extraordinary and dull.
Dazzling and quotidian.
To the visitors, it was exotic and tantalizing and new and as inebriating as advertised. They were dizzied by the lights, addled by the sounds; the city had them in its thrall. But it was ordinary to us. Mundane and unremarkable. We’d grown accustomed to the lights, blinking out of darkened aisles. We were deaf to the digital treble of the machines, the laughter of the drunks. A visitor’s once-in-a-lifetime was our everyday.
This is the first paradox about Las Vegas: the Positano Luxury Resort & Casino was the beating heart of Friday-night euphoria, and it was our home. It sat center-Strip, the city spreading round it like a widening spiral of magic and commonplace, strip clubs and college dorms, shooting ranges and Walmarts, private jet landing strips and bus stops to quiet distant hopeless suburbs. We can’t explain about the fire without establishing this, that a town can be both fiction and reality, both paradise and home. We all here have to come to terms with it, sooner or later.
Then there was the money.
Inside the neon-lit darkness of the Positano, herds of visitors roamed our halls, chasing it. They bounced from wall to wall, from distraction to distraction, letting the room slowly guide them to its center, its raison d’être: the gaming pits. The colors of the playing chips turned money into a fantasy: blue for $1, red for $5, green for $25, black for $100, purple for $500, yellow for $1,000, beautiful white flags for $5,000, their edges striped in patriotic red and blue. We still long for them after all these years. Behind glass cases on the tables’ chip banks, in the hands of pit bosses and dealers, in the satchels of the high rollers. We look at them. We ache for them.
Everything here is about money; when it looks like it’s not about money, then it’s definitely about money. This is the second paradox. That the money too is both fictional and real, both exhilarating and tragic, both there and not there. The town itself embodies this, glittering and triumphant, but hidden away from prying eyes in the middle of an unforgiving desert. The one truly free market in America. Free of guilt. Free of shame. We cannot think of the fire without asking ourselves what role money played, how much of the night had its roots in those silly little disks of color-coded clay. The crowds in the casino hallways. The conversations in the cocktail lounge. The deals struck in elegant offices on the highest floors. The high-stakes Texas Hold’em in the upstairs poker room. You don’t spend as many years in Las Vegas as we have, treated daily to the sight of fortunes changing hands, without learning to question the nature of these things. We can’t help it.
Finally, there are the stories. The third and hardest paradox. Because the more Las Vegas seems but a loose collection of unrelated individuals—the more its inhabitants, both temporary and permanent, look like isolated segments of life that don’t link up together, disparate narratives incapable of producing any meaning—the more the city demands that they connect. A city that wasn’t built to be lived in, perhaps the only one in America, defined for us by the memories of pen-happy visitors and weekend drunks. The idea of a town. It’s in the stories of those who stay that Las Vegas exists, in the low constant hum below the chiming and music, in the real city they created, against all odds, at the heart of a glorified theme park.
We cannot begin to explain the night of Friday, May 1, 2015, at the Positano, the bomb at the Scarlatti Lounge, the sound of the alarm, the blackout, who made it out and who, tragically, did not, without trying to summon, at least in fragments, the stories of the ones who were there. Their stories are part of our story, and ours is part of theirs. We wish we could do more.
This is not going to be easy.
PART I
FALL 2014
1
Ray
On the pinkish backdrop of Google Maps, the blue dot of Ray Jackson’s car trickled down coastal California like a teardrop on a puffy cheek. Or, photographically, the car being white and the actual surface of California sometimes yellow and sometimes green or brown, more like a drop of milk foam flowing down a paper cup. But to the driver inside—who was about as far from sentimentalism and designer coffee as a native Californian can be—the whole thing resolved only into a suboptimal situation, the result of a string of suboptimal decisions yielding undesirable outcomes at every turn.
First of all, he disliked driving. Given the set of all plausible vehicles, the set function of his ability to enjoy the journey showed a conspicuous dip at the independent variable “car.” To make things worse, in the aftermath of two weeks at home for Thanksgiving, he had accepted his uncle’s advice to take the long way round from Marin County to Vegas, through Big Sur, without giving it much thought. This wasn’t like him, but he’d told himself he could use some time to go through things again re: his moving-to-Vegas plan. Yet now that he was on it, the 101 to the 1 instead of the 580 to the 5, he could see how this scenic detour had been a mistake: he was a nervous driver, eyes firmly on the road at all times, too focused to take in the reportedly breathtaking colors of the Pacific streaming to his right. All he’d accomplished was turning a nine-hour straight shot on the interstate into a twelve-hour oceanside ordeal.
Secondly, while there was no doubt he would need a car in Las Vegas, he was not so sure that taking his dad’s had been such an EV+1 deal after all. True, his father no longer drove it to Sacramento twice a week on account of: (a) he didn’t do career counseling for CSUS anymore, and (b) he had gone partially blind due to two successive retinal vascular occlusions in the last couple years. Also true, while Ray could technically still afford to buy a car, a large expense now didn’t sound like a great idea, given his situation. Still, taking the white Chevy SUV provided his parents with an excuse to suggest visits that, coupled with how much closer to home he would be now as opposed to Toronto, could easily backfire.
The main issue, however, remained Las Vegas itself. When he’d moved out of his apartment in Toronto, Las Vegas had been a vague idea motivated mostly by a desire to get the hell out of there, asap. He’d figured his stay in Marin County ought to give him enough time to evaluate his options and derive the optimal living solution, but fourteen days of his parents, an incredibly old dog, and a fierce ping-pong opponent had ended up draining his computational stamina. He had been, he had to admit, unacceptably lazy. And now he was moving to Vegas without a real grasp on the mathematical landscape of the decision and with what a less analytical mind would probably call a “bad feeling.”
For years, as a professional online poker player, Ray had regarded live poker and the world of brick-and-mortar casinos pretty much the same way a neurosurgeon would regard the game Operation: they were all very cute, with their chips, their drinks, and their serious faces, but let’s be honest, they had no idea what they were doing. Ray’s world, the world of high-stakes online poker, was a specialized haven of advanced math and tracking software, and the idea of moving to Vegas to play in casinos felt like an insult. Not to mention what his online peers would think. Was he maybe just overreacting to this whole thing, just running away from his problems without really thinking things through?
Surrounded by an excess of nature, he kept looking at the axis of the road ahead. It really had been naive to think time at his parents’ could help: the house had a way of muddling his thoughts, stirring up a fog of prolixity and bad logic he was only now starting to come out of. He decided to concentrate on the new episode of one of the machine learning and AI podcasts he’d listened to nonstop during his last weeks in Toronto. That always made things clearer.
Two weeks before, Ray had arrived in Marin County at night. Having spent the cab ride home looking at his phone to discourage the driver from talking to him, and having had to wrestle his father for control of the heavier, more wobbly-wheeled bag on the way inside (so that “Seriously Dad, let me do it” had been his first words), he’d had no time to gradually reacquaint himself with his childhood town, neighborhood, and house. At the periphery of his vision, familiar shapes gave in quietly to the sameness of the night. But as soon as he was inside, the yellow glow of the low-energy light bulbs on the cherrywood bookshelves awakened him to his obvious mistake: he was home.
It took Ray a few days to readjust to the place where his precocious talents had been first noticed and nurtured. In the quiet jazz suffusing the rooms he knew so well, he could still hear the whispered expectations for his future his parents had gone to extreme pedagogical lengths to hide. It was in the living room, where they had insisted on throwing him house parties and, worse yet, surprise parties with the other, non-mathematically-gifted children. It was in the kitchen, where he had been recruited in all manners of commis activities by his French-cuisine enthusiast mother ever since he had been tall enough to reach the countertop, drawing him away from his desk and his calculus. It was in his parents’ bedroom, where secret pillow talk about Ray’s limitless potential must have taken place for years. The secrecy, Ray knew, was some hippyish hokum meant to alleviate the pressure and allow him to organically develop his dispositions. But behind the smiles and the encouragements to “go out and have some fun,” Ray never doubted for a second the narrative his parents had always wanted from him. For him.
At the root of his problems with the house was a familiar and much more tangible contrast: the Jacksons’ was a house of Letters. It was, in fact, in response to this axiom, transparent and irrefutable for anybody who traversed their labyrinthically bookshelved corridors, that young Ray had derived his own clear-cut identity as a man of Numbers. In the late 1980s, only a few years before his birth, Howard and Victoria Jackson had opened the Satis House Bookshop in San Rafael, a so-called independent little hideaway for the literarily inclined. Throughout Ray’s childhood, the bookstore had been the object of his parents’ endless profusions of love and endeavors, and had hosted readings by some of the most celebrated writers of the time. Ray himself, cute and well-behaved, had soon been a welcome guest at both the readings and the postreading dinners with this or that novelist, which accounted for the wealth of unnecessary synonyms and flowery phrases that still clogged his mental storage centers. And now that he was back, and corridors were once again something you traversed, and cutting a potato was called batonnet-ing or allumette-ing (two different things), and decisions were made because of how they felt, regardless of their optimality, Ray found himself utterly incapable of the very rational thinking that the future of his poker career demanded.
The days leading up to Thanksgiving became an elaborate game of domestic chess. Ray’s king, who only wanted to castle short and mind his own business in a corner, was assailed by opposing forces from both flanks. His father, a short, thin, gray-haired man whose face had developed a kind of puffiness with old age and whose eyes had narrowed to small horizontal slits, haunted both floors of the house like a slow-moving, legally blind ghost. He had a way of walking into whatever room Ray was in, hands joined against his lower back, like a Parisian flaneur (his words), that always managed to drive Ray up the cherrywood-paneled wall: he had no reason to come in and made no attempt to hide the fact, he just walked in and sort of loitered. It would have been quite better, honestly, if his father had started chopping wood right there in the room—something Ray pointed out with the disgruntled “What?” that opened most of their conversations throughout the two weeks.
If sitting in one place, evaluating different answers to the question that kept vexing him (he simply could not stay in Toronto any longer, this much he knew), made Ray vulnerable to his father’s loitering, moving around the house exposed him to his mother’s own traps: simply running into her, the tallest and strongest-looking Jackson, entailed a project (usually kitchen-related) that would tie him for an hour in a collaborative activity he knew was only an excuse to have a chat.
It wasn’t that Ray didn’t want to talk to his parents (as much as he felt like talking to anybody at all lately). He was, he would have been ready to admit, acceptably fond of them, after all. It was more that he really didn’t want to talk to them now, now that his impeccable decision-making had frozen, his future wasn’t loading, and there were signs of an imminent internal personal OS crash.
And of course, as if on cue, his father started announcing that they needed to “have a talk” before Ray left, “just whenever you have five minutes.”
Ray mentally outlined two possible scenarios: in the first one, his father having been a career counselor for decades + Ray having chosen professional poker as a way of employing his gifts + his being in the process of moving away from Toronto and (maybe?) reconsidering his career path, all suggested the heart-to-heart about his life choices and how they made him feel that he had so far miraculously managed to avoid. It wasn’t anything personal, he just really didn’t want to talk about it.
The fact was, the son of the career advisor had never really needed any career advice. Ray had been seventeen when he left home for parental-chest-swelling Stanford, and nineteen when he scandalously dropped out and moved to Toronto to pursue his online poker career. By then he had already been VF1nd3r, online poker prodigy and heads-up cash game2 specialist, for quite some time to pretty much everybody he knew (except, of course, the people he knew in person). But while he had stayed enrolled through the early stages of his phenomenally fast ascent to poker stardom, the 2011 ban on online poker in the United States, known among initiates as Black Friday, had brought him to a crossroads. Stay in school, or follow the international diaspora of American poker pros? Stanford, or Pokerstars.com? It was the first time he had been able to apply his EV computations to a real-life problem, and it had been a simple, reassuring victory for math-based decision-making. Less than two months after Black Friday, he was signing the lease to an apartment in Toronto—sight unseen, based on an elaborate neighborhood scoring system of his own creation—by far the most rational way of playing the hand he’d been dealt.
It wasn’t easy to determine how his parents had taken the move. What for years he had called their “being chill,” he knew, was really a byproduct of their inability (his and theirs) to discuss anything of importance with each other. He knew they worried, suspected they worried a lot, but could never figure out how much the fact that their son was making nontrivial sums of money playing cards on the internet bothered them (the Jacksons’ being one of those rare American households where moneymaking was not considered of value in and of itself). Still, their support had stayed unwavering. As for him, if the DoJ ban that had made him an exile had taken an emotional toll (as it seemed to have for most of his poker friends on Skype and Two Plus Two Poker Forum), he did not care to know: introspection was a guessing game he had no time for. His public persona displayed no doubt, having left only one lapidary comment in the “Black Friday/F*** DoJ/where next?” Two Plus Two thread: “Worry only about what you can control. Whining is for result-oriented fish. This is poker, adapt or die.” (This had been quoted and commented “so much this” by lower-stakes players even more fervently than his posts usually were.)
And so online poker had become his life: the monetary upswings and downswings caused by a capricious mathematical goddess called Variance3 less and less capable of causing comparable swings in his mood; the validation he received from his graphs more important to him than the actual money he made (his words); the fact that his friends’ names were sauce123 and OtB_RedBaron and that poker was quite literally all they ever talked about absolutely ordinary and fine to him. In the poker world, he was a pioneer. He was one of the first to systematically apply advanced game theory to real in-game decisions. He filled notebooks with decision trees before any software was developed to do it. He was even one of the four Brains selected to represent humankind in the historic Brains vs. Artificial Intelligence poker challenge in Pittsburgh last spring.
The second possible topic his father might want to broach scared him even more. Wasn’t it possible, Ray considered, that what his retinally occluded, philosophically inclined father wanted to discuss with his only son was the issue of his own aging and mortality? Wasn’t it possible that he wanted to talk about his health, “open up” about his “feelings,” even sort of preemptively counsel his son through his future grieving? It would be entirely in character. Ray shuddered at the prospect. When had the human race gone so collectively wrong that they started to value the noise of the psyche over the signal of the brains? Where was all this sharing coming from? Introspection, again, was better avoided, a luxury application for underutilized servers.
