Vegas Hustler

CHAPTER ONE

Blackjack, I said.

I heard the slight moans and quick grunts of my customers. The tourists gave me hard looks. People on vacation loved to be the tough guy and give the blackjack dealer a hard look.

I was beating the pants off the table. A skinny, nerdy and acne covered kid in the first chair hit on almost everything. No matter what my up card was he scratched his fingers across the green felt and said, Hit me. He was like a mental patient. This threw off the play of the whole table.

I was near the end of my shift and a drunken blonde made a pass at me. She was middle aged but halfway decent looking. She was a glitzy blonde with bit tits. She was the aging showgirl type. She wore a low cut, form-fitting black leotard teddy under an open coat. Big broads always wore them. It was like their uniform.

This blonde chain-smoked and kept spilling her drinks on the stained green felt of the blackjack table. I held my hand up for the waitress to clean it up. No one minds when someone spills a drink in Las Vegas. It’s a cliché but Vegas really does love a drunk. And this broad was tipping big which enamored her to me. I gave her my big white Tom Cruise like smile.

You’re making a fucking mess here baby, I said.

She ignored this and said, I hear it’s kind of hard to get some sex in this town. People think that it’s all about gambling and money. That fucking takes a back seat.

For some reason this dirty talking, chain smoking, sloppy and zaftig old blonde was getting me hard. I could feel it push up against my tight white slacks and the little apron they make us wear. They make us wear those aprons so we won’t slide chips down in our pockets.

The casino security watched us like hawks.

I don’t know, I said. A pretty girl like you might get lucky. You could probably manage it.

She was so peculiar, such an obvious cliche of the Vegas matron, that it made it interesting. I felt an euphoric sense of doom as I flirted with her. The thought of me screwing her seemed absurd and funny. I was in a vaguely apocalyptic mood, so I thought, what the fuck.

She pushed a hundred-dollar chip at me as a tip and a glimmer of hope flashed in her eyes. The bright lights of the casino made her dyed blonde hair shine like a halo around her tan face. Her tan looked like a salon tan and her skin had an almost overly healthy look, like she took too many vitamins.

After she tipped me, she fumbled through her leopard skin purse and brought out a room key. She tossed it at me and my hand shot out and caught it. I shoved it in my little apron. It was a plastic encoded electronic key with the palm tree logo of the hotel on it, and the hotel’s name embossed in swirled black letters, The Flamingo.

Ling-Ling, my relief dealer showed up. I clapped my hands in front of me, so the eye in the sky could see I wasn’t palming any chips. No one tipped. Ling-Ling was a killer Japanese dealer and I knew she’d clean the players out even more. I went to the employee’s lounge to freshen up.

I walked through the casino. The oxygen they pumped in to keep the gamblers awake heightened all my senses. Like a wolf, my vision, sight and smell felt supernaturally sensitive. I loped across the casino floor like a wolf in heat. I slipped on dark green tinted shades to dim the extreme vision.

Sly and Max, a couple fellow dealers, played cards on a chipped white Formica table. The table had cigarette burns all around the edges. The table had seen better days. What’s up Seamus? Sly called out to me as I walked over to a sink to splash water and CK One all over me.

I’m about to dive into some ancient history. It would be some undiscovered country for me. I am going to fuck a broad that is at least as old as my dead mother.

I’ve been fucking your dead mother for years and it’s the best pussy I’ve ever had, said Max.

Funny. Listen. You’d fuck it, eat it, regurgitate it and fuck it again. Vomit corpse is soft and warm, I said.

This thing about the Irish is true. You are some dark, gloomy but poetic souls, said Sly.

I had made friend with my fellow dealers at the casino. They talked a lot of shit but had helped me out of many jams already.

I took off my shades and slapped my faced with CK One. Then I smoothed my jet black hair back with a handful of Brycleen and looked at my face in the mirror. My green eyes were rimmed with red from working so late in the casino. My face was olive skinned, dark, and the type of coloring people call ‘black’ Irish and my nose were a Roman nose. I had boxed when I was younger and it had been broken so it was slightly crooked. I looked like Apollo in the distance, if you didn’t look to close. You’d see scars.

My redeemer doth liveth, I said to my reflection, to my handsome Irish face. More than a slight irritating touch of narcissism lived in me. Couldn’t get rid of it. I liked the way I looked and it was hard to hide. Women were hitting on me all the time. I dried my face and put my shades back on.

So how you like it motherfucker, said Max. How you like being a working stiff?

Listen, I said. I’ve had the shittiest jobs on the planet. I’ve worked at McDonalds and Blockbuster. That’s the seventh ring of hell my good friend. But listen to me now Max and listen well. God lives in the details. When they asked me to clean the floor at McDonalds I cleaned every tiny inch of the fucker. The floor would gleam. Shine. I knew if I missed a corner, which would be the corner that God lived in. If you do everything with style and pay close attention to every moment, every detail, no job is shitty. It’s a prayer, man; my life is a prayer. And I deal the cards with style. No one sees my down card. So this is cool with me.

Max and Sly, flabbergasted by my little speech didn’t say a word as I walked back out on the casino floor. My speech was shit. I wanted to be like the total Zen guy but I wasn’t.

The Flamingo didn’t pay dealers shit and the tips were lousy. Las Vegas was quickly losing any style or gangster glamour it had and now it’s just sad.

But the money was still there.

I walked through the casino in my cute little dealer’s outfit. Tight white pants, bright red button down shirt with black garters around the sleeves. There was worse. The poor guys at Circus-Circus had to wear big puffy pink blouses with huge balloon like sleeves. It made them look like bridesmaids at Jabba the Hut’s wedding reception. Most dealer’s outfits were demeaning, they were designed to keep us humble and in our place.

The music of Vegas filled my ears. It was a world of bells. Quasimodo would have loved it. A strange, weird world created by men to con people into thinking they were in another world. The casino world was a magic tingly world where money didn’t matter. Constant ringing and flashing lights kept my over stimulated psyche working at full steam. The music of the spheres rang in the casinos.

The lights were cool. I liked them. The noise hypnotized me as I strutted across the clean red carpet of The Flamingo to the bank of elevators. The Flamingo was one of the cleanest, classiest places on the strip.

The elevator quickly packed up and a keno girl I knew got on.

Take those green shades off Seamus, she said.

I can’t do that. I’m Cyclops from the X-Men. If I take them off my laser eyes will kill everyone in this elevator, I said.

Ignoring the disturbed looks from our fellow passengers she backed her tight butt right into my crotch. She knew it too and wiggled her ass back and forth against me. The hourly employees were always fooling around like that.

She got off on the fifth floor and gave me a luscious smile in the mirrored door of the elevator as it opened and she pranced out. I wondered where she was going. Shit. I could of fucked her and saved myself a lot of grief.

This was one of those moments in time when I felt I could change the future. If I got off the elevator now, I’d end up in a nice suburban ranch house with a wife, two kids and a mortgage. If I stayed on until the seventh floor I’d end up in Greece or the south of France playing backgammon with some chick that looked like Melina Mecouri. It was fate knocking at my door. Time to choose.

I got off on the seventh floor, walked down the hall and knocked on the door of room seven seventy-one. It reminded me of an old joke. What’s seventy-one? It’s sixty-nine with two fingers up the asshole.

I had the key but, always a gentleman, knocked anyway. She didn’t answer right away but now I was horny from the keno girl so I knocked again.

Shit, I thought, this was losing. I remembered what Iggy Pop once said in an interview that I had read. Iggy said that winning and losing were the same thing. Like Zen philosophy. Winning and losing are essentially the same thing. Here I was. Master of Zen, standing in the hallway of The Flamingo hotel, with a raging hard on, knocking on heaven’s door.

And my demon answered the door.

I didn’t think you’d show up stud, she said.

CHAPTER TWO

I walked inside the room.

It was a typical Vegas room on the strip. A nice room but everything is bolted to the floors these days. If you try and pick up the remote control on the end table you’ll find it’s clamped down with bolts to keep the tourists from taking home a souvenir. I never fantasized about who stayed in these rooms. I knew who stayed in these rooms. I was a card dealer.

She came up to me and rubbed her hand on the front of my pants. She felt my hard dick through the cloth of my dealer’s apron. She had some of the lingerie on that I noticed through my life that women with big tits always favor. Her underwear was black and lacy. Her face was lined with deep wrinkles. Her mouth engulfed my face and her prehistoric leathery tongue hungrily probed my young mouth. I could smell cigarettes and suicide on her breath. She was trying to eat me alive. Death had me in her soft wrinkled hands and was trying to fuck me. She knelt down in front of me and I looked out the picture window at the beautiful view of the strip as Mrs. Death did her thing on me. I didn’t give a shit. I just enjoyed the view and listened to her slurp. I looked down and saw the gray stands of her hair and naked scalp. It grossed me out.

Wanting to get this over with, I picked her up off me and tossed her on the big pink bedspread. Of course there was a mirror on the ceiling.

Why did there have to be a mirror on the ceiling?

She stared at me as I did her. Don’t you feel funny, screwing such an old lady? she asked. Her bright white capped teeth smiled at me.

I looked down at the witch like face and groaned. I faked an orgasm because I just wanted to get away from making love to death…and my future.

Exhausted, I fell back on the bed and looked at myself in the mirror on the ceiling. I looked good. Tan and my twenty-nine year old body was tight and strong looking. I worked out in the hotel gym and kept myself in shape. Was this wizened old lady next to me what I had been keeping myself in shape for?

Is that it? she said.

That’s it doll face, I said. Listen. I hate to take the bus this late from the strip to downtown. It’s always packed full of tourists going back to the cheap hotels downtown. I was wondering if you could spare cab fare? I said this hoping she was drunk enough to forget the hundred dollar tip at my table.

She was pissed off. She grabbed a carton of cigarettes off the end table and handed it to me. This is all it was worth pal. Take some ginseng or something next time. She rolled over and her pocked white ass waved a short goodbye to me and I walked out. I didn’t smoke very much but I took the carton of smokes anyway.

As I walked away down the hall I wondered to myself why the fuck I didn’t use a condom on that old whore. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I prayed that I didn’t catch anything. It was too late to worry.

Then I looked down at the carton of cigarettes and saw the edge of a bill poking out of the carton. I pulled it and five yards, five one hundred dollar bills, fell out on the red carpet of the hallway of the seventh floor of The Flamingo hotel. My redeemer really did live.

CHAPTER THREE

Sly, Max and I worked the same shift at The Flamingo. Midnight to Eight A.M…Max was black and always talking shit. The night after I screwed Mrs. Death, (that’s the names she’s taken in the windmills of my mind) he was slightly more subdued than usual.

He’d been taken the previous night by a suspected card counter for ten thousand dollars. This shit happened once in awhile but management never dug it. And Max was on a memo. The system was three strikes you’re out, a verbal, a memo and then a suspension.

Motherfuckers act like no one ever made a fuckin’ mistake. I’d like to tear that floorman’s head off and take a shit in it. Why didn’t he spot the motherfucker, said Max.

Don’t worry about it man. Their memories are as short as their white dicks. I tried to console him.

How you know they dicks is small.

I’m white and mines small. I got a little dick and I love it. Most women can fit the whole six inches in their mouths when they blow me.

Max and Sly laughed like hell at this and I was glad to hear it. I had always been the class clown and I brought this with me to all the shit service jobs I’d had since high school.

Speaking of dick, how did you do with that old lady? asked Sly.

I’m five hundred dollars richer.

They stopped laughing.

Five hundred fuckin’ dollars! That old bitch gave you five hundred dollars just to fuck her? said Max.

Sure did. I smiled. And I didn’t even finish. It was grossing me out. I had this vision that I was fucking death, so I groaned like I came and rolled off her. She was a little pissed but it must be better than what she’s getting. For five hundred dollars a pop, I could get used to it.

I want a young one. The youngest ones are hardest to get, said Max.

Money. They should invent a cologne that smells like money and the women would flock to you. They got that nesting thing. They can’t help it. You ever notice that if a bald guy owns a house and a Lexus he always get some young good-looking pussy. Girls have no shame man. Some handsome motherfucker riding a bus ain’t getting shit, said Sly.

I knew this video store clerk when I lived in Huntington Beach out in California, I said. "This guy took maybe one bath a week. They were always busting him in the john smoking a joint with the cover of a porno video, probably jacking off. Me and him were kind of friends and went to the movies a few times. I couldn’t sit next to him, he stunk so bad.

Then the motherfucker gets lucky and sells a movie script. Directs it too. Then another. Of course I never see him again except on Entertainment Tonight and he’s dating movie starlets. Uma fucking Thurman like. And he’s not exactly ugly but damn close. But that dough made him look good and smell good. Some funky come smelling, dope smelling, stinky motherfucker and now he gets all the money and all the pussy. Same kid. So that’s the trick man. Like Tony Montana said in Scarface.‘First you get the money.Then you get the power.Then you get the women.’ I know by experience that if you get the women first you’ll never have any money or power. They all got that credit card jones that’s worse than any dope jones or gambling jones that I’ve ever seen.

I know that.You ain’t talkin’just any shit there,said Max. Speaking of broads, I’m due for some pussy.

We just stared at each other for two beats then laughed our asses off. We knew about due. Due paid our salaries. Due built the hotel we worked in. Due built Las Vegas.

Y’see, when a