The Poker Report

8/4/02
The Poker Report Meets A Girl In Vegas

Las Vegas is a platinum septic tank. A cesspool full of diamonds. A glistening golden pile of dogshit in the middle of a radioactive desert. And the Hard Rock Casino is the worst it has to offer. An exploitative sucker magnet full of leather short wearing cocktail waitresses, ten dollar minimum tables, over-priced rooms and drinks, and three a.m. hookers stuck on automatic at the one dollar slot machines outside of the central casino otherwise known as the pit.

And I'm the biggest sucker of all. I've flown out to this arid paradise on a shaky jet from San Francisco to meet a girl I've never met on the basis of a snapshot and a name.

The last time I was in Vegas I won fifteen thousand dollars and found out that my ex-fianc� was getting married. It was the basketball playoffs, they were importing testosterone in from all over the country. The streets were rivers of raging male pheromones, a mighty army of receding hairlines and college sweatshirts ready to crush the empire, unless of course Maryland wins.

In other trips to Vegas I've spent three days in jail and lost everything I had. I've sat on the sand filled highways waiting for the hand of the law to grab me by the throat, and, at fourteen with Jon Kim, I stopped into the Caesar's Palace for a glass of water after our absurd journey from Chicago via thumb and Los Angeles and we came upon restrooms filled with boxes full of matches. Look at all that sulfur. But I've never come to Las Vegas to meet a girl.

At the blackjack table there's good luck and bad luck but the house always wins. I run through fifty dollars killing time. Waiting for my room to open up or my girl to magically appear in the center bar. Maybe she won't make it. Two to three odds it's a guy. I pull twenty-ones from sixteens and lose to a seven with two kings showing. The guy next to me plays haphazard, knocking on thirteens and hitting with fifteens six up. But I'm not superstitious. His cards don't change my odds, my odds remain the same no matter the sum total of bad players in the world. And if I can not lose the money I won from Pat two weeks ago playing poker at Dave's ranch in Bodega Bay I'll consider myself a winner.

I'll consider myself a winner if I can stay one step ahead of the suckers I left back home. Which shouldn't be too hard. Pat's got the memory of a platypus or a Kulak after The Terror. And long tall Cooney bluffs every hand, no matter what's showing, because he just doesn't have it in him to fold. Wendy doesn't mind losing ten dollars and Jenson minds but does it anyway. Donahue gets drunk, money falling from his fingers, coins rambling out between his teeth and pouring in foam down his cheeks as he snarls, "Write a book, I don't care, but I'm not giving you your money!" But he always pays up in the end, an honest sucker to the bottom of his toes and when he's sober the rage stays inside. Abby always plays like a champ and Ben does too whenever he takes his eyes off Wendy, which is never. Jon Berry is brilliant in spurts but his agoraphobia keeps him out of most games.

So in blackjack all you can do is damage control. Don't bet too much. Always split eights. Split twos versus twos and threes versus threes. Let the dealer break and hope for the best. I don't care. I'm just killing time. And she's there, golden hair running over her shoulders like honey, in a shimmering white top, sipping Ameretto, in the center bar.

Dawn arrived at the cafe at 3:00pm. We went straight to the room. Everything was fine, until later, walking the strip to Mandalay Bay, where Dawn had decided to buy me a cowboy steak, since I was paying for the room, we started talking about politics. It was precipitated by the New York hotel and a comment about the Trade Towers. And she thought that good things will come out of it. And I said nothing good will come out of it except a suppression of the media. And she said maybe it's good to suppress the media sometimes. And I said, No, actually, unless you have a Stalin fetish.

We made up over volcanoes and rushing water at the Rum Jungle, an absurd and overpriced restaurant with giant ceilings and 100 different kinds of rum. The cowboy steak cost $45. The drinks were $8 and made from exotic fruits and the waitress was also an exotic fruit. Dawn was happy. We're having a good time. They don't have places like this in Oklahoma.

8/5/02

The morning is a hard rock wilderness. A drunken memory of a craps game and five hundred dollars. I told her to kiss the dice, maybe that was my mistake, groping at the craps table, her breasts across my nose impeding my judgement.

It's hard waking up next to somebody when you have a headache and you're poor. But it's wonderful to come back to a hotel room, having won all of your money back, pressing eights and sixes, early morning gamblers screaming at the craps tables. "That's right! Everybody makes money! I don't care! We're killers on this side of the table! Isn't that right boss?"

The dice are flowing easily for breakfast. The dice are like orange juice. I lay five on the pass line, five on the come line. I back up my odds. I buy in for two-hundred. I back up three four or five times. He's screaming for eights the hard way. People are betting crazy. I stay cool. The dealer tells me to only use one hand. The dice move to my left. He rolls forever. He rolls until noon. I press my pass line. I let fifty dollars sit on four, five, six, eight, and ten. He rolls ten the hard way, three times. I win all the money back I lost last night. I go back to my room. My girl is there in her thin white top, putting on her face by the window. Her little white top, her little white 94 shorts. I kiss her neck. We're glad to be here. Las Vegas is being good to us. We lay down together. It's nice to come back to a hotel room with a view of a parking lot and a palm tree and make love after winning five hundred dollars. That's the benefit.

Mephisto. You cucumber, le cumbre! You bandit, weasel, toady. It's late at night and Dawn is circling the bar with a whiskey sour in her fingers and men in fishing caps are reaching for her waist. I'm playing the dice again, because the dice are the fastest game. And a satanic looking man saddles next to me. The table is full, my streets are on fire. He's betting the Don't Come Line. He's betting against me. It rattles through my fingers to my very core. He doesn't know that I'm a famous writer staying in this very hotel with a beautiful girl. Why, just this morning, I read to her for twenty-minutes straight of brand new prose. I will have to purge him, but first he must tell me loves me. He bets against himself and then he loses. He bets the Don't Pass line when I'm shooting sixes. I need him to confess.

The lady in the white doesn't want to roll. Roll! we say. Twenty of us around the table like a river and one lady standing still. Howling for a hard eight, rubbing our erections against the drink bar. Roll! The rich guy in the corner tosses her a twenty-five dollar chip. "That's yours if you roll." She looks at him. "Roll the dice," her boyfriend tells her. "The nice man just gave us twenty-five dollars." I'm surrounded by demons and pimps.

Because I spent the day in the sun, and I've been drinking, and because life is fair, and I have an inordinate belief in myself and my country, and because there's a pretty girl who wrote me to say she liked my book and so now we are in Las Vegas together. And because the sun sets in the west and Trotsky died with an icepick in his head and Iggy Pop rolled in glass and I got a note today stating unequivocally and without equivocation that SOMA will in fact be publishing my diatribe on Ozzy Osbourne and his heavy metal army, a six hundred dollar check is in the mail sanctifying me as the greatest rock and roll critic of all time, I decide to double my bet whenever I touch the dice.

My streets were on fire when I crapped out and crawled back to the missus up in room 377. She asked me if I won money and I said no. She said she wanted to see my journal. I said I'd make her a deal. We've had two moments that have given me pause. One when she told me I was emotionally distant, and another, the next day and completely unrelated, when she called me a narcissist. Over steak and spinach I told her we should live for now and forget. She was wearing a spaghetti strap black dress at the time. She said we have fundamental differences, starting with the fact that she is a woman and I am a man. She said she used to be a Marxist feminist and thought things should be equal but now she realizes that she is a nurturer and I am a hunter/gatherer. She comes to me, when my purples are riding the come line. She nurtures me while I am hunting and gathering.

8/6/02

On the third day I wake up with a sore throat and I suggest to Dawn we stay another night and she agrees. We confess that we like each other. The craps table has a three hundred dollar lien on my soul. One more night and then we'll forget about everything. We'll sit by the pool again where the hotel has constructed a beach so you can put your feet in the water and feel sand. Tonight we'll have to eat cheaply. She suggests she pay half for the hotel room. I tell her she can't even afford to leave Oklahoma.

Then the sickness comes. Perhaps the weight of my sins or an airborne virus, it's impossible to be sure. The sore throat moves into my head, and my ass. I sit on the toilet most of the morning, running to the table for ten minutes of dice, then back to the rest room for twenty minutes of diarrhea. I ask my girl if she still likes me, even with my ass on fire. She says that's the difference between us. That's true, I tell her. I don't ever want to know if she has diarrhea.

I'm so sick that I spend most of the afternoon in bed and instead of going to the pool we watch Unfaithful, starring Richard Gere, on the hotel television. It was the man, perhaps, the demon looking one, always betting the Don't Come line. He cursed me. And so on my last day in Vegas with this beautiful sweet woman who has driven all the way across the American West to see me and I feel terrible. I work through a box of napkins, a paper snot filled village on the floor next to the bed.

Later I have some whiskey, and this rouses me for a little while. I become didactic. Dawn says she likes me more when I drink. I tell her she has nothing to worry about. She says I talk like a professor when I'm drinking. She slept with a professor once. Professors are swine, I tell her. They sleep with all of their students, it's what they do. It's why they wanted the job in the first place. English professors are the worst, followed by the philosophers and the historians with their dumb black turtlenecks and meaningless dissertations. The historians always show up after the revolution. They miss everything because they're afraid to take chances. They can only see the world in hindsight.

Soon the whiskey wears off and we're back in the room again. We lay in bed for a long time. And the night passes uneventfully. And in the morning it's time for me to go, and she's got a long drive ahead of her.

"Maybe I'll come see you in Oklahoma," I tell her. "We can chase dustballs together." "You'd never come to Oklahoma," she says. But she's blushing, and our vacation is over.

© Stephen Elliott 2002

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