Slot Attendant

by Jack Engelhard

  “That was another life.”

  “I know you fool around.”

  “No I don’t.”

  “You lie.”

  I used to think she was kidding, but no, Maggi wants to get laid. She says if I continue to spurn her she’ll start spreading those rumors about me.

  “What rumors?”

  “That you’re a spy.”

  She’s heard, she says, that I’m really a writer. That I was once very famous.

  “So what am I doing here?” I ask.

  “That’s what I’d like to know. That’s what we’d like to know.”

  “There is nothing to know, Maggi. I’m a slot attendant.”

  “Oh sure.”

  “What you see is what you get.”

  “You can’t make me believe that someone like you likes doing this. Come on, Jay, fess up!”

  “I never said I like doing this.”

  “I just wonder who you’re spying for. Management? The Commission? Some newspaper for an expose?”

  “Afraid it’s not that glamorous.”

  “But you were once a famous author, right?”

  “I’m a slot attendant, Maggi. That’s what I am.”

  “Once I get you to bed, you’ll spill.”

  I am beginning to think that Freud had it right. It is all about sex. Just weeks ago I made a connection with a movie producer who was there as a club owner in Greenwich Village during the 1960s. My pitch was that his memoirs would make a terrific movie, all that idealism, the music, the counterculture. He said that he remembered none of that, only that he kept getting laid.

  * * *

  After a time you get used to the hours; even graveyard can get to be a habit. Ten p.m. when you first hit the floor you’re spooked. You don’t know what to expect and where to expect it from. But you’re gonna get nailed, for sure, from a player, a supervisor, from another player, from another supervisor. Most gamblers are surly. It’s not life and death, but it is about money, so maybe it is life and death.

  A few hours later you’re in control, at least you’ve managed and working off the rhythm of the place, and working from your adrenalin. When the clock runs down to about four in the morning, you run down as well, and the last thing you want to do is check your watch. The minute hand never moves when you keep checking and sometimes it seems six o’clock, punch out time, will never come around.

  When the clock hits six, six a.m., it’s like a miracle, like being born again.

  Chapter 4

  So this morning I overslept on the train and find myself in Philadelphia, 30th Street Station, where even breathing echoes all around.

  I settle in for a Danish and a cup of coffee at the McDonald’s and watch people come and go. They’re all groomed for action, business. I’m unshaved, a refugee from graveyard.

  I need two trains to get me over to Lindenwold.

  Finally, I’m back. My wife, Melanie, has kept the car running. Melanie is the most beautiful woman in the world, according to a survey I took. When she saw me among the missing at the 7:50, she knew. As always, she tried to run up the platform to activate a search party, but too late. Dave, the conductor, shrugged his regrets as the train took off with me in deep slumber. First time this happened, Melanie was alarmed, but it’s become routine. Happens about once a month.

  “I should remember,” she says laughing, “to wait on the platform.”

  We don’t talk much on the drive home to Voorhees. We rent in a fine apartment building, all very suburban with grass and trees and an endless backyard, and have even adopted a cat that came from a huge litter, the cat, Beige, really quite a charmer and an animal of deep wisdom. But they’re converting these apartments into condos, and when that happens we don’t know what we’ll do. Melanie knows I’m beat. Obviously, she has no news. If she has nothing to tell, I have nothing to ask. But, back home, I ask anyway.

  “Any phone calls?”

  “No, no phone calls.”

  The cliché “no news is good news” doesn’t work in my business.

  “Nothing from Sylvio.”

  “Nothing.”

  I step in for a quick shower and remind myself that Smooth Operator is still out there, being read. Anything can happen. Sylvio said so himself.

  When I come out and start toweling off, she says, “One day that phone call will come.”

  Better come soon. I just heard Philip Roth say it again, that the novel will be dead in 20 years.

  From one novel to the next it’s a race to meet the deadline.

  We hardly make love anymore, Melanie and I. It really doesn’t matter. It’ll pick up, we both know, when our luck turns.

  We hardly do anything anymore. Melanie has family, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, the works, and she’s always talking about them and wanting to visit. That’s not me. I have no time for her family, or for mine. Tolstoy said all happy families are alike, but Tolstoy ended up half-insane and in the end was found talking to himself at some railroad station, so what did he know? I do have family, but I don’t know where, and I don’t care.

  It’s past noon and in about five hours I’ll have to be back on the train again, back to Atlantic City. Not much time for monkey-business and not much time for something even more important, sleep. I’m toilworn, practically staggering, but that doesn’t mean sleep. No, sleep is a battle. Sleep is a fight. Daylight is meant for being awake. The bedroom, even with the shades drawn, is no sanctuary. Pigeons have taken over the eaves, top and bottom. Their gurgling drives me nuts.

  We had an exterminator come around, and he sided with the pigeons; said it was their home thousands of years before it was ours. Moreover, it’s against federal, state, county and local ordinances to touch these pigeons. (I’d had dreams of picking them off one by one with a shotgun.) So, they belong here; we don’t. They were here first and this is their home, so we’re only visiting. In fact, all animals and even pests were created before we were, so they’ll surely outlast us as well. The mouse and the ant, and the pigeon, came before man.

  Melanie shuts off the ringers on the phones, as if that does any good. There’s still traffic, horns honking, people talking, kids playing, babies crying, school bells ringing, hard-hats drilling, sirens wailing, garbage trucks rumbling. I’m in bed, taken one Valium. Nothing doing. I ask Melanie to bring me another, which she does, with a glass of water. That sends me to the bathroom. I may be getting another urinary infection, I don’t know. Haven’t been to the doctor in years. I don’t want to know, and if it’s something, I don’t want it to come with a name. Anyway, Dr. Kozansky, when I do go there, all we talk is politics and books. There’s barely enough time for an examination.

  He admires me, Dr. Kozansky. Says he can’t image what it’s like being a writer. Where do those ideas comes from…and then to put them down on paper! Wow!

  Dr. Kozansky – he’s the one who keeps saying it’s getting late. Time for another success. You don’t want to hear that from a doctor, that it’s getting late.

  Melanie says that’s what happens when you let your system get run down (as if it’s my fault); you become susceptible. You get urinary infections. Used to be, for sleep, one Valium did the trick. Now it takes two. Soon it will be three and then four, and then what? Sleeping pills, I’d tried those, but they get you up still sleeping. They’re meant for a full night, not two hour naps, which is what I average on a good day. I wonder how long this can go on.

  I don’t want to know the time. That’s the worst thing to know when you’re struggling for some shuteye. Panic never helps. But I know it’s about 2:30 when I finally drift off, and by 4:30 I’ll be up and that’ll be it, as usual. I shower again, and shave, and wonder what happened to my face. I have no color and my eyes are vacant. I need a haircut. I’ve been spoken to about that by my supervisors. No beards, either. There is a grooming code for slot attendants. Einstein would never make it as a slot attendant. Neither would Hemingway or Beethoven.

  Never mind time, I don’t know se
asons. All I know is day, when I try to sleep, and night, when I work. Seasons come and seasons go without me knowing one from the other. But I think it’s baseball over on the TV, if not live then some replay. I used to follow every pitch. I knew all the batting averages. Now I don’t even know who’s on first. Is it time to call it quits when you don’t care for baseball anymore?

  I get dressed in my all-green casino uniform; snap on the tag. It says, “Jay Leonard, slot attendant at your service.”

  Melanie draws a deep breath and sighs. “Why do you do that, I mean while you’re still home?”

  I explain that I hate to change at work. That means going to the uniform department, in one of those dressing rooms, where who knows what’s been going on.

  “I just can’t stand you in that outfit,” she says.

  Melanie, Lit and Journalism graduate from NYU, is a freelance book reviewer so our home computer is her place of business. She does pretty well, brings in enough money to help pay most of our bills, though we are maxed out on most of our credit cards and the phone calls have begun. We can’t afford a new car or even a used car. The car we do have we don’t trust beyond the neighborhood. If it weren’t for the train, I wouldn’t have that job in Atlantic City. We’re actually quite fortunate.

  Benefits! That’s the one plus of the casino job. Still, as we await that wonderful phone call from New York, Melanie thinks I should be canvassing for a job closer to home – and, even more important, 9 to 5. She keeps reading the Want Ads for me. I refuse. That is too depressing. There aren’t any jobs for writers anyway, unless it’s technical, and I don’t do technical. I’d already done the advertising and public relations, as we all have.

  I stopped reading the Want Ads a long time ago but Melanie keeps finding jobs for me in hospitals, nursing homes, or homes where people are terribly sick, God forbid, and “caregivers” are always in demand. The hours are good, the locations nearby, but the pay is bad, and…no Benefits! Anyway, I don’t think I’d do well in those environments.

  You’re supposed to network, and I do have friends, even friends connected to the literary world, but I don’t know. I just don’t know.

  Melanie stays cheerful. I don’t know how she does it, but she does. They say a happy childhood lasts a lifetime and I guess that’s what accounts for her upbeat disposition, though there’s no escaping what’s plain and obvious, even for her. So she’s built a wall. She calls it a wall. Once in a while the wall comes tumbling down, as when the electric company sends a second shut off notice.

  This happened just yesterday, and she’d kept it from me. “Suppose,” she says, as a bad moment overtakes her, “that phone call from Sylvio never comes?”

  She’s made me something to eat as she says this. I don’t know what I’m eating, but it is food. It’s soup, I think.

  I’ll eat a bigger meal once I get to the casino. That’s another big plus. Free food. I don’t know what I’m eating there, either.

  She’s expecting checks from five newspapers and two literary websites and these checks are always slow in coming. People just don’t want to pay.

  “We’ll manage,” she says.

  She hates to send me off gloomy.

  “We always do, don’t we?” she says.

  “Yes we do,” I agree.

  Sometimes I feel guilty having married her. She could have done much better. Until recently, we used to reminisce about my hit with The Ice King, how glorious it all was, money coming in, people wanting interviews, autographs, and the stars we met in Hollywood, and the red carpet treatment we got at the opening. But we don’t do that anymore. That’s done.

  We don’t even watch the movie when it comes on TV. That used to be an occasion when The Ice King came on. No more.

  No, it’s time for something different and Smooth Operator is where we’ve got our hopes pinned.

  This is where I’ve made my stand, all or nothing, live or die, on that novel. There is this, and no hereafter.

  It’s about a guy who starts off as a Good Samaritan and then…oh what’s the difference.

  I tell Melanie my joke, the joke about how I’m going to accept the Oscar. I’ll say: “I am mostly indebted to my wife for seeing me through thin and thin.”

  Melanie doesn’t like the joke, mostly because it isn’t true. We’ve had fat city. We’ve had plenty of good times, good days. Sometimes we compare ourselves to people who really have it tough. Just read the newspapers – and there’s always a phone call from some relative of hers who’s come down with something really serious. So we compare ourselves to the rest of what’s out there and find that we’re not in such bad shape, after all. People have it worse. Talk like that, usually at McDonald’s, puts us in good spirits, but only for about five minutes.

  I do worry about this, if and when that good phone call does come along: Maybe there comes a point in life when even success comes too late.

  The world is getting started on you, begins to appreciate you, but you’re finished.

  “It’s very upsetting when you get dressed in that outfit,” she says. “You’re making a statement.”

  She means that I’m expressing defeat, which is not true. Mere convenience. No, I’m in the fight. I really am. One day I’ll get even. That day will come!

  Six years is not that long a time to be absent from your latest success. Look at J.D. Salinger. He’s been gone nearly 60 years and people still talk about him.

  “We’ll be fine,” Melanie says, as that hour is approaching and I am soon to be turned into a slot attendant.

  “Of course.”

  I take two books with me for train reading – F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crack Up and King Solomon’s Ecclesiastes – both, centuries apart, on the question of futility and whether life is worth all the trouble. Fitzgerald, his career in freefall after a thousand failures and rejections swamped his early success, said that he’d continue on as a writer but stop being a person. He’d present himself good and polite but only as a front, keeping his bitterness in reserve.

  Writers, novelists, generally don’t make it till the end. Twain grew miserable. Hemingway grew suicidal.

  Nathanael West wrote two fine books while clerking in a hotel. I’m a slot attendant.

  “Get some sleep on the train,” she says. Then she pats me gently along the cheeks and gives me a big warm smile.

  Back at the start, when taking the train from Lindenwold to Atlantic City (and back) was still a novelty, I wanted to get to know my fellow passengers. Now I know them. This still amazes me, how many of these people read the Bible on the train. Some hide the Book within the centerfold of Time or Newsweek, afraid to be exposed as religious fanatics. Better to be caught with Playboy than Genesis.

  I got to talking to one of these people, a young kid and not a religious type at all, but a big fan of the Psalms. I opened by saying I’m a big fan myself. He asked me what message I got from King David, and I said, faith of course, though am not sure what faith is, not really, except that it’s maybe like trusting that your father won’t let go until you know how to swim. What attracted me, since I seem such a skeptic? The poetry, the majestic precision of language, how incredible that after 3,000 years not a single word or thought is outdated…but also, shame. Shame? Yes, how odd that King David’s greatest fear was about being put to shame. Almost every Psalm deals with that, the fear of being put to shame. (Who can’t relate to that!)

  This same kid asked me if I’ve ever delved into the Talmud. He’s not Jewish but wants to become a lawyer and his professor suggested the Talmud as a means to develop an inquisitive and argumentative mind. That’s why Jews make such good jurists. So yes, I have delved, and we got to talking about that passage where it’s asked what you should do if you find a stamped and addressed envelope on the ground? Instinct says, the kind thing to do is mail it, BUT…suppose the letter contains a bill of divorce and the person changed his or her mind, and there you go ruining two lives?

  Of course, generally I know better th
an to talk religion or politics with strangers, or even friends, or even relatives, or anybody.

  For some reason there are a good number of Born Again Christians on this train route, also devout Jews. I don’t know why. On the Paoli Local there is gambling going on, here, occasionally, proselytizing. A certain man, actually a kid, who said he was heir to a travel agency fortune, once, on the train, when I was half asleep, told me something really disturbing.

  He said that people who die in wars and famines and other catastrophes pretty much have it coming. This weeds out the weak and leaves us with survival of the fittest. He cited the Holocaust as an example of nature, or God, saving the best for life. I got into it with this brat. I suggested – suppose the opposite is true? Suppose it’s the good and the strong that go first, leaving us with the bad and the weak? Suppose, as I have come to believe, it is the unfit that make up most of the world?

  Is there any doubt about this?

  Before leaving for work, I try Sylvio again. Marci answers and says he can’t come to the phone. He’s all tied up. I know this isn’t proper, hardly even ethical, but I ask her if she knows anything. She says if anything comes up Sylvio will be sure to let me know right away, but she really has to go, it’s so busy around here, so many publishing contracts to study and sign, and the phones just won’t stop ringing.

  “You know how it is.”

  Yes, I know how it is.

  Sometimes I feel like giving up. But then where do you go? Is there something like a used car lot for people – used people, broken people, discarded people, forgotten people, wasted people, defeated people? Melanie senses this mood of mine and suggests that I give Ann Shutt another try; this editor, at a major publishing house, who fell in love with The Ice King but has ignored me since. I don’t remember why. It’s been several years. Oh gawd no – I really do not want to start that business again.

  “Go ahead,” Melanie says. “What have you got to lose?”

  Plenty. You can lose your self-confidence. You can lose hope. You can lose your faith in people. You certainly can lose faith in editors.