We see the lady in all her jewels crawling after the single twenty-five cent coin that bounced off the brimming tray. We see it all and it is not good.
There is another side, to be sure, but that’s not what comes sloshing in. Mark the guard says, “What makes people go stupid the minute they walk in that door?”
So maybe it’s not the people, it’s the casino environment (see under: greed) that causes them to plunge into depravity. Otherwise, back home in Iowa, surely they’re okay.
The only people you trust, here on the frontlines, are the people you work with, and it is true that some of them speak the language of “he don’t” or “I ain’t gonna” and they’ll not be found with Brahms in Philadelphia or with Beethoven in New York. They’ve never heard of the Kimmel Center or the Lincoln Center, and it’s never the Met, but rather the Mets. For them it’s jazz or hip-hop. They move to a different beat, but they’ve become your friends. You trust them. They trust you.
This Friday – and it is more crazy than usual, a zoo – Mark the guard, who knows the ebbs and flows from his many years on the job, tells me there are bad vibes in the air. George, his alter ego, or rather the ghost from his past life as an engineer with Henry Ford, has come to him with that signal. “Something’s wrong,” says Mark. “Someone’s going down.”
I’m in Zone 10, where the Hot 7s draw the most unruly crowds (it’s non-stop for me here) when Mark approaches with that hunch of his.
“I don’t know what it is,” he says.
He’s been around long enough to trust his nose.
Same here. Maybe it’s because upstairs, Toledo Vasquez wasn’t there to clock in or to stand in line to get his assignment and key. He was nowhere around.
But Jeff is doing double-duty. Jeff Milgrim is a new hire. He’s about 28. He’d just finished his three month probation and apprenticeship and we formed a quick bond when he found out who I was. He wants to become a poet and belongs to a poetry club in Margate. He’s had two years of community college and is enrolling again for courses in writing, despite what I told him, that courses in writing ruin a writer, those academics, they take all the music out of a sentence, although, depending on the professor. Jeff keeps asking me to read his poetry and I keep reminding him that I am not good at poetry, the reading or the writing. In this I am nearly alone, for I have yet to meet anyone who is not a poet.
Jeff also wants to talk politics. He has scrolled me on Google and came upon this: “Who are these professors who are babysitting our children and feeding them pabulums of anti-Semitism?” But I refuse to talk politics and have taken a vacation from writing politics. One voice against so many and it starts to hurt when you find yourself so outnumbered. They want to do it again and my journalism is not going to be enough to stop them.
So Jeff is working the floor first time alone. He’s covering two zones at a time, 8 and 9, and that is odd for a rookie, and for a Friday night, one man, two zones. He’s doing all right, jumping from jackpot to jackpot, from hopper jam to hopper jam, and I’ve already told him that I’m available if he needs help. These are busy zones, 8 and 9, armpit hell, especially on weekends.
There is murmuring. A mutiny is about to erupt, there in Jeff’s two zones, when a group of squatters takes over the entire row of the Cotton Candy machines. They’re not here to play, just here to rest, but they’re taking up seats that are desired by real gamblers who demand their right at those machines. So it’s one group, from the suburbs, against another group, from the inner city, and it’s about to get racial. There’s shouting and the shoving is about to begin. The squatters won’t budge, now as a matter of respect, but lucky for Jeff, and probably for the rest of us, the suburbans disperse with plenty of hard feelings all around.
When he’s caught up, Jeff ambles on over and asks if it’s true that I’ll be teaching a class in writing, right here, after hours. I explain that, no, not writing, but English, maybe; for our foreign co-workers. Oh, he was hoping for a class in writing. He’d love to take part. I am wondering how word filtered down so fast, and I hadn’t even agreed. Nothing’s been agreed.
“Hey, Jeff, why two zones?”
He shrugs.
“I don’t know. I think I’m filling in for someone.”
I take it to mean Toledo. So where is Toledo? Supervisor Omar steps up with his usual scowl and snarls “enough” and Jeff disperses. I zip back to my rounds in Zone 10, where there’s plenty of disgust at my neglect for three jackpots ringing away and six hoppers waiting to be filled, and after I get it all calmed down, after the children have been momentarily pacified and tucked in, here comes Carmella, radiant as ever, and smiling that Spanish smile. She should know about Toledo. But she says, “Just because I have a jealous husband does not mean you have to avoid me.”
“Avoid you?”
“Yes, Jay, you are avoiding me.”
“Never.”
She leans in and whispers. “We can still play.”
I tell her to make herself scarce. Omar is in the vicinity and on the warpath.
“I don’t care,” she says. “I can get a lousy job like this any place. I don’t need this.”
Sure enough here’s Omar, miffed.
“What’s going on?”
He snaps her back to her zone. As she vanishes back into the mob, she gives me a farewell swivel and wiggle. She sure does know the tricks, that Carmella.
But where is Toledo?
This, Zone 10, is where you’re always behind and where they face you breath to breath, poke you in the ribs and whistle for you to come fix their machine.
New problem. The machines aren’t taking the new twenty dollar bills. It’s always something.
They’re always losing, most of them, and that never helps. Even when they win, and you congratulate them, they tell you they’re not even close to getting even. They’re never satisfied and nothing makes them happy and what a strange place to visit, a casino, to get miserable. There must be better places for this.
It’s Friday night, for sure, because every seat is taken, every machine’s in action, there’s movement like entire armies advancing and retreating, and there’s more than the usual laughing, hacking, cackling, sneezing, wheezing, coughing, groaning, clanking, whooping, and somewhere the ear-splitting, bloodcurdling screech of a woman who’s just hit a jackpot. The lights are dim and the air is thick and urgent. The natives are restless.
I get into it with one beer breath who keeps whistling for me. He’s been waiting an hour for his hopper jam to be fixed. He’s got a bus to catch. They always tell you it’s been an hour and there’s a bus to catch. I tell the guy to please be patient, a supervisor is coming, I’ve made the call, but it’s Friday and it’s busy, so please; I’m speaking firmly.
“You think you’re tough?”
“Just doing my job, Sir.”
“You’re nothing, you know.”
“Hey.”
I walk away. Suliman taught me that at the start. Walk away.
A few minutes later Omar finds me amid the mob and says a customer took down my name and number because I’d been rude. Beer breath, no doubt.
Omar disappears because there is so much other business.
Humberto Valdez is doing the payoff and hopper fill run. He’s that tall kid that I did not like at first, always so zany and full of punk and rap and hip-hop, but I’ve come around. He’s really a nice kid, once you get to know him, once you get him to sit down and quit making a show of himself. He’s got speed, which is what you want on payoff/hopper fill detail, and now he’s moving all around, joking with the players, many of whom respond favorably. Humberto knows how to work a room. He nods me over.
“Did you hear?”
I move along with him and help him empty some bags.
“What?”
“Our hombre Toledo. He’s in trouble.”
“What trouble?”
“Big trouble.”
But the clatter of coins makes it too difficult to talk and anyway, h
e’s already five rows down.
“Later, man,” is all I can make out.
I find Roger Price over by the Magic Diamond machines where he’s helping someone tuck in one of those new 20s. I know he’s going in for a heart operation and I feel terrible for him. It always happens to the best of us, these things. Omar is healthy and Roger Price is sick. That’s the way it goes.
Roger then moves along to pay off a jackpot and when he’s done and still moving to pay off the next jackpot I ask him what’s going on. He doesn’t even look up. Actually he can’t because he’s counting out five one hundred dollars bills to this customer who has her arms and hands out like it’s the first money she’s ever seen.
“What’s up, Roger?”
“What’s up” is a good one. It’s replaced whatever. “What’s up” is all over the place. Back in my neighborhood it used to be – Oh yeah?
He says, “The less you know, the better.”
I realize that Franco DeLima isn’t around, either. Toledo is gone. Franco is gone. Is there something to add up here or something to subtract?
“Can’t wait to get out of here,” says Roger, paying off another jackpot.
But what a way to go, straight to hospital.
Back in my zone I’m running around like a rat in a maze. These Hot 7s are planted in a circle, a carrousel. I’m saturated with sweat inside the green uniform and am having second thoughts, about everything, but particularly that offer from upstairs, which does sound good, if it weren’t so bad, so bad about being on display. Can anything be worse than this, Friday night, Zone 10? At this moment, no.
Actually this is a compliment when they give you Zone 10, Friday night, the roughest zone of all. They don’t assign this to just anybody. I must be making a name for myself.
“Please don’t do that,” I tell a lady who pokes me in the ribs.
“But I keep calling you and you’re not coming over.”
“These people were first, ma’am. I’ll be over soon as I can.”
“Are you people on holiday or something?”
“Just busy, ma’am.”
“This place is awful.”
A black lady asks why I rushed over to help that white lady first. I explain that’s because she WAS first, had her hand up first. The black lady says I’m a bigot.
I wonder, at this moment, if we will ever get over this, from both sides.
Mark the guard comes over because someone has complained that the chair she was sitting on made her fall off. Mark will have to make out a report.
Of course the chairs by the machines are all loose, lumpy, worn and torn. Fat Ass America needs to get on a diet.
The one good part about this zone is that they’re pros. They don’t ask stupid questions. They play the machines like virtuosos, like Serkin at the piano. Except that they’re expressionless; their faces a showcase of rowhome vacuity. We all know why they’re here; to get even with life, to make amends. Life cheated them, so here they come to get what they figure is owed them. That’s why they’re so quick to get nasty when even the casino cheats them, or rather refuses to pay off. Some pray to one machine, one god; others move from machine to machine, serving other gods.
But where is Toledo?
Our horny supervisor, Maggi Holt, stops by to help me clear out a jammed hopper, and then informs me that she’s “met a guy.” He’s an accountant in the Bronx and it could be love. He could be the one. She still wants to get laid, though. “Oh, Jay,” she says, “I can tell you’ve been around, quite the lady killer.” Ancient history. “I’ll get you in the sack before this is all over. You’re a cutie pie.”
“You say that to all the guys, Maggi.”
Actually she does. I remember Mark the guard telling she’s hit on him as well – and who else? Not much to be flattered about.
“Maybe,” she says before leaving, “you’re afraid of me.”
“Maybe I am, Maggi.”
“Maybe you’re not so good in bed.”
“I’m terrible in bed.”
“So let’s find out.”
“Bye, Maggi.”
I hardly remember. Melanie and I are saving it up for when we celebrate.
So where is Toledo?
Beer breath whistles for me again and when I don’t respond he makes a dash for me and I think he really wants to fight. I could take him, but then everything goes.
I explain, again, that the people who fill the hoppers and make the payoffs – they’re a different crew.
“I thought you were all the same. Scum.” He says that he’s already reported me.
This, at a moment like this, is when you remind yourself that your book sold a million and a half copies domestically. You attended your own premiere.
Never mind overseas. They even translated it into Chinese and Japanese. That must be something, being a translator.
I’ve got those books in my den, from all over the world.
Yes, this is the time to remind yourself that you’ve got back class and back class is always dangerous.
Guys like this beer breath, of course he’s ticked off. He takes it 9 to 5 from his boss, then his wife, then his kids, then his in-laws, so here you are, so available.
At the start of my break I stop off at the Million Dollar Club, Zone 1, the high roller territory where Marty Glick is on duty in his tux. Marty is all right. He also married from a catalogue, mail order, just like Flint. Actually, Marty was first, and that’s what prompted Flint. Whenever we get together, the three of us, we compare American women to foreign women and American women always lose.
Marty usually takes home a thousand dollars a night, in tips. No riff raff for Marty. He’s rich, just bought a new home, and his Filipino wife drives her own Mercedes. Marty’s zone is right across from the craps tables where sometimes there’s a half million dollars riding on the next toss of the dice. It’s much more pleasant, much more Monaco, much more Bond, James Bond around here, and no wonder we all want a turn. But this is not Marty’s job, it’s his career. He’s not looking for anything else. This is just fine.
The Egyptian guy who plays the same $10 game every night motions me over and says he just heard from Bob Foster, our president, that I’m a celebrity, that I wrote a movie or something. I say all of that was a long time ago. I figure he’ll want more information, and he does. “So what are you doing here?” he says. Just then he hits a jackpot and Marty rushes over to congratulate and write it up.
Good timing. I hate that question. What are you doing here? I’m doing here what I’m doing here. What are you doing here? Where should I be?
The clerk in that bookstore up the street got that question kicked off, six years ago. She was really quite attractive, this sales girl at Borders in Marlton. When The Ice King sold out and Hollywood signed on, and I walked in for another book, Thomas Pynchon’s latest, she said, “What are you doing here?” She thought I’d moved to Hollywood. Real authors don’t hang around New Jersey.
Marty asks me to join him at the cage where he’s going to collect the cash to pay off the Egyptian. Marty wants to know if I’m destined for supervisor or shift manager or maybe something even bigger. Word has gotten around that I’d had a confab upstairs. “No such luck,” I say. He refuses to believe, as many times as I deny. “Just remember that I’m your pal,” he says. That’s either a signal, or he’s afraid I’m taking over his zone.
But where’s Toledo Vasquez? I am getting butterflies.
Upstairs in the cafeteria Bob Michaelson offers to sell me a genuine Rolex for fifty dollars. He’s got so many businesses on the side.
“This will stop once you become a state trooper, won’t it, Bob?”
He’s laughing. “It’s a genuine Rolex.”
“I’ve also got a genuine bridge to sell. Wanna buy?”
I find a quiet table to do some writing. The TV is on, some final game of a playoff. I used to be so big on sports.
“Can’t make it on this salary,” says Bob Michaelson.
> So I’m at this quiet table trying to write, but nothing’s coming. There’s the usual nutty crowd acting up, but that’s not what’s stopping me. I’m used to thinking and writing around noise. Anyway, they honor my privacy. They accord me reverence and I return that reverence. It didn’t start off that way, but that’s how it’s ending up.
But I can’t write. I am all written out. I don’t know what they want out there, Roe Morgan and his crowd. They want yarns? Yarns they want? They want golf? Well, Sylvio is giving it his best. Maybe, just maybe Sylvio can succeed where I failed. Of course Melanie is right. This can’t go on. This isn’t my life. I’m fooling myself if I believe this is what I’ve been cut for. My contentment with this is a sham.
She is also right that it is cruel of me to keep insisting that I am a slot attendant, end of story. End of story, end of dreams. It was cruel of me to keep rubbing it in at that party in Haddonfield, for which I am not sure she has completely forgiven me, and I can’t say that I blame her.
As I’m finishing up my 40-minute break, Carmella arrives. Her break has just begun. I marvel at how stunning she is, Carmella. Now here’s someone who could have done better. What a creep, that husband of hers. She whispers, “I love you,” and whizzes past. I don’t know what this is all about and where this is going. Then she says something in Spanish. I don’t know what it means. Toledo would know. He’d be the man to ask, when I see him.
Which I do. I’m back downstairs on the casino floor, or, that is, just reaching the landing off the escalator, when it’s all stopped, like freeze frame. There is a parade marching by, people in uniform on drill, of some sort, faces professionally tight, and in the middle of it all is a sunken figure, Toledo, in handcuffs.
The players hardly stop to notice this procession, but for the rest of us, this is a moment. We’re paralyzed. We’re stricken. This could be one of us, and in fact it is, it is one of us, and one of our favorites. What a sight – Toledo like this, proud kid, too, put to shame. His arms are shackled behind his back. He seems so small. They’ve taken the starch out of him.
I’m trying to find his eyes, to offer some sign, that I am with him, but they’ve got him good and surrounded, and besides, his head is down, down to the floor.
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