Pocket Kings

by Ted Heller

  Johnny pulled her aside, over to the window, and when their conversation become heated I went over and joined them.

  “I can’t do this!” Laurel said. “Stop it!”

  Second said, “Yes you can!”

  “I can’t and I won’t.” She turned to me and said, “Your friend here wants me to arrange hookers for him! And for you and the other guy.”

  “What,” I said to Johnny, “Tracey doesn’t get one too?”

  “I hadn’t gotten around to her yet!” he said. He turned to Laurel and asked: “What about that old Texas geezer in the next room? You didn’t arrange his harem for him?!”

  “Look,” Laurel said, “do you want tickets to a Cirque show tonight or what?”

  Second: “Fook the feckin’ Cirque du bloody feckin’ Soleil!”

  After Laurel left, Second said to me: “You would’ve liked it, I promise.”

  He told me he was going to get one woman for Cookie, two for me, and three for him. History could join in if she wanted. When I told him that those numbers seemed skewed towards him, he told me he was counting on Cookie not taking part, so I would have gotten his girl and then it would have been even. “See, I’ve always got your back, Chip,” he said, “don’t I?”

  I took the elevator downstairs, found Laurel about to drive away in her red Jag convertible, made nice with her, and took the Cirque du Soleil tickets. Later THC, Hist, Second, and I went to Burger King for dinner. Second, after complaining to the manager that our meal in no way involved all four flavor profiles, sold the Cirque tickets for $200 to a family from Arkansas in the next booth.

  After we got back from dinner and combined our uncannily invincible powers to send Toll House Cookie’s winnings over $150,000, Second retired to the loo.

  Six minutes later he emerged with a very puzzled look.

  “How do we know,” he asked, “if the thing is real?”

  “What thing?” History said.

  “Rusty’s shite thermometer! The Dumpostat or whatever the hell it is. How do you know it’s really tellin’ you what’s what? I just took a reading and it said three pound, four ounces. For all I know it just goes to any bloody number. It could be off two ounces, it could be off a whole feckin’ pound or two. It’s not like when the thermometer says its fifteen feckin’ degrees outside and every other thermometer says it’s fifteen feckin’ degrees outside and then you go outside and it’s exactly fifteen feckin’ degrees out.”

  “Do you really care that much?” I asked, seeing that he was all worked up.

  “You could weigh yourself first and then afterwards,” History recommended.

  “Yeah, I could,” Johnny said. “Or I could get a very accurate scale and just pinch a loaf onto that.”

  He rubbed his chin. Presently he was wearing, for no reason at all (we’d just been to a Burger King, after all), a gray three-piece Armani suit and a pair of turquoise $700 rayskin shoes. Very sharp, very striking. But the look was spoiled because he still had on the mauve I MONSTER TRUCKS! hoodie.

  “I think I’ll have me a chat with that Texas millionaire gob­shite . . .” he said.

  That night I took a taxi by myself to the Strip and hit five or six casinos, but as soon as I got out of the cab I regretted leaving the room. My place was in the Poker Galaxy. Everything in Las Vegas was fake—fake New York, fake Paris, fake tits and fake skies and mirth-by-numbers—but in the Galaxy, even though nobody was really there, it was a lot more real.

  I needed friendship. I needed true camaraderie.

  Looking over the Venetian’s indoor, air-conditioned, and odor-free Grand Canal, I called Lonnie Beale in New York. His wife Vanessa answered and soon reminded me that she and Lonnie were separated and would be divorced in a matter of months. I apologized for bothering her and she told me to call his cell phone. Then she—perhaps spitefully—asked me, “So, Frank . . . any new books coming out soon?” and I said good-bye right away.

  I wanted to tell Lonnie to take a few days off and hop a plane and join me out here. I’d even pay for it. He’d wanted to raise hell with me a few weeks ago . . . well, now I was up for it.

  I called him and left a message on his cell.

  I walked into the smoky cardboard box that is Harrah’s and took in the sights: an eighty-year-old-man with a USS Yorktown cap in a wheelchair glued to a Buffet Mania slot machine. A zonked-out rhino of a woman with canary yellow hair smoking two cigarettes at once and playing roulette. Morose, hunched-over players at blackjack tables, getting their cards and grumbling, then losing to the dealer. More chips, more cards. Another cigarette, another vodka, another losing hand.

  Out on the Strip, the sky was blue velvet, the insane neon was flashing, and the mountains in the distance, beyond the spike of the Stratosphere, were as dark and still as spilled syrup.

  I called Harry Carver and left him a message: Hop a plane right away or drive from L.A. . . . I have my laptop, I have the time . . . we’ll write your screenplay . . . our screenplay. We’ll stay two weeks here, I said, and we’ll get it done. We’ll live like kings, man.

  I tried to get into three very good restaurants but they were booked, and wound up having a Big Mac and large fries at a McDonald’s. My cell phone was out on the table as I ate . . . maybe Lonnie would call and say he was on his way, maybe Harry would call and say he was on his way. Maybe it would wind up being the three of us. And then, what larks!

  But they didn’t call.

  I got back to Jimmy’s at one that night and the place was empty and dark.

  There was a note on my pillow, hastily scribbled down on three pages of a Jimmy’s Hotel & Casino notepad.

  I’m getting a taxi and going to the airport and I’m going home. I went [out] for a while[,] when I got back 3 hours later I walk into my room and what do I see [but] 2nd Gunman and Tracey naked on my bed and she was on [top of] him. And they wasn’t alone[;] there was 2 other women with them naked too. It looked like fun but I don’t want any part of that so I’m leaving now and if you want you could keep the new clothes I bought but I don’t think they’ll fit you.

  If you ever meet my wife Chip you have to get my back ok? We was in Atlanta you & me at my cousin Cleon’s funeral in case she ever asks, ok?

  Cookie

  The final night, I slept alone . . . I had the whole suite to myself. Where Johnny and Tracey were, I wasn’t able to find out. I still haven’t. History Babe, over the course of the ensuing weeks, has hinted they went to an Off-Strip “couples club.” I’m glad they didn’t invite me because I would have had to decline. Although it would have been nice if they’d invited me.

  In the morning I drank coffee, ate a complimentary doughnut, and watched ESPN SportsCenter on all three screens; when the show was done, they played it again. And then again. While cornerbacks cracked other people’s spines and broke their own knees, I again vowed that I would make vows. When I get back to New York I will finally take action! The reason people were pushing me around . . . was because I was letting them. I would call Clint Reno and confront him, I would confront Ross F. Carpenter. . . . I would get up in the grille of any person who had ever stood in my way. I had to stand up for myself!

  I hit the street and found an old barber shop in the middle of the desolate nowheresville the hotel was situated in. There was one barber and two chairs. I wanted to do something radical with my look, something that would give me spirit and fierceness. I had to be fierce! There was going to be a new me and I needed to look the part. I told him to dye my hair “very blond, almost white” and, after making sure I really wanted this and shaking his head, he sluggishly got out a bottle of peroxide. He moved reluctantly, as though I was asking him to give me a vasectomy, but while he worked I looked in the mirror and began thinking things such as Hey, Scott Heyward . . . it’s payback time. This time it’s war. You want a piece of me, Clint Reno? Bring it! Not In My House. This time . . . it’s for real. You, Beverly Martin . . . are . . . going DOWN. Cody Marshall, I OWN you. I repeated those phrases to
myself and then I realized I was just regurgitating what I’d heard over and over on ESPN for three hours.

  When I was done, my hair was platinum blond. He combed the fringe of my front hair forward and layered it into a Caesar cut. With the new do and my new round shades and new thirty pounds, I did look sort of fierce, for a change. And it felt good.

  On our last day the weather was grim. I had never seen Vegas this time of year and it didn’t seem like the same place. One day they will put the whole city inside a bubble and keep the climate always between 90 and 105 degrees with 0 percent humidity, allowing only the cigarette smoke and the light of the Luxor’s mighty beacon to escape.

  Second Gunman and History Babe (both of whom told me they liked my new look) and I took one last walk up and down the Strip. I was barely aware of what day of the week it was . . . but I knew that Second’s plane home to England was the following day, that History had to teach history tomorrow, and that Cynthia was coming home soon, too. If everything went well, Wifey wouldn’t ever know I had skipped town.

  Johnny and Tracey hadn’t slept at all and he had cut off the long sleeves of the hoodie, which was damp with what I hoped was merely his sweat, and History Babe had dark bags under her eyes. We took a taxi downtown and went into Binion’s Horseshoe, which wasn’t even Binion’s anymore, and the Golden Nugget. We gorged on prime rib, Alaskan King Crab, and brownie sundaes and drank a bottle of Dom Perignon. It was our first meal in God knows how many days that didn’t taste like it was cooked under a hairdryer on a conveyor belt.

  “Where do you think Abdul Salaam is by now?” Johnny asked me, pulling some crab out of his two front teeth. “I wonder if he made it back to New York in one shot.”

  “No idea,” I said. “He may still be driving.”

  “He’s probably eatin’ pork somewhere in Kansas City when no one’s lookin’.”

  Back in the room we packed up. None of us had arrived with much luggage so we didn’t know what to do with our purchases. Second stuffed his new Armani, Prada, and D&G wardrobe into a large white plastic garbage bag. I left the maid my white blue jeans, BMX biking socks, and a two-hundred-dollar tip.

  Cautiously, Laurel Dodge dropped by, asked us if we’d had a great time. I told her we had and thanked her. I could tell she wanted me to hand her scads of money and I would have given her half that amount had she not been so obvious about it.

  “So how was Cirque du Soleil?” she asked.

  “Oh, it was just so spectacular!” I told her.

  When she left I heard History and Second whispering in her room. She was sniffling. I could guess what had happened: he had plucked her from the wintry ennui of her everyday life, pulled her away from her prayer-addicted sister, shown her a scintillating time, entertained her with the force of his huge personality . . . and she didn’t want to let him, or the experience, go.

  You’ll see me again, Trace, he said, I promise you you will. Soon.

  I had called and gotten two airline tickets for myself and Second back to New York; History was flying back to Colorado Springs. Her flight left an hour before ours.

  As we were closing the door to our high-roller suite for the last time, the door to the other suite flew open, and one of the Go-Go Girl escorts, in shocking pink hot pants and a black fishnet halter top, ran out and headed down the hallway toward the vending machine. There was none of the usual silly giggling from inside the suite. Another of the escorts, possibly Shiloh, stepped out and stood hand on hip . . . she still had on the sequin-spangled mini and was telling the other to “Hurry! . . . hurry!” She looked fed up and tired. The hot-pants escort came jiggling back with a bucket of ice and went into the suite. Shiloh looked at me and said, “This isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, let me tell you.”

  I looked in and saw Rusty Wells on the floor, not a stitch on save for his white Stetson, on his hands and knees. Two other woman were standing over him while he retched onto the shag carpeting, and the Jacuzzi in the room was hissing and the steam was rising. The ice-carrying escort handed a few cubes to another one, but nobody knew what to do. Rusty’s back and arms were as pink as coral and he was vomiting and laughing and there was a handcuff around one wrist and he said, between heaves: “Awww man, it just don’t get any better ’n this!”

  Twenty minutes later we were at the airport.

  Security there did a double-take: the dull, moppy gray hair on my driver’s license photo no longer matched the hot yellow hair on my head. But then they figured it out.

  I didn’t want to be there when Johnny said good-bye to Tracey, so I went into the small airport bookstore and looked for myself in the fiction section and, of course, didn’t find any sign I’d ever written a book or even been born. However, three neat stacks of Saucier: A Bitch in the Kitchen books were prominently displayed on their best-selling-fiction table. Each copy, I saw, had an Oprah sticker, and a serrated knife sliced through every organ from my neck to my colon.

  (My blurb had almost gotten into the book. Was this as close as I’d get to ever being published again?)

  There was tap on my shoulder and it was Second.

  It was time to board and we got on line. We didn’t mention History Babe.

  “Hey,” Johnny said to me as me moved forward. “Did you win or lose?”

  “Where? . . . Here?”

  His puffy, bloodshot eyes needed a long rest: the flight to New York and then to England might not be enough.

  “Yeah. Did you finish up or down?”

  I told him that I hadn’t bet the entire time. Not on the terrestrial flesh-and-blood plane, only in cyberspace. Not one hand of poker or blackjack, not one roll of the dice.

  “I didn’t bet either,” he said with a little laugh. Then he said something out of place, for him (or for anyone): “Didn’t Albert Einstein say that God doesn’t play dice? Well, neither did I.” Who knew that the night clerk of the second-best hotel in Blackpool could quote Einstein?

  We had traveled over 2,500 miles and driven over lolling, shade-drenched hills and down through emerald and teal sunswept valleys; we’d gone past a thousand Main Streets and around spankin’ brand-new exurbs that looked as if they were constructed out of Legos, and past redbrick high schools and A-frame Lutheran churches with purple and cherry-red stained-glass windows; we’d seen spewing smokestacks and abandoned factories and mile-high silos and cricket-infested fields with phantom Christinas dragging themselves along the tall grass; we’d driven past sunlit malls that bustled like ant farms, past moonlit ballfields and lonely eternities of cornfields; we’d gone over mountains and through great charred wastes all the way to the desert; and neither Toll House Cookie nor History Babe nor Second Gunman nor Chip Zero had risked one single red American cent.

  But I had won—on the laptop, in the flickering etherworld—more than $29,000 in three days.

  12

  WWHMD?

  Wifey never did find out that I hadn’t been in New York pining away for her return from the Appalachians. There was no telltale tan, sunburn, extended hangover, or conglomeration of hickies, and the apartment looked just as bad as if I’d been there the whole time. It was perfect. What wasn’t perfect was her first impression of my new platinum-blond hair and tricked-out James Joyce shades. (When she first got a glimpse of it, her response was simply: “Okay . . . so, why?”) I kept the look and she said, unconvincingly, she would try to adjust.

  One night I went to my desk and pulled out Dead on Arrival from a drawer and looked at it with fresh eyes. It had been a while. I read the part where the wife kills herself and her children. Twenty pages later my main character was having sex with his kids’ babysitter, fifteen pages after that he was doing his late wife’s sister. Nick Hornby, I knew, couldn’t write stuff like this if he wanted to. And he wouldn’t want to. John Updike, John Cheever, and Richard Yates had never come close to this type of ugliness. This was the churning, toxic cesspool behind Revolutionary Road that everybody preferred to agree wasn’t really there.

&n
bsp; “So,” I asked Cynthia later that night, “did you finish it?”

  “Not yet,” she answered. “It’s so dark.”

  I looked at her blankly and she said, “I don’t know what else you want me to say.”

  She would, I could tell, never finish it. She and thousands of others would never make it to the last page. It was a crying shame.

  I didn’t know much about the books Deke Rivers and Last Resort Press put out, but they had to be worse than Dead on Arrival. I wasn’t going to shell out one cent to have my breakthrough novel published and it would have been nice to have gotten paid for all my hard work, but by now any publisher in the world could have had it for free. Didn’t they know that?

  (But maybe I didn’t want them to know that.)

  After I reread the first half of Dead on Arrival and reflected on how I’d ascended halfway up Literary Mountain only to plummet all the way back down, after I considered that the path back up was now blocked to me, I would venture to say that of the eleven pints of blood in my body, ten and a half consisted of furiously boiling rage. The other eight ounces were merely anger.

  Clint Reno had let me down. I had to let him go. Even though he had let me go first.

  I wanted to tear every hair out of his head, especially the slick ones in his perfect ponytail, and then pummel him in front of his coworkers who, in this juvenile homicidal fantasy, would cheer me on and claim to the cops that they’d seen nothing, heard nothing. “Great job, Frank!” one of them would say. “We were hoping someone would do that to him one day.”

  (“You really have to stop carrying around these horrible grudges,” Wifey has told me numerous times. “It’s unhealthy.” “You don’t understand,” I’ve explained to her, “I am my grudges.” And it was true: if I didn’t have them, then I didn’t have me.)

  Clint hadn’t e-mailed me when I had pneumonia, he hadn’t e-mailed me when I was in a hospital with an eye patch over my eye and another patient’s excrement all over my pajamas (yeah, I know: that never really happened, but he didn’t know that!). I thought of sending him e-mails telling him I had brain cancer . . . I wanted to see at precisely which ailment he would be moved to write me back. A stroke? Pleurisy? Food poisoning? Maybe no disease was drastic enough. Maybe he would only contact me after I was dead.