Random on Tour: Las Vegas

by Julia Kent

  And then Santa Claus walked by.

  I knew the casinos would be a soup of humanity, different bits and pieces floating together to make a tasty whole, but experiencing it was nothing like my imagination’s conjuring.

  “Hmph,” someone next to me said, a female’s condescending voice shattering my observations. “Guess they let anyone bet these days, even at the higher-stakes tables.”

  Before I even turned, I knew who I’d see.

  Ms. Queen Bee.

  Ignoring her, I kept watching.

  “Bill!” she snapped. “Get me a vodka and Coke. Coke Zero. Only Coke Zero. If they don’t have it, I want nothing at all.”

  “The waitress will be here soon,” he said in a bored tone. I kept stealing little covert glances at him, trying to view him from a bunch of different angles. I knew it wasn’t rational — not one tiny bit — but some part of me started to wonder if my daddy hadn’t really died in that car accident.

  What if he was alive, a rich man who’d renamed himself Bill, and —

  “But they always get it wrong!”

  “I’m sure it will be fine.”

  And was catering to a piece of shit who was all fussy over the difference between Diet Coke and Coke Zero.

  “You know I don’t like being stuck with a mouthful of something nasty.”

  I looked at Bill openly now. His eyebrow twitched, but he was a master at ignoring her. Why would a sugar daddy even bother with someone so bitchy?

  Yet the way he moved, his scowl of chagrin, how he licked his lips before rolling his eyes — these were the mannerisms I’d seen in the rare home movies Mama had.

  A roar went up among the crowd as someone’s bet won.

  “Let’s go watch baccarat,” Queen Bee whined. “The people there know how to dress.” Her eyes raked over me and one eyebrow went up. I could taste her sneer in the back of my throat.

  You know. A mouthful of something nasty.

  She departed. I rejoiced. To my left, a loud shout and a groan made it clear someone had just lost some serious bucks. At that table, the stakes were lower. Joe’s comment at the airport slot machines pinged through me.

  The more expensive bets have better odds.

  Hundred-dollar minimums, with a maximum inside bet of twenty thousand. As if I’d ever get to that point, I thought, chuckling to myself. The dealer caught my eye and smiled at me. Mario cashed in some of my chips from house chips to table-specific chips, the color red being assigned to this one.

  Red for risk.

  I put the twenty I’d won back at the airport, plus another eighty bucks, down on black thirteen – lucky thirteen, as far as I was concerned – and just like that, I became one with the universe.

  I didn’t have an abundance mentality.

  I was abundant.

  And I don’t mean my gunt.

  The dealer nodded and suddenly a hand brushed against my upper arm.

  “What can I get you, sweetheart?” asked a breathy voice, her mouth smelling like mint cigarettes and orange, the cocktail server’s smile when she met my eyes one of those guarded looks. Too bad Queen Nasty Mouth left without getting her precious Coke Zero.

  “Uh, something simple,” I said, feeling better and better, warmer and warmer.

  Loose.

  Lucky.

  “Tequila?”

  “Sure. Thanks.”

  Seconds later, it seemed, she was back.

  With a double shot.

  I reached into my purse for some money and she waved me off with a smile. “Tip me when you win,” she said, my attention split between her and the wheel.

  When.

  But I didn’t. For the next six tries, I lost, $600 gone. Poof! Gone.

  Two chips left, both $100. Shit. I’d lost six hundred dollars. Six hundred dollars! That was all of our old lot rent plus utilities for a month back home in Peters, Ohio. I should have quit while I was ahead, except I wasn’t, damn it.

  So when you’re already down, and you’ve spent most of your life with your face so close to a pile of shit you can smell nothing but, even if your face isn’t in it, you know what you do?

  Lose until you can’t lose no more.

  Just as I was about to place my hundred-dollar chip on red 31, Queen Bee arrived, carrying an amber-colored drink and a chip on her shoulder the size of her sugar daddy’s bank account.

  “Losing?” she asked, her mouth twisted in a smile. She cut her eyes over to Bill. “The house loves people like that.”

  If Joe had been a woman, he’d have sounded just like her.

  In regular life, people talk like this, but I hadn’t heard it for a while. Back home in Ohio, bitchy talk comes from longstanding feuds, the kind that start in third grade when someone makes fun of your rainbow barrettes and by high school, you just hate her because.

  Queen Bee here went from nobody to bitch-eating-crackers status in three seconds flat, on purpose.

  “What the hell is your problem?” I asked rhetorically, giving her a grimace like she smelled funny. “You don’t need to comment on me, lady. You don’t even know me.” I half hoped Bill would rise up and defend me, the way a daddy should.

  Bill had the decency to cast his eyes away, but it was a brutal gesture, one born of time and frequency. She clearly did this.

  A lot.

  And I guess sugar daddies didn’t get in the way.

  “‘You don’t even know me,’” she mimicked, looking around the faces at the table for the bully connection. You know the look. When someone’s being a jerk, they need other people to validate their jerkiness, as if the only way to feel superior is to have other people agree that they’re superior.

  No one bit. Not even Bill.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said to Bill, touching his wrist as I slid my chip over to red thirty-one just in time, before the dealer spun the wheel. He met my eyes and gave me a kind, resigned look.

  God, he looked like my daddy.

  “Sorry?” she sneered. “Why would you tell Bill you’re sorry? Although,” she said, looking down her obviously cosmetically enhanced nose at me, “you really should apologize for that outfit.”

  “Come on, Victoria. Let’s just go,” Bill snapped.

  “I’m not leaving,” she insisted, watching the wheel like Narcissus staring at his own reflection in a lake.

  “She’s expensive, huh? The high-maintenance ones always are, especially as they, you know, age out,” I said to him. Victoria’s beady little eyes cut over to me and I realized who she reminded me of.

  Suzi.

  Joe’s ex-fiancée.

  I watched the wheel, ignoring her digs and nasty noises. Suddenly she sneezed, just as the roulette wheel was slowing down, my prospects strong for red thirty-one hitting.

  But then the wheel did something.

  When you watch as much roulette as I’d watched in the previous few weeks, you get a kind of sixth sense for the wheels. Stability, balance, rate of speed, rate of decline – it’s a physics lesson. Back in high school, physics felt too much like complex math for me to be interested, but now that it was attached to dollar signs, it was suddenly exciting.

  Just as that ball was about to give me a red thirty-one, it moved, the ball hitting a tiny little imperfection on my spot, rolling into double zero. The 00 mocked me as I groaned, another hundred lost, the queen bee rubbing her nose like it was her clit. I caught her eye and saw her pupils were the size of black holes, and it hit me.

  She was coked out.

  As the dealer took my money, I fingered my last chip.

  I peered hard at the wheel.

  “Lady, did you just shoot a booger outta your nose?” I said under my breath, contemplating the impossible and at the same time filled with a kind of glee to call her out on something so base, so disgusting, so unrefined.

  So human.

  “What?” She rubbed the end of one nostril, nothing but a wall of disgust coming my way.

  The dealer began the next round, glancing at
me but not examining the wheel closely. I fingered my chip.

  What the hell, I thought, sliding it on red one. That was right next to the double zero. I would have bet double zero but that’s an amateur’s move. You don’t bet the number that just hit.

  Bill laughed at me, looking at Victoria as he handed her a hankie. The dealer started the roulette wheel and I prayed.

  God didn’t hear me.

  The ball teetered, so close to double zero, then my number, and then kaput. It landed in double zero.

  “Fuck!” I hissed.

  Victoria laughed.

  I got as close as I could to the wheel, squinting just enough to sharpen my vision. Sure enough, there it was:

  Victoria’s noseburger.

  Small but mighty, in the context of a roulette wheel. Even the slightest weight change could be calculated in my favor if I played it right.

  My mind raced in the face of this fascinating detail because I don’t know about you, but generally speaking, a random piece of nose garbage doesn’t make me lose a hundred bucks. Even I have basic manners and know that pointing to Victoria’s nose slug and shaming her in front of all these posh casino patrons was gauche.

  Crass.

  Vulgar.

  So I did one better.

  I played her booger to my advantage.

  When life gives you boogers, make money.

  Not from the boogers directly, because that would be gross.

  Hmmmmm, that chocolate Giles gave us was so divine, I almost felt high. High on life.

  How, pray tell, did I take a piece of concentrated snotgreen and turn it into a five-figure win?

  By not taking what life handed me and settling for less.

  Without another word I stormed off, searching for my credit card on route to a cash machine or a cash counter, which was nowhere on me. All I had was the band’s credit card. The red and silver design on it was so pretty. Gorgeous and bold, telling me to do it. Go for it. Risk it.

  Take – don’t passively accept.

  I did a cash advance on the spot, maxing out the $8000 allowed on the credit limit.

  My heart pounding in my chest like an angry Sam playing a solo, I cashed in the whole wad for hundred-dollar chips and carried my substantial (to me) pile to the table. Mario exchanged them for table chips without comment. Careful not to tip my hand, I checked the spot on the track to the right of the double zero on the wheel.

  Yes! Green streak.

  I played a hundred dollars each on black ten, red twenty-seven, green double zero, red one, and black thirteen. Why?

  They were all in a row with the double zero in the middle.

  Five hundred dollars on a single bet. The crazy math whizzes with their blogs and tutorials online better have been right. Here and there, one of them would say that if you could find the tiniest flaw in the roulette wheel and use it to your advantage, well...

  The cocktail waitress delivered me another double just as the dealer spun.

  “Black thirteen!” I squealed as the dealer removed my four hundred dollars in failed bets, left my hundred-dollar chip on black thirteen, and gave me $3500 in winnings. 35-to-1 odds.

  I held my breath.

  No. Mario the dealer hadn’t made a mistake.

  My math brain improves remarkably when I am being handed four figures in winnings, and as my own microprocessors computed, working hard to finish before a hormone bath flooded them, I realized the odds added up.

  Thirty-five fucking hundred dollars.

  I was sitting on a total of $11,100. Up by $3100.

  As I inhaled deeply, filling my lungs with the scent of success, with the taste of victory, I found the nasty, bitter flavor of being sneered at moments ago to be nothing more than a passing aberration.

  I let black thirteen ride and this time positioned my bets like green double zero was midnight, trickling back to 10:30 on an analog clock. Green double zero, red one, black thirteen, red thirty-six, and black twenty-four.

  This wasn’t random anymore. Holy shit. Joe was right.

  Higher stakes meant a better chance of winning.

  And a weighted roulette wheel no one else noticed, played right, was the best chance of all.

  Spinning before I could blink, the wheel did its job. It turned, the ball bouncing, a tiny bit of the green weight of perfection eroding away. Yet again, the ball landed near green double zero, this time on black twenty-four.

  My brain lit up, rainbow style.

  “You’re killing it!” Bill shouted, turning to clink glasses with me. Mine was empty. At some point, I had sucked down that second double shot the waitress delivered.

  We watched together, me and my new not-quite-daddy Bill, as the dealer took away my four hundred dollars in losing bets and gave me another $3500.

  I knew about plenty of ways a woman could use balls to make money, but this was the one that smelled best.

  I now had $14,200.

  And a bad case of the vapors.

  “Let it ride,” I said, leaving black twenty-four, betting on red thirty-six, red three, black fifteen, red thirty-four, black twenty-two, and red five, like covering 10:30 to 9:30 on a clock face. That tiny little booger weight was wearing off, ball stroke by ball stroke.

  I needed to play my advantage while I still had it.

  Crowds are how Random Acts of Crazy makes money. We love crowds. People clustered together in big and small groups to be entertained are the backbone of the music industry.

  Yet those same crowds can be daunting when you’re suddenly shrinkwrapped against a roulette table, the flock descending to watch.

  People who come to rubberneck are, by and large, bloodthirsty. They would cheer if I won, but they’d snicker when I lost, patting themselves on the back for not being the poor chump who threw it all away. But oh, how everyone loves them a winner, too.

  Folks are funny that way, hedging their bets.

  This spin of the wheel, the ball drifted further away from its weighted place, but damned if it didn’t land on red thirty-four.

  “What’s your name, sweetie?” the cocktail waitress asked, bringing me another drink.

  “Darla,” I said as I slipped her a hundred-dollar chip because wasn’t that what winners do?

  We spread our money, the generosity a symbol of abundance.

  Finally.

  Now I got Trevor’s world view.

  After all was said and done, I had $17,100.

  “Go home with your winnings or try again, Darla?” someone in the crowd asked as I tried to be a computer, grasping pieces of my functional mind like they were sails on a pirate ship in a bad storm, the loose ends flapping in the wind. Try as I might, I couldn’t hold onto them, being lashed by forces beyond my control.

  A woman took out her phone and snapped a picture of me. Security stepped forward as someone recorded a video on their phone. I didn’t catch it all as time slowed to a halt, my own brain working like it was walking through wet cotton candy.

  Letting it ride on red thirty-four, I bet black fifteen, black twenty-two, red five, black seventeen, red thirty-two, and black twenty.

  “Last one,” I muttered, just as Victoria appeared again, wobbling on drunk ankles, her makeup smeared. The woman clearly contoured, but as the day wore its grooves into her, she looked more and more like a Picasso painting.

  And… spin.

  Black twenty.

  The table erupted.

  Quick math told me I now had $20,000. Eight grand was the band’s, and my profit was a whopping $12,000.

  “Let it ride? You’re on one hell of a lucky streak,” Bill said to me with a wink. Even old Barbie the Booger Queen seemed marginally impressed. Or maybe her tapeworm was acting up. Somehow, she showed a little interest.

  Or I was drunk and misinterpreting.

  “She’s too green to let it ride and bet it all, Bill. A casino coward. You know the type.”

  Coward.

  Coward?

  You can call me plenty of names a
nd I’ll let those roll off my back, but there are two words that start with c that you can’t call me. Coward’s one of them.

  And you don’t call me a fucking coward in front of a man who invoked so many aching memories of a daddy I’d give anything to have back alive.

  I looked at the wheel, surprised to find green double zero completely devoid of Victoria’s nostril dressing. That meant all the odds had changed.

  “See, Bill? Amateur,” she said, shaking her head.

  I finally spoke.

  “Lady, I am twelve grand up. That’s more money than you probably make from a blow job.”

  Bill sprayed Victoria with his drink.

  “She’s way overcharging you, Bill,” I said before I took my chips and started dividing them to put on the table.

  “You can’t do that if it’s over twenty grand,” the dealer said sternly.

  “Huh?”

  “See, Bill? Amateur.” Victoria wasn’t even trying to hide her fangs at this point.

  My blood began to heat up, fired near to the point where my bones melted into the ground, impulse control razor thing.

  “What’s the most I can bet?” I called out to the dealer. Looking at the track without being obvious, I could tell all traces of Victoria’s snot rock were gone. Game over. It was time to take my enormous winnings and the ocean of adrenaline churning through me and walk away a winner.

  Joe and Trevor would be stunned and amazed when I went back and showed them. The band would love me. Bill would be impressed and somehow he’d reach up to heaven and get Charlie Jennings’ attention, so he could be proud of his baby girl.

  I could take the eight grand I cash advanced, pay off the bill before anyone knew, and have a sweet twelve grand in the bank.

  It was foolproof.

  Bill beat him to it. “You can do an outside bet. An outside bet is –”

  “I know what it is. I don’t need to be mansplained to,” I replied. I could bet on black or red, bet evens or odds. An outside bet was different from betting on one color and number combination. I stared at the wheel, debating, the room spinning from alcohol, my newfound financial cojones, and pure rage at Victoria, who was so far beyond bitch-eating-crackers territory by now.