by Tom Cunliffe
‘There is no catch,’ she replied straightforwardly. ‘It’s well-established that a man with his pockets full of money will ultimately lose more than one who has spent over what he really should on accommodation. The firm gives you a good deal on the price of a room so you feel richer and spend longer at the machines or the tables. We get your money one way or the other, unless,’ she rounded off with a winning smile, ‘you get lucky and win the jackpot!’
As if on cue, a machine in the foyer began noisily disgorging hundreds of dollars into a plastic tub held under its maw by an elderly lady clutching a large handbag.
‘So, are we obliged to play here?’ I asked.
‘No sir. You do as you please. But you’ll find we have all you need for a sporting night out. Why look further?’
Our suite was on the ninth floor of the central tower of the complex. It offered the perfect retreat to sleep off a bad run of the cards. Huge bed, view of the Strip with the moon mountains beyond, the widest television screen I had yet seen, a beautiful bathroom and a small but tastefully appointed sitting-room in which to hatch a better strategy for the tables.
After a bath and a snooze, we inspected the various dining areas that fringed the casino floors. We opted for ‘Tex-Mex’ and were promptly and politely served with first-class food for practically nothing. Dining, like sleeping accommodation, clearly came under the philosophy of not tying up gambling money. The players were certainly making the most of the opportunity to feed in style and, for the first time since leaving California, the fat boys and girls were back. The desert doesn’t encourage obesity and we’d seen plenty of lean cowboys and healthy, resilient women in the dusty towns. Here at the Palace Station, we were back in mainstream USA.
Despite the culinary largesse from the management, on balance the house must win on all games where the odds can be controlled, so the slot machines, roulette or blackjack will see you off in the end if you play for long enough. The punters, with notable exceptions performing excellent PR for the management by winning, mostly looked to be on the down side of even. I only saw one guy sitting with his head in his hands, however. The rest seemed to be bearing up stoically as they made their personal contributions to the $2 billion worth of tourist gambling that pours though Nevada’s casinos each year.
Over in one corner of the main floor was a small room housing three luxurious green baize tables. Poker. The gentleman’s game. I’d learned the rudiments on the waterfront in Canada and I love a hand or two. For a while we watched the action to get a handle on things. The dealer noted I was there and courteously raised his eyes in query, implying that I might like to take a spare seat. I shook my head with equal civility.
‘Later?’
He nodded.
The game was Texas Hold ’em, where each player receives two cards that he keeps to himself. A further five are dealt in stages face-up on to the table, with bets at each round. All players hold the five in common, making up their final competitive hand with the two ‘in the hole’ which are hidden from all but their own eyes. The climax arrives when those left in turn up their cards and show their hands to the world.
After observing for ten minutes I was impressed by the restrained good humour of this game. The atmosphere was so much more civilised than out there in the clattering, ringing hall where the best thing, by a very long chalk, was the standard of the cocktail waitresses. Needless to say, the drinks were free if you were playing. Depending on their individual aptitudes, the girls flitted, wiggled or floated around the floors with their little trays. Casino standing orders rendered them immune from propositions, at least officially.
Stakes on the poker table were affordable, with early players ‘anteing up’ one or two dollars and things following on from there. A good pot could go $70 or more, but unless you were really going for broke, you’d be unlikely to lose more than 20 or 30 in a single hand. If you folded early, the losses would be small change.
In poker, a payment to the house can be charged to each hand, but the odds are not stacked. I reckoned that while some of the players looked good, one at least had less idea than me, so if I were prepared to hazard, say, $100, I might come out ahead. First, however, Roz wanted to see the Strip after dark.
A bus stopped outside the hotel every fifteen minutes to cart the faithful down to the slaughterhouse. Predictably, there was no fare to pay. We hopped aboard, climbed down at Caesar’s Palace, then hiked from one end of the Strip to the other, popping into an occasional famous casino in its ludicrous fantasy building and popping out equally rapidly. The scenes on the main shop floors rapidly became boring. Rattling fruit machines, rows of blackjack tables and roulette wheels inexorably extracting their percentage. Touts on the seething street corners handed out leaflets advertising individual girls for sale, complete with inviting photographs.
Immediately opposite one of these centres of marketing enterprise we found a full-scale pirate ship raid with tiny lakes and actual wooden ships. The crowd was huge and the kiddies loved it. In an oddball sort of way, so did I. People visiting Vegas seemed on the whole to be having a good time. We saw a lot more smiles than suicides. Even the pictures of the whores had a charming, schoolboy ring to them. An ironic honesty was veneered on to the general tackiness and essential amorality that seemed to say, ‘What you see is what you get,’ or, ‘This place does exactly what it says on the can.’
To us, Vegas compared favourably with the huge, factory-like casinos shooting up in Connecticut on Indian reservation land, beyond the jurisdiction of the state ‘no gambling’ laws. These promise ‘family entertainment’ and employ all manner of subterfuge to hook the kids while Dad is fleeced of his last buck, his shirt and, in all too many cases, his home as well. Punters are bussed in by the thousand from New York and Boston, and the house winnings are literally carted away in sackloads. These places have an ugly feel to them, the victims appear demoralised and humiliated, while the buildings themselves are a major eyesore in the lovely woodlands of New England. They may be the red man’s only route to revenge, but a quiver of well-aimed arrows would be tidier.
As the pirates fired their last cannonball into the desert night, we realised that we were hot, sticky and our legs were giving way. We both needed another shower and I was ready to play. The Palace Station was only a few blocks away. In fact, it was visible in glimpses between the towers so we opted to promenade home. A bad mistake.
Our guard was down and we were tired. Peace and security was in sight at the Palace Station. The trouble was, we couldn’t walk straight to it. Every road seemed to have reconstruction problems, while every wall stretched too far and across our path. We veered away to the right of our track until suddenly, the streets became dark, the buildings shabby and the music throbbing out of the casinos faded away. On our left, raised up 10 feet, was the main drag into town with cars humming by. The only way of reaching our goal was through an underpass whose width was reduced to half by the cement-stained plywood boarding of yet more construction work. Gratefully, we turned into this dark alley not a quarter-mile from salvation. It was only when the highway was right above our heads that we came face to face with our stupidity. The subway had so far been deserted, but as we rounded a sort of chicane in the boarding, three men materialised out of the shadows 30 yards ahead. They were waiting there for something, and it certainly wasn’t a meeting of the church organ committee.
I felt Roz falter, but I knew there was only one thing to do.
‘Just keep going, and don’t slow down,’ I hissed.
I straightened my back and thanked my stars the light was behind us. I might be grey of hair but I do have extremely wide shoulders. We were also wearing jackets, jeans and nondescript leather boat sneakers, not fashionable trainers. At least we didn’t look like tourists.
My insides felt like water, but I kept my eyes ahead, checking the men out as we approached them. Black; maybe eighteen or twenty years old. One, tallish, exhaled a cloud of smoke, threw down his cigarette and ground
it out with his boot. The other two were smaller, but equally menacing. Maybe we could run through them if they challenged us, I thought, but what about arms? I put one hand inside my jacket as though I were handling something heavy and turned to them as we went by, close enough to have to twist sideways to squeeze through. I gave some general ‘excuse me’ greeting in an American accent, as though meeting them in there was like asking for space in a crowded elevator. Then we were past. I turned to Roz and whispered,
‘For Chrissake, don’t turn around. Keep walking steadily.’
We strode on, waiting with undiluted dread for the following footfalls, coming faster as the boys closed in. Worse was going to be the command to stop if they decided I was bluffing and one of them pulled a gun. But nothing happened. We had convinced them we were locals, maybe armed, and they had fallen into the elementary mistake of judging the book by its cover. Ten minutes later we were slugging back Wild Turkey in our padded suite nine floors up. Roz was physically shaking and I was still sweating. After a few minutes, half-way down a second drink, we settled down.
Everyone I speak to about travelling in America warns me about bandits, muggers and drug-powered street crime. Since my advisers are often Brits whose experience of the US is far less than my own, and culled mainly from television and violent movies, I refuse to spoil my day with it. During the long winter holed up in the Bronx with a disabled boat, I had picked up some basic street wisdom. Apart from never dressing like a tourist, or letting anyone think you don’t know where you’re going, the essence of this was twofold: don’t be in the wrong place at the wrong time but, if you are, try to look like you’re at home. For a lone, middle-class white to appear as though he belongs in Harlem late on a Saturday night is a major challenge, but you learn if you live. That night, we knew we had come close to blowing it.
‘I think you should grab a hundred bucks and go and play poker,’ Roz announced as I finished my drink. ‘If you could fool those creeps, you’ll clean up with nothing more than a ‘ten-high’ – so long as you keep your face straight.’
And so I showered, tidied myself up, bought a hundred’s worth of chips and found a table with the seventh chair empty. The company was as congenial as it had been earlier that evening, and watching the dealer was a lesson in professional card handling, but for half an hour I never found myself holding anything approaching a hand. I folded regularly and was $30 down before I finally won a round. A pair of aces was face-up on the table and I had one more, backed up by a king and a jack. Three of a kind. There was one more ace out there somewhere, but it was better than evens it hadn’t been dealt. Plus, I had ‘king high’. Not a great hand, but a playable one. Besides, I was suddenly feeling extremely fatigued. There was a minor showdown with a charming gentleman from the South who reminded me of Colonel Sanders, the man on the Fried Chicken advertisements. He folded when I raised $10 and I ended up ahead, but not by much.
Three hands later I was back down to $90 and the dealer had turned up the unusually high tally of two kings, a queen and a pair of jacks with no particular suit favoured to encourage a flush of any sort. I had a king and a queen in the hole which gave me a king-high full house, a tough hand to beat. The betting had been brisk as the dealer flopped out the cards, with me calling the shots as lightly as possible so as not to frighten off my victims. The Southern gent looked slightly hesitant. He was fiddling with a diamond ring, a nervous habit, but he stayed with me all the way, following like a lamb when I went ‘all in’. This meant that I shoved my whole pile into the middle and stood to walk away with only my shirt in the unlikely event of my losing.
Without showing vulgar triumph, as is proper at a poker table, I quietly displayed my royal hand.
‘Ah,’ breathed the Colonel slowly. Very kindly, with the sort of sympathy normally reserved for funerals, he turned up a second pair of jacks. He had four of a kind, and I was busted out. It wasn’t my night.
We slept late in the morning, revelling in the personal safety which came with the tower block package. At breakfast, we were planning our route through the Arizona and Utah canyon country of Bryce, Zion and the Grand Canyon itself, when I lamented the loss of my short lens. I’d been managing with my long zoom, and Roz had more than made up the slack with print films on her Olympus, but it was my job to furnish transparencies, and I was falling short.
‘Look at all these punters,’ Roz said, indicating a restaurant full of gamblers. ‘Some of them must be desperate. They’ll have done their money and don’t dare go home until they’ve made some back. If you were in their shoes and your credit cards were empty, what’d you do?’
‘I’d hock my camera! You’re a genius. This town must be full of pawn shops.’
As we checked out, my friend the receptionist asked how we’d made out.
‘I lost, you won.’
She smiled her brilliant smile.
‘Why not stay another day? You look lucky to me.’
‘I used up all my luck somewhere else.’
A great place to lose your shirt, the Palace Station.
The downside of staying in an uptown hotel was that we had to hump all our stuff from the bikes below ground in the lockup along to the elevators, up to the room, then back again in the morning. Even though we had only allowed ourselves the minimum of personal kit, there were also tools, redundant fleeces, leathers, cooking gear, tent, bedding rolls and the cameras; plus fifty other lesser items that somehow disappeared into a studded Heritage saddlebag but were worse than a pig to carry. It took several journeys. In a standard motel room we could just heave it all in through the door. Easy. Sleeping rough or in the tent, we didn’t even unpack; a major benefit, as loading up the bikes took a half-hour every morning. The chore never grew any easier, and we never really believed it would all fit in until I heaved down the last meaty leather strap.
Ready for the road at last, we cruised the baking streets of downtown Vegas searching for pawn shops. We scored first time. The brisk, dark-suited man behind the counter had no Nikon zooms, but he was able to sell me a neat little ‘straight-through’ fifty. Under pressure, he threw in a twenty-eight and a lens bag for the ludicrous all-up price of $40 cash. The purchase more than made up for my $100 handed over to the Southern gambler.
Ahead of the game again and fired up by this new possibility for bargains, we spent the morning checking out the trade some more. On sale were colourful examples of gamblers’ watches with diamond-studded bezels, loud card faces and other horrible features. Many a wife or girlfriend had handed over her jewellery, and in one emporium, an evening suit was prominently displayed. I pitied this spectacular loser, who must have had little indeed to his name when he walked back out on to the street. But it was the personal firearms that really turned over the money. Nominally locked up in show cases behind one counter gleamed the widest possible selection, from shiny ladies’ handguns to ugly-looking automatic weapons. The needs of all could be met here and, if the money accepted for my camera lens was anything to go by, at the right sort of price. Had the armouries been pledged by gangsters down on their luck at the tables, or did they represent a crosssection of what the middle-American family packs in its travelling bag?
Three days after Vegas, we found ourselves cruising south down US Highway 89. Behind us spread the Painted Desert. Somewhere ahead lay Flagstaff, Arizona. In the past seventy-two hours we had clocked up 600 miles through some of the world’s most fantastic scenery and were pretty much dead beat. First had come Zion Canyon with its smooth road surface clear from the lower end to the tunnel out on to the plateau at the top. A great ride. On the two subsequent mornings we had turned up at Bryce and Grand so early that, as at Glacier, we had beaten the Rangers to their posts and entered free of charge. Both sunrises had been moments to hold on to. Bryce Canyon, with its miles of unique pinnacle rock formations flushed vibrant pink by the dawn light, a totally feminine experience; and Grand, enormous and masculine. It’s easy to find oneself carried away with hyperbole when co
nsidering these geological phenomena, but for me the final word on them was reported from Mr Bryce himself. A century or more ago, this bold adventurer homesteaded the difficult land outside the Canyon that now bears his name.
‘A hell of a place to lose a cow…’
The journey down to Flagstaff saw us dodging the first rain we had seen for weeks. The substantial town stands at almost 7,000 feet and even higher mountains guard the road in from the north. The wind was a gusty westerly, with bike-shaking squalls ripping down the hillsides and black thunderclouds gathering around the peaks. The land was wide and the mountains smoother-sloped than back in the full desert of Nevada. There was some evidence of cultivation here and there, but the overall effect was barren. Traffic was thickening up as we approached within 30 miles of town and a deep grey rain wall driving out of its windward edge was threatening to drench us. We crested the shoulder of a bare hill and although I had hoped to outrun the storm, I stopped to take in a totally new sight.
A long, dark market-stall set a short distance off the highway ran for 20 yards, surrounded by battered vehicles and colourfully dressed people. One or two smart cars stood slightly aloof 50 yards clear. Above the open-sided tent, in front of it and on both sides, small flags of all kinds snapped in the blustery airstream. US ensigns, confederate flags and international signal code flags competed with pennants of coloured bunting, while strips of cloth very like the ones at Wounded Knee gyrated at the top of willowy 10-foot poles whipping in the strong wind. The overall effect was of brave optimism. Close-up, the people running the show became recognisably Native American. I guessed that these would be Navajo. They were selling trinkets, beads, belts, and souvenirs to the passing tourists. Nothing they had for sale was any use to us, but they chatted in a friendly way about the bikes and the fact that we were going to be very wet shortly unless we made tracks.
The Indians were right. We passed the snowy San Francisco Mountains in a downpour and called Clark’s friend Mara from the edge of town, so totally soaked that we might as well have jumped into the bath fully clothed.