Darling by Richard Rodriguez Page B

to crosswaysover the streets. Along both sides of the overpass corridor are Mexican families selling bottled water from ice chests. The prices are better than in the hotel shops and people do buy. There are long lines of touts—young Mexican men who snap advertisement cards together, as one might oppose two playing cards to make a clicking sound like the stops on a wheel of fortune. I accept a few cards to see what they are. One is for a bar called the Library. The others entitle the bearer to a dollar off a drink or a ten percent discount or some similar enticement to seek out one among the hundreds of lounges and casinos in the hotels along the Strip and downtown.
    To get to the overpass, the pedestrian must thread his way through a cul-de-sac of shops—like Paris, I hear one tourist say; like Jerusalem, I think to myself. There is no other way to cross the street. The crowd is aimless, the crowd is distracted, the crowd is expectant, the crowd feels lucky. The Strip is actually rigidly controlled. Taxis cannot pick up or leave off passengers on the street, but only at hotels. There are entertainments that are free—the dancing waters, the pirate ship, the Roman gods with animated eyes—but these are hotel inducements. I don’t notice any buskers on the streets; they would interfere with the flow; the flow is everything; a great deal of money depends on the flow.
    I had taken a walk earlier Saturday morning to locate the cathedral and to learn the hour of the Easter Vigil Mass. I passed the pirate ship on my way and I studied it for a time. The crow’s nest was shrouded in drab velvet—obviously the stage for some eventual derring-do. Riggings and ladders would be climbed; the mast would be descended. The pirate ship looked down at heel as, I suppose, a pirate ship ought. At that hour of a Saturday morning, the pirates were still in their beds, somewhere in the real Las Vegas.
    But now I pass the ship in twilight. The velvet curtain is thrown open (and as red as one could wish it under theatrical lighting). The pirate captain brandishes his sword (white-hot as a laser) to signal the cannonade; the ship is enveloped in fogs of colored smoke. (Tolstoy’s description of the Battle of Borodino: colored smokes, fairyland.)
    One’s purpose is buffeted by the confusion of entertainments and architectures. There are loudspeakers in every palisade, under every hedge, overhead in every arcade. Huge digital screens on the sides of hotels project
David Copperfield Live!
One’s thoughts are not one’s own. This is some other syndrome. The Happy Hour syndrome. The Happiest Place on Earth syndrome. This must be how non-Christians feel at Christmastime (the Jewish antiquaire, played by Erland Josephson, making his way through the darkening streets of Stockholm in Ingmar Bergman’s
Fanny and Alexander
).
    By the time I pass the Wynn, the crowds thin and the Strip recedes. I see a Thai restaurant and the cathedral behind it. The main doors of the church are locked. I am late. I enter through a side door. The place is packed; an usher directs me into the choir loft where there are some families with children but the majority are solitary latecomers like me. I take a pew behind a woman whose posture I read as burdened.
    The Cathedral of the Guardian Angel belongs to the modest Las Vegas of the fifties and sixties—of low-rise hotels and casinos. Moe Dalitz, a reputed mobster in Cleveland and a revered philanthropist in Las Vegas, donated the land for the construction of the church and selected the architect, Paul R. Williams, an African American, who had designed Frank Sinatra’s house and other celebrity homes in Palm Springs. Two marble angels flank the altar—the sort of angels one might see in any nineteenth-centurycemetery. Behind the altar is a large mosaic mural of the softest modernist declension—intersecting mandala (free form rather than cubist), and within the mandala