The first time I went to Las Vegas, they had the sheriff escort me and these two other poets out of town. We were there to teach poetry to children in Nevada High Schools. One of our poems had a "bad" word in it, and a teacher complained. I made a passionate defense of poetry, liberty and street language. The teacher called the principal, the principal called the Allied Arts Council of Southern Nevada (our employer), and someone called Senator Bible. Senator Bible called the sheriff. The year was 1972, Nixon was President, the Vietnam War was raging, and Elvis was king of the town, having made his famous comeback a few years earlier. Howard Hughes was still growing his hair and nails in his aerie above the Desert Inn. But poets couldn't say "bad words."

I was sorry to have to go. We had been put up at the Tropicana Hotel. The drinks were cheap. The food was great and practically free. I didn't gamble much, but my first time out at a blackjack table I made $50.

I also liked the drive we took that night to look at all the crisp fantasy of electric color carved into the pure desert air. Tom Wolfe, in his classic essay on Vegas, "Las Vegas (What?) Las Vegas (Can't Hear You! Too Noisy) Las Vegas!!!!," tried to give names to the styles of some of these amazing signs. He came up with: "Boomerang Modern, Pal-ette Curvilinear, Flash Gordon Ming-Alert Spiral, McDonald's Hamburger Parabola, Mint Casino Elliptical, Miami Beach Kidney." As for the colors, most of which do not exist anywhere outside the Vegas skyline, he thought of "methyl green, cyanic blue, tessellated bronze, hospital-fruit-basket-orange," among others.

The second time I came to Vegas was in 1978, alone this time, and just for fun. My friend Lamar, who lives here, took me on his own personal tour of the skyline. He drove down a dark street and told me to close my eyes. I did. When I opened them, I nearly went blind: We were on Fremont Street, or the Glitter Gulch, the "old" section of Vegas, built before the Strip. Wow! It was the Fourth of July mixed up in Peter Max's paint can.

We parked in front of Binion's Horseshoe Hotel and Casino, one of Vegas' old-fashioned gambling parlors. Every year, the World Series of Poker takes place here. I had heard all about this fantastic event, with its attendant legends. I knew about the fabled contest between Nick the Greek (Nicholas Dandalos) and Johnny Moss, the gambler from Texas. According to a source at Binion's, the marathon game lasted five months with breaks only for sleep. By the end of the match, and after every imaginable kind of poker was played, Moss walked away with $2 million. The Greek was reputed to have once won $60 million from Arnold Rothstein, the biggest gambler on the East Coast.

My luck, however, wasn't in that class. I lost $50 quicker than you can say "horseshoe," and then dropped another $50 for good measure. That was a good thing because now, free of financial burdens (and finances), I could enjoy the unique air of the Gulch. There was, for instance, "Nudes on Ice & Steak: $9.95." We didn't go in, and I regret it to this day. The place is gone.

Other carnivalesque old places are gone, too, but what remains of Fremont Street, a k a. the Gulch, is now being put under an electric canopy to preserve its "historical" character.

Bugsy Siegel's vision

History, like everything else, moves fast in Vegas. There was mostly desert here until 1946 when a mobster named Bugsy Siegel opened the Flamingo on the day after Christmas Day. Bugsy's vision of a city in the desert took root, though Bugsy himself was killed by his associates when the Flamingo had a less-than-successful opening. After the Flamingo came the Thunderbird in 1948, the Desert Inn, the Riviera, the Dunes. After that came the '60s and Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Wayne Newton, Barbra Streisand, Tom Jones and Elvis. Las Vegas became, in a short two decades, the place where middle-class America could go to enjoy all the stuff that good sense forbade at home. It was legal to gamble, it was OK to stay up all night (since, inside the casinos, you couldn't tell the difference between day and night, anyway). And you could take in some spectacular acts. Provided, of course, that you were financially solvent and didn't make too much a nuisance of yourself.

Over the years, I took infrequent trips to Las Vegas. Each time, I gambled a little more and lost a lot more. One time, I went there with a film crew to shoot a documentary for WGBH-Boston about "odds." We were standing in front of a row of slot machines, and I was telling the camera about my mother, who loves slot #F machines. A woman turned around as I was saying this, and she looked a lot like my mother. I asked her to play the machine next to me and gave her 10 quarters. I hoped she would lend some authenticity to my story but, unfortunately, I could never get it out because every time I started to open my mouth, she won and the clinking coins made a huge racket. Finally, I had to give her another 10 quarters not to play.

On another occasion, I was making a documentary film for PBS, called "Road Scholar," and I came to Vegas to play poker with some of the world's best poker players. This memorable event took place at Bob Stupak's Vegas World, an extravagant, spaceship-decorated hotel-casino. Stupak himself was a legendary Vegas character who was often quoted for tactless remarks and who once ran for mayor and punched out his opponent on live TV. The card-dealers at Vegas World wore little bow ties that said "Bob Stupak. He's Polish."

Stupak was Polish, pugnacious and quite friendly. He gave the crew and me a short but colorful lesson on odds, poker and life. And then I sat down to play for the camera with the likes of Tank Top Tony and his father. There was a pile of black $100 chips on the table. Every time the camera was on, I won.

I amassed almost the whole 10 grand before the camera was turned off. Alas. As soon as I wasn't in the spotlight anymore, I lost it all. It was a good thing that it was only play money, thanks to Stupak's generosity. If it had been real money, I'd have sweated bullets.

During that trip, I investigated briefly Las Vegas' wedding industry, too. I watched several weddings at the Little White Chapel, and a drive-in wedding. The drive-in took three minutes, cost $25, and the happily married couple zoomed off into the desert sunset.

One of the locals told me, "As long as you have a driver's license and cash, Vegas is yours. It's an adolescent fantasy world for adults."

Almost wholesome

But instant weddings and "Nudes on Ice" aside, Las Vegas was changing. New, more spectacular casino-hotels kept rising on the Strip, and the skyline became even more fantastic. Egypt's Luxor and medieval Camelot met in the sky without any apparent conflict. Disney cartoons and New York streets hovered equally at ease over the mobs of vacationers from Middle America. At the same time, the town kept growing bigger and bigger. The overwhelming sense of controlled naughtiness that was Vegas' chief product kept receding to give way to an almost wholesome image of a town on the go. Not a town on the "go-go," but a city

going places, a city with bookstores, a public radio station (KNPR-Las Vegas) and restaurants without slot machines.

The image-makers of Vegas started pushing Vegas as a family destination, but the main business of Vegas is still gambling. And as gambling is now being legalized to balance state budgets all over the nation, Las Vegas has to look elsewhere for revenues. Why not, then, make it a "family-oriented entertainment" center?

I thought to look at this question.

The MGM Grand, where I stayed, has 5,005 rooms! The 24th-floor where my room was had a pillar decorated with romantic movie scenes of the Old South. If I followed the hallway directly opposite Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler dancing on the veranda of a moonlit Tara, and walked about a mile, I arrived at my lodgings. The first night, I went the wrong way and realized it only very late when I ran into security guards escorting a round little man with a cigar in his mouth and a black bag full of cash in his hand. A leggy blonde in a spandex suit followed him out of the suite. That wasn't my hallway, for sure. I had no suite, no bag, no guards and no blonde.

I backtracked the two miles and thanked the MGM for the free exercise it threw in. How did the little round man get to his room? In the old days, big gamblers with cigars didn't like either exercise or undue strain. They also preferred their steaks well-fried, their mashed potatoes amply buttered, and their desserts creamy. These days, nouvelle cuisine has reached into every corner of Vegas.

An old-time gambler might be at a loss in the new Vegas in other ways, too. One way to get to the slot machines and poker tables is to go through Oz. When Oz opens, throngs of kids surge up the Yellow Brick Road and crane their necks to hear the animatronic figures of Dorothy, the Straw Man, and the Cowardly Lion hold forth about life and Kansas. The sky over Oz changes suddenly, too, going from blue to cloudy, from ominous to stormy. The bewildered gambler may find himself heading toward the MGM Grand Adventures Theme Park instead of the comfort of green felt, clinking chips and whirring machines. He might get swept up by the kids to go unwittingly down the Grand Canyon Rapids. He might watch a mutiny on a pirate ship, or free-fall 100 feet on the SkyScreamer "skycoaster," or Over the Edge on a log flume. He might visit a New York street, an Asian village, a French street, or a Salem waterfront. If the exhausted gambler still finds his way to the tables after this detour, he deserves to win a few bucks.

Just leaving the MGM is an adventure, involving the finding of the exit (not easy with Oz in the way), weaving through complex family groups waiting for their complimentary rides to the airport or milling before the gates to the Adventures, and then sprinting past taxis, minibuses and tour buses. The MGM lobby alone is the size of an airport in a mid-size city.

As I was making my way toward the exit like a mountaineer toward a peak, a remarkable couple appeared. A bride and groom, married at the MGM's Central Park Wedding Chapel, stepped into view. The bride was swinging a magnum of champagne, while the groom drank from one of her slippers. They took their places in line at Nathan's Famous. She wanted a "chili dog with everything." He just wanted "some fries."

"Look," a little girl's brother said, "a bride! When you grow up you can come here and get married!"

That day was not far off, if they could only wait long enough. The two children were waiting for their parents, who were somewhere inside the casino. They were sitting on the edge of a fountain in the huge Midway Arcade at the MGM Grand. A sign overhead said: YOUTH ACTIVITIES CENTER. CASH MACHINE. The Youth Activities Center was closed. But the Cash Machine blinked happily open. The kids looked bone-tired. They had done the Adventures, and they had gone to Circus Circus, where they had won a stuffed animal each. They had also gone to the Guinness World of Records Museum and to the Liberace Museum. Now they could go to bed as soon as Mom and Dad were through with adult kind of fun.

I wished the kids and the newly married couple the best of luck, and got out of the Grand. This was more like it. The human scale. On the Strip, some of old Las Vegas was doing business. T-shirt vendors hawked some colorful wear. I was handed a yellow flier advertising GIANT 1/2 POUND HAMBURGER: $1.95. On the back it said, FREE COMBINATION: UNLOCK IT & WIN 5,000. I wasn't sure where this combination was: inside the giant hamburger? What was it a combination of? Numbers? A few steps later someone handed me a brochure advertising "Private Dancers."

Well, that was much better. But as I went past the Aladdin Hotel and Casino, I was handed a flier that said "FREE! FREE!" It turned out that a pair of dice and a free pull on "every Aladdin machine" was mine for the taking. I went in and got my free pull (lost) and the dice.

Later that night, I wrenched myself from the casinos and went to a bookstore. It was a huge place, with enough floor space to be a gaming hall, and it was well-attended. There were even kids running around in the children's book section or sitting on the floor, reading. The bookstore had a T-shirt that said: "Why Gamble Anywhere Else?" and under that was a picture of books that looked like a deck of cards.

Vegas is indeed becoming a family-oriented vacation place. Cery, real families live here. It is true also that families are coming in droves. There are a lot of things for the kids to do. But if I had a choice, I'd take the kids to their grandma's. Her ice tea's better, and her stories actually mean something. Leave Vegas to the rest of us jaded wretches.

Andrei Codrescu is a commentator on National Public Radio.

When you go ...

Weather: The desert climate of Las Vegas provides low humidity year-round with very little rain. Average spring temperatures range from highs in the 60s to upper 80s and lows dipping into the 40s and 50s. Summer temperatures hit highs in the 100s and lows in the 60s and 70s. In the fall, highs begin in the 90s and drop into the 60s by November, while lows range from 65 to 41. Winter highs tend to hover in the 50s with lows in the 30s.

Tips

* If seeing a show in a showroom, the time ticket price usually includes gratuity. If not, a 15 percent tip is appropriate.

* Leave $1 or $2 tips for maids each day.

* If winning big in the casinos, tip the dealer or play a hand for him or her. But, don't place it on the table. Put it in the dealer's top shirt pocket. (Casinos don't like dealers touching any other money than what is being bet.)

What to pack

* If most of your time is going to be spent in the casinos, pack layered, moderately dressy favorites and comfortable shoes. Temperatures inside the casinos can be cool, and standing at slots or tables can be a lot more enjoyable with a comfy pair of shoes. Because some casino-goers are decked in cocktail dresses and others sport sneakers and cutoffs, it's a good idea ** to bring items that can be coupled with accessories to dress them up.

* If you plan on side trips to nearby parks such as Red Rock Canyon National Recreation Area, don't forget sunglasses, sunscreen and hiking boots.

Must sees

* Taking up 20 acres, the 2,035-room mega-hotel New York, New York features a faux Brooklyn Bridge, Empire State Building and Coney Island arcade area.

* The "Fremont Street Experience" in downtown Las Vegas on Fremont Street is a 90-foot high canopy covering 4 acres of the casino area on which light and sound shows are projected by computer.

Newest attractions

* In January, the Las Vegas Hilton debuted "Star Trek: The Experience," a $70 million high-performance, hi-tech, motion-simulation ride that also features the History of the Future museum of costumes, alien masks, weaponry and props.

"The Race to Atlantis," inside the forum shops at Caesar's, is a virtual-reality experience on the lost continent of Atlantis. Also in the shops are talking statues of an Atlantis king, and Bacchus, the great god of excess, comes alive every hour.

Where to Stay

* Monte Carlo Resort & Casino has 3,000 rooms and is located right on Las Vegas Boulevard. Call 800-311-8999 or 702-730-7777.

* Stratosphere Hotel & Casino has 1,500 rooms and is located on Las Vegas Boulevard; call 800-99TOWER or 702-380-7777.

* New York, New York Hotel and Casino located on the Strip has 2,035 rooms. Call 702-740-6969.

Kids

Because very few hotels offer baby-sitting, Las Vegas is not a good place to bring small children. Kids over 10, however, can have as much fun as their gambling parents thanks to hotels such as MGM Grand and Circus, Circus, both of which house theme parks on their grounds. There are the classic favorites of ++ roller coasters and bumper cars along with new-age games such as Circus, Circus' Rim Runner, which shuttles riders around a jungle inhabited by dinosaurs. Other options include:

* New York, New York: The mini-city mega-hotel where a roller coaster jets around the Chrysler Building and the Statue of Liberty.

* Excalibur: Game area features the ring toss, digital rides and mechanical horse races among others.

* The Stratosphere: Home of the most-elevated roller coaster in the world. Atop the 1,149 foot structure sits the High Roller roller coaster along with the Big Shot, a gravity defying ride that shoots securely strapped in riders straight up in the air only to fall straight back down onto the top of the Stratosphere.

Side trips

* Hoover Dam is less than an hour from the Las Vegas strip. An elevator runs to the bottom of the dam and a bridge takes you across the Nevada/Arizona state line. Call 702-293-8321.

* Red Rock Canyon offers picnicking, rock climbing and hikes and there is a visitor's center that has interesting information about the canyon. This is also the home of the Keystone thrust fault which was formed around 65 million years ago when two crustal plates collided. Call 702-363-1921.

LTC * Primm, Nev., 40 miles from the Las Vegas Strip, offers outlet shopping and a massive roller coaster boasting the largest incline in the U.S.

Information: Las Vegas Tourist Bureau at 800-522-9555.

- From wire reports

Pub Date: 7/26/98