Swimming with Bridgeport Girls

by Anthony Tambakis

  She rinsed the remaining shampoo from my hair and stood up. “OK, you,” she said. “Take me shopping or take me to bed.”

  When I asked Bob Mota for another limo, he grinned tightly and said, “See if you can’t get this one back to us, hey, Raoul?” and then we were off down the Strip. I was feeling dreamy again because of the drugs, and I stared out the window at clusters of families inching their way down the sidewalks, sweating all over their fanny packs in the heat of the desert evening. You couldn’t help but wonder who took their children to Las Vegas in the flaming heart of the summertime. Or any time, for that matter. The chamber of commerce goes out of its way to make the place seem kid-friendly, sure, but Vegas is Vegas. I mean, if a madam put a kiddie pool behind the bordello, would it really change what was happening in the house?

  In the least surprising news of the day, Coco hadn’t shown up for work, so we had a new driver named Lyle. He was all sideburns and self-confidence and chatted up Renée while I contemplated giving her some money, dropping her off, and hotfooting it back to the MGM to hit the tables. She was extremely excited for her shopping spree and firing on all cylinders, blasting through topics even faster than she usually did. Did I think it was strange that roses had the shame shape when they were dead as they did before they bloomed? Why was Arkansas pronounced Arkan-saw and not Ar-Kansas? Why are all girls named Sam nice and all girls named Alex bitches? Would The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo have been as sexy if she didn’t have any tattoos? Should Renée herself get a tattoo? I tried to pay attention, but there was something gnawing at me, some vague recollection of something L had said on the answering machine when I’d heard it the night before. Something about how, if it was the police calling, she had no information about me, which seemed unnecessary to put on an outgoing message. She also said she’d be unreachable, which I didn’t like the sound of now that it was coming back to me. Time did seem of the essence all of a sudden.

  Renée socked me in the arm. “Lyle just asked you a question. Geez. You’re like that old-timey song with that Major Tom guy who bit the radish.”

  “Man, I got high as fuck to that song a couple weeks ago,” Lyle said.

  That reminded me I had a loose joint in my pocket. I asked whether he minded if I fired up, and he said, “Hell no—that’s the best thing I’ve seen all day,” before adjusting the rearview, eyeballing Renée, and adding with a grin, “Well, second best.” He was a good-looking kid and a very smooth character. I had no doubt he had limo stories to tell.

  Renée took a drag and blew the smoke into my mouth, but my throat was too swollen to take it, and I started hacking.

  “Dude, you sound like you’ve got pneumonia,” Lyle said.

  “He’s very sick. I’m his nurse.”

  “Where’s your uniform, then?”

  “I’m not, like, a real nurse. I’m just taking care of him. And not in a pervy way, either,” Renée snapped.

  “Whatever it is, it’s not a bad deal,” said Lyle. “What’s a guy gotta do to get his own personal nurse?”

  I kept coughing. There was no end to it in sight.

  “You know, I feel like I’ve definitely seen you somewhere before, dude,” he continued.

  “He’s in plastics,” Renée said. She sounded so proud that for a minute I kind of wished I were in plastics.

  “You sure you’re not an actor or something? You look like someone I saw on TV.”

  “He could be an actor. He’s, like, good-looking enough.”

  “I swear I’ve seen your face before. I don’t know. Let me hit that thing again.”

  Lyle took a professional toke and passed the joint back to Renée.

  Renée took a toke. Looked at me seriously. “What do you call the guy who takes back your car if you don’t make your payments?”

  “A repo man?”

  “Reeeeeeepo man,” she said, cracking up for no apparent reason, though there didn’t seem to be any logic to the question in the first place.

  Before I could put together what was so funny about a repo man, we pulled into the driveway at Caesars, rolled past a twenty-foot statue of Julius Caesar himself, and cruised alongside the fifty-foot Italian cypresses that line the drive. I think the limo was still moving when Renée whipped her door open and starting dashing under the geodesic dome out in front and on into the casino, where girls dressed like Cleopatra and guys in gladiator getups meandered around the floor. It was all I could do to keep up with her. You have never seen anyone so excited in your life.

  “Hey, Raoul, look! I’m kicking this gladiator’s butt.”

  She had stopped her sprint toward the Forum Shops and was playfully punching a guy with arms as big as my thighs. He wore the put-upon expression of a classically trained actor forced to slum it until the world recognized his prodigious talent. He gave Renée a once-over and said, “I’m not a gladiator, baby, I’m a centurion.”

  She said, “Whatever,” and pulled me through the casino by my good hand, though I had to stop her short at one point when I was overcome by another coughing jag. Renée pounded me on the back, yelling, “Shake it off! Shake it off!” like a football coach, before charging on past a couple of empty craps tables and into a gold and marble foyer where a replica statue of Michelangelo’s David stood. A cluster of Canadian girls wearing backpacks and hiking boots were standing around the base of it, giggling and pointing. I heard one of them say, “Not much of a pecker, eh?”

  Renée walked over to read the plaque at the base of the statue. All the Canadian girls stopped talking and looked at her critically. She was wearing white short shorts, a tiny black tank top, white sneaker-shoes with four-inch soles, and the kind of big black bubble shades Jackie Kennedy used to wear after things fell apart in Dallas. The Canadians rolled their eyes and walked off, one of them sticking her finger down her throat, one throwing her chest out, and the others laughing. It pissed me off. Canadians are usually better than that. Renée was oblivious to them. “Hey, sickly, guess how high this statue is?”

  “Five feet,” I said.

  “Seriously.”

  “Five-six.”

  “Uh, I’m five-six. You’re not even in the whatchamacallit. The ballpark. It’s eighteen feet. Guess how much it weighs.”

  “Twelve pounds.”

  “Twelve pounds! It says it’s, like, an exact replica made with the same Italian marble. Listen. ‘David is an exact replica made with the same Italian marble.’ See? So how can it be twelve pounds? It’s marble. I mean, I’m a hundred and eight and a half!”

  “Twenty pounds, then.”

  “You’re impossible,” she said. “It’s nine tons. Eighteen feet, nine tons.”

  “How much is a ton?” I said, amusing myself, because every time you asked her a question, you were seconds away from solid entertainment.

  “A ton? I don’t know. But it’s a lot, ’cause every time somebody says something’s heavy, they say, ‘This thing weighs a ton,’ you know? So a ton must be, like, insane.”

  “So he’s eighteen feet, nine tons,” I said. “Some underdog.”

  “Whatever, goofy. Let’s roll.”

  She dragged me past the Cartier window and Le Paradis, and then through another deserted stretch of casino before we ended up amid the piazzas, statues, and fountains of the Caesars Palace Forum Shops, the mother of upscale malls. Above me, a ceiling painted like an afternoon sky was moving around, swirling and swaying, and I thought for certain it was the painkillers playing tricks on me until Renée pointed up and said that the roof of the Forum Shops shifts from day to night over a stretch of three hours. Another flashy and pointless Vegas gimmick.

  “The girl who cuts my hair for free ’cause she’s a student and they make them told me that,” she said proudly.

  I pulled out two $10,000 straps I had brought along and handed them to her. Her hands started shaking as if I had just plopped a pair of grenades in them.

  “No way,” she said.

  “Way. But I’m feeling a little
weak. I’m just gonna sit over by the fountain for a little while. I’ll be right over there. At Bertolini’s. Knock yourself out.”

  “This is the coolest thing ever,” she said, kissing me. “You’re such a babe.”

  Then she marched across the mall. Outside of watching Bruce fetch a tennis ball, I’d never seen such a blend of joy and determination in my life. I walked past Spago and sat at a table outside Bertolini’s, where I ordered hot tea for my throat and checked out the marble statues of Greek gods behind me while I waited. There were angry bearded men wielding tridents and winged horses in midflight and all manner of ancient madness. Renée waved at me from the Versace store, then proceeded to do the same thing from the windows of Bernini, Gucci, Escada, and Salvatore Ferragamo, where she held up a black leather shoulder bag and hollered, “Whatcha think, Raoul?” across the plaza. At some point during the twentieth century, possibly on the eve of the end of one great war or another, there may have been a human being who was equally happy, but it’s inconceivable to imagine anyone more so.

  I rested my head on the table, and a surly waiter, irritated that I had ordered only tea, tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Try and stay awake, guy.” I reached into my pocket and produced a C-note, which I held up between my index and middle fingers without raising my head. The money exited my hand, the waiter put the tea on the table and said, “Rest is actually the best remedy for a cold,” and if I failed to adequately describe exactly what kind of town Vegas is, there you have it.

  Sometime later (minutes, hours, who really knows), Renée woke me. She was clutching a couple of armfuls of bags and beaming like Mother Sunshine. She showed me some of her purchases, then insisted I get something for myself, dragging me into Hugo Boss for a three-button black suit she said was “too hot for words.” Next was Kenneth Cole for some shoes, and then to bebe, where she attracted the attention of every straight male in the place (and even some boys who might have been on the fence) by trying on a series of belly chains. She then ran into Bulgari to try on watches, and I stood outside, where a cluster of statues suddenly started moving. Then the ceiling went dark and lightning ripped across it. Trumpets started blaring and operatic voices rose from the fountains, and then a statue of an old sage in a toga came to life and a voice boomed out, “Atlantis! His kingdom was destroyed by foolish pride!”

  It was too much for a hungover, drug-addled, bronchial catastrophe to deal with, so I wandered off alone, past the Gap, where chipper workers were busy putting out fall jackets and sweaters despite the ungodly heat outside. A Gap girl put a lemon-and-lime-striped sweater around my neck and said, “These colors totally work for you.” I shrugged the sweater off and walked on toward FAO Schwarz, where I stopped to get my bearings in front of a giant replica Trojan horse. It was then I heard someone say, “Mr. Parisi?” behind me.

  I don’t know why I turned around. There was no possible benefit to it. But it was hard to keep track of, the Raoul McFarland thing, and your instincts tend to take over when you hear your name whether you’re fucked-up on pills or not. There was also the fact that it was Mr. Parisi, which was generally something people used to call my father. No one called me Mr. Parisi. I was always Ray. Even the interns at ESPN called me Ray without my having to tell them to. I just wasn’t the kind of guy anyone called Mr. I mean, I couldn’t remember the last time anyone had ever used it. Until I turned around. And then it dawned on me exactly where the last time I heard it was. “Miles?”

  It was Miles Smithson, the shortstop who’d booted the grounder that had started the fifth-inning unraveling of the Little League World Series championship game. Stu Lock was the son of an air force officer. He insisted on protocol. He made everyone call him Mr. Lock and me Mr. Parisi. It was a nonnegotiable thing before I came on as a coach.

  Miles nodded without smiling. I tried to recall something about him, but all that came to mind was that he was a beady-eyed, humorless little bastard with a cannon for a right arm. That and the fact that he was a dead ringer for the runt who fell off the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in Saturday Night Fever.

  “How you doing, man? How’s the old wing?” I said, touching his right shoulder. “You go on to play college ball?”

  “I blew it out in high school,” he said.

  I shook my head sympathetically. “That sucks.”

  “You know what also sucks? Having everyone think you’re a fag when you’re twelve years old.”

  “What?”

  “That shit you said about it being cool if we were gay? You looked right at me when you said it.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Yeah, you fucking did. Next thing you know, you’re Johnny Television, and I’m in line for ten years’ worth of queer jokes.”

  “That wasn’t my intention,” I said. “I was just trying to calm you guys down. Everyone started crying after—”

  “I booted that gimme. Thanks for reminding me.”

  “That’s not what I was gonna say.”

  A couple of guys in matching Yankees caps and Derek Jeter tank tops came strolling over. Friends of his. They looked as humorless as Miles was.

  “Take a guess who this is,” he said to them.

  The Yankees looked me over. Shrugged in unison.

  “Ray Parisi.”

  “Who?”

  “Ray Parisi.”

  “From ESPN?”

  They sized me up. Looked at the cast.

  “You’re in deep shit, man. Fucking everybody’s looking for you.”

  “Yeah, they are,” said Miles, smiling for the first time in his life. “I bet there’s a pretty big reward, too.”

  I offered a weak smile before slowly turning on one heel, casually resting my hand on the Trojan horse, and then dashing off into the heart of the mall, dropping my bags as I ran. Lightning continued to rip across the ceiling, and thunder cracked as I raced through the crowd and Miles and the boys from the Bronx gave chase. The ridiculous Atlantis show worked to my benefit, since the shoppers were all clustered and staring straight up and the mall was dark.

  I did a nice spin move around some jewelry carts and ended up in front of Kenneth Cole, where I stuffed a couple of hundreds in the hand of the salesman who’d sold me shoes. Without explanation, he led me to the employee bathroom and shut the door behind me. I sat on the toilet in the dark and caught my breath. After a minute or two, I decided to check my texts while I waited for the coast to be clear of shortstops from summers past.

  It was the usual. People asking about Belmont Park. ESPN colleagues looking for an interview. Threats from Bing Buli, who was combing Vegas for me. Guilt trips from Dawn, ending with one that read, “I would have loved you if you let me. Goodbye, Ray.” And then one from L saying, “We need to talk,” which are four words that have never managed to appear next to each other and connote any kind of positive feeling whatsoever. I started erasing them all. As I was flushing the sewage of drama and disappointment from my phone, the door to the bathroom eased open and the salesman hit me with an “OK” sign. I handed him whatever loose bills I had left in my pocket and scurried back out through the mall, where the sky on the ceiling had returned to blue and announcements of lost kingdoms and foolish pride were momentarily past. I made it out of the Forum Shops, through the Caesars casino, and hopped back into the limo, where Lyle was waiting.

  “Where’s the nurse?”

  “She went to do some volunteer work,” I said.

  “Volunteering to spend some of your money, maybe. Where to?”

  “Base camp.”

  “Right on. You got any more weed on you?” he asked.

  “Not on me. I’ll hook you up later, though.”

  “Sweet. Hey, let me ask you: You the dude who was with that fag Coco last night?”

  I looked out the window as we pulled onto Vegas Boulevard. Cowboy Bob was back on the sidewalk in front of the Imperial Palace, his broken body jerking this way and that amid the neon chaos. Tourists walked around his chair, ignoring him. I though
t again of Howie Rose. What if it was him? I mean, if someone were putting him out there to collect money, they wouldn’t use his real name. They’d stick a stupid hat on him and call him Cowboy Bob or something equally pathetic, wouldn’t they?

  “You hear me, dude?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Coco. You the guy who was with Coco last night?”

  “He was our driver, yeah,” I said.

  “Fuck happened to him? Pole smoker totally flaked. They just found his ride out near Barstow.”

  I closed my eyes and laid my head back as we inched up the boulevard in bumper-to-bumper traffic. “I don’t know,” I sighed, staring back at Howie Rose/Cowboy Bob. “I really don’t know what could have happened.”

  CLOSURE

  February 11

  . . . then he left some crazy note about how he was starting to read the Bible because he wanted to take an interest in the things I was taking an interest in. He read a little bit of the New Testament and concluded that Peter was worse than Judas. Judas had sold Jesus out for thirty pieces of silver, he said, but he had felt bad about it and hanged himself, so that made it OK, whereas Peter kept denying Jesus, and then when the coast was clear, he was right back by his side as if nothing had happened. So that was his takeaway from the New Testament. That Peter was a jerk, and Judas got a bad rap.

  WHEN I GOT BACK TO the MGM, I signed for a quarter million and started playing $10,000 per hand, three hands at a time, right off the bat. The casino was relatively empty, nothing like the night before, and neither were the cards. I’d win two hands, lose two. When I caught a nice shoe, a shit shoe followed. I’d get up a little, give it back. Get down a little, win it back. Mota and a couple of the pit bosses stood nearby with their arms crossed, waiting impatiently for a collapse. In the back of my mind, I knew that if it came down to it, I could arrange to play one hand, win the Kinder House, or go bust, but I never really thought about doing it like that. I had won the first $650,000 so easily that it didn’t seem like it would be long before another run came along and I’d get where I needed to be. If I went for it all and lost, it would all be over, and I couldn’t bear to think about that.