Slot Attendant

by Jack Engelhard

  Pini Cleopatrus swoops down and snags me again for being so slow, and being so short and so thin she does have an advantage of being unnoticed until she’s at your nose. Jackpots are ringing, zinging and buzzing all over the place, and the people want their money and they want it now. We all lead lives of quiet desperation all right, only here it’s not so quiet.

  Pini and I used to get along, there at the start, but, after a while, it goes sour. Slot attendants and supervisors seldom get along.

  A black lady calls me over, and there’s fury in her eyes. She’s got those Sevens all across and she wants to know why no jackpot. I’m experienced. I know the problem. I knew it even before I scooted over. I explain that you have to insert the maximum amount of coins, three, otherwise poof, you’re out of luck. She’d only tried one.

  “You’re all alike,” she says. “You white people.”

  Pini strolls over and tries the polite routine, to no avail. The lady says it’s all rigged against African Americans. (She is correct, in a sense, except that it’s rigged against everybody.) Pini tells the lady to go to hell, if not in those words, and stomps off. Pini Cleopatrus is from Ethiopia. She is not African American. She is African. Africans, I’ve begun to notice, feel and express no kinship with African Americans. Anyhow, people are not at their best in this environment, no matter what color they go by. If you’re going to become bigoted at this job, there’s no single group to choose. They’re all the same.

  People are people, and that’s no compliment.

  “Hey, you, come here and do your job.” I know who that is. That’s a certain man named Howard Glass who’s playing that same machine he always plays, the Wild Cherry, which is only a quarter game, and though the jackpot is ten thousand dollars if you get the cherries even and across, it is not a rich man’s game, and Howard Glass is rich, rich, mean and spiteful. He’s always at my zone, somehow, and he’s got it in for me for some reason, as if I once did something to him, which I didn’t. I don’t know him and he doesn’t know me, but he’s assigned himself to be my bully.

  Actually he does know me, that once I was somebody and did something big, which he’d probably read about in the papers, so now that I’m here, a slot attendant, which is quite a comedown, actually a crash, he loves to rub it in. He’s an old man with a limp and watery eyes and saliva dripping from his crooked lips and it seems that he comes here, to the casino and to my zone, just to mock me. That’s what he lives for. He knows that I can’t talk back for the risk of losing my job.

  Sometimes he just sits there at a machine and doesn’t even play but just waits for me to pass by so that he can give me that scoffing grin. Usually, though, he makes a comment, like, “Too bad, huh?” Or, “What happened to you?” I just ignore this, but just once I would like to sock him, or at least tell him off. He’s gotten under my skin, this Howard Glass. Sometimes he’s with his wife who’s a member of the Salvation Army or something and she is worse than he is and they do make quite a couple.

  So he’s calling me over, and I know there’s nothing wrong with his machine, and I say, “Yes, Mr. Glass, what’s the problem?”

  He smiles that ugly, watery-eyed smile and says, “Just want to keep you on your toes. Make sure you’re doing your job.”

  He stares at me, still smiling, waiting for a reaction, which is what he wants, his triumph, my defeat, but this I will not give.

  “I’m doing my job.”

  “Just making sure,” he says, and I move along as if nothing bothers me.

  I stroll over to the Keno, which is where I’m not supposed to be because it’s outside the territory, outside the ZONE where I’d been assigned, but I like that action, Keno. There’s a man here who’s always at the same machine, wears those shades and always has a book tucked in his lap. He is obviously a scholar, an intellectual (smart people also go for dumb luck) and he reads during the dry periods, when his numbers don’t click.

  Sometimes they do. Just now, in fact, he’s hit six out of eight, and that means four hundred dollars. I shouldn’t be here and the slot attendant whose zone this is should be here any second, indignant, so I’d better hurry with my question. I ask him, “What’s your system?” He says he gets his numbers from upstairs. God gives him the numbers. He’s into Kabbalah, which is all about the mysticism of numbers. “You ought to try it,” he says.

  Well, I have. I’ve tried it at the racetrack, for exactas and trifectas, but God keeps giving me the wrong numbers.

  I’m back where I belong and I’m starting to get groggy and heavy in the legs. I’m getting light-headed and woozy. It’s the hours, 10 p.m. to six a.m., wears you down. Real people weren’t meant to work those hours. They’ve offered me daytime, but that’s even worse since that would keep me from my writing and out of touch with New York. Six o’clock will soon be here, thank God, and soon I’ll be trudging over to the train station. I don’t trust the jitneys. They come late, or they don’t come at all.

  I’d better not fall asleep on the train and miss my stop. Except that usually that’s the only sleep I get. Dave, the conductor who’s become sort of a buddy, enough of a buddy that he’s got an autographed copy of my book, doesn’t always remember to wake me at my stop in Lindenwold. More often than I’d care to remember I’d dozed off and ended up in Philadelphia, 30th Street Station, where the big trains, the real trains, come and go, and had to wait two hours, grungy and grimy, for a train back. That’s the one good part, watching the big trains. That’s quite a sight, watching them roar in, clanging, so huge, so powerful, like a leviathan on rails. My wife knows to wait it out and not to worry. My wife knows everything. Melanie knows the whole story.

  Chapter 2

  It’s my day off and I’m up in my literary agent’s office in New York. His name is Sylvio Morinaro, the hottest rep in the land. His office is near Grand Central Terminal, on the third floor. That’s why I picked him. I can use the stairs. Actually, he picked me. Six years had passed since my Big Book, The Ice King, and nothing, nothing much, had happened since. The Ice King was a smash, a bestseller, and then turned into a Major Motion Picture. Everybody made money. We, my wife and I, made enough to square a generation of debts. That’s how it is in the writing business. It’s a labor of love for writer and reader, but otherwise it’s not an occupation that commands a shingle and draws customers to your door. Editors aren’t idling impatiently for you in the waiting room and they’re not rushing for your services through the emergency entrance. Nobody cares.

  We never got rich thanks to my Big Book, well – obviously.

  So, six years since my last score. My last hit. Is that a long time? Is it like the old man who had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish?

  People tell me that I should have made enough money to live like Trump or Hefner. My agent at that time, Gloria Marlowe, admitted that she’d goofed. The contracts she’d had me sign for book and movie were not in my favor. I signed every paper put in front of me. What did I know? She’d goofed all right, but I did have that Big Book, so I had fame, reputation, pedigree; bigger offers were sure to come. Life had other plans. Take it from me, when one door closes, another door closes.

  So six years zipped by and I worked odd jobs, even driving a cab for six weeks until everybody realized that I had no sense of direction, especially the passengers. I usually gave them the grand tour but never on purpose. Too often I had to ask them for directions and anyway, soon the Somalis and the Afghans took over, one by one, every single cab. Nobody knew where those newcomers got the money but there was talk about a grand scheme. I was never big on politics, figuring, as I did, that none of it will ever get resolved, so why be troubled? But there was talk among the cabbies being bought out and forced out that Muslims were taking over this country stage by stage. Let it be. Life is too short to worry about everything. Finally (always when you least expect it) can it be? Yes, it’s Sylvio Morinaro on the line and he asks what’s happened to me? Yowzah!

  I said that I’d been working on a
nother Big Book. This was true. The name of it was Smooth Operator and what’s new in the world of publishing is that they don’t reject you so much anymore; they just don’t respond. Ring Lardner advised writers never to add their return addresses along with their submissions so that publishers wouldn’t know where to return manuscripts together with rejection slips. That was supposed to be a joke.

  So when they wash you off like this, the question you have to ask yourself is this: Is it possible that I am right and the rest of the world is wrong?

  Have you been kidding yourself all these years? Can you really be that mistaken?

  Part of the trouble is that once you’ve sold a book to Hollywood, you’re stamped as writing for the movies even though you’re not; you’re a serious novelist and Hollywood just happened. Whose fault is that? New York and Hollywood don’t get along. New York is about words. Hollywood is about pictures. No wonder. Anyway, I got caught in the middle, and here comes that phone call from Sylvio.

  I send him Smooth Operator and he likes it and says he’ll sell it in a snap. That was some months ago. No snap.

  So now I’m in the waiting room. There’s another writer waiting with me, brimming with bright-eyed high voltage energy that they teach you in those 12-Step seminars, which are usually reserved for business go-getters, though artistic-types may monitor those classes to learn that failure is not an option, except when it is, which is something you learn after class. (Failure is an option. Despair isn’t.)

  Anyway, this guy, his hair is uncombed and he’s dressed like a slob, but he’s a writer, so it’s legal. He’s wearing jeans that Melanie, my wife and wardrobe terrorist, wouldn’t even allow me to wear up to the 7/11. He tells me he’s written a Big Book and that Random House has poured in an offer. It’s all over but the signing. He says, “We all need that Big Book.” He raises his arms and gestures quote marks with his fingers when he says Big Book. This is so annoying. People should not do this, writers especially. He says only “genre” books sell these days. What’s my genre? I don’t have one. I don’t have a genre.

  Writers, I have noticed, do not get along with other writers. Writers – all artists – are entirely self-absorbed.

  Who cares? Nobody cares.

  He’s written a book, this writer, for the improvement of individuals and the world and I know that this genre sells – these are always at the top of the bestseller lists – but strangely, altruistic as this is, speaking as a slot attendant, I have not yet seen any improvements in most individuals or the world. Agents and editors have asked me to tackle this subject but it is not my style since I haven’t the vaguest notion how to improve myself or the world. Even step one is beyond me.

  Another writer steps in and he is in a hurry, only came in to deliver his manuscript. He is bald and rumpled and breathing fast as if he has other more important engagements. He tells the receptionist that Sylvio was expecting this. She asks his name. “Weiss,” he says, “but I am not Jewish.” She tells him to have a seat. I say, “Your name is Weiss?” He says, “Yes, but I am not Jewish.” Finally Weiss gets to deliver his manuscript and is off again to remind people that his name is Weiss, but not Jewish.

  Out comes Sylvio with another man and both are sipping champagne. The man is red in the face and neck from an abundance of joy and keeps shaking Sylvio’s hand and thanking him. He backtracks out the door still bubbling his gratitude. Sylvio gives me a nod but the other writer, who was here first, gets ushered in and now it’s me and Sylvio’s assistant, Marci, a sweet-natured nearly-attractive blonde.

  I like Marci because she’s pleasant and also because she’s been here longer than two weeks. Good help is hard to find and even harder to keep. Most “office managers” in the literary and entertainment world last until the nearest paycheck. They’ve all got bigger plans. So one day it’s Susan, next day Carla, and then Cindy and suddenly it’s Gabriella. You’re always reintroducing yourself and starting from scratch.

  But Marci is staying, I think. She says, as she’s doing business at her desk and computer, “Your day will come.”

  I don’t think she knows my name. In an agent’s office, authors are as common as oranges to a grocer. You are not special.

  I say it already did. My day already came.

  “Came and went, huh?”

  Then she apologizes. Didn’t come out the way she meant it to. She saw the movie of my book, The Ice King, but hadn’t read the book. She knows, though, that it was a wonderful novel and that the movie surely didn’t do it justice. Wasn’t the book number one on The New York Times bestseller list for quite some time? Wasn’t the sexy cover splashed all over the place here and abroad?

  What, asks Marci, was I doing these days, besides, of course, this new novel I’ve got going with Sylvio?

  I tell her (in that mask of jubilation that I’ve managed to adopt) that I’m also doing journalism, which is true. I write for my hometown paper, The Gazette, for which I get paid $75 per opinion article. I do not tell her, naturally, that full-time – well, full-time I am a slot attendant in an Atlantic City casino. (She wouldn’t believe me anyway. Nobody does. Even Melanie’s mother cannot believe this and frankly even I do not believe this but it is true. It is true.)

  She is also Sylvio’s reader, so she’s read my manuscript for Smooth Operator and likes it very much (especially the sex scenes) and it is sure to top The Ice King. Just hang in there, she says, “You know Sylvio has never lost a patient.” She chuckles and I smile at the odd inference, at the thought that a writer is really a patient who needs to be cured; of, perhaps, this writing affliction. “No, I mean it,” she goes on. “Sylvio sells everything, and for huge bucks.”

  I like hearing this.

  “Six figures,” she says.

  I like six figures.

  She starts giving me the names of some of those writers that Sylvio had turned into winners and I pretend to know them but I don’t.

  I don’t care about them either and am beginning to get tired of hearing about other writers.

  I do not care about other writers unless they are failures and the successful ones make me sick.

  Finally, Sylvio steps out with that genre writer and they’re not sipping champagne but they are happy. Sylvio asks me to give him a minute, so I’m still waiting. But I don’t mind. I’m in New York, not Atlantic City, and I’m not wearing my green uniform. I’m in decent pants and jacket and one of those polo shirts without a collar that Melanie, my wife and, as I keep reminding her, my wardrobe tyrant, made me wear. She really is something, Melanie, when it comes to clothes. I am not color blind but I just don’t know what matches. I think women want to keep on dressing you the way they kept on dressing dolls when they were girls. I think that’s what it is, what it goes back to. They want to turn you into Barbie, or is it Ken? So, anyway, I’m in New York and we’re talking books and writers and huge bucks.

  I’ve done all this before, six years ago, and I was happy then, too. I love New York.

  Marci asks where my ideas come from and I know that she’s just making conversation but I start explaining anyway that ideas come from a parallel universe and as I’m really getting into it, just getting warmed up, talking about the mystery, the magic and even the miracle of creativity, a buzzer sounds and Marci says to go right in. She wasn’t paying attention anyway. People pretend but nobody cares. This too I have noticed.

  Sylvio is on the phone, that headset contraption they’re all using these days to free their hands. I sit down, opposite him and his desk, and he’s talking to a publisher, obviously, though from moment to moment I’m not sure if it’s me he’s addressing or the phone, and as he shoves a book in my direction I’m not sure whom he means when he asks, “Have you read it yet?”

  “Me?” I whisper.

  He nods.

  The book is titled Plaintiff and no, I haven’t read it and wonder why I’m being asked; I am here, I thought, to talk about my book, not someone else’s.

  “Robert Dunlap wrote it,�
� he says.

  Good for Robert Dunlap.

  Sylvio has a soft voice for a big man. He’s got a pink, baby-faced complexion and, especially when he’s seated, his body is shaped like a pear. He is rather fat but not jolly. He is the hottest literary agent in New York, but his reputation is not spotless. Time and Newsweek, or some such magazines, have taken swipes at him for being “an ambulance chaser.” When bad things happen to bad people, they go to Sylvio to turn their stories into books, the bad people do.

  So Sylvio is on the phone between me and the party on the line, and I remain confused.

  “We’ll talk it over during lunch,” he says and I shrug to ask if it’s me and he shakes his head that it’s not.

  “But he’s got a big name,” Sylvio is saying to the phone, “so don’t give me mid-list. We’ve been through all that and it’s time to talk turkey.”

  Is it time for me to get excited?

  “No,” Sylvio is saying, “we’ve already passed the eight hundred thousand dollar figure.” Sylvio wants a straight million. That figure makes headlines. After all, he says, “I’m not giving you some kid off the street. I’m giving you an established writer who turned out a prime-time book, never mind that movie.” Then Sylvio pulls out the ace: “Look, I’ve already got a million dollar offer from another house, so let’s stop playing games.”

  I did not know this, and yes, let’s stop playing games.

  “What do you think?” Sylvio says.

  “Me?”

  Yes, he’s talking to me.

  “A million bucks sound all right?”