Benny smiled. “Johnny take care of you? Get you a room all right?”
“He was great, thanks. Can I buy you a drink?”
Benny shook his head, not turning me down, more like he couldn’t believe the question. “Blackie’s kid buying me a drink,” he said. “Isn’t life something?”
“Yes,” I agreed. “It really is.”
The bartender was looking in our direction. Benny said, “Hey Carl, how’s it going?”
The bartender told him it was going fine. “Black Label, Benny?”
“Lots of ice.”
“You got it.”
“My father’s drink,” I said.
“Yeah. I used to drink Dewar’s. Blackie told me to stop being such a cheapskate.”
“Life is too short to drink cheap booze.”
“That’s what he always said,” he recalled with a smile. When the bartender served him, Benny asked me, “You drink this stuff?”
I shook my head. “Uncle Vincent and I got together a few weeks after my father’s funeral. He wanted to talk things over, so we went at a bottle, neat.”
“Dangerous.”
I laughed. “We started toasting every memory we could come up with. I passed out at the table for a while, but he didn’t notice. I still have the bump on my head where I went down.”
“C’mon.”
“Just kidding. I drink vodka or Jack Daniel’s. Safer for me.”
“Same proof, no?”
“Sure. Different memories, that’s all.”
He nodded, said, “Salud,” then we touched glasses and drank.
Benny and I spent some time looking around the room, commenting on the games. I asked him if he wanted to sit down.
“Nah. I sit too friggin’ much as it is.” He drank some of his scotch and I waited for him to tell me why he was there. “When you going back?”
I said I was leaving in the morning.
“You booked the flight already?”
“Yes,” I replied.
He asked me which flight and I told him.
“American, eh? I got a friend at the airport, maybe get you an upgrade.”
I thanked him, and explained I’d already done that. “I travel a lot for my ad agency, have a load of frequent flyer miles.”
He looked impressed. “So, the early flight on American.”
“No sense in sticking around,” I told him, “and I’ve got to get back to work on Monday.”
Benny took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I know you came a long way to see me. You respected what I told you, that I wouldn’t talk about it over the telephone.”
I waited.
“You always showed respect,” Benny said. “And you were always a smart boy.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me. Your father was a smart guy, it figures he’d have a smart son. He could be a little nutty,” he said with a deferential raising of his hand, “but Blackie was smart. Don’t ever let anyone tell you different.”
I felt like thanking him again, but took a pass.
Benny sipped some more of the scotch, then moved a little closer and lowered his voice. “I realize finding this letter, especially after all these years, it’s like, uh, it’s like Blackie talking to you from the grave. I don’t want to get sentimental, but you know what I mean, right?”
I was glad he had no intention of becoming any more sentimental than discussing my father’s grave. “I know exactly what you mean.”
He placed his hand on my shoulder. “The thing is, kid, even if a guy talks to you from the grave, that doesn’t mean he’s making any more sense than he did before he was dead. You understand that, right?”
“I think so.”
“Good.” He squeezed my shoulder, then took his hand away and backed up a little bit. He took a moment to check out the room, as if someone might be watching us. “The last thing I want for you is that you should have any trouble. I don’t want that on my head. Your father would haunt me the rest of my life.”
As he struggled with that idea I started to feel rotten that I’d come to Las Vegas to bother him. I said, “I have the same problem, in a way.”
“Right,” he said, then reached into his pocket, took out a small piece of paper and pushed it into my hand. “The guy in France. That’s his name.” He gestured toward the paper with a tilt of his head. “I don’t know where he lives anymore, but I’m pretty sure he’s still in the south, someplace near Nice. I haven’t seen him since Marseilles, but your father talked to him every now and then. He may be dead himself, for all I know. He was older than we were.”
“You haven’t seen him in more than thirty years?”
He smiled a sad smile. “Yeah, I guess that’s right. Hadn’t thought of that. More than thirty years.” He paused. “Point is, he’s the only one who could tell you anything about this. After a while I didn’t want to know about it anymore. Your father and Gilles. It became their thing.”
I unfolded the slip of paper. It said Gilles de la Houssay, and I did my best to pronounce the name. “That how you say it?”
“Close enough.”
“What am I supposed to do with this?” The question came out sounding harsher than I intended, but let’s face it, this wasn’t exactly the sort of clue that would send Sam Spade scurrying for his shoulder holster and booking passage to the Riviera. “What I mean, is what should I do next? Isn’t there anything else you can tell me?”
Benny looked around the room again, then shook his head back and forth very slowly. “This is it for me. I think you should let the whole thing go, which I told you enough times already. But now you have all I got to give. See if you can find Gilles, see if he’ll talk to you.” He made another quick nod toward the paper in my hand. “That’s it.”
And I knew him well enough to know, this time he really meant it.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Benny and I stayed at the bar for a while longer, then he left and I went to play some more blackjack. After a couple more drinks, and a winning streak that got me back to even, I headed upstairs to bed. I felt a little drunk, a little tired and emotionally spent, so I was disappointed to wake up at four in the morning. Although my body was in Las Vegas, I guess my brain thought it was still in New York and decided it was time for me to get up.
Alone in a hotel room in the pitch dark, I was wide awake, with nothing to do but think.
The human brain is a magnificent thing, but the one feature it lacks is an on-off switch. You can stop yourself from doing just about anything, except thinking. You can close your eyes and stop seeing. You can tune people out and not listen to what they’re saying, even without putting your hands over your ears. You can stop moving, walking, talking. You can even hold your breath for a while. But your noggin just keeps going, asleep or awake, whether you like it or not.
I have friends who claim that meditating stops your mind from working, but it didn’t work for me. All you do when you meditate, instead of allowing your mind to run off in its own directions, is to focus on a solitary thought like a one-word mantra, or the picture of waves crashing on a beachy shore, or some other repetitive image that’s supposed to be peaceful and soothing.
God save us from the gurus.
Rather than some deep breathing exercise, I preferred to lay there and worry about things, so naturally I thought about my father. And, being in Las Vegas, I thought about the time he decided he was going to teach me how to play poker.
I was thirteen and I wanted to buy a junior golf permit, which cost twenty-five dollars. I had a couple of friends who started playing golf, I tried it a few times and it was fun. Van Cortland Park and Mosholu were the municipal courses near where we lived in the Bronx, but they cost ten dollars a round without a permit. With a junior permit it was only three.
Blackie didn’t like the idea. He believed I
was too young to play golf.
“Golf is for old men,” he said. “Kids should play baseball and football. What kind of pussies are you hanging around with? Next thing I know, you’ll be coming home with a tennis racquet.”
I didn’t think of my friends as pussies, and I liked golf. I was too skinny to play football, and couldn’t hit a baseball very far—I was all glove, no hit, which doesn’t get you chosen for the starting nine at that age. I was good at stickball, since I was fairly coordinated and you don’t need a lot of strength to power a rubber ball with a broom handle. But how much stickball can you play?
I wanted the golf permit.
When Blackie came home one night after a few cocktails, I figured it was a good time to bug him again about the twenty-five dollars. With some drinks in him, I thought he might be feeling generous.
“What’s the matter, don’t you have any money of your own?” he asked me.
I felt like telling him, sure, I have that two million in the trust fund you set up for me, except I don’t feel like going to the bank this week. Instead, I said, “I have about six dollars saved up.”
“Okay, big shot, I tell you what. You bring your bankroll into the kitchen and we’ll have a little poker game. You and me. One on one. I’ll give you a chance to win the money and teach you a little lesson in life.”
I already knew how to play poker, although I don’t recall which of my friends taught me. Poker is just something you seem to know how to do, except maybe you get confused about whether a flush beats a straight, but only in the beginning. It’s not like chess or bridge, where someone has to sit you down and explain all the moves and the rules and the nuances. Poker is just something you learn how to do, almost by osmosis, like checkers.
Since Blackie was a little snookered I figured I had a chance. I hurried inside, pulled out the money coins I had hidden in a tin box, and ran back to the kitchen. When I got to the table my father was waiting with a deck of cards, my mother standing over him, serving up a lecture on what a bad example he was setting and how gambling was evil and that there had to be something seriously wrong with a father who would even suggest that he play cards for money with his own son.
When my father saw me standing in the doorway he started shuffling the cards. Ignoring my mother, he asked, “You know how to play poker?”
“Sort of,” I told him.
“What you don’t know you’re about to learn. Siddown.”
I looked at my mother, giving her one of those imploring looks that said, come on Mom, give me a shot here.
She said something like, “I can’t believe this,” then stormed out of the room, leaving me to work it out with my father.
“Table stakes?” Blackie asked as I sat down.
“Huh?”
“How much are we playing for?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I need twenty five dollars for the permit.”
“I don’t want to hear about the damned permit after tonight, you understand?”
I nodded.
“Put your money on the table.”
I opened my hands and spilled my collection of coins and bills onto the speckled mica table top.
Blackie put down the cards and counted my money. I had six dollars and twenty-five cents. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a roll of bills. “Table stakes means you can bet anything on the table. You understand?”
“You have a lot more than I do.”
“That’s all right, I can’t bet any more than what you have in front of you.”
Seemed fair to me.
“And we ante fifty cents a hand.”
I agreed, feeling proud that I knew what it meant to ante. I slid two quarters to the middle of the table.
“Cut the cards,” he told me, and I did. “Five card draw, all right?”
I only knew two games at the time, five card draw and seven card stud. I was grateful he picked one of them. “Sure,” I said.
He dealt out the cards, then asked me if I wanted to bet.
“Not yet.”
“You don’t say, not yet. You pass.”
I nodded earnestly. “Okay. I pass.”
“I bet two dollars,” he said.
Two dollars! The fifty cents ante already made this the largest poker hand of my life. I looked at my cards. I had a pair of jacks, so I nervously slid two dollars to match his and asked for three cards.
“Dealer takes two,” he announced. He took my discards and dealt me three new ones. Then he replaced his two. After he looked at his hand he explained that he had the right to make the next bet since he was the opener.
“The opener?”
“The player who made the first bet,” he said impatiently, his whiskey breath filling the air between us. “You passed and I opened, so I’m the opener. Unless there were other players and somebody raised, then the last raiser would be the bettor. I thought you knew how to play this game.”
“I forgot that part, I guess.”
“Three dollars and seventy-five cents,” he said, throwing four singles on the table and pulling out a quarter.
“Three seventy-five?” That was exactly what I had left. I stared at the cards I’d drawn, which included a third jack. Then I looked at my father. “If I lose, that’s it?”
“That’s it.”
I wasn’t exactly the Cincinnati Kid, but I had an idea he was bluffing, trying to bull me out of the game on the first hand. I slowly pushed all my money to center of the table.
Blackie looked surprised. “What have you got?”
“I think you have to tell me first, right?”
“Don’t be a smart ass.”
I shook my head, then slowly laid out my cards. “Three jacks,” I said nervously.
“Sonuvabitch,” Blackie said as he threw his cards face down on the table.
“I won?”
He shoved the cards at me. “You deal,” he said.
The next few hands Blackie stayed with his scorched earth policy, trying to scare me out with large bets. I dropped out a couple of times, but after eight or nine hands I’d won more than twenty-five dollars. I was feeling pretty excited. “Well, that’s it for me, Dad. I quit.”
“You what?” he asked in an angry voice. You would have thought I just told him I’d thrown his television out the window.
“I have the money for the permit. That was the idea, right?”
“Did I tell you not to mention the permit again?”
“You said after tonight. You said I shouldn’t mention it again after tonight.”
He started to get out of his chair. “Are you razzing me?”
I felt my insides get a little shaky. “No, I’m not, I’m really not. I just thought what you said—”
“I don’t give a good goddamn what you thought. You can’t quit while you’re winning.”
“I can’t?”
“You gotta give me the chance to get even.”
“I do?”
“That’s right.”
“Then how does the game ever end?”
I don’t know if that concept had never previously occurred to him, but it seemed to take him by surprise. And made him even madder. “The loser says when it’s over.”
“But Dad, if I lose I have no more money. You could keep losing forever.”
I knew the concept was right, but the way it came out…
“You think I’m gonna go on losing to you forever?” he hollered.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I’ll bet it’s not.”
By now my mother was back at the kitchen door, providing her version of a Greek chorus, reminding my father that she had warned him, that these were the wrong lessons for a father to teach his son, but all she did was stoke Blackie’s anger.
I sat there as they g
ot into it, occasionally glancing at the pile of money in front of me. As the volume of their shouting increased, so did my fear that I was not going to be allowed to keep the money I won.
I wasn’t.
In the middle of his argument with my mother, Blackie announced that I was not entitled to my winnings since I had not given him a chance to get even.
I couldn’t believe the utter stupidity of his reasoning. “Why would anyone bother to play poker,” I asked, “if no one is ever allowed to win?”
He turned from my mother, glared in my direction, then got unsteadily to his feet and grabbed all the money off the table. All of it, not just my winnings, but my original six and a quarter as well.
I stood up too. “What about my money? What about the money I started with?”
“That’s the price of learning a valuable lesson,” he sneered at me, and made his way out of the room, into his bedroom, slamming the door behind him.
To this day I have no idea what valuable lesson he was referring to, but I can tell you that I never played another game for money with my father, not for the rest of his life, certainly not when he was drinking.
That said, when I woke up in the morning, I found twenty-five dollars next to my bed, which neither of us ever discussed again. As I may have mentioned, Blackie was a mass of contradictions.
***
WHEN DAWN FINALLY ARRIVED that morning in Nevada, I was already showered and dressed. I headed for the airport, boarded the flight for New York and settled back in a comfortable gray leather seat, grateful for the frequent flyer miles that got me to the fancy upstairs compartment they used to have on the 747. A Bloody Mary seemed a reasonable idea as I prepared for several hours of wondering what the hell to do next about Blackie’s letter. All I had so far was Benny’s refusal to help and the name of a Frenchman who may or may not still be around.
As I sank into a bog of confusion, a young woman’s voice intruded with a polite “Excuse me.”
She was seated just across the aisle to my left and, as I turned in her direction, she apologized for interrupting whatever I was doing, which was obviously nothing. Unless you consider staring into space doing something.
She had a pretty face, if you’re partial to a firm line at the jaw, well drawn but delicate features, deep blue eyes and a healthy tan. I had given her the once over as I got on the plane, but when she barely glanced at me in return, I sort of forgot she was there.
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