“This game rocks,” Carly said as she hung from the edge of the waterslide tower at Wet ’n Wild, drunk, her thin body swinging three stories up in the hot wind that rolled across the desert while the kids in line gawked and cheered her on and the boy working there stood frozen, with no idea what to do. No one could believe what Carly was doing and Chase got pissed at her later and threatened to tell their mom and that’s when Carly got scared and apologized and since no one wanted to try and top Carly’s stunt (she’d won!) the Fear Game ended and the Lust Game was about to begin. But Carly and Michele had friends who wanted to play the Lust Game (friends who had things for Hunter and Bailey and Chase) and with others involved the interest in the game—for the girls—stopped abruptly. And so everyone—Chase and Carly and Michele and Hunter and Bailey—agreed that whatever game they played should include only the five of them and no outsiders. When that decision was made Chase had a sense that things were getting out of control.
So Lust was skipped (the boys were disappointed) and they moved directly to the Insult Game. Anonymous notes were written to one another with the goal of insulting the recipient so harshly that he or she had no choice but to quit the game—it would be proof that some boundaries could be crossed. The winner would be the one who cared the least about what was said about him or her.
Chase was the first victim.
According to Hunter or Bailey or Carly or Michele: Chase was too skinny and his nose was too small for his face and his neck was too long—almost swanlike, almost effeminate—and he was unable to do anything about his hair and he should just shave it but his head was too large and he’d look even worse if he did so he was fucked either way. He was too serious. He was too intense. He was hard up and never got laid and would likely end up paying for it, though—according to one of the anonymous notes relaying the insults—Carly might give it up to him if she were drunk enough because that’s what Carly did: she got fucking wasted and turned into a ghetto-ho slutbag who once sucked three guys off at a party and they were all black and members of the West Side Crips and none of them wore condoms and she begged them to finish her off in the ass and they laughed at her as they threw her out of their Cadillac convertible naked and crying onto her front lawn—did anyone remember that night? Yeah, if that’s your sister, dude, how do you think you add up?
According to the group Chase was a freak and a loser. He was someone whose so-called art sucked ass. Everyone thought his wigger ways were bullshit. And it was abnormal that he spent all that time on the west side playing basketball with the black guys who thought he was as much of a geek as everyone else did. And all the tacky murals he painted in the ghetto and that got written about in the local papers were fruity and full of shit. And the truth remained: he was self-absorbed and delusional if he thought he’d get to New York and sell a single painting, much less make it as an artist. Instead, Chase would end up teaching high school at forty and luring little sluts like his sister back to his apartment by offering to paint them but he would just end up getting them drunk and stoned, anything to get them nude.
Chase never cracked. He sat with Bailey late one night at Del Taco and they looked at each other for a long time without speaking. They had decided to meet because things were getting pretty intense. Bailey was convinced that Chase would be the one most affected by the game. But Chase wasn’t.
“Nothing, dude. I swear.”
Bailey had a stupid grin on his face. He didn’t believe Chase. “Nothing?”
“Not a thing. Nada. You’re all losers anyway, so what’s going to be said that’ll affect me?”
“Look me in the eye and tell me you’re not bothered.”
Chase did so without hesitation.
“Want to know who wrote what?” Bailey asked.
“Doesn’t matter,” Chase said.
“It might.”
“I don’t care.”
“It would matter to me.”
“It’s all a game,” Chase said. “Isn’t that the point? That once I start caring who said what then I’m affected and then I lose? But honestly I don’t care.”
“This is for real,” Bailey argued. “This isn’t a game anymore.” He paused. “You know who thinks your art sucks?”
Chase thought about it for a moment. “You?”
Bailey shook his head. “I love your shit. I’m trying stuff and then I look at yours and I stop because what’s the point? I’ll never be that good.”
Chase suddenly wanted the conversation to stop. “I don’t care, Bailey. I really don’t.”
“Michele.”
“Please.”
“She thinks you’re a fraud. She says you copy shit from books and magazines and what you don’t steal and claim as your own is shit and the whole black and Mexican and white unity theme you’ve got going on is weak and no one’s feeling it and the one you did at Doolittle that was in the paper is like comic book art that doesn’t move anyone. She was the one who went off on you the most.” Bailey paused.
Chase shrugged and Bailey grinned.
“Wow.” Bailey was really impressed.
“Nada. Unaffected.”
“Even the part about your work being totally lame?” Bailey asked. “That didn’t get you even a little?”
Later that night Chase wrote an anonymous note to Michele because she was the next victim. It was brief and vicious and the words came with a certainty and clarity that was so strong Chase almost couldn’t type them. What Chase wrote about Michele he would regret telling her as long as he knew her and she would most likely never forgive any of them. The game had overtaken him—it was too powerful. Chase wrote: You are not loved by anyone. Not by your drunk mother who sent you here to Vegas to live with your clinically depressed grandmother or by anyone who thinks they know you and calls you a friend or by Bailey who thinks you give lousy head (but at least you swallow) or by Carly who thinks you’re pathetic and doesn’t have the heart to tell you to just GO AWAY or by Chase who thinks you’re a slut and a bad influence on his sister. No matter how many hours you spend at Chase and Carly’s house asking their mother if there’s anything else she wants done—doing anything that will keep you near them in their home with their lawn and their view and their pool and trying desperately to BE like them—it will NEVER happen. That’s the trick here that you don’t see. The whole thing is set up to keep you wanting what you can’t have and what you can’t become until it drives you away or makes you kill yourself. You’re lucky you’re beautiful, Michele, because without that you’d be nothing. You wouldn’t exist. And beauty always fades. So you’re fucked either way.
7
Everyone is dreading summer. It’s still only June and no one can believe that for eight days in a row the temperature has topped a hundred degrees. The heat wave is the lead story on the news every night because the heat has driven the coyotes down from the hills looking for water and food. The news carries warnings about the coyotes and people are told not to leave garbage out and to keep an eye on their children and pets. But no one seems to listen to the warnings. Dogs and cats vanish in epidemic numbers. A three-year-old Mexican boy playing with his sister on his second day in Vegas (after being sent from Camarillo by his stepfather to live with his mother) was attacked in the backyard of his mother’s Summerlin home. He was found by his sister near a wall surrounding their backyard, devoured: a mound of bones, shredded clothing, a tiny pair of blood-soaked Nikes.
Michele smells like apples, which means she has appointments this morning. She runs her fingers through her damp hair, checking her image in the rearview. Traffic is clogged on East Charleston. It’s seven-thirty and it’s Thursday. Julia was going to leave with everyone else from the National Black MBA Conference but decided to stay. She had money saved from her work at JPMorgan and since Chase and she both loved the Hard Rock they spent their extra days in the hotel and on the fake beach and playing roulette and watching pay-per-view porn. But this morning Chase left Julia in the room at the Hard Rock to meet Mic
hele, who has errands to run and two appointments before noon.
Chase and Michele are at a Public Storage on East Charleston, walking the hot and narrow concrete hallway to locker number 3114. Every few days since Michele and Bailey started hiring girls to work out of the Sun King suite at the Palace, they store their cash in one Public Storage location and then move it to another: from Industrial Road to Henderson to East Charleston. Today is one of those days. Bailey is in Cabo and there is too much money, already, for Michele to feel safe moving it alone. It’s all cash because it’s “the best way” now, especially this summer, with the huge spike in earnings. When it was just Bailey and Michele—when they started “it” four years ago (when Michele started accepting money for massages with “extras”)—it was easier to keep the money in shared bank accounts because deposits and balances were never high enough to “alert” the IRS. The “plan” is: until they can figure out the “smartest way” to pour the money into “other ventures,” they will store the cash in red canvas bags and bury them beneath piles of clothes like the one Michele is now kneeling over on the concrete floor. The cash is wrapped in cellophane bags and held together with thick rubber bands. Michele peels one stack of bills open and counts out five thousand and then puts the cash in her purse. She re-wraps the money and places it back in the red canvas bag.
“What are you doing with that?” Chase asks.
“I’m depositing this into my account because this is mine,” Michele says.
“But isn’t it also Bailey’s?” Chase asks. “What are you doing, Michele?”
They drive to the Strip.
Michele will open a savings account tomorrow. This will be her second account. The other account is in San Diego. Bailey doesn’t know about either account. Bailey knows only about the account the two of them have always shared—the one from the very beginning—along with a mutual fund in his father’s name that they contribute to and occasionally draw from. Bailey doesn’t know that Michele is keeping more from each appointment. Bailey doesn’t know that Michele books more appointments than she acknowledges. Bailey does not know about all of this extra money. But what does it matter? Bailey’s not going anywhere. Bailey wants to direct movies yet won’t apply to film school. Bailey wants to open a chill cocktail lounge but doesn’t want to bother managing it.
They pass Treasure Island and Hunter’s ship is idling and dark and Chase glances at it as if it means something. Michele is saying she sees a window and it’s fluid but closing fast. Chase tries not to picture the watery dark hole that’s sucking in everything around them even while Michele keeps insisting this summer is it. Chase can’t ask what “it” means because Michele’s talking too fast and he’s feeling queasy and Chase simply nods. “You look so scared, Chase,” Michele says. She touches his thigh and stops talking. But then she says, “They want forty-two down for the Hills house and now I’ve got twice that.”
His mother’s house—the one they had to move to when Chase was fifteen—is small and down the rim and out of sight from the Green Valley house he grew up in. Beverly Way: one floor instead of two, two bedrooms instead of three, no pool. It lies hidden in the late-afternoon shadows of the Strip. It was the kind of street where couples fought violently and at night you heard loud thumping hip-hop and sirens wailing across the desert and the echoes of helicopters whirling in the dark sky above, their searchlights aimed at kids drag-racing, tearing through the smooth wide boulevards. It was the kind of place where Chase always felt he needed to be prepared. And he still feels that way as he turns onto the gray street lined with pickup trucks and motorcycles, the occasional used Oldsmobile, the ancient Cadillacs. Cheap boats sit on trailers their owners take to Lake Mead on weekends. Trash cans are knocked over and garbage is strewn across dirty yellow lawns. Rusted car parts and porcelain toilets have been left discarded in the brown weeds of an empty lot. Someone spray-painted a white swastika on a palm tree across the street from his mother’s house a year ago and it’s still there.
Julia tells Chase to relax and lets out a huge sigh when she says it again. She massages his hands, which are gripping the steering wheel too tightly.
“Where is it?” Julia asks, looking over the row of ranch-style houses.
Chase points out the latest version of the Sahara Hotel & Casino marquee, with its vaguely Arabic lettering and the two neon camels facing away from each other under the words. The marquee displays a kaleidoscope of red, white, and blue bulbs listing concert dates and the names of performers, and the colors actually spill onto the edge of his mother’s lawn. Gigantic orange numbers tell the time and temperature (5:34; 97) and a booming garbled voice invites people to visit the NASCAR café inside.
“Listen.” Chase holds up a hand.
“What is that?” Julia asks.
“Electrical currents.”
The asphalt feels soft from baking in the sun all day and as he shields his eyes from the wind Chase looks up at the giant marquee.
“With all the other noise it’s not so bad, but when it’s quiet you really notice.”
Julia nods when he asks her if she’s feeling it. She extends her hand toward the marquee and closes one eye and Chase can tell from the shadow stretching across Julia’s face that the sign blocks out the sun completely.
His mother’s house is minimally nicer than the rest of the generic boxes that line Beverly: the grass is green and wet and a cobblestone walkway stretches from the sidewalk to the front door. In the driveway sits the red Subaru station wagon that his mother has had since Chase was a kid. It’s missing a hubcap and duct tape keeps a sheet of plastic in place where a window used to be before a neighborhood kid shot it out with a paintball gun, remnants of the blue paint still visible on the door. On the porch overlooking the street, two white wicker chairs sit beneath wind chimes, a small table between them. During the summer his mother and Carly used to share Marlboro Lights and give each other manicures on the porch and watch the numbers on the Sahara sign change, and when midnight came Carly would sing along to the Pink Floyd record that she always played until their mother finished her gin and went to bed.
The man lounging on the couch sits up quickly and grabs a T-shirt, pulling it over his head when he hears Chase and Julia walk in.
“Your mother’s getting cigarettes. She’ll be back.” Edward seems more at ease in the house on Beverly than he did the last time Chase saw him here.
“Why aren’t you getting them?” Chase asks.
“I quit.” Edward grins.
Edward is in his late forties and has tan muscular arms covered with murky tattoos. He lives down the street in a yellow house that is the same color as his thinning hair. He wears a black T-shirt with the words WELCOME TO AMERICA: NOW SPEAK ENGLISH written in fat white letters across his chest. Chase introduces Edward to Julia but he doesn’t want to spend too much time in the house after Edward glances quickly at Julia’s breasts and lowers his eyes to the silver stud in her navel and then glances back to Chase. Edward’s a mechanic who does odd jobs around the neighborhood and talks a lot about leaving Vegas for Idaho or Montana where he can fish and hunt (he actually tells people this), and since Edward’s shirt had been off when they came in it occurs to Chase that he might still be sleeping with his mother.
“You should come up for the Fourth,” Edward says as Chase and Julia leave the room. “It’d mean a lot to your mom.”
“So you’ve met the boyfriend,” Chase tells Julia when he closes the door to his bedroom. His mother has cleaned it recently because mail addressed to Chase sits on his desk along with an article she clipped from the Review-Journal about First Fridays, a monthly art fair downtown. And piled on his drafting table is a stack of old notebooks from high school. His mother left a cardboard box and a Hefty bag next to the table because she wants Chase to decide which ones to keep and which ones to throw out. Julia sits on the bed and starts to flip through one of the notebooks and Chase briefly considers asking her not to. Casino chips—the reason Chase is at t
he house on Beverly Way today—are lined up along Chase’s dresser. The chips confirm his fears: they’re worthless. Five $100 chips from the Dunes, three $50 chips from the Hacienda, and a $500 chip from the Sands. He can recall the demolition of each casino—having watched the Hacienda and the Sands with his sister and Michele and the Dunes with his father, who had been extremely drunk that afternoon. Only the Stardust chip is worth anything: burnt orange and white around a gold center with the Stardust logo and its value: $500. Chase’s grandmother told him that Tony Bennett sat at the blackjack table with her when she won that chip. Chase decides to leave it for now.
* * *
Chase’s grandmother—his father’s mother—followed her son and his wife to Vegas from Illinois and lived alone in a small house near Nellis Air Force Base and stayed in Vegas even after her son left his family behind for California twenty years ago. She liked to drink martinis and play bingo at Sam’s Town. She would catch the shuttle in the morning, spend the day there. Chase’s mother would get a call from one of his grandmother’s friends to come pick her up because she’d had too much to drink and passed out on the couch in the lobby. Chase’s grandmother would hand over to her daughter-in-law the casino chips she’d won, with instructions to give the chips to Chase and Carly for birthdays and Christmas, for high school and college graduations. “Security,” his grandmother would tell Chase. “Whenever you come home you’ll always have a little security.” She would joke that it was his inheritance, since her worthless son was blowing all of the money he made on bimbos in a beachfront house in Malibu. Chase’s mom has been dispensing the chips since his grandmother died. When Chase still lived in the house on Beverly Way he would sometimes wake up to find a small stack of chips on his dresser or next to the bathroom sink or in an empty cereal bowl in the kitchen. Next to the chips there would always be a note with a smiley face and nothing else.
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