Letter from Las Vegas:Forget whatever you might have heard about red-state middle Americans being puritanical prudes. Once in Las Vegas, where they travel in droves, these otherwise righteous denizens become as grossly absorbed in the vice and gambling on offer everywhere in the city they call Sin as Kenneth Starr once did in Bill Clinton's sexual peccadilloes.
Like a bizarre mirage in the Nevada desert, Las Vegas is an outrageous adult playground where the adage of "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" lures the usually timid to give themselves over to all-night casinos and strip clubs. Vulgarity is a truism when it comes to this anything-goes, how-do-you-want-me city whose sheer audacity is quite simply breathtaking.
The sex and strip clubs are everywhere and open all hours, comprising the principal entertainment apart from gambling. Outside one club, I tried to get a taxi to take me to my hotel, only to be politely declined by one driver who told me that they were waiting for the clients to come out from one of the shows, when they were often a bit distracted and somewhat soft touches to be easily fleeced with cab fares.
Only in Vegas? Probably not. Officially, prostitution is illegal in Las Vegas, though not in the state of Nevada.
Vegas is packed all year round, with more than 90 per cent of the visitors coming from middle America. It's a full-on bacchanalia once they get here, with people walking around the streets with undisguised cans of beers or other drinks all day long and pale-faced gamblers in the smoky casinos, playing the slots and the tables.
No one is smiling in the 24-hour casinos, where the lighting is set to a kind of permanent twilight and many have blue skies painted on the ceilings. At the roulette and craps tables, the gamblers seem to be mostly men. Other groups of men occasionally appear and cheer them on.
The solitary gamblers seem somewhat poignant and are often middle-aged women and older putting endless coins into slot machines with names like Cashman, Hexbreaker, Life of Luxury, Deep Pockets and Diamond Ridge. Over the machines there are digital screens which keep flickering and showing constantly increasing sums of money which can allegedly be won in each game. The drinks are free and huge, and you can smoke, while skimpily-dressed waitresses keep circulating the casinos with trays of cocktails.
It is a kind of netherworld, where time is uncountable.
Outside the worlds of sex and gambling, Vegas is an intense shopping trip, with oodles of chic designer shops everywhere. Everything is more expensive in Vegas and not just because it all had to be brought to the desert. When people come here it seems de rigueur to become parted from your cash as speedily and in as many ways as possible.
Many performers since Elvis have seen out their days in Vegas, not all of them in the best of health. But the audiences are huge and big spenders and it's less of a cliché to perform here than it was. Prince now does Vegas regularly, so does Elton John. Tom Jones is another perennial and Céline Dion has been cleaning up here for years. Michael Jackson is in negotiations with Steve Wynn, one of the original architects of the very notion of a Disneyland for adults, which Las Vegas is.
Wynn is now talking about building another type of Vegas, only bigger and brasher (just imagine!) further into the desert in Nevada. Donald Trump has begun construction of three more casinos on the famous strip in Vegas and instead of feeling challenged by even more competition, local business seems to be delighted at the scale of his proposed development.
It's like a version of the American dream on its holidays. Whatever parts of your fancy have been untickled the rest of the year, it can be remedied here. No time to visit Europe? No problem. Vegas has reproduced the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe as facades for casinos. There is an indoor Venice, with operating gondolas to help the visitor forget he is actually in the desert. New York's Times Square is also replicated, with reduced-scale replicas of famous landmarks such as the Chrysler building. Sin City has pre-digested "culcha" coming out of its ears.
It's not just inhibitions that are loosened in Vegas. It is as though everything in the city is designed for maximum sensory impact with minimum effort. Even the heat of the desert has a soporific effect which seems to make visitors malleable and easily persuaded. There are places on the street where you can have fully dressed "pick-me-up" massages and refreshers to get you back inside to play.
And when you leave Las Vegas and re-enter the barren desert, unless you've left the deeds of your house on the gaming tables, it all feels like some garish illusion and sensory overload from which it is truly a relief to escape.