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It was a lone hour in Vegas doing what I loved that changed our relationship for the worse, forever—when we sat at a poker table for the first time together.
From the time I was sixteen, I dealt out hands of seven-card stud, face up, on the floor of my room. One hand to me and four-to-six hands to invisible, hypothetical players. Between the silence, the tactile feel of the slippery plastic cards shuffled, fanned, and dealt, and the meditation on a single question: What would I need to do to win—regardless of the real strength of the cards I had? The allure was intellectual satisfaction and romantic—almost as good as sneaking cigarettes and eating sedatives. There was also a more practical reason: I wanted to have gambling stories.
Dad’s shadowy gambling exploits may have been my first drug. When I was little, he would return from Vegas with a small green-and-pink souvenir slot machine and maybe a pair of red-and-white Vegas dice. His stories came from his dealings in big casinos and smoky card rooms, or with bookies and bruisers, amateurs and pros.
While his stories had a vagueness of details, I filled in the cracks with my imagination. The situations sounded dangerous, exhilarating, but a place for men to earn respect by just being there and a possible way to get Dad’s respect. Only a badass walked Dad’s path. I was a twig but had a rich fantasy life. From the first time I could convince him to tell me about a casino, I knew that was what and where I wanted to be—a man earning his stripes as a gambler.
So I dealt out hands on the floor and looked for ways to understand the odds and probabilities. I read books about body language and the individual strategies for every version of poker. By the time I was twenty, I had played in most of the local card rooms in town and a few in Vegas. I learned quickly, and though I was never a great player, I knew how to get up and leave with more chips than I’d started with. Within a couple of years, I had fared well in small tournaments and played solid in ring games in casinos and home games. I even began to count cards in blackjack.
With Dad living in Las Vegas and me confident in my card-playing ability, I wanted to show off and garner mock esteem from Dad, to show I had somehow arrived as an adult.
“I have a proposition,” I told him. “I know this seven-card game over at Bally’s. Why don’t we buy in for a tray each, blow up the game, and move on to the Mirage”—the best card room on the strip, at the time—“for a little fun with someone else’s money at a larger game?”
Bally’s was a dud of a casino, but it had a regular $5/$10 stud game and attracted players who wanted to splurge on their poker experience, who did well playing cards in their aunt’s living room.
“What are you, weird?” Dad said. I assumed he thought that he would take my money and would feel guilty if he stole his son’s bankroll. To me it was worth the risk. I convinced him I could handle the loss.
We walked into the endless sounds of the plinks and blongs and coins falling on each other from an island of slot machines at a time before casino technology went coin-free. The casino was not crowded and made the busy, multicolored casino carpet, dim-glitz lighting, and neon dizzying. Regardless of how they are marketed, the best casinos are lonely places that need to seem glamorous to those who are alone, as a justification. When we arrived at the poker room, a roped-off section of the casino floor surrounded by more slot machines, there were several games going, mostly low-stakes hold ’em.
Around the tables were a collection of fat locals who ate meals at the table and rarely played a hand unless they had a pair of aces to raise with, and a few scattered tourists who just wanted to feel what it was like to play poker with real poker players. These folks played too many hands and ultimately were frightened by seeing lots of chips pushed into the center of the table. Dad and I waited about thirty minutes for a couple of empty seats at the ten-dollar table.
We sat at opposite ends of the green oval felt table, with me on one far end while he sat close to the dealer. My strategy was simple. Watch the game for about half an hour, see who knew how to play and who didn’t. I planned to make many loud comments about the poor play of everyone at the table and flash my bad collection of rings on every finger: the lumpy gold nugget ring, the ring of intertwining horseshoes with ruby-colored rhinestones, the class ring of some frat boy that I stole at a bar when he took it off from some drinking game. I wore dark sunglasses. Everything I did was done by design to be a nuisance or a distraction. It was subtle and effective. “Is this the game where one pair beats two pairs? Because they do that at some casinos,” I asked the table as the first hand was dealt.
Dad played the first hand against two others. Dad was showing a six. I watched closely. Trying to learn from his experience and skill. By the end of the hand, Dad had called bets in every round before weakly throwing away his hand. He shrugged his shoulders at me and said, “Missed.” It didn’t look like he had a straight or flush draw.
Obviously, it was all for show. He wanted to look weak. It might have cost him a hundred to call a few bets, but it would likely come back when he started to play strong. I thought, Wow! He must be a great card player, because he sure looks like an idiot. I scooted my chair closer to the table for a better look.
The next three hands all played out the same as the first. Dad called multiple bets before folding at the end. He ordered a Budweiser, lit up a cigarette, looked confident, and pulled out several more hundred dollars to fill the empty space in front of him where chips were supposed to be. I ached in the pit of my stomach. I wanted to believe that this was all part of a larger ruse, but I could tell it wasn’t. That’s when I realized all of his drinking and mindless splashing of chips into the pot with absolutely no chance of winning was not an act. My heart began to pound like I was on a sinking ship. Over the next hour, Dad tanked and quickly blew through a grand of crumpled hundreds. Dad sat there laughing, smiling, clinking glasses with another loser next to him. My throat burned as I suppressed tears. I slumped in my chair, so caught up in Dad’s failure that whatever competitive spark I had was quickly doused.
He went from smart hustler, the way I had seen him my whole life, to obsessed action junkie in sixty minutes. I now saw him perhaps for the first time. He was not merely an idiot in a tongue-in-cheek way, in a way I could laugh with him about being a lovable rogue. But I saw him as something far worse than a liar and a cheat. He was a mark. Every illusion I had of him shattered into a million pieces. I sat there with all my chips in front of me. I did not play a single hand but felt like I had lost everything.
I watched him laugh and drink and puff and call another raise. He was having fun. I folded the next hand without even looking at my cards and walked around the table as Dad flung a few chips into the abyss while he said, “I’m in.” I crouched down next to him and took a long drag of smoke. I looked at the floor and waited to be noticed. My hands were clammy and throat dry. He was quietly annoyed by my presence but still played on, until he lost the hand and probably another hundred. When he turned to me, he said, “What do you fucking want from me?”
“Dad, let’s not do this. I am not sure I can watch this.” There, I said it. The words made me ill. I didn’t want to say more than that. Those two sentences should have said everything to him: my sadness, disillusionment, dark view for my future.
He looked confused. “I thought you wanted me to play cards with you?”
I said, “Let me buy you a few drinks.”
We both cashed out and then we sat in the hotel bar and had green midori and creams that went down like Lysol with beer chasers.
In the end, I proved nothing to him or myself. If I could do it over, I would stay there and win my portion of his losses.
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Dad ended up not being much of a gambler, but he still had game.
“I wouldn’t go over there if I were you,” Rick said over the chiming and rattling noises that came from bar-top video poker machines. Rick stared into the
bottom of his glass, a small shooter of a beer that could only be served off the Strip in a crappy, wood-paneled bar on a weekday night in Vegas. The place smelled of rust and vomit, where regulars slumped over the bar with confidence that the red-sparkle, vinyl-covered barstools remained empty on either side of them. The walls had red-and-blue flickering neon beer signs and posters of pro sports teams that had seen better days. The chatter of the few talking patrons, whirring ceiling fans, and air-conditioning hum filled the room. I massaged my temples and stared at Dad from across the bar. It was late. Dad and Las Vegas pissed me off.
It had been an hour since Dad excused himself to use the “crapper” and instead plopped himself next to the lone single, attractive female in the building about a minute before I planned to do the same. He wore an untucked dress shirt, brown dress shoes without socks, and a pair of stained green sweatpants. Dad looked homeless.
The young woman Dad sat with was about twenty-four years old and thirty years his junior. She was a cute brunette. Well, cute enough and revealing a bit of cleavage. She looked clean and normal, out of place in that dump, but Dad helped her fit in. He had been putting on a show for her, making funny faces, animated hand gestures. He lit her cigarettes and bought her a tall, fruity drink, then two beers for himself. She was listening, laughing, and occasionally putting her hand on his arm. Dad needed little encouragement. He got her to clink glasses and bottoms up while I watched intently.
I tried to read his lips as I sat across the bar with my uncle Rick. I came to understand that it didn’t matter what he said. We had been in that shithole for hours. Dad had an affinity for dive joints, but it only just occurred to me why he liked them.
Places like that bar were uncrowded and dark. The regulars were alcoholic and kept to themselves. The bartenders made little conversation and kept the drinks flowing. Rick looked at the bottom of his glass for only a moment before it was refilled—as if by magic—by invisible bar elves. So too did tiny Dixie cups of stale Brazil nuts arrive out of nowhere. The place smelled of old beer, cigarettes, and stillness. The only motion consisted of occasional souls that wandered toward the jukebox in the corner, to play “Freebird” by Lynyrd Skynyrd to drown out the slot machine noise. The dusty pool table with a single warped cue that sat on its green felt acted as an illusion of activity. All this meant that Dad had the run of the place, and any woman walking through the doors probably had some problems and was sad and alone. It was a place to come to when you did not want to be yourself. Dad knew they needed cheering up. Dad had game. Between gulps of beer, Rick also watched them intently, perhaps studying Dad’s moves. Rick had far less game.
“You know, I owe him plenty, but you know how it is.” Rick swirled the foam in his glass as he spoke. Rick was my father’s youngest brother—half-brother, really, with a shared mother—and was not yet at a state of wretched drunkenness accompanied by slurred speech, finger jabs into my chest, and his opinion of what he really thought about me. His opinions were never complimentary. Rick was short and wide with a growing bald spot on the back of his big, moon-shaped head. I had no idea why I sat there, beyond some distant notion that my family and I were on vacation together and I loved the guy. I waited for Rick to shift gears into belligerency, which, as history showed, happened in a flash.
Rick was rubbing my back and still friendly when he repeated, “Yeah, better not go over there, your dad’s working.” Rick knew I was annoyed. Dad was fat, actually thirty pounds more beer-soaked than I had ever seen him, probably in the 250 to 260 range and working a lonely girl I’d decided was completely age-inappropriate. “Besides, you’re not really up for going over there,” Rick said. I had been on an 8,000-calories-a-day diet for a year and bench-pressed until veins popped out of my forehead. I was fit. I wore socks and regular pants. Somehow I still had no game but found the energy to be indignant.
Rick pulled out a ten-dollar bill and laid it on the bar, “Can I get a roll over here, I am fucking lucky.” Rick began to play quarter slots at the bar. To me, playing the machines was something like giving up on life. I knew if I were to put in that first quarter, I would want to kill myself within a couple hours.
The only other women in the place were a few hillbillies who might have been attractive twenty-five years ago, before their alcoholism made their mascara permanently pool below their eyes and made their hair lump in a bleached morass on top of their drunken skulls.
As I scanned the room, increasingly pissed that Dad might end up with the only attractive woman in the bar, Rick soured between sips. “No one really likes you,” he said to me. “You’re only acceptable because of your father.” Rick pumped in another five quarters and slammed his fist down on the button to start the machine.
I drank down to the foam of my beer and wiped it off of my mouth with my sleeve before walking over to introduce myself to the lone female in the room, planning to shoo Dad’s old ass away in the process. “Thanks for keeping my seat warm, geezer, now skidattle,” I planned to say.
But before I even made it all the way to his side of the bar, Dad said, while raising his voice and turning toward me, “There he is. I want to introduce you to my gay son,” pointing at me as I came around the corner of the bar. Dad turned toward the brunette. “He has been having a hard time coming out, but I try to love him like he is normal.” Then Dad looked down to his beer. “All he does is lift weights and hang around with those guys. I want him to be happy, I really do, but this has been a really hard time.” The brunette leaned closer to Dad as he continued, “You know, I had such hopes for him when he was little. I am not sure what I did wrong.”
The brunette said, “It’s not your fault. I bet you were a great dad.”
I thought, what the fuck, as I stopped dead and went rosy and turned around to walk back to Rick. I had already lost, but not before Dad raised his glass as if to toast me and said, “Be proud, son.” I was more in shock than humiliated. And instead of getting angry, I felt admiration. Dad was so seamless and convincing, I almost thought I was homosexual.
It was a shameful twenty-two steps back to my barstool. My beer had been refilled as Rick slammed his fist against the slot machine button. As I sat down, Rick never even looked up. “Did he say you were a fag and make you feel like a loser?” I nodded to agree, and Rick threw a few more quarters into the machine before he said, “Well, you are. You, fucking, I know you. Fuck.” I picked up my undersized lager, moved a few barstools away, ordered a paper bowl of chili from the bartender, and nursed a warm beer.
About an hour and three beers later, Dad came over with the brunette on his arm and said, “I have a ride home,” and gave me the keys to his fifty-foot-long, chocolate-brown Lincoln Continental with the velour seats. Then he handed me a black (one hundred dollar) chip from the Imperial Palace. He said, “The hundred is for getting rid of Rick.” He leaned into my ear. “Put him in a cab and send him to Mars. You, don’t come back.” I watched as the two of them giggled their way out of the front door.
Now I was saddled with crusty Uncle Rick in the worst bar in America, eating the worst chili in America. Without a better plan, I dumped Rick at a low-rent strip joint with enough money for three beers but not enough for a cab ride back to Dad’s place. Rick said, “Fuck you. You and your old man, fuck the both of you.”
I said, “I’ll be right back, I have to go to the crapper.”
By the afternoon of the following day Rick would remember none of it.
I drove around in that big stupid car and tried not to feel alone. I ended up in the Flamingo Hilton to buy cheap weed in the keno lounge. It was easy. I pantomimed with my thumb and forefinger together like I was taking a drag from a doobie and made eye contact with everyone in the room.
“What you looking for?” He had one bushy eyebrow and a dime-bag of skunkweed with my name on it. I smoked out in the middle stall of an all-white toilet with marble floors that smelled of sanitized lemon. I slept in the Lincoln
and in the morning went out for heat-lamped pancakes and a fresh pack of cigarettes at Foxy’s Firehouse. My eyes were bloodshot and my throat was raw from too much smoke. My chest ached. Two days later, I drove home to Los Angeles and told everyone that I had a great time and that Dad and Rick were doing great.
Chapter 5
My itinerary was hectic, changing by the moment. Daria from the office of Cádiz Tourism called daily with updates. I thought about Daria often. Our initial meeting was brief and she was only being polite, but I could not help seeing myself lightly holding her hand, our fingers barely intertwined, walking through a path of golden leaves through some park in Spain. It was easy to daydream along the swaying roads of Andalucia, and perhaps not too surprising.
I had used random women to validate me for years. So I pinned the idea of love on Daria, a woman I did not know. The notion that I was still an angry, jittery twig covered with acne persisted long after my life improved both physically and financially.
Andalucia consisted of various hotel stops and lengthy meetings with vice-president-of-marketing types, who sat with me and gave me tapas galore and touted their destination as being more authentic than the last place I had visited, somehow more Spanish, relaxing, idyllic, or corporate.
Oddly, all the hotels I visited were the quintessential part of Spain the industry hoped to project. Hillside converted monasteries that overlooked fields of wine grapes. Quaint fifteenth-century homes divided into unique guest rooms. In all of them, I sat and sipped tea in a courtyard surrounded by overgrown plants. I should have fawned over the delightful quiet and ambiance, but I didn’t. The childhood I was given had me feeling sorry for myself about Dad.
I wanted the type of father who would lean with me over the motor of a stalled car and teach me how to fix it. I wanted to have a talk about the birds and the bees before the health class permission slip and before I stuck my hand down the front of some girl’s panties.
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