I had seen his car in our driveway one night when I happened to be driving around my old neighborhood after another regrettable evening at the casino, and then it started appearing there more and more often. After I noticed it parked there in the morning one time, I wrote down his plate number and fired up Web Sleuth, one of those online investigative services that tells you everything you need to know about a person for $49.99. I printed out some pertinent data and took the information up to L’s door later that night.
“I’d like to have a word with your Memphis-bred fifty-five-year-old sleepover friend, Boyd, if I may,” I said. “It’s adorable that you two have the same birthday, by the way. That’ll be fun for the eight or nine that he has left.”
L looked stunned for a moment, but she gathered herself, and that’s when she started throwing around the phrase restraining order with conviction and regularity. I also began to realize that forgiveness might not be my only obstacle to getting L back. I also had to contend with Father Time in golf cleats.
While I was contemplating the evil curiosity that was Boyd Bollinger, I heard a high whistle and a pop out in the parking lot. Bruce lumbered over and gave a low woof at the drapes. I immediately grabbed a half-full can of Pringles that I had been munching on before falling asleep and chucked them across the room. He turned away from the window, stuck his nose in the can, and started hoovering them up but good.
“What was that?”
“What was what?” I said.
“I heard barking.”
“That’s nothing. That’s the TV. Scooby-Doo reruns.”
“Scooby-Doo talks.”
“Not always. Sometimes he, you know, barks and whatnot.”
“That’s the second time you’ve said you know.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“That’s the second time you’ve said that, too. Those are the two things you always say when you’re lying.”
“I honestly don’t know where you come up with some of this stuff,” I said.
It was at this point that things took a distinctly negative turn. The unsupervised, troublemaking little hot dog and hamburger out in the parking lot decided to spark the entire pack of bottle rockets at once. They whooshed and whistled and rat-a-tat-tatted for a good ten seconds. Let’s just say that Bruce failed to keep his shit together. It sounded like feeding time at the city pound.
“You son of a bitch!”
“No!” I said, though I have no idea why. What on earth was there to say no to? I had the dog. She knew I had the dog. Everything pointed to yes, not no.
“If he’s not back here in ten minutes, you’re going to get a visit from the police. And I have never been more serious in my life.”
“Listen—”
“Ten minutes.”
I got off the bed and looked at the dog. He had quit barking and returned his attention to the chips. I transmitted, “Hey, man’s best friend. Terrific work. Really.” He looked up, the Pringles can stuck to his nose, blameless as can be. But he had a glimmer in his eye. I knew it and he knew it. And that glimmer said, “Remember when you left me at the Prince and Pawper Kennel Club for six straight weeks last year while you were bingeing on blackjack eighteen hours a day and sleeping on Dawn’s couch? Remember that? I do.” And I looked right at him and thought, “Yes, I remember leaving you at the Prince and Pawper for six weeks. But I sprang you, didn’t I? You had a pretty good time staying at Dawn and Penny’s after that, if I remember correctly. And I made it up to you by taking you to Myrtle Beach with me. A trip you totally spoiled, I might add.”
He looked at me. Gave me nothing.
“Anyway, this was no time to make a point. Now drop the fucking chips and let’s go.”
I hauled him down the stairs and tiptoed past Maurice the day manager’s office. All four hundred pounds of him were at his desk, gnawing on a Hot Pocket and listening to WFAN on the radio. He looked right at me as I went past, which meant I’d be answering a series of questions later regarding the no-pets policy.
I tossed Bruce into the F-150 as the two perpetrators of my demise looked on smugly. This was simply another case of bad luck for me. In a day and age when parents put webcams in the bathroom in case Junior wants a juice box while he’s taking a crap, I had found the last two unsupervised children in America. Kids who were allowed to play with fireworks, no less. I gave them the finger with my good hand, pulled out of the motel lot, drove up past the golf course, and rumbled through my old neighborhood, where the sight of my truck had gone from being one that inspired waves galore to one people averted their eyes from. It had gotten so uncomfortable that I often parked down by the driving range and walked through the woods to my old backyard on days when I was worried that L’s Cobra batteries had died. I had done that earlier in the day, which is why reasonable doubt was still on the table before the hound blew it. I knew the first thing L had done was canvass the neighbors and ask if they had seen my truck in the driveway. She would have come up empty there. If a couple of things had broken my way, the search party/mai tai idea could very well have been successful. But you don’t get the breaks you need when you’re on a downslide. You get shit, and then you get more shit, and when you think you’ve maxed out, you get a little more shit on top of it all.
As I took the corner onto Archer, I could see the dreaded champagne Lexus parked where my old basketball hoop used to be, moronic bumper stickers on display. And there in the front yard, looking for all the world like he owned the place, was the Old Rooster himself, Boyd Bollinger. He was chipping plastic golf balls toward where my hammock used to hang. Now that was gone, too. I parked on the street. Walked past a good deal of high-end luggage sitting at the end of the driveway. He broke out a Silver Fox smile as I strode past him. He fancied himself a regular George Clooney, this motherfucker.
“Ray.”
I looked at him. The Kentucky Derby mug I’d gotten on a trip to Churchill Downs was at his feet, steaming with tea. Who the hell drank hot tea in the goddamn summertime?
“Boyd.”
When the dog who blew my cover and I got up to the door, L tossed the screen open and Bruce raced in. Her hair was shorter than I had ever seen it. It made the delicious blue speck on her bottom lip even more pronounced, and her eyes looked like a pair of little moons. Though I had known her for sixteen years, the girl got more breathtaking every time I saw her. It was unsettling.
“First-rate cut. Very stylish,” I said, smiling and nodding at the luggage in the driveway. “You going somewhere?”
She shoved her Cobra CXT 1000 into my chest and slammed the screen door; it was still rattling as I trudged back across the grass.
“Have a good one, Ray,” Boyd chirped.
The geriatric was relishing the situation. I would have clobbered him except for the cast on my right hand, which was one thing, and the fact that the cops were probably already in the process of figuring out who I was after the incident at the racetrack earlier in the day, which was another. Plus, he was six hundred years old. He’d keel over on his own soon enough.
I took a couple more steps toward the truck as a limousine pulled into the driveway. I turned around and looked at Boyd Bollinger. He was smugly holding a pitching wedge, wearing a lavender V-neck from the Republican Casual line. I walked over to him and gave him a menacing look (I had a solid six inches on him, not to mention being twenty years younger), then picked up the Kentucky Derby mug, dumped the tea out, and tossed it, left-handed, across the driveway. Because I’m a righty, it was a lame, ineffectual toss, and the mug bounced off the pavement and into the bushes without even breaking.
As the limo driver began piling luggage into the car and Old Man River tried to tether down the slightest of smiles, L watched from the window and shook her head in disgust. The neighbors across the street did the same. Jesus. Hadn’t anyone ever been on a losing streak before?
THE GAMBLER’S GUIDE TO HAPPINESS
March 11
. . . and
where I came from, therapy was a tremendously suspect thing. Airing your problems and grievances to a total stranger? Ridiculous. Mom thought analysis was just another industry invented to pamper rich people. If you needed to talk, that’s what your mother was for. When I think about it, in all the years with R, I never really spoke to him about anything substantial. I always called my mother. I remember when I told her I was pregnant. We joked that I already had one rambunctious child, so what was another?
AT THE BOTTOM OF MY old street, past the municipal golf course entrance, the road splits and affords a person in my position two clear and equally depressing options: 1) turn left and go back down Rabbit Hill Road to the motel of exile; or 2) turn right and head up the Merritt Parkway to the casino that led to the exile in the first place (and from which I’d recently been banished by security). While I’d strung together so many lousy days in a row that I’d forgotten what a good one looked like, this one had been aggressively shitty even by my standards. The trouble I had gotten in out at the racetrack earlier in the day was likely just beginning (my escape from the confusion being nothing more than an illusion of freedom and barely dodged consequences), the dog incident had further damaged my reconciliation campaign with L, and the limo and bags outside my old house suggested that the Boyd Bollinger issue was getting more problematic. All of this was on top of the fact that I had lost my job at ESPN, owed my bookie $52,000, and had maxed out my final credit card two weeks earlier on a cash advance that had led to a disaster at the blackjack table, one which resulted in a brawl that had led to both a broken right wrist and my banishment from Mohegan Sun. I might have been a glass-is-half-full guy, but there was no getting around the fact that the glass was now shattered all over the floor, and I spent the better part of each day doing a nice little merengue on the shards.
I sat in my truck at the bottom of the hill and paused. Going left meant an awkward conversation with Maurice, where I’d have to lie about having a dog in my room, then face another night sitting in that nautically inspired shit box, watching lousy network TV under that outraged image of the hopeless sea captain and taking personality and life expectancy tests online. While I had discovered through multiple tests that I had a dynamic personality, I had also learned that I was projected to live to ninety-one years old, a fact that I would have been thrilled about if it didn’t mean I might be spending another fifty-six years in a fucking motel.
Going right meant a trip to Mohegan Sun, which I wasn’t allowed back into and would likely be removed from the second I walked in the door. Even if I wasn’t shunted off the property, I had no money to gamble with, and Dawn Dondero, the only person on the premises who might be inclined to cough up a small loan so I could play a little, was also a person who wasn’t speaking to me at the moment. Given a choice between being alone and facing my situation, or being surrounded by people and possibly making it worse, I made the obvious decision and turned right.
It was a lousy time of day to be heading toward the casino. The two-lane parkway was clogged, and the last light was fading from the summer sky. All around me, cars and SUVs were filled with people living either the kind of life I used to live or the kind of life I would have been living if I hadn’t started gambling.
It had started, benignly enough, in New Orleans. I was on a four-man panel show on ESPN, and the producers sent us in for a Saints playoff game, setting up a makeshift studio in the concrete dungeon that is the Superdome, and informing us in the preshow meeting that it would be appreciated if we didn’t mention the place had basically served as a third-world refugee camp during Hurricane Katrina, a national disgrace even if you were someone like me who had no interest in politics and didn’t even watch the news. This set me in contrast to L, who at some point went from being blissfully in the current-events dark to keeping MSNBC on around the clock and listening to something called TED Talks, which basically seemed to be smart people going on about how the world would be a better place if everyone were as smart as they were. L was living in what seemed to be perpetual outrage about the state of the planet, which didn’t strike me as being any worse than it had ever been. I mean, I’m no scholar, but isn’t history just an unbroken line of catastrophes and misdeeds? Haven’t the same fucked-up things been happening since the start? What’s the point of paying attention to things you can’t possibly change?
Once our show in the Dome wrapped, a couple of local crew members invited me out for a drink. We ended up at a joint in the French Quarter called Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop, which apparently was the oldest bar in the country and named after a pirate who used to plot his marauding there. One of those features is plenty enough to recommend it as a spot to do some day drinking, and two makes it pretty much a no-brainer, so I joined the locals and we proceeded to line ’em up. We drank and dominated the jukebox until Rowdy Ronnie the piano player came in, then we pulled up some stools around him and spent all night reveling in the fact that every time a tourist requested Billy Joel’s “Piano Man,” Rowdy would instead play Warren Zevon’s “The French Inhaler,” which he said was the only song that truly captured the desperate, lonely essence of a bar, a handful of Tom Waits songs notwithstanding (unlike L, I didn’t find anything wrong with resembling a character in a Warren Zevon song—they were always very colorful). Ronnie considered “Piano Man” an abomination, utterly phony and representative of everything that was wrong not only with music but with life itself, and he refused to play it even when a cluster of Wall Streeters offered him a hundred bucks for just a verse. Everything about Rowdy Ronnie suggested he could use the cash, but New Orleans has a curious integrity despite its general poverty, and he wouldn’t play “Piano Man” no matter how much they tried to muscle him with their money. I remember being very impressed by this, as I usually was with any genuine display of principle.
At around midnight, it was suggested that a moonlit stroll along the Mississippi and a trip to Harrah’s casino were the logical next steps. My phone had one bar of battery left, so I called L on the chilly walk along the river, left her a message, and then rolled into the casino with about half a dozen of my new Louisiana compadres, most of whom were shocked and appalled that I had never gambled before, despite having both Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun in my backyard.
A couple of the crew gave me a quick lesson in the fundamentals of blackjack, how to play what they called “basic strategy,” and then we sat down at a five-dollar-limit table to give it a whirl, each of them taking pride in advising their “celebrity” guest on how to play his hand and adjust his wagers. I cashed in for a hundred dollars, and the feeling I got when I placed that first chip down on the felt was—Jesus, what was that? It was as if someone had taken an extension cord, plugged one end into the French Quarter’s electrical grid, and shoved the other end right between the back pockets of my Levi’s. Everything—nerve endings, lights, sound—was heightened, acute and new, yet at the same time I felt outside of myself. Plugged in yet floating. Time somehow accelerated and stood still at the same time. It was strange and magnificent. The dealer kept busting, everyone at the table was cleaning up and raising hell, the drinks were free—where in Christ’s name had this been all my life?
After nearly sixteen hours had somehow evaporated, I went back to my room at the Royal Sonesta and plugged my phone in. Aside from a slew of voicemails, I had no fewer than twenty “Where are you?” texts from L, which was alarming because she never texted when she was at work and was most definitely not one of those girls who needed you to check in all the time. If she said “I’ll see you at the house tonight” when she was going out the door in the morning, then that was exactly that—she’d see you later at the house. She didn’t feel any need to correspond throughout the day. She’d never send you a picture of the salmon salad she was eating for lunch or forward you some allegedly hilarious video a colleague had sent her of a cat hanging on to a ceiling fan. The more the world threw the seeming simplicity and ever-presence of technology at her, the more she ignored it. L used no so
cial media, something she’d managed to quite freely and happily live without before the world conspired to make everyone feel like they were missing out if they didn’t participate and do so aggressively. She wouldn’t even use the GPS in her car. She was a girl who thought maps were beautiful. In fact, now that I think about it, her office was filled with framed maps. I had always assumed the firm decorated all the offices, but that might have not been true. I’m not really sure. We didn’t talk about things like how to decorate an office (or anything meaningful, according to her, though I don’t consider office decoration important, and I believe we discussed the issues of the day quite routinely no matter how L remembers it).
I called her back, and before I could brag about my blackjack prowess, how I had won $365 on my very first attempt at the game, she blurted out that she’d had a miscarriage.
“What?”
“I had a miscarriage.”
“But you just found out you were pregnant,” I said.
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“I’m not sure.”
And I wasn’t. I wasn’t entirely sure what a miscarriage was. I mean, I knew roughly what it was. But how it actually played out I had no idea. My knowledge of that topic was basically limited to wealthy mustache-twirlers tossing heartbroken girls down the stairs in old movies, usually in mansions, or any dwelling with a deep and dramatic staircase.
“You’re probably relieved,” she said.
“Are you OK?” I asked.
“I’m fine.”
“Then of course I’m relieved.”
Swimming with Bridgeport Girls Page 2