Chapter 2

Chapter 2

   You are always alone in Las Vegas.  I mean, there are streets full of people and nights full of neon but no one ever sees you.  No one ever looks.  Everyone is transient, everyone is busy, and everyone sees exactly what they expect to see -- and nothing else.  This means you can have webbed fingers, scaly skin, and gills and not a soul in Sin City will think twice.

I have all of those things.  This is why I live in Las Vegas.  It’s also really dry in Vegas.  I like that too.  It helps keep the greenish tinge of my skin to a minimum.  It was alright at home to be greenish.  My elementary school still takes school photos in black and white because a third of the kids are little green water babies.   Baby dolls in Bridge City come in brown, white, and green.   Being amphibious in a small bayou town is fine but being green anywhere else is a Muppets song in a bad way.  Star doesn’t mind but she was raised with all of her cousins playing tag underwater for hours during the summer.  And I mean underwater for hours, not just playing for hours.

Anyway, that’s all well and good for someone who wants to live in port Arthur forever.  But there are things and people and places which aren’t filled with swamp people and those are the things I want to be a part of.  A cautious part of.  A slightly retiring, mostly hidden, well camouflaged part of, but better an observer of the large world than nothing at all.   Which is why I am wandering around the so-called “Arts District” in downtown Las Vegas in the dark and cold Friday night.   It’s a little thing called “First Friday” and it was started by a bunch of folks who think they are bohemian and artistic and decided that roughly two blocks off of Charleston & the Strip should be artistic.   There are some galleries and two giant neon paintbrushes but it takes more than hipsters with masturbatory artistic tendencies to make a thriving art scene.   The Arts Disctrict is as genuine as the casinos up the street.  If you believe The Venitian is just like Venice, The Paris is just like a city in France, and Circus Circus is just like the seventh level of hell, then our arts district is the place for you.

Of course, I’m totally here.   The art sucks but the people are fascinating.   I love to wander the streets and watch the people here.  For every pack of interchangeable hipster kids there’s a guy in a pinstripe business suit sporting a 2 foot tall Mohawk.  For every purple tie-dye draped old lady there’s a pack of overweight comic book nerds looking for girls who might like them.  Every college student is matched by an aging cholo, and every mascara-caked eyelash on the goth boys flutters when seeing a handbag-holding grandma waiting to see her grandson deejay.  Then there’s the food truck culture.  I personally have waited an hour for a shave ice from the SnoOno truck and it was worth every minute for the football-sized tiger-blood drenched tower of goodness.  I know I’m not cool enough to be a hipster, a person who knows food truck people personally, a chick who has Pia Zadora hair and Zoey Dechanel eyes, a woman who is so full of smiling ennui that she shrugs her grandma-sweater clad shoulders and welcomes in all the hordes of admirers who flock around.  I know I’m not that.  In fact I’m prickly. Or maybe it's more like hyper defensive.  It’s the amphibious part of me, I like to think.  The part that likes to pull in its head, sink quietly into the water, pull away from what is potentially a dangerous situation and wait for more information, more data, a sunny patch, a clear exit, something.

Yeah.  That’s it.  And because that’s such a clear easy answer, I know I’m just lying to myself.  Fact is I love people.  I come from a huge family of freaks and I love the freaky in everyone.  The problem is that I’m a freak myself.   Las Vegas is a good place to be alone.  It's really lonely.