After the show was over, I wandered out into the casino to convert the rest of my money into chips and then convert the chips into cash receipts. It was nearly eleven at night.
I started with craps, and instead of betting small to hold down my losses, I was, all of a sudden, making fifty– and hundred-dollar bets. I was losing about three thousand dollars when Cully came up behind me, leading his high rollers to the table and establishing their credit. He took one sardonic look at my green twenty-five-dollar chips and my bets on the green felt in front of me. “You don’t have to gamble anymore, huh?” he said to me. I felt like a jerk, and when the dice sevened out, I took the remainder of my chips to the cashier’s cage and turned them into receipts. When I turned around, Cully was waiting for me.
Let’s go have a drink,” he said. And he led me to the cocktail lounge where we used to booze with Jordan and Diane. From that darkened area we looked out at the brightly lit casino. When we sat down, the cocktail waitress spotted Cully and came over immediately.
“So you fell off the wagon,” Cully said. “That fucking gambling. It’s like malaria, always coming back.”
“You too?” I asked.
“A couple of times,” Cully said. “I never got hurt, though. How much did you lose?”
“Just about two grand,” I said. “I’ve turned most of the money into receipts. I’ll finish it up tonight”
“Tomorrow’s Sunday,” Cully said. “The lawyer friend of mine is available, so early in the morning you can make your will and have it mailed to your brother. Then I’m sticking to you like glue until I put you on the afternoon plane to New York.”
“We tried something like that once with Jordan,” I said jokingly.
Cully sighed. “Why did he do it? His luck was changing. He was going to be a winner. All he had to do was hang in there.”
“Maybe he didn’t want to push his luck,” I said. I had to be kidding, Cully said.
– -
The next morning Cully rang my room, and we had breakfast together. After that he drove me down the Vegas Strip to a lawyer’s office, where I had my will drawn up and witnessed. I repeated a couple of times that my brother, Artie, was to be mailed a copy of the will, and Cully finally cut in impatiently. “That’s all been explained,” he said. “Don’t worry. Everything will be done exactly right.”
When we left the office, Cully drove me around the city and showed me the new construction going on. The tower building of the Sands Hotel gleamed newly golden in the desert air. ‘This town is going to grow and grow,” Cully said.
The endless desert stretched out to the far outlying mountains. “It has plenty of room,” I said.
Cully laughed, “You’ll see,” he said. “Gambling is the coming thing.”
We had a light lunch, and then for old times’ sake we went down to the Sands and went partners for two hundred bucks each and hit the crap tables. Cully said self-mockingly, “I have ten passes in my right arm,” so I let him shoot the dice. He was as unlucky as ever, but I noticed he didn’t have his heart in it. He didn’t enjoy gambling. He sure had changed. We drove to the airport, and he waited with me at the gate until boarding time.
“Call me if you run into any trouble,” Cully said. “And the next time you come here we’ll have dinner with Gronevelt. He likes you and he’s a good guy to have on your side.”
I nodded. Then I took the cash receipts out of my pocket. The receipts good for thirty thousand dollars in the casino cage of the Xanadu Hotel. My expenses for the trip, gambling and air fare came to about the other three thousand. I handed the receipts to Cully.
“Keep these for me,” I said. I had changed my mind.
Cully counted the white slips. There were twelve of them. He checked the amounts. “You trust me with your bankroll?” he asked. “Thirty grand is a big number.”
“I have to trust somebody,” I said. “And besides, I saw you turn down twenty grand from Jordan when you were flat on your ass.”
“Only because you shamed me into it,” Cully said. “OK, I’ll take care of this. And if things get real hot, I can loan you cash out of my roll and use these as security. Just so you don’t leave any traces.”
“Thanks, Cully,” I said. “Thanks for the hotel room and the meals and everything. And thanks for helping me out.” I felt a real rush of affection for him. He was one of my few friends. And yet I was surprised when he hugged me goodbye before I got on the plane.
And on the jet rushing through the light into the darker time zones of the East, fleeing so quickly from the descending sun in the West, as we plunged into darkness, I thought about the affection Cully had for me. We knew each other so little. And I thought it was because we both had so few people we could really get to know. Like Jordan. And we had shared Jordan ’s defeat and surrender into death.
– -
I called from the airport to tell Value I had come home a day early. There was no answer. I didn’t want to call her at her father’s house, so I just caught a taxi to the Bronx. Vallie still wasn’t home. I felt the familiar irritated jealousy that she had taken the kids to visit their grandparents in Long Island. But then I thought, what the hell. Why should she spend the Sunday alone in our project apartment when she could have the company of her happy-go-lucky Irish family, her brothers and sisters and their friends, where the kids could go out and play in fresh air and on country grass?
I would wait up for her. She had to be home soon. While I waited, I called Artie. His wife came to the phone and said Artie had gone to bed early because he wasn’t feeling good. I told her not to wake him, it wasn’t important. And with a little feeling of panic I asked what was wrong with Artie. She said he just felt tired, he had been working too hard. It wasn’t anything even to see the doctor about. I told her I would call Artie at work the next day, and then I hung up.
Chapter 15
The next year was the happiest time in my life. I was waiting for my house to be built. It would be the first time I’d own a house of my own, and I had a funny feeling about it. That now finally I would be just like everybody else. I would be separate and no longer dependent on society and other people.
I think this sprang from my growing distaste for the housing project I was living in. By their very good social qualities blacks and whites moved up in the economic scale and became ineligible to stay in the housing project when they earned too much money. And when they moved out, their places were taken by the not-so-well-adjusted. The blacks and whites moving in were the ones who would live there forever. Junkies, alcoholics, amateur pimps, small-scale thieves and spur-of-the-moment rapists.
Before this new invasion the housing project cops beat a strategic retreat. The new kids were wilder and started taking everything apart. Elevators stopped working; hall windows were smashed and never repaired. When I came home from work, there were empty whiskey bottles in the hallways and some of the men sitting drunk on the benches outside the buildings. There were wild parties that brought in the regular city cops. Vallie made sure she picked up the kids at the bus stop when they came home from school. She even asked me once if we should move to her father’s house until our own house was ready. This was after a ten-year-old black girl had been raped and thrown off the roof of one of the project buildings.
I said no, we’d sweat it out. We would stay. I knew what Vallie was thinking, but she was too ashamed to say it out loud. She was afraid of the blacks. Because she had been educated and conditioned as a liberal, a believer in equality, she couldn’t bring herself to accept the fact that she feared all the black people moving in around her.