101 Places Not to See Before You Die - Catherine Price [53]
D. Aliens
Living in Nevada can make a person paranoid. If the government already used the state to test nuclear bombs, goes the logic, who’s to say it’s not up to other things? For example, concealing evidence of alien landings. Don’t believe me? Go to Rachel, Nevada, a tiny town—or, rather, trailer park—some sixty miles from the nearest gas station on a road whose official nickname is the Extraterrestrial Highway. Tucked next to the mysterious Area 51 (a top-secret air force base), it’s a mecca for some of America’s most fervent believers in extraterrestrial life. And Rachel encourages them—its official Web site lists its population as “Humans 98, Aliens ??” and signs on telephone poles advertise an alien-sighting hotline. These days the town’s main gathering place—and only business—is a motel called the Little A’Le’Inn, where visitors gather to swap stories of alien sightings over burgers and cups of coffee. It’s worth a visit, but be careful—if you stick around long enough you have a high chance of being invited over to someone’s house to watch home movies of UFOs.
The Sphinx at the Luxor Hotel (underneath is valet parking)
Tobias Alt/Wikipedia Commons
BRENDAN BUHLER
Fan Hours at the Las Vegas Porn Convention
There are some twenty-two thousand conventions in Las Vegas every year. Some are wondrous, many are boring, and a select few are terrifying.
You wouldn’t, say, want to hang out with the guys from the military section of the surplus merchandise convention, as they tend to wear German helmets and play with stun guns. And very few people could be comfortable at the dentists’ convention, which amounts to a room that’s a couple hundred thousand square feet and filled with the maddened whine of drills, saturated by the smell of burning demonstration teeth, and sprinkled with giant screens showing gum tissue being abraded by lasers and pressurized water, melting like Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
But none of those compares to fan hours at the porn convention.
Technically, the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo is two shows. Downstairs, there’s the business-to-business convention where porn shop owners browse the latest outfits, clamps, whips, gels, and miscellaneous toys in hopes of finding something new for their spring displays. This is initially titillating, eventually boring, and frequently confusing—as in “Really? A giant vibrating pink cone is the future of sex?”
Upstairs, though, is where you find the industry’s personal side: the porn stars and their agents, directors, and many, many producers. Putting aside the clothes people are wearing, the videos that are being shown, and the fondling that often takes the place of handshaking, the atmosphere is pretty businesslike. But woe unto you if you should be caught upstairs when the fans are let in.
The fans—they look like the crowd at a Star Wars convention after it’s done time at a state institution. These are round and unshaven men, pierced and badly tattooed, many of them tumescent, all of them with cell phone cameras held high pressing against you, a scum-dappled tide lapping toward the performers. Like salmon who will never successfully spawn, they are single-minded and devoted in their quest, taking no notice of anyone trying to press through the crowd without touching them. Instead they bear you backward, grunting slightly. Up close you note their oily skin and an odor that suggests Axe has introduced its own line of nacho-flavored body spray.
When they reach the front of the scrum, they’ll play it cool and casually tell the star how much they love her earlier work and that she showed great range in, say, the