Going in Style

by Robert Grossbach

  “Whoa! What’s that rumblin’?” asked Al. He was next to a window.

  “You askin’ me?” said Joe, trying to keep his teeth from chattering.

  “I think the plane’s fallin’ apart.”

  They began to move down the runway. “Just close your eyes,” said Joe. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “I see the wing,” said Al, his voice rising. “It’s vibratin’ like crazy.” They picked up speed. “I think we’re shakin’ ourselves to pieces!”

  The scenery outside began to blur. Runways, towers, other aircraft merged into a strung-out, ghostly continuum. “Oh, my God,” said Al softly. “Oh, my God… Oh, my God…”

  The deafening racket lessened, and the immense metal bird lifted gracefully from the ground.

  “Oh, shit!” yelled Al.

  They rose at a steep angle through the sultry afternoon air. Moments later, they were at a thousand feet, and still climbing.

  Al turned to Joe, who hadn’t uttered a word. “That was all right,” he said.

  Joe nodded stiffly. “Didn’t bother me at all,” he lied.

  Al gazed out the window. “Amazin’,” he said. “The people look like ants.”

  “Must be ants you’re seein’,” said Joe. “We ain’t that high yet.”

  “Only one thing bothers me,” said Al.

  “What’s that?”

  “The captain. When he said, ‘We’ll be back to see you all later.’ Now, did he mean the whole crew at the same time?”

  13

  A Run of Luck

  It was dusk when they landed at McCarran Airport. By the time they’d gotten a taxi and were heading down the Strip, it was dark. Right from the beginning, Vegas was spectacular. A light show of unexcelled tawdriness, a decadent, rococo mecca of sleaze before you were halfway down its first street.

  “Hey, look, there’s the Tropicana!” said Al, as they rode by a giant, brightly flashing marquee. “And there’s the Aladdin!”

  They passed Flamingo Road and turned onto Las Vegas Boulevard. Wayne Newton, announced the crimson sign at the Sands. Vic Damone, countered a huge, blinking ochre panel at Caesars Palace.

  “I heard of these places,” said Joe. “Don’t Johnny Carson always appear here?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Al. “Look, there’s the Riviera!”

  Win a Car, 25$ advertised a sign. Welcome Teamsters. Free Aspirin. Penny Slots. Craps. Casino. Hugo’s Rotisserie.

  “You know where you’re goin’ yet?” asked the cab driver. At the airport, they’d told him to just drive through town until they made up their minds.

  “Maybe you could recommend something?” said Joe. The violent lighting had somehow intimidated him.

  “It all depends what you’re lookin’ for,” said the driver. “Different places feature different things. You wanna gamble, there’s a hundred joints you could pick. You wanna meet girls, the same. You lookin’ just to relax, to swim, to sun, that’s a different story. You lookin’ for cheap, that’s another ballgame. It’s all according, see.”

  “I think we’re mainly looking to gamble,” said Al. “But the other things are good, too.”

  The driver seemed to consider. “Well… there’s a new place on Charleston Boulevard, opened maybe three weeks ago. They probably ain’t booked yet. You wanna try there?”

  “Sounds good to me,” said Al.

  The taxi made a right turn and three blocks later stopped at the entrance of the Aces Up hotel. The marquee supported a sign fifty feet high depicting a cowboy shooting at an ace-of-spades playing card. The 5000 multicolored incandescent lights that comprised the sign had the eye-numbing intensity of flashbulbs. A constant stream of cars stopped at the curb, and dozens of well-dressed men and glamorous women swept in and out of the lobby.

  A uniformed man opened the door of Joe and Al’s cab. Al grinned at him sheepishly while Joe paid the cabbie. The doorman signaled a bellhop, who removed their suitcase from the trunk. “I’ll bring this inside for you, sir,” said the boy.

  Al smiled amiably. The doorman rocked back and forth on his heels. He cleared his throat. A tip, Al suddenly realized. Of course, that’s what he was waiting for. Al reached in his pocket, handed the man a five-dollar bill.

  “Thank you, sir!” said the doorman, and he ushered Joe and Al inside.

  The lobby was shrouded by velvet carpeting that featured red and yellow aces of the various suits. Just about every available surface was covered; the carpet crept from floor to walls to ceiling. The front desk was carpeted, as were the doors of the men’s and ladies’ rooms. Carpeting ran up the sides of the gushing, multi-jetted, spotlighted center fountain onto the base of the life-sized Sammy Davis Jr. statue, and into the bank of public telephones. It folded over the garbage pails and standup ashtrays, and enclosed a machine that measured your blood pressure for a quarter.

  “Owner must be in the rug business,” said Al. Automatically, he was drawn to the only uncar-peted area in the lobby—the glass doors of the casino.

  “Go ahead, look around,” said Joe. “Ill check us m.

  At the desk, he waited several moments before a clerk noticed him. “Do you have a reservation, sir?”

  “No, I dont,” said Joe.

  “Is this a single room you’ll be wanting, then?”

  “Yeah, one room, that’s all,” said Joe.

  “No, I mean, will more than one person be occupying the room?”

  “Yeah,” said Joe. “Sure. Me and my friend.”

  The clerk consulted a ledger. “Well, we have a double room available in the Hearts wing for the next three nights. Will that be okay?”

  “Fine,” said Joe. He signed in.

  “And will this be cash or charge?” asked the clerk.

  “Cash.”

  “We’ll need one day’s deposit, sir, if you don’t mind. Just step to the cashier’s window.”

  Joe paid the deposit, then returned to Al, who was still peering through the casino doors. A panorama of roulette wheels, blackjack tables, craps tables, miniskirted waitresses, women dealers, and ace-shaped chandeliers spread out before them.

  “Just like in the movies, eh?” said Joe.

  “Last time I seen so many people in one place was the Forty-Second-Street Cafeteria,” said Al. “And the women! They’re all fallin’ out of their dresses.”

  “Come on,” said Joe, “Let’s go upstairs and check into the room.”

  “I think I’ll stay here,” said Al.

  “Never mind.” Joe signaled the bellhop, who was waiting with their suitcase. “You were feeling tired earlier?”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “So now’s the time to take a nap.”

  “And what’re you doing?”

  Joe shrugged. “Oh, I guess I’ll go up and change my clothes.”

  “And then?”

  “And then, maybe, come down and try my luck,” added Joe, grinning.

  Al laughed. “Forget that nap nonsense. I think them vitamins just hit me.”

  In the room, they changed quickly into sport jackets and slacks. Al put on his bow tie, then wandered into the bathroom while Joe was tying his shoelaces.

  “Hey, they got two different lights in here,” called Al. “One’s regular, one’s pink.”

  “I think the pink one’s supposed to help you dry off after a shower,” said Joe.

  Al emerged shaking his head. “Next thing, they’ll have a lamp in the toilet so’s to make things interesting when you pee.”

  Five minutes later they were standing in the casino. Surrounding them was a tableau of spinning roulette wheels, chain-smoking women who held stacks of blue and white chips, expertly manicured blackjack dealers, squint-eyed pit bosses and slot-men, convention members with pinned-on name tags, hyped-up newlyweds on honeymoons, matrons on tour with B’nai B’rith, vacationing electrical engineers with “systems,” shills paid by the house to sit and gamble, floorwalkers and shift bosses, narrow-tied craps stickmen.

  “If the co
ps just came in and arrested everyone,” said Al, “I’ll bet they wouldn’t go far wrong. This here is the most wicked looking place since Sodom and Gomorrha.”

  “Oh, yeah?” said Joe. “Did you see that, too? Besides, you ain’t even been next door yet.” He pointed to an ace-shaped exit. “I hear they got over a thousand slot machines in there.”

  Al grinned. “You ready to play?”

  Joe nodded. “Let’s knock ‘em dead.”

  They began with roulette, betting various combinations of numbers and colors, and became bored after losing a hundred dollars. “This here is basically for women and children,” said Joe as they left the table. “This, keno, and the slots keeps ‘em busy while the men do the real gamblin’.”

  “What’s the real gambling?” said Al.

  Joe sat down at a blackjack table. “Right here’ll get us a good start.”

  A grim-faced dealer peeled out cards. The table had a minimum bet of one dollar, a maximum of five hundred dollars. There were positions for six players, although two of the chairs were unoccupied. “I used to play this as a kid,” said Al, “but I forgot how it goes.”

  A sign lettered on the table said: Dealer must stand on 17 and must draw to 16. A player on the extreme right said, “Double down.” Another man called, “Stand,” and then it was Joe’s turn. “Hit me,” he said, and crooked a finger. He had bet three hundred dollars. His hole card was a seven, his face-up card an eight. Now he glared disgustedly at the card he’d been dealt, a nine. He was over twenty-one. Busted. He stood up. “Enough of this,” he said. “Time to move to a man’s game.”

  “I thought you said this was a man’s game,” challenged Al.

  “You listen to everything I tell you?” said Joe.

  They edged over to one of the large craps tables. Eight bettors and five dealers, casino employees, stood around it. Al watched as the bettors placed chips in various boxes marked on the green felt surface. A man chewing on a cigar threw two dice up against the padded end of the table.

  “EEE-eight!” shouted one of the casino men, holding the dice trapped with a curved stick. “Pay the line!”

  Two other dealers collected and disbursed varying quantities of chips. When the new bets were placed, the stickman released the dice to the cigar-chewer, who rolled them again.

  “Nine!” yelled the stickman. “The point is nine.”

  More bets were placed. Again, the dice were thrown.

  “Yo-leven!”

  Al turned to Joe. “You follow this?”

  “It looks the same like we used to play during the first World War. I learned it in France.” Joe chuckled. “We played it in the halls in the hospital.”

  “F-i-i-i-i-ive!” called the stickman.

  “I’ll explain it to you,” Joe told Al. “Basically, your first roll is called a come-out. You roll a seven or eleven on the come-out, you win immediately. You roll a two, three, or twelve, you lose. If you roll somethin’ else, that’s called your point. The whole idea then is to shoot your point again before you roll a seven. Do that, and you win. Roll a seven, you lose.”

  “That’s all there is to it?” said Al. “And all these years I never gambled because I always figured the rules was too crazy.”

  Joe’s eyes sparkled. “It ain’t the rules that kill you,” he said, “it’s the bettin’.” He reached into his pocket and withdrew a thick wad of bills. To one of the dealers, he said, “We’d like to get a thousand dollars worth of chips, please.”

  The dealer stacked the bills neatly and crisply, then handed them to the boxman, who quickly examined and counted them. The boxman nodded, and the dealer shoved four stacks of chips over to Joe.

  “Sevvv-en!” chanted the stickman, at the next throw of the dice.

  “He loses, right?” said Al, as losing bets were cleared off the table.

  “Hey, I got it!” He looked over at the cigar-chewer, who glared at him. When he returned his gaze sheepishly to the table, he saw that the stickman had shoved five dice in front of Joe’s chips.

  “Is it your turn?” Al asked.

  “No, yours,” said Joe, smiling.

  “What?”

  “Go. Play.”

  “What do I do?”

  “Take two of the dice and throw ‘em.”

  Al meekly reached for two dice, and the stickman swept the others away.

  “You gonna bet?” Al asked Joe.

  Joe nodded. He moved two fifty-dollar chips onto a space on the felt marked Pass Line. “A hundred on the line,” he said. “See Al, I’m bettin’ you’re gonna win. Throw ‘em nice, now.”

  Al threw the dice in the air, a hesitant, feeble toss that carried only halfway down the table.

  “Fi-ive!” called the stickman. “The point is five.”

  “Now you gotta get a five before you get a seven,” said Joe. He turned to the dealer. “You give odds on the five?”

  “Three to two, sir.”

  “All right,” said Joe. “I’d like to put another two hundred on the five. Where do I do that?”

  The dealer pointed to a space directly behind Joe’s original bet. “One hundred only, sir. Can’t bet more than your initial wager when you take the odds.”

  Joe placed two more fifty-dollar chips where the man had indicated, and the stickman swept the dice back to Al. “Sir, could you throw them so that they bounce off the wall at the other end of the table?”

  “Helps stop cheatin’,” whispered Joe.

  “I’ll try,” said Al stiffly. He smiled nervously at the dealer. “It’s still my turn?”

  The dealer nodded, and Al threw the dice. They smacked into the end wall of the table and caromed crazily back to the center.

  “Ten! Easy ten.” The stickman shoved the dice back to Al.

  “Again?” said Al, looking at Joe, who nodded.

  Another toss.

  “EEE-eight!”

  Once more, Al threw.

  “Fi-i-ive!” intoned the stickman. “Pay the line.”

  Joe clapped Al on the shoulder. “Hey! Attaboy!”

  “What happened? We win?”

  “That’s right.”

  The dealer placed a small stack of new chips in front of them, and the stickman returned the dice to Al. “You’re still up, sir.”

  Joe placed three hundred-dollar chips on the Pass Line space. “This says my friend is gonna throw ‘em right.”

  Al smiled and threw.

  “Sevv-en! Pay the line!”

  “Al!” shouted Joe. “You’re doing all right.” He added the three new hundred-dollar chips the dealer gave him to his stack.

  “We won again, huh?”

  “You gettin’ bored?”

  Al smiled. “This is easy.”

  “Another three hundred on the line for my friend,” said Joe, shoving forward the chips. Al threw the dice.

  “Sevv-en! Pay the line!”

  Joe turned slowly to look at Al, and a woman, showing exceptional cleavage smiled at him from across the table. When Joe said, “Five hundred on lucky fingers over here,” she matched his chips at the Pass Line.

  Al flung the dice with exaggerated carelessness.

  “Yo-leven!” called the stickman.

  “Uh-oh,” said Al. He was surprised when the dealer piled five new hundred-dollar chips in front of him. “You mean that was good?”

  “Sure,” said Joe. “Remember what I told you? Seven or eleven wins on the first roll.”

  “But I been throwin’ for a long time.”

  “No, no. When you win, the next toss is considered like you’re goin’ the first time again.”

  “I see, I see,” said Al.

  “You don’t have to see nothin’,” said Joe. “Just keep burnin’ in them dice.” He moved a thousand dollars worth of chips onto the Pass Line.

  “Five hundred dollar limit, sir,” said the dealer.

  “You gotta be kidding,” said Joe. “What is this, a kid’s game?”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” said th
e dealer. “That’s the limit for this table. You can bet on as many different numbers as you like, but only up to five hundred dollars on each.”

  There was something about the man’s voice, his tone, that sent a subliminal tingling down Joe’s spine. Impulsively, he snatched back his thousand dollars, and bet instead a single twenty-five dollar chip. “Okay, pal. This says my friend hits it again. Go ahead, Al.”

  Al grew tense. “Something wrong?”

  “No, no. Not at all.”

  “But how come—”

  “Just roll.”

  Al threw the dice. The upturned faces showed a one and a two. “Craps!” called the stickman.

  The dealers cleared off the losing bets. The woman with the cleavage, who had withdrawn her wager when Joe had reduced his, called out, “Come on, honey!”

  “I’m feeling lucky,” said Joe. “Let’s go for all the numbers.”

  “What’s that?” asked Al.

  “I’ll show you,” said Joe. He leaned forward and began depositing stacks of chips on boxes marked with individual digits. “Five hundred on the four, five hundred on the five, five hundred on the six, the eight, the nine, and… five hundred on the ten.” He sat back.

  Many of the other bettors were now staring at Joe and Al. The cleavage woman bet fifty-dollar chips at all the points Joe had covered. A tall man with a Stetson hat did the same with hundred dollar chips.

  “What do I gotta get?” asked Al.

  “All you have to do is roll one of these numbers before you throw a seven,” said Joe. “Simple.”

  “Are you ready, gentlemen?” asked the stickman.

  “We sure are,” said Joe.

  “My friend thinks we are,” said Al.