Page 37 of One More Time
‘Our next stop,’ Sonny said, ‘is the world-famous Neon Museum, a sign boneyard where the history of Las Vegas continues to inspire awe and wonder. If you’d like, we can go in and have a walk around.’
‘Sonny,’ Lucy chided, ‘I thought you knew me by now. Of course we want to go in.’ Then, she threw the door open and raced out.
‘I would have opened the door for her,’ Sonny said with a chuckle. ‘Guess I was too slow.’
‘Welcome to the club, my man,’ Nicky replied. ‘Welcome to the club.’
The Neon Museum was like an electrified fever dream. The signs were enormous, rising fifteen or twenty feet up into the night sky. Nicky could pick out the more important ones by how well they were propped up, how much space they had around them. Others remained unlit, lying on their sides, stacked on top of one another. Sharp, space-age fonts from the Sixties. Big block letters from the Seventies. A cowboy. A showgirl. A neon duck.
Lucy wandered aisle after aisle taking pictures with her phone. Happy.Impressed.
‘You may find it interesting to know that in addition to films likeMars Attacks!andFools Rush In, the boneyard has been the setting for a number of music videos,’ Sonny said, mostly to Nicky.
Lucy turned around from where she’d been staring at a sign that said ‘Sassy Sally’s’ and said, ‘Come on, Nicky. Give us a taste.’
‘A taste of what?’
‘The rock-star vibes,’ Lucy teased.
Nicky scoffed. ‘Excuse me, I always have the rock-star vibes.’
Lucy tilted her head, examined him, pretended to be skeptical. ‘Nope.’
‘Nope?’
‘You’re going to really need to turn it on. You know, smolder a little.’
‘Oh, sorry. I can’t turn on the smolder without a wind machine. It’s not safe.’
Lucy laughed and stepped closer, threaded her arm around his. ‘Do you guys even make music videos anymore?’ she asked.
‘Sometimes. But they basically go straight to YouTube.’
‘Weird.’
‘I know,’ he said, guiding her through the aisles of broken old things. ‘Remember MTV?’
‘I would turn it on as soon as I walked in the door after school, and didn’t change the channel until my parents had to watch something dumb likeMurder, She Wrote.’
‘OrThe Rockford Files,’ he added.
‘The Nightly News with Dan Rather,’ Lucy offered.
‘Such a buzzkill.’
‘Totally.’
On the way out of the museum, Nicky shoved a wad of hundreds into the donation box in the souvenir shop and bought Lucy a T-shirt that said ‘I got lit at The Neon Museum’ just so she had to put it on and he could take her picture.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
LUCY
Sonny stopped in front of The Bellagio. Its gently curving, cream-colored façade rose up behind the massive blue fountain, the perfect marriage of elegance and ostentation. The Bellagio was now a landmark of Las Vegas, as easily identifiable as the columns of Caesar’s Palace or MGM Grand’s enormous pyramid.
On a night when the temperatures still hovered around the eighties, the volume of water outside The Bellagio struck Lucy as breathtakingly bold and irresponsible. But also, magnificent in that way that bold and irresponsible things often are.
‘Even I know this one,’ said Nicky beside her in the back seat. ‘Ocean’s Eleven.’
