LIVING LAS VEGAS

By J. Patrick Coolican (contact)

Sunday, July 22, 2007 | 1:16 a.m.

The night air at Coral Garden apartments just off Boulder Highway doesn't carry the scent of ocean breeze that the name otherwise implies. Instead, when it's real Vegas Summer hot, and the wind blows just right, the heavy air of a nearby treatment plant wafts over.

Mark, the young man in apartment J-14, braves the heat and the smell many nights and sits forlornly on the stairs smoking Marlboro reds. He throws the butts into the sandy garden below, which now resembles a kids' sandbox in some twisted tobacco town.

Mark left Florida some months ago, alone, like so many great American icons, with the dream of seeing the Pacific and the exhortation of Horace Greeley - Go west, young man - ringing in his ears.

He got as far as a Vegas blackjack table.

When his mathematical destiny played out, and the money was gone, he called home and asked for the $800 needed to get back East.

No go, said his peeps. They sent him $300, enough to get himself a one-bedroom at Coral Garden .

He was stuck in Vegas.

Reading "On the Road" is often more enjoyable than living it, and just as Jack Kerouac could have really used an editor, so sometimes the world's bohemians might like an editor for their lives, someone to take a red pen to faulty decisions before they leave us friendless in strange places.

He no longer gambles.

Instead, he works at a convenience store and soon will have enough money to leave, though now he's considering staying. Curiously, though, during the same conversation, he said he hates the place.

For one thing, he's a night owl, but he has to work early in the morning.

His alarm rings aggressively.

Yes, thin walls, he notes.

Before Mark, J-14 was graced by Frank and Kati, a Hungarian couple who were renting a home in Marin County, Calif., when it burned down. They lost everything.

Like so many others, they heard there was plenty of work and cheap living in Las Vegas, so there they found themselves at Coral Garden in the shadow of Nevada Palace and Sam's Town, where the marquee says Miller Lite bottles are $1 at every bar.

On the walkway outside the second-floor apartments of the J Building, which we treated like a balcony, Frank often shared his artisan beers, his Hungarian liqueur and his cryptic wisdoms.

Frank is highly educated, a reader of Kertesz and Kundera, and a house painter. With his exacting standards and honed appreciation for excellence, no doubt he's a real master of detail work on the finest homes.

He had lived in New York and San Francisco and Budapest and traveled the world. He and Kati cut a striking figure: He with silver-flecked hair and intense eyes, she of a dour and frail but alluring beauty.

In his nightly lectures, which were no less enjoyable for being so filled with didacticism and outrage, he shared the recent indignities Las Vegas had dealt him. He was promised $22 per hour, but was paid just $20. Someone stole all the tools from his truck.

Even a minister ripped him off.

He was incredulous at the shoddy work he witnessed every day.

The drunk Pittsburgh guys from downstairs sometimes carried on all night, and that's when Coral Garden could feel like an amphitheater, with the sound bouncing around mercilessly. Once, when he complained, they yelled up, "Go back to where you came from!" A proud moment to be an American, that was.

Frank's bitterness was leavened by his special wisdom, which seemed to combine Eastern phil osophy, Western existentialism and the sometimes pedestrian insights and hearty laughs of what I presumed was cannabis smoking.

It was only his recognition that the mind is infinite that kept him going, he'd say.

And, "There are people with this recognition, people like you and me, everywhere; we merely speak a different language." Sip.

Frank was writing a three-act play, he said, that would continue the themes of the Eden story in Genesis: "It's the same mistake over and over again: Arrogance and an unwillingness to surrender to the universe."

"God gave us enough blood for our brain, and our libido, but not enough to have them both work simultaneously."

Often, when Kati made an occasional trip outside, she would join us for wine, and roll her eyes at Frank, who could talk endlessly.

"If you want to find your soul mate, you will find her, but only once you invite her into your soul."

"The bed we make determines our dreams."

Finally, they couldn't handle it anymore. Kati would get insulting tips at the luxury hotel where she worked room service, another contractor disappeared without paying Frank. Plus, there was the heat, and the smells, and, well, it was time to leave Las Vegas, like thousands before, and so many more to come.

They are back in the Bay Area. I miss them, though I'm certainly eager to hear more about Mark's foolhardy adventure that landed him in their apartment.