Pocket Kings (29 page)

In Utah, I-70 came to an abrupt end . . . it was like shooting a cannonball into a wall and the ball just sticking there. Seventy connected with I-15 and we took that, Abdul at the helm, down into Nevada. As we passed Cedar City, only an hour and change from the Nevada state line, a critical issue that not one of us had yet publicly discussed was finally brought up. It was something that had crossed my mind many times already but one that I dared not mention, perhaps because by not discussing it aloud I was able to detach myself from the outlandish lark I was presently embarked upon, this being that I had hopped into a taxi at 3 a.m. in New York City with someone I barely knew and that we'd picked up two other people I knew even less and were heading 2,500 miles west to win back money that hadn't really been mine to begin with.

“So where we staying?” THC asked.

“Yes,” History said. “Where?”

“I could stay in the car,” Second said. “I'll stay anywhere. I don't care.”

“It's not our car, Johnny,” I reminded him.

History Babe said: “I know some okay places way off the Strip.
Th
is time of year they'd be around eighty dollars a night or less.
Th
ey're kinda boring though.”

“We're gonna get one room or four?” Cookie asked.

We looked at each other. Nobody, I surmised, wanted to spend too much time with anyone. Had History been a Babe, that might have greatly changed things—there might have been a scramble to be her roomie. Second and THC were never going to get along; I would have been surprised if they ever played online together again. THC and I had nothing in common, other than he worked within two miles of where I lived, and he wouldn't recognize a witticism if it tied him to a chair and waterboarded him for three hours straight. Also, could I ever really be that close to anyone who'd been fourteen and seen Pam Grier naked and then not rubbed one out? To him I was probably just a rich, spoiled, white-boy loser who'd won a lot of dough but who didn't really need it. To me, Second Gunman was interesting, he was a character, he was an eccentric . . . but he was the kind who could embarrass me and make me cringe at a moment's notice. He had done this several times on the road already in fast food joints and at gas stations. (“Hey,” he'd said to the two Hannah Montana wannabes at the Arby's, “this guy”—me—“wrote a best-selling novel . . . he could get you big parts in the movie.”) He was getting tired of me, too, I could tell; I had surpassed the world's record of getting called a gobshite the most times within a two-day period. Yes, we all needed a little distance from each other. With our online poker winnings, each of us could afford our own room and spend some time apart.

“Why don't I,” Second said, breaking an uneasy minute-long silence, “call one of the hotels on the Strip and try to get a fancy large high-roller suite for all four of us?”

Abdul Salaam had never seen Las Vegas before and he let out a deep and extended gasp when in the distance the mysterious contours of the Luxor, the skyline of New York, New York, and the probing needle of the Stratosphere shimmered into view. He whispered a few words of Arabic to himself—whether they were words of praise or damnation, I shall never know.

He dropped us off on a sidestreet near the Flamingo, in the middle of the Strip.
Th
e last three hours of driving were like passing through a diorama of a Cormac McCarthy novel, a merciless barrage of russet endlessness. I had certainly felt such desolation in my soul before but had never gazed upon it, and nobody inside the car said a word.

We got out of the taxi. It was in the seventies but the air there, as usual, was dry, and already I was thirsty. Cookie unsnapped his Port Authority jacket, Hist unbuttoned her coat.

It was time to settle.
Th
e meter read $5,423 dollars.

“Okay, how are we doing this again?” I said.

“I forgot our agreement when you got in, my friend,” Abdul admitted.

Our driver thought about it while the fading sun beat down on his long, black beard . . . it was late afternoon and the mountains in the west were writhing under the coming sunset.

Everyone agreed that $5,500 would be good enough.

Second reached into his jacket and pulled out some money and I went into my wallet. I'd left my apartment with two thousand dollars, but along the way I'd been stopping at ATMs and withdrawing cash—Cookie had been doing the same thing. We were loaded. History had left her house with three grand, but since she only had been aboard since Colorado, we only hit her up for $400. It took five minutes for us to work everything out, including a nifty four-hundred-dollar tip for the most patient, well-mannered taxi driver in New York City history. Everyone seemed pleased, but then a few seconds later, Abdul said: “
Th
ere is an additional charge, my friend, because I picked you up after eight o'clock at night. A dollar fifty. Plus sixteen dollars for the two tolls.”

Cookie rolled his eyes and handed Abdul a twenty and Abdul got back into the Crown Victoria and began his lonely journey home.

My laptop and knapsack on the ground between my feet, History and Cookie right next to me, and Second off looking for a hotel for us, I gazed into the Fountains of the Bellagio as Celine Dion sang the
Titanic
theme song, and reflected: When Man attempts to emulate Nature, Nature usually finishes a distant second.
Th
e skies of Michelangelo and Casper David Friedrich are more spectacular than any real sky I've ever looked up at; a suburban swimming pool contains far fewer sharks, jellyfish, seaweed, and tsunamis than the ocean and is a much better environment for swimming; no gust of wind I've ever felt outdoors is quite as soothing as the effect of an air conditioner cranked up to high cool; and let's face it, Las Vegas's Venice is cleaner, smells better, and has much better food than the original one in Italy. Try synchronizing geysers and springs to Celine Dion and you tell me which is more spellbinding, them or the Fountains of the Bellagio. No, it is not Man that cannot emulate Nature, but Nature that cannot . . .

“Okay, I got us the high-roller suite at Jimmy's Hotel and Casino,” Second said, interrupting my contemplation. In his hand were a dozen business cards he'd been handed on the Strip: they were all for leggy, busty girls-for-hire . . . strippers, dancers, whores, whatever.

“Where the hell is that?” I asked him.

Th
e hotel was off the Strip, he told us, and wasn't even a half mile away—by which he meant, I could tell, it was four miles away—but it seemed safe and nice.

“I've never heard of this place,” History said. “Jimmy's . . . ?”

“A high-roller suite?” Cookie said.
“Us?”

Johnny looked at us like we were all hopeless sticks-in-the-mud. Behind me, the Fountains and Celine were reaching their grand climax together, bursting into the air as high as they could, pounding like heavy artillery. Her heart, she knew, would go on.

“Smile!” Second Gunman said. “We're whales now! Smile for Chroist sake!”

Our hotel turned out to be one of those places that you only see when your less-than-honest Las Vegas taxi driver isn't taking you the fastest way from one place to the other. A large blue banner with red lettering draped haphazardly over the hotel's flat façade screamed
J
IMMY'S HOTEL & CASINO
but suggested to all those passing by—there weren't many of them—that the place hadn't always been Jimmy's or a hotel and had once been some other sort of enterprise. It was a cube, an ivory cube with four stories and a hundred rooms. Size-wise, it looked like it would have made a good clinic for alcoholics and drug addicts to dry out in. It also turned out there was no casino. Either the sign maker or Jimmy himself had lied.

Our high-roller suite was on the top floor.

Th
e door opened onto a sunken living room with a Jacuzzi right in the middle of it, three flat-screen televisions, cheesy shag carpeting, all the usual stuff. But our cough-syrup-scented rooms weren't large and this only confirmed my suspicion that at one time this place had been a medical facility and had been gutted and renovated, or a lunatic asylum that had gone out of business because most people in Las Vegas were lunatics and it just wasn't needed.

Two bedrooms adjoined the living room, each one had two double beds.
Th
e windows in both rooms looked onto the backside of another unlit concrete cube, most likely a Best Buy or Office Depot that the developers had given up on halfway through.

While I was putting away my few personal effects, Second called the front desk and, as dollar bills spilled out of his suede jacket, began complaining: “
Th
e safe doesn't work. . . .
Yes,
I followed the instructions. . . . Yes, I know. . . . I work at a feckin' four-star hotel in England, you think I don't know how to use a hotel safe? I've slept in more hotel safes than you've seen! . . . Well, do it soon. . . . And another thing . . . It says the sheets have a six hundred thread count. . . . Now since I work in a hotel, there's one feckin' thing I know and that's thread counts and these sheets aren't six hundred any more than my feckin' IQ is six hundred. . . . I counted the threads three bloody times and even double-bloody-checked it twice. . . . Okay . . . Okay . . . Cheers.”

Within five frenzied minutes we had a new safe and new sheets. Second gave the manager and the maid $40 each and it was then decided via flips of a coin that I would be rooming with Second and that Cookie would be rooming with History Babe, an arrangement, as it happened, that seemed the least offensive to everyone.

“If I don't get me a bit of squaff soon,” Second Gunman, shuffling his little deck of naked hottie cards, whispered to me, “I'm gonna die.”

We took showers and got ready to go out and play.

“We need to get new gear,” Second said to me in the living room. “We'll go shopping on the high street tomorrow.” He was watching all three TVs at once, not staying on any channel for more than three seconds. (It was, in its own way, a remarkable display of digital dexterity and mental Attention Deficit Disorder.) “
Th
e high
what?
” Cookie said. History came out of her room, her hair still wet and with some makeup on. I could tell that Second was disappointed by her looks—he wanted her to look like Carmen Electra or Pam Anderson or some more current sexbomb. I didn't care what she looked like, but I did hope that Second wouldn't hurt her in any way. She seemed like a good egg.

Cookie asked if we were ready to go out and I said: “Should we have a drink first?” As we were high rollers there was a fully stocked bar, but as we were high rollers at an $89.99-a-night joint far off the Strip, fully stocked meant: a pint of Smirnoff vodka, a pint of Dewar's (half of which was gone), some tonic and seltzer, and a six-pack of Fig Newtons (the wrapping of which may have been bitten through by a mouse). Being a high roller here was like being the United Nations ambassador of a country that only the people of that country had ever heard of.