"Elite girls," he said.
"You know. Good-looking. Up girls."
Noah and Jason told me that in New York, they take great care to
curate the girls; if you're not a model, if you don't have an
avant-garde fashion sense, if you can't maintain a look of aloof boredom
even while seated next to Jay-Z, you may not get past the velvet ropes.
In Las Vegas, all you really need to get into a club is the lack of a
visible penis. Which isn't to say they don't prefer some women to
others.
If a woman is "elite," she's given drink tickets and delivered
personally to a bottle-service table so that there's some nice
ornamentation when the table customers arrive. The "filler" girls—that's
what they're called, filler, like the cornstarch in the McNugget
mix—are taken to a special line near the Boulevard Pool, filtered
through an entrance, and set loose to roam the club. All this is done
before the crush starts, before the bottle-service customers arrive, so
that dudes who are paying thousands of dollars don't have to walk into
an empty club. This is called "painting the room," and it's also the
reason all the waitresses are obligated to dance for an hour before the
shitshow begins in earnest. If you come early, you'll see them all
standing at attention, smiling, doing this kind of torso twist, with
feet planted, that looks kind of like the central agitator in a washing
machine.
Being "elite," though, doesn't just mean that you're attractive.
"They don't want reserved girls at the table," Bhagya said. "They
want people who are up there going crazy, jumping around, drinking." He
laughs. His Sri Lankan accent is barely noticeable: It registers merely
as a kind of playful singsonginess. Then he said the only thing there
was to say: "I mean, at the end of the night there's only one thing that
guys want. They want it to be, you know, a
But Bhagya, that's not really something that you can guarantee,
right? It's part of my theory about how the nightclub is fundamentally a
lie, the same way going to Disney World ends up being fundamentally a
lie: the fallacy of fantasy fulfillment. Like the nameless sorrow one
feels when one realizes one will never
meet Dumbo or
become friends with Snow White, so is the nameless sorrow one must feel
when one exits the club realizing none of those breasts were for you.
"It's not something anyone would want to guarantee," Bhagya said.
"But listen, guys come to Vegas for one reason? Trust me, girls come to
Vegas for the same reasons. I have [female] friends, and I go to their
rooms to hang out, and they open their suitcase, and they have all their
condoms in there. They have prepared! That's got to say something about
how, when they come out here, nothing matters."
We watched Benassi. We had Joe take us to the private bathroom
(that's a service he provided, "bathroom walks") and felt as if we had
paid to pretend we were kind of famous. We had our ice changed twice in
fifteen minutes. (We were now timing it.) We watched people raising
their hands in the air, either in a kind of Euro tomahawk chop or in an
uncomfortably
-like gesture—this has replaced the booty grind
now that electronic dance music has replaced hip-hop in some clubs—and
dancing pretty much without moving their feet.
We saw that our ice hadn't been changed in half an hour and started
feeling kind of irate. We let Jessica pour rounds and rounds of drinks
for these female Asian chem majors from Cal who kept waving and winking
to their boyfriends who were railbirding it on the lower level of the
dance floor, watching as their dates got their free drinks on. We saw,
at the table behind ours, that a member of the bro posse we figured was
either Lebanese, French, or Israeli had vomited. Like really vomited. It
was as if a Hale and Hearty Soups had exploded at table 96. But it
didn't take a full minute before a team of men in black materialized,
equipped with an arsenal of towels and cleaning solvents, to scrub the
area, and the puker, absolutely pukeless. They were a vomit pit crew. In
no time at all they had propped the guy up, faced him toward the dance
floor, poured him a glass of ice water, and disappeared. This puke would
not derail the (extremely lucrative) fun at table 96.
And the music never stopped. Like there was never a pause, there was
never a caesura or anything. EDM is essentially a series of buildups and
"crashes" (that's when you're really supposed to go ape) that are
totally predictable and seemingly interchangeable and make you feel—as
DJ Spider, who works at clubs owned by Steve Wynn, told me—like you're
on a roller coaster that just keeps going. Like forever. Which makes it
super fun if you're on Ecstasy (or "molly," which is pure MDMA without,
say, amphetamines), and sometimes maybe like you're the only one who
doesn't get it if you're not.
It's one of a thousand different ways the management invisibly kept
the club fires stoked, the energy level impossibly high. Like how, as we
drank more and more and it got later and later, three o'clock and then
four, they began emptying the outer reaches of the club—the pool deck,
the Library—and pulled everyone in toward the dance floor. So that from
our high-priced bottle-service real estate we still had the valuable
sensation that we were at a place where the party, like the music (or
the Ecstasy), would never, ever end, where more and more girls could be
fed in from still more flights out of Kansas City and Sacramento and you
could start to think that the you who has a job back in Pittsburgh or
Irvine doesn't exist, and also that after this you'd better go find some
coke or else deal with the reality that awaits you back in the rollaway
suitcase in your hotel room. Or if you're the fourth-generation heir to
a toothpaste fortune who doesn't have a job in Pittsburgh (and there
are people who come here they can drop $500K in a night and not feel bad
about it), that there's a world where
But Marquee isn't just a nightclub. It is also what's called a
dayclub. If you think about it, it's just logical. What's the invisible
barrier to the expansion of the nightclub? The
part. Why not keep the cash registers going from noon until six as well?
On a Saturday at the end of April, Marquee held the grand-opening
party for its dayclub season. At the door a large man was filtering the
crowd. "So this is the first day the dayclub is open?" I asked him.
"No," he said. He looked like a Samoan linebacker and smelled like a fine barbershop. "It's been open. It just hasn't been
grand open."
I could hear the roar before I got there, and when I walked onto the
pool deck, the dayclub provided, if it's possible, an even more dramatic
entrance than the nightclub. The sun was hot and bright in a surgical,
shadowless way. You could take in the entire tableau in extreme
midday-in-the-desert detail. Every pair of pink bikini bottoms, the
glint off each nipple ring, the desert grit glommed to sweaty skin. With
the dry air, and the sense that there's no atmosphere here, it felt
like we were all partying on one of the lonely moons of Mercury, if
Mercury had any moons. There were no fewer than 1,500 people here.
Hundreds of them were glued together on the dance floor in front of the
DJ booth at the far end of the club, where a tiny Swedish DJ named
Avicii was performing. In the center of the deck was a rectangle of
green-blue pool with water so cloudy you couldn't see your hand in it.
(One security guy told me, "I'd never go in there. Semen, feces, blood,
vomit—that's what makes that pool cloudy.") Some patrons lounged near
the entrance, where the casino had installed outdoor blackjack tables
and posted dealers in bathing suits. One row of private cabanas lined
the left side of the club, and another lined the right. But the majority
of the square footage was taken up by $500-plus chaise longue chairs so
tightly packed together it seemed like a vast first-class cabin on a
new carrier called Ecstasy Airlines. On a round daybed at the foot of
the pool, an Asian man in a headband lay diagonally, as if felled by a
tranquilizer dart.
Jason Strauss met me at the door. He was in shorts, a pressed dress
shirt partly unbuttoned, and sunglasses. He took my wrist in the way he
does—it makes you feel the way a woman wants to feel with a man—and led
me through the crowd. He and Noah had one of the cabanas that overlooked
the trippy web of taxi and limo approaches to the new CityCenter across
the street. I met a French model who was having her
twenty-first-birthday party. I met someone who owned a gold mine and had
Tom Cruise's new haircut. I met a guy who worked for the royal family
of Abu Dhabi. I met an investment banker from Deutsche Bank who helped
broker the deal with Jason and Noah. He never stopped dancing or put a
shirt on.
The New England Patriots receiver Wes Welker had rented the cabana
two down from Jason and Noah's. In a couple of months he would be
marrying a woman named Anna Burns, who was once crowned Miss Hooters
International. But today he was enjoying his bachelor-party weekend,
lounging in the "infinity" hot tub all the cabanas are outfitted with.
Champagne, being the featured beverage of clubs, was everywhere. People
drinking it in flutes, holding it aloft as they danced, receiving
bottles of it from conga lines of bikinied cocktail waitresses who tried
their best to make an "event presentation" without the use of sparklers
or glow sticks. Wes Welker himself—because the hot tubs are Plexiglas
and the water is in a constant bubbly churn—looked like he was
submerged, with board shorts, in a giant overflowing glass of champagne.
And overlooking the crowd, another man was holding a bottle between his
legs and in great thrusting motions spraying a $1,000 magnum of Dom
Pérignon while below him women opened their mouths to receive his gilded
French ejaculate. Let's just say that everyone seemed to understand the
subtext of the lifestyle.
(A note to dayclubgoers: If you don't want quite this much of a
scene, a weekday might be more your speed, and while it's not officially
"toptional," like the pool at, say, Mandalay Bay, on the weekday I was
there, three women—who looked like they were either Iranian, half
Indian, Brazilian, Azeri, Peruvian, or possibly just white American—lay
sunny-side up on a daybed. And while only one woman was dancing that
afternoon—she had on a pool-soaked Burberry tie—the music was still so
powerful that I believe I could see the Azeri breasts vibrate almost
imperceptibly along with the bass line, the way water glasses do when a
giant robot is approaching.)
At the grand opening, Noah appeared and smiled at me:
This is crazy, right? The
cabanas are raised from the main floor, and from a plinth we could
overlook the crowd. The Funktion-One was blasting Avicii, and when the
song crashed, the pool erupted into yet another round of synchronous
splashing, so that I was surprised there was any water left to piss in.
Confetti was occasionally splooged from cannons near the DJ stage, and
at really exciting moments a "cryo" system would shower down actual
snow. One plinth over, a professional handstander in lollipop sunglasses
and a polka-dot bikini was standing on her hands. She lowered her chest
almost all the way down and dangled her legs over the revelers, trying
to blink away the sweat dripping into her eyes. No one paid her the
slightest attention.
The VIP
One night I met a man named Brad Honigfeld at one of Marquee's
tables. Brad is the single largest owner of T.G.I. Friday's franchises
in the world—seventy of them, plus forty-three Wendy's and some chain
hotels. He is 53 years old, balding, with a belly, and he loves
nightclubs. He goes to one of Jason and Noah's clubs in New York or Las
Vegas five nights a month. We spent an hour or so together at his table
on the dance floor at Marquee while he mixed vodka cranberries and
occasionally disappeared into his mindscape to feel the music in some
deep, deep part of himself where only DJs tread.
When he resurfaced, he poured himself another drink and said,
"Nothing gets me high like this music. It's like Circa Lay at a
nightclub."
What?
"Circa Lay! You know. The people running on the wheels."
He meant Cirque du Soleil. He'd had a lot of vodka cranberries. He ordered more.
"Another bottle, another thousand bucks!" he said. As a businessman,
he gets a little giddy thinking about the profit margins of this place.
He also considers himself part of the hospitality business, and he
appreciates the way Noah and Jason do hospitality.
"I don't know these guys. I've spoken to Jason five times in my life.
But they have guys who know who I am. They have a way of knowing all
their clients."
It's Brad's vision to bring the high he feels, the nightclub vibe,
to the world we all live in even when we're not in Las Vegas. A couple
of years ago he opened a yogurt shop in New Jersey that's basically a
yogurt dayclub. "I do a yogurt concept with the music," he told me.
"It's based on DJ culture. When you come in, it's like a nightclub." And
if you think that sounds like a stupid idea, consider that this
1,100-square-foot yogurt shop netted a million dollars last year, and
Brad is opening ten more.
The Waitress
When you see them moving through the nightclub in their black
platform boots, the cocktail waitresses seem like comic-book characters:
tough and giant-breasted, in fishnets and heavy eye makeup. It's kind
of jarring to see them with the lights up at the pre-service meeting
before Marquee opens. At seven thirty or eight they're all couched-out
near the dance floor in love pink sweatpants and leggings and furry
Uggs, eating salads out of Tupperware and applying astonishing amounts
of complexion-altering makeup from little clear plastic makeup bags they
all stow near the service bar. They look older and more tired, and they
look more average and less fantastical. I hardly recognized Nikki Bee, a
waitress I'd met a few nights before, when I saw her sitting
cross-legged discussing the takeout from a salad concern.
Nikki Bee, 25, is from San Jose, California. Before moving out here,
she'd helped open up a Hooters back home, managed a hair salon. She once
had a job driving the little Red Bull Mini Cooper around, doing events.
She has braces and seems at once to be brittle and unsure of herself
and incredibly determined. She worked sixteen-hour days all last
year—waitressing from noon until 4 A.M. in platform heels—so she could
buy a house out near Spanish Trails.
"I just feel like I've seen it all," she told me when I asked her about her job.
Like what?
"Like Pitbull throwing thousands of dollars in the air like it's just
napkins," she said. And there was the prince from Indonesia who would
spend, like, $90,000 a day at the club, for weeks at a time. "He lived
in the bungalows out near the pool, and he'd come to the club in, like,
slippers."
Nikki told me about Kim Kardashian's birthday party last year; Kim
was reportedly paid $100,000 for throwing it at Marquee. Nikki's friend
had waited on her.
"She came an hour and a half late, and then she left after twenty minutes," Nikki Bee said.
I asked Nikki Bee if she liked her job. She said the same thing
pretty much all the cocktail waitresses told me about working here.
"People come here to have a good time," she said. "I'm seeing everyone
at, like, the best night of their year. The best night of their life!"
But doesn't it get tiring, acting like you, too, are having the best night of your life every night?
She won't say that, but what she will say is that she likes that no
one knows what she is actually feeling. It was almost as if her point
was that it's not hard for her as long as it's mostly fake.
"Like no one knew the day I bought my house," she said. "I loved that no one knew that but me."
4:30 A.M.: Before exiting, please make sure the ride has come to a complete stop
Marquee is one of those places in which it's impossible to tell that
you're drunk until you leave. And even here, there does come a time when
you do have to leave. Either because you're just too drunk or because
you
want to check out some other spots too so hit me up later I'll tell you where I'm at, bro, or because it's 5 A.M. and the nightclub is closing and the dayclub won't open for another five hours.
The night of the bachelor party, we were among the last to leave. You
exit the club through a dedicated exit, totally discrete from any of
the various ingresses. Whether you walk out at midnight, right as the
party is at its apogee, or at 4:30 A.M. as we did, there's just this
tidal flow of women carrying their painful heels while they walk
barefoot down the stairs like ladies leaving a wedding, and bros
carrying other bros down like firemen carrying smoke-inhalation victims.
We entered in a tranched class system, but we all exited together into
an echoey sheet-metal-and-spray-on-fire-retardant stairwell devoid of
any kind of, as Noah calls it,
wow factor. It gives the lie to the notion that you were ever anywhere other than a converted convention space. Our
experience was no longer being managed. Laura the elevator host wasn't here to deliver a speech about how much fun we'd just had.
And did we? Have fun?
Going to a nightclub, like going on vacation, sometimes gives rise to
this really stressful internal-feedback loop that initiates when some
dark part of your brain transmits a pretty obvious question: "Am I
having fun?" Then: "Is
this fun? What about
that?" Or,
"Those people look like they're having fun—are they pretending like I
am?" Or, "I should be having fun, but am I really? How about now?
Or...now?" And then this other part of your brain says, "Shut up, this
is your dedicated night for fun, you paid all this money for it, and if
you're not having fun now, maybe you're not capable of fun,
so please for the love of God just shut up." "Okay. Okay... But how about now?"
I think this is what Ecstasy is for. I think it closes the door to
that part of your brain. Another way to deal with that anxiety, the balm
Jason and Noah offer, is to make the customers believe they are at the
party that other people wish they were at. Marquee must always feel like
the place to be tonight. "We always have photographers on hand,"
Jason told me. "The key is to recap it the next day so we can be like,
'Look what you fucking missed.' " For the club to be hot (or in the
parlance of people who go out, "good," as in "Is CLUB GQ good on
Thursdays?" or "CLUB GQ used to be good, but isn't anymore"), you have
to feel like you're walking into a party that's reaching that brief
apogee one party in a dozen reaches. And the corollary of the principle
is that this apogee must be sustained for at least four hours,
predictably, every night. That they are able to pull that off, that's
the special sauce.
And the beauty is that none of it needs to be real. That's beside the point. People
want to
believe. Las Vegas works because the dupes are willing parts in the
con. You don't gamble because you think the odds are in your favor. You
don't pay $3,500 for a table because you think that's how much the
drinks should cost. You pay money to go on the ride.
And now the ride was over. The reason they keep exiters separate is for the benefit of the people entering: How can it be
the place if
people are streaming out? Seeing exhausted women carrying their ho
shoes under their arms while they search for a cigarette just kind of
breaks the spell.
Outside, there was a long line of weary clubgoers waiting for taxis.
But there was no line for the VIP limousines. What's $100 more, on a
night that costs $3,000? We slumped into the back of the limo. The
driver aimed the car, shot us from the concrete driveway chute and out
into the early morning.
If you guys like, he told us,
I could arrange a table at a strip club. Any strip club you want.
Credit : GQ Magazine
