In Las Vegas: Working Hard for the Money

By Jane O'Reilly

Eight o'clock in the evening is a slow, sullen hour in Sin City, a.k.a. Lost Wages. "I'm tired," whines a member of the United States Twirling Association. "C'mon, we're supposed to be having fun," snaps her companion, a clone. In razor-crease jeans and stiletto heels they stamp into the ladies' room, flounce around the corner past the polished washbasins and disappear into the two long rows of toilet stalls. They are the kind of girls who obey their mothers' warnings never to sit on strange toilet seats. Attendants have to nip in after that type, making sure the next woman will have no unpleasant surprises. That is the sort of job specification that made Donna Summer's song about a ladies' room attendant, She Works Hard for the Money, a big hit, especially in the neon city.

A circle of flattering pink mirrors catches multiple reflections of the plaster statue of Diana. On the dusty-rose settee, two elderly ladies in Orion lace sweaters tell each other racist jokes and giggle. The attendant, who is black, has just unwrapped twelve rolls of toilet paper and is now dragging two huge bags of trash out the door. She passes an aghast English-speaking European tourist, who apparently expected Las Vegas to be more in the style of James Bond at Monte Carlo.

Two women on the far side of 45 stand next to each other before the washbasins, excavating makeup from the inside corners of their eyes. Vision restored, they notice they are wearing the same velour jogging suit. The turquoise version is from Pasadena, Calif., the deep pink from Evanston, Ill. Imagine that! Instant sisterhood. Evanston, who is in real estate and relaxes by playing the slots, says, "Have you got one of those rooms with the round bed and the mirror on the ceiling? Just out of curiosity, I asked the bellboy what it would cost me to get some company. He said, 'It's hard to get any kind of a sharp looker in here for less than $100. But you shouldn't have any trouble on your own.' So I checked out the craps tables. This adorable guy, my type, with the Southern drawl, the boots and the $500 chips, told me to step right up and be his good luck. Well, after ten minutes I realized I'd have to stand there all night to shift his attention away from the table."

"Yeah," says Pasadena, "I'm married to one of those kind of guys." Pause. "Did you say $100? That seems sort of high." Both women scrub hands blackened from pushing hundreds of coins into slot machines, and then each takes one thin quarter from the paper cup holding her slot-machine supplies and deposits it on the tip plate. An attendant, sweeping together the wreckage of paper products they have left behind, says, "Women don't tip like men. Sometimes I don't take home more than $6 in tips."

At 11 o'clock everyone is friendly, wide awake and ready for action. A response of "Nice dress" to "You like that mascara?" leads, within minutes, to "So I told him, if he wants to see those children, he has to stop tearing them up emotionally." A circle of strangers, all intricately wielding lip pencils, choruses sympathetically, "Baby, I know just what you mean." A dealer from another casino drops in to visit a friend, who looks at the dealer's name tag and says, "Bernadette? Since when?" The real name is Pamela, but, she says, "I'm sick of it. I tried Edith one time and all I got was 'Oh ho, Edith, have your cake and Edith too, eh?' Mona is best. It sounds sort of untouchable." The false Bernadette says she had dinner with "someone influential, very prominent in town." This is code for someone with reputed underworld ties. "It was boring. I'm not going out again until I find someone as smart as my ten-year-old son."

A classic bimbo comes in, a sincere (as opposed to commercial) bimbo, a woman who has chosen her life-style and works hard at it. She is accompanied by a bimbo-in-training, a young woman who has not yet imagined all the places blusher can be applied. Both wear draped and beaded jersey jumpsuits. It is hard to go to the bathroom in such garments, and the subsequent readjustment involves lots of friendly bantering with the attendant.

"We came with some degenerates who went straight to the tables. They haven't even been up to our rooms." ("Degenerate" is an acknowledged category of gambler in Las Vegas, one step ahead of "compulsive" on the road to ruin.) In perfect synchronization, the two women lean over with brushes in both hands, and each beats her hair into a froth. Upright again, both declare, "Ugh! Straw!" The little bimbo says, "I'd never put color on my hair. People would think I was phony."

Her mentor, wiser and blonder, lets the remark pass. She takes out a small bottle and sprays her face. "Baby oil. Gives you that fresh, dewy look." But doesn't it smudge? "Oh, you never let them play kissy face--it ruins your makeup." They depart from the premises, the big bimbo's cleavage prompting admiring stares from a mother and daughter in windbreakers.

Says Mom to newlywed daughter: "How'd you like to have a pair like that?"

At 2 o'clock in the morning the tourists are as blurred and fading as children allowed up past bedtime.

The women who work the graveyard shift sneak in for a cigarette. Says a cocktail waitress: "We're supposed to go to designated areas for our breaks, and otherwise the bosses want us out on the floor all the time." "The bosses" is the Las Vegas equivalent of "the Man," covering every rank of power from a floor supervisor to a casino manager to the Mob to God. The bosses are, almost without exception, men. "Dorks, all of them," says a cashier. "A boss asked me out last week. We'd go to the mountains, he said. You guessed it. No mountains.

Halfway through dinner he says, 'Are we going to get between the sheets or not?' Cute, huh? Lucky thing I brought my own car." She takes out a tube of Super Glue and, in a surrealistic gesture worthy of Buftuel, reattaches a thumbnail that is one and a half inches long.

Fingernail maintenance seems to fill the hours women once devoted to straightening stocking seams and rolling pin curls. The ladies' room crowd admires a tourist, the owner of a nail shop in California, who reveals a gold nail set with diamonds on her left ring finger.

But the home champ is Leta Powers, whose nails are polished, striped with silver and pierced with little gold circles and charms. Leta works as a Goddess, which means she is a cocktail waitress at Caesars Palace, a hotel and casino organized around a spurious Greco-Roman theme. Locally, the Goddesses are dubbed coneheads, after the shape of the false hairpiece that is part of the costume. Unchanged since the hotel opened in 1966, the uniform, with its uncomfortable corset top and cutie-pie short pleated skirt, is as archaic as the clothes in a Currier & Ives print. The Goddesses, carrying a tray of drinks in one hand, give a thin gloss of glamour to a job that is a grueling eight-hour hike in high heels. But, says Goddess Bonnie Arrage, "I'm one of nine sisters, born in Kentucky. I was working as a secretary in Michigan, and I got laid off. I decided I wanted to go where there was money left in the world. For someone like me, with only a high school education, this is opportunity city."

All night the conversation threads along: aching feet, daughters' weddings, chemotherapy, whether or not it will rain that weekend--and men. A coffee-shop hostess says, "You know Howard? My old boyfriend? He's seeing a new girl. She's 30, with two kids. They've already got an apartment together. Well, last night he comes into my place. I gave him one of my superduper dirty looks. He says I've got to talk to him because the two of them need money. He wants to borrow some. Can you imagine?"

Jean Brown is the attendant from 2 a.m. to 10 a.m., and she knows what to say: "You keep a positive outlook. Don't give up. Keep faith in yourself. You never know when Mr. Right will show up."

The hostess sighs. "I never thought I'd be carrying menus at 35." And then, "What do you think I ought to wear when he comes back to get the money?" --By Jane O'Reilly