The Lights of Vegas: A Parable
The beauty of life cycles.
Today’s selection is an unpublished essay about a recent trip to Las Vegas, Nevada.
The Lights of Vegas
Sitting alone in El Cortez’s restaurant, Siegel’s 1941, a casino’s pre-civil rights era relief station in the heart of downtown Las Vegas, I sip on my first mimosa of the day, my iPad open in front of me as I wait for my fully comped breakfast of shell-eggs, hash browns, and spinach. A recent blood test—and the worst reaction of my life—had revealed a gluten allergy that made food feel like my newest, if most containable, enemy. A homemade ham and cheese sandwich had sent me into hives, facial scarring, and total body swelling just weeks before. Who knows, I mused while glancing at the overpriced salmon on the laminated one-page menu, maybe it was the ancestor’s way of welcoming me into the next chapter of my life as a geriatric millennial.
A few days shy of the 57th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” the irony of my concern over gluten, while sitting in a restaurant my great-grandmother wouldn’t have even been allowed into, wasn’t lost on me. But over the years, I’d learned how to stuff that kind of shit way down and put it to the back of my most immediate concerns because, well, you’ve got to pick your battles. And the only battle I wanted to fight these days was the monumental one with my first prose manuscript.
***
The night before, I had checked into this vintage gambler’s haven off of Fremont Street, a broke Black writer desperately in need of a break from my three generations of family living under the pretty but falling roof of a garden house five hours away in Escondido. Greeted by El Cortez’s infamous red door, I noted the plastic peel-off numbers 2259, my room number, sitting squarely above a brass knocker. If you’re into numerology, you might find it serendipitous that my relief came with with the 9–a number associated with life chapter endings, advancement, closure, and so on.
As I am in a 9-year at the age of 36, I found it all very ominous. The 57th anniversary of Bloody Sunday (5+7=12=1+2=3), the year is 2022 (2+0+2+2=6), and the room number and my year are both 9. For the uninitiated, there are several scientific and spiritual theories that suggest the power inherent in patterns that result in 3, 6, 9. The real life applications ranging from the evocative shapes of pyramids to the golden ratio (3.14) to the branches of our federal government. And here I was—tired, facing an onerous family crisis, and questioning my path in the world—staring into the magical numbers that suggested I was experiencing a turning point in my journey.
Opening the heavy red door, I stepped into the eery rest machine, a flat and wide room filled with all the steady must of any poor renovation, the wall’s white paint barely covering over what could have been anything from mold to blood. Without bothering to even look into the bathroom, which I was sure would be just as frightening, I stepped over to the couch and dropped my bags, watching the colors of the neon El Cortez sign sliver and sing throughout the otherwise dark room. Defeated by the day—the year—I cut off the one bedside lamp and watched the light blink through the dusty curtains until I wearily passed out on the top sheet.
***
Sitting in the restaurant the next morning, browsing a flurry of emails, tweets, and text messages, I happened across a NASA article about the question of dark energy and dark matter. Having got nothing but time and a healthy curiosity about all the definitions of scientific blackness—now that I was stuck in Vegas for a day—I dived in.
In the simplest of terms, the NASA article announced that our leading scientists are just coming to a collective agreement that the never-ending black pool we associate with space, what is officially identified as dark matter, may actually be composed of more unquantifiable energy than previously known. The Mambo in me laughed. Of course it is! For eons, Indigenous communities of every continent had been speaking on the unknowns of our corner in galactic space, recognizing and incorporating the power of the unseen and unquantifiable into their spiritual practices. Nice of NASA to join the conversation, I thought.
Hopping onto science Reddit, I dug into the arguments between independent researchers and working scientists and the thousands of explanatory threads that ranged from the dense to dogmatic, all of them arguing about how to classify this now “known” immeasurable energy. And I say immeasurable because when our scientists tried to use contemporary quantum theory to measure the energy itself, it came out—in their words—to “an impossible number.” Reading this professional opinion from NASA, I laugh out loud, dousing my eggs and hash browns in Chalula. Of course the number is impossible, I thought, it would mean that either parts of Albert Einstein’s celebrated and now standard theories were incorrect OR it would suggest that there is something, currently ephemeral, that lies outside of humanity’s critical understanding.
***
Stuffing my mouth with the cheesy mess, I thought back to a conversation I had with a friend recently. We were sitting on my condo’s patio at The Lucy, a modernist artist haven curated in part by Black Mountain Institute for their visiting fellows off of 6ht Street, less than five minutes from El Cortez. Smoking fancy pre-rolls from NuLeaf, we had stared up at the once-in-a-lifetime lunar eclipse in November 2021, revisiting the little moments that had brought us both there to that moment. The higher I got, the more esoteric I became. “I think we can literally control the outcomes of our lives, if we know how to.” She nodded in deep agreement, the way any good friend does when the THC hits right. “I think that it’s impossible to separate the experiences of our physical bodies from the experience of the universe. What happens to the moon, happens to me, and what happens to me, happens to you.”
She sheds a tear here. It’s been less than a year since a sudden death and this moment was supposed to be a chill weekend filled with laughter, weed, and gambling—but I was there talking cosmos. And I couldn’t seem to stop myself. “I’m just saying, if the moon existed before us and it’ll exist after us, isn’t it possible that death isn’t the final step? Isn’t it possible we’re all just energy manifested, and if the laws of thermodynamics says that energy doesn’t dissipate, it transforms, then aren’t we all just in the process of change…” She stopped me there with her head down and a single, pointed manicured finger. When I was quiet, she picked her head up and looked at me—“Sis. I can’t. This is Vegas! Let’s just finish these and get to the casino.”
Of course she was right. Ain’t nobody got time for theory when there was still a crap ton of living to do. And she couldn’t. Not right then. “You right. More vodka?” “Yes! Please!” She let out a hearty laugh, her long gray curls swirling around her shoulders and her chest heaving as she let out a big sigh and stared up at the sky, crying.
I knew that I didn’t have to be a scientist to ask these questions—inquiry into the mysteries of our world is not a gate that can be manned by higher education—but to ask these questions of myself is one thing. To ask these questions of my loved ones, who are always in the midst of their own turbulence, is something entirely different.
***
Scanning my third or fourth article at Siegel’s as I finished up my food, I realized that this most recent private dalliance into space—this glance into the real conversations about the scientific weight and name of the unknown—was nourishing. Surrounded by the sounds of tinkling slot machines, all of them glowing in this dark, smoky, underworld of hope, hunger, emotional upheaval, and discord—I found myself oddly relieved to know that I was not the only one who believed that there was more left to be discovered about how each of us is connected, sometimes unwittingly, to something greater than ourselves; that what we know to be true about what created us will change and, as they say, change is inevitable.
Closing my iPad, I took my receipt to the cashier and mused about how far I had come, not just from my family’s home or from Texas or from my first years as a writer, but as a person. My meal was $24.31—and free. I was—am becoming—free. Someone hit the jackpot as I signed my receipt slip and I walked out past two officers in uniform, only slightly wincing at their star-shaped badges. In another world, another one of my lifetimes, this meal had ended much differently. The food wasn’t free. I had never made it pass the officers. No bells had gone off when someone hit the jackpot, but there had certainly been tinkling lights all around me. But here, in the world I had managed to create in this newest chapter of life? Smiling to myself, I headed back to my room to fall asleep and dream.
***
There are moments, when we learn something honest about what it means to be human, to be a glowing body floating in the heart of an unending darkness with unknown borders. This was one such moment, a time during which I remembered that for all I think I know about how everything is connected—about how the cycle of life is meant to end and begin—there is still more to be discovered.
The death of a single person, or a group of persons, is what appears to be a clear closing to a chapter. But in the span of time, it is simply the closing of a cycle of knowledge. History repeats, the kinds of death we experience at the close of each cycle spanning from the physical to the emotional to the spiritual.
What of “Bloody Sunday” is connected to my moment in Siegel’s 1941? My very presence is the evidence of a cycle having closed and begun again, an advancement of someone else’s hopes and dreams manifested with my ability to sit, order, eat, and leave, unharmed, a space they would not have been welcomed in.
What about dark matter and dark energy is connected to my journey through the galaxy of Las Vegas? The experience of gaining wisdom while navigating the darkness of the soul and of the mind in a physical space renowned for its chaos.
If in every moment of our lives as breathing beings we represent or walk through someone else’s manifestation—their hopes and dreams for themselves or for their creations or for their businesses or for their politics—than it might be easier to believe that our hopes and dreams, our desires for a transformed politic or innovative creation, might be more than hopes but certainties.
***
I’ve gone on long enough, so I’ll leave you with this—tomorrow, Tuesday, April 12, 2022, is a day of dreaming. It is a day to ground yourself by asking what it is you truly want out of your life. It is a day to dream your biggest dreams, the ones you’re afraid to share with others because you are afraid of what they might say or think. It is a day to believe that it is possible for that dream to come to fruition, especially as you are living in a time during which so many other’s dreams have already come to fruition. It is a day to be honest with yourself about how you want the rest of your days to go. To incorporate your pleasure and joy and satisfaction and happiness into your world.
Take a shower. Light some candles or incense. Turn down the lights, turn off the electrics, and bathe in the vision of yourself. Be excited. Be encouraged. Believe that the world works in mysterious ways because, well, it does. What you want may be far more achievable than you know.
May the Light Find You Always.
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