"A beer distributor?" he said. "Cool." In Vegas we stay one step ahead of the wrecking ball-Sahara, Riviera, Imperial Palace, New Frontier-Goin' old scrip, Bobby Rausch calls it. We walk everywhere. Bobby takes huge strides and I have to throw in a skip now and then just to keep up. Bobby wanted to stay at the Sands and the Dunes, but those hotels have been torn down, replaced by themed mega-resorts: Paris and the Venetian. So we stay at whatever old strip hotels haven't been blown up yet, like the New Frontier, which-according to the brochure-opened as a roadhouse in '42, re-opened as the cowboy-themed "Last Frontier" in '55, became the space-themed "New Frontier" after Kennedy's 1960 convention speech ("We stand at the edge of a New Frontier-the frontier of unfulfilled hopes and dreams"), hosted Elvis's first Vegas performance in '66, and went back to being a cowboy place in the '70s. The New Frontier is a paint-chipped, dirty old hull of a building that takes up an entire block. Its eighty-foot sign advertises bikini bullriding, $8.75 steak and shrimp and mud wrestling with cold beer and dirty girls. The hotel is scheduled to be demolished in two months, but the guests at the New Frontier don't look like they'll make it that long. Everywhere there are canes and walkers, oxygen machines and motorized wheelchairs. It's like staying in a VA hospital. In the New Frontier bar, Bobby smashes his beer can and says-as he says every time he finishes a beer-"Let's ride partner." I really should tell Bobby what I'm doing here. Here's what Bobby is doing here: Every night, thousands of illegal aliens stand along the Vegas strip, handing out little playing cards with pictures of naked women on them. They snap the cards to get your attention. If you were to call the phone number on the snapper card, a stripper would come "direct to your hotel room." Or a van would pick you up and take
THE NEW FRONTIER
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