by Greg Baxter
I would’ve kicked his motherfucking ass, said my father, though he was already yawning and checking his watch. Not long after, he announced his departure. He wagged his finger at me: Don’t stay up too late, we’re starting early tomorrow – breakfast at eight.
Barbara and I chatted for a while at the bar, with Bobby intermittently joining us. There was no discernible evidence that Christmas had arrived, except that the casino was almost empty – nothing but Asians and the really really down-on-their-luck, the guys playing roulette and blackjack with drawn grey faces, rubbing their eyes heavily with the balls of their palms after big losses, or pulling their baseball caps very low.
Barbara said she was going to hit the sack as well. Your luck getting any better? she asked.
Worse, I said.
She grimaced. What are you playing?
Mostly roulette.
Maybe you should play some craps.
I think I’m done gambling for the night.
She started digging in her purse and I told her not to bother. I’ll just lose it, I said.
That’s the point, she said. She handed me three hundred dollars – all crisp notes, fresh from the endless wellspring of her unbelievable luck.
After she left I sat at the bar by myself wondering what I ought to do with what seemed to me a half-divine offering, a hand right out of the clouds – save it for the next day, try my luck again, or not gamble it at all, just take it back to Dublin, since outside of this surprise excursion I was a hundred kinds of broke. In a few months I’d be on an all-potato diet. I rolled this question around my head for a long time – maybe five minutes – before I decided to get up and walk around the casino and see what might happen. Maybe there’d be some girl to talk to, I considered, before discarding the idea. No girl worth chasing would be haunting the Horseshoe at one a.m. on Christmas morning. I sat down at Po’s bar and the guy who called me Irish was working: he’d be there till five. He asked how long I was married. Seven years, I said. Any kids? Nah, I said. Jesus, that’s crazy; I love kids; couldn’t live without them. I nodded. He started to talk about his kids and I changed the subject to football. He took offence and walked away. Then suddenly I was up on my feet again and passing through the doors into the street outside, listening to loud piped Christmas music which was full of xylophone simplicity and sweet voices and the reassurance that one man loved us and suffered so that all men would be free. I was alone and drunk and five thousand miles from my house, and I could have crawled against a wall and slept for a week. I had nothing in my stomach.
I turned into the only spot I knew downtown where you could pay to see naked women – the Glitter Gulch. I’d never been inside: even the times I’d come with groups of guys, no one would enter. Ten years ago the outside was covered in hazy portraits of topless women posing temptingly. Now, as part of the attempted familification of downtown, all that was gone, including the guy outside who tried to lure you in.
In a dark sparse velvet-walled anteroom I paid the twenty-dollar cover. I could see the main stage from there. The woman dancing was old and unshapely, and there were only a handful of men watching. The air was oil-dark and loud – I think it was AC/DC. The girl behind the desk said, Thanks, enjoy yourself. I remember she had glitter all over her eyelids. Another woman, who was slightly haggish and sun-wrinkled and fat around the belly, took me by the arm and led me past thick black curtains. She asked me where I’d like to sit. The bar, I said. She asked if I’d like a dance and squeezed my arm and I realized she was offering. I told her I wanted to take it slow, which was not the truth.
The room was a large rectangle with a long bar in the middle. Green lights in the ceiling cast an atmosphere of radioactivity. It was not as empty as the first glance had suggested. There were several lone men at tables, some talking to dancers, others falling asleep. The girls were, for the most part, unsightly – some fat, some far too skinny, some wretchedly old and worn. The men were worse – they shined dismally in the green light and the roving white spotlights. They drank and flashed money. The girls came by and rubbed their shoulders and hair and whispered to them. Soon the dancers undressed and began to dance, asses on laps, arching backward, squeezing their tits together, making eye contact with other men. Meanwhile the girl on the main stage was nude and lying with her legs spread wide in front of some unenviable man, her fingers pulling her cunt open so that he could peer inside. On another part of the stage a woman hung upside down from a pole with her old tits dangling into her face. Here, yes, this was it, humanity like a cadaver, a cold corpse in a lab, cut open, ribs pulled out, organs dumped in a bin.
I sat at the bar, which was empty, and made friends with the bartender, Martin, a plump-faced, loquacious Latino who served me a beer for six dollars and a shot on the house. We talked for a long time about Ireland. He was taking advantage of the slow night to experiment with new cocktails, and we tried one after another – he made big ones for the girls and we drank the remainder in small glasses. During this time, which may have been half an hour, I wasn’t approached by a single dancer. They walked past me as though I were a permanent fixture. I told Martin it was giving me a complex.
I can get one for you, he said.
But they’re all fucking ugly, I said.
But, you know, it’s Christmas morning.
And though it seems somewhat fibbish to say so, somewhat novelistic, it was around that time that a young, good-looking girl took a seat at the bar, about five spaces away, and ordered a drink. She had dark hair and white skin and started checking her phone. Martin made her something fruity and I told him I’d pay for it. When it came to her I called over, Can I join you?
Sure, she said.
Her name was Jackie. She had pretty, light-brown eyes and freckles. We made chit-chat – there seemed to be no rush. She was nineteen and studying literature at UNLV, or would continue as soon as she could afford to. Before she could afford to go to college she needed fake tits, so that she could work a little more and really afford to go to college. She missed her English courses. We got on to the subject of dead authors: her favourite Dostoevsky novels, Hemingway, several others that have slipped out of the grip of my memory. She said she wanted to become a writer. If she had not said that, I would’ve assumed the literary references were lies for my benefit, something out of a stripper handbook: how to talk to bookish men.
She said, Would you like a dance?
How much?
Here or in the private room?
The private room.
A hundred bucks for three songs, or three hundred for the hour.
Let’s start with three songs, I said, because at the time it seemed the perfect balanced solution to the problem of this money: spend a hundred on Jackie, blow a hundred on roulette, and save a hundred for the morning.
She stood and took my hand and said, Follow me. Martin nodded – not ostentatiously, not creepily, but as though to say, See you in a bit. Jackie led me to a small space separated from the main room by dark but half-transparent curtains. In it was an L-shaped couch against the wall and a few tables. She picked a spot and sat down, crossed her legs, and lit a cigarette. Do you mind? she asked.
Not at all, I said. I lit a cigarette and leaned back into the seat and put my hand on her back. It was cool and muscular. She looked up, presumably at a camera, but said nothing.
What kind of stuff do you write? she asked.
All kinds of stuff.
A book?
Maybe.
She had her hand on my leg. I cannot remember if it had been there from the beginning. We were sitting in an odd calm that seemed a great distance from everybody else. We were all alone in the room. I have a tendency – and this is an old cliché but what can you do when it’s the truth – to fall in love with strippers. I’ve never been to a club without leaving under a hazy, pathetic crush.
She tamped her cigarette in the ashtray. It was only half-smoked, but I understood. I did the same and leaned back and she put one leg ove
r me and leaned forward. I put my hands on her waist and squeezed. I cannot even begin to express the sensation that contact with a woman’s waist, the curve from the hips up, the soft flat belly, drives through me. It is like taking off all my clothes, standing in the rain, and grabbing an electric fence.
Dutifully Jackie threw her head back. She undressed when the next song began. She did this with the slow expertise of all strippers – this holding of the top against the breasts while the straps are undone, then the bent-over slow unravelling of a G-string – and in a moment she was naked on top of me, completely, faced away, and pressing her ass in my lap like a cat trying to get comfortable in a pillow. I scratched her back. She leaned forward and soon her hands were on the ground and she was upside down on my lap and I was staring into the eloquence of her hairless cunt and asshole. And I became something of that unenviable man, frozen, shaken, bankrupt. If I had been spotted by anyone they would have pitied me. When I pulled her ass apart with my hands she slid off with feline agility and moved to straddle me again and said, This is nice. If I had not been in love with her before, I was then. And if not then, I was when she danced into the fifth and sixth songs and when at last I could not bear to have her tits so close to my mouth without sucking them and I licked and bit her nipple and she squeezed herself close and let out an almost silent whimper.
Then she stopped and asked, Do you want to go longer? We’ve gone way past three songs.
I don’t know, I said.
She remained very still.
Can I smoke a cigarette and think about it?
She got off my lap and put on her G-string and bikini top and lit a cigarette, reclining into the couch and crossing her legs. I’m probably going to get in trouble, she said. You’re not supposed to touch me.
Yeah, but it’s Christmas.
Exactly, it’s Christmas.
We began a conversation again. She said she was tired, but had to dance the morning shift at a place on the Strip. That shift started at six, so she’d have a couple of hours to kill. I told her she should come back and drink with me at the Horseshoe. She thought about it. Maybe, she said.
Why do you want to get fake tits? I asked. Yours are perfect.
Hardly anybody likes real tits anymore, she said. You make a lot more if they don’t move when you dance.
Well, I like them.
She put her cigarette in the ashtray. You want to see them again?
I want to fuck you.
She smiled. I’d definitely get in trouble.
Two hundred more for the rest of the hour?
She nodded. You should give Yuri something too.
Who’s Yuri?
Yuri was the guy just outside the curtain who made sure the girls were safe, and that they didn’t cross the line. I presumed Yuri was a fake name intended to intimidate clients, but he didn’t need it. He was the shape of Frankenstein’s monster. I gave Yuri fifty and he nodded without saying anything. I had no idea what value fifty bucks had in this economy, but when I told Jackie she raised her eyes and told me to move to the far corner of the couch.
I grabbed my cigarettes and slid to the far end of the L and she said, Okay, we’re off camera.
When my time was up, it was about three a.m. There was another guy and his dancer, an older woman with short hair and cellulite, going through a conventional routine. He’d been watching us. We hadn’t done anything too astonishing, but it had felt like sex. I felt like I’d been fucked. Jackie dressed and we went to the bar for a drink, and on the way out I gave Yuri another thirty dollars. I wanted to walk around the place giving everybody money.
At the bar, Martin was still experimenting with cocktails. We had a few shots – Jackie had shots and an energy drink – and my mouth began to fill with gobble and my tongue became chewing gum. I started lighting cigarettes and leaving them to burn in ashtrays. Jackie said she’d better try and make a little more money before her shift was finished. She had half an hour. I told her to come to the front bar of the Horseshoe – Po’s bar – when she was done, and she said she would. When she left, Martin and I spoke until I could make no more sense of his words or my own. I went to stand and nearly fell over.
In an instant I was at the Horseshoe, at Po’s bar, and the bartender said, Any luck, Irish? I said I was still losing, but was done for the night. I put twenty bucks in the quarter poker machine and pressed the button once. My free drink came. Beside me there was an old man who could speak only by pressing a bandaged-up hole in his throat, and even then you couldn’t understand a word. At the end of the bar was a frat guy in a tattered baseball cap, dozing. There was one Asian dude playing roulette – the table that had crucified me – and one or two others playing blackjack. The craps dealers were standing silently in position while the pit boss paced behind them. The slots jingled in rhythmic alarm but I didn’t see anyone playing them. It was four in the morning. I was drinking very slowly, and as the time passed and Jackie did not arrive, I grew sleepy. I closed my eyes a few times and may have dozed.
I was about to order some water and retire – I had to be up in a few hours to gamble with my father – when Jackie showed up. She was wearing jeans and red jumper with a low neckline, and flats. She sat down and said, I didn’t think you’d be here.
I didn’t think you’d come, I said.
So, do you really live in Ireland?
Yep.
Too bad, she said.
She began to play the poker machine at her seat. She had long fingernails and they cracked the buttons rapidly. She played with unconscious speed, and spoke at the same time.
She hit a big hand and won a few hundred dollars. The old guy started clapping and the frat guy woke up. The voice box spoke – it asked a question. I didn’t understand but Jackie said, I got a flush. The old man nodded. He began to tell us a story about something. I didn’t grasp a word of it. When he was finished he laughed very hard, and so did Jackie. The frat guy exploded momentarily about shit luck.
If you lived here, said Jackie to me, we could’ve given dating a shot.
I put my hand on her leg. The thought of dating someone who undressed and danced on top of other men filled me with lascivious curiosity. Dismissively, lightly scolding, she reminded me that I didn’t live there, so there wasn’t much point.
Did you think I was coming here to hook up with you?
Of course not, I said, instantly growing very tired.
The old man spoke again and Jackie responded. He’s a writer, she said. He’s going to write about us.
The old man turned and reached out to shake my hand. With his other hand he pushed his throat and said, Pleased to meet you.
We spoke, the three of us, Jackie translating, for another half-hour, suffering a few more explosions from the frat guy, who at one point began flexing his muscles and feeling them. He was totally oblivious to the moment. He could have been in a jungle hanging with apes. Finally Jackie said she had to go. She cashed out. She held my hand for a moment and kissed me. It was light but lingering – hard to say who did the lingering and who did the leaving. Then she walked out. The old man and I watched her. He said something. I didn’t understand, but I knew what he said. I have a second memory of that morning, purely imaginary, in which she and I went up to my room and fucked and dozed through the day, and this imaginary memory is as true to my mind as what really happened – I could retell it now with the same sincerity. As she disappeared into the blinking, illuminated morning, she took all my energy with her. When she had vanished totally, the room became pendulous and swampy. My eyes began to close at once. My nose started to run again. The frat guy was talking about hookers. I knew what he meant. I told him to fuck off. The bartender said, It’s Christmas, Irish, go get some rest.
Oakhurst, Texas
My mother lives in a small trailer on a couple acres of land that she and her husband, David, have turned into a little farm with vegetables and chickens and rabbits. To get there you have to cross a deep, muddy, litter-polluted gor
ge, and this cannot be done without a four-wheel-drive truck. It is a sinister-looking spot, the abandoned development where they live, just bulldozed roads that have turned, in a thousand heavy rains, to clay and slime. Everywhere you look there are hand-painted signs nailed to skinny pines that say Trespassers Will Be Shot, or DOG, and you are quite certain you’d rather be shot. Drive one minute up my mother’s road and you find an empty two-storey house that used to be a meth lab. Part of it is collapsed, and a dozen cars rust outside it. My mother has lived in all sorts of places, but this is where she will die, someday, and I think she will die satisfied.
This is my second landscape, of muggy green woods and scrub pines and cut-out, semi-paved neighbourhoods. My second novel is about this place, but since it sits unfinished, memories remain and stir a great deal of lingering antipathy. Gas stations in the middle of nowhere. Long country highways narrowly forged out of unhealthy forests. Vast car dealerships, giant stores along the interstate, wide roads with closed-down groceries and industrial bottling complexes, colonies of chain restaurants at ten-lane intersections, creosote plants, pawn shops, sad diners with my mother, always working, always broke, who was, for a long time, the loneliest person on earth. But never defeated.
I arrived on the evening of the 27th. I don’t remember the first night much. We saw a few relatives. We had dinner and a few beers and watched a movie, most of which I slept through. I woke the next day at around nine. It was warm and bright. My sheets were wet from night sweats and I felt better for it. My mother made coffee. We sat in front of the large television while she read a book about gardening and I read over a story I’d been meaning to edit – it had been accepted for publication, but I had to make some changes, make some connections more explicit. David was just up: he is a tall, white-haired man with short legs, hulking, monolithic and rectangular, except for his large belly. He is absurdly large in the situation of the tiny trailer. And he had looked better. He’d had cancers removed from his face, which was red and scabby – too many hours working outside, fixing roofs, rebuilding houses, and he hadn’t the skin for it.