Pocket Kings (32 page)

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!
Th
e 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.

Th
at 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.
Th
en 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.

Th
ere 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

Th
e 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!
Th
e 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.
Th
ere 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!
Th
ere 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.
Th
is time it's war. You want a piece of me, Clint Reno?
Bring it! Not In My House.
Th
is 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.