VEGAS: A Memoir of a Dark Season

by John G. Dunne ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 25, 1973

Where to go when the chips are down -- where else, but where the chips are up? Thus, in the middle of his thirty-seventh year and first nervous breakdown, reading obits of college pals in the alumni rag, the husband-author manque of Joan Didion rents an apartment in the town that's always open. In between sleeping and TV quiz shows he gets to know some of the occasionally wealthy but always degenerate desperate citizens: comic Jackie Kasey, who gets $10,000 a week but drives himself crazy with lack of fame and status games like ""taking steam"" with Frankie or Sammy or Cosby; Artha the hooker who turned 1203 tricks with 1076 johns in five years, including 54 ""multiples,"" 24 S and 1 M; and Buster Mano, the private dick, who traces straying conventioneering hubbies and hustles gambling debts. The aging author doesn't like hippie chicks any more than they like him; he calls up his first screw (professional), who's 62; and after a season in hell he goes home to write a super book about sleazing around the city Howard Hughes bought with the consent of Tricky Dick.

Pub Date: Jan. 25, 1973

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1973

Categories: NONFICTION