Darling by Richard Rodriguez

Dunes.
    On a calm October evening, therefore, two hundred thousand spectators lined Las Vegas Boulevard South. Heralded by cannonade from the pirate ship harbored in the lagoon of the Treasure Island Hotel (another of Wynn’s visions), the south wing of the Dunes Hotel—not yet forty years old—was dynamite-imploded. The crowds cheered.
    Back in the sixties, when the “old” Dunes was running at full-tilt, a thirty-five-foot fiberglass sculpture of a raffish sultan stood over the entrance to the hotel, as upon a parapet, to welcome travelers to his desert kingdom. Tastes change. The kitsch idol was eventually removed to the hotel’s golf course as a relict of the age of personified brands. One day an electrical short in some chamber of the sultan’s heart caused him to melt to the ground. The city of antique lands was amused by the tragic kismet.
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    Luther and Peter moved to Las Vegas because their apartment building in Berkeley was converting to condominiums. For what it would cost to buy their two-bedroom apartment, they could get a new house in Las Vegas. Peter was enthusiastic; Luther was iffy, but if that was what Peter wanted.
    Initially, we heard excitement about their house. Luther’s medications, though, were not controlling his condition as effectively as they once had. He was tired all the time; there was nowhere to walk; you had to get in the car and drive to a mall if you wanted to take a walk. Luther couldn’t drive because he couldn’t see; he had various cancers—of the eye, of the jaw. Whenever Jimmy called, Luther was just watching TV, watching Miss Oprah.
    But then Luther found a new doctor, someone efficacious. New meds! Turns out, the drugs should have been changed years ago. Luther began to feel well and he began to feel better about Las Vegas. He liked the extremes of it—the heat, the cold, the flats, the mountains. He liked being a house owner in the desert—the strangeness of it! He said he felt like a pioneer. He talked about special window treatments, solar screens—unknown in Northern California. Barack Obama ran for president and Luther’s HIV was undetectable.
    Now that Luther lies dying three miles away, we finally visithis house. I am in the backyard with Peter. Peter has observed that some neighbors persist in planting grass. The summer burns it all away. Come September, the lawns need to be reseeded. When Peter and Luther wanted to plant some trees, they had to call out a contractor with machines of the sort that are used in mines. Look, Peter says, attempting to dig with his heel in the backyard dirt. The desert refuses his heel.
    I ask Peter if he and Luther ever go down to the Strip to see the shows. Only when friends come to town, he says. People in town rarely go. Though there are special rates for townies. The musicians that interest Luther—singles and groups from the sixties—often play the lounges at smaller hotels, and they sometimes go to those.
    The Moulin Rouge hotel and casino opened on the west side of town in 1955 and catered to a black clientele. Nat King Cole, Louis Armstrong, Lena Horne, Pearl Bailey, and many other stars performed there. The Original Sin of Sin City had nothing to do with the sexual gaming Las Vegas now advertises. Las Vegas—the western town, the Mormon town, the mobster town, the stardust town—was a Jim Crow town well into the 1960s. Las Vegas granted dispensations to excess only within limits—white limits.
    Black entertainers could perform at the Strip casinos, but they could not eat or drink or gamble or take rooms in them. This story may be as apocryphal as the rest of Las Vegas: One evening, exiting the stage door of a famous hotel and crossing the pool area, Dorothy Dandridge slipped off one of her pumps to cool her foot in the pool. Someone observed Miss Dandridge—an employee or a guest. The management of the hotel had