Viva Las Vegas, Bugsy Style

My design business took me to Las Vegas for a night and a day. I can't tell you what it's all about yet because it really isn't anything until it really becomes something, and if I told you everything, you wouldn't need to come back Monday to find out more. I'm not a Vegas kind of guy. As far as I'm concerned, what happens in Vegas can stay in Vegas. As I don't gamble, enjoy shows, or whore around, I spend my time looking at what my design idols build when developers throw bushels of money at their projects. The story of a guy like me being flown out here to design something bodes well for the economy. A town built on gambling hasn't thrown too many building dice for over a year. Old projects with money in the pipeline have been built through the recession, although some are a little late and some a little less extravagant. New work has been as scarce as the crowds at the tables. My flight and the Las Vegas airport were packed, as a big fight brought all the players to the dessert.

We were put up in the M Resort a new new new oasis of steel, glass, and expensive furnishings built way out in the middle of nowhere. M was empty, and you could hear a lone player scream and a roulette ball bounce from the front desk miles away. My design partner Marc Dizon and I changed from our airline clothes to our Vegas clothes and headed to Tao to meet a guy who wanted to chat. I haven’t been to Tao in a couple of years. Last time I was here, I was designing what became known as the Opium Room upstairs. I was a partner at SL Design back then. I never actually saw the room complete and alive—you know, with people enjoying it. I was thrilled to see the Taoists dancing to hip hop anthems. There were pretty young things everywhere, and everybody was frisky, but it was like 5am New York time and I had an early meeting, so we headed out.

As I looked around at the mayhem and the massive crowd, I felt that there was little here for a guy like me except for the technical stuff. How it was functioning, light levels, staff, service ... things like that. This is one of the top money-generating joints of all time, so there were lessons to be learned or reaffirmed everywhere. They have really hot go-go dancers. Funny how except for a business chat, a business analysis, a go-go glimpse, and an indulgence of my own vanity, I didn’t feel a need to hang. Then she pinched my butt. I turned and got a million-dollar smile from a beautiful young thing. Ok, ok, ok—it may have been a 500-dollar smile, or she might have just been nightblind, or I reminded her of her dad. I’ll never know, but it did put some pep in my step, and I realized I was thinking too much and Vegas is just fun—nothing more and nothing less. I smiled and told her thank you, and she hit me with a second smile and hard stare that I’m sure is rarely ignored ... but I stepped and went back to the empty M in the desert.

Tao was frenetic—the Venetian packed with distractions—but I found comfort in my pillow and dreams. The morning had me stumbling into a grand bath, and when I settled into it with Britney Spears prancing around on the TV inside the bathroom mirror and bath salts and suds washing the night away, I glanced out the floor-to-ceiling window of the bathroom. I could see for miles and miles the timeless desert. It was the same desert Bugsy Siegel saw when legend says he stopped to take a leak going from no where to Los Angeles. In a flash he saw the lights and sounds, and Vegas was born. In my inner circles I am known as Bugsy. I sometimes have impossible dreams and try to build them. I used to have a violent and unpredictable temper, and like Bugsy I am an incurable romantic. Years before I scratched my mark into the nightclub terrain, I lived in Bugsy Siegel’s desert. I had hair down to my waist, weighed a buck thirty five, and looked like a cross between ZZ Topp and Napoleon Dynamite. I actually had come to the desert on a horse with no name, and yes at the time it felt real good to be out of the rain. In the desert I tried to find and define my name, and yes there was no one there to give me no shame.

It was a very romantic time in my life. There was a beautiful girl—maybe a few—when I left to come back to New York to visit my folks for Thanksgiving one year, I thought I’d be back, but I never returned. In my bath I realized what was missing from Vegas: It seems to have everything but true romance. You can build all the monuments to lust and action and fun. Light it up like the sun and provide every distraction a man or woman could desire, but desire is not romance. F. Scott Fitzgerald saw the romance of New York and described it in The Great Gatsby. Jay Gatsby and Nick Carraway traverse the bridge on their way from Long Island to Manhattan. “The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge,” Nick says, “is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world”. I’m coming back tonight to the romance that addicts me to New York. Even though I live downtown, I’ll insist the cabbie take the bridge.