Swimming with Bridgeport Girls

by Anthony Tambakis

  The money came in bricks of $100,000: ten straps of $10,000 each wrapped in cellophane. I got two bricks, five unwrapped straps, and $2,500 in loose hundreds. It all fit in an MGM tote bag with room to spare. This surprised me. In the movies, someone can owe as little as, say, fifty grand, and they’ll go through this whole rigmarole where a big suitcase is hauled out and the latches are popped and boom, there’s this sea of cash, but that’s not what that kind of money really looks like. It’s a movie thing, like how they always show some insanely lucky couple who just hit a big score celebrating on a king-size bed. They scoop up huge gobs of cash, toss it in the air, and watch the bills fall from the ceiling in slow motion like autumn leaves. But that kind of money in real life is crisp and new and sticks together, and even if you took off the wrapping and the straps and flung a couple of packs in the air, it would just kind of plunk down on the bed no different than if you had tossed a couple of pounds of sliced ham toward the ceiling. The movies consistently ignore this kind of reality, which is precisely why I like them.

  Renée and I waited for the elevator to go up to the suite, chatting away, and again, this was nothing new for me, as I was always making fast friends when I traveled. I would say that I enjoyed and excelled at meeting new people, and L would say I was terrified of being alone, and as usual, I was kind of right and she was exactly right. We got into the elevator with an elderly couple in matching Windbreakers, khakis, and fanny packs. They stared at Renée like they had just gotten a memo that the world was coming to an end and young women like her were directly responsible. She was wearing a black leather miniskirt, black high heels, and a white halter top with SAY WHAT? written in rhinestones across the chest. She was oblivious to how they were eyeballing her, but not to the way Mota and Manny C. had been looking at her downstairs.

  “That Bob dude and that GD pit boss were looking at me like I’m a whatchamacallit,” she fumed. “A working girl.”

  “You are a working girl.”

  “Oh, for Mike’s sake. Not a working girl. A working girl working girl. You know.”

  “Oh, I’m sure they didn’t think that,” I said, though I was certain they had.

  She took a look at my cast. “What’d you do to your arm, fancy pants?”

  “I fought off a mugger.”

  “On the real?”

  “Yep.”

  “God. People are so fucked-up.”

  The Boca couple looked at her. They were clearly offended by her language, but Renée saw their interest in a different light and failed to notice that the husband kept hitting their floor button over and over in a pointless attempt to get there quicker.

  “Hey, you guys have been around for a while,” she said. “Have people always been this fucked-up, or is it worse now?”

  The older couple looked down without answering. Renée got defensive. “I don’t dance, if that’s what you’re thinking. And I’m not a whattyacallit, either. Tell them, Raoul.”

  “She’s not a whattyacallit.”

  The couple kept staring at the ground. They wanted no part of us. Renée shrugged it off and looked at the signatures on my cast. “Who are all these bitches?”

  “Random girls from downstairs. They were signing when I was playing.”

  “They’re a bunch of skanks,” she said. “You can tell by how they write.”

  “They seemed all right.”

  Her defensive look came right back. “Better than me?”

  “Obviously not,” I said.

  I had taken a couple of pills down at the table, and they were starting to kick in, or had at least jump-started the pills that were on the fade. It was getting hard to concentrate.

  “You don’t think I’m a bad person, do you?”

  “Not at all.”

  “I really don’t want you to think I’m a bad person, OK, Raoul? I mean, I’m a good girl. Like, I haven’t been with as many guys as you think I have. Do you think I’ve been with a lot of guys? You do, don’t you?”

  “I haven’t really thought about it,” I said.

  “Well, I haven’t. I had a boyfriend from the time I was thirteen to the time I got out of that stupid factory last year. He still works there. He wouldn’t leave that disgusting town if you gave him a trillion dollars, ’cause everybody knows him. Like that’s a big whoop or something. He was always like, ‘Why go somewhere else?’ and I was always like, ‘Uh, get a clue, dude.’ Even the air stinks like paper. Leslie liked how it smelled, if you can believe that. That’s his name. Leslie.”

  “Your ex-boyfriend’s name is Leslie?”

  “I know. It’s a girl’s name, right? Every time I talk about him, people think I’m a lesbo. I Frenched a girl at a party once, but I don’t see what the big deal is. It was on a dare. His parents named him after some old actor, I think. I don’t know. I don’t want to talk about his sorry butt, anyway. All he cares about is deer hunting.”

  “I can’t believe people still shoot deer,” I said, thinking of the Sarge and the cereal.

  “Uh, yeeea-uh. Him and all his dipshit friends spray themselves with deer piss and go sit in trees all day. It’s totally disgusting.”

  When we reached their floor, the Boca couple dashed off the elevator like they were grabbing the last chopper out of Saigon. Then Renée and I got to my floor and headed toward the suite. She linked her arm in mine as we made our way down the hallway.

  “You’re pretty young to be Joe Money Bags,” she said. “You’re not one of those Bernie Madoff people, are you? I saw a thing on him on TV. What a pecker. I mean, if you steal and you’re way poor, it’s like, OK, I get it, no worries, but rich people who steal are just total scuzbuckets.”

  “I agree,” I said. “But I’m in plastics. That’s where, you know, I made my fortune. Pretty much.”

  “Ohhhhh. Plastics. Cool,” she said, though she had didn’t have any more of an idea what I was talking about than I did. “I was just kidding about the Bernie Madoff thing,” she said. “He’s a bad person and you’re a good person. I can tell.”

  When I opened the door to the suite, Renée raced over to the long stretch of window to take in the view while I found the room safe.

  “Cheese and rice!” she yelled from across the suite. “This place is sick. It’s like that movie with the Scientology dude and that retarded guy.”

  “Rain Man?”

  “Sí, señor!”

  I took a $10,000 strap out of the bag and locked the rest away, using L’s and my anniversary, 1123, as a code. Then I poured a couple of vodka pineapples and fired up one of the joints I had scored. I took a pull and offered it to Renée.

  “I will if you gimme a shotgun.”

  I took another drag, held the smoke, and then she put her mouth close to mine and I blew it in.

  “This place kicks so much ass at night,” she said, looking out at the Strip. “During the day it makes you want to kill yourself with a razor.”

  She was right. There is no place on earth that looks more different from day to night than Las Vegas, Nevada. It’s like the difference between despair and hope.

  “Gotta beat Ohio,” I said.

  “Hell yeah it does. That’s why I call it Blowhio. Look! There’s the Excalibur! My friend Teresa’s retarded crush CJ works up there at the show with those guys with the horses and the big sticks.”

  “The jousts?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Whatever you call those old-fashionedy people with the clanky metal suits. It was like a hundred years ago, so I don’t really know. CJ’s not one of those guys, anyway. He just, like, cleans horse shit, pretty much. Hey—you gonna ask me what I’m doin’ here or what? It’s kinda weird you haven’t. I mean, you’re acting like we’re old friends. Which is awesome. But it’s a little weird, right? You don’t think it’s random that we were talking last night and now I’m here?”

  “I hadn’t really thought about it,” I said.

  “Probably ’cause you were too busy winning a skillion dollars.”
>
  “Maybe.”

  “Well, I had an interview at Wet Republic. Which is gross. That lazy river is nothing but sweat and pee and Coors Light. Anyway, I’m not a stalker or anything. I had a reason to be here. Then I saw this whatchamacallit in the casino, this commotion, and I checked it out, and there you were. I was like, holy moly, it’s the cute dude from the bench! I watched you for a while. You were really cool with everybody. They all liked you. I mean, they liked you besides for the fact that you were giving them money. Some people give people money, but they’re dicks about it,” she said, her face clouding. “Like all those gross guys who come into the club. They’re, you know, a hundred percent disgusting, but they think since they have cash, they’re God’s gift. Deep down they hate the girls ’cause they have to pay to see good-looking ones, and the girls hate them ’cause they try and treat them like whores. Who makes someone pick up money off the ground? Even animals don’t do that. Not that they have money, but if they did, I bet they’d just give it to each other and not be asswipes about it. Or at least not make each other feel like shit about it on purpose.”

  She walked around the suite, picking things up and putting them down like she was at a high-end yard sale.

  “People are like that, you know. They’ll try and make you feel like crap if they feel like crap. You’ll be with a guy, and he’ll be in a pissy mood or something and tell you your ass looks flabby even if it doesn’t, ’cause, like, he wants you to think it’s flabby so you don’t get to where you feel too good about yourself. Guys think that if they make you feel crappy about how you look, then you won’t leave them, ’cause you won’t think you can do any better than you’re already doing.”

  I thought of L. Of what an emotionally generous person she was. She used to call me her “beautiful boy.” And I was constantly reminding her how perfect she was. We were not stingy with those things. Not ever. Some couples are—Renée was right—but we weren’t. And that’s important, you know? Because after a while, when you look in the mirror, you start to see what the person who loves you sees and not whatever it was you might have seen before, if that makes any sense. After L and I were together for a while, we came to see ourselves like the other saw us, and I think that’s one of the most amazing things love can do. Maybe the most amazing thing, if you think about it.

  Renée reached into her pocket and pulled out her iPhone. Her face lit up. “Oh my God. Raoul. We gotta go to the Rio! Ryan Gosling’s at VooDoo!”

  Renée had received word from one of her “posse” that the actor and an entourage were at VooDoo, the rooftop bar at the Rio. She was crazy with excitement and insisted she simply had to meet him before she died because he had changed her life, since it was after seeing The Notebook on cable that the true nature and possibility of love had been revealed to her. As Renée explained it, when she saw the love Ryan Gosling had for Rachel McAdams, she decided then and there that it was time to get out of Ohio and her emotionally unsatisfying relationship with Leslie Womack, whose displays of romanticism were limited to: 1) yearly Valentine’s Day outings to the Paradise Motel (a by-the-hour eyesore still within a quarter tank of the factory); and 2) ceremoniously dragging a twelve-point buck up to her parents’ front door as a gesture of apology after bypassing her sixteenth-birthday dinner in order to go deer hunting with his coworkers from the paper factory. Gosling’s unyielding, incalculable love for McAdams was made even more resonant by the fact that Womack fell asleep next to Renée during the movie, thus sealing his fate and finally squandering the enormous emotional credit he had built up as a result of being the only guy she had ever slept with. I ignored the obvious parallels between me and L and focused instead on the fact that Gosling had built a beautiful house in the hope that McAdams would return, thus cementing the fact that I had indeed come up with the perfect plan, or at least one that had worked multiple times in American fiction of varying quality. Renée made it clear that she didn’t “want to, like, hook up with Ryan or anything sketchy like that,” but merely wanted to meet him and express her gratitude for his having helped her understand that there were men in the world who would lay their lives down for a woman. Anything short of that, she said, was no longer acceptable to her.

  “Can we go, Raoul? Can we? Even if you don’t care about Ryan, VooDoo has a kick-ass view. It’s just like this one, only there’s no glass in front of you, which makes a pretty big difference, I think.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

  “Awesome. You want me to call Carmelo for party favors?”

  “What kind of party favors?” I said.

  “You know. Rhymes with joke-brain.”

  “Ah. You like that stuff?”

  “Never buy it, never sell it, never turn it down. I heard a girl at the club say that. Do you like it?”

  “Not really,” I said. “I just like the way it smells.”

  She looked at me. For a long time.

  “That was a joke,” I said.

  “Ohhhhhhhhhhhh. Holy moly, that’s, like, genius. I gotta use that! Can I use that?”

  She called Carmelo to discuss the procuring of party favors while I poured another drink. Now, I know what you’re probably thinking: You’re on a roll, Ray, and so close to seeing the Plan through. Why not hit the sack, wake up fresh, and get after it in the morning? Take the suckers down and get out of Vegas before night falls again. Which makes sense. Complete sense, really. But I’m a social person, for one thing, and I hadn’t felt this good in a very long time, for another. I wanted to celebrate a little. It wasn’t that I had any interest in sleeping with Renée or anything like that (in my mind I had never gotten divorced, and no matter what L thinks about the Dawn situation, I hadn’t looked twice at another girl since the day I’d laid eyes on L at the Parker House, and you’ll never find anyone to say otherwise), and though time was an issue, it didn’t seem like that much of an issue. L and the fossil were off God knows where on vacation. I had a little time. I mean, I’d been exiled for so long already. Didn’t I deserve to enjoy myself a little?

  Bob Mota arranged a limo for us, and we headed down Vegas Boulevard with a young Asian kid named Coco behind the wheel. Renée informed him that he had “the coolest name ever, besides for this girl Pooh Jeter who lives in my apartment complex.” I poured a couple of drinks from the wet bar and lounged on the leather seats, enjoying the way the pills slowed everything down and made the lights outside the tinted windows shimmer. Renée stuck her head out the sunroof, and Coco did his best to keep his eyes on the road and not on the rearview as she leaned on the roof with her butt up in the air.

  On Renée’s direction, he pulled into a parking lot off Flamingo where a decrepit shack of a bar stood. Out front was a white plastic sign like you usually see outside used-car lots. It read W LCOME TO T E HAP IEST P ACE ON EAR H in black letters. Missing letters notwithstanding, it probably should have billed itself as “the place on earth that has the least interest in truth in advertising,” since the dim-light, dead-end clientele and deathly glow from the video poker machines made your average Cambodian sweat shop look like a month of Sundays in comparison. I waited by the door as Renée made a quick exchange with the bartender (Carmelo, presumably), and then we headed back toward the limo, where she handed me some cash. “Here’s your change, Raoul.”

  “Keep it for drinks.”

  “Nuh-uh. Lou Ann says never take money from a man.”

  “Who’s Lou Ann?”

  “This old lady I play bingo with at the Plaza. She made me a scarf. Now that my real family doesn’t talk to me anymore, she’s like my grandmother. I’ll probably eat Thanksgiving with her. She brings it up every five seconds even though it’s still a skillion degrees out and the last thing I want to think about is freaking gravy,” she said. “Yo, Coco Loco! Head over to Harbor Island. I gotta pick up some of my peeps.”

  Standing outside in the parking lot of the Harbor Island apartment complex were seven friends of Renée’s (most of them likely carrying fak
e IDs, though so was I), one of them toting a Chihuahua in a leather side bag. Within seconds they had all piled in the limo and started snorting lines off a local travel guide. Then Renée started talking a mile a minute to one of her friends. I watched her in drugged-out amazement.

  “This driver’s name is Coco how freaking cool is that Raoul’s in plastics I don’t know he doesn’t look Mexican at all that girl in sixteen should move to Bitch City yeah tell me about it two-faced where’s Pooh what do you mean she moved she didn’t even say goodbye what a lame-o she can be such a basic bitch cheese and rice is it hot I’m sticking to these seats yo Coco Loco fire up the AC it’s like being in jail working there Pooh Jeter moved that’s crazy that guy is a big-time loser Rio I know totally Raoul is at the MGM holy moly you should see his room it’s like Rain Man I don’t know some movie the place kicks ass yeah the music is gay there for sure what do you mean you hate s’mores that’s crazy I don’t like bingo I just feel obligated I know he’s cute look at him plastics I don’t know you’ve never seen so many freaking chips a hundred dollars a drink no Wet Republic ya huh screw Hard Rock they suck don’t be gross I have no idea he’s not wearing a ring why don’t you freaking announce it Camille you never should have got that stupid dog it pisses on everything where the heck are you gonna put it holy Einstein that’s genius no not Britney S. Britney P. I would not I don’t care what you say Leslie still thinks I’m gonna move back there and marry him fat chance deer piss Ryan Gosling totally Channing Tatum is not you can have him never in a million years I’d rather die little pecker no I haven’t talked to her of course it’s insane he is not now you’re being disgusting don’t buy it don’t sell it don’t turn it down I know uh-uh not really I just like how it smells thanks no that’s Raoul’s yeah totally woo to the hoo let’s go Coco time to do this thanks Raoul you rule no this way party-time people!”