His slice of the city, fading

By Michael Mishak

Sunday, March 15, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Gas station manager Robert Moore is thumbing through his latest science fiction novel when, from out of the dark, two women approach his cramped attendant’s booth.

They live in the Daisy Motel, a two-story tenement house a half-block away on Main Street, in a barren part of downtown Las Vegas.

This is where the Las Vegas City Council wants to build a new city hall.

“Hi Bob,” the one says, taking a drag off her cigarette. “You got a few minutes to talk about Dianne? She’s not answering her phone.”

Dianne, the other says, had a stroke recently. She may need help.

Moore promises he’ll check on her at the Daisy when his shift ends at 10 p.m. The women thank him and walk away.

“Feel free to call me anytime,” one shouts. “And I won’t tell Madeline.”

Moore laughs. By Madeline, the woman means Margaret, Moore’s longtime girlfriend. He smiles to himself and then gets back to reading Clive Cussler’s “Dragon.”

• • •

Wedged between a boarded-up rooming house and a shuttered bail bonds office, this Terrible Herbst’s gas station at Main and Lewis is something of a demarcation line between the neon glow of Fremont Street to the north and the quiet darkness to the south. Moore, 57, has become the caretaker of this little corner of the world, its places and its people ignored and forgotten.

Take Dianne, for instance. She’s 62 and lives alone, Moore says. He takes her grocery shopping once a month. Recently he drove her to Wal-Mart, where she bought 78 cases of soda. Moore asked her if she intended to sell them.

“She told me she needed them,” he says. “I guess, for once, she’s going to have as much soda as she wants.”

With storage space scant, he used some of the cases to build Dianne a table.

Then there’s Larry, who’s 86 and old-fashioned. He likes to carry around a fat money clip. He was robbed twice last year.

These people, the residents of the Daisy, are why he’s concerned about Las Vegas’ plans for a new city hall. The project would be built across the street from his service station — and it would raze a number of old hotels, including the Daisy.

“I want to see people go back to work,” Moore says. “But my friends would have to move.”

And while he worries about where they’d end up, downtown needs attention too.

Moore appreciates the city’s strategy. He’s been reading the papers and thinks the idea could work — the city would entice private investors to pay for construction of the city hall, and then repay their investment with interest by leasing the building from them.

More than anything though, he hopes the new city hall will bring about a revival, commercial and residential. He’s especially tired of the drug traffic.

Until now, of course, nobody has asked Moore for his opinion. He doesn’t pretend to be a student of urban planning. But when asked, he relishes the opportunity. He holds court inside his booth, leaning toward the money slot in the security glass to be heard outside.

He’d like to see “something nice” replace the blighted buildings.

And yes, the project would certainly help all the unemployed construction workers. They’ve been good customers, buying cigarettes during their nightly candlelight vigil to show their support for the proposed city hall. They were polite and kept the corner clean, Moore says.

One fellow even showed up with a saxophone, a welcomed distraction.

“He wasn’t great, but he was good enough,” Moore says, chuckling. “It really made the night go well.”

But tonight the corner is empty and quiet, the only signs of life being the urban detritus collecting on the street.

Moore reminisces about “the weird-os” who usually occupy his nights. The other night it seemed that four or five guys were hanging outside his booth. Turns out it was just one man, muttering to himself in what sounded like several different languages. Then there was the time he burst out of his booth to capture a Chihuahua that had jumped from a customer’s car.

All of these memories ­­— and other downtown scenes — are captured on his cell-phone camera. He especially likes the picture of a man in a wheelchair pushing himself through another business’s drive-through lane.

This is Moore’s life and he loves it. For 40 hours a week, sometimes more, he sits in his booth, under fluorescent light, getting out only on the rare occasion when someone needs help filling the tank or washing a window. Otherwise he keeps one eye on his surroundings, and reads. His preferences are history and science fiction — or, as he calls it, “future history.” (Moore just finished a biography of Israeli statesman Abba Eban.)

Moore moved here a decade ago from Texarkana, Texas, a small town on the edge of Tornado Alley. He said he tired of “pine trees blowing through my house.”

Years earlier he had attended Texas A&M and majored in parks and recreation. “I had no desire to do anything,” he says. “I wanted to eat pizza and drink beer. I was very successful at both.” There were some accounting classes, too. Moore never graduated.

Then came the Arab-Israeli War of 1973. Having “missed out on the Vietnam thing,” Moore moved to Israel, hoping to enlist in another war. “I thought I could do something useful,” he says. Instead of fighting, he took the place of an Israeli reservist on a kibbutz, or communal farm. Moore worked the land for the better part of two years. (“The orchards were the best. The chickens were the worst.”) Then he traveled in Europe for six months.

But Moore ended up back in Texarkana, where he got a job first with an inventory company and then a steel mill. Before long, he started his own retail accounting firm for pharmacies, hardware stores, that kind of thing.

He got married, raised two children, got divorced. After two decades in the inventory business and a pine tree through his roof, it was time to move. Because his children had decided against college — and who was he to argue? — he spent the money on himself. He bought a Harley-Davidson. “I’ve owned bikes my whole life, but never a Harley,” he says. “I’d never been on a real motorcycle until I got on a Harley.”

Moore and his ailing mother packed up a U-Haul and headed west. Drawn by affordable homes, he had bought one on a previous trip. “I said the heck with it,” he says. “Let’s go someplace entirely different.”

Then he took a bus back to Texas and rode the Harley to Las Vegas, even getting snowbound in Show Low, Ariz.

Within a year, his mother died of cancer.

Moore found work managing a Terrible’s gas station in Henderson, where he met Margaret. “She came in to get coffee and it progressed pretty rapidly from there,” he says.

Since then, life’s been good. Moore has been assistant manager at the downtown Las Vegas gas station for the past seven years. Just the other day Margaret hit a $2,600 jackpot on a penny machine. After seven years, he says, “someday we’ll get married, I’m sure.”

But after work tonight, he’s got to check on Dianne.