“Don’t call me a spade,” I joke.
She’s real quiet. I think maybe she’s falling asleep. Her head is resting on my chest. My chest is wet with her tears. It is late at night and we have to appear for arraignment tomorrow. Maybe a relaxing trip to a casino is a bad idea. Maybe we should just get some sleep.
I understand her story completely. The guy’s a gambler. What gambler wouldn’t kill to gamble? What gambler wouldn’t kill to win? I mean, not me, but other gamblers. They would kill to gamble. I am lucky, so I don’t have to, but others would do it, I’m sure. I think that’s the point of the story, but maybe it’s not.
One thing I do know is that the old lady is a bitch.
If she had this secret, why not tell the guy? Why not tell somebody? What good was it to her? She wasn’t using it. Gambling is real hard on us, and if you know how to beat it, you should tell. It’s not fair to keep a secret like that to yourself. Are you working for the casinos? They’re the bad guy, not the poor gambler.
And the old lady’s husband, when she was young—he’s a bitch, too. He should have just paid the debt and shut his mouth. That’s no way to treat your woman.
No way at all.
My lawyer (the best), he does his best.
And I pull my strings. Hard.
The trial lasts four days.
At the end of it, I have high hopes, but C.L. is found guilty and sentenced to six months in jail.
For my lawyer, it is a sort of victory. For C.L., it is a victory (the accomplice dealer got 15 years). For me, it is not.
I’m pissed with everyone: the lawyer (punk), C.L. (why did you do it, baby, why? I wanted to beat them. Beat them like they always beat us. And you, the idea of topping you, of wiping that arrogant smile off your face, Mr. Lucky Gambler, it made my heart beat faster. But baby, we’re a team. That’s what you call it), and the casino (ungrateful bastards). All the money I dump into this place. Treating my woman like this. I move out the same day. Move across the street into another casino’s presidential suite, where I settle in and then sigh:
Six months without her. Six months. Maybe I’ll ask her to marry me again when she gets out.
Maybe I’ll ask her to leave.
Kick her to the curb (but we’re a team, P. Oh, so now we’re a team?). Six months in jail. Twenty years barred from every casino in the state of Nevada. Twenty years. What good is she to me now?
I mean, I still love her, but she really is no good to me now.
Why did she do it? Why?
Ah, C.L.
54.
“It’s all about roundness,” the professor says.
It is the day after I put C.L. on the plane back home. It is a good day, relatively speaking. Yesterday was a bad day. Yesterday I won’t talk about. C.L. didn’t go easy. Can you believe that after all I’ve done for her she’s threatening to sue me for palimony?
“A pre-pubescent girl is unattractive in the eyes of a normal adult male because she lacks roundness. She hits puberty and everything changes. She gets curves. Breasts. Hips. Fuller arms and legs. A bigger ass. Roundness.”
The professor outlines an hourglass figure in the air with his hands and smiles confidentially. He is reclined in a patio chair by the pool. He’s got his shirt off and his dark shades on and he’s nursing a strawberry daiquiri, but he is checking out every shapely, bikini-clad woman who passes by. It is good to see that he hasn’t lost his sexual appetite in spite of his major financial setbacks. He’s my guest this week out here in Vegas. I’m covering his room and meals. I’ve bankrolled him 20 grand to improve on in the casinos. If he wins, he pays me back. If he doesn’t win, he’s probably going to come begging for more. I hope he wins. I’m in a pretty sour mood because of C.L. and I would really hate to turn him down, because he is, after all, my mentor.
“This whole mating game, this whole seduction thing, all of this fascination with sex—it’s all up to the woman, really. See, after puberty, the female attains her roundness, and then—” the professor stops mid-sentence.
Two really nice ones, Ms. Brunette in a tiger-striped two piece and her girlfriend Ms. Big-Breasted Blonde in white tube top and white shorts, come out and make a big giggling fuss of unfolding their chairs and positioning them in the ideal spots in the sun. There is lots of bending over and sighing and moving about and more bending over. When they get their chairs just right, Ms. Big-Breasted Blonde takes off her white shorts, revealing her thong bottom, and Ms. Brunette takes off her tiger-striped top, revealing two perfect medium-sized breasts that are nicely tanned right down to the nipple.
The professor ceases his narrative, as he and I both wait expectantly for Ms. Big-Breasted Blonde to take off her top, too. Please. Pretty please.
She doesn’t. She just takes out her iPod, sticks the buds in her ear, and joins her topless companion in stretching out face-up on the lounge chairs.
The professor shakes his head, disappointed, as I nod my understanding. He picks up his daiquiri and slurps lustily through the straw. He says, “So now she is round and she has sexual desires. The woman has sexual desires, mind you, not the man. So she displays the curves to a man that she desires. What happens? He, having attained sexual maturity also, is inexplicably drawn to the roundness. He is not attracted to the woman, but to her roundness. Her roundness triggers in him a reaction that results in a temporary sort of male roundness, an erection. An erection, unlike a lubricated vagina, is a discomfort, not a pleasurable sensation. The male seeks, in the female, relief from this discomfort, and here’s the rub. He must give her things of value in return for this relief. What does the male give her? First and foremost, he must give her pleasure. The sex act is pleasurable to the female, not the male. She receives pleasure because of the clitoris, which delights in the friction of rubbing; he receives only release from discomfort and only at the very end of the sex act. Second, the male must give her seed that will ultimately result in offspring. Third, he must provide for her and the eventual offspring—in the wild, I mean, in primitive times. But it’s not much different today.”
“So you’re saying males don’t have sexual desire?” I’m sitting next to him in my patio chair. I have a good view of topless Ms. Brunette. I am keeping my eye on her. I have an erection. “Are you gay, professor?”
“I am not gay,” the professor says. “And, no, we males do not have sexual desire. We have a sexual reaction.”
I whisper, “I am reacting right now to that brunette’s nipples.”
“I, too, am reacting. But I am not desiring, P.”
“I think you’re wrong. I think I’m desiring because I’m salivating. This is definitely desire, professor.”
“You’re reacting,” he insists.
“Can’t a man just be horny?”
“No! A man can only react!”
“Whatever. You’re the one with the education.” I shrug. “Well, I wonder if they’re desiring us.”
The professor glances at them and decides, “They’re most likely teasing. They know that we are reacting, so they’re teasing us. Torturing us.”
He’s right about one thing. This erection is torture. Hmmm. “So a woman who does not desire you, but knows that you react to her, can dangle her roundness in front of you in order to get valuable things from you.”
“We seek release from discomfort in them. They seek things from us.
Protection. Food. Shelter. Babies. Multiple orgasms. Money.”
“Holy crap!”
“What?”
“You finally said something that makes sense.”
“What?”
“The casino is a woman with roundness.”
The professor nods sadly. “You got the wax out of your ears at last, my boy.”
“I mean, most of what you say is B.S., no offense, but I get this. This, I get.”
“I’m glad you get it.”
“But I still like to screw.”
“P, look. Oh my God.” The professor nods his head in the directi
on of Ms. Brunette and Ms. Blonde, who, to our great delight, is slithering out of her tube top. Her breasts are awesome. Big. Soft. Roundness.
I say to the professor, “Well, I’ve made up my mind. I am going to fu— get my release from discomfort, as you put it, from one or both of those women tonight.”
“It’s going to cost you.”
“It always costs me,” I quip.
I am getting up now so that I can go over and get this thing started, and the blonde has already scoped me out and is pretending that she hasn’t, pretending she hasn’t licked her lips ever so lightly in my direction. In fact, she is busy rubbing tanning oil on the shoulders and chest of the brunette—rubbing tanning oil all around and over those already tanned breasts. Such teasers they are. My penis has fully and completely reacted to their roundness. I am really going to enjoy the hell out of them. We’re going to gamble and screw and gamble. Get my mind off C.L. But where are my manners? I have company over. Ever the good host, I say to the professor, “You want some of this?”
He says, “Naw. I better head to the casino and try to do something with this bankroll you spotted me.”
“I hear you, man. Good luck.” I slap him five.
He says to me, “Thanks for the loan, my friend, and good luck to you with your adventure.”
“Yeah.”
But for this adventure, I don’t need luck. Just cash and a good stiff reaction to roundness.
55.
There is a time in every boy’s life when his father is the greatest person in the world. I do not remember ever feeling that way about my father. Maybe he pushed me too hard. Maybe he didn’t push me hard enough, who knows?
He wanted me to be a man’s man, so he did things to toughen me up. These dark things I will not talk about, for he is, after all, my father. Okay, there’s one thing I will tell you. When he caught me smoking at twelve, he slapped my mouth so hard that he loosened a tooth. Then he dropped me off that night in the roughest part of town that he knew of—79th Street and Biscayne Boulevard—left me with five bucks, and told me to get back home how I could now that I was man enough to start smoking.
It was the middle of the night. I was a skinny—real skinny— 12-year-old kid. As I made my way to a bus stop, every guy I saw—I thought he was a pimp or a pusher. Every woman was a hooker. Every unfamiliar sound was evidence of murder in progress. I wanted to believe that my father was still there. That he was close by, hiding in his car and watching to see how I would make out. Certainly he would not abandon me out here in this dangerous place. What kind of crazy man would do that to his son?
When I finally got home two and a half hours later, he was in bed snoring.
My father.
I remember his beer (Pabst Blue Ribbon), his beer belly, and his laugh, the few times I heard it. It was a good laugh. He bellowed. I wish I had heard his laugh more often. I remember that cowboy hat he always wore. It had small gold letters on the ribbon: Don’t Mess with Texas. I do not believe that my father, who was born and raised in Miami, ever spent a day of his life in Texas.
I remember that he could be very patient with you when he wanted to be, like the time he taught me to ride a bike and I kept falling off. Even now, when I ride a bike, I get the feeling he’s running alongside me with his hand on the back of the seat keeping me from tipping over.
He could be very gentle with my mother. He always made her laugh. I remember he whored around on her a lot. They fought about this all the time, but never in front of us. We could hear them in the bedroom shouting—hear her shouting, hear him taking it with the occasional rhetorical questions back: Well, what did you expect me to do? She came after me. I’m a man. Am I not a man?
Sometimes they would go out to the car to have it out. We would peep through the blinds and see their mouths opening wide, their wild white eyes blinking rapidly, but we could not hear.
For all his problems, he worked hard all his life to keep a roof over our heads. I know that he had plans for all of us, though he didn’t talk about them much. I remember that he cried when my big sister V got pregnant at 15. She was the smart one, the one who would go to college and come back an engineer and make us all proud—before she met that guy with the Corvette. While my mother was screaming her lungs out at V in the kitchen, bemoaning her whoredoms, as she and the Holy Bible called it, my father shook his head, got a beer out of the refrigerator, and went into the den to watch TV. When I went in there, I saw that his eyes were red and his face was wet. Wiping away the wetness with a hand, he asked me to bring him another beer. His voice sounded so pinched it could have been coming from a man half his size. My father was a big guy. When I brought him back the beer, he whispered to me, “She’s gonna make it, though. You watch her. She’s a damn good girl. She ain’t no whore. Your mother’s full of shit saying that.” I said to him, “Mom’s full of shit?” And he slapped my mouth so hard he rattled my loose tooth.
My sister V and the Corvette guy didn’t last long. She had her baby, finished high school, went to college, and came back as an elementary school teacher. She met another guy, a teacher like herself—married him and had three more kids. V made out all right. My father was proud of her, though he never said it that I know of. That’s the way he was.
When he was sick and only had a few more months to live, I was watching a Dolphins game with him one Sunday at his house. There had been more of us there to begin with, my mother, my wife, our children, but they had wandered off to other parts of the house to do other things, leaving my father and me, the only true football fans, sitting there in front of the TV with the game. Suddenly, I had one of those moments when I expected something special to happen.
Well, here was my father who was dying. How many more opportunities would he get to be alone with me, his only begotten son? If he had any great pearls of wisdom, or whatever, to pass on to me, here was his chance. He was laying back in his recliner. Only his face showed. He was covered from neck to feet in blankets and quilts by my mother, who believed she could keep him alive longer if she could keep him warm. He had his beloved Texas hat on his head. He reeked of Vicks VapoRub and camphor (my mother, again, believing she could keep him alive longer if she could keep his nasal passages clear). He noticed I was looking at him and made a face like, What do you want? Say it, so I can get back to the game. My father hated when people interrupted a game with needless conversation, especially when Marino was playing.
I said to my father, “Me and you were in here when V got pregnant, remember?”
“I remember,” he said, nodding. “So what?”
“You had faith in her. You said that she would do all right. You said that getting pregnant wouldn’t hold her back. You were right.”
“She’s a teacher. She did all right.”
“You knew she would.”
“I knew she would,” he echoed. Then he said, “What the hell is this all about, P? The game’s on.”
“Did I do all right?”
“Oh,” he said. It sounded like a sigh.
I said, “Did I do all right?”
He said, “You got a nice family. A house. You did fine. You did all right.”
“Did I?”
He said, “Turn the volume up.”
I had the remote. I turned the volume up.
He said, “I don’t want nobody to hear this. To hear you getting all mushy like this, for God’s sake. Don’t let your boys hear this. They have to grow up to be men.”
“Did I do all right?”
“I’m proud of you.”
“Are you?”
“I’m proud as hell of you.”
“Even though I could’ve done better?”
“You could still do better. This is America. The game ain’t over until it’s over. You could go to college and get a degree. There’s still time. I never understood why you didn’t do it in the first place. You were the smartest of all the kids. You had the best brain.”
“But I did the least.”
&nbs
p; “I didn’t say that. Don’t you put words in my mouth. All I’m saying is it’s your world. You can have anything you want with your brain, but you decide not to use it, so I say, okay, he doesn’t want anything. But then I see you with the Amway, and the silly investment plans, and the get-rich-quick books, and I say, okay, so he does want something. Well, go out and get it. Show the world what you can do. We’re all waiting.”
“You think I should go back to college?”
“Yeah. Or start your own business.”
“But I have the kids. I gotta keep food on the table. It’s hard.”
“So you drive the bus,” he said. “Okay. But can’t you take classes, maybe, one at a time? They let you do that, you know. Then in a few years you’ll have your degree.”
“It takes so much time. I’m running out of time.”
“You’re crazy. You’re not running out of time. You’re just a kid. Now me,” he said, “I’m running out of time.”
I said, with a straight face, because I wanted him to hold on, because I wanted him to have courage: “You’re not running out of time, Dad.”
He said, “Yes I am. I’m dying, boy. But I hope I don’t die until I finish my class.”
“Class? What class?”
“I’m taking a college class on the computer there.”
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