Life on Sandpaper

by Yoram Kaniuk

  Those nice innocent girls were listening to him and eventually we interrupted and called him over. He came over and whispered, What are you doing here? What, the woman from New York told you to look for me? I don’t owe her a cent. And I’m fixing up a wedding for myself and then I’ll have a Green Card and that’ll be the last you hear of me. We told him that we just happened to be passing through, and he said, Since when does anybody just pass through a thousand miles from any real city, and we said that we wanted to convert and marry those pretty girls and he said they were very devout, like the goyishe version of the people in the Mea Shearim quarter in Jerusalem. Yalla, do me a favor, I’ve got it good here and if I’m seen with you too much I’m finished. I’ll have three wives and Jesus too. With God’s help, I said, and he said, Yes, with God’s help, and added, The choine on my boike is bwowken, just like he used to say when he was still Shimon and thought it was funny and so we left.

  After hours of monotonous driving along deserted roads we reached a small town called Provo and were surprised to discover that we’d run out of money. We found a public phone booth and made some calls, me to Avi Shoes—collect, of course—but he wasn’t there, and Oved called his brother Hanoch in Los Angeles and he wasn’t there either. The hours passed. When we picked up the receiver the operator would ask, Is this Oved or Yoram? Our voices were similar and sometimes when I hear myself I think it’s him and she knew by then who to connect us with and we were getting hungry. A flotilla of young girls from the local college passed by. We looked at them. It was sad. They were there. We were here. The wonderful telephone operator who wouldn’t give her name sent us coffee and sandwiches via a nice little boy and Avi Shoes finally arrived at one of his offices and wired us a money order and we drove on.

  We came to an empty gold-mining town. All made of wood. Not a soul. No name. Collapsed buildings. Neglected empty streets. Dogs roaming around. We found one old man living there, so he said, because all the people who’d left were fools and soon they’ll be starting to look for uranium and after all there was gold here once but today’s gold is uranium and I’ve got a Geiger counter. He was waiting. And no, he wasn’t bored, he went hunting sometimes, he said, he talked and dreamed a lot about uranium with passing travelers like us, and he’d never been all that fond of people to begin with and all his wives had been cruel and he hoped they were all dead and now he had ten dogs and he trusted them, he called them and they came and he told them to behave themselves and they obeyed and he said, Don’t trust people, they’re all cheats.

  After an hour in the desert by canyons gashed with sunlight it was decided that Oved, Hanoch, and I would go to Las Vegas and try out Oved’s system for beating the casinos. He’d learned the system from his late grandmother of blessed memory who had prayed for him and saved him in the war and now he’d had a dream about her and she’d told him what to do. For a guy who came up with the idea of hiding the fact that his Israeli passport had expired by covering it with Jewish National Fund stamps, this all came pretty easily. We had a little money left over for this trip and Oved found an old Dodge and we drove for seven hours across the Mojave Desert and Death Valley and reached Las Vegas—wide streets and one-armed bandits in every gas station. We found a small motel, had something to eat and drove to the Sands, which was considered the best. We checked out the territory. We were interested in the craps tables, because the roulette wheels had two greens and the house took you for all you had on both.

  We saw that free drinks were being served all the time and there was a bar where people were eating and drinking without paying, but we discovered too that the minimum at every casino on the Strip was a dollar. We didn’t have enough money to gamble whole dollars so we went downtown. Going there was like going back in time, before we’d even been born. Poor, withered, sad-looking people were shouting, Seven! Seven or eleven! and shooting craps or playing blackjack. The pit boss sat on a high chair looking like a brawny lifeguard at the beach. Down below a few guys we wouldn’t have liked to meet in a dark alley were moving through the crowd. The minimum there was a quarter. We got some chips and Hanoch went to sleep at the motel and Oved and I played. He stood behind me saying, Put it on the red or Put it on black. Or, he’d do a quick calculation and say, Six, and I’d put it on—No, no! Eight! And I’d move it. After a day of playing we saw we were winning about the same sum over any given two hours. After deducting expenses and losses we had won twenty-five dollars.

  After the second day a short, heavy-jawed man came over and asked who we were. We told him. He was overjoyed, Ah, boychiks from Yizrael! Then all kinds of bosses and semi-bosses came over looking like the gangsters from Guys and Dolls, and they gave us drinks and awarded us the house medal and a Las Vegas medal and invited us to the wedding of one of the owners. We went. We danced. They’d brought a rabbi from Reno. They said that the sheriff was a Jew as well and that he’d spent five years in jail. Most of the security people and the bosses had been small-time gangsters and now they were running the most crime-free city the world had ever known. People would forget huge sums of money on a table, come back and find it was all still there. But everything in the club was shoddy and cheerless. People lay drunk and half dead on the floor, a passing winner would toss them a coin and suddenly roused from sleep or a drunken stupor they’d manage to catch it, get up, stretch and become men, go to the cashier, buy some chips, put them on a number, and then if they lost they’d yell something to some god or other and lay right back down. Every few minutes the bouncers would frog-march somebody to the door and throw him into the street. Not far away, in the desert, you could see the green of an enormous golf course, and a police station with the waving hands of prisoners sticking out through the bars, all the guys shouting, Let us play! Let us gamble! Whiskey bottles were passed from hand to hand and in the halls, in the jail, in the parking lots you could hear pleas, like a melody. The Jews asked me and my friend to sing for them, I think that Hanoch who had woken by then was the one who agreed, and they sang something like, How pleasing it is the Sabbath of Israel together, because their Hebrew education had apparently only been so-so. Each morning we went back to the motel room with twenty-five dollars. Oved said, The system works but we don’t have a safety net, we’re not showing a profit, we’re breaking even; if we had two hundred dollars in our pocket we could go to the Strip and play for whole dollars and make some real money.

  After four days during which we were hailed national heroes, the nice Vegas Jews told us, stone-faced, that they were going to give us a few more medals, a bottle of whiskey, some candy and chocolate, but although it pained them to say so it would be better if we didn’t show our faces in their clubs any more. Why, we asked. They didn’t answer. Do yourselves a favor, they said, we’re all brothers, the People of Israel, but get lost. Oved smiled because he understood that the system was working, but when I asked our friends what would happen if we went back, after all these were casinos in an American city and there was law and order here, they told us, Look boys, we’re the law here, nobody’s ever been robbed or murdered in Las Vegas, there’s no death or theft here, but on the other hand there’s a big hot desert and all sorts of people who asked too many questions are out there in the ground. And I, poor little me, said, But what will happen if we complain, because it’s not fair to throw people out just because they’ve been winning twenty-five dollars a night, and then one of them kissed me on the cheek, hugged me tightly, his hands were like steel bratwursts, and said, Who would you complain to? We’re the staff, the bosses, the cops, city hall, the courts, the bailiffs, and we’re all graduates of Sing Sing and Attica and a few more universities that aren’t exactly Yale, so don’t play tough guy with us, okay? We won’t snitch on you because you’re flesh of our flesh and we’re all our mother’s boys. Go up to the Strip, maybe they won’t catch on at first, go break the bank and don’t forget that you’re the most honored guests we’ve ever had and shalom.

  We consulted.

  Hanoch had to get
back to Los Angeles. Oved and I cased the biggest joints and again decided on the Sands because everybody said it was the best. For the food too. Part of it, so they said, belonged to Frank Sinatra, whose career, after all, I had restarted, and to good—not bad!—gangsters. We learned the lingo from the hookers, who were not called hookers, and what they didn’t know you could write on the head of a pin. They lived at the same motel we were staying at and liked us; Oved was tall, he had the face of a despondent Swede, and we’d meet in the mornings, have breakfast together after they’d been working all night, and they told us all the secrets. We started playing. It was a classy joint. More than four-star. Seven-star at least. We were there for two weeks. We swam in the pool, ate in the restaurants for free, heard the greatest performers without paying, just as though we were high rollers. The hall was vast. Every hour along came a half-naked girl with a tray and served drinks to the gamblers. Unlike downtown, here we saw the who’s who arriving in their private planes and winning a million and losing a million and it had no effect on anybody. The house won on the 12 that was like the green in roulette but in craps it was called 12, and there was only one, because one was enough for them.

  One day, or one night, a huge Indian came in dressed like a chief and surrounded by ten young fierce ladies. He came, played, we stood near him, we stopped gambling, he won two million dollars and lost three and went on winning and losing, laughing all the time and hugging the duty girl and after two hours he went to eat with his troop of virgins, that’s what he called them, and we followed him. He was happy to talk. The virgins moved around and made eyes at all the gamblers who were ogling them and we asked why he was willing to lose so much money. He asked where we were from. We told him. He said he’d heard there was such a place, and explained: As you can see, I’m a goddamned Indian. My father lived on a reservation. My grandfather too, who had a great name, died there. And his father too. The tourists would come to see real Indians and I had to go Woo-woo-woo and my wife had to embroider, and the children—I had children then—had to dance with feathers stuck in their hair, and the FBI came and got everybody drunk because the war against us was still going on, it never stopped, it would never stop until not a single Indian remained alive. I was supposed to be given some land outside the reservation, some hole in the desert, to build a hut for selling Indian clothes to the tourists. But I was given a big plot of land by mistake so I was forbidden to sow or plant and only cacti grew there. And one day a young man came along and put his finger in the soil and smelled it and said, There’s oil here! And he took pity on me. He knew something about Indians, and not only from the movies, and ran me to Oklahoma City where you can see those big metal grasshoppers pumping oil at the entrance to the Oklahoma State House of Representatives, and I got official confirmation that the land belonged to me because they’d thought it was just a little old useless piece of desert for giving to Indians who don’t know how to think clearly without whiskey and are only good for John Wayne to kill. They took me back to my land and the young man came along and drilled. They put in a drilling derrick. That was in 1946. There was a gusher and in one day I was rich. Then they tried to get rid of me. It reached the Oklahoma Supreme Court, but with all their power the law was still on my side, because that nice young man brought in reporters from all over America, and then the government fumed and sent in some thugs but I rounded up a few tough Indians and we beat up the thugs and they left me alone. They said, Okay, so there’ll be one Indian with oil, that’ll be good PR for America. People wrote about me in all the world’s papers. They wrote what the press attachés at the embassies told them to write. They did a TV report and said, One Indian with oil, but there won’t be any more. And then I started buying things: I bought a ranch. A yacht. Why a yacht in the desert? For kicks! I bought a plane. I hired pilots. I bought a restaurant just for me. I bought twenty young girls for a hundred dollars a day and they get a tip after a good night. I’m seventy years old. I can’t even count my millions. I can buy anything. All of a sudden I wanted to buy a big company in Texas. I bought it. They tried to stop me, but money is the real law in America. And then one day I realized I could buy anything I wanted. I thought, there’s got to be something I can’t buy. I searched. Classy women? I bought them. A church? I bought one. Until I passed through here by chance. The city was tiny. I gambled. I suddenly realized that there was one thing I couldn’t buy—luck. Here they say luck is a lady and when I come here I get excited not because I win or lose but because I don’t know if I’ll lose or win when I roll the dice or wait for the croupier to shout, Seven! Seven! Or eleven. Or three. Or twelve. See? It’s wonderful to feel yourself hanging in the air and not knowing, because money can’t buy that throw of the dice—because even if I buy five croupiers I can’t buy luck. He looked happy. He tossed two hundred dollars’ worth of chips to us, which helped us to play for real money and win a hundred a day. But we still didn’t have the big, big money.

  I called Avi Shoes but Miss Hauser answered and said dryly that Avi Shoes had sold most of his shares, bought a ranch in North Dakota, and taken Mira with him. She told me he’d said he wanted to learn to fish and he didn’t have a phone and didn’t want to hear from anybody and he’d call if necessary and that bastard, my father’s murderer, told me he loved me. And he said he loved you too. But he doesn’t want to talk with you now because you’re a loser who’s trying to gamble instead of painting.

  The wives of the gamblers who frequented the casino and didn’t play roulette or craps would crowd around the one-armed bandits and play on them. The casino, which knew its clientele, built niches in the walls around some of the bandits and the wives would hide there, and if word got around that someone had been playing a long time without winning they’d run like crazy to grab the machine as soon as it was abandoned, out of an erroneous belief, hard to uproot, even if they’d studied statistics at Harvard, that if the machine had been working for a certain time without yielding results, then the next player would surely be a winner. The guys from the casinos knew better than all universities in the world how to con people, the bandits only paid out at random and the hiding women had nothing going for them.

  We continued playing and it wasn’t easy. I’d stand close to the table, one hand stretched out with a chip, I’d wait, and Oved stood behind me making calculations in a tattered notebook and saying, Red! No, black! Or, Eight, no, no, no, six! And I was forced to concentrate and know exactly where my hand was in the face of the croupier’s calls and Oved’s shouts, and sometimes I thought that his voice was mine thinking aloud, and sometimes he lost his voice and I didn’t hear what he said, or there was some commotion, a gambler who didn’t know how to lose, and some of the nice guys quickly dragged him outside, and we continued, with the best will in the world, to play for single dollar, we couldn’t raise it to five because if the losses and gains stayed at the same level we would still only win a certain percentage, just like downtown, but we’d also be losing more, and we just hadn’t reached the point where it was worth our while. To get to a five-dollar bet we’d have to play for another four and a half weeks. The girls at the motel kept us entertained and told us what had happened to them and who they’d worked on the night before, and we drank together, and one day a one-eyed man came along and told us we were wanted upstairs by the management. We followed him because from the way he looked we could tell that running was out of the question. We were taken into a spacious room. At the far end sat a friendly looking man who got up, came toward us, it took him a few minutes to impress us and he said his name was Jack Entratter and he wanted to show us something. He led us into the next room where there were TV screens showing every blackjack or poker table and everything else in the house, including the one-armed bandits. We looked and saw how we’d been watched for the past two weeks. Everyone was being watched. Even the Indian chief. And then we were taken back into the big room.

  The man asked us to sit down facing him. He ordered coffee for us. He asked some innocent qu
estions like whether there was a casino in Israel and had we fought in the war and whether we knew where we were. We answered as best we could. He said, Look, my friends, I’m here to make money, not to be nice. When I was nice they stuck me in jail for it. So this is how it is, two of your good friends from downtown were discovered found dying of thirst in the desert, maybe because one of them, or both of them, hinted that you should come gamble at the Sands. This is the Sands. The Sands is me. They really were nice guys, but they talked too much. Sure, they’ve come back now, they weren’t buried out there, but they’ve got histories in town and they know what a mistake they’ve made. I mean, they were helped to understand what a mistake they made with the aid of a certain party who can smash through a concrete wall with one fist. Here on the Strip, systems vary. As you must have noticed, we don’t care how much you win here, even if it’s ten million in an hour. But—we do care that you’re winning the same amount every night and that one of you takes notes while the other plays. We’ve had hundreds of miracle system players here and they all learned soon enough that we don’t scare easy. Because, you know, here in Vegas there’s only one fear: like at Sodom and Gomorrah, which went up in flames because of a vengeful God, the fear here, which keeps us up nights, is that somebody will come along with a real system, and that system will finish the whole city off. So we don’t know if your system is really that system, or if you’ve just been lucky, but we don’t like worrying or taking risks. So it’s like this: You’re going downstairs right now, I mean right now, in a minute, and you’ll cash in your chips, take your money, go to your motel, pack your things, pay your bill, go to the parking lot, get into your shitty Dodge, drive to the first Gulf service station on the right as you leave town, fill up, and then head out in the direction of Los Angeles. Just remember that, until you pass a certain point—and this is wholly out of concern that nothing unpleasant should happen to you on your drive—you’ll be tailed by a black Packard with Nevada plates that’ll keep an eye on you until you cross into California, we don’t cross the Nevada state line, and then once the Packard disappears from your rearview mirror just remember to continue driving in the direction of Los Angeles, and I’d like to say this in the nicest and fairest way possible, because I like you and I’d even adopt you both if I could spare the time but there’s no free time in my life and I work hard since my bosses—who are both partners and friends—aren’t around to keep an eye on things themselves, but you’ve got to go, you’re hitting the road today, and I’m going to ask that we don’t see you here for a very long time, not because you’re not nice, on the contrary, you’re very sweet, but we’ve got a situation here where our love for you blinded us for a while and we don’t like being blind. So come here a second and take a look. Look—he took us to one of the TV screens—look, see over there? Groucho Marx. See? He’s just won half a million. Water off a duck’s back. Tomorrow he’ll lose. Or somebody else will. But winning that much every night, or even a small sum, consistently, that’s dangerous. Look, a gambler comes along. He knows that if he loses he’ll double his bets and if he wins he cuts his losses by half. That’s the sort of system we allow, the pros use it, and it doesn’t scare us because whatever a pro wins he’ll lose, or somebody else will lose it for him. The guy’s come to gamble, but how long can he gamble? How many hours? Five? Six? A day? Two days? You’ve got to sleep, eat, drink eventually. And we’re here with a hundred craps tables and twenty roulette wheels and they all work twenty-four hours a day because in the normal course of events a man can beat the machine, but you can never beat the system. So here’s a little something for you, for the road, a few cigars, club lighters for the both of you, despite that one there not being a smoker, and we’ll even give you back the cost of the call you made to Avi somebody in New York, but now, regretfully, I want to see you going through that door, and out of our deep respect for you both you’ll be shadowed by some nice guys who want only the best for you until you are in your car and driving.