Innocent couple led into sin

Innocent couple led into sin
Written by Mark Kinsler

I began my exploration of Las Vegas Boulevard at 8:30 Sunday morning. Natalie was in her finance professors' meeting this weekend at Harrah's Las Vegas, 35 stories of hotel rooms built atop a casino the size of River Valley Mall.

We don't gamble. Never have. I've studied enough about lightning to understand that luck doesn't come in streaks. If the customers won very often there wouldn't be gambling casinos built in the shape of pirate ships and the Eiffel Tower across the street from us. Even if you do win, there are branches of Gucci and Tiffany's nearby to relieve you of excess cash.

The main hall of Harrah's contains row after row of elaborately-decorated slot machines, including poker machines, Wheel of Fortune machines and Magic Fishbowl machines. These have bill acceptors ($1 to $100) instead of coin slots, and lists of rules I don't understand. The walls are lined with restaurants and bars, some of which feature a gambling machine set into the counter at each stool.

Big video screens blaze forth football games from every wall. The wall display in the main sports betting room listed the hapless Colts at 1,000-to-one to win the pro championship. Of the poker room's 16 tables, only three were occupied this Sunday morning; presumably everyone else was at church. Then I reached the acre or so of roulette and card games, where scantily-clad cigarette girls right out of the 1940s plied the customers. A TV screen above, somehow tuned to "Meet the Press," distracted me: an efficient-looking woman suddenly appeared and asked me to state my business. Upon receipt of a blank look she briskly informed me that I had blundered into the "pit" area where the dealers stand.

And so I hastily completed my tour of the facilities, escaping across the street to the multi-story shopping mall at Caesar's Palace, where I gaped at the titanic statues of Roman goddesses filling the atrium. The four spiral escalators twining around these were the only ones I'd ever seen, and I was sure that Natalie knew nothing of them either.

Now, I am not proud of how I later lured my short, unsuspecting spouse to admire the statues and the stores there, but my evil plan worked far better than I'd hoped. For Natalie, terrified of spiral staircases, failed to notice that she'd stepped onto the giant spiral escalator. Then she looked up, saw what it was, and with a scream threw herself to safety, almost knocking me over, which I deserved. Then she made a small fist and plotted revenge.

But the city of Las Vegas is interesting to an engineer. It lies in the driest desert: each palm tree that decorates the street is kept alive by a thin water pipe because only desert scrub and sagebrush can survive this climate. Water is supplied courtesy of the Hoover Dam.

Tomorrow we will take a bus to the Grand Canyon. With luck I won't fall in.

Mark Kinsler is a science teacher from Cleveland Heights who lives in an old house in Lancaster with Natalie and the cats, whom we miss. He can be reached at kinsler33@gmail.com. Write if you have a favorite column you'd like to see in a book.