I pictured what the hub airports would be like, with all their chain restaurants. I’d starve. The good news was, by the time the trip was over, I’d be skinnier than I’d been in years. If I wasn’t dead from starvation.
And, no, I guess it wasn’t the food, either, although that was certainly a preoccupation. It was everything. It was leaving behind all the comforts of home, not just the food. It was leaving behind the security of family, of friends, of routine to fly into the unknown with a man I had yet to spend more than several hours with at a single go.
“You seem so tense, Baby,” Billy said. “Just remember one thing.” He covered his hand with mine. “Whatever happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.”
Oh, brother.
“Welcome to Vegas, Baby,” Billy said, gallantly handing me out of the limousine he’d hired to speed us out from the airport.
Nothing had prepared me for the surrealness of the city as I’d gazed down at it from the airplane, the sudden nuclear glow of neon bursting out of the darkness of the surrounding desert.
“Wait until you approach it like that from the ground,” Billy said. “It’s the oddest driving experience in the world. You’re driving along in the desert and suddenly—boom!—bright lights, minicity.”
“You actually drive outside of the city sometimes when you go there to gamble?” I was shocked. My dad had mentioned many times over the years that there was plenty to do in the Vegas area—hiking, the Hoover Dam, chopper flights to the Grand Canyon, tours of the Ethel M Chocolate Factory and the Liberace Museum—but that he’d just never bothered to do any of it.
“Of course not,” Billy said. “I’ve just seen it like that coming in from the airport.”
If Billy had skimped on the airline, he certainly hadn’t skimped on anything else. Not only was the limo a white stretch with full bar in the back and liveried driver, but the hotel…
“It’s beautiful!” I jumped up and down, gazing up at its gold-toned monolithic twin structures. “I can’t believe we’re staying at THEhotel at Mandalay Bay!”
“You mean you’ve heard of it?” Billy sounded surprised.
“Well, no,” I admitted, “but I do like the eccentric way they spell the name, THEhot—”
“C’mon,” he said, grabbing my hand. “We’ll let the bellhop grab our things. Let’s go inside.”
“It’s beautiful!” I oohed again.
The lobby was indeed impressive, and not at all Las Vegas-y, what with its black walls, subtle lighting and overall eschewal of glitz. Not to mention…
“Is that a real Andy Warhol painting?”
“Try not to gape, Baby. Yes, it is. And that’s an authentic Jasper Johns, too. You didn’t think I’d take you to a dump, did you?”
I don’t know what I’d thought. My dad had always said that since you spent all your time in the casinos in Vegas, the room didn’t matter.
Suddenly, I wanted to see the room.
“Let’s go.” I tugged on his hand, tugging him toward the elevator banks.
“Let’s go see the casino first,” he said, distinctly tugging me in the other direction. “Don’t you want to see the casino first? It’s one hundred and thirty-five thousand square feet. Can you imagine how big that is? They have twenty-four hundred slot-video poker machines, they have one hundred and twenty-two table games—”
“Please?” I said. “I need to settle in first. There’ll be plenty of time for that later.”
His expression softened.
“Of course, Baby,” he said, “if you need to warm up to the place first.” He patted my hand. “Anything you need.”
“I love this room!” I said, flopping down on the cream-colored bedspread. It was huge! THEhotel at Mandalay Bay was an all-suite hotel and not only was there a giant plasma TV in our bedroom area, there was even one in our bathroom, as well! And the sitting room…which had a third TV…
“I could stay here all day,” I said, “or at least all night.”
He removed his tux from the garment bag, hung up the bag.
“Yes, well,” he said, “if we start that…” He went off to the bathroom, presumably to change. But who knows? Maybe he was going to watch some TV.
Prior to the trip, we hadn’t gone into the specifics of the sleeping arrangements. All I knew was that Billy had overridden my protests about paying my own way, saying, “Don’t be ridiculous, Baby. My talisman doesn’t pay her own way. What kind of person would I be if I expected you to accept such terms? And you needn’t worry about owing me a tit for my tat. Anything that happens between us in that regard is purely your decision.”
But of course as I’d seen firsthand that night at his cottage, it wasn’t my decision, not if when I made my decision he could easily say no to me.
“I don’t mind at all taking the couch in the sitting room,” he said, adjusting his black bow tie as he emerged from the bathroom. “It’s plenty long enough for me.”
“I just assumed…” I said.
“What?” He looked up. “That I’d booked two separate rooms?” He shrugged. “Well, it is a bit pricey.”
“No, I mean, I thought…”
“What? That we’d share the same bed? Look, why don’t we wait and see how things develop, shall we? I’m sure that, after a night down in the casino, well, anything might happen.”
He was right, wasn’t he? Hadn’t I come here to finally win enough for my Jimmy Choo Ghosts?
Still, something was stopping me.
“I just don’t feel…ready,” I said. “It was such a long flight, what with the layovers and all. I’m just worried that if I play now, I might…lose.”
I was thinking about the sad story my dad’s ATM receipts had told. And he even had an ATM machine with money in it to back him up! At least until he lost it all. I didn’t even have that. If I lost my stake the very first night, I’d be stuck here until Monday with no money. Certainly, I’d feel foolish asking Billy for money.
Apparently, he could be made to see reason, though, or maybe there was something in the word lose I’d used, because he surprised me by saying, “Oh. Well. We can’t have that.”
“Thank you! Thank you!” I said. I was so relieved I threw myself into his arms. “I’m sure that by tomorrow morning I’ll feel—”
“Yes. Well.” He gently peeled my arms off. “I think at the very least we should go downstairs and look at the casino, don’t you? That way the layout won’t be completely unfamiliar to you tomorrow morning. I mean, it can’t hurt you to just look, right?”
Of course, he was right. And he’d done so much for me already, paying for the trip, putting up with all my little idiosyncrasies without too much teasing. Why, he’d even had Diet Pepsi Lime on hand when I’d gone to visit him! When I thought about it, I realized he wasn’t really asking for very much.
“Just let me throw some water on my face to freshen up,” I said.
Then I noticed he looked antsy.
“Tell you what,” I said. “Rather than holding you up, why don’t you go down now, I’ll put my own things away so they don’t wrinkle any more than they have already, and I’ll meet you down there in a few minutes?”
“How will you find me in one hundred and thirty-five thousand square feet of casino?”
“You’ll be the man in the tux by the blackjack tables, right?”
Ka-ching!
It was difficult to tell, from the sound of the slots, whether more people were winning or losing. One thing was for certain: a lot of people were going to have sore right arms in the morning.
As I passed through the ocean of one-armed bandits and the roulette tables into the blackjack area, I craned my neck to find Billy among the multitude of gamblers. Despite that there were so many people crowded into the room, it being Friday night which was no doubt a hot time in the old town, I figured it wouldn’t be that hard to find a man in a tux. After all, America had long since gone the way of down style, so that most people dressed in jeans or khakis in places where form
ally you would have only found black tie or some other form of formal dress, meaning that with the exception of the pit bosses, Billy would be the only one in jacket and tie and his tie was even a bow tie, and not an old-fashioned bow tie like Tucker Carlson’s, but a really cool bow tie, a fuck-you bow tie. But what I hadn’t counted on was that the crush of people, combined with my own tiny stature, would make the task as difficult as finding a free chip on the floor. I mean, who drops a chip in a casino without noticing?
“Mine!” a man shouted, knocking me over as he insinuated himself between two gaming tables and stamping his foot on the ground just within bounds of the pit.
“I believe that is the House’s chip, sir,” a pit boss said, ringing the man’s ankle with his hand and stopping him cold.
“It’s mine, I tell you,” the man said. “I just dropped it.”
“Ohh, really?” the pit boss said, with a little more sarcasm than I felt the situation warranted. And, hey, wasn’t anyone going to help me up off the floor here? Crap. I guess I was going to have to do it myself…
“Then tell me,” the pit boss said, “what denomination is the chip?”
The man tried to wiggle his foot so he could see underneath it, but the pit boss held firm.
“It was a twenty-five,” the man said, a bead of sweat breaking out on his brow. “Yeah, that’s it,” he added. “It was a twenty-five.”
The pit boss lifted the man’s foot and with disdain set it down next to the chip.
“Sorry, sir,” he said, picking up the chip and not looking sorry at all, “but it looks like the chip you didn’t lose was a hundred. Perhaps you should have aimed higher? Better luck next time.”
“Crap,” the man muttered to himself. “Whatever happened to ‘finders keepers’?”
“Whatever happened to ‘you knock the lady down, you help her up’?” I countered with my own mutter.
“What did you say?” The man turned to me and now I could see him clearly for the first time, how disheveled he looked with his shirt half hanging out of his pants, a porkpie hat jammed on his head.
“You knocked me over.” I stood my ground.
But apparently my problems were secondary and I was incidental.
“Did you see what that jerk just did?” he said to me, muffling his angry voice enough so the pit boss wouldn’t overhear him. “He stole my chip!”
“Well, actually, I think he fairly successfully proved, even if he was a bit rude about it—”
“That was my chip! My last chip!”
“Oh, I’m sorry, but—”
“I was going to use it to stage the biggest comeback this town has ever seen!”
“Well, yes, I’m sure it would have been—”
“Hey, have you got some cash on you? You got a spare chip?”
“Well, no, I don’t have any chips. I just got here and—”
“What about the cash then?” He snapped his fingers. “Come on, come on.”
“Are you trying to mug me in the middle of a casino?”
“Mug? What are you talking about? I just figured, since it was your fault I lost my chip—”
“My fault? Your chip?”
“Of course.” He looked a combination of shocked and hurt. “If you hadn’t gotten in my way, I would have seen the exact denomination of that chip I lost and then that shyster could never have stolen it from me. I’ll bet he goes out for drinks after work tonight…on me.”
“I’m sure there must be rules that govern what a pit boss has to do when he finds a chip—”
“Come on, come on. Are you going to give me that fiver to make up for screwing up my night?”
“When did we agree on a fiver?”
“You’re not going to just give me a handful of change, are you? I suck at the slots.”
I was in a quandary. A part of me, the part with gumption, wanted to tell Mr. Porkpie to go scam someone else. But another part of me, the betting part, admired the idea of someone who could actually believe that all it would take would be five dollars to rebuild his fortunes and stage the biggest comeback Vegas had ever seen. Really, it took big balls to be as big of a jerk as this guy was being and it merited some kind of reward.
Reluctantly, I reached into my bag, located my purse. Then I opened it just the tiniest of cracks, for fear that if he saw what I had inside it, he’d be hitting me up for something bigger than a fiver.
“Thanks,” he said, with apparent relief when I handed over the bill. Now that he had what he wanted, the tension in his expression eased as though we’d gone from being sort-of adversaries to being sort-of friends. “You know,” he confided, “it really was my own damn fault.”
“That’s right,” I said righteously, glad he was finally admitting it. “If you hadn’t created so much bad karma by knocking me over—”
“What the fuck are you talking about? Get over it already! I meant I should never have forsaken my cardinal rule.”
“Which is?”
“Always keep a fiver in your sock and you’ll always have something to start over with.”
“But what if you lose that fiver? That’s what you’re going to do now, isn’t it, gamble some more?”
“Details. And, anyway, who said I was going to lose?”
“Well, you could.”
“And all I’m saying is, missy, you should always stash a fiver in your sock and no matter what happens, somehow, you’ll be okay.” He glanced down at my feet, took in my Momo Flats. I’d worn the shoes for luck and, inside them, I was sockless.
“Oh,” he said. “I guess it doesn’t apply to dames.”
“Who calls women dames anymore?”
But he ignored me. “Just put a fiver in your bra, missy, and you’ll always do okay.”
He was an odd person to be taking advice from, but it didn’t seem prudent to be ignoring obvious omens and as soon as he walked off to stage his comeback, I hightailed it to the nearest restroom and stuffed a fiver in my Victoria’s Secret. Hey, it didn’t pay to be too careful, I thought, jiggling my shoulders around a bit as I tried to get used to the feel of the crisp money scratching against my boobs before hitting the casino again.
Where was Billy?
“Would you care for a drink?”
No, the speaker wasn’t my purported date for the evening. It was a cocktail waitress in full casino mufti: towering heels, bustierlike leotard, hooker makeup and a feather or two.
“How do you walk in those things all night?” I asked, looking at her feet.
“Honey, if my bunions could talk, they’d say, ‘Cut it out, bitch,’ but lucky for me, they can’t talk or I’d be out of a job. Every time I turn around, they’d be flipping off some bozo or another.”
I giggled. “Can toes flip someone off?”
“Believe me, when toes have been abused as much as mine have, they become capable of just about anything.”
“Then why do you do it?”
“Are you kidding me?”
I shook my head.
“Well, let’s see…” She consulted the high ceiling, perhaps reading the smoke signals from all the cigarettes. “Medical school lost my application, being a call girl might involve some daytime work and I hate to work a split shift, and I’m not smart enough to take the dealer’s course.”
“If you’re smart enough to remember who gets which drink, I’d think you’d be smart enough to remember the basic rules of blackjack from the dealer’s standpoint. It’s pretty easy—draw to Sixteen, stand on Seventeen, if the player gets Twenty-one you pay back three to two and if the cards in the chute get low, reshuffle.”
“Too many numbers.” She shrugged. “Besides, it’s not like I really remember everyone’s drinks.”
“You don’t?”
“Hell, no. Oh, sure, I listen as well as I can, but mostly I just count how many people give me orders, then I order that many drinks from Charlie the bartender. And if Mr. Gin & Tonic ends up with Mr. Rum & Coke’s drink, who’s there to complain?”
>
“You mean the customers don’t mind?”
“Nah, so long as it’s a guy and he hasn’t lost too much, I just wiggle a feather or two at him and he takes what ever I give him.”
“But the women do mind?”
“It all depends.” Another shrug. “Some do, some don’t. I think some of the ladies like the feathers, too.”
“Have you seen a gorgeous guy in a tux? Tall? Blond hair? Talks with a slightly British accent?”
“You mean Mr. Club Soda?”
I had no idea, but it sounded like Billy, at least when he was gambling.
But how did she remember his drink when she couldn’t remember anyone else’s? Oh yeah, that’s right: Billy’s charisma was memorable.
“Okay,” I said. “That’s him.”
“Last time I saw him, he was down that second aisle over there—” she pointed “—third blackjack table on the left.”
“Thanks.”
“So, do you want that drink?”
“Sure.” I thought about it. “Can I get a diet cola with lime squeezed into it.”
“I don’t see why not. Just don’t be upset if I come back with a Seven-Up with lemon in it. Or if I don’t find you again. That sometimes happens, too.”
As she went off to maybe get my drink, I looked for Billy down the second aisle at the third blackjack table on the left. But Billy wasn’t there.
Where was Billy?
I circled the entire blackjack area, weaving in and out between the tables, but I couldn’t find him anywhere. Maybe, I started to think, I kept just missing him? Maybe, as I was desperately searching to find him, he was desperately searching for me?
That’s it, I thought, coming to a stop with my back to the blackjack table that was most centrally located. I would just stand there and wait until he showed up. The Native Americans, formerly known as the American Indians, used to say that if you stayed in one spot long enough, eventually the whole world would come by. I didn’t actually believe this was true—I mean, what were the chances that the Dalai Lama or the Pope or Tom Jones was going to just walk by?—and I wasn’t even sure the Native Americans had ever really said or believed that. It was just something I’d read in a book. All I knew was that despite the fact that I wasn’t burdened with the towering heels of the cocktail waitress, and even though I was wearing my gloriously comfortable Momo Flats, my dogs were tired after a day of travel and now a night of standing. Surely, if I just stayed in one spot and didn’t move, surely if Billy was looking as hard for me as I was looking for him, the man of my dreams would find me right where I was standing.
Baby Needs a New Pair of Shoes Page 18
