Chapter 7: The Descent

The second windowless interior.

I want to begin there, because I flagged it in my notebook at the Peppermill — No windows. First windowless interior I've encountered in Vegas. Note for future reference — and this is the future reference, and I want to be precise about what changed between the first windowless room and the second, and what did not change, and what cannot be accounted for by the difference.

At the Peppermill, I lost ninety minutes. I sat down at 11:15 PM and stood up at 12:45 AM, and the ninety minutes between those two times did not register as duration. I attributed this to the sealed environment — no external time cues, no daylight shift, no street noise cycle. A reasonable explanation. A good explanation. The kind of explanation that lets you close the file and move on.

At Frankie's Tiki Room, I lost the night.

I need to explain how I got here — not geographically, which is simple (Charleston Boulevard, west of the Strip, a twelve-minute rideshare from my hotel), but investigatively, which is more complicated and involves a breach of the discipline I described in Chapter 6.

Eleven days after the man at Atomic Liquors placed a yellow book on the bar, I opened my notebook to the folded page and typed the title into a search engine: Principia Discordia. I had waited eleven days because my methodology requires it — you do not chase anomalies during active review periods, you finish the current work, you process the notes, and only then do you investigate the things that didn't fit. I had followed this protocol. I had been, by my own accounting, disciplined.

The search returned results immediately. The Principia Discordia is a text — a religious text, or a satirical text, or both, the distinction appearing to be one of the work's central concerns — published in various forms since 1963, written pseudonymously by writers using the names Malaclypse the Younger and Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst, who were in reality Gregory Hill and Kerry Thornley, who were in reality two men from California who created, or discovered, or channeled (the vocabulary depends on how seriously you take the enterprise, which is itself one of the enterprise's central questions) a religion called Discordianism, which venerates Eris, the Greek goddess of chaos and discord, and which holds as its foundational tenet that the universe is fundamentally chaotic and that all attempts to impose order on it — political, religious, scientific, or culinary — are both necessary and doomed and funny.

I read this sitting at my hotel desk with coffee and the practiced skepticism of a person who has spent a career separating signal from noise. I read about the Law of Fives, which states that all things happen in fives, or are divisible by or are multiples of five, or are somehow directly or indirectly related to five — if you look hard enough. I read that this was a statement about perception, not arithmetic, though the text did not seem entirely sure about the distinction. I read about the Sacred Chao, which is a symbol resembling the Taoist yin-yang but containing, in its two halves, a pentagon and the golden apple of Eris, inscribed with the word KALLISTI — "to the prettiest one" — the apple that started the Trojan War by exploiting vanity and competition, which is to say, by being thrown into a system and letting the system destroy itself.

I read about Operation Mindfuck. I read that Discordianism had been entangled, through Thornley's personal history, with the Kennedy assassination and Jim Garrison's investigation and the general paranoid epistemology of the American twentieth century. I closed the tab. I wrote in my notebook: Interesting. Possibly relevant to the anomalies. Not relevant to the current assignment. File and return later.

I filed it. I returned to my reviews. I was a professional. The notebook went in the bag. The information went in the file. The data journalist had done their due diligence and found that the yellow book on the bar at Atomic Liquors was a countercultural religious text from the 1960s, which is exactly the kind of thing you find in bars in Fremont East, and the fact that a man had placed it on the bar in front of a food critic with a notebook meant nothing more than that a man had placed a book on a bar, and the look he'd given me was the look you give a stranger at a bar, and the bills fanned on the counter were cash left by a person in a hurry, and I was not going to spiral into pattern-matching on the basis of a single evening in a bar that serves drinks named after nuclear detonations.

I went to Frankie's Tiki Room three days later because it was next on my list. The Charleston corridor was the western edge of my Course Two territory, and Frankie's had been in my research file since January — a 24-hour tiki bar with no food, no windows, and a rating system based on skulls. I was going to review it, write it up, and add it to the guide, because that is what I do, and my methodology does not accommodate detours.

I did not know, when I walked through the door at 7:30 PM on a Tuesday in April, that I was walking into a pentagon point. I did not know what a pentagon point was. I did not know there was a pentagon. I was a food critic entering a bar, and the bar did not have windows, and the last time I had been in a room without windows I had lost ninety minutes of my life, and I had explained the ninety minutes rationally and filed the explanation and moved on, because that is what the methodology requires, and the methodology is the thing that matters.

The door opened. The world outside ceased to exist. I went in.

Frankie's Tiki Room was established in 2008 by P Moss, a Las Vegas local and tiki culture devotee, in a space on West Charleston Boulevard that had previously been a different bar and before that something else and before that probably desert, because everything in Las Vegas was previously desert except the desert, which was previously an ocean, and the improbability of any of it compounds the further back you go. The bar occupies a small building — maybe fifteen hundred square feet, possibly less — and every inch of it has been elaborated.

I need to describe what "elaborated" means here, because the interior of Frankie's Tiki Room is not decorated in the way that most bars are decorated, where someone has made choices about color and furniture and hung some things on the walls. Frankie's is constructed. The ceiling, the walls, the bar, the booths, the bathroom doors — every surface has been carved, painted, sculpted, or otherwise transformed into a continuous environment of tiki figures, tropical ephemera, bamboo, lava rock, glowing pufferfish lamps, and the kind of immersive detail that takes years to accumulate and that you stop trying to inventory after the first five minutes because the density of objects exceeds the capacity of a single visit to process. It is less a bar than a habitat — a pocket ecosystem designed for a species that drinks from skull-shaped mugs and has no use for natural light.

The lighting is red and low. Not the warm, flattering low of a steakhouse or the moody low of a speakeasy, but the specific, biological low of a space that has decided to operate at the minimum luminance required to find your drink and your mouth and the distance between them. Your eyes adjust. They have to. The adjustment takes approximately four minutes — I timed it at the Peppermill and I timed it here, because timing things is what I do in the absence of other forms of control — and when your eyes have adjusted, you can see the carved tikis watching you from every angle, their expressions ranging from benevolent to threatening to amused, depending on the tiki and possibly depending on the drink.

The drinks are rated by skulls. This is the detail that I had noted in my research file and that I was, I admit, looking forward to encountering in person, because I have spent two decades refining a five-star rating system and the idea that someone had built an alternative system based on skulls struck me as both absurd and interesting in the specific way that alternative measurement systems are always interesting to someone whose life is measurement.

The system works as follows: every drink on the menu is rated from three to five skulls. Three skulls indicates a drink that is sweet and approachable, though "approachable" at Frankie's means "contains enough rum to constitute a legitimate occupational hazard." Four skulls is stronger and less sweet, the rum or other spirits asserting themselves over the fruit and the sugar with the confidence of a person who is done pretending to be friendly. Five skulls is a warning. A five-skull drink is a drink that the menu is telling you, through the universal language of multiple skull icons, will alter the conditions of your evening in ways the establishment accepts no responsibility for.

There is no one skull. There is no two skulls. The scale begins at three, which means there is no mild option, which means the entry point is already committed, which means Frankie's has made a decision about its audience that most businesses are unwilling to make: the decision to exclude the uncommitted. You do not come to Frankie's for a light beer. You do not come to Frankie's for a glass of white wine. You come to Frankie's because you have looked at a menu whose gentlest offering is a three-skull tropical cocktail in a room with no windows and no clock and you have said, yes, I will drink the skull drink in the dark room with no sense of time, and whatever happens next is between me and the tikis.

I ordered a four-skull drink called the Lava Flow — a frozen cocktail involving rum, coconut, strawberry, and structural confidence — and I sat in a booth and opened my notebook, and I began to write.

The review I wrote at Frankie's Tiki Room is the only review in this guide that I am transcribing directly from my handwritten notes. Every other review in this book has been composed at my desk, from notes, with the deliberation and editorial control that I believe food criticism requires. This review was written in the bar, in real time, in pen, in a notebook, by a person whose phone had died forty-five minutes into the visit (I had not charged it sufficiently; I do not normally rely on my phone in restaurants, but I use it for timestamps, and the loss of the timestamp function was, in the specific environment of Frankie's, disorienting in a way I did not immediately appreciate) and whose only recording instrument was the notebook and the pen and whatever remained of their professional discipline in a room designed to dissolve it.

I am transcribing the review as written. I have not edited it. I have corrected two misspellings and added punctuation where the original was ambiguous, but the words are the words I wrote in the booth at Frankie's, in handwriting that starts controlled and becomes, over the course of several pages, progressively looser, as if the hand holding the pen was slowly releasing a grip it had not known it was maintaining.

Here is the review:

Frankie's Tiki Room does not serve food. This is the most important thing about it and the thing that most reviewers treat as a footnote. No food. A bar that serves drinks and nothing else. Except: you can bring your own food. Delivery. Takeout. A sandwich from your hotel. You can eat anything in this bar as long as you didn't buy it here. This means the bar smells different every hour. When I arrived (early evening, I think, though the concept of "early evening" loses its referent in a room with no indication of whether the sun exists) someone was eating pad thai in the booth across from mine and the entire bar smelled of peanut and lime and chili, and it was the most honest smell I have encountered in Las Vegas — an unmanaged smell, a smell that arrived because a person was hungry and had preferences, not because a ventilation system had been calibrated to produce a specific olfactory experience.

The skull system. I want to talk about the skull system. I have been using a five-star system for twenty years. Stars. Astronomical objects that generate their own light through nuclear fusion and that we have, for reasons I have never examined, decided to use as metaphors for quality. What does a star have to do with a restaurant? What does the number of stars have to do with the degree of excellence? The metaphor is dead — it died so long ago that we do not even recognize it as a metaphor. Stars mean good. More stars mean more good. This is so deeply embedded in the critical apparatus that questioning it feels like questioning gravity.

Skulls. Frankie's uses skulls. A skull is a human head with the human removed. A skull is what remains after everything temporary has been subtracted. A skull is a container — it held a brain, it held a personality, it held opinions about restaurants — and now it is empty, and we fill it with rum, and this is either a desecration or a liberation, and Frankie's position on the matter is clear: liberation. Five skulls. Five empty containers, refilled with something that will empty the container you are currently using — your own skull, the one with the brain in it, the one with the opinions, the one that thinks stars are meaningful.

I am on my second drink. Four skulls. The tikis are watching. I do not mind the tikis watching. I mind less than I usually mind being watched, which is to say I mind less than I should, which is to say something about this room is reducing the distance between observation and comfort, and I do not know what that something is, and for the first time in a very long time I do not feel the need to identify it before I can experience it.

There is no clock in this bar. There is no way to determine the time without consulting a device, and my device is dead. I am writing by the light of a pufferfish lamp. The woman three stools down is watching me write. She is older than I am — sixty, maybe, or seventy, with the kind of face that has been looked at professionally and knows it. She has the posture. The showgirl posture. You see it in Las Vegas, in women of a certain generation — the spine that learned to carry a headdress and never unlearned the carriage. She is drinking something from a skull mug and watching me write and I am watching her watch me and neither of us has spoken.

I have not spoken to anyone in this bar. No one has spoken to me. The bartender took my order and delivered my drink and nodded and returned to the other end of the bar, and the nod was the entire transaction, and the transaction was perfect. I did not need to be greeted. I did not need to be welcomed to the experience. I needed to be given a drink in a room with no windows and left alone with a notebook, and Frankie's understood this without being told, the way the server at Top of the World understood I wanted Cabernet, the way the Peppermill understood I needed to be safe from the clock. This city is reading me. I have been reviewing it, and it has been reading me, and I do not know which assessment is more accurate.

Third drink. I have lost count of skulls. The pad thai person has been replaced by a pizza person. The smell has changed. The woman with the showgirl posture is still here. The tikis are still watching. I am going to give this bar five stars.

I have given five stars to nothing in this guide. I said, in the introduction, that five stars means a place that changed something in me — not my opinion, not my palate, but my understanding of what a restaurant is for. Frankie's is not a restaurant. It does not serve food. It should not qualify. I am giving it five stars because the skull system is better than the star system and the acknowledgment of this fact has changed something in me that I did not know could be changed, which is my belief in the adequacy of my own tools. My tools are not adequate. My tools were designed for restaurants that serve food in rooms with windows during hours that have meaning. Frankie's does none of these things. Frankie's operates in a category my tools do not have a name for, and the absence of a name does not reduce the thing — it reveals the poverty of the naming system.

Five stars. Five skulls. The numbers match. This is either meaningful or meaningless, and I do not care which, and the not-caring is the most frightening sentence I have written in this notebook, because I have always cared which. Caring which is my profession. Caring which is my personality. Caring which is the load-bearing structure of a career and a worldview and a life organized around the principle that the distinction between meaningful and meaningless is the only distinction that matters.

The woman is still watching me write. I am going to stop writing now.

The review ends there. The notebook page after it is blank. The page after the blank is the beginning of my notes for the next restaurant, dated three days later, in handwriting that has returned to its normal controlled state.

I do not remember stopping. I do not remember what happened between the last sentence and the moment I became aware, again, of being a person in a bar with a pen and a notebook. I know what happened in the broadest sense, because I have two pieces of physical evidence. The first is that when I left Frankie's, the sun was up. I had entered at 7:30 PM. The sun in Las Vegas in April rises at approximately 6:15 AM. I had been inside for a minimum of ten hours and forty-five minutes.

The Peppermill took ninety minutes. Frankie's took the night.

The second piece of evidence is a card.

It was in my jacket pocket. I found it the next morning, back at my hotel, when I was looking for my pen — the pen I write reviews with, a specific pen, a Uni-ball Signo 207 in black, 0.7mm tip, the same model I have used for six years because consistency of instrument is part of the methodology, and I mention this not because the pen matters but because the act of searching for the pen is what led me to the card, and the card matters.

The card was heavy stock — cream-colored, slightly oversized for a business card, the kind of paper that communicates permanence. It had been printed, not handwritten, in a font that managed to be both formal and irreverent, the typographic equivalent of a wink in a courtroom. It read:

THE BEARER OF THIS CARD IS A GENUINE AND AUTHORIZED POPE OF DISCORDIA.

Below that, in smaller text:

ALL RITES REVERSED. HAIL ERIS.

I turned it over. The back had a single line: a URL. discordianism.org

I stared at the card for what my internal clock — now restored to function by the presence of hotel windows and morning light — estimated was four minutes. Two facts were immediately apparent:

The first: the word "Discordia" connected this card to the book on the bar at Atomic Liquors. Principia Discordia. Discordia. The same word, the same tradition, the same whatever-it-was, appearing in two different locations, through two different vectors, within the span of a single week. Two data points. In my professional framework, two data points are not yet a pattern — you need three — but two data points are a coincidence, and coincidence is what you call a pattern before you have enough data to call it a pattern, and I had said exactly that in Chapter 6, and here I was, holding the second data point in my hand.

The second: I did not remember receiving it. Somewhere in the ten hours and forty-five minutes between my last notebook entry and the sunrise, someone — the woman with the showgirl posture, I assumed, because she had been watching me, because she had been the last person I documented before the gap — had given me a card declaring me a Pope, and I had put it in my pocket, and I had no memory of the transaction.

This was not, in itself, alarming. I had been drinking skull drinks in a dark room for most of a night. Memory gaps under such conditions are pharmacological, not mysterious. The alarming thing was not the gap — it was the card. Not its content, which I did not yet understand. Its materiality. The yellow book at Atomic Liquors had been someone else's object — I had observed it, noted it, but it had left with the man who carried it. The card was mine. It was in my pocket. I was, according to the text printed on it, a Pope.

I did not feel like a Pope. I felt like a person who had stayed in a bar for eleven hours, who had given a five-star review to an establishment that did not serve food, who had written things in their notebook that they did not remember writing, and who was now holding a card from a religion they had researched for twenty minutes on Google three days earlier and had filed under "interesting but not relevant to the current assignment."

I put the card in my wallet. I did not throw it away. I am a documenter — I keep things, I file things, I do not discard evidence before I understand what it is evidence of. The card went behind my driver's license, where it would remain for the rest of my time in Las Vegas, where it is now, as I write this, worn soft at the edges from months of proximity to the other objects in my wallet, and I do not take it out and I do not throw it away and I do not know what it means and I have stopped believing that not knowing what something means is a sufficient reason to discard it.

Here is what happened at 3 AM, two nights after Frankie's.

I was in my hotel room. I was not sleeping. I had not been sleeping well since the Peppermill, which I had attributed to the ordinary circadian disruption of reviewing restaurants that operate on schedules designed to defeat the human body's preference for regularity. But the sleeplessness had gotten worse since Frankie's — not the anxious insomnia of a busy mind, but a specific, alert wakefulness, as if my internal clock, having been broken once at the Peppermill and shattered at Frankie's, had recalibrated to a setting I did not recognize. I was awake at 3 AM in the way that Frankie's is open at 3 AM: not because something was wrong, but because the distinction between the hours had stopped mattering.

I picked up my phone. I typed the URL from the back of the card: discordianism.org.

I want to be clear about my state of mind. I was not searching for meaning. I was not having a crisis. I was a professional who had encountered an anomaly — two anomalies, technically, the book and the card — and who was, at 3 AM because 3 AM was when they happened to be awake, following a lead. This is what data journalists do. We follow leads. The URL was a lead. I followed it.

The website loaded. It was, by the standards of modern web design, aggressively unoptimized — no hero image, no video autoplay, no cookie consent banner, no chatbot. It looked like it had been built by someone who cared about the content and was either indifferent to or actively hostile toward the conventions of digital presentation. The color scheme was gold and purple. There was a drawing of a woman — Eris, I assumed, from my earlier research — holding a golden apple.

I read the homepage. I learned, or re-learned, that Discordianism was founded in 1963. That its goddess was Eris. That its sacred symbol was the Sacred Chao — a yin-yang containing a pentagon and a golden apple. I learned that the Discordian calendar divided the year into five seasons of seventy-three days: Chaos, Discord, Confusion, Bureaucracy, and the Aftermath. I learned that five was the sacred number, and that the Law of Fives was both a mathematical claim and a perceptual experiment, and that the experiment was: look for fives. You will find them. What you conclude from finding them is up to you.

I had been finding fives for three months. Table numbers. The number of restaurants in the convergence pattern. The number of platforms I had tested. The five-star rating system I used. The five chapters of Course One. I had been finding fives and filing them under coincidence, because coincidence was the rational explanation, and I am a rational person, and rational people do not assign meaning to the frequency of a number.

The Law of Fives does not claim that fives are meaningful. It claims that if you look for them, you will find them, and it leaves the question of meaning to the observer. This is — I recognized this at 3 AM, in my hotel room, with the screen glowing gold and purple — the most honest epistemological claim I had ever encountered in a religious text. It does not say: believe. It says: look. And then it says: what you see is your problem.

I read about the Pentabarf — five commandments, one of which prohibits eating hot dog buns on Fridays, unless you want to, in which case you should. I read that every person on Earth is a genuine and authorized Pope of Discordia, which meant the card in my wallet was not an initiation but a notification — I had been a Pope my entire life and was only now being informed.

I found a link to a text called Discordia Decompiled — described as "A Chaotic Anthology for the Post-Truth, Pre-Apocalypse Era, 2026 Edition." I clicked it. The table of contents appeared: Cosmogenesis & Digital Mythology. Doctrines, Anti-Doctrines & The Space Between. Prayers, Invocations & Things You Shout at the Void. Parables for the Perplexed & Perpetually Online. Rituals, Ceremonies & Sacred Observances. The Bureaucracy of Chaos. Manifestos Against the Machine. Apocryphal Additions & Holy Leftovers. Practical Discordianism for Daily Life. Conclusions, Contradictions & Continuations.

I read the first chapter. The creation myth: Eris and her sister Aneris, the goddess of order and non-being. In the beginning was the Void, and from the Void emerged two forces — chaos and order — and neither was good or evil, and neither could exist without the other, and the universe was the space where they interacted, endlessly, and the interaction was everything that happened. I read this and thought: This is a metaphor. I read it again and thought: This is a framework. I read it a third time and thought: This maps onto what I am seeing in Las Vegas — the chaotic and the ordered, the independent restaurants and the algorithm, the ghost zones and the 0.67 percent, the Peppermill and Hell's Kitchen, the skull system and the star system, existing in a tension that is not a war but a geometry.

I read: "Think for Yourself: Question everything, including Discordianism itself. Belief is a tool, not a cage."

I read the Camden Benares quote: "If you think the Principia is just a joke, you don't get the joke. If you think it's serious, you really don't get the joke."

I closed the tab. I opened it again. I closed it. I bookmarked the page. I closed the laptop.

It was 5 AM. I had been reading for two hours. The sun was coming up over the Spring Mountains and the light was hitting the Strip in the way that morning light hits the Strip, which is to say unflatteringly — all the tricks that work at night, the LED and the neon and the carefully calibrated darkness, are dissolved by the sun into what the Strip actually is: concrete and glass and scaffolding and parking structures and the unromantic infrastructure of a machine that generates wonder after dark and generates nothing before noon.

I told myself this was research. I had encountered a religious tradition — a minor, obscure, countercultural tradition with roots in the same 1960s milieu that produced everything else the 1960s produced — and I had read about it, because a man showed me a book and a woman gave me a card and two data points deserve a Google search, and the Google search had become a two-hour reading session at 3 AM, and this was fine, this was normal, this was what a thorough journalist does when the data leads somewhere unexpected.

I did not sleep. My dreams, when I finally dozed off around 6:30 AM, contained fives. I do not remember the specifics. I remember the number.

I need to go back and finish the review.

Frankie's Tiki Room. Five stars. The first five-star review in this guide, given to a bar that does not serve food, in a room with no windows, based on a review I wrote longhand in the dark and do not fully remember writing. I said in the introduction that five stars means a place that changed something in me, and Frankie's changed something in me, and the something it changed was my confidence in the instrument I was using to measure it — which is the same thing the Peppermill did, except the Peppermill did it gently, over ninety minutes, and I was able to explain it away, and Frankie's did it completely, over an entire night, and I was not.

But there was something else — something I am reluctant to name because it complicates the narrative of professional crisis I have been constructing. The night at Frankie's, whatever else it was, was the first time since arriving in Las Vegas that I was not performing the role of food critic. Not running the rubric. Not maintaining the professional distance that my methodology requires and my personality prefers. The longhand review — the one I wrote in the dark and do not fully remember writing — is the most honest piece of writing in this guide, and it is the most honest because the professional apparatus had been temporarily suspended. No instrument between me and the thing. Just a pen and a notebook and a room that did not acknowledge the existence of the clock. I want to feel that again. I do not know how to access it deliberately. I suspect that deliberately is the obstacle — that the act of trying to dissolve the apparatus is itself an act of the apparatus, and the dissolution, when it comes, comes only when you stop trying. I do not know what to do with this suspicion. It is not a data point. It is not actionable. It is a feeling, and I do not trust feelings, and I am noting it and moving on.

The crack in the methodology — the one I first noticed at the Peppermill, the one I patched with a good sentence at Atomic Liquors — is no longer a crack. It is a structural question. My rating system is a five-point scale. The skull system is a three-to-five-point scale. Neither system is wrong. But the skull system knows what it is — it is skulls, it is a death's head emptied and refilled, it is a measurement that announces its own absurdity — and my system does not know what it is. My system pretends to be objective. My system pretends that the difference between three stars and four stars is a measurable quantity, that the criteria can be listed and weighted and applied consistently across cuisines and neighborhoods and the vast churning chaos of human beings cooking food for other human beings, and the pretension held for twenty years, and it held through the Peppermill, barely, and it did not hold through Frankie's.

Five stars. I cannot defend them. I could not defend the Peppermill's fourth star either, but I could at least articulate the problem — the star was for something my methodology didn't have a name for. At Frankie's, the problem is larger: the stars themselves, all five of them, are for something my methodology was not designed to encounter, which is a place that is not a restaurant, in a time that is not time, that does something to the person inside it that cannot be captured by a rubric that scores cleanliness on a scale of one to five.

I am giving the five stars anyway. The system is cracking and I am using the cracking system to rate the thing that cracked it and this is either the most honest or the most absurd thing I have done in my career, and I wrote that same sentence about honesty and absurdity in Chapter 1, about the arbitrary rules, and I am beginning to notice that I keep arriving at the same junction — honesty or absurdity, discipline or rigidity, pattern or coincidence — and choosing both, and the choice of both is not a choice my methodology was designed to accommodate.

I am noting this. I am moving on. I have reviews to write. The methodology holds, for now, the way a bridge holds when you can hear the cables singing.

Practical Information

Getting there: 1712 W Charleston Boulevard, approximately a ten-minute drive west of the Strip. Rideshare or drive — this is not a walking destination from the tourist corridor. Free parking lot. The exterior is identifiable by the tiki signage. The door is the boundary between the world with time and the world without it. Once you cross it, your phone's clock is the only clock, and I recommend not looking at it.

What to drink: Start at three skulls. The Lava Flow is a good entry point — frozen, tropical, sweet enough to mask the commitment you are making. If you have experience, move to four skulls. Do not start at five skulls. Five skulls is not where you start. Five skulls is where you end up, and the distinction between starting and ending up is the distinction between a plan and an adventure, and Frankie's is not a place for plans.

What to eat: Whatever you bring. Frankie's does not serve food. You may bring your own, you may order delivery to the bar, or you may eat nothing. The BYOF policy is not a limitation — it is a philosophy. A bar that serves food is a bar that has decided what you should eat. A bar that lets you bring your own food is a bar that has decided it is none of their business, and in a city where every restaurant, every casino, every algorithm is trying to decide for you, a place that refuses to decide for you is worth the trip.

What to know: Frankie's is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. This is not a marketing claim. This is a commitment to the abolition of scheduling. At 10 AM on a Wednesday, Frankie's is indistinguishable from 2 AM on a Saturday, because the interior — no windows, no clocks, the same red light, the same carved tikis, the same skull drinks — provides no information about what is happening outside. The city could end. The sun could fail. Frankie's would not notice. This is either comforting or terrifying. At three skulls, it is comforting. At five skulls, the question does not arise.

One last thing: If a woman with the posture of a retired showgirl offers you a card, take it. Read it. Put it in your wallet. It will not explain itself immediately. It will explain itself eventually, or it won't, and either way you will carry it until the edges go soft, and you will not throw it away, and when someone asks you why you kept it, you will not have a good answer, and the absence of a good answer will be, itself, the answer.

I know this because it happened to me, and I kept the card, and I do not have a good answer, and I am a person who has always had good answers, and the loss of this particular certainty — the certainty that I could explain my own decisions — is either the most frightening thing that has happened to me in Las Vegas, or the most important.

Both. The answer is both. I keep arriving at both.

Frankie's Tiki Room 1712 W Charleston Blvd ★★★★★

A 24-hour tiki bar with no windows, no food, no clocks, and a rating system based on skulls that is more honest than mine. I entered at 7:30 PM and left at sunrise. In between, I wrote the most unguarded review of my career, received a card declaring me a Pope of a religion I do not belong to, and discovered that my rating system — the one I have used for twenty years, the one I explained in the introduction with the confidence of a person who believes in their tools — is not adequate to the task of measuring what happens in a room that has abolished time, light, and the pretense that the critic is separate from the experience.

Five stars. The first five stars in this guide. I said there would be five five-star restaurants, and this is the first, and it is not a restaurant, and the five-star rating was written in a notebook I do not remember closing, in a room where the hours did not pass so much as dissolve, and I am standing by it because the alternative is to admit that the only honest rating I have ever given was the one I gave when my instruments failed, and I am not ready to admit that yet.

I will be ready later. This is a promise, not a threat, and I am making it to myself as much as to you.

Reviewed April 8.

One visit. I do not need to go back. Frankie's is not a place you visit multiple times for verification. Frankie's is a place you visit once and carry with you, the way you carry a card in your wallet, the way you carry a sentence you wrote in the dark and do not remember writing, the way you carry the knowledge that there exists, on West Charleston Boulevard, a room where your instruments do not work and your methodology does not apply and the tikis are watching and the skulls are full and the night passes without your permission and you emerge into the sunrise a Pope of nothing, holding a card that says you always were.