Had a brief flashback last night to 2017, when I woke up to the news of the Vegas massacre, then hopped on a plane to go there and find the unsung hero. At the time, that event seemed unthinkable. What happened the other night in D.C…. well, I don’t know about you but I sort of knew before I knew, if that makes sense. Here are some thoughts on that as well as an excerpt from my forthcoming book that deals with the Vegas massacre.
The book — If I Am Coming to Your Town, Something Terrible Has Happened — just received a starred review at Publishers Weekly, which I’m told is a big deal. You can pre-order it here. Use the discount code “08TERRIBLE,” (that’s a ZERO at the front) to get 30 percent off. If you choose to become a founding member of American Doom, I’ll send a free signed copy of the book.
We have some exclusive reporting coming on a few fronts, including more on ICE deaths and efforts to interfere in the midterms. So, as always, I ask for your paid support or contributions to our Coffee Fund to help pay for our journalism here.
Driving through the salt marshes lit by the moon we laughed and talked about the gig. The band had played well and the crowd was good. People enjoyed it and tipped us accordingly: each of us made $75 from the tip jar. A successful night. She told me about some of the people who had talked to her about the music, including the bartender at another place on the island I’ve always wanted to play who said he wanted to book us there. Then, she asked, “Do you want to hear the other development?”
Sure, I said, knowing what it was before she even said it: someone had tried to kill him again. Maybe that’s my finely-tuned intuition after having spent the better part of the last two decades reporting on the violence and upheaval of this country. Or, it’s just a reflection of our collective understanding and acceptance of the violence and upheaval of the Trump era.
The first thing I read about the attempted assassination was someone’s post saying they believed it was real, that it was not staged — another grim hallmark of times in which a faked presidential assassination attempt seems even remotely plausible. A quick scan told me everything else I needed to know. They caught the guy, he was nuts, and he had some guns.
The circumstances of this attempt are a bit different than the last two — or three, depending on how willing you are to trust the U.S. intelligence apparatus under Trump — but some of the results will be relatively the same: some in the legacy media put out a story about a changed, reflective and humbled Trump. He’ll surely blow a hole in that narrative in the coming hours and days as he blames half of the country for the actions of a single person before using the attempt on his life to enact further crackdowns on immigrants, or civil liberties, or decides to expand the surveillance state.
Meanwhile, men and women caught up in the ever-growing network of immigration detention centers continue to die at a record pace; alleged drug traffickers and at least some innocent fishermen continue to die in extrajudicial drone killings carried out by our military in international waters; the war in Iran drags on with no clear end or objective as we send more assets to the region, making us vulnerable to attacks elsewhere as our stockpile of munitions is depleted by the endless bombing.
And to add a bit of Trumpian absurdity to the growing catastrophe, Republicans in the wake of the attempt on Trump’s life have taken up talking points about the construction of a White House ballroom that is now apparently a matter of national security.
Combined with several other major renovations and construction projects at the White House, Americans would be justified in wondering why the president is spending so much time, money (ours) and effort revamping a building that he is required by law to vacate in less than three years. Many Republicans have already been coalescing around the idea that he is not required to leave office at the end of his second term, or that they should change the rules to allow him to remain in power.
Simmering underneath all of this are efforts to upend what is currently the only threat to Trump’s power — the November midterm elections. Across the country, Republican state legislators have introduced more than 1,000 bills, according to an American Doom review of legislation in several states, that seek to enact some of the anti-democratic measures for voting and elections that Trump and the election denial movement insist must take place. Some of these bills include state-level changes to who is allowed to call themselves a U.S. citizen for the purposes of voting.
Urged on by developments like the latest attempt on Trump’s life, Republicans nationwide continue to operate under the belief that they are both victims targeted by an ascendant and violent left, but are also always the victors. This seemingly contradictory narrative is fleshed out a bit by Jeff Sharlet and a colleague, who described it succinctly as “Victory over victimhood.”
They will ride this narrative into November, when they will try — through legal, quasi-legal, and probably other means — to hold on to the power that allows them to brutalize the people they blame for not being more rich and powerful than they already are.
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DALLAS, LAS VEGAS — I finished up work one day and punched in a single word into Google Maps: “bar.” Five minutes away was a place — no reviews, no website, no photos, just a neon “OPEN” sign shining and a hand painted ship on the side of the building: Tradewinds - The Original Social Club. I opened the door and took off my sunglasses to adjust from the blinding Texas afternoon sun to the utter darkness inside, where the only light came from the glow of TVs and Christmas lights. “I called earlier. Cool to bring in my dog?” Sure, the bartender said, and in ran Hendrix, a wildhearted Wheaten Terrier mutt who never met a person he didn’t like or a set of woods he didn’t want to disappear into. Before I could introduce myself, Henny was behind the bar, jumping up on the bartender’s leg and getting pets on the head.
Thus began my three-year residency at Tradewinds, the last real neighborhood bar in an area of Dallas that was either becoming trendy or being ignored by developers because it was too Mexican. Tradewinds was right in the middle of those two worlds. Henny and I took our barstools — back then, Henny was still spry enough to jump up on one — and I introduced myself. “I’m Justin, too,” said the bartender, “and that’s Justin down there.” Just three Justins sitting in a dark bar drinking Lone Stars on a warm spring Texas afternoon. I texted Sarah the address and told her to meet me there after work. I was elated. After leaving Chicago and moving to Texas, I figured my days of neighborhood bars were gone. Finding Tradewinds was like finding a piece of home right down the street from our house. She was, shall we say, less than pleased to walk in and find Hendrix and I sitting on a barstool at five o’clock in the afternoon after a few hours of drinking. But she made the best of it, and put up with my affection for Tradewinds and its cast of rough-and-tumble regulars as I acclimated to Texas. She put up with a lot of things I wish she wouldn’t have.
We rented a small home in Oak Cliff, which we filled with art and records and tchotchkes from our lives of travel. Things began to slow down. I bought a lawn mower and a grill and began reporting on immigration. At night I sat outside on our patio and listened to the neighbors blaring Tejano music as I slowly got drunk on Tecates. One bright morning I awoke with my usual sudsy hangover and saw Sarah looking at her phone. Fuck, she said, 50 dead? I opened my own phone to an email from the Washington Post asking if I was available to chase down some addresses in Dallas tied to the shooter who opened fire in Las Vegas overnight. Then came the rush — shower, clothes, laptop, notepad, phone charger, car, highway. By 11 am I had found a few of the homes and talked to some neighbors. Nothing doing. No one really remembered the guy. He was just another nobody. By noon I was on the phone with my editor in New York at the Beast. A call to Sarah — “Gotta go, love you” — then back to our house in Oak Cliff, and then the rush again — suitcase, car, highway, airport, security, airport bar, seat, Bloody Mary. By 10 pm., Sin City for the first time in my life.
My experience with hotels up to that point was that my car was usually sitting just on the other side of a dirty door in a parking lot no more than 15 feet from my bed, so dropping my bags in a room 20 stories off the Vegas strip was nice. It was 11 o’clock local, a little more than 24 hours after a madman had picked off 55 people with a machine gun from his turret in a highrise hotel room at Mandalay Bay. The time meant there probably wouldn’t be much for me to do, not that I thought there was much to do on this story regardless of the time of day or night. From the moment I woke up the day before in Dallas and hit the ground running to try to unravel the mystery of the shooter, Stephen Paddock, I knew it was a fool’s errand. I couldn’t say why; I just knew. The answer would come to me in bits and pieces over the days, months and years that followed.
I took the elevator down to the lobby and emerged to eternal daylight. New York is a city that occasionally sleeps —Vegas never does. I walked outside onto the sidewalk and into the freakshow diaspora that is the strip on any given night. People watched the worst of the other drugged out or drunk people laugh, cry or argue under the false sense of security that they weren’t like that, that they would keep it together. In Las Vegas, no one keeps it together for long. Your time crying in the pit is always just a few more hours away. The sidewalk was filled with these freaks, people from all over the country and the world unchained from their daily selves, laughing or crying and puking their way toward midnight. I walked through them and toward the Mandalay Bay. A TV news van was parked on a street corner just on the public side of yellow crime scene tape. A woman stood in front of it, posing for a photo her boyfriend took. There was no sense in something like the worst mass murder in US history ruining their vacation.
I went to a casino and sat at a bar and drank Jack and Cokes, smoking cigarettes and taking in the scene around me. The incessant chiming of slot machines provided a comforting white noise as an hour or so wore on. I talked to no one and went to bed. The next day I woke up to the sun streaming bright orange desert light across the carpet and got to work. I had heard that Paddock had tried to shoot up another music festival a week before and headed to the hotel that was across the street from where that event was held, where I found a manager and asked whether they’d seen Paddock when he stayed at the hotel and whether anything seemed amiss. The manager didn’t want to talk, and it was hard to tell, as it always is, whether that was because he had been trained not to talk or knew something he’d been told not to tell a reporter. Across town, the police were holding a press conference and argued my way inside. I didn’t have press credentials. For some reason I almost never had them over the years. Maybe I always thought I was faking it. I convinced a cop that I was actually a reporter and snuck in just in front of a group of reporters in line who weren’t allowed in because the room was at capacity, and wound up jammed underneath the TV cameras streaming the press conference out to the world. The reporters in the front row asked dumb questions like, Why did the shooter do this? As if the cops would know then or ever. I thought they should have been asking more obvious questions like, Didn’t anyone see this guy checking into a hotel room with a giant bag full of machine guns? Or, Why the fuck did it take you guys so long to find this guy and take him down? One of the officers leading the press conference talked about law enforcement’s response to the shooting and offhandedly mentioned that it was a security guard at Mandalay Bay who first found Paddock as he carried out his rampage. I wondered who that person was and why he wasn’t getting the attention he deserved for being the hero that finally drew the violent carnage to a close. I went back to my hotel and called the Mandalay Bay and asked to speak to the head of security. Someone there said I would have to speak to the union for security officers. A man told me a guard had been called to the 32nd floor, where Paddock’s room was located, for a hallway door that had been left ajar. When he walked past the room, Paddock saw him through cameras he had set up outside the door to his room and shot him in the leg. The guard alerted police who took a few excruciating minutes to reach the hallway. Meanwhile, Paddock shot out a window and began firing on the crowd below. The security guard was a hero but no one knew it. That was about to change. I told the union official that the security guard deserved credit for his heroic actions and after an hour of cajoling convinced him to let me tell the world his name: Jesus Campos. I wrote up my story in an adrenaline fueled rush so powerful that my hands shook as I typed.
I had my big story and watched it blow up online and on cable news as word spread of Campos’ heroism. Then I got drunk because that’s what I did when a big story went out, because the combination of adrenaline and alcohol was the best feeling in the world to me. I knew when I went to Vegas that I wasn’t going to leave there with the why of Paddock’s massacre, but it felt good to have figured out a little bit of the what the hell actually happened here? Now that the what was out of the way with, there wasn’t much left to do than some victim cleanup. That is, tell a few stories of victims’ families so the world would know what it felt like to lose a loved one in what people like to call senseless violence. I had done this hundreds of times over the years but wasn’t much in the mood for it in Vegas. It depressed me and I didn’t like feeling depressed. I was in this line of work for the adventure and the chase, not the sadness.
Over the years, I had ignored the traditional requirement of objectivity in journalism to advocate for people and causes I thought had gotten a raw deal. I used the concept of objectivity to justify my purposeful lack of emotions for those who had experienced the worst things imaginable. Drinking just made that easier. I drank away that which frightened or disturbed me and dismissed those feelings with forced callousness under the guise of journalistic objectivity or good, old fashioned gallows humor. If a murder victim’s mother broke down in front of me I carefully described the scene in order to not feel the emotions it brought. I relayed the facts of grim realities like the psychological breakdown of a grieving mother to an editor as if I was collecting meaningless bits of construction material to build a house I would soon abandon. In Gary I described the physical dismantling of the murdered women in excruciating detail in order to make them less human to me and more mechanical, soulless structures that were taken apart. In Piketon I wrote about the minor crimes of two young men who had been brutally murdered in some obsessive and heartless quest for a complicated and meaningless truth. As far back as Peoria and throughout my travels I often othered the Black community by reporting on it like it was a foreign warzone instead of a neighborhood across town where my fellow Americans lived. I deluded myself with the internal narrative that I was a righteous truth-seeker. I wasn’t like the politicians on the evening news and the Stephen Paddocks of the world who degraded and destroyed human life through their quest for power and control. I convinced myself that even if I fed on whatever soul had just passed, at least I did so in pursuit of the truth. The reality was, sometimes I was just a parasite.
By that evening I was back on my patio in Texas listening to the neighbors play Tejano music and sipping a beer. I was tired, so I did something I hadn’t done for a very long time: I turned my phone off and just listened. I heard the birds chirping, then a mother screaming over her dead son in Peoria. I heard the Tejano music, then gunshots in Chicago. I closed my eyes and tried to focus on the orange film that the sunlight created through my eyelids, then I saw the man bleeding from a gunshot wound to his stomach in the back of a car in Ferguson. I opened my eyes and looked up into the trees, then saw tear-gas canisters with smoke spiraling from them flying through the air in Baltimore. Things began to feel bright, sharp and loud. I knew that it was the beginning of a panic attack. But I couldn’t understand why. How can I have anxiety because of the things I have seen? I didn’t lose my son to murder in Peoria. I wasn’t shot in Ferguson. I wasn’t at a country music festival in Las Vegas where a madman fired on innocent people with a weapon of war. I didn’t experience any of these things myself. I had just learned about all of these events and written about them in intimate and excruciating detail before moving on to the next one. I simply compiled terror and pain for a collection of stories that comprised the body of work that was my career. I was just a normal guy, I thought, whose line of work caused him to have random thoughts like wondering whether the chef’s knife I used to chop cilantro was the size of the blade Tino Bagola used to murder his two cousins on that remote Indian reservation in North Dakota. I closed my eyes and tried to focus on the orange film and the Tejano music, then I saw Bagola’s eyes, staring back at me through a haze of dilated pupils and psychotropic drugs from a jail cell in Fargo, where I met him just before he was shipped off to prison for the rest of his life.
Three weeks after returning from Las Vegas, a young man shot up a church in Sutherland Spring, Texas. That day, I had had my phone off for hours. Things were slowing down in my life — a bit. Sarah and I were settling into our new home and I’d was enjoying spending time discovering Texas with her. I turned my phone on and learned of the shooting, then waited for the emails and calls to come in with the assignments. They didn’t. I had to sit this one out. And for the first time in a while, I wanted to.
***