Slaughterhouse 11

START TIME 9:35 PM
END TIME 10:42 PM
WORD COUNT 1020

“Go to a public place and describe the scene, but in so doing, turn it into a short piece of fiction.”

As a hobby, I run triathlons, and when the weather’s nice enough I get to train outside. Since I’m in Las Vegas, it can be nice a lot of the time. Since I’m also living in an economic war zone, I’m running through neighborhoods where a lot of Bad Things have happened.

The sky is huge here, disproportionate to reality, one huge blue sunny day after another. Some people attribute the sky being bigger out west to the wide open spaces of cowboy lore. The truth is the sky is bigger because there aren’t any trees. Palm trees and some others are planted, sure, but they came on a truck. Blue skies, sunny days, and awful news. I keep running.

I pass by a gentleman walking toward a construction site on some apartments. He’s got the work clothes, a hard hat, and the appearance of competence, and the job is about two blocks away. He’s drinking from a pint bottle of Seagram’s. It’s 9:30 in the morning. I keep running.

A grown man holds a cardboard sign advertising a $5.99 Recession Lunch Special at a tavern in the strip mall across the street. The level of responsibility for a job like this is akin to a bucket of sand, but they’re everywhere nowadays – selling computer repair, estate sales, used cars. I nod and smile slightly, and he seems embarrassed to nod back. I can see in his face that he’s not the type to be standing still at this hour. I keep running.

I finally get to the construction site, an uncharacteristic hive of activity. It appears to be condominiums on a piece of land that would normally support a single family home, but when they broke ground on this project a year ago, the only way they could justify the price of the land must have been to go multi-unit, stack ‘em up, great second home, practically a timeshare, come on out for your vacation, look at how this place has appreciated, you’d be an IDIOT not to buy here. The men working are moving at a clip that betrays their knowledge of their fates: the only reason they’re working on this job is the city is probably fining the daylights out of the developer who’d rather let the wood frame rot. When shoeboxes are going for Jello box prices, why live in a matchbox? So the men work on a building that no one will live in for a developer who can’t sell it to anyone to fulfill a loan to a bank that doesn’t want it in the first place. It’s a little like “It’s A Wonderful Life,” only there are lots of people who wish this had never happened. I keep running.

I pass by the grocery store, which still has a pretty good crowd of cars out front. The side shops are disappearing quickly as people recognize a sudden desire to do their own nails and don’t take their clothes to the dry cleaner as often. The grocery store’s parent company got absolutely hammered last year, because one of the things you notice quickly about living here is we don’t produce a goddamned speck of food locally, it all shows up by truck, and when gas prices doubled in two months they couldn’t raise prices fast enough. The stock boy grabbing carts looks older and more haggard than the usual occupant of that position; it doesn’t look like this is his only job. I keep running.

I turn the corner back into the residential neighborhood. There aren’t the stacks of “For Sale” signs that dotted the landscape last year, and the year before that, as boatloads of people did the Churn And Burn and went from house to house, cashing out, cashing in, getting space, but it’s very apparent that the Musical Chairs have come to a stop. Where you are, you are. What they bought it for, they won’t sell it for. They won’t even get close. If a buyer offered some people the chance to get back 60 percent of the 2005 value of their home they would have a hard time signing the paperwork before turning cartwheels – fully cognizant that it’s a six-figure loss. And either those “For Sale” signs got converted into new families, or – judging by the lawns and the keyboxes hung from the doorknobs, they didn’t. I keep running.

I come up on the remnants of a new subdivision, where I’m sure there’s a chipper agent inside. The signs that said “The Last 100 New Homes in Las Vegas” are gone, and while one remains promising a “105% Price Guarantee” I’m not really sure who’s dumb enough to believe that any more, and it looks as if work has stopped entirely at the edges of the lot. I wonder if the agent will still give me a free bottle of water like they did in the old days; it’s more likely I won’t be able to leave without presenting a drivers license. I keep running.

I turn another corner and can see the Strip. There are five or six tower cranes remaining, most of them at CityCenter, the project that is slated to open next year with an additional 10,000 rooms of hotel occupancy while MGM Mirage stock continues its gentle decline towards bankruptcy. They are taking job applications on their website. You are allowed to apply for one, and only one, position in a resort that’s expected to offer thousands of jobs. And if everything goes according to schedule, it won’t be open until the end of the year.

And I look at that massive building, filled with construction workers who will have no other project to go to once their work is done, building condos that no one wants to buy, and a hotel for people who don’t want to stay here any more and couldn’t afford it if they did, to gamble with money they don’t have and drive home using gasoline they can’t afford, and I wonder how much worse it can get before it gets any better.

For a couple seconds, I stop running.