Pocket Kings

by Ted Heller

  “It’s the Stoolometer,” Rusty said, handing it to Second. “You drop a number two into the toilet and you stick it into the water and it weighs your product. It’s correct to the quarter ounce or your money back. This here is the simplest one. The Stoolometer-Plus you don’t got to insert into the water each time . . . it just fixes right into the bowl just so. We got one version out there now that’s even got the Bluetooth, too.”

  He told us how, even though American retailers wouldn’t go near it, millions had been sold here and in South America, Europe, and Asia, and about the tons of money he’s made and the new life he’s living, and I thought of all the books, short stories, plays, screenplays, and poems I’d slaved over. I had once wasted three months of my life writing a twenty-five-page postmodern epic poem called Thirteen Ways of First Looking into Keats’ “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.” And for what? Big Tex here had a brand-new life and many millions, and all I had was a fragment of my dignity.

  “Well, nice meetin’ ya,” he said with a sly wink. “Hope to see ya again real soon.”

  We watched him walk down the hallway with his giggly, sparkly, high-heeled escorts.

  We took a taxi to the Luxor—Second wailing and air-strumming Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” en route—where we hung around a dice table, each of us afraid to take the first plunge, and decided not to play. We walked up to Caesar’s Palace and thought of playing blackjack—even concocting a reasonably good card-counting system—but didn’t, agreeing that, when you’ve played as much poker as the four of us (combined, had we played over a million hands?), blackjack just seems too monotonous and luck-based. We crossed over to the Flamingo and hung around the dice tables again. Craps had always seemed the safest and most fun casino game to play, but it no longer would bring me any real satisfaction. The pit crew carefully gathering and doling out chips, marking whose chips are where, making sure loaded dice hadn’t been slipped into the game—it took too long between rolls. When I used to go to the track with Harry or with my family, the half-hour between races seemed to last two hours; now the minute or so between dice rolls seemed like half an hour. I missed the rat-a-tat blitz of online poker.

  And I wasn’t the only one.

  “Shit,” Cookie whispered to me as we looked on, “this takes forever.”

  “I know,” I said. “It’s really slow. And you just cursed.”

  “Yeah, I know I did, but I’m just sayin’.”

  We walked up to the Wynn, then took a taxi back to Jimmy’s and heard slumber-party laughter coming out of Rusty Wells’ suite when we walked by . . . my guess is, they were naked in the hot tub, drinking Cristal, doing lines of coke off each others’ titties, that sort of thing. Or maybe they were just cuddling in the dark and watching Pillow Talk on DVD.

  We had two laptops, mine and Second’s. From 1 until almost 3 a.m. we all took turns playing poker. Given the time—even with the time difference between Vegas and New York—I played against people I rarely played against. And I soundly trounced them. I won five grand that night and was now only down $2K from my losses at Big Lou’s. Whenever that was: at this point Memory was a many-tangled Slinky wriggling clumsily down the Spiral Staircase of Time. History won $1,800, THC a bit more than that, and Second, playing in Ultra-High, recouped half of his losses. I just won, he said, three thousand from Bjorn 2 Win with two 2s! We were so giddy, so pumped, and so flushed with victory that, well, we simply had to go to a . . .

  . . . a loud, massive, five-tiered, ear-pounding, $40-cover-charge, NBA-arena-sized strip club, inside of which I fell fast asleep for an hour in sort of a crucifix pose under the swaying penumbra of four reupholstered breasts. It was late—or early—almost six in the morning, and after I woke up in my sticky red banquette and after I made sure I still had my wallet on me, I went outside and called Wifey in West Virginia, where she was just waking up.

  Never letting on for a second where I was, I told her the weather the past few days in New York was very typical for that time of year, and she told me that she was making her way, albeit slowly, through Dead on Arrival. “So first you kill,” she said, “your main character’s wife and kids and then he has to hook up with the sister-in-law and all her best friends?” “If the wife and kids don’t die,” I responded, “and he doesn’t hook up with the sister, then there’s no book. Take away the whale, there’s no Moby Dick.” “Where I left off last night,” she said, “he was trying to convince his friends to go to Vegas with him.” “Fancy that,” I said.

  Just as the sun was peeking up over the mountains in the east, she told me she missed me and that, after she was done with DOA, she wanted to take a crack at the Trilogy, but when I saw Second and History leaving the strip club and coming my way I said a quick good-bye.

  In the taxi back to Jimmy’s Hotel, four things crossed my mind: (1) How do I know that Cynthia really is in West Virginia? What if she’d been so upset by my lying and pokerizing that it’s get-even time and now she’s having an affair? (2) She really does seem to be reading Dead on Arrival. Naturally, she’s repulsed by it (“This is going to be an impossible sell,” Clint Reno had told me the previous December, “for women, who read ninety-seven point five percent of all fiction”), but she’s reading it. (3) She wants to read the Trilogy? What??? Only one human being has ever read all three books: me. (4) She’s being so sweet. Will her first words to me, when we see each other again back in New York, be “Darling, I’ve joined a convent”?

  When I got back to the room I turned on my laptop and read this e-mail:

  Where are you? Are you okay? Talk to me please. Are you bored of me? If so please do not just vanish into thin air like this. I miss you so much, Chip, that I feel ill.

  Not only had Artsy Painter Gal noticed my absence, but it was making her sick!

  The next morning our doorbell rang and woke me up. I slipped back into the accursed multi-pocketed pale blue jeans that THC had gotten me and answered the door. Before me stood a woman so suntanned that for a second I thought I was looking at a copper statue. She had a helmet of shoulder-length dirty blonde hair and was wearing white slacks and a pink satin tank top. She was in her early forties and once I realized that, no, she was not a statue, I saw that she had the most leathery skin I had ever encountered. Too many afternoons lounging by the pools at the MGM Grand. Still, despite the Ultrasuede skin, I don’t think there was a pore of skin on her face that hadn’t received a jigger of Botox. But it was a sad case of too much too late.

  She told me, as I wiped the four hours of sleep from my eyes, that she was Laurel Dodge, our personal host: she was going to make sure we were insanely happy and get us tickets to shows and reservations at restaurants and get us past the velvet ropes of the most exclusive Vegas clubs. “I just want to make sure,” she said, “that you come back to Jimmy’s.”

  “Are you interested,” she asked as she made her way into the living room, “in seeing Cher or Barry Manilow tonight? Or maybe an Ultimate Fighting match?”

  Suddenly she formed her mouth into an O and hers eyes opened wide. Due to all the Botox, however, the muscles in her face couldn’t fully register shock, but I could tell something was awry. I turned around and saw Johnny/Second stark naked and scratching his mop of reddish blond hair, eyes mostly closed, Jughead-like. He was enviously well-hung, uncut, and had about fifteen pounds worth of ruddy love handles hanging from his sides. He also had a severe case of backne . . . it looked like he had been whipped on his back and chest years ago and the welts would never heal.

  Laurel didn’t wince or say anything about the nude Blackpooler presently airing out his morning flatulence; instead our socially skilled, suede-skinned hostess fixed her eyes right on mine and never moved them. If her orbs had been burning a hole through mine, my eye sockets would have been hollow and not one eyelash would have been singed.

  “Or,” she continued with aplomb, “you just name any Cirque du Soleil show and the chances are good I can get you in.”

  “I’ll kee
p that in mind,” I said, “but I don’t think we’ll be going to too many shows.”

  “Just came to play, huh?”

  Still no change in her expression. She was a statue.

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  Second grunted, grabbed a kitchen towel and girded his loins with it. He looked ready to appear as an extra in a gladiator movie, had they been filming one in the hallway.

  Laurel, whose sapphire ring was as big as a doorknob, rattled off the names of a few restaurants she could get us into and gave us four business cards. I thanked her and saw her to the door.

  A few seconds after she left, Second drank some coffee right out of the pot and asked himself aloud, “I wonder if she’s got the tickets on her?” Then he ran into the hallway in nothing but his jerrybuilt loincloth.

  A minute later he came back in wielding four ducats to see Cher. The seats weren’t the best, but I wasn’t surprised: the water in the Jacuzzi in the room didn’t get that hot and barely bubbled, the flat-screen TVs were flat but weren’t that big or that good, the shag carpeting was musty, stained and not that shaggy. We weren’t truly whales, not if we were staying here at Jimmy’s. The truth was we were just blowfish.

  “Gee, Johnny,” I said, “I don’t see you liking Cher. I had you figured more as a U2 or Arctic Monkeys fan.”

  “The hell with Sonny and feckwad Cher,” he said. “I’m sellin’ these tickets on the street.”

  “You’re bloody daft, you are, lad!”

  He may have been daft but he did get $500 for them.

  The four of us had breakfast together at a Denny’s on the Strip and with every foul, mealy forkful I thought of calling Laurel Dodge and asking her to reserve me a table, all by myself if need be, at the most expensive place in town. Second finished half his breakfast—the Lumberjack Special—then complained about the steak being overcooked to the waitress, who apologized and then, five minutes later, brought him the Lumberjack Special v.2. In this way he managed to eat, for the price of one, one and one-half Lumberjack Specials and, as he stuffed steak, sausage, and flapjack into his mouth, he told us his Vegas brainstorm. “I think I’m going to call,” he said, “Steve Wynn’s secretary and maybe try to get an appointment with him. From what I’ve seen all his concepts are stale lately. The Wynn and Encore don’t even have feckin’ concepts for Chroist sake—they’re just called Wynn and Encore. There’s not even a ‘the’ in front of ’em. Look, there’s New York, New York and there’s Paris, Paris and the Venetian, the Venetian. Well, these are my ideas . . . Atlantis. The world’s first undersea hotel. Ten thousand rooms, all underwater . . . guests all have oxygen tubes, like Jacques Cousteau. Live dolphins in every room. Walruses in the halls. Or how about this? Hell. Ten thousand rooms. All in Hell. The dealers and maids would be dressed up as devils and you could rig it up so they breathe fire. The water in the swimming pools would be black and boiling, like it was tar. Okay, one more. Instead of New York, New York, you do: The Las Vegas. Ten thousand rooms and it’s a mini Las Vegas within Las Vegas, a reproduction of the city you’re already in. You’d have a fake Eiffel Tower and Empire State Building but they’d be fake fake ones. . . . Okay, it was just an idea.”

  After breakfast History Babe called her fanatical sister in Colorado Springs. She was still praying. Praying for what, I asked History. Well, she answered, now it’s for my wretched soul. Toll House Cookie called his wife in New Jersey. Mrs. Cookie asked how Cousin Cleon’s funeral was and Cookie told her, “They ain’t had it yet.” See, he told us after he got off the phone, I didn’t really lie. You know, Marvis, I said to him, the Lord may not be filling in your pages for telling lies but he’s probably scribbling tons of notes along the margins.

  We walked down the Strip on one side of the street, then came up the other, going as far south as the squalid, doomed Tropicana and then as far north as the equally squalid and doomed Circus Circus. Cookie was too scared to take a gondola ride at the Venetian. He was afraid of cars, he’d admitted to us, but that was nothing compared to his fear of gondolas. It was almost noon and it was in the low eighties and his toll-collector outfit was back on.

  But that day, we finally bought new clothes. Second sprang for History Babe’s new dresses (Valentino) and skirts (bebe) and they didn’t come cheap. I was glad we’d picked her up. Her gentle presence alone, I believe, prevented the three males among us from either separating from each other for good or from slitting each other’s throats.

  In the casinos sometimes we stayed together, sometimes we drifted apart. I watched craps and blackjack, Second hung around the roulette tables over at the Rio, together all four of us stood on the periphery of a poker tournament at the Bellagio, separately I almost started to play craps at the MGM Grand. The table there was boisterous, people were winning and laughing, but they weren’t truly interacting, not like they did online. In that world you see the same people over and over again, every day, but these people gathered around the table, I knew, would never see each other again. It was too transitory and was ultimately meaningless, the difference between an empty one-night stand and an actual relationship, and I didn’t want any part of it.

  After a late lunch we retired back to our suite at Jimmy’s, where Second called the hotel manager and let him have it: “The soaps in the bathroom say they’re French-milled on them. . . . It says it on the wrappers. ‘French-milled.’ I’m lookin’ at one now. . . . I know French-milled soap when I see it and this soap isn’t French-milled. . . . At best this is Belgian-milled or maybe Luxembourg-milled. . . . So either take money off our bill or get some real French-milled soap up here straight away. . . . Okay, cheers.”

  I went online and sent an e-mail to Barbara Bennett at Egregious Pictures asking if there was any news about Pacer Burton, whose Breakthrough was due to open around Christmas. So much for me depended on the Plague Boy movie coming to pass. I sent an e-mail to Courtney Bellkamp at the Reno Brothers asking for the list I needed. I sent an e-mail to Ross Carpenter reminding him I was still alive.

  Second and I began playing poker on our laptops. We made sure not to play at the same tables at the same time. I was going up and down but mostly winning, he was doing the same. Then History stood over my shoulder, watched what I was doing, and told me she had played against three of the players at my table. She sat down next to me and helped me out since she knew their style of play. Meanwhile, THC was doing the same with Second. After losing three hands (and $900) in a row I called THC and Second over, so it was all four of us playing as one. It was extraordinary, it was teamwork at its best; we were like Secretariat and were moving like a tremendous machine. I won ten of the next thirteen hands. I recouped all my losses at Big Lou’s and then won $9,400 more. The four of us then shifted to Second’s laptop and our Thumpin’ Think Tank did the same for him. We all worked together, the gears spun and meshed beautifully, and we were unbeatable. The Incredible Four-Headed Doyle Brunson. In an hour Second won $7,000. Yes, a tremendous machine.

  At one point I said to Second, “Hey, I could seek out Bjorn and we could really win a lot.”

  But he wouldn’t go for it. “It’s not a good idea,” he said, suddenly agitated. “We’ve taken enough from him.” He told me he felt sorry for the Insufferable Swede and I dropped it.

  We four blowfish then took a taxi to the Flamingo. Only one of their pools was open and it wasn’t very crowded, this being autumn. (I slipped the towel boy a twenty and he let us through.) We were in brand-new bathing suits: the thoroughly unreliable Cookie had bought the guys yellow banana hammocks and History an imperceptible Corona Beer yellow bikini. Her skin was pigeon gray but she had skinny legs and a sexy ankle bracelet I had trouble not looking at. Cookie, Second, and I each drank three beers and History had a peach margarita and while he held a sun reflector up to his stubbly chin, Second related to me the brainstorm that had just struck him: “Your writing career isn’t goin’ too well. As a matter of fact, it’s not goin’ at all. Well, there’s got to be a university here, l
ike a College of Las Vegas University, right? So why don’t you become their writer-in-residence? You could live at the Bellagio, some of your students would be showgirls who wanted to become writers, the weather would always be great, and you could gamble between classes, and you could keep writin’ all yer books here that don’t ever get published. . . . Okay, you don’t have to give me that look, it was just a feckin’ idea.”

  After listening to that I went inside the hotel and found a cool pair of round tinted glasses in a gift shop and bought them. I wanted a new look and this seemed to be a good start.

  Then I decided to take a walk around the pool.

  The last time I had done such a thing I collapsed.

  It almost happened again. And this one would have been a book-related collapse too.

  I saw a woman reading Saucier: A Bitch in the Kitchen and let out a quiet groan and kept walking. Then I saw another woman reading it and groaned so loud that the people around me assumed I was in some sort of extreme anguish. (I was.)

  I had to do something about this. And I vowed that I would.

  Back in our rooms the three of us were gathered around History Babe as she sat and won money on Second’s laptop, when Laurel Dodge dropped in on us again, looking as suede as ever. Her upper lip seemed a little puffier than the first time I’d laid eyes on her. Either she’d had some work done that day or had jogged into a mailbox.