☼☼☼ A note for new subscribers: Motel Chronicles are a fictional, serialized account of a road trip through Arizona, Nevada, and California set in the fall of 2020, published and released on a semi-regular basis for paid subscribers.☼☼☼
☼☼☼ Laughlin, Part 1
In Laughlin, you can get married on the river but not on land. The Riverside Resort—a casino whose ground floor functioned like a pit of snakes, was likely to be the worst place to be during a pandemic. Thick carpet, maskless Trump-lovers, indoor smoking allowed! Laughlin, the morning after Vegas. How did they get here? How long had it been?
The Riverside sat on a literal river—the Colorado, which split the border between Arizona and Nevada so that gambling and sex work enjoyed legal status on the western side of the river, while nary a pair of dice existed on the eastern corner of Arizona. On that side, casino land is managed by the Arizona Tribal-State Gaming Compacts which are held between the State and all 22 federally recognized Arizona tribal nations, similar to California. Casinos were the beacons of the island plots that reservations appeared to be, at least that’s how they appeared to her as she grew up heading east for school and boyfriends and to buy the good avocados from ranchers on mountains roads. Casinos popped up like jack-in-the-boxes along the highway. Reservation boundaries were rarely indicated. Casinos became the shorthand for tribal nations in a way that seemed to her negligent.
Nevada on the other hand, is as loose as Arizona is tight in terms of litigation but more so, how white supremacy is expressed in each state's founding and enduring constitutions and culture. Nevada whites hid inside casinos and sinned on rivers in the bare desert sun; Arizona incarcerated whomever they don't like and lets the desert barter for the rest.
She couldn't remember why he wanted to come here and he couldn't either. It looked interesting enough on the map—closer to the familiar Lake Havasu, a party lake that kids she grew up with in private school went to during Spring Break and family summer vacations. She heard stories about riding beach cruisers down main streets, felt jealous about Hawaiian sno-cones and parents who owned second mansions whose bathrooms had heated tiles so her peers' feet never experienced the discomfort of cold ceramic first thing in the morning. The area held a sense of shopworn glamor to her, a provincial cosmopolitaness like how she imagined people who vacationed in the Hamptons or the town in The Gilmore Girls. To her they were more than fictional places, they were destinations for suburban fantasies. "Vacation" as a concept wasn't foreign to her growing up but it held visages of Midwestern sensibility like discount motels, long drives in the four-seater used Pontiac her dad drove, and tours of National Parks that embarrassed her without her understanding why. The gift shop held no histories for her, no air of authenticity, she had to guess at how America was formed for lack of a stronger education. She grew up in Reagan and Bush's education system and a Christian one at that; she knew nothing of the liberal arts or sex until her twenties. She approached new places like a Mennonite; on foot and with a feigned indifference—she hid her thirst and urgency under a practiced blank expression while her eyes roved. The world would keep changing and she kept missing it. At least, this is how she felt. The sun was setting as they crossed the overpass into Laughlin.
She counted the Trump stickers in the parking lot.
The chaos of the Riverside Resort and Casino had a distinctive aesthetic and it horrified her. She loved casinos. This one felt more like Club Med after a hurricane. The elevators were broken, another horror. At the same time, she was horny. What was wrong with her, she wondered. The line for the elevators ran the length of whatever end of this casino clusterfuck they were in. Near the elevator she saw a man wearing a black shiny leather face mask with a black zipper, like a gimp mask. He was smoking a cigarette through the zipper. She was stunned and intrigued, powerless against the novelty of the casino.
The line didn't seem to be moving and only one elevator was working for a casino which boasted two towers of elevators. She consulted the "Feelings Wheel", a graphic rainbow with a detailed list of adjectives describing feelings, that she pulled up on her phone. Her therapist sent her the link when she was unable to describe the dread she felt when they were in the creepy sundown town, Prescott. Her eyes followed the saffron-yellow wedge of "Anxious" yoked to the slim slices of "Overwhelmed" and "Worried" in Kraft-singles cheese orange.
Everything else off-screen flashed maroon and dark blue, seemed taped together, fully carpeted and off-kilter. Sixteen-inch Panasonic TVs with attached VCRs were wrapped in the same maroon carpet as the floors. They were strapped to the load-bearing pillars inside the casino floor and on them played footage of the rubber-faced baron himself, ✨ Don Laughlin.✨
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