Will Self

I was reading Jean Baudrillard’s meditation on Las Vegas – on an iPhone sitting in a sushi bar in the dead centre of the casino at the Mandalay Bay resort in Las Vegas. “It is in such a universe,” Baudrillard wrote of the modern mediatised world, “that what [Paul] Virilio calls the aesthetic of disappearance gathers strength, and that the following begin to appear: fractal objects, fractal forms, fault zones that follow saturation, and thus a process of massive rejection, of the abreaction or stupor of a society purely transparent to itself.

“Like the signs in advertising, one is geared down, one becomes transparent or uncountable, one becomes diaphanous or rhizomic to escape the point of inertia – one is placed in orbit, one is plugged in, one is satellised, one is archived – paths cross: there is the sound track, the image track, just as in life there is the work track, the leisure track, the transport track, etc, all enveloped in the advertising track.”

My friend and colleague David Flusfeder has written eloquently for the NS on gambling in Vegas but my journey to the dark heart of the American dream possessed not even the impetus of the adrenalised: I was there because it was the obvious stopover on a family trip back from the wilds of Zion in Utah to our jetting-home point: Los Angeles.

Flusfeder observes that Las Vegas presents the best exemplar of the great democratic denomination of American culture: the dollar. Anyone can lose their shirt in Vegas – so long as they have a shirt to lose. He also points out the strange Manichaeism that invests American debauchery: everyone is entitled to go to Vegas, get drunk and stoned, have commercial sex and gamble – so long as the shit they do stays steaming in the desert, while when they return home they continue to say grace before dinner.

However, in recent years this dichotomisation has been undermined by the drive of the big casino hotels to broaden their market base. Hit hard by the recession, no longer do gamblers flow through the flashing mandibles of the gaming rooms like so many krill being sifted by an avaricious leviathan; and so the monsters of the deep have gone looking for smaller fish to fry. Strolling through the vast halls and Babylonian corridors of the Mandalay Bay, what struck me was not cod-opulence but the complexion of the crowds thronging them.

Men-in-black and ladies-in-couture conventioneers were massing for the evening’s moral turpitude, crepuscular gamblers were a-creeping and demi-prostitutes a-sidling but just as thick on the polished ground were family groups returning from the artificial beach (the vast pool had been closed due to proximate lightning strikes, not even Moe Greene would relish his punters being stir-fried in chlorine). In the teeth of recession a plush room that more than comfortably houses a family of four was going for $200 a night, all in – about £35 a head – so it was cheaper to enjoy all this largesse than it would be to put up at your local bypass-bound Travelodge. On our first trip down from the 15th floor the lift was full of little girls in swimsuits sitting cross-legged in pools of water – clearly they’d been playing in there. Elsewhere stolid Midwestern families sauntered past the blackjack tables as they might stroll past the enclosures in a petting zoo.

What this infusion of genuine – rather than feigned – juvenescence does for Vegas I’m not altogether qualified to assess, but my hunch is that it spells out T-H-E  E-N-D, as clearly as the final credits of a major sword-and-sandals motion picture. It wasn’t the public exhibitions of hyenas being induced to rape female slaves that did for the Roman empire – it was the presence of Patrician kiddies in the stands of the Colosseum. There’s something about the mass acknowledgement of transgression as a trans-generational phenomenon that does for a culture. In Vegas I was witnessing Baudrillard’s society that is transparent to itself – and therefore invisible: the point about the children trotting through the casino was that they couldn’t really see it, while the gamblers couldn’t really see them. Both moieties were childlike in their belief that by covering their own eyes they could somehow not be perceived by others.

Baudrillard, who didn’t live to see the final familiarisation of the Vegas mirage, would undoubtedly have appreciated it as the complete confirmation of his view that under conditions of late capitalism the very notion of “the social” becomes a product to be marketed exclusive of any real relations. But then, speaking as rhizome, what would I know: I just eat raw fish and extend my filaments through neon loam.

When, back in the mid-1990s, I was asked to write restaurant reviews for the Observer, I told my then editor that I wanted to broaden out the chomping field and give due weight to the sort of places where people actually ate. This premature stab at the idea of Real Meals was greeted with some scepticism – Britain was about to be submerged beneath a cresting wave of extra-virgin olive oil and the consensus on the edible was that thi-ings can only get bett-er! But before the axe fell on the pancetta and I was compelled to spend evening after evening having jus drizzled over me, I managed to fire off a couple of despatches from the front line of chain restaurants.

One of these was about Garfunkel’s, which was – and thankfully still is – the sort of joint where a callow teenage boy might take his first date. With its brassy, banquette-laden interior, photos of generic celebrities and all-you-can-graze salad bar, Garfunkel’s speaks to the condition of the tourist family, weighed down with fractious children. The first Garfunkel’s opened in 1979; by the time I reviewed the chain in 1995 there were a few branches in London and southern England and, 20 years later, there are only a few more – with an outlier in Edinburgh.

Still, in the glorious year of our twin saviours, Elizabeth and Olympia, it seemed worthwhile to go back. After all, the majority of visitors to our shores are unlikely to give a flying fuck about the Fat Duck: Garfunkel’s and its ilk are where the forking action is. So I dragged the 14-year-old from what he terms his “man cave” and hauled him into town. In the 1990s, I’d had a vision of Garfunkel the man as a wannabe southern Californian dude with a Magnum PI ’tache in a cheesecloth shirt and bell bottoms, frolicking by a poolside with a bevy of pneumatic lovelies, but my teenager went one up. “Garfunkel,” he said, scanning the menu, “sounds either like a grinning, gap-toothed child molester or a performing monkey.”

Then – with some trepidation – he kicked off the meal by ordering a Coke float, while riffing about a mate of his who will “eat anything: like, he’s eaten almost all animals there are, except for reptiles. In Thailand, he ate some, like, scorpions – but he said they put him off bugs for ever.” Sadly, there are no bugs of any sort on the Garfunkel’s menu, which is weighted towards old-fashioned Brit and chips, with lots of meaty feasts. A charming young man from Szczecin took our order. My son went for the London Tower Burger, a £13.95 masonry pile comprising two beefburgers, dill pickle, Monterey Jack cheese, crispy bacon and onion rings. He seemed to feel this was the epitome of gastronomic adventure: “I didn’t use to like onion rings,” he said, “but now I love them.”

Still, I couldn’t talk: after receiving assurance that Garfunkel’s chicken was free-range (presumably it hangs out at the poolside with Mr G), I selected a quarter of fowl from the rotisserie, which came – bizarrely – with a Caesar salad and pasta. Because of my fashionable wheat intolerance (a legacy of all that focaccia during the Blair regime), I swapped the pasta for chips. All around us sat balding, middle-aged men in shorts accompanied by harassed wives and children tethered to helium balloons. I was pleased to see that the Garfunkel’s salad bar was still at the epicentre of the establishment, although its echt 1990s matte-black livery had been changed for what looked like a variation on the theme of giant Aga stove. Weird.

Weirder still was the decorative scheme, which consists of pen-and-ink-style drawings of jumbled London landmarks, juxtaposed with ludicrously inappropriate flower-power slogans: “Tune in, turn on, drop out”, “Make love, not war” – you get the miserable picture. The Tower Burger, another landmark, loomed into sight and the Boy Wonder mused as to how he was going to fit it into his mouth. This I found a bit rich, because in the family he is known preeminently for having a huge (albeit fetching) gob. When he was about two, his mother and I caught him standing sucking on a doorknob. The entire knob was inside his mouth.

True to type, he demolished the Tower; and I made quick work of my chicken, which must have been very free-ranging indeed, because it was a skinny little thing. Not content with his Tower, my companion then had a great mound of pancakes with maple syrup and ice cream – while I had ice cream and an espresso. The bill, I thought, was, especially for a vaguely 1960s themed restaurant, pretty uncool: £56, including tip. Still, if you’re a tourist, you pays your money and takes your lack of choice.