From The Memory Box: The Vegas Story

Halloran Parry
14 hours ago
4 min read

I do commissions for people who have a story to tell and don’t know what they want the art to look like. You come to me when you want to make sense of something significant in your life and you’re not quite sure how. Your job is to tell me a story, and my job is to extract the core of your story and transform it into something visual.

“Women in Vegas have no heads and no legs.”

Reader, I didn’t have any more context than you when I heard that sentence, so I just had to sit there in silence and wait for the world to make sense again.

“The billboards,” M clarified. “Women on billboards in Las Vegas are just torsos.”

Aahhh.

This isn’t the sort of thing that just comes up in conversation. If you want to hear about headless women in Las Vegas, you have to ask the right questions. In this case, the question was, “I’m doing pieces about stories that matter to people. Is there a story that matters to you?”

M and I have known each other professionally for years. In my former career, we cultivated the “distant but familiar” dynamic you get in big companies. I’ve seen her name on lots of emails, she does stuff I care about, but we’ve never worked on the same thing at the same time. We don’t hang out, I’m not calling her every weekend with the latest news in my life, we’re not each other’s emergency contacts on anything. So I wasn’t sure where we’d get to in this story-sharing process.

M told me she didn’t have a story, but she did have a lot of memories. She told me she had a childhood full of moments she was trying to make sense of. The billboards in Las Vegas were one example. She was wrestling with her past and she was wrestling with whether or not she could even give herself permission to do so, given all of everything going on in the world. “It feels irresponsible right now. There are more important things.”

I get it, I understand the sentiment, but the chaos of the world isn’t going to let up any time soon. We’re not going to get space to breathe just by waiting for it. We have to carve it out for ourselves. And realistically, not every action has to be big. Not every gesture has to be grand. Life is a series of small moments with occasional cataclysms thrown in. What do those small moments add up to, and what do we lose by dismissing them collectively as inconsequential?

It’s a relevant question for M, whose story is a series of small moments, utterly forgettable in their banality. Except she didn’t forget, and I wanted to know why.

The Vegas billboards were one memory. Another: “If you want to go to college, you better learn how to spell it.” I don’t know how M feels about having her father’s voice deliver that line repeatedly in her head for a few decades. But I can see why it stuck around.

The image that seemed most clear in her mind, and the one that gave shape to the piece I did for her, comes from when she was about ten years old.

“I was out in the desert with my cousins. We were going shooting. It was hot. My cousins were all taking their shirts off; they were all boys. But when I went to take mine off too, they told me I couldn’t. I was ten. I had a ten-year-old’s body. And I didn’t understand what was different about me.”

We’re talking about the past. We’re talking about memories. So the question is: why these memories? Why did they leave such an impression so many decades later? They’re small moments. They’re not exciting. For a lot of people, they probably would have blended into the general noise. Telling a kid to keep their clothes on is a pretty normal thing. Happens all the time. So why did this particular moment leave a mark on M?

One answer might be that they all had something in common. There’s a through-line. They’re all bricks in the wall of a narrative.

It’s not my place to tell M what to do about any of this. But I can show her this through-line. I can show her the story I see her in. And in doing so, maybe I can give her the narrative equivalent of a map and a compass. And maybe, armed with some pathfinding tools, she’ll find a way forward.

I heard M’s story and I saw the child she described. I saw the Las Vegas skyline, I saw the desert, and I saw the gun. And I thought about the dark skies above the desert. I thought about all the stars, and what sort of future a ten-year-old kid steeped in a culture of casual devaluation might see written there. A headless, legless future, probably (and, ironically, probably also shirtless). And I saw that child take up arms against what destiny had in store.

It’s equal parts inspiring and tragic and I’m honored to have been entrusted with it.