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| - I checked into my room at the Flamingo and something seemed funny... just not right. The room smelled like it had OD'd on Calvin Klein CK One, and a chair was turned over in a sinister, random fashion. I advanced cautiously through the room by the variable light from the giant pink neon Flamingo sign on the wall just outside... not wanting to turn on the lights. There seemed to be someone in the bed! "Hey, wake up." I shook the unmoving form cautiously, but there was something wrong. I pulled back the covers. It was a dead guy.
Okay, I made that up. There wasn't a dead guy in the bed... not even a mint (unless I didn't notice it), but everyone needs an exciting Las Vegas story. My entire stay was rather drab and uneventful, so I thought I'd better make something up for the benefit of the people I had to borrow money from to get back to New York. Some nagging journalistic code, however, prevents me from not coming clean... I know I should just get over it.
The room at the Flamingo could have been a Holiday Inn just outside of Kansas City except for the view... the view, to the west, Caesar's Palace, The Palms, then mountains, was what I was paying for. They may as well not have bothered with curtains, as far as I was concerned, or a TV. The window took up the whole wall, and it was worth the price of admission, 24 hours a day.
The rest of the hotel I could do without. Every time I walked into the lobby, whether it was midnight, daytime, or breakfast-time, Eighties rock was blasting from the sound system. I guess they know their audience, but come on, what happened to Sinatra? If I want to be constantly serenaded by the crooning of STING, I'll check into a room in HELL.
Of course, there is also the endless drone of electronic slot machines, whether real or manufactured... and I guess nothing here is real... but anyway, that sound is ever-present everywhere in Las Vegas, and if you can't stand that sound you'll probably end up doing something inappropriate. I sort of like it, at least it occasionally distracted me from the Eighties rock.
Anyway, I spent most of my time in Bill's Olde Time Rootin' Tootin' Gambin' Hall next door, which is a much more human scale kind of place.
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