Pocket Kings (30 page)

“Where do we go?” Second said. “Should we start out a strip club and then start playing or do it the other way around?”

Cookie, ever the gentleman, looked at History and said, “I'll skip the strip club . . . I'd rather play. I got me enough naked girls at home.”

Second scratched his chin and said: “Yeah, I guess playin's why we're all here.”

We left our rooms, our plan of assault being to take a taxi to the southernmost end of the Strip and work our way up.

When the elevator doors opened out came a tall, broadshouldered, silver-haired man in his late sixties dressed all in white, except for a black bolo tie, surrounded, as though they were his bodyguards, by five smiling, tanned beauties all about five foot eight.
Th
e women were dressed in flashy minidresses or miniskirts and tight, revealing tops.
Th
ese chicks were state of the art and were giggling when the elevator doors opened. (A note on the exact nature of the giggling: it sounded more like girly pajama-party laughter than adult cocktail-party laughter.)

“You're in the other suite, I guess,” he said with a very white, very expensive smile.

We nodded.
Th
e women stopped giggling but were smiling.
Th
eir teeth were big and white, too, and I don't think there was anything smaller than a D-cup in sight.

“Rusty Wells,” he said, introducing himself and lifting his Stetson. “Houston, Texas.”

We all shook his hand but when Tracey held out hers, Rusty kissed it.

He introduced us to his five lovely escorts but was unable to remember who was who.
Th
ere was a Jasmine among them, as well as a Shiloh and an Aurora.
Th
ey'd just had dinner and you sensed from their collective burnished sheen that they'd eaten and drunk quite well.

Rusty told us he'd been coming to Vegas since the good ol' days when everything was mobbed up, when the casinos took a skim, and when, if you were caught cheating, they took you out to the desert, tied you to a tree stump and let the sun fry your body and the jackals eat you alive. “Yep, things were better back then,” he said while Aurora (or Shiloh) straightened out his bolo tie. His five escorts could have stepped out of the pages of
Harper's Bazaar,
had the pages been dated 1969.
Th
ey were in their twenties or early thirties but came from the era of vinyl boots, pot parties, Polaroid Swingers, blue Corvairs, and much too much makeup.

When Rusty asked us what we did for a living, I told him I was once a writer.

“What books you write?” he asked. “I read a bit now and then.”

“Rusty,” I said, knowing he never would have heard of me and wishing to spare him the discomfort, “to be honest, I've forgotten the names of 'em and what they were about.”

“Tell them what you do for a living,” one of the women—she wore a gold sequin mini-dress and her eyelashes were as a big and fluttery as butterflies—said to Rusty.

Rusty told us that ever since he was knee-high to a grasshopper he liked to tinker. During the Vietnam War he was in the Army Engineer Corps but “they didn't take a shinin' to my ideas and I got drummed out honorably,” he said. He eventually landed a job in the oil industry in Houston, received three patents for machines that dredged and drilled, but couldn't stand it. “I didn't fit in with that refined, upper crust, golf-clubs-stuck-up-their-asses country-club set and didn't want to.” Five years ago, he was struck with “the most brilliantest, simplest idea that ever struck a man since the light bulb” and now he proudly plucked the issue of this earth-shattering idea out of his jacket pocket. It looked like a cook's thermometer, something you'd use to see if a pot roast was done, but the bottom end was more complicated and the readout was digital.

“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.
Th
is here is the simplest one.
Th
e 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
Th
irteen 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.
Th
e 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 (“
Th
is 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!

Th
e 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.