Gorilla Beach (12 page)

“Yay! Okay, next question. Will I have tan babies?”

“Um, yes. You will have tan babies. Four or five of them.”

“When I get old, like, thirty, will I be a MILF?” asked Gia, eager, on the edge of her seat.

To her credit, Madame Olga nodded seriously and closed her eyes. “Yes, I see you will be a sexy mama. You will stay attractive until the end of your long, happy life.”

Gia beamed. “Great reading!”

Madame Olga accepted her praise. Bella, a cynic, didn't doubt she had a horde of repeat customers who came again and again for a sunny forecast. Gia vacated the hot seat, excited and energized by the news that she'd get everything she wanted, and soon. Reluctantly, Bella sat down and put her hands on the table.

Madame Olga looked at Bella's palms and frowned. “You have a hard life.”

Huh? Where was the prefab prediction, like, “I see travel in your future”? Bella shifted nervously. “I didn't ask anything yet.”

“You have had much pain. You worry terribly about a loved one's health. Someone you trusted recently betrayed you.”

Bella snatched her hand back. Fiercely private, she was rattled. If Madame Olga could see at a glance that Bella's world had been turned upside down, that her most sacred relationships had been shattered, maybe anyone could. Bella felt naked suddenly, and itchy to get away.

“That's enough,” she said, plucking two twenties from her wallet and leaving them on the table.

“Are you sure? I have answers for you, if you're ready to listen.”

Unlike the doctors, Madame Olga could tell her if her mom was going to live or die? Right. “Another time,” said Bella, her voice shaking embarrassingly. Then she walked away, Gia jogging alongside in her wedgies to keep up.

“Don't say it,” warned Bella.

“I was going to say that you could probably use a drink.” Pointing at the large sign for a place nearby, Gia added, “This place has everything we need. Better not to be false advertising.”

The sign read
GORILLA BEACH BAR
and had an arrow pointing them toward a long ramp from the boardwalk. They trudged along the ramp, through dunes and sand-friendly tall grass, all the way down to, presumably, Gorilla Beach. The closer they got, the louder the music, the thicker the scent of Axe body spray. They passed a particularly tall dune, rounded a corner, and the bar was revealed like something out of a dream.

The place sat on a wood-planked riser and appeared to float a few feet off the beach. It was open air, but protected from the sun by a palm-frond-thatched roof. Tables with and without umbrellas were bustling and busy, full of laughing, tan people with more tattoos than clothes. Waitresses in tiny red bikinis raced around, carrying trays laden with beers and umbrella drinks.

“Is it my imagination, or is every single person here freakin' gorgeous?” asked Bella.

“I've dreamed of this,” said Gia, her jaw unhinged. “It's my own personal episode of
Fantasy Island
. Slap me.”

“What?”

“This can't be real. Slap me.”

Bella shrugged. She didn't see what reality and slapping Gia had to do with each other, but whatevs. She slapped Gia's cheek. Lightly. Just enough to make a nice sound.

Gia shook it off. “Felt it. I'm awake. And there's still a fuckton of gorilla here. Like two thousand freakin' pounds of beef. Okay, I know I said I was never leaving our suite before. Well, I'm never leaving this bar.”

“You might want to reconsider,” said Bella, pointing toward Gorilla Beach itself. Gia and Bella found seats by a low railing overlooking that section of the Atlantic City beachfront, making puddles of drool watching a stunning parade of hardbodies go by. Bella, in all her days of gym and beachgoing, had never seen such a dense population of smokin'-hot juiceheads with hairless, tan, rippling abs and shoulders.

A guido in a red T-shirt with a GBB logo gave them a bowl of pretzels. He was dark and yummy as rum with soulful, deep-brown eyes that made Bella forget how to talk.

Gia was equally transfixed. “Are you, like, a mirage?”

“I'm your flesh-and-blood bartender/waiter. You guys ready to order?”

Even the waiters were dimes? AC was the greatest place in the entire universe. “Am I dreaming?” asked Bella.

“A wide-awake shot? You need a Dragon Bomb. Vodka, Red Bull, grenadine, and lime juice. And for you,” he said, turning to Gia, “a Pink Bikini. Vodka, peach schnapps, cranberry, and Red Bull.”

“Perfect,” the girls agreed.

“I'm Tanner, by the way.”

“Screw you, we just got here!” said Gia.

“My name. It's Tanner.” He showed his name tag and left to make their shots.

“Tanner is a frickin' name?”
asked Gia. “First
Guido
. Now
Tanner
. What next? A guy named Gym?”

“You called?” asked another waiter. Name tag:
JIM
.

The breeze, the music, the busy bar scene, and Tanner's tasty beverages quickly dissolved Bella's raw nerves. Gia's nerves, however, were getting rubbed the right way. Only a few feet away, a pack of gorillas were doing push-ups on the beach, their backs bare, bronzed, and glistening with oil. Others were throwing a Frisbee, running and jumping in the sand. Gia watched, mesmerized. “That's it. Run. Run for the Frisbee! Jump! He caught it. Sweet sausage, that's hot.” Her eyes big as mussels, Gia said, “We've landed at Gorilla Ground Zero. Look at that monster!”

Bella was already staring. “If we were animal researchers searching for gorillas in the wild, we'd have to alert the media with news of a secret, previously unknown cluster of gargantuan specimens.”

“Officially, no regrets about leaving Seaside for AC,” said Gia.

If Seaside was a gorilla petting zoo, AC was a friggin' jungle.

Tanner placed a pair of frozen margaritas in fluted, two-foot-long plastic glasses with red straws, and cherries on top. “Care of those guys,” he said, gesturing to a table with six shirtless juice-heads.

Meanwhile, a six-foot-five, 250-pound wall of solid muscle with abs that shamed the marble statues in Nero's lobby lumbered by the bar and caught Bella's eyes. He stopped in his tracks and said, “Hey, girl,” in a voice as rumbling and deep as thunder.

It was an embarrassment of riches. Outrageous fortune. They honestly did not know where to look.

Gia waved to the juiceheads to thank them for the drink, took a sip. “I'm going over.”

Bella said, “And give up our prime seating? Don't you dare move. Wait one second.” She uncrossed her legs, got out of her
chair, and bent over it as if she were searching for something in her purse on the floor, giving the entire bar a spectacular view of her barely covered, tanned ass.

Fifteen gorillas suddenly swarmed the two girls, baring their teeth (smiling), offering drinks and back rubs, and sending off powerful animal pheromones.

“Calm down, boys, I speak gorilla,” said Gia. “Just grunt twice if you like to party.”

A dozen started grunting at the girls, scratching their sides and hopping from foot to foot in a primal dance. It was like a scene out of
Rise of the Planet of the Apes,
minus James Franco. Bella and Gia looked at each other and started giggling, hard.

It was Bella's first belly laugh in months. Man, she needed that.

Fredo exited his bedroom
in the same black suit he wore to the Crumbi wedding, what Gia called his
Reservoir Dogs
look. Granted, it wasn't as slick as that of a lot of the players he saw when he scoped out the casino earlier in the day. But it was a suit, and not a dirty T-shirt and cargo shorts with a fanny pack, which was how most of the tourists dressed.

Gia and Bella were attacking the maxifridge when he came into the living room, plowing through little wheels of cheese, crackers, and sliced salami. They'd spent the whole day at a beach bar and grill, but were acting as if they hadn't eaten in weeks.

“Aren't you getting dressed?” he asked.

Gia glanced up, crumbs around her adorable lips. “You're not wearing that, are you?”

Bella wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Oh, Jesus. The undertaker of Atlantic City.”

“You said you'd be ready by nine,” he whined. Fredo was excited to get to the tables. He couldn't wait to test his Dumb Luck theory, see if Gia had it, in spades.

“Give us twenty minutes,” said Gia.

“Make it thirty,” said Bella.

They disappeared into their bedroom, giving him brotherly pats on the head as they walked past him. He'd take brotherly.
He'd talk friendly. As long as he got to hang out with them, he was happy. Gia and Bella had “it,” a quality that he couldn't define, that made them magnets for attention. The only attention Fredo had drawn thus far had been the wrong kind. He'd reacted by trying to make himself invisible to the people who hurt him. Everything he wore, did, and said was about fading into the background of life. The boring black suit. The shyness. The avoidance of girls and social situations. He had a secret hope that spending time with Gia and Bella would break him out of the shell of his own design. Maybe some of their “it” would rub off on him. Not in a sleazy way (oh, shit, not wood knocking again!). He just hoped they liked him, really. They seemed to.

He'd better not fuck this up, he thought nervously.

Fredo spent the next twenty minutes imagining the many ways he could offend his new friends. Then forty. Finally, an hour after they went into their room, the girls came back out and erased any negative thoughts from his mind.

Bella nearly took his breath away in a black wrap minidress with a deep V-neckline, and a wide leather belt, and four-inch-high, glitter-dusted black pumps. Gia wore a leopard-print dress. Short, tight. Did he mention
short
? When she walked, it rode up, so she had to yank it down. Cute. She'd put on six-inch leopard stilettos to complete the look.

In her hand, a can of hair spray. “Fredo, we're not leaving this room with your hair like that.”

“Like what?”

Bella said, “Like an oil slick. Dude, it's gross.” From behind her back, she showed him a damp towel. “We're doing this for your own good. Now, just sit back and let us do what we do.”

Frightened now, he asked, “Will it hurt?”

“Hurt so good,” said Gia.

They pinned him. Bella used a lot of muscle to rub the pomade
out of his hair. “My mother said it looked good like this!” he complained.

“His mother,” muttered Gia. “She wants you to be a virgin forever.”

“I'm not a virgin!”

Crickettes. The towel was over his face so he couldn't see their reaction. If they could see his expression, they'd know for sure he was lying.

Suddenly, the towel was gone, and Gia had a blow-dryer in her hand. “I'm going to blow you now, Fredo. Which is not nearly as sexy as it sounds.”

Actually, the feel of her fingers in his hair was plenty sexy, but more soothing. When the whirring and spraying sounds stopped, he reached up and touched the top of his head.

It was stiff, and his hair was sticking up, like a crown. The girls were looking down at him on the couch. “Well?” he asked.

“It's a start,” said Gia. “Once I start a makeover, I can't stop until I reach full guido power. Do you submit?”

Ach, why did she have to use words like
submit
? It was like an electric shock to his junk. “I … okay. Just don't make me wear too much gold jewelry. I get a rash.”

“Are we good to go?” asked Bella, one last spray for herself.

Gia doused her hair, too. “Ready.”

They took the elevator ride down from the penthouse to the casino floor. “We start small. Just a hundred bucks,” said Fredo as he led the girls through a maze of slot machines toward the table games.

“Look at all these suckers,” said Bella. “You might as well set your dollars on fire.”

A girl on each arm, Fredo escorted his women to the casino floor proudly. He could feel people staring at the girls. He was like the invisible man between them, but it didn't matter. He had
to admit, the crown of his hair made him feel taller, cockier. Like a big shot. “We'll play with my money, and split the profits three ways,” he told them. “You don't have to worry. You're not risking anything.”

“Shiny! Sparkly!” said Gia, distracted by the flashing lights like a six-year-old with ADD.

Fredo felt an all-too-familiar flash flood of anxiety. Was she up for a night of betting? Would her brain overload from the blinking, buzzing, and blazing of a thousand lights on the casino floor? This was exactly what casino designers had in mind. If gamblers were distracted by the bells and whistles, the free drinks, and skimpily uniformed waitresses, they'd lose their concentration and make mistakes.

He reminded himself that Gia didn't need a brain. She just needed to stand there, look pretty, and let luck flow through her. If she could beat his grandmother at bingo, she could play the simplest casino game.

They stopped in front of a green felt table with a roulette wheel. The guy behind it turned the wheel and spun a small white ball in the opposite direction in the inside edge of the wheel. They watched as it went round and round. Other gamblers frantically placed colored chips on individual numbers inside a rectangular grid or along the outside in spaces marked odd, even, etc., red or black.

The wheel slowed. The ball inside hopped around the numbered slots, finally setting. The operator said, “Thirteen.”

A woman whooped. The operator placed a Lucite paperweight on top of a pile of her chips in the square for thirteen. After doing the calculations, the operator pushed a massive pile of chips in her direction. One turn of the wheel, and the winning player just paid for her room and drinks for the night.