Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Las Vegas Phone Number History (Or Lack Of)

Before my TV and DVD player are unplugged on Thursday and hauled away by the movers who will meet us at our new home early Friday afternoon to move everything in, I was planning to watch Lucky You (mostly crappy script, but one of the great movies about Las Vegas because it gets the actual feel of the city right and not how Hollywood usually sees it), Swing Vote (for the election season), and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (symbolic of a new adventure in my life) again. I watched some of Lucky You before the week started, but I can easily watch Swing Vote and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy after we're settled in our new home and everything's hooked up again, including cable service with CenturyLink, which offers the ability to watch recorded shows on any TV in the house. That's going to be a godsend.

Anyway, instead of those movies, I watched most of 10 Items or Less, starring Morgan Freeman and Paz Vega, early this morning, to remind myself that I have to get used to finding good people all the time in Las Vegas, which is hard to imagine at first after nine years in Santa Clarita. Most of them in Las Vegas anyway, but the majority leans toward goodness, because living in Las Vegas, you're in the desert and you have to make your life work. People are more real there.

While I watched Him (Freeman) walk into Archie's Ranch Market in Carson to do research for a role as a supermarket manager that he hasn't committed to yet, I saw the pay phone that he uses to call someone to pick him up after the production assistant (Jonah Hill) for the movie doesn't come back after dropping him off an hour before, and my mind wandered to the news the day before that we got our new phone number. I've memorized it, just like I have our new address after changing many magazine subscription addresses.

After revealing our new phone number, Dad said that it had been out of service for three years, and I perked up at that piece of news. Once in Las Vegas, I want to know absolutely everything about my home city. I want to explore every inch of it, along with Henderson, Boulder City, Summerlin, and North Las Vegas, as well as the rest of Nevada. I don't necessarily want to become one of the foremost authorities on Las Vegas and Nevada; I just want to know enough for myself, that wherever I go, when I drive by various casinos, I know their histories, that when I walk through downtown Henderson and downtown Boulder City, I know how long those buildings have been there and what the lobby of the Boulder Dam Hotel in Boulder City looked like decades before, also knowing that Clark Gable and Carole Lombard once stayed there.

I wish I could know the same about our new phone number. Three years out of service before it was given to us. Who had it? Was it a business? Was it a resident? Was it a transient resident who had had enough of the city and moved east or back to California or maybe Arizona or New Mexico? Was it a resident who died of old age or died in middle age and their family took care of the arrangements to release the phone number? Or did the number just float briefly from place to place during those three years before settling down on us? I like to imagine that it was a resident who eventually tired of the city, who left room for us. Something like that. I know that I won't ever know the history of our new phone number, but the speculation to come out of it, those potential stories, are endlessly interesting.

No comments:

Post a Comment