BY ROLF POTTS | I understand this now: Things don't happen in Las Vegas. Things are happened in Las Vegas. All actions in the town are so meticulously predicted and orchestrated that spontaneity itself exists only as the ghost of compulsion.

Perhaps this can explain why I rolled into Las Vegas with $5 and ended up losing $100.

The plan was simple: My friend Jeff and I were going to conquer Las Vegas by being cheap bastards. We knew that Las Vegas is a brilliantly marketed town that has taken the American Dream, distilled it into a cheery doctrine of potential wealth and replaced the dismal idea of the work ethic with a voodoo religion called Luck. Skeptical of Luck and its dogmas, we decided to milk the city for its gaudy entertainment value and vanish like the proverbial mouthful of sailor's lies come dawn. We each took $5 from a kitty we were saving for Mardi Gras, jammed our jackets with lukewarm cans of leftover Pabst Blue Ribbon and locked up our van in the Hacienda lot at the south end of the Strip.

The act of walking the Strip itself was delightfully entertaining, since it involved plowing through a gantlet of scruffy men who had positioned themselves every few feet on the sidewalk to pass out glossy flyers for strip bars, private dancers and Nye County whorehouses. In spots of heavy pedestrian traffic, the sidewalks of the strip looked like lunatic fencing competitions, with brochure-pimps tirelessly lunging and feinting their flyers amid the tourists.

Jeff and I trudged all the way up the Strip and each blew $2.99 of our $5 budget gorging ourselves to the point of agony on lukewarm cuisine at the infamous Circus Circus lunch buffet. We spent the hellish ensuing hour digesting and watching tightrope unicyclists at the free Circus Circus circus upstairs. Once we had fully recovered, we came back downstairs to stroll the casino and pretend to gamble, since it is standing policy in Las Vegas for casinos to give free drinks to anyone who is gambling. Jeff and I bellied up to the dollar slots and pulled on the levers for 15 minutes, but the barmaids didn't seem to be impressed. Jeff sent me up to the bar to get some glasses, so we could drink our Pabst.

The bartender was a flashy young guy who was suavely trying to console a blond, firm-bodied barmaid who stood two stools down from me. "Chin up, babe," he said to her, winking sympathetically and biting his lower lip. "They'll come around with those tips. You're an angel. Just keep showing 'em that smile of yours. Make 'em think you're their special one. You never know who might give you a $100 bill."

Not used to hearing someone my own age call someone else my own age "babe," I assumed that the bartender was jokingly talking like a cheesy Vegas person in an attempt to improve her spirits.

"This really is a circus, isn't it?" I said to the bartender when the barmaid was gone.

"What's that, pal?" he said spunkily, not really looking at me.

"Working here is the postmodern version of running away to join the circus," I said, thinking I was being witty with him. "You know, 'The Greatest Show on Earth,' only we're the clowns."

"How's the luck today, champ?" he said with a toothy smile, acting more like I had pulled an invisible voice-box string labeled "conversation" than made a specific statement.

His non sequitur caught me off-guard. "Um, I haven't really started yet."

"Gotta put that trust in Lady Luck." He grinned like a chipper zombie. "What'll-it-be-for-ya?"

"I'll just take a couple glasses of water."

The bartender shot me a stunned and somewhat disgusted look. It took him about 20 minutes to get the water.

N E X T+P A G E+| In our underwear at the Sheraton