The Englishman and I exchanged business cards, wished each other well, said goodnight. As soon as he was gone, I felt a tiny tickle of excitement in the top part of my stomach. I was alone, and that tickle was my body’s way of telling me that I was happy to be alone again. Was it typical for me to feel excited like this after a seemingly harmless chat? It was. It’s always been this way for me. Once, after a business meeting in a hotel barroom in Vancouver last winter, I stopped off in the lobby Men’s Room and caught a glimpse…
From what I could tell the Englishman was a thoroughly decent man, decent all the way down to his English bones. Had it occurred to me that this situation—two strangers having a drink together in a casino shaped like an Egyptian pyramid—might turn into some sort of sick, twisted, perverted encounter? Yes, that had occurred to me. All my life I’ve thought that even the most innocuous situations are going to somehow turn into sick, twisted, perverted encounters. But the truth is this: very few of the situations in my life that I’d thought were going to turn into sick, twisted, perverted encounters actually turned into sick, twisted, perverted…
My cab ride with the Englishman and his stylish cardigan was quick and painless. One of the things that I actually like about Las Vegas—maybe the only thing that I actually like about Las Vegas—is that the airport is bizarrely close to the city itself. From the airport to The Strip takes only fifteen minutes. Twenty minutes, if traffic is congested. The Luxor’s main entrance was, like all things in Las Vegas, oversized and melodramatic. It looked like a shabbier version of the backlot of the 1963 film Cleopatra. But the entrance was also somewhat rundown in small ways. Several overhead lights were burned out; bits of…
