by Grant Mccrea
While I was taking all this in, a double-wide lady on a scooter was explaining it all to her friend, in a voice loud enough to hear at the Golden Nugget across the street. Among other nuggets, the scooter lady was sharing with her pal the fact that all top poker players are cocaine addicts.
Really? her friend said.
I’m telling you, said the big gal, with an air of absolute knowledge.
You learn something new every day.
At the Rio sports book, and all the others I’d been to, the games and odds were displayed in twenty-first-century fashion, on mammoth computerized screens. At Binion’s, they were written in multicolored Magic Marker on a wall-size whiteboard.
Ah, the good old days.
I asked the poker room manager where I could get some of the famous brisket. He smiled indulgently.
That, he said, was long ago.
I needed a drink. Before I started crying.
At the bar, I thought for a moment I’d stumbled on a black lung convention. The paradigm Rio player is a morbidly obese guy on a rented scooter. The Binion’s crowd leans more to the tubercular. Old men with hollow cheeks and days’ gray growth of patchy beard. Guys with serious years of serious living on their faces. One guy came up next to me with three beer vouchers, got his three bottles and sucked all three down within a minute and a half. Then he turned to me and asked if I had a spare beer voucher.
I pulled up a stool. I looked around. A tiny pale cadaverous curly-haired thing, arms tattooed with snakes, fumbled with her purse, looking disturbed. Not enough in there for a beer, it seemed. She dropped the purse on the sticky soaked floor and stumbled away. A toothless lady with a rooster neck and several painfully large–looking spikes inserted through her eyebrows and lips was cavorting with three young Mexican guys. They’d hit the jackpot, their faces told you. The snake lady returned, proudly waving at the barkeep a plastic-embossed card. He looked at it carefully, nodded. Gave her a beer. The card, apparently, entitled her to keep drinking forever.
Damn, I thought. How do I get me one of those?
There was a short, dark-skinned man with an Hispanic air washing dishes at the sink behind the bar. He sported a surly manner and bad acne scars. His shirt said Jose.
Aha, I said to myself. Could it be? Could detecting be this easy?
I tried to catch Jose’s eye. He was wiping some grime onto some beer glasses. He ignored me.
I waved at him.
Another guy came over. His shirt said Dave.
Hi, Dave, I said.
Hi, said Dave, expressionless.
I ordered a double scotch. Lots of ice. Drank it fast. Waved Dave over again. It took three tries. He gave me a Look that said, I’ve got a lousy job and a worse life, give me some shit, please give me some shit, so I can stomp your face and get at least a little satisfaction out of the day.
I didn’t give him any shit.
A couple of stools over were two women who had some hard miles on the odometer. Had that hair that’s been dyed so much it looks like you could snap it off like a pretzel. One said to the other,
He killed his sister and her baby.
Well, no, said the other, he hit the baby with a sledgehammer, but apparently it lived.
I ordered another drink. When Dave came back with it, I said nothing about the lipstick on the rim of the glass. Instead, I asked him about Jose.
His name isn’t Jose, he said.
Oh, I said.
I refrained from objecting that the name appearing over the pocket of Jose’s shirt was, in fact, Jose. I was quite sure Dave, or whatever Dave’s name was, was aware of that.
Uh, what is his name? I asked.
Fucked if I know, said Dave, turning away from me to share his grim personality with the charming ladies.
I figured I needed to take the direct route.
Jose! I called out.
Even if that wasn’t his name, I surmised, he must be used to people assuming it was.
He was polishing the grease on the countertop with an oil rag filched from the trash of a long-abandoned gas station.
He looked intensely interested in the work.
Jose! I called out again.
He looked up.
I motioned him over with a nod.
Slowly, reluctantly, he sidled over.
What’s your name? I asked, as nicely as I could.
He stared at me blankly.
Cómo se llama? I asked in my awful Spanish accent, trying to curry some cultural favor.
He gave me a small smile that twitched into something resembling contempt.
Harold, he said, without a trace of an Hispanic accent.
Oh, I said. Sorry, your shirt …
Yeah, he said. So whaddya want.
It wasn’t a question. It was a reflex.
Hey, I said, I didn’t mean to offend you—
You didn’t offend me, he said definitively.
Uh, okay, I said. Listen, I’m just looking for some folks. I’ve been hired to look for some folks. Nothing to do with you. Nothing official, you know what I mean. I just heard you, or somebody fitting your description, might know something about these people. They used to live in Henderson. Eloise and, Vladimir, I think.
Harold took a step back. Leaned against the sink. Crossed his arms.
It was enough to tell me I’d found the right guy.
Can’t help you, he said.
Yeah, I said. I know. I get it. Listen, would you just indulge me? Meet me for a drink later? My tab. The Golden Nugget. Could be something in it for you. When do you get off?
Harold considered my offer for a moment. Narrowed his eyes. Scratched his left sideburn.
No, he said, stepping up and leaning forward. Too close. Upstairs bar at the Terrible. Two hours.
At what?
Terrible Casino. The upstairs bar.
Well, I thought, that could describe any number of joints around town. But not wanting to further reveal my utter lack of cool, I just nodded my head. I figured I’d ask around about this Terrible place.
Gotcha, I said.
He got back to his rag duty.
I had a couple hours to kill. I was in a casino in Vegas, famous for its poker room.
The choice seemed obvious.
The poker room was as well-worn as the rest of the joint, though the players had a bit less of the cancer ward about them. One guy, a dealer playing in his spare time, was Rio-sized, which is to say, fat beyond human imagining. And there were a couple of the usual Internet kids: a fat boy in a NY Yankees cap and green flannel shirt, jolly and wheezing and stinking; a tall, weedy guy with steel wool red hair wearing a t-shirt that said Jesus Died for My Space in Heaven. One young guy said he was a professional, lived at Binion’s. Can’t beat the price, he said. Twenty-nine bucks a night, at the poker rate.
Forty-nine on weekends, a veteran corrected him.
I guess with overhead that low it’s fairly easy to be a professional, of a sort.
There was a stout lady with a mammoth beehive, playing beside her husband, shorter than her and with a heavy Brooklyn accent and the nose to match. They had an extended discussion about Grey Goose martinis, at the conclusion of which the waitress arrived. Her shirt said Betty. The husband gave Betty detailed instructions on how to make the martinis.
Betty had to ask a couple questions, make sure she got it right. She didn’t seem too happy about it.
We’re not usually … difficult, the beehive lady said, but this is the one thing we really like.
At our age, we better be having a good time, her husband clarified.
The game was fairly soft. Too small, though. 1–2 no limit. The biggest game they were spreading. I got up fifty bucks or so. Got stuck there. Got bored.
The guy next to me seemed to be awfully nice. Too nice, maybe, to be a poker player. I struck up a conversation with him. He said he was Jim. He was writing a book. I asked him what it was called.
It’s called Nothing Falls, he said.
Thanks, he said. You know, the dealers mostly come out ahead. I mean, think about it. I tip them every time I win a hand. But when I lose one, do they tip me? No sir. So at the end of the night, they’re ahead of me.
You’ve certainly got a point, I said.
Another woman at our table said her name was Alice. She was a middle-aged woman of the frumpy persuasion. Baggy sweater. Stained sweatpants, extra large, to accommodate her oakish thighs. Mousy hair. She looked harmless.
Then she opened her mouth.
Jesus fucking Christ! she shrieked when someone sucked out on her for a flush on the river. Oscar, change the fucking dealer! I can’t take this shit! Paul, how many times you gonna do this to me?! Fucking shit on a stick!
She was a terrible player, so she had a number of opportunities to yell at Oscar, the floor guy, and Paul and the other dealers. She couldn’t resist pushing her chips around whenever she had half a hand. She’d make a big preflop raise out of position, a pot-sized continuation bet on some raggedy-ass flop. Hey, aggression is good. You can win a lot of money playing aggressive. But it was clear that everyone at the table had her figured out. They’d all just wait for a hand. Any decent hand would do. Top pair was fine. Because she’d be pushing it in with middle pair, bottom pair, a gutshot. Whatever. Every once in a while she’d hit it, of course. Take down a big pot. Nobody would mind. That’s what keeps the dead money coming back. Like a golfer who only remembers the one drive he hit straight last Sunday. She’d tell the story a thousand times, how she was playing with Huck Seed at the Bellagio in ’97, pushed all in with Four, Three off suit, hit the boat on the river to crack Huck’s flush. Eight-thousand-dollar pot. Or ten. Thirteen. She told the story again every time someone new showed up at the table. The pot kept growing.
Seriously, she screamed after being outplayed in yet another hand, I’m going to commit suicide! I’m going home! Fuck this. I have some Percodan. That’s it. It’s over. I’m not putting up with this again. Fuck this. I’m going to kill myself.
Jim, like I said, was a nice guy. Real sweetheart. Kind of guy who feels your pain. And apparently he’d never played with Alice before. A few hands after the suicide rant, he takes her down for a nice pot. Alice goes into her routine again. I’m going to kill myself! I have some Percodan! She stacks her few remaining chips into a rack. Storms out.
Oh my God, Jim says softly.
Everyone laughs. A hand is dealt. The beehive lady bets out. I call. Jim looks absently down at his cards. Throws in some chips. The four seat folds. A Korean guy named Henry goes all in.
Jim is staring blankly at the TV monitor. A replay of some NBA slam dunk contest is on. Nate Robinson bounces a ball off the backboard, grabs it on the way up, does a three-sixty and slams it down. Everybody cheers. Jim just stares.
The dealer nudges Jim. Your action, he says. Henry’s all in.
Jim shakes his head slowly. Sorry, he says. That really disturbed me. I mean, do you really think she’s going to go home and kill herself?
Oh my God, Jim, says the dealer, she commits suicide four times a week. Call or fold?
I remembered why I was there. I looked at my watch. Shit. The bartender. I got up from the table. Bid everyone good luck. Cashed out my tiny winnings.
It was a funny thing. I felt like I’d made some friends. That never really happened in the big-time casinos. I mean, you’d meet people. You’d get to know their names. But you knew you were never going to put them on your dinner invitation list.
At Binion’s, I wasn’t so sure about that. I would have liked to invite the whole table out for steaks, to tell the truth.
Maybe I’d look into that twenty-nine-dollar-room thing.
31.
I FOUND OUT FROM OSCAR THE FLOOR GUY that although there did not exist a Terrible Casino, and there did of course exist a number of terrible casinos, arguably all of them, there was indeed a Terrible’s Hotel and Casino, a fact which astounded me perhaps more than all the astonishment contained within the cranium of one or even two eight-year-olds from Akron, Ohio, upon arrival at the famed New York, New York complex, which resembled New York City only in the miniaturized façades of certain Manhattan landmarks and in no other conceivable way but could nevertheless, I could only assume by its enduring popularity, excite in the average relatively undeveloped Midwestern brain a modicum of otherwise ludicrous excitement comparable to my reaction, as noted, to the existence of an entity in Las Vegas known as Terrible’s Hotel and Casino.
But enough of that. Fact was, if I were to have a conversation with Scarface, confirm that he was indeed The Guy, or maybe knew who The Guy was, further discover if he was the repository of any Clues, I would have to find this Terrible place, scope out the upstairs bar therein, and await my fate.
Not a problem. I’d endured worse. Even in the last forty-eight hours I’d endured worse. Far worse.
The cabbie, who smelled of Listerine and almond-scented massage oil—I wasn’t about to ask—knew what I meant right away. Took me there.
It was pretty terrible, all right. But when you think about it, the amazing thing about these places is that it’s not that they’re not trying. And it’s not that they don’t have enough money. The sixteen hideously mammoth chandeliers didn’t come free. The potted plants ubiquitous in faux brass sconces cost something. What was amazing was that somebody, somewhere, had decided, had been paid to decide, to purchase live plants that looked exactly like plastic plants.
The elevator lobby had all the charm of a moldering log. They’d designed it with drop-down curved ceiling pieces, intended, I guessed, to be reminiscent of the Guggenheim or some such. But the effect was more like that of meandering Oreo cookies.
The cost of carpeting all of that acreage must have been enormous. And sure, they didn’t have the budget of the Bellagio. But some person no doubt holding themselves out as something of an expert consciously chose this design, abstract sworls of dirty oranges and jaundice yellows, splotches of insect green on a dark background of indeterminate murk. Colors that were guaranteed to become filthier and more unattractive with every compulsive gambler’s staggering footprint. It was as though someone had dropped a vat of tricolor pasta on the floor circa 1993 and people had been tromping through it ever since.
And they were all like this, every low-rent, upward-striving hotel and motel and conference center in the whole of these United States of America was the same in all relevant respects. Sure, the details differed. Maybe the design professional they hired for the Quality Inn down the road selected a slightly darker shade of beige for the faux Danish lobby furniture. The Red Roof Inn had faux Bauhaus instead. In any case, they all managed to wear the faux like a neon sandwich board.
You say ugly is relative? Okay. You got me. Then the place was, relatively speaking, ugly as hell.
On the upside, once inside it took but four or five queries to discover what my new best friend Harold must have meant by the upstairs bar. I mean, it was a bar. No mistaking it. They served drinks. And access to it was via a staircase. Hence the upstairs bit.
Hah, I said to myself. Not many out there can out-detect old Rick Redman, say what you will about his untrimmed shock of startlingly white hair, his air of utter confusion in the face of anything more complex than a motel receptionist, his inability to resist the charms of anything more attractive than a floor mop.
Ninety or so minutes later, Harold appeared. By that time I was teetering on the edge of thoroughly toasted. I was relieved that Harold had gotten there while I still could speak.
Harold! I said too loudly, stumbling to my feet and offering a hand.
He took it reluctantly.
His hand was rough and greasy. I hadn’t been aware that a hand could be both.
Sit down, I said. What’re you drinking?
I’ll have a beer, he said.
I called over the waitress. She was very large, stuffed into a tiny black miniskirt and busti
er. A roll of fat tumbled over the waist of the skirt.
The Bellagio this wasn’t.
She was nice enough, though, kind enough to bring Harold his Corona, lime on the side, and my fifth double scotch.
Harold! I said again.
Harold grunted.
Listen, man, I said, I know you don’t want to rat on anybody or anything, but it’s nothing like that. I was hired by this lady in New York to find her sister. She lives out here. Or used to. Henderson. Big old house. But she doesn’t live there anymore. The lady who lives there now remembered her and her boyfriend, or husband, or whatever. She also remembered them talking about a guy looks like you, worked the bar at Binion’s. They said he was Hispanic, and I guess you’re not, but if your working name is Jose, I was thinking, they could think so. So I thought it might be you. You see? Nothing criminal or anything. Just trying to find this lady’s sister.
I am Hispanic, he said.
Oh. Sorry. I just can’t seem to get this right …
My mother was Irish.
Ah. Well.
What if she doesn’t want to get found?
Your mother?
This lady.
Well, I guess she can tell me that when I find her. Meanwhile, her sister’s very worried.
He snorted. Took a large hit off the Corona. Squoze some lime into his mouth. Belched.
So how’m I supposed to know if I even know these people? he asked.
I told him what I knew. The slim woman in the Chinese dresses. Japanese. Whatever.
Harold nodded. Sucked on his beer.
I told him what the house looked like.
Harold ordered another beer.
And the guy, I said. Tall, with an accent. Big guy, probably Russian. Name Vladimir. Probably.
I did it for show. I knew damn well he knew who I was talking about.
Harold didn’t say anything. Looked at me with hooded eyes.