Leaving Las Vegas (15 page)

“So now I have an excuse,” says Al to no one in particular. Sitting alone in his malfunctioning Mercedes on the shoulder of route 93/95, he is on the tail end of a temper tantrum and the calm in his
own voice irks him. “I don’t need one!” he shouts, banging on the steering wheel. “I don’t need this excuse! What do I care of her waiting. It will build her character. She will not dare to disappoint me again!”

He is doubly frustrated because he can imagine no way to blame the failure of his car on Sera. He failed to phone her with instructions last night, though he had told her to wait for his call. Occupied with shopping yesterday evening, he was unable to arrange anything even at the bar of his hotel; then it was too late and he couldn’t bring himself to admit failure to her. He needs time. He needs his jewelry back too, and this was to be his early morning errand, followed by a triumphant return with fully dressed fingers to her apartment, until the Mercedes took a piece of fuel tank rust about the size of a small kidney stone into its filterless fuel line and tried passing it through a carburetor: no go. These matters of automotive arcana are of course inscrutable to Al, who knows only that he has been dealt yet another bust card, and that the rich deck of his youth is getting harder and harder to cut; especially now that he can almost taste it, after so many hard, private years.

And what could be more descriptive of his life than this car. Taken by him as payment of a should-have-been-forgotten debt from an aging Venezuelan drug wholesaler who had to flee Canada—
-flee Canada!
—and who found himself, on one unfortunate afternoon, in the same plasma clinic on Sunset Boulevard that was frequented by Al. Al left that clinic with a set of car keys and about as much legal ownership of the yellow Mercedes as the man from whom he had taken it had had. Earlier possessorship of the car is sketchy, but it is probable that the serial number had long since faded from any official silicon, which it certainly must have at one time occupied. Though it pained him to squander his blood money, Al could not bear to drive such an unclean car, but
it was the true color of the Mercedes, as it emerged from the wet, fluorescent tunnel of Suds-N-Spray out into the daylight, that really caused him to stop and solemnly mourn the great black beasts of his long-gone wealth.

And the fall had been swift and certain, though Al could not in a million years explain what happened, or at least was not able to explain it to himself in six years. It could have been any or all of the myriad influences which converged on him virtually simultaneously. Sera left. Then two other girls left. Then Hollywood got super dry—no new girls, no old girls, nothing. Then he tried to move some drugs and got busted for the first time in his life. Then it seemed he got busted all the time, for anything. Then his attorney sued him, and all his property was seized. Then came the immigration problems from out of the blue. Then he was totally alone and had nothing.

After all the different things had happened, they looked to him, in his mind’s eye, more like just one big thing, something that he could overcome. So, rather than be not-Al, he stayed and did everything he knew to do to become Al again. But he couldn’t. Then he got old—again, all at once. Like a tumor, a thought had been growing, perennial and torpid, in the back of his mind. There was something that he had defeated long ago; it was away, in a different place, and for that reason, he thought, he could defeat it again. It had been a big thing in his life. Now it was greatly distant from his life, and it didn’t even know that he knew where it was.

A lesson that Al took away from Los Angeles is: do what must be done, so he gives up on retrieving his pawned jewelry today and starts off on foot down the road to a gas station which is visible in the distance and somehow looks expensive.

But the fact that he does this doesn’t change the way he feels about doing it. Al hates this, and the anger that rages inside his
head is splenetic and bleak. He hates the fact that he is walking on the side of a desert highway so that he can overpay a disgusting American grease monkey to fix a hideous piss-colored wreck, all so he can go and humiliate himself in front of Sera—who has never been all that blind, he knows—by demanding more money with which he can secretly get his jewelry back from a pawnbroker! This is not what Gamal Fathi’s destiny is meant to be, and there can be little doubt that the blame should be placed on… on the evil American forces that have all along conspired to make his life a living hell, on the cesspool that is Los Angeles, on the faithless and disloyal women to whom he has offered only kindness and protection. He wants for so little in comparison to those fattened corporate Americans who once came to him with their repellent requests and whose greed is limitless. Perhaps it is they who are responsible; perhaps it is everyone, for what non-collective power could paint his soul with so much acrimony, so much venom.

Sera has been awake for hours, watching the silent television, which as she slept drifted in and out of a three-hour test pattern. The absence of sound does little to alter the inanity of daytime TV, but this is not an observation that she is capable of making right now; it is far too irrelevant and would undermine her fascination in the image of a man soundlessly screaming as a superimposed
$10,000
burns on his chest.

Hungry. She’s pretty sure that she ought to eat, but the kitchen isn’t holding much this morning. So… what? Yes, she generally goes out to the store at a time like this, but she dare not. Al would be very angry indeed if he called or came over and she wasn’t here. There’s an enormous distraction here. If she had
enough money she could go play blackjack. But she really can’t leave. She can eat later. She could use a trick—go back to work. Al will find her something. On the television is a local commercial: the power company wants her and her family to know more about the Hoover Dam. She knows, she’s heard the copy many times this week. An aerial shot of a rushing river dissolves to a very still Lake Mead, then the dam, looking about seven hundred and twenty-six feet tall, if she remembers correctly. She should check her makeup. She goes to the bedroom and checks her makeup.

From the bedroom she hears—she forgot to lock the door—the sound of her front door opening.

“Sera.” Al’s voice booms from the other room.

“Al. I’m here in my bedroom, Al. I’m hungry.”

Taken aback for no apparent reason, Al stops, still in the other room, and cocks his head. Too many problems this morning, or maybe he’s just hungry too. Ultimately, after catching his own reflection in an oblique window, he smiles broadly at her tone. Probably best, he thinks, not even to mention his failure to call last night.

Entering her bedroom, he finds her at her mirror waiting expectantly, and says, “Then I shall buy you lunch. You will need your strength tonight. After lunch we will come back here and you can shower and dress… you look a little rumpled.”

“All right, Al. Let’s have lunch. Then I can shower and dress,” she says.

Not a bad little suite, this here at the Sahara. Or is it a big room? It’s sort of a sweetroom, strange American, Las Vegas, not-yet-or-no-longer-big-time type configuration. To Al, alone and waiting
for Sera this late evening, it’s a guess crossed with a necessary compromise. Way back at his best there was too much money spent to prevent and too much worry about people laughing at him; nobody’s fool, he always suspected this, just to be on the safe side. After that, at his worst, there was no money to spend and people were definitely laughing at him. Now there’s a little money, he’s spending all of it, and nobody’s paying any attention to him. The sweetroom here at the Sahara—wet bar with executive wood-grain refrigerator, dining alcove, two bathroom sinks—is… okay.

Too, that long gone serendipity may be returning to him, for he was able to dig up a pretty good trick for Sera tonight. Not easy—after wasting time in three different bars he finally scored all the way down at the Sands, only to discover that the guy was staying right here at the Sahara—but it all worked out. She’s there now, just four floors down, with this guy and his wife. Classic work, almost like it used to be, especially when she showed up and the guy really did come up with a grand, once they got a look at her, hours ago.

He crosses the room and answers the door. Sera walks past him, sitting down primly at the foot of the bed.

“They tipped me another hundred,” she says. “They wanted my number, but I told them to talk to you.” She looks over at the television and seems a little disappointed to find it turned off. “Do you want it, the hundred I mean?”

Arms folded, he looms over her. Neither one of them realize that he looks only as threatening as an unhealthy man can look.

“How was the trick?” he asks, and with the question comes the realization, to him at least, that he is way out of practice.

Oddly, it is Sera who reflexively falls into a groove. The chat having always been part of the gig, she again has someone to chat to, and her speech flows more freely than it has since Al first made himself known to her. “Could have been worse,” she says. “They
use a lot of gimmicks, some big stuff… I’m a little sore. Reminded me of those two dykes in Brentwood.” Looking up at him: “Remember? They always wanted me and Wendy.” She continues on his belated nod. “He of course spent half the time watching from the corner of the room. You should see how they are. They love themselves for doing this.” She looks down at the shag carpet, carefully. “You get her? I mean, did you pick up on her? She’s a junkie… made me watch her shoot up.”

Al doesn’t know how to respond to this, for he missed this observation, and he shouldn’t have. “You will need to work on the Strip tomorrow night. I have business all day. You like it best on the street. This will make you happy.”

The flow gone from her words, Sera nods and says, “Could I keep it, the hundred I mean? You know I’m always straight with you, Al.”

“Ah! It is a gift from Al,” he says with a benevolent grin. “It is yours. Buy yourself a present from Al.” He bows his head briefly—an old gesture she had forgotten—and begins to undress. “Now go shower for me, Sera. I have missed you tonight.”

She blinks, and walks with difficulty to the bathroom. But inexplicably, it is the throbbing cut on her cheek that is the greatest source of her pain by the time she reaches the sinks.

The bathroom door shut, Al turns his attention to the mirror and manipulates his hair, here and around, with an unbreakable Ace comb. On the dresser, reflected in the mirror-world, he reads the alphabetical mess on a confused promotional pamphlet:
He hears the shower start up. He considers his jewelry: he should go and get it tomorrow.