Carson City shares Samuel Longhorn Clemens with Missouri. Vegas has Puzo and John Gregory Dunne.

Well, we have Hunter Thompson, [...]]]> The city of Kent in the U.K. is opening a theme park based on the works of Charles Dickens. (Guardian). Which raises the question, what author could North Las Vegas create a theme park for?

Carson City shares Samuel Longhorn Clemens with Missouri. Vegas has Puzo and John Gregory Dunne.

Well, we have Hunter Thompson, who mentions “North Vegas” while fearing and loathing our sister city to the south:

About thirty minutes after our brush with the Okies we pulled into an all-night diner on the Tonopah highway, on the kirts of a mean/scag ghetto called “North Las Vegas.” Which is actually outside the city limits of Vegas proper.  …

This is Nevada’s answer to East St. Louis — a slum and a graveyard, last stop before permanent exile to Ely or Winnemuca. North Vegas is where you go if you’re a hooker turning thirty and the syndicate men on the Strip decide you’re no longer much good for business out there with the high rollers .. . or if you’re a pimp with bad credit at the Sands . . . or what they still call, in Vegas, “a hophead.” This can mean almost anything from a mean drunk to a junkie, but in terms of commercial acceptability, it means you’re finished all the right places. …

So once you get blacklisted on the Strip, for any reason at all, you either get out of town or retire to nurse your act along, on the cheap, in the shoddy limbo of North Vegas . . . out there with the gunsels, the hustlers, the drug cripples and all the other losers. North Vegas, for instance, is where you go if you need to score smack before midnight with no references.

So, there you go. Nor’Town should make Hunter Thompson our literary mascot, kinda like Key West uses Hemingway, and Kent uses Dickens. We should take one of those new parks and turn it into HunterLand with “Just Say No” rides to make kids sick and simulate Thompson-esque other-reality experiences. Our many fine shooting ranges could sponsor a Hunter Thompson shooting contest. Entrepreneurs could sell T-shirts and cigarette holders. Our many fine saloons and taverns could have drinking contests, and our schools could sponsor Gonzo essay contests.

And everyone can cash in by opening up a Hunter Thompson Bed and Breakfast, proudly displaying a Hunter Thompson Slept Here sign. That’d be a lie, of course, since Thompson only stopped for coffee, but so what? Lying is what the tourist trade is all about.

And isn’t “gunsel” an interesting word? When originally coined, it meant a young homosexual partner of an older male, particularly in prison. The word is derived from the Yiddish word for gosling.

Dashiel Hammett played a joke on everyone by using the word in his detective stories to refer to the young male companions of his bad guys. However, other writers and movie producers thought the word meant “hired gun,” and although it took awhile, the movie Maltese Falcon got by the censors with the word “gunsel” intact. That left interesting double entendres like the following in the movie:

Sam Spade: “Why d’ya let these cheap gunsels hang around the lobby with their heaters bulging in their pockets?”. Writer Dashiell Hammett used the slang word Gunsel. Studio censors okayed the word because they thought it meant gunman. But in the thirties a gunsel was a young homosexual male (Wilmer Cook), especially one who was the companion of an older man (Gutman).

How was Thompson using the word in his bit about Nor’Town? I’ll leave that up to your imagination.

And if you’re a Deadwood fan, you should know that folks in the 1870′s didn’t really use the word “gunsel’ except, perhaps, to refer to poultry.