Breaking New Ground

By Matt Allen

Doug and I saw 12 trains that day. Each time there was a train on the tracks, and then it was gone again, as if it had never been there at all, nor ever would be there again, Doug would sigh, and say, “The tracks are over there?”

“Yes, those are the train tracks.”

He would forget again and immediately remember in a moment the straight lines of darkened metal, the arrow driven engines of fury, those linked metal boxes that carried the unimaginable cargo, human or otherwise, from one place to another. He remembers after asking the question one more time, and then forgets again. The questions are a way of life, a hesitant embrace with a world that is never the same for him, or for any other, from one moment to the next.

“What will come on those tracks?”

“A train.”

We drive west and the landscape slowly transforms from the sweeping vertical grandeur of the continental divide and the Rocky Mountains to an impressive portrait of emptiness: red visions of massive stone mesas that play with one’s hope of permanence, and dusted vacancies of land that one will never understand from the inside. Perhaps if we were to stop, get out of the car, walk away from the road, and wander into the opened expanse, we might begin to know this desert. But we do not. Insulated and secure, we drive on.

Doug is 46 years old and I am 15 years his junior. We drive together across the world, across this part of the world, through the mountains and across the desert and plains. We drive at 95 miles per hour and cut through the outside world with the penetrability and efficiency of a bullet. I drive as Doug keeps his eyes on the tracks, which lie just outside and parallel to this bubble of motorized comfort. The tracks sometimes cut under or over our path, veering away from the highway to discovery of sights and visions meant only for track dwellers, conductors and passengers. When the tracks disappear from sight and Doug loses that side thread of thought to follow, he lapses into silence, into introspection, into the safety of his mind. I do the same, enjoying for the moment this break, this feast of silence.

We drive to Las Vegas, Doug and I, and we drive with lightness and speed to meet many of my old friends from other worlds, hometown friends, friends that I am not sure are still friends. Doug is excited. Vegas offers up a collection of images and dreams to him that I can’t even begin to guess at. My own imaginations move without clarity through the pyramids and canals, the streets and the slots, the old men in tennis shoes and white shorts, cameras slung around their necks, and the smart business suits of those looking to impress.

Doug is never trying to impress. He moves in a world where our impressions can only be as ephemeral as they truly are. He worries little about clothing, apart from how to get it on, and even less about his hair or his ears or his white tube socks pulled all the way up to his knees. I, on the other hand, vacillate between contempt for my inflated concerns and the reality of the concerns themselves, which are manifold and constant. What will the boys from Iowa think of this foray into the sun with my one-of-a-kind co-pilot? How will the teeming crowds in the streets and casinos react when Doug comes charging through the door, imaginary pistols drawn, shooting his fingers to the left and to the right? How do I stand up to the successes and failures of those I knew as a boy, how will they measure against me? Is my hair too long? Are my teeth a bit yellow? Unbearable thickness of ego, incredible fear of space, all my own.

We see another train and thankfully I am drawn out of my self and back to the cooled interior of the car where Doug hoots loudly that the tracks with a train on it are back where they belong. I hoot with him and we chant: “Number twelve, number twelve, number twelve!” It’s a hootenanny and I feel light, alive, breathing again.

Flagstaff and its green-covered mountains welcome us after the loneliness of the desert. We pass by in a flash and cut away from the interstate of many miles. We head northwest past Hoover Dam, away from the trains and their tracks, past valleys of charcoal gray peaks, the last natural drama before the city itself appears. It rises out of the desert like so many lost and scattered thorns, dropped in this place as seeds decades ago, now full grown into a monstrous bramble of concrete and glass, polished to a high sheen of aspirations and anecdotes. Doug points his finger through the windshield, asking, “Is that Vegas?”

“Most definitely, Las Vegas,” I respond.

“Are we in Las Vegas?”

“We’re so close we can almost taste it.”

“Is that Vegas?”

“Vegas it is!”

“We saw 12 trains today!”

“We sure did.”

“Is that Vegas?”

We check into our hotel, the New Frontier, amidst the electronic overkill of the slot machines. The lobby of this hotel, like all the others in this town, does not waste space, filling each nook and darkness with as many machines as possible. The rows between are narrow, and Doug stands unsteadily at my arm as I yell to be heard by the hotel attendant, who can barely be seen through the smoky glass partition that separates us.

“We have a reservation in one of the suites,” I scream.

“All the rooms are the same here. No suites,” he yells back.

“But I was told I was reserving a suite.”

“Well, we call them all suites, all the rooms are the same.”

“So, do we have suite?”

“If you want to call it a suite.”

“But you just said they’re all suites.”

“Right.”

“My last name is Allen.”

“Right. And you’ll be staying with… your wife?”

“No, I’ll be staying with my friend Doug.”

The little man, and he is a little man, maybe five feet, stands up from the stool he is sitting on, not any taller now, and peers through the stained window. Doug smiles and tells him, “We’re in Las Vegas!” then turns to me and asks, “Are we in Las Vegas?”

“We are in Las Vegas.”

The little man climbs his stool again and looks at both of us with a fresh look of suspicion.

“How will you be paying, Mr. Allen?”

“We’ve already paid on the Internet, with a credit card.”

“Right. Do you need one key or two?

I turn toward Doug and ask him if he wants a key.

Doug looks back at me, and then at the little man and says, “We’re in Las Vegas, baby!”

The little man looks very suspicious now, startled even, and I am exhausted, and I don’t feel like explaining anything.

“How many trains today?” I ask Doug.

Doug smiles, shakes his head at the memory, and says, “Twelve.” The little man passes the key to me through the slot, smiles like a monkey, and says,

“Enjoy your suite, gentlemen.”

“We most certainly will.”

So many plans for this short weekend in Vegas. First, we settle in. Doug chooses the bed closest to the window and, lo and behold, we can see a train yard from this fifth floor suite. Full of trains, like 30 of them. They don’t count (in the train-counting way) because they aren’t moving. Doug informs me that a train has to move if we are to count it, so we hold at number 12. His energy is high, fired by the excitement of the unknown, and he jiggles as he moves, unable to contain all that possibility. I, on the other hand, just drove like a maniac for 11 hours through the desert, and I’m ready to take a bath and pass out with a movie, calling it a night. That, of course, just isn’t going to happen. This is Vegas, baby!

It’s at times like these that I question my sanity in driving cross country, to Vegas of all places, with Doug. I love him, this is without question, and I enjoy his company all of the time – okay, most of the time – but when I’m low on energy and he’s lifting off the ground with exuberance, I’m not sure I can take one more minute of his questions. I take my bath while he watches The Wheel of Fortune. (“Is that Vanna White? What does she do? Does she turn the letters? Is that man Pat Sajak? Is he the host?”)

When I have sufficiently soaked away my impatience and step out of the bath, I finally find myself excited to be here. I call my friends at their hotel and make arrangements to meet all ten of them for dinner. Doug listens to me while I’m on the phone and decides that, more than anything, he would like to order a pizza and have it delivered. I calmly explain that we’re planning to meet everyone at a restaurant, and that he can order a pizza there if he wants.

“Will they deliver it?”

“Well, not really, but they’ll deliver it to your table.”

“Will they come to the door?”

“Not if we’re in the restaurant.”

“I want to order a pizza.”

“That’s totally fine.”

“And I want it delivered to this door.”

“But we’re going out, you know, to meet my friends.”

“And then we’ll order pizza when we get home.”

“But we’re going out to eat.”

“After we eat.”

This conversation almost sends me in for another bath but I hold firmly to the plan and we make it into the car, down the strip. We pass what seems like thousands of sandal-wearing pedestrians, video screens the size of my apartment, and red-faced limo drivers who cut us off simply for kicks. Finally, we are in the massive parking garage of the Mandalay Bay Resort, where most of my friends have rented rooms, not suites.

Doug meets each of them in turn, in the respective rooms, and it goes well, for the most part. He does manage to hear one of my friends call another of my friends “lazy” and so asks him multiple times, “Are you lazy? He says you’re lazy! What are you going to do with him?” My friend, unschooled in the ways of Doug in particular, and the ways of people with disabilities in general, holds his own pretty well, bantering back for a while, looking at me with a big question mark. Some of the others look at Doug, all six feet and 190 pounds of him, with curiosity and a little bit of fear. They look at me like they don’t know anything about me anymore.

Doug acts as a buffer, this much I know, as I can focus on his needs, on his happiness, and I don’t have to deal as much with the uncomfortable feeling of being sized up by people I once spent every waking moment with when we were kids. For the moment, the pizza delivery has been forgotten, both by me and, thankfully, also by Doug.

We eat amidst the throngs of Vegas revellers, winners and losers both, and I forget the feeling of being uncomfortable with my friends. They seem to accept Doug and I, and we enjoy a heavy meal of, yes, pizza, which of course reminds Doug of our real mission for the night. Pizza delivery.

After this meal, and considering the day we’ve had, it’s all I can do to find our car, drive back through the cattle chute of the main strip and get us back into our suite. Doug, too, is showing signs of exhaustion, and after brushing his teeth, settles into bed. I think he’s asleep when I come out of the bathroom, but he’s not.

“Matt?”

“Yes, Doug?”

“Tomorrow we’ll order pizza and have it delivered to this door.”

“To this door, and to no other.”

“We saw 12 trains today.”

“We sure did.”

“Your friend is lazy.”

“He sure is.”

“We’re in Vegas.”

“That we are.”

“I like Vegas.”

“Me too, Doug, me too.”

And finally he rests. I’m so tired, yet I have noticed the difference – out of questions for the time being, Doug is making sense of the world around him through statements instead. In a half-sleep, I realize that Doug has started to make his own declarations of independence.

I sleep like a stone. In the morning I wake up to silence and Doug is smiling at me, ready to announce his battle plans for the day. “Are we going to order a pizza?” he asks.

“Of course.”

“When?”

“How about after we order some room service for breakfast?”

“Room service?”

“Yes. We can order bacon and eggs and juice and coffee, and anything else you want, and the waiter will bring it to the door.”

“To our door?”

“To our door.”

To our door the breakfast comes and so begins a whirlwind day of joy, excitement and a little more exhaustion. We eat like kings, I take another bath and Doug is coerced into taking a shower. We leave our suite, and Doug is enthralled that someone will come in while we’re gone and clean up our mess, make our bed, clean the bathroom.

We head downstairs, right into the casino. We buy ten one-dollar coins and Doug begins feeding them into the mouth of a random machine. On the third pull of the arm, lights go off, whirrs resound, bells ring, and two hundred – count ’em, two hundred – golden coins drop into the lower platter. I’m amazed, Doug’s amazed and we get outta there while the gettin’ is good. We drive to the Monte Carlo, another Vegas behemoth, buy ten dollars worth, and Doug wins 100 golden coins. Again, we cash in and get out of there quick. I keep thinking to myself that if anyone in this place deserves to win it’s Doug, but I end up looking at that word, deserves, and I’m not sure, really, what it means.

I know this streak of luck cannot last, and it does not. We eventually end up, when all is said and done at the end of the weekend, up about 40 bucks. The look on Doug’s face as those coins ring out one after another, though, is worth the frustration we both get in the end, a frustration that is itself as illusory as the coins.

The slots are only the beginning. We ride in a longboat in the canals of “Venice.” We visit the MGM Grand, once one of the staples of the strip, now old hat to the newer and grander rivals, to watch an in-house version of The Wheel of Fortune, Doug’s favorite television program. The stage looks the same, and the audience has the same anticipation as if Vanna herself was getting ready to start turning vowels. Doug is busting out with energy, even after a long day of the ebb and flow of chance, and his excitement is volcanic. As we enter, each member of the audience is given a number, and when the show begins, I realize that the numbers are to choose people to participate in the game, to spin the wheel. There are probably 300 people there, so I calculate our chances of getting to the stage to be about two in 300. But don’t forget we’re with Doug here, and of course, on the second round of play, his number is called.

I lean over and tell him he’s a contestant, and he looks at me with real fear, stage fright. Call it what you want, but Doug is not going up on stage. I take his number and dash on up, ready for my moment in the light. As I stand on the stage, and as the host (not Pat Sajak) gets to know us a little better with a few questions from home, I turn to see Doug in the audience, standing with his mouth open, a camera to his face, flashing picture after picture after picture. Even after the film is gone he continues to flash. I spin the wheel, buy some vowels, think and stammer a bit, and eventually solve the puzzle: “Breaking new ground.”

When I come down from the stage a few minutes later, having won a camera, a watch and a miniature television, Doug sits with me, his knees shaking, his voice hoarse, tears in his eyes.

“You were up on stage.”

“I was, Doug.”

“I took your picture.”

“I saw that. Thank you so much.”

“You won the prize!”

“We won the prizes, Doug – it was your number, remember?”

“Yes,” he says, “I want the watch and the camera.” He doesn’t hold back. “And the TV.” Very matter of fact.

“How about I take the TV, and you get the other two?”

“OK.” He’s willing to negotiate.

We leave the casino, prizes in hand, and I feel like nothing could be more perfect. Nothing could possibly be any better than what just happened. But of course, I’m wrong. Doug reminds me of our real mission here in Vegas: pizza delivery. With much anticipation, the pizza is ordered! We have returned to our suite, my bath has calmed the frenetic pulsing of my blood, and, yes, pizza is on its way.

A man bearing red, white and blue colors, with a red hat and a large red satchel, appears at our door as if by magic. He sweeps into our room, takes off his hat, pulls a large pepperoni pizza out of his bag and places it ceremoniously on the table. Doug is beside himself, literally jumping up and down, screaming, “PIZZA, BABY! PIZZA, BABY!” The pizza man is taken aback, but not for one moment does the smile leave his face. He exits backward, bows a little bow and closes the door. As we eat our pizza, I realize that Doug is right. There is something beautiful and heart-wrenching in the anticipation and fulfillment of pizza.

I wake again, Sunday morning now, looking forward to and dreading the long drive back home, backtracking, driving at high speed. Doug, too, is quieter, looking solid and pensive.

“What do you think, Doug? Are you ready to go home?”

“I want to stay in Las Vegas,” he says.

“But won’t it be exciting to tell everyone about our adventures here?”

“Can we tell them about it?”

“Of course we can. We’ll tell all about the slot machines, and the gold coins, and the canals of Venice, and The Wheel of Fortune, and everything else.”

“Will we tell them about the pizza?”

“Of course, how stupid can I be? Of course we’ll tell them about the pizza.”

“Matt?”

“Yes, Doug?”

“Can we do this again?”

“Yes.”

“When, Matt?”

“How about next year?”

“Will Vegas still be here, next year?”

“If we’re lucky, my friend, if we’re lucky.”

“Matt? Will we see trains today?”

“You can count on it.”

(Matt Allen is a freelance writer living in Boulder, Colorado, U.S.A.)