Research and development (labor) 80%
Capital investment 19%
Seminal development 1%
“Before plunging into the details of the revised charter for Eudaemonia,” the letter continues, “some of you may be interested in seeing the current tally of time and money that have been invested in roulette madness.” There is a blank space on the page where Doyne meant to make this tally. Among all his other projects, he never got around to it. But if he had, the highlights of the Eudaemonic balance sheet would have read as follows: total capital investment of $15,000, the bulk of it coming from Doyne and Letty, with another few thousand dollars from Norman, Tom Ingerson, Dan Browne, and others. Of this money, $8500 was an advance on Mark’s salary for a year and a half of overtime work. The remainder was spent on computer chips and other components. A separate fund for betting capital included as bankers for the Project Rob Shaw, Tom Ingerson, Letty, and Doyne’s parents. But the truly astounding item on the balance sheet would have been the tally under “Goodwill.” Heading the list of those donating labor and ideas during six years of roulette madness were Doyne, with thirty-five hundred hours of credit in the Eudaemonic Pie, Mark, with three thousand, and Norman, with two thousand.
Late that night I find Mark down in the Shop. His face is lit by the green glow of sine waves rolling over the oscilloscope. In front of him multicolored strands of bus wire stretch from the KIM computer to one of the sandwiches. “I’m testing the system,” he says. “The KIM is running the sandwich through a cycle program. It works like a human being in pacing the computer through its predictions, except that the KIM makes no mistakes and never gets bored; it can produce the same result a thousand times in a row.
“I want to be sure the computer doesn’t miss a step. I’m going to sit here awhile,” he says. “Maybe all night.”
In preparation for the yearly reunion of Pie holders, Eudaemons, physics wizards, and friends, work on transforming the house for its yearly fête begins early Halloween day. Out of the kitchen comes the smell of fruit pies and brownies. Doyne carries in a tank of nitrogen and demonstrates how, at -265°, the liquid can be made to skitter across the floor and bubble up into a cloud of steam. “You can also blow it out your mouth,” he says, practicing what looks like fire-eating in reverse. “This should amuse all the physics wizards.” Ingrid busies herself converting Norman’s fish tanks into punch bowls filled with dry ice. Letty works on remaking the bedrooms into tactile and meditation chambers. Norman and Rob Shaw, who have borrowed a professional sound system with five-foot-high speakers, wire the living room into a quadraphonic disco with aluminum foil walls and a homemade light show of lasers and strobe lights. After scattering TV screens throughout the house, Jim Crutchfield turns the old Project Room into a production studio complete with makeup table, mirror, TV monitor, and video camera. One theme for this year’s Halloween party is feedback. The camera and screens are being set up so that people throughout the house will be able to watch themselves watching themselves.
In spite of the effort, the tone this year is subdued. There is a sense of impending breakup, with the house about to be sold and the residents scattered like seeds from a pod. Doyne to Los Alamos. Norman to Paris. Ingrid to San Rafael for a job with Lucas Films. And Letty to either New Mexico with Doyne or San Francisco to strike out on her own. Acknowledging the mood, the official title of this year’s reunion is “The Last Halloween Party.”
The house fills early with costumed dancers. The TV screens wired to the camera in the front room play a nonstop show. A woman seated in front of the makeup mirror glues a mustache to her upper lip. A Phyllis Schlafly look-alike demonstrates how to cross and uncross her legs. A girl does jumping jacks. A monster eats a Boy Scout. Swirling across the screen and into the house are a procession of clowns and fairy princesses, a mirror with eye holes scratched in the glass, a Rubik’s cube, woodland deities, Arab sheiks, and survivalists of various persuasions. I pick out Rob Lentz in a terry cloth burnoose. Jim Crutchfield floats by wearing purple tights and sunglasses. So convincing is the green putty bulging off her forehead like a hemorrhaging cerebrum that I barely recognize Lorna as Frankenstein. Lacquered in green tights and gold paint, Wendy dances with an ape wearing hairy safety goggles. It’s Mark. Letty, in a black wig, sarong, and sandals, is dressed as a Balinese tourist. Norman appears in white shoes, black pants, a black shirt, a white tie, and a towering headdress of black and white crepe. “I’m basic integration,” he announces. “As in mathematics?” I ask. “No,” he answers. “As in black and white. It’s the way of the future.”
At midnight the house empties and everyone troops down the street to the parking lot of the New Riverside Szechuan restaurant. Here Rob Shaw, wearing a platinum wig and long johns, puts on a show of homemade pyrotechnics. The crowd exclaims over the rockets and Roman candles bursting overhead: “Score one for Nicaragua. A little farther to the east, Rob. Maybe we can take out Washington.”
Back inside the house, the music throbs as dancers whirl under laser beams and mirror balls. Two fairy princesses dance cheek to cheek. A Jesuit priest with fangs makes out with a bearded nun. The third sex is much in evidence, but there seems to be a cultural split this year between decadence and punk—the sex-change—transvestite look and your basic-black nihilism. Ingrid, wearing motorcycle boots, a cut-off T-shirt, and a Vaseline duck’s ass hairdo has come as a Hell’s Angel. The front of her shirt says “Mustache Rides,” and the back reads:
Born on a mountain
Raised in a cave
Biking and sex
Is all I crave
Doyne, inclining toward the decadent end of the spectrum, is dressed in stockings and heels. He wears red lipstick, bangles, gold earrings, a corset, and a brassiere with a wad of play money stuffed into his bosom. Swimming over his head is a blond wig, which gives him the ratted, floosy look of a Las Vegas call girl long since gone to seed.
The house shakes to the sound of Xene singing “Johnny Hit and Run Pauline.” Liquid nitrogen steams up off the floors. The TV monitors begin to whirl and pulse with strange patterns. I discover Ralph Abraham with the video camera in his hand, and he’s pointing it straight at one of the TV screens. “It’s a feedback loop,” he tells me, motioning toward the balls of light pulsating on the screen. “The camera shoots an image of itself shooting an image of itself in endless regression. Because of a split-second delay in its focusing, the image is unstable. So you get continuous feedback. It’s a kind of sensory overload.” The pulsating balls and crescents of light perform a kaleidoscopic dance of electrons. The screen glows luminous with patterns that never repeat themselves. “The system is so overloaded that it can’t resolve itself into a stable pattern,” says Ralph. “It’s a perfect example of strange attraction.”
Late the next morning, nursing our hangovers over crab salad served on the sun deck at Aldo’s, we blink out at the blue waves and yachts bobbing in the harbor. Mark picks at his food and avoids looking at the sun. Ingrid excuses herself and walks off the porch to lie in a bed of ice plant. “I think the party was a throwback to the old days,” says Norman. “It was decadent rather than punk, and decadence is out of fashion.”
“I had the sense of an era coming to an end,” Doyne says, “the feeling that this may really be the last party. Anyway,” he adds, turning toward me, “it was a good sendoff. Let’s pack our bags and get out of town.”
16
Cleopatra’s Barge
Desperate, but not serious
Adam and the Ants
That afternoon Doyne and I load two pairs of magic shoes and socks into the Fiat and head for Las Vegas. We also take with us twenty-five hundred dollars in cash and a nice selection of stay-pressed pants and Hawaiian floral-print shirts. Driving south on Route 101 through the vineyards and grazing country above Monterey Bay Doyne turns to me. “Do you know why we called the computer sandwich a sandwich?”
“No.”
“Mark figured that if we ever got in a
really tight spot we could eat it. One of the features we thought of including in the shoe was built-in ketchup packets. But we expected we’d run into problems tweaking up the ketchup-packet holders.”
Doyne rummages through a paper bag and pulls out a brownie left over from the party. “I wish I were in a casino right now. Which isn’t to say that I’m not looking forward to Bakersfield.”
At Paso Robles we turn east into the foothills of the Diablo Range, on the other side of which lies Bakersfield and a steeper climb into the Sierra Nevada. Not until crossing Tehachapi Pass will we drop down into Boron, Barstow, Baker, and the flat run through the Mojave Desert to Las Vegas.
The car suddenly swerves. Doyne cranes his neck to stare out the back window. “Did you see that tarantula?” he yells.
“I didn’t see anything,” I reply, turning to look at the pavement receding behind us.
“It was as big as a crab. It was huge. Or maybe it was a bat, or a vampire,” he says, as we both start laughing.
On top of the pass through the Diablos we look east over the Central Valley to the high Sierra. A dusting of snow on their peaks glows red with light from the setting sun. We cross Highway 5, the major north-south truck route, and find ourselves driving through a featureless lowland scratched into row upon row of cotton fields. Outside of Wasco, where it turns into fruit and nut country, we find a surprising number of ‘57 Chevies cruising the highway. A banner over Main Street advertises the Wasco Turkey Shoot, and we hear the sound of rifles popping in the fields.
“Our Explorer Post put on a turkey shoot once,” Doyne tells me. “We were trying to raise money for a trip to South America.”
Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks come on the radio playing their special brand of Hawaiian tutti-frutti music. “If I ever make any money,” Doyne says, “I’d like to get a stereo and buy a few records. I’d start with early jazz, the vintage stuff from the late twenties and thirties—Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole, Django Reinhardt, Stéphane Grappelli, Mike Lovell France. They could take anything from ‘Sweet Sue’ to ‘Sewanee River’ and turn it into music you could dance to. Then I’d pick up some Fats Waller, Willie Maybaum, and other people who played blues piano in the early fifties. And the Boswell Sisters. They sang swing and jazz that always hopped. I’d buy all of Hank Williams and Dan Hicks, at least his early records. I’d want a decent amount of Cream, for whenever I got that Creamy feeling, and the early Beatles and Stones, along with the Kinks and Buffalo Springfield. Add to that list the Coasters—definitely the Coasters. And I almost forgot the complete Chuck Berry.”
Tehachapi Pass is OPEN, say the flashing road signs. We line up behind the big rigs and file over the mountain in a haze of diesel. Coasting down into the town of Mojave, we pass the Bel Aire Motel and a neon sign lit over a palm-reading salon. “I’d stop and go in for a reading,” Doyne says, “but now that we’re in the desert we should cruise.”
Transparent night settles around us, with stars shining in it like gems pushed forward on a jeweler’s mat. The moon rises gibbous. Emptying the last paper bag of apples and brownies, we pass through a buzz of neon at Stateline before dropping back into the blue envelope of desert night.
Forty miles out of Las Vegas the sky lightens. Swept up in a stream of traffic, we roll toward a preternatural dawn that turns from burnt umber to pink until suddenly, down below us in a valley stretching east from the Spring Mountains, we come on the full glow of this pleasure dome shining in the desert. Giant clusters of light erupt and mutate in what looks like a time-lapse movie of flowers blooming in neon. Silver veins of light stretch far into the desert as the city-organism below us winks and spins in photokinesis.
We exit off the interstate onto Las Vegas Boulevard South, otherwise known as the Strip. The traffic rolls slowly from one burst of color to the next. Spotlit in this neon garden are the fountains, plaster statuary, Persian tiles, Roman arches, porticos, and loggias that decorate casinos ranging in style, as Robert Venturi puts it, from Miami Moroccan and Hollywood Orgasmic to Niemeyer Moorish, Roman Orgiastic, Arabian Tudor, and Bauhaus Hawaiian. A frenzy of light exploding in starbursts and whirling over aluminum palm trees illuminates the huge, seven-story signs that announce the evening’s entertainment. “Wayne Newton is playing tonight at the Aladdin,” Doyne intones with the mock enthusiasm of a tour conductor. “The Aladdin used to be a dump. But they’ve remodeled it with a neon sign as big as everybody else’s. Things change.
“Here’s the MGM Grand, rebuilt after the fire, and the Jockey Club, a new casino. On your right we have the Barbary Coast and Maxim and the Flamingo Hotel, where Bugsy Siegel started the whole shebang. On your left we have the triumphal entrance to Caesars Palace. The elevated conveyer belt allows you to drop into the casino from the heavens. The statuary, as you’ll notice, is anatomically enhanced.” The neon sign at Caesars Palace, which is decorated with statues of centurions and steam bath towel boys, announces that Cher is playing the Circus Maximus, while Pupi Campo and Bruce Westcott are rocking out on Cleopatra’s Barge.
“We’re approaching the Wild World of Burlesque at the Holiday Casino, and off to our right is the Imperial Palace, for Oriental pleasures. We’re bedazzled in front of the Nob Hill Casino, the Sands, and the Castaways, which is another of the town’s new attractions.” Teenagers in low-riders grind their gears and honk as we cruise together past the Frontier, the Desert Inn, and the Stardust.
“There’s the Silver Slipper, famous for its ninety-nine-cent breakfast. Although I see on the sign that it’s gone up to a dollar twenty-nine. And here’s the Silver City Casino, the scene of our first big win, where Ingrid cleared five hundred dollars in thirty minutes of play. On your right is the Landmark Tower, and coming up on the left, for family gambling, we have Circus Circus. As you know, that casino has been the scene of many a successful roulette session. Next door at the Stardust we have for entertainment ‘The All New Direct from Paris Lido Show Les Bluebells Girls with a Cast of a Hundred.’”
Farther down the Strip, a picture of Loretta Lynn lights up the front of the Riviera. “She looks nice,” says Doyne. “We should check her out.” Past the Silverbird and the Candle Light Wedding Chapel, advertising “Immediate Wedding Services All Checks OK,” we turn right at Foxy’s Firehouse Casino onto Sahara Avenue, and then take a quick left onto Paradise Road.
“We’ve stayed here before,” Doyne says, stopping at the Brooks Motel. “You can’t beat the location, and it’s cheap.” The manager takes a week’s rent in advance, and we drive around back to unload the car. We hear the sound of gunshots and the neighing of horses as TV screens flicker in the windows. Entering a small courtyard filled by a swimming pool and a palm tree, we walk up a flight of stairs to our apartment, which has one bedroom and a living room divided from the kitchen by a low partition. A sliding door opens onto a balcony overlooking the pool.
“That’s where the second-story men get in,” Doyne warns me, nodding toward the balcony. “In Las Vegas there’s a lot of funny money floating around in people’s pockets, and these guys figure they’re helping to keep it in circulation. So if you open the window at night, you might want to sleep with your shoes on.” I wonder, is he referring to shoes with or without computers in them?
It’s one in the morning, and we’re tired. But we’re also jazzed by being in Las Vegas. So we lock up the apartment and drive to Fremont Street. Here we find the three blocks of casinos that constitute what Las Vegas calls downtown. We split up and stroll the neon corridor. Sauntering into the Mint and the Golden Nugget, I stop to watch the action at the roulette wheels. In a small notebook—official issue of the Project—I record wheel data on high sides and rotor speeds. I jot notes on the croupiers and map the layout of tables on the floor. “Las Vegas wheels are as tilted as ever,” Doyne declares when we meet back at the car. “I’d say it’s looking good. Very good.”
We wake up late the next morning. The day is already hot with dry air wrapped around us like a garment bag. I step out ont
o the balcony. Below me the manager is filling the Coke machine next to the pool with red and white cans. Last night when we checked in she had showed us a picture of Melvin Dumar. Signed “To the Brooks Motel with fond regards,” the photograph showed a man with a pompadour hairdo and a pout on his face. “Mr. Dumar is heir to the Howard Hughes fortune,” said the manager, “but at the present time he is doing an Elvis act. When he’s in town, Mr. Dumar always stays at the Brooks.”
I look out from the balcony toward the mountains that rim Las Vegas. The Spring Range rises to the west and Sunrise Peak to the east. What I can see of Las Vegas itself includes the roof of Foxy’s Firehouse Casino, where a large sign pops on and off to advertise FREE HAMBURGERS FREE DRINKS NO LIMIT. Across from Foxy’s is the tower block leaning over the pool at the Sahara Hotel, while to my left the view takes in Paradise Road and the tops of women’s heads whose hair is dark at the roots but golden blond by the time it flips over their shoulders. The women peer from behind sunglasses at a choice of storefronts that includes an acupuncturist, an abortion clinic, and a specialist in cosmetic breast surgery and silicone implants.
Doyne and I drive down to the Golden Gate for a breakfast of pale eggs jiggling in bacon grease. We take another stroll down Fremont Street and stop at the Golden Nugget to watch them leveling a roulette wheel. A croupier studies the bubble floating in a spirit level laid over the wheel. A security guard lifts the wheel housing, and the croupier stoops to adjust tumblers on the feet of the table.
“You can’t reliably level a wheel that way,” Doyne tells me later. “I’m surprised at how crudely they do it.”
Spending the afternoon at the motel, I spread the layout and chips over our coffee table and put on a pair of magic shoes to work out with the betting practice box. Doyne tweaks up his solenoid plungers and cuts holes in his socks. He drives out to Radio Shack for batteries and takes a nap. After a dinner of microwaved tortillas at Carlos Murphy’s Irish Mexican Café, we head for Fremont Street and our first night’s work.
The Eudaemonic Pie Page 30