Rhino What You Did Last Summer

by Ross O'Carroll-Kelly

  I’m thinking, will I just nail the accelerator here?

  It’s only when they come closer that I realize they’re basically handing out concessions for, like, clubs and then, like, escort services as well? They’ve got this way of, like, holding the cords between two fingers and flicking them with a thumbnail, so they make, like, a fffttt, fffttt sound and they’re also going, ‘Girls! Girls! You want girls?’

  One of them goes to hand me a cord, roysh, and I’m just about to go, ‘Sorry – black or not – I’m actually here with my son?’ when he suddenly turns around and goes, ‘Hey, Ronan – what’s de stareee?’ and offers him the high-five.

  Ronan goes, ‘Alright, boys?’ and then he sort of, like, flicks his head at me, presumably to say, ‘Get out of here – I’m with the oul’ fella.’

  The light turns green and I step on the accelerator. There’s a squeal from my tyres and the three – again – black dudes jump back in fright.

  Of course, I’m left shaking my head again, but this time not in a good way?

  ‘Ah, they just know me from walking up and down The Strip,’ Ronan goes, as I’m pulling into the casino cor pork.

  I’m there, ‘Ro, forget what I said about secrets. There’s shit I don’t actually want to know?’

  10. Vegas, Baby

  I tend to do a lot of my – I suppose you’d have to call it – deep thinking while I’m shaving. So there I am, roysh, staring into the mirror, and it’s suddenly going through my head how much I’ve missed the goys and how much I’m looking forward to hanging out with them again. They flew in last night and I’m trying to work out how long it’s been since I last saw them. We’re talking November to the end of June – you do the maths.

  Ronan’s outside the door, telling me that the Nevada Gaming Commission are on his case – or, more specifically, busting his balls, over what he calls his ‘associations’.

  ‘Oh, no,’ I go, ‘not again,’ because sometimes you’ve got to just, like, play along? It can be good sometimes for kids to have an imagination.

  ‘Piece-of-shit motherfuckers,’ he goes, ‘saw me having breakfast with Solly Abrams and Santo Trafficante! At the Dunes! Ah, you know how that goes.’

  ‘So that’s, like, a bad thing, is it?’ I shout out to him.

  ‘What have you got, rocks in your head? Everyone knows they’re wiseguys.’

  ‘Of course – I forgot.’

  I finish up and wipe the rest of the foam off my face.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind,’ Ronan goes, ‘but I’m the one trying to keep the fucken peace out here. Phil Profaci’s gone kill-crazy. You know Blowtorch Phil?’

  ‘I know the face,’ I go. ‘I’ve never heard the name.’

  ‘Well, he’s supposed to be the outfit’s outside man here – shouldn’t be on the floor. Anyway, two nights ago, he has a bad night at the craps table. You know Abie Zwillman? Best fucken stickman on The Strip. Abie’s been with me for thirty years. Phil breaks his fucken arm, then tells Johnny Guzak, the pit boss, to tear up his marker or he’ll melt his fucken face – I’m talking about a marker for twenty large here…’

  I slap on the old Kiehls.

  ‘Then, he hits the bar,’ Ronan goes, ‘gets all liquored up, comes back, busts his way into the soft count room and walks out with a caseful of big ones…’

  And the old Gaultier the Sequel.

  ‘So anyway, they’ve decided to take him out. Giuseppe Bonnaro and Tony the Ant are flying in. He gets a shave every morning in the barber shop at the Silver Slipper. Phil’s sweet on one of the broads there – ah, she’s up in the paints age-wise, but she still knows a few tricks…’

  I step out of the bathroom. I’m there, ‘Can I just ask, Ro – we are just bantering here, aren’t we?’ because it does always pay to check with him.

  ‘Course we are,’ he goes. ‘Ah, it’s just I been listening to Big Juice and he’s stories. I’m telling you, the fellas over here, Rosser, back in the day, thee’d put the boys back home in the fooken ha’penny place.’

  I’m actually pulling on my green Apple Crumble, roysh, which is maybe why I stort to feel suddenly patriotic? And it’s weird, roysh, because I’m the one suddenly defending Ireland? ‘What about The Genoddle?’ I go. ‘The Penguin? The Monk?’

  It’s actually the mention of The Monk that gets him. He stares into the distance and smiles. It’s nice to see he’s still a major fan.

  ‘Here,’ he goes then, ‘I need to talk to you about this wrinkle I’m after coming up with.’

  I don’t know what a wrinkle is, but it doesn’t sound very legal? I check my phone. I’ve got, like, a text from JP. They’re actually out on The Strip. He’s like, ‘Hav u seen this thng?’ presumably meaning the Star Wars Casino and I suddenly realize that I haven’t. We came in the back way last night and, because Ro already had the key, we went straight up to the room in the lift – or elevator, if you want to call it that.

  I turn around to Ro and I’m like, ‘The goys are outside – why don’t you tell me while we’re walking?’ which is exactly what he ends up doing.

  ‘See, I’m after been examining traditional algorithms and equations which describe various kinds of wheels and spindles,’ he’s going. ‘For example,

  which is a cracking little equation for figuring out the speed of the wheels of a train…’

  We pick Big Juice up in the lobby. It’s, like, mayhem down there – loads of Star Wars characters milling around. I spot three or four Jar Jar Binkses serving drinks, although I’m pretty sure they’re called Gungans.

  Ronan’s still going. ‘Using a Markov chain – a stachostic model describing a sequence of possible events in which the probability of each event depends only on the state attained in the previous event – it’s possible to predict, with great accuracy, what a ball will eventually do, based on the first few seconds of the spin…’

  I hear Big Juice tell him that it’s the best scam he’s heard since Tony ‘Big Tuna’ Collovati took the Hacienda for seven-hundred-and-fifty large and I’m thinking, I’ll definitely have to ring Nudger and Gull to tell them that, whatever they paid, they really got their money’s worth with this dude.

  They’re waiting in front of the place – we’re talking Oisinn, JP and Fionn – and of course, you can imagine the banter. What, after having not seen each other for, I don’t know, however many months?

  We’re all on fire.

  Of course, straight away they stort on my nose. At first they don’t recognize me and then, when I finally convince them that it’s actually me, they stort giving it loads.

  ‘I thought it was Tiny Winky,’ JP, for instance, goes. ‘I didn’t know whether to say hello or eh-oh!’ although I do end up hitting them back with one or two cracking one-liners of my own, don’t you worry about that.

  Then it’s, like, high-fives and hugs and introductions. I tell Big Juice that these three, plus the dude we’re about to meet inside, are my, basically, capos, which I’m pretty proud of, it has to be said.

  Fionn looks well. Three months’ summer holidays – why the fock wouldn’t he? ‘So what do you think of it?’ he’s the one who goes.

  I realize I haven’t even looked at it yet, so I spin around and I swear to God, roysh, I end up nearly crapping my pants. The building is in the shape of Dorth Vader’s head – well, head and shoulders – and it’s honestly the most impressive thing I’ve ever seen.

  I look around me and there’s, like, hundreds of people standing around, staring at it in total awe and I feel like telling every single one of them that my best friend actually built it. Well, project-managered it.

  I think I speak for all of us when I say we’re all just, like, shaking our heads as we stort walking towards the thing. ‘Imagine trying to get planning permission for something like this back home,’ Oisinn goes.

  JP’s there, ‘Ross’s old man probably could – with some of his contacts,’ and everyone laughs and I end up having to point out that his old man sold most of the gaffs that
my old man built – which means he basically put him through focking school.

  JP says he didn’t mean anything by it? See, the thing is, roysh, I’m my old man’s biggest critic, but what I really hate to hear is people having a go at him when he’s not here to defend himself, the stupid dickhead.

  Fionn puts his orm around my shoulder and tells me that I’m probably just nervous for Christian, as we all are.

  The doors into the casino bit are Vader’s actual mouth. We walk through them into the main reception area and I don’t know about the others but I am just blown away. There’s this life-size Rancor in the, I think it’s called, like, an atrium? – must be, like, a hundred feet high – reaching right up to the ceiling, which is black with, like, stors painted on it?

  We tip over to the security desk, where a Sandtrooper asks us if he can help us. I’m there, ‘We’re actually here to see Christian? As in Christian Forde?’ and he asks me for my name.

  I can’t resist it, of course. I wave my hand in front of his boat and go, ‘You don’t need to know my name,’ but then he’s suddenly looking over my shoulder, going, ‘Hey! Big Juice! How you doing?’

  Big Juice goes, ‘Guido? Guido Roselli? Is that you in there?’ and suddenly it’s all hugs and talk of old times and some old mate of theirs who was found chopped up like a tomato and floating around in a fifty-five-gallon drum off the coast of Miami. Of course, Ronan’s face is lit up like he’s just met Santa Claus.

  Guido eventually radios upstairs, then he says Christian will be down in a minute.

  I’m still looking around with my mouth open – an actual Land Speeder goes by – when the next thing I hear is, like, footsteps and suddenly there’s, like, eight stormtroopers morching towards us in two columns of four, with two Royal Guards on either side – and there, smack bang in the middle of them, is Christian.

  JP storts giving it the Dorth Vader theme music. ‘Dom, dom, dom, dom-de-dom, dom-de-dom…’ and the rest of them join in, knowing that this is probably the proudest moment of the dude’s life – after beating Newbridge in 1999, obviously – showing off this thing that he’s, I suppose you’d have to say, created?

  I don’t join in, though, bad and all as that sounds. ‘I’m tempted to tell you that I’m proud of you,’ I go to him, ‘except you haven’t been returning my focking calls.’

  I can’t help it.

  He sort of, like, squints his eyes at me and goes, ‘Ross? Is that you?’ and of course the rest of them react like this is the funniest thing they’ve ever heard. ‘Sorry,’ he goes, still checking my face out, ‘the last episode of the show I saw, you still had the bandages on.’

  I’m there, ‘Maybe I’d have told you if we’d spoken to each other in the past two months.’

  He’s there, ‘Ross, it’s been manic, with the baby, and then…’ he looks around him, ‘… all this.’

  And I’m nodding, roysh, because I’m suddenly getting the message. Lauren’s convinced him that what happened by the shores of Lake Ewok that day was my actual fault and she’s using it as a reason to break us up.

  The rest of the goys haven’t seen Christian for, like, nearly a year, so it’s all hellos and high-fives and whatever else, but I have to admit, roysh, I’m hanging back in a serious way while he’s giving us the whole guided tour.

  I crack on not to be even impressed when he shows us the cocktail bor, which has been modelled to look exactly like the one in Mos Eisley in the first movie – they’ve even got those freaky-looking fockers with the saxophones. He says there’s another bor on the second floor that’s modelled on Jabba’s sail-borge.

  The goys are all like, whoa! But I’m like, whatever!

  ‘And Time and Newsweek are both putting us on their covers,’ he goes, which I take as a definite dig at me – as in I only made it onto the cover of Us Weekly and one or two others you wouldn’t wipe your hole with.

  ‘Time and Newsweek?’ I hear myself go. ‘Who the fock reads them?’

  Behind me, roysh, I can hear Ronan banging on to Fionn about parameters and variables and Fionn’s banging on about residuals and blahdy blahdy blah blah.

  Christian asks us if we want to meet the little fella and all the goys are like, ‘Cool,’ and, ‘Thought you’d never ask,’ and whatever else. But I’m there, ‘Er, I actually can’t. I’ve got to pick up Sorcha and Erika from, like, the airport,’ even though they’re not in for another four hours. I just don’t want to face Lauren again. ‘In fact, I’d want to stort thinking of making tracks.’

  ‘Oh, okay,’ he goes.

  Then, roysh, his face is suddenly all serious.

  He’s like, ‘Ross, you know your nose is bleeding?’

  I put, like, my palm up to it. When I take it away it’s, like, covered in blood. ‘Yeah,’ I go, ‘it does that.’

  Sorcha says she’s thinking of having the electricity in her shop converted to, like, wind power. I tell her I wonder how the Powerscourt Townhouse Centre will feel about that and she says she doesn’t actually care? In fact, she’s – oh my God – never listening to negativity again. ‘Remember what Karl Lagerfeld said about Stella,’ she goes, ‘when she started in Chloé?’

  We’re sitting in the Eiffel Tower Restaurant, the one in Paris – as in Paris, the casino? – staring across at the fountains of the Bellagio, watching all these jets of water dance to a tune that Sorcha immediately recognizes as ‘Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini’ by Sergei Rachmaninov, while I’m thinking about that CD she bought years ago –The Best Classical Album of the Millennium… Ever! – and how it really focking paid for itself in the end.

  I feel fat as a fool here, having had the blue cheese soufflé and the duck two-ways and having polished off most of Sorcha’s braised salsify and what Erika left of her Israeli couscous with mint pistou. I’m thinking, a brandy could be just the thing to settle the old Malcolm. ‘Armagnac?’ the waiter goes.

  I check my pocket, make sure I’ve got the old man’s cord.

  I go, ‘Armagnac, oui, oui.’

  Erika says the last time they were here was in 1999 and this place had only just opened. The funny thing is, roysh, I remember that myself. They spent the summer in Mortha’s Vineyard, working as chambermaids – totally focking miserable. Yeah, Sorcha used to ring me in tears, telling me about the shit she used to find in people’s rooms. Then, at the end of the summer, they came here for, like, a week’s holiday.

  Erika goes, ‘Remember those two guys we met?’ and Sorcha looks at me – I’m pretty sure it’s not a word – but guiltily?

  See, we were technically still going out at the time.

  ‘They were acrobats,’ Erika goes, ‘with the Cirque du Soleil,’ and I know from the way she says acrobats exactly what’s being implied.

  Sorcha smiles sadly at me, but who am I to make her feel bad? I went through her friends that summer quicker than the Ugg boot craze. I look at her as if to say, it’s cool – it doesn’t matter now, which it doesn’t.

  ‘Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini’ finishes with an unbelievable – I’m still pretty sure the word is – crescendo? On the very last note, the water shoots, like, three hundred feet in the air, then all the lights go out and in the dorkness, roysh, you can hear all the wows and the whoas and the oh my Gods, and then the lights come on again and everyone just claps.

  It’s, like, you’d have to?

  ‘Hey, we went to see Lauren,’ Sorcha goes – meaning obviously Christian’s Lauren – just as the dessert trolley rolls by. She thinks she might have the crème brûlée, but then she changes her mind and waves the dude on.

  I’m there, ‘How was that?’ except I look at Erika when I say it. See, she’s always had a thing for Christian, which I still find weird – and I’m saying that these days as her brother. She shrugs as if she doesn’t know what I’m banging on about. ‘Little Thomas is gorgeous,’ she goes.

  ‘Or Edward,’ Sorcha goes, ‘because they still haven’t decided what it’s going to be. I still think I’d prefer Edward
Thomas to Thomas Edward.’

  Erika’s there, ‘Lauren’s so happy, though. It’s so lovely,’ and I stare at her for, like, ages afterwards, I suppose for signs that she’s being a bitch?

  ‘She was asking for you,’ Sorcha suddenly goes.

  I’m there, ‘Yeah, well, I’m going to be avoiding her. I’m sure she’s going to want to give me the big lecture – don’t fock up Christian’s big night, blahdy focking blah blah. To be honest, I’m sick of her treating me like a piece of dirt.’

  I stand up and knock back the rest of my brandy. Sorcha says she has the babysitter until midnight. They’re going to see Phantom at the Venetian if I want to come. I tell her no, but thanks anyway, then she asks me if I’m okay and she says it like she really means it? I tell her I’m fine and I’ll see her in the morning. We’re taking Honor to the Mirage to see the dolphins.

  Before they all get here.

  ‘And cut!’ Johnny goes. ‘Beautiful! Beautiful! Okay, Sorcha, I want to get a shot of you looking all Marlene Dietrich to close the scene. I’ve got Heather Nova singing an acoustic version of Gwen Stefani’s “Cool”.’

  I stort walking away. ‘Hey, Ross,’ he shouts, ‘stick around. I want to cut a short piece into the middle of that scene. Erika’s going to mention Charles and Helen arriving for the wedding tomorrow and you say something like, “There’s not going to be a wedding!” Can you do that?’

  I keep walking.

  ‘Ross,’ he shouts, ‘do I have to remind you that you are contractually obliged…’

  I hear Erika telling him to let me go.

  I don’t know what’s suddenly wrong with me. If I’m being honest, maybe it is this whole wedding farce.

  I find our waiter and hand him my cord. ‘Et cinquante dollars pour vous,’ I go.

  He’s there, ‘Ah, merci, Monsieur! ’ and I’m like, ‘Ne rien,’ and it’s being suddenly fluent at French that gets me thinking – maybe that’s it. Maybe I just need my Nat King Cole.