Las Vegas Weekly

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Las Vegas Weekly Staff

Wed, Oct 24, 2012 (6:30 p.m.)

The latest edition of Stephens Press’ Las Vegas Writes series, edited by Scott Dickensheets, features short stories and essays by Quentin Bufogle, Maile Chapman, Maxwell Alexander Drake, Lindsey Leavitt, Corey Levitan, Greg Blake Miller, Lissa Townsend Rodgers and the Weekly’s own Kristen Peterson. The following is an excerpt from Peterson’s piece, titled “Into the Night.”

I suppose one never sets out to be a showroom usher, and many of us didn’t expect to find ourselves in Vegas. But here we are. Things happen, you move west, escape the cold, the boredom, and the expectations, and you land in this place, where the union calls you into its office and sends you out to work—a temporary gig, you imagine, something to pay the rent and give you good material for a book you may write some day. I’ve never known how to thank them. The showroom manager hired me because he thought I was a 17-year-old runaway, which perplexed me, given the stringent process of working in Vegas hospitality. There’s the sheriff’s card, the union card, the TAM card, and the health card. Besides, I was 25. There’s no way I could have slid through this system underage. I would have tried, had I known, back in the Midwest, that this life existed. I’d have done anything to punch in on the swing shift in Vegas sooner, shirk tradition, stay up all night with my insomnia, knowing I wasn’t the only one moving along this chunk of Earth at this hour, and then wake each day to a desert bleached by the sun.