VEGAS: A Memoir Of A Dark Season
By John Gregory Dunne

As the book starts, writer Dunne is having a tough time with depression in his home of Los Angeles and ends up getting carried away with a sudden case of the wondering bug; i. e. going out for bread and ending up in San Francisco and spontaneously flying to New York City just to watch the World Series on TV. The bug stops wondering briefly enough to see a billboard proclaiming ‘Visit Las Vegas Before Your Numbers Up!’ Seeing this as a sign in more ways than one, he takes off to spend six months wondering around Las Vegas (circa 1974), shaking down humanity either in person or through the old phone book.

…and this is where the book really takes off. It’s, more or less, a collection of characters Dunne encounters during his stay, or composites of such people he has melted together. He lets you know about this level of artistic licenses right off the bat and is a good enough writer to make it flow and work well.

Practically on the first day of his Vegas stay, a man is questioning Dunne’s receding hair line and ends up offering his ‘Piece Work’ in the lobby of The Mint.  Soon after, Dunne is looking for an apartment with a working air conditioning (a small piece of sub-plot on the importance of good A/C) and gets a lesson on Vegas’ legendary Sheriff Ralph Lamb from a one-legged loose-lipped landlord. Then there another sub-plot of everybody knowing Bugs Siegel before and after he got murdered. Then there are bigger pieces of the Vegas character: local P. I. Bruno Mano shows up twice, first on trailing wondering lost conventioneers and shooting the breeze on many hangers-on trying to get job references. Maisty Morgan (real name: Maureen Moran) (?), a former showgirl who plans to be a graphologist who also has one boob.
Comic Jackie Kasey selling himself off as Brother JayJay to take the rut out of his lounge act, who proclaims that “there is nothing like a good piss.”

….and so on….

There are also stories of bad and/or questionable sex habits (not terribly explicit, but it’s there to add to the cacophony) and people in general trying to survive like lizards in the middle of the hot desert and keeping their heads together with the barrage on the psyche this town is know for.

There are parts of this book that gets so moody that you might think ‘Vegas Noir’ just might be a fitting genre for this title; Dunne’s spends a chapter about his former Catholic faith that felt out of place for me. Regardless, it is an entertaining book.