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This might end up being the hardest part of my Las Vegas life to share. Not because of anything I did or that happened, but mainly because the memories are hazy. We are looking back to the year 2000 from the end of 2024. A lot of time has passed.
The time leading up to the move is fairly clear in my mind. Much of my time in Vegas is clear, obviously, because I kept a journal. Then there is the in-between. The period from maybe the last week of August through late October when I began the journal is a bit muddled.
My memory seems to show me that my father was a bit hesitant to have me come and stay with him in Las Vegas. I think part of him relented because of a chance to try to show my mother that he could actually be a supportive parent. I think another part was guilt over being a terrible parent and likely a bit of pressure from family members. The bottom line is I was more of a tenant than a son when I moved out there.
There were scores of sad but hopeful goodbyes as I left. I remember my greatest sadness being toward my niece Kaleigh. She was about 15 months old and I had been a big part of her life throughout it. I hated the idea of her growing up and not remembering me.
I packed up everything I had. At that point there was no laptop, no smartphone, my biggest piece of technology was probably my Sony Discman. Speaking of Discman, I packed all of my CDs to bring with me on the plane. Yes, nothing was mailed ahead of time.
How did I pull off bringing my CDs? It was simple. A few years earlier I had been given a large hockey duffel bag by my friend John. Or he just ‘forgot’ it at my house, I don’t remember. The bag was large enough to fit our friend Barry inside of it. I loaded that thing up with as many CDs as I could fit. In the end that bag weighed a ton and was hell to move. I can remember upon my arrival at my father’s apartment having burn marks on my shoulder from trying to carry the duffel over my shoulder through the airport.
Oh yes, the flight out. I was terrified of flying. My initial trip to Vegas in January 2000 was complete with me leaving a sweaty palm print on my Discman as I clutched it for dear life as the plane took off.
On this second flight, I was a bit calmer. Plus I was filled with optimism about this new life I was embarking on. I was 22 years old and had spent my entire life living in the relatively rural area of Cape Cod surrounded by the vast majority of my family and friends. Here I was now venturing thousands of miles away to a city where I’d be able to count on one hand the number of people I knew and still have fingers left.
Hope. That was the biggest thing I remembered about the time leading up to the move as well as the first few weeks. There was this feeling of anything being possible. Cape Cod felt restrictive. In my early 20’s I believed the only way to fulfill my potential was to move away. As much as I love Cape Cod to this day I still believe that the opportunities are fewer there. In Las Vegas, there was a seemingly endless landscape of opportunity.
My arrival was the first week of September. I believe it was right after Labor Day. Despite fall being on the horizon the heat was palpable. There was a string of 110+ degree days when I first got there. Sure it was a dry heat which made it tolerable. Still, when I’d open the door to the 2nd floor apartment to step outside it felt like someone blowing a hair dryer in my face.
Over the ensuing weeks, I would use that dry heat to my advantage when it came to laundry. I’d hang my clothes on the balcony before going off to school or work and come home to dry clothes that smelled like the outdoors.
Of course, there was one time that it was windy and when I came home from school I noticed much of my laundry had blown off of the balcony and was strewn all over the grass and parking lot. That was not a good time. There was also a time that I tried to do laundry a bit late and while my clothes were in the washer in the apartment complex’s laundry room the attendant locked the door. I was able to call and get them to unlock it so I could get my clothes though.
So I had arrived. My father worked as a cook and was gone the vast majority of the week. He was either working or drinking and gambling at one of the smaller ‘locals’ casinos. His favorite was a place called Arizona Charlie’s. In a weird bit of trivia, the restaurant where he worked called Lakes Lounge was located in the same strip mall where Diff’rent Strokes actress Dana Plato had robbed a video store in 1991. It was a place called Lakes Video.
I was on my own basically from the jump in Vegas. My father was always out. My family, Uncle Eric, Aunt Emma, and Patrick lived in Vegas but it was about 15 minutes to drive from West Charleston Boulevard to their house on Pioneer Avenue. I didn’t have a car, plus they had established lives so it wasn’t like I could just hop on the bus and go visit.
My first major orders of business in my Las Vegas life were to get a job and to enroll in classes at the nearby Community College of Southern Nevada. The college courses were an easier task.
On the grounds at CCSN
I had been taking classes in Communication at Cape Cod Community College. So when I enrolled in Vegas I looked for classes along those same lines. A major one I remember is Broadcast Writing. I learned how to write scripts for television news which was fun. The college was a 5 minute walk away and had a neat layout. There were all sorts of colorful and unique structures all over the campus. One time I bought a disposable camera at the nearby Walgreens and took a bunch of photos of these structures.
The job was a different story. I did not have boatloads of money stashed away for when I got to Vegas. Being 22 and having never been away from home my preparation consisted more on packing my CDs in a duffel bag than socking away money. This proved to be a major problem and maybe the ultimate predictor of my failure there.
My father wanted money for me to stay at his apartment. I don’t know why I thought he might see this as a chance to help his son out for a bit until I got on my feet. I should have known better. He was always incredibly selfish. He routinely refused to pay child support and then once I was working he would be constantly in my ear begging for money. The fact that he immediately saw me as an ATM machine again should not have been a surprise.
My funds were steadily leaking once I got to Vegas. I had to be a bit rude to my former job on Cape Cod to get them to send me the last of my paychecks so that I could stay afloat a little longer. Desperation was setting in quickly which was not a good sign. I needed something fast.
What I ended up doing was applying for and getting a job in the back stockroom of a Target a few miles away. I felt it was just a stopover as I went to school and until a better job came along. I’ll never forget sitting in a conference room with a handful of other new arrivals to Target. The person in management running the orientation told us to write down in the ‘pay’ area $6 per hour.
It was a big-time gut punch. Sure it was 2000 but $6/hr was half of what I was making on Cape Cod. I felt terrible. I moved across the country to get a job making half of what I was making? I kept reminding myself that it was just the beginning and that something better would come along. Still, my pay was definitely a motivator for how hard I worked.
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| The Target where I worked in Las Vegas |
My time working at Target was an adventure. The rest of the ‘Backstock Boys,’ as we called ourselves, were still in high school. I was the old man. They didn’t work hard, just like me, but they were all harmless and fun to be around. The irony is that today I only can remember one of them.
The one Backstock Boy I remember is a part of one of my favorite Las Vegas stories. He had a crush on a girl who worked there. She was dating another employee. My fellow Backstock Boy, seeing that I was in relatively good shape, had a proposition for me. I still don’t know if he was serious or not but he offered me $100 to beat the hell out of this girl’s boyfriend.
Now I don’t know what my beating this guy would have done to make the girl want to date someone else. I doubt the $100 would have even paid for my bail money when I inevitably got arrested for assault. Nonetheless, this kid would nickname me The Assassin. He would either flash the money fingers sign to me or just shout out ‘a hundred bucks,’ several times a day when we were working.
I said above that I was feeling the pinch for money but it was never bad enough that I wanted to beat people up for money. The actual work was easy. We boys would put a lot of stuff away in the back. We’d get calls over the radio to retrieve an item for a ‘guest.’ A lot of the time we were just messing around listening to the day's hits on 98.5 KLUC.
A few things that I remember about my Target backstock days.
One, my boss was an addict. I forget his name, which is good, but he was the backstock boss. He was always on something when he came back to give us our marching orders. This was evident because he’d tell us something, then leave, then come back a little while later and say the exact same thing like it had never happened. The story was he had been injured on the job and rather than take time off he had started taking pain meds. Now he was hooked.
Two, there was one kid I worked with who would routinely make himself pass out as a joke. He would take a really deep breath and then bend over and breathe in and out in short quick breaths. Then he’d fall over. We’d have to make sure there was something soft to break his fall so he didn’t crack his head open on the concrete floor.
Three, a favorite pastime of the Backstock Boys was as follows. At the end of one of the aisles in the stockroom, we would pile large pillows against the wall. Then one of us would get a running start with a scooter or a bicycle and crash headlong into the pillows. I told you, for $6/hr I wasn’t going to be killing myself stocking shelves. Target did have a Pizza Hut cafeteria so there was that.
Getting beyond college and work there was a lot of freedom in Las Vegas. It was option overload when it came to food. This is probably my most cherished memory from this time. Within a mile walk of where I live,d there was probably every fast food spot imaginable. It included McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, Carl’s Jr., Wienerschnitzel, Del Taco, and more. My two favorites were Jack In the Box and Panda Express.
Jack In the Box was in between where I lived and my school so I paid them a visit constantly. Burgers and chili cheese curly fries for dinner before watching WWF Monday Night Raw which came on at 5pm since I was out west. I had a few Jack antenna balls I wish I could find. They were the head of the mascot.
Panda Express was and still is my favorite of any fast-food place. The closest one to where I live is over an hour away. When I was in Las Vegas it was about 1 ¼ miles each way to walk to it. I gladly did this a few times a week in the 100-degree heat for some of that orange chicken.
If I needed groceries, with whatever meager funds I had from my high-paying Target job, I visited Albertson’s. The main memory I have of that store is the alcove of slot machines that were beside the entrance. Many a time I was called by those belles and chimes.
I would blow through some, or maybe all, of my money at the slot machines in Albertson’s or the nearby 7-Eleven. I stated in the last blog that winning on my first try at slots when I arrived for my visit to Las Vegas was the worst thing that could have happened.
That became a reality when left to my own devices. Within weeks of moving out there, I was in debt due to a gambling addiction that only stopped when the money ran out, and sometimes not even then. I routinely overdrew my checking account blowing money on slots. It was a regular issue that I mentioned a lot in my journal.
Fast food and slim money combine in the story of the gym I signed up at. Q The Sports Club was a short walk from the apartment. It was a massive 24-hour gym with part of the building being a glass, or plexiglass, pyramid.
It had all of the cutting-edge equipment. This included cardio equipment where you could access the internet. Of course that was only while you were moving. So if you were peddling the bike you were online, once you stopped the screen would go black. It was a brilliant way to get people to keep working out. There were many times I would be writing an email while peddling only for me to slow down and have the screen go black.
I can remember often walking to the gym late at night, sometimes after 10pm, and never feeling concerned about my surroundings. Perhaps it was just my age. I do know that the apartment complex where I lived a few years later appeared on the television show COPS. I guess I left at the right time.
When I look back on Q The Sports Club a few things pop into my head. One was the smell of chlorine that hit you when you walked in the front door. This was due to the pool just to the right of the entrance. The other was when I was being shown around the premises by an employee when I signed up. When we walked past the hot tub he made sure to tell me that since they were open 24 hours I could theoretically come in with someone at 3am and go into the hot tub and...you know. Honestly, that’s the first story I tell people about that gym.
I am sure that there are more of the nuts and bolts of my initial arrival in Las Vegas that I am forgetting. Being 25 years ago makes details a bit hazy while the major talking points remain clear.
This brings us up to date as to when the actual Las Vegas journal begins. I was somewhere between six and seven weeks into my time there. Things had not been progressing the way I had hoped and I felt alone and hopeless with nobody to confide in. I ended up confiding in a little black spiral notebook instead.
In less than two months I went from believing that all I had to do was get to Vegas and my life would immediately be better, to feeling like I had escaped one rut only to fall into another. My Quarter-Life Crisis did not end just because I moved away from Cape Cod. I naively thought it was that easy.
Next, we will get into the actual journal from the time. It starts on October 25, 2000, and things were looking bleak.
Previous: The Vegas Journals - Prologue
