Pocket Kings

by Ted Heller

  Abdul was back at the wheel, and an hour later we were at the address that Tracey Winters, History Babe’s real name, had given us. It was an eerily quiet middle-class neighborhood and she lived above a hardware store, and as I leaned against the lamppost on the corner I felt like a faceless figure in someone’s poor attempt at a Hopper painting. It was snowing lightly and it was only us on the street. While THC stretched his stubby legs in his brand-new wide-wale Barney-purple corduroy pants, for some reason I thought of Cynthia. I missed her and hoped that she was thinking of me, too. Then the front door opened and one of the mousiest-looking women I’ve ever seen came out, rolling a small green suitcase.

  “Are you Second Gunman?” she said to me. Her voice sounded mousy, too. She was five foot four, in her mid-twenties, had thin straight brown hair tied back in a tight ponytail; her complexion was grayish, her eyes were brown, she had tiny ears and no curves at all to her waify body, and her round eyeglasses were for a woman, or an owl, with a much larger head.

  “No, I’m Chip Zero,” I said.

  I looked down at her, she looked up at me. If they knew what she really looked like, I wondered, how many of the five hundred men she’d coaxed into orgasm would love to have those orgasms back?

  Cookie introduced himself and gallantly put her suitcase in the trunk and we all got in: Abdul was at the wheel, Second rode shotgun, Cookie was at one window in the back, I was at the other, and History Babe was sandwiched tightly in the middle. The windshield wipers went on and swept aside a furry wreath of snow, and onward we rolled.

  “Okay,” THC directed Abdul, “now go back up Interstate Twenty- ­five, then get on Seventy going west again.”

  “Nope,” Hist said. “That’s not the best way. Take Fifty west. It hooks up with Seventy in Grand Junction. Then we get on Fifteen. You’ll save lots of time. I’ve done it before.”

  I looked at THC, who sat stone-faced but for rapid eyeblinking. Finally a hmmph emerged from his epiglottis.

  We were in the home stretch. Only eight hundred miles to go, which included a hell of a lot of desert. But beyond the quiet limit of the world wasn’t absolute silence; there was neon, gold, platinum, silicone, beer, cashmere, lap dances, and prime rib.

  A woman’s presence in the Crown Vic changed the group dynamic and not for the worse.

  There was a sizable decrease in the amount of tomfoolery and cursing in the car, and on those occasions when Second did curse, he was quickly reprimanded by Toll House Cookie. “Hey,” THC would snap, “we got a lady present now!” There was a lot less talking in the car, period, and there was also less farting and belching and the air quality improved significantly.

  Cookie paid a lot more attention to the awesome scenery of the American West and was heard to utter the words “wow,” “unbelievable,” and “look at that!” as we passed the majestic Rockies and then the desiccated moonscape of the Great Basin Desert. These sentiments were echoed by all others present, including History Babe, who said “awesome” so many times that I requested she please employ another adjective. (She ultimately settled on merely “nice.”)

  Another change: Abdul Salaam drove considerably faster than he’d been previously driving. Perhaps he was discomfited by the presence of a woman. Conversely, when History Babe took the wheel, in Green River, Utah, our speed got up to 95 mph, the fastest we’d yet traveled. She changed lanes as if she was playing an Activision NASCAR: Suicide video game, and Second dug his fingernails into the flesh on Cookie’s wrists for support.

  Also, the men had chivalrously decided that we wouldn’t inflict our lousy eating habits upon Tracey/History Babe and that our next meal would be a good one, a healthy one, consisting of fresh ingredients and local produce, something that took more than two minutes to prepare. But somewhere along the road History Babe said to us, “We could just go to a Taco Bell . . . I really like their stuff.”

  But we weren’t perfect and I heard History Babe say to Second while we drove through Cisco, Utah: “Can you take your hand off my knee please?”

  In Utah, I-70 came to an abrupt end . . . it was like shooting a cannonball into a wall and the ball just sticking there. Seventy connected with I-15 and we took that, Abdul at the helm, down into Nevada. As we passed Cedar City, only an hour and change from the Nevada state line, a critical issue that not one of us had yet publicly discussed was finally brought up. It was something that had crossed my mind many times already but one that I dared not mention, perhaps because by not discussing it aloud I was able to detach myself from the outlandish lark I was presently embarked upon, this being that I had hopped into a taxi at 3 a.m. in New York City with someone I barely knew and that we’d picked up two other people I knew even less and were heading 2,500 miles west to win back money that hadn’t really been mine to begin with.

  “So where we staying?” THC asked.

  “Yes,” History said. “Where?”

  “I could stay in the car,” Second said. “I’ll stay anywhere. I don’t care.”

  “It’s not our car, Johnny,” I reminded him.

  History Babe said: “I know some okay places way off the Strip. This time of year they’d be around eighty dollars a night or less. They’re kinda boring though.”

  “We’re gonna get one room or four?” Cookie asked.

  We looked at each other. Nobody, I surmised, wanted to spend too much time with anyone. Had History been a Babe, that might have greatly changed things—there might have been a scramble to be her roomie. Second and THC were never going to get along; I would have been surprised if they ever played online together again. THC and I had nothing in common, other than he worked within two miles of where I lived, and he wouldn’t recognize a witticism if it tied him to a chair and waterboarded him for three hours straight. Also, could I ever really be that close to anyone who’d been fourteen and seen Pam Grier naked and then not rubbed one out? To him I was probably just a rich, spoiled, white-boy loser who’d won a lot of dough but who didn’t really need it. To me, Second Gunman was interesting, he was a character, he was an eccentric . . . but he was the kind who could embarrass me and make me cringe at a moment’s notice. He had done this several times on the road already in fast food joints and at gas stations. (“Hey,” he’d said to the two Hannah Montana wannabes at the Arby’s, “this guy”—me—“wrote a best-selling novel . . . he could get you big parts in the movie.”) He was getting tired of me, too, I could tell; I had surpassed the world’s record of getting called a gobshite the most times within a two-day period. Yes, we all needed a little distance from each other. With our online poker winnings, each of us could afford our own room and spend some time apart.

  “Why don’t I,” Second said, breaking an uneasy minute-long silence, “call one of the hotels on the Strip and try to get a fancy large high-roller suite for all four of us?”

  Abdul Salaam had never seen Las Vegas before and he let out a deep and extended gasp when in the distance the mysterious contours of the Luxor, the skyline of New York, New York, and the probing needle of the Stratosphere shimmered into view. He whispered a few words of Arabic to himself—whether they were words of praise or damnation, I shall never know.

  He dropped us off on a sidestreet near the Flamingo, in the middle of the Strip. The last three hours of driving were like passing through a diorama of a Cormac McCarthy novel, a merciless barrage of russet endlessness. I had certainly felt such desolation in my soul before but had never gazed upon it, and nobody inside the car said a word.

  We got out of the taxi. It was in the seventies but the air there, as usual, was dry, and already I was thirsty. Cookie unsnapped his Port Authority jacket, Hist unbuttoned her coat.

  It was time to settle. The meter read $5,423 dollars.

  “Okay, how are we doing this again?” I said.

  “I forgot our agreement when you got in, my friend,” Abdul admitted.

  Our driver thought about it while the fading sun beat down on his long, black beard . . . it was late afternoon an
d the mountains in the west were writhing under the coming sunset.

  Everyone agreed that $5,500 would be good enough.

  Second reached into his jacket and pulled out some money and I went into my wallet. I’d left my apartment with two thousand dollars, but along the way I’d been stopping at ATMs and withdrawing cash—Cookie had been doing the same thing. We were loaded. History had left her house with three grand, but since she only had been aboard since Colorado, we only hit her up for $400. It took five minutes for us to work everything out, including a nifty four-hundred-dollar tip for the most patient, well-mannered taxi driver in New York City history. Everyone seemed pleased, but then a few seconds later, Abdul said: “There is an additional charge, my friend, because I picked you up after eight o’clock at night. A dollar fifty. Plus sixteen dollars for the two tolls.”

  Cookie rolled his eyes and handed Abdul a twenty and Abdul got back into the Crown Victoria and began his lonely journey home.

  My laptop and knapsack on the ground between my feet, History and Cookie right next to me, and Second off looking for a hotel for us, I gazed into the Fountains of the Bellagio as Celine Dion sang the Titanic theme song, and reflected: When Man attempts to emulate Nature, Nature usually finishes a distant second. The skies of Michelangelo and Casper David Friedrich are more spectacular than any real sky I’ve ever looked up at; a suburban swimming pool contains far fewer sharks, jellyfish, seaweed, and tsunamis than the ocean and is a much better environment for swimming; no gust of wind I’ve ever felt outdoors is quite as soothing as the effect of an air conditioner cranked up to high cool; and let’s face it, Las Vegas’s Venice is cleaner, smells better, and has much better food than the original one in Italy. Try synchronizing geysers and springs to Celine Dion and you tell me which is more spellbinding, them or the Fountains of the Bellagio. No, it is not Man that cannot emulate Nature, but Nature that cannot . . .

  “Okay, I got us the high-roller suite at Jimmy’s Hotel and Casino,” Second said, interrupting my contemplation. In his hand were a dozen business cards he’d been handed on the Strip: they were all for leggy, busty girls-for-hire . . . strippers, dancers, whores, whatever.

  “Where the hell is that?” I asked him.

  The hotel was off the Strip, he told us, and wasn’t even a half mile away—by which he meant, I could tell, it was four miles away—but it seemed safe and nice.

  “I’ve never heard of this place,” History said. “Jimmy’s . . . ?”

  “A high-roller suite?” Cookie said. “Us?”

  Johnny looked at us like we were all hopeless sticks-in-the-mud. Behind me, the Fountains and Celine were reaching their grand climax together, bursting into the air as high as they could, pounding like heavy artillery. Her heart, she knew, would go on.

  “Smile!” Second Gunman said. “We’re whales now! Smile for Chroist sake!”

  Our hotel turned out to be one of those places that you only see when your less-than-honest Las Vegas taxi driver isn’t taking you the fastest way from one place to the other. A large blue banner with red lettering draped haphazardly over the hotel’s flat façade screamed JIMMY’S HOTEL & CASINO but suggested to all those passing by—there weren’t many of them—that the place hadn’t always been Jimmy’s or a hotel and had once been some other sort of enterprise. It was a cube, an ivory cube with four stories and a hundred rooms. Size-wise, it looked like it would have made a good clinic for alcoholics and drug addicts to dry out in. It also turned out there was no casino. Either the sign maker or Jimmy himself had lied.

  Our high-roller suite was on the top floor.

  The door opened onto a sunken living room with a Jacuzzi right in the middle of it, three flat-screen televisions, cheesy shag carpeting, all the usual stuff. But our cough-syrup-scented rooms weren’t large and this only confirmed my suspicion that at one time this place had been a medical facility and had been gutted and renovated, or a lunatic asylum that had gone out of business because most people in Las Vegas were lunatics and it just wasn’t needed.

  Two bedrooms adjoined the living room, each one had two double beds. The windows in both rooms looked onto the backside of another unlit concrete cube, most likely a Best Buy or Office Depot that the developers had given up on halfway through.

  While I was putting away my few personal effects, Second called the front desk and, as dollar bills spilled out of his suede jacket, began complaining: “The safe doesn’t work. . . . Yes, I followed the instructions. . . . Yes, I know. . . . I work at a feckin’ four-star hotel in England, you think I don’t know how to use a hotel safe? I’ve slept in more hotel safes than you’ve seen! . . . Well, do it soon. . . . And another thing . . . It says the sheets have a six hundred thread count. . . . Now since I work in a hotel, there’s one feckin’ thing I know and that’s thread counts and these sheets aren’t six hundred any more than my feckin’ IQ is six hundred. . . . I counted the threads three bloody times and even double-bloody-checked it twice. . . . Okay . . . Okay . . . Cheers.”

  Within five frenzied minutes we had a new safe and new sheets. Second gave the manager and the maid $40 each and it was then decided via flips of a coin that I would be rooming with Second and that Cookie would be rooming with History Babe, an arrangement, as it happened, that seemed the least offensive to everyone.

  “If I don’t get me a bit of squaff soon,” Second Gunman, shuffling his little deck of naked hottie cards, whispered to me, “I’m gonna die.”

  We took showers and got ready to go out and play.

  “We need to get new gear,” Second said to me in the living room. “We’ll go shopping on the high street tomorrow.” He was watching all three TVs at once, not staying on any channel for more than three seconds. (It was, in its own way, a remarkable display of digital dexterity and mental Attention Deficit Disorder.) “The high what?” Cookie said. History came out of her room, her hair still wet and with some makeup on. I could tell that Second was disappointed by her looks—he wanted her to look like Carmen Electra or Pam Anderson or some more current sexbomb. I didn’t care what she looked like, but I did hope that Second wouldn’t hurt her in any way. She seemed like a good egg.

  Cookie asked if we were ready to go out and I said: “Should we have a drink first?” As we were high rollers there was a fully stocked bar, but as we were high rollers at an $89.99-a-night joint far off the Strip, fully stocked meant: a pint of Smirnoff vodka, a pint of Dewar’s (half of which was gone), some tonic and seltzer, and a six-pack of Fig Newtons (the wrapping of which may have been bitten through by a mouse). Being a high roller here was like being the United Nations ambassador of a country that only the people of that country had ever heard of.

  “Where do we go?” Second said. “Should we start out a strip club and then start playing or do it the other way around?”

  Cookie, ever the gentleman, looked at History and said, “I’ll skip the strip club . . . I’d rather play. I got me enough naked girls at home.”

  Second scratched his chin and said: “Yeah, I guess playin’s why we’re all here.”

  We left our rooms, our plan of assault being to take a taxi to the southernmost end of the Strip and work our way up.

  When the elevator doors opened out came a tall, broadshouldered, silver-haired man in his late sixties dressed all in white, except for a black bolo tie, surrounded, as though they were his bodyguards, by five smiling, tanned beauties all about five foot eight. The women were dressed in flashy minidresses or miniskirts and tight, revealing tops. These chicks were state of the art and were giggling when the elevator doors opened. (A note on the exact nature of the giggling: it sounded more like girly pajama-party laughter than adult cocktail-party laughter.)

  “You’re in the other suite, I guess,” he said with a very white, very expensive smile.

  We nodded. The women stopped giggling but were smiling. Their teeth were big and white, too, and I don’t think there was anything smaller than a D-cup in sight.

  “Rusty Wells,” he said,
introducing himself and lifting his Stetson. “Houston, Texas.”

  We all shook his hand but when Tracey held out hers, Rusty kissed it.

  He introduced us to his five lovely escorts but was unable to remember who was who. There was a Jasmine among them, as well as a Shiloh and an Aurora. They’d just had dinner and you sensed from their collective burnished sheen that they’d eaten and drunk quite well.

  Rusty told us he’d been coming to Vegas since the good ol’ days when everything was mobbed up, when the casinos took a skim, and when, if you were caught cheating, they took you out to the desert, tied you to a tree stump and let the sun fry your body and the jackals eat you alive. “Yep, things were better back then,” he said while Aurora (or Shiloh) straightened out his bolo tie. His five escorts could have stepped out of the pages of Harper’s Bazaar, had the pages been dated 1969. They were in their twenties or early thirties but came from the era of vinyl boots, pot parties, Polaroid Swingers, blue Corvairs, and much too much makeup.

  When Rusty asked us what we did for a living, I told him I was once a writer.

  “What books you write?” he asked. “I read a bit now and then.”

  “Rusty,” I said, knowing he never would have heard of me and wishing to spare him the discomfort, “to be honest, I’ve forgotten the names of ’em and what they were about.”

  “Tell them what you do for a living,” one of the women—she wore a gold sequin mini-dress and her eyelashes were as a big and fluttery as butterflies—said to Rusty.

  Rusty told us that ever since he was knee-high to a grasshopper he liked to tinker. During the Vietnam War he was in the Army Engineer Corps but “they didn’t take a shinin’ to my ideas and I got drummed out honorably,” he said. He eventually landed a job in the oil industry in Houston, received three patents for machines that dredged and drilled, but couldn’t stand it. “I didn’t fit in with that refined, upper crust, golf-clubs-stuck-up-their-asses country-club set and didn’t want to.” Five years ago, he was struck with “the most brilliantest, simplest idea that ever struck a man since the light bulb” and now he proudly plucked the issue of this earth-shattering idea out of his jacket pocket. It looked like a cook’s thermometer, something you’d use to see if a pot roast was done, but the bottom end was more complicated and the readout was digital.