The Las Vegas summer wind was not comforting. It was not like most gusts, where the breeze can make a summer sauna feel like a cool air-conditioned room. It was like opening an oven baking at over 450 degrees and sticking your head inside. It was unexpected, unwelcome and the antithesis of what a soft wind should do.
But it was seemingly the only part of Las Vegas I had grown discontent with since I moved here about a month ago. Vegas: a dream I had prayed for the previous several months, and with my prayer answered, it seemed God had gone a step beyond my expectations.
This evening was no different. I walked outside the freshly-painted brown gates of my year-old complex, the Las Vegas Grandeur, with an appreciative smile on my face, and looked right toward the towering Strip. With the sun setting into the mountains against the backdrop of the brightening neon lights of the Strip, the illumination seemed too good to be true—a potpourri of colors, splashed together against a golden orange background.
Las Vegas wasn’t Disney for adults. Walt Disney couldn’t have imagined a setting as beautiful and awe-inspiring as this, and Picasso couldn’t have drawn a sunset as gorgeous as this.
“Change, sir?”
I looked left, toward the grey pebbles underneath the bright white sign by the gate to the complex. At the edge of the pebbles, a homeless man covered in a raggedy green shirt that was half-unbuttoned, dark jeans torn at the knees and over-worn brown boots looked pleadingly, his expression barely visible in his face creased and darkened by the Vegas sun. If he hadn’t said anything, I probably would have confused him for a pile of trash. Not because he was trash—his shirt camouflaged with trash can colors, and his skin blended with the exterior of the building.
I grimaced. I hated how our complex was surrounded by a constant stream of homeless people. I knew people needed help, but I didn’t like that I was in an august island in the ghetto. I didn’t want all my friends to visit and get asked for dollars from anything other than the blackjack tables or slot machines.
“Here’s a quarter, man, hope it helps,” I said, gently flicking one his way with my left thumb.
The man nodded in appreciation.
“God bless you sir, I appreciate it.”
“Anytime,” I said, waving two fingers at him and continuing on before he asked for anything else.
I got to Flamingo Road and veered left after making sure no cars were speeding toward the complex, heading toward Subway for dinner. The wind blew directly into my face again, adding the usual furnace blast to the 112 degree heat. I felt the sweat form on my forehead, and my shirt collar dampen.
That was one other thing I hated about Las Vegas.
The heat. The unbearable, too-hot-to-be-outside heat. The heat where even if you were sunbathing nude—as more than a few people, male and female, shamelessly did in Vegas—it was still what I imagined hell would feel like.
Nothing could ever prepare you for that heat. And I doubted anyone could ever adopt to that heat. Sometimes, people would claim “it’s a dry heat, so it’s not as bad. Don’t worry about it.” That was true, I suspected, for any month that didn’t begin with “Ju.” 95 degrees without humidity sounded like a gift from heaven. But when it was June or July, and the cacti shriveled up and the desert critters sought shelter underneath rocks by day, the only things thriving were the electric companies.
But I shrugged and laughed as I wiped my forehead. Besides the weather of Vegas, life was great! I was gambling for a living, meeting new girls every night and living and blogging every 22-year old’s fantasy. What was there, really, to complain about?
