Free Darling by Richard Rodriguez

Andrew to the opera, Luther to apply for a job at the phone company.
    Right off, the employment manager offered Luther a job as a messenger. Luther pivoted on his heel, walked back to the law firm, elevator to the nineteenth, straight into the Old Man’s office. Messengers didn’t have to knock. Luther stood facing the OldMan. With a shamed and thumping heart, Luther said:
If I wanted to be a messenger, I could have stayed right here.
    The Old Man didn’t get it right away, that Luther had been offered the job he already had. Once he did understand, the Old Man seized the phone with relish, catching the scent of hare. “Now look here,” the Old Man’s voice rolled like thunder over Mr. Sears’s salutation. “I meant for the kid I sent to get a leg up. He’s already a messenger. Why would you offer him a job as a messenger? I’m going to send him back, and I expect you to offer him a decent job.”
    The Old Man slammed down the telephone and winked at Luther: “Off you go, kid.”
    The following week, Luther began training in the switch room of the telephone company. Over the years, he worked himself into the highest classification of every job he was assigned; he moved from switchman to trunk man to optical-fiber cable work. (The Old Man died.) To something so specialized he was one of only two or three technicians who knew how to do whatever it was he did.
    The joke among the three friends was: Who gets to be buried in the black suit? And what will the mourners wear?
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    We establish a little routine. Twice a day I commute between the hospice on North Buffalo and the Bellagio on Las Vegas Boulevard South. Drop Jimmy off in the morning, spend a couple of hours at the hospice, pick Jimmy up in the late afternoon. In between, I look around. There is a street in town named Virgil. The famous hotels on the Strip are not actually located in Las Vegas, but in an unincorporated entity called Paradise.
    In the nineteenth century, Rafael Rivera, a Spanish scout—a teenager—joined a trading exploration party out of New Mexicothat sought to establish a new trail to Los Angeles. Their hope was to find fresh water along the way. The party left Abiquiú in November of 1829. Rivera separated from the group at the Colorado River junction. He was, as far as anyone knows, the first European to enter the valley, to find the two lucky springs there, or, at any rate, to infer water from the vegetation of the valley. Rivera named the oasis Las Vegas—“the Meadows.”
    The main street downtown is named for John Charles Frémont. In 1844 Frémont led a surveying expedition that followed the San Joaquin River south, through the long Central Valley of California. At the Mojave River, Frémont’s party veered eastward, crossed the Sierra, then followed the Old Spanish Trail for a time. Las Vegas was already a place of refreshment along the Spanish Trail, a trail that had been blazed more than a decade earlier by Rafael Rivera. Frémont recorded two streams of clear water: “The taste of the water is good, but rather warm to be agreeable.” The streams, however, “afforded a delightful bathing place.”
    John Frémont died of peritonitis in a boardinghouse in New York City on July 13, 1890. No one I talk to can tell me what happened to Rafael Rivera; whether he returned to New Mexico or Old Mexico or Spain; whether he married; where he lies buried.
    Recently, a complex of hotels and condos and offices in a sober international style has opened on the Strip under the mundane designation CityCenter. Its owners obviously intend a kind of restraint Las Vegas normally does not engage—gray exteriors, dark atriums. The visitor could be in São Paulo or Seoul or wherever the money flies. A cab driver tells me the new complex will not draw because there is no craziness to it. Here, you gotta be crazy, he says. Togas.