America, You Sexy Bitch Read online

  Michael: After I get a couple of hours’ sleep and have a quickie shower, we reassemble in the lobby. Tonight we are heading downtown, to old Vegas, the original Strip, where cowboys and Mafiosi first crossed six-shooters to build a desert oasis.

  The old Strip has really gone to pot. All the classic casinos are still there: the Four Queens, the Golden Nugget, Binion’s, and Fitzgerald’s. But whatever magic and glamour may have been there in 1963 is long gone. The only connection to those days are the cocktail waitresses; most of whom look as if they never left. This is the home of the three-dollar blackjack table and the ninety-nine-cent shrimp cocktail. This is where Lady Luck went to kill herself.

  Old Vegas is so much more exciting to me than new Vegas because it is the truer face of the city. It’s scrappier and hungrier. Old Vegas is the gambler who lost everything but just knows he’ll make it back if he can just catch a couple lucky breaks. Who knows, maybe old Vegas can get lucky again; just across the street from the seedy casinos, there is a new downtown revitalization movement happening, an entrepreneurial revival unnoticed by the tourists sucking down giant frozen drinks out of enormous plastic hookahs.

  Stop number one on our tour is the Downtown Cocktail Room, or “DCR,” as it’s known to its hipster clientele. Yes, even Vegas has hipsters. Whether or not there are enough of them to turn around this grungy neighborhood I do not know, but they are definitely giving it a try. The bar was opened by Michael and Jennifer, who agree to have fancy drinks with us. The cocktail room is dark and luxe, radically different from the garishness just outside their door. This is a place for serious libation. There are, for example, eight different varieties of absinthe on the offering, and concoctions with names like “Persephone’s Pomme” and “Satan’s Whiskers.” Our waitress is dressed, inexplicably, like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange, complete with bowler hat and fake eyelash. I order something fruity, as is my nature, and we get to chatting with Michael and Jennifer.

  They’re a great couple, the kind of young, practical, industrious people that America is rumored to be filled with. For whatever reason, they’ve decided to make downtown Las Vegas their mission. They’re making Brooklyn in the desert here. Not only do they run the DCR, they’ve also got Emergency Arts, a coffee shop/art collective housed in an old medical center. Friends of theirs own a bar-arcade called Insert Coin, where we play video games and drink bubblegum-flavored vodka.

  There’s a lot going on here, but the entire downtown restoration only extends a couple of blocks. For every new bar or art gallery, there are ten vacant buildings. When the economy fried, Vegas was the first place to get zapped. The whole town has a kind of jittery vibe to it, the way people get when they’ve been up too late partying. Las Vegas looks like a girl who stayed out all night and now her dress is crumpled, she’s lost a heel, and her mascara is all over her face. Las Vegas is a hot mess. No wonder Meghan loves it so.

  We spend the rest of the night walking around Freemont Street, a long outdoor plaza covered by an enormous electronic canopy. The canopy stretches for about three city blocks and is illuminated with millions of LED lights flashing messages, advertisements, and the occasional patriotic light show. The effect is to make it feel as though you are living underneath a football stadium scoreboard.

  The street is mobbed with badly dressed, lumpy, drunken tourists, sipping from novelty plastic grenades and beer bongs. Attractions abound. A zip line system runs just above our heads. There are multiple Elvis impersonators and people dressed as SpongeBob SquarePants. A local ’80s cover band is set up at the end of the street. They all have identical black plastic hair wigs and skinny jeans, skinny ties. They look miserable bopping around up there, exhorting the audience to “Wang Chung tonight.” The crowd looks equally miserable half-heartedly stumbling along in something that looks like, but definitely is not, dancing. We stand on the edge of the crowd feeling a little miserable ourselves, but we don’t want to leave because we don’t want to miss anything; there’s too much white trash shit show to take it all in. Sometimes hedonism can feel like a lot of work. When we finally tear ourselves away, I leave feeling dirty and depressed. Thank God I have a happy-ending shower waiting for me back at the Palms.

  Meghan: One of the main things I want to do with Michael while we’re in Vegas is tour the Zappos headquarters. I am a frequent user of the Zappos website to buy shoes and sometimes clothes. Although that is what I use Zappos to shop for, you can find a huge variety of things to purchase on the site that extend past shoes and jeans. Everything the Zappos company touts itself to be is true. My shipments come when they are supposed to, it is easy to print out a return slip from their website, and the customer service is amazing, probably the best I’ve ever encountered. Everything is simple and easy, and the people I have talked to about an order seemed happy to help me. As weird as it sounds, it is really refreshing to do business with a company that seems to truly believe in customer service. For the record, I have no affiliation with Zappos other than as a customer. On top of that, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh has established a substantial cult following as a result of the wild success of Zappos and its somewhat unorthodox business environment; or depending on your perspective, the working environment all other working environments should follow and replicate.

  Zappos made Fortune magazine’s annual Best Companies to Work For list and it grosses over a billion dollars in sales annually. In fact Tony Hsieh’s book, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose, has been an overwhelming success, spending twenty-seven weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. His latest venture is to rejuvenate downtown Las Vegas, where they are preparing to move their headquarters to the city hall building, which was slated to become a homeless shelter until Hsieh stepped in. He is attempting to invigorate Vegas in ways that the city hasn’t seen since Bugsy Siegel—investing his own money and the time and talent of his entire team in coming up with new ideas to pump fresh blood into the area. Some say he is trying to create a new Silicon Valley right in the center of town. I say, more power to him.

  Michael: I have never ordered anything from Zappos and do not know anything about them as a company, but Meghan is excited to tour the company because apparently people come from all over the world to observe their amazing corporate culture. In my experience the words “corporate” and “culture” do not coexist well together, sort of like “chocolate” and “martini.” People often put the two together, but why?

  What’s so special about Zappos that people are freaking out about the company and wanting to emulate its success? As it turns out: construction paper and tambourines. The Zappos corporate culture can basically be boiled down to “adult day camp.” Everything about the place is FUN! The popcorn machine in the lobby: FUN! The free ice cream sandwiches: FUN! The big throne where you can pose for pictures while holding the scepter of your choosing: FUN! Everything is shiny and loud. As we take the tour, every time we pass a different section everybody takes out their tambourine or kazoo or whatever noisemaker is on hand and makes a racket of welcoming.

  “This is our designer handbag team.”

  JANGLE! HOORAY! YIPEE!

  “This is our spring apparel team.”

  WHOOPEE! YEEHAW! HUZZAH!

  Everybody’s cubicle looks as if it was decorated at arts and crafts. Even their legal department is covered in construction paper and cardboard tubes so that it looks like a comic book Hall of Justice. In fact, there is a homemade sign outside the legal department that reads HALL OF JUSTICE.

  The whole thing is so goddamned chipper it creeps me out. Meghan looks creeped out too.

  “I could never work here,” she whispers to me at one point.

  “I don’t think I could even breathe here,” I say.

  And it’s true. Everybody seems passionate and happy, but the whole thing feels too hunky-dory to be real. Can anybody survive this amount of enforced cheeriness? I know I could not. But Zappos is not for everybody, and our smiley tour leader tells us that they
accept one employee for every thirty applicants. Everyone has to fill out personality tests and undergo a rigorous interview process. Then, after a couple of weeks at work, the new recruit is offered two thousand dollars to leave. Very few of the Zappoistas take the money. After all, they have no-pay lunch, assorted free vending machines, the kind of health care only Congress has, and the encouragement from above to make sure that everyone plays as hard after hours as they do during them.

  “How do you know if somebody is a good fit?” Meghan asks our tour leader.

  “You just know,” he says, and I don’t doubt it. He’s got the glow of a true believer about him. The whole thing has a fevered Scientology vibe to it, and I’m happy when it’s finally time to go. If Zappos were a child instead of a company, I’d prescribe some serious Adderall.

  Meghan: Although I consider myself a Las Vegas veteran, coming to this city with the anthropological intention of figuring out exactly what role Las Vegas currently is playing in American culture still felt like a daunting task, and I thought I needed to call in a little backup. My friend Paul Carr is a British writer and journalist who notoriously lives only in hotels and has written several books about his nomadic and unconventional lifestyle. He has just spent a month living on the Strip in Las Vegas and stayed at every single hotel on the Strip while blogging about the experience for the Huffington Post. I asked Paul for advice on where Michael and I should go to experience the “real” Las Vegas and to make sure there was nothing we could possibly miss during our stay. He gave me a list of recommendations and asked if I wanted to meet some exotic dancers, then signed off our email exchange: “Viva, etc.”

  Strippers. Strippers. Strippers. What is a proper trip to Vegas without strippers? Or excuse me, exotic dancers. Well, actually I have had many trips to Vegas that did not include the presence of strippers or a trip to a strip club. Michael told me early on that he has never been a huge fan of strippers and maybe only been to a strip club once or twice. He described his forays as “uncomfortable” and “inorganic.”

  A trip to a gentleman’s club with Michael and Stephie turns out to be something that sounded a lot better on paper than it does when we are actually getting ready to do it. Michael is happily married with two young children, and Stephie is getting married in the fall. She really doesn’t seem comfortable with the idea of going to a strip club, and I do not necessarily feel comfortable twisting her arm. Stephie is probably the sweetest, most innocent twenty-five-year-old I have ever met, and I am more than happy to not be responsible for anything that is going to corrupt her.

  The thing about exotic dancing is that I am incredibly conflicted about the industry. The feminist, empowered part of me finds the whole profession depressing, degrading, tragic even, and innately sad for the women who feel the need to resort to taking their clothes off for money in front of strange, and probably more often than not, perverted men. Any woman who elects to become a stripper will always in some fashion have a social stigma attached to her for the rest of her life.

  The other side of me personally knows women who work in the industry. Some of them claim to feel empowered by making the kind of money that the high-end customers shell out. Some of them treat their profession as an art form, and work hard on new routines and exotic costumes. There seems to be a huge demand for it in America. I mean, let’s face it, America is obsessed with sex, porn, and exotic dancing. It’s a weird dichotomy that in such a conservative culture there would also be such an intense appetite for all elements of the sex industry. Sex, porn, strippers—I think whether or not I approve of the industry, or partake in any element of it, all of these things will continue to go on. So from my perspective, I would rather have an open conversation about what the sex industry should be in America and how it should be better regulated than simply shutting down everything entirely.

  I think there are bigger questions at hand: why our obsession with sex and the sex industry only seems to grow, and why exposure to pornography through the Internet also only continues to grow and become more readily available. Instead of ignoring the conversation and having the attitude that all sex is evil and wrong, we need to have a more open and honest dialogue about the sex industry in America if we are ever going to really address its issues.

  As I write this I can already hear the bloggers firing up their laptops: “Meghan McCain supports the sex industry—this girl loves her some strippers.” This will be an easy thing to take out of context and use to somehow exacerbate the already “wild child” reputation that for many reasons I do not deserve; but I still am a Republican and the daughter of one of the most famous politicians in America, so anything having to do with stripping and the sex industry is heightened to an unreasonable taboo level. What I really find comical about this entire scenario, though, is that Michael seems ready to throw up even before we leave the hotel. Of the two of us, he is the one who seems to be losing it a little bit.

  I need to bring in more reinforcements, so I call my friend Josh Rupley and his boyfriend, Kasey Mahaffy. If you are an intense and longtime follower of my life and blogging career, you’ll know Josh is my confidant/hair fixer who traveled with me during the presidential campaign. Josh’s longtime boyfriend, Kasey, is an actor and one of the sweetest, most sensitive guys I know. He also loves whiskey as much as I do, which was an early bonding tool for us. I love Josh and Kasey dearly. They can also drink me under the table, which is what I need if I’m going to take these greenhorns out on the town. I think they will be perfect for breaking the ice with Michael and accompanying us on our tour of the underworld of exotic dancing.

  Michael: Here’s something you might not know about Vegas strippers : they pay to take their clothes off. Strippers are not employees of any club but are rather “independent contractors,” who give the clubs a house fee for the privilege of taking off their clothes in front of drunken bachelor partiers and handsy conventioneers.

  Think about how genius that is for a second: the Sapphire Gentlemen’s Club, which bills itself as “the world’s largest Las Vegas strip club” (whatever that means), claims to have up to four hundred girls dancing there a night. House fees start at forty dollars and increase twenty dollars an hour from 7:00 P.M. until 10:00 P.M. That means a girl can spend a hundred dollars just to go to work, and with four hundred girls on the floor that means Sapphire is generating tens of thousands of dollars before they even turn on the smoke machines.

  Meghan’s buddy Paul has arranged for us to meet Sapphire’s own Daisy Delfina for an “X-rated tour of Las Vegas,” but first we go to dinner with my buddy Phil Gordon, an Internet entrepreneur turned professional poker player. Phil is far more active politically than I realized. He’s a libertarian, which makes sense for a professional poker player. They are a “live and let live” breed, and in fact he and his professional poker buddies are in the middle of a battle with the federal government over the poker website they started, Full Tilt Poker, whose assets were frozen by the government. Phil has millions of dollars tied up in this venture, so politics affect him in a very direct, very consequential way. And here’s the thing: it’s all politics.

  Gambling—or “gaming” as the industry prefers to call it—is an industry like any other. They’ve got their big players—the big casino owners and operators—and they didn’t like the idea of a start-up operation like Phil’s poker thing raking in money; money that could be going to them instead of to a band of poker players and their backers. The casinos were happy to let online poker sites exist when they were young and unproven. Once the market matured, it became a threat. So they had it shut down. Is that the free market at work? Or is that corruption? Is it influence peddling? I don’t know. I just know that it smells shitty and my buddy got hurt.

  Phil, to my surprise, tells us he’s thinking about running for Congress from his district in Washington State. He’s got the money to do it, he’s brilliant, and he’s got a compelling personal story. But he’s not sure he wants to subject himself or his family to the
professional and personal rigors of a campaign for office. This is something we hear a lot on the road. Good people, the kind of people we like to envision running for office, don’t want to do it. God knows I would never do it. Not that I ever could. Unlike Phil, I don’t have the money, am not brilliant, and there are enough comedy videos of me featuring dildos out there that I am most likely unelectable. Probably only one dildo video is enough to prevent you from holding elected office, though by the time this book is published, somebody is bound to have proven me wrong.

  Meghan: Much to my surprise and satisfaction, Michael’s good friend Phil Gordon is not a Democrat. In fact, he didn’t vote for Obama, which means he voted for my father. When Phil reveals this, I think Michael is going to spit a spring roll out of his nose.