“Oh. You’re Mr. Gandy, hello. You’re lucky to get something. They got the Consumer Electronics show going on right now, good thing you thought to stop at the Visitor’s Center.” She’s shaped like a gourd, her hair long with ends split and dyed a shade of black that doesn’t occur in nature. Between the elastic of her paisley slacks and the bottom of her blouse, little black hairs dance obscenely around the milky white vortex of her navel. She takes a key hanging in front of a cubby in which three envelopes sit aslant and hands it to me.
“There’s mail in that slot,” I point out.
“There’s a fellow always gets this room when he comes through. Salesman.”
So I’m subletting someone else’s rented room, basically. I don’t care. I’m lucky to be getting anything, as the ladies at the Visitor’s Center pointed out to me when I pulled into town. It’s a modest little motel, the Visitor’s Center lady said, but super clean; you could eat off of those floors. I climb the open staircase to the second-floor balcony overlooking a swimming pool filled with cloudy water the color of urine. A couple are sitting next to the water smoking and glaring at one another without saying anything, and as one they swing their gazes upward toward me.
“What the fuck you staring at, faggot?” the woman says. She has on a shirt that says, I SUFFER FROM CRS. Her nipples are sticking straight out through the cotton, and at this moment there may not be a pair of tits on the planet I would less rather see, short of maybe Mother Teresa’s; this one can’t weigh much more than eighty pounds, with the emaciated face of a lifelong smoker. Even with her Jackie O shades on, her eyes look sunken.
“Seems like someone’s looking to get his ass kicked,” her companion says. He’s so obese I can’t imagine him able to get out of the lawn chair he’s overflowing from, but I stare straight at him and sense that he’s serious. I picture the fight and figure it could go either of two ways: He gets me down and crushes me under four hundred pounds of suet, or I dance around him and tire him out until he has a heart attack.
“Sorry!” I yell, and I head down the balcony looking for number 36. It’s around the corner, facing the back ends of some houses. A dog in one of the yards starts a vicious barking jag as soon as I come into view, and keeps it up once I get into the room.
Clean enough to eat off the floors, I think after a quick walk-through, wishing I could force-feed the chipper Visitor’s Center lady a nice, greasy fried egg off of the gritty shag carpet.
There’s a ratty terry cloth bathrobe hanging from the clothes hook inside the bathroom door, presumably the salesman’s. He must be balding, because there’s hair all over the goddamned place: on the pillow, in the toilet, around the tub drain.
I’m not here for a vacation. Having spent the last few months tending bar for my stepfather’s strip club in Wichita, I’m on my way back to L.A., where I am foolishly expecting to be able to pick up my old life where it left off. When I called my friend Skip to alert him of my return, he had a proposition for me: If I was coming through Vegas, he’d give me two hundred dollars to pick up a package from a stripper named Babs.
I didn’t have to ask Skip to know I’d be carrying crystal methamphetamine. I’m more of a pothead myself, with a taste for the occasional hit of acid or pharmaceutical speed. Meth makes my teeth itch. But I can use the two hundred, and Skip is a good guy. (Within a couple of years, though, he’ll transform into a violent monster whose ass I’ll be forced to kick off my couch and out of my house in a futile effort to save my marriage. Said marriage hasn’t happened yet, either, at this point.)
When I call the number Skip gave me, Babs doesn’t bitch about the hour or seem surprised, just gives me directions to a bar called the Tumblin’ Dice a few blocks off the Strip and says she’ll meet me in half an hour. I tell her I’ll be wearing a Dodgers cap.
It’s past midnight and my new friends are still out by the pool. I stare as I pass by them and wink at the lady, who gives no sign of remembering me from twenty minutes ago. Her boyfriend doesn’t react, having by this time fallen asleep.
The Tumblin’ Dice is a monument to skank. No one here looks close to sober, particularly the lanky, disheveled bartender, whom I take at first for the victim of some exotic neurological disorder. After a long wait, he lurches over in my direction and braces himself on the bar with a big bony hand, a large bandage stretched across his right knuckles, blood starting to seep through the beige fabric.
I order a draft beer and park myself in front of a nickel video poker machine with hearts and diamonds faded to a cheerful, blurry pink. I play one nickel at a time, which proves to be a mistake.
“Fuck a duck, baby, you gotta play more’n a nickel a pop, you’re fucked that way if you hit a big hand.” The woman next to me is small and junkie-thin, with puffy dark circles under her eyes. I have no theoretical designs at all on the woman I’m supposed to be meeting but I can’t help hoping that this isn’t her.
“I’m just killing time, waiting for a friend.”
“Fuck, I’ll be your friend,” she rasps, and then slaps my back harder than I would have thought possible, cackling. “Just kidding. I will, though. I’m Nicki.” She rolls up her sleeve to reveal an amateur tattoo of a nickel the size of a silver dollar on her upper bicep. Jefferson looks pissed, like he’s not happy about being tattooed onto a junkie’s arm, or maybe it’s the big infected whitehead erupting from his cheek. “Short for nickel’s worth, get it?”
I shake my head no, even though I do.
“I done time, baby. Five big ones. Know what I did?”
“No.”
“I’m not gonna tell you, either. Not till I know you better.”
“Okay,” I say, cursing the inborn Midwestern politeness that keeps me involved in the conversation and darting my eyes back and forth between the door and the machine. I drop another nickel and draw three nines and two queens, pat.
“Fuck, man, see that? You ain’t getting shit for that, baby. You should’ve bet five nickels, that’s the way you build up a bankroll.”
“Like I say, killing time.” Her short blond hair is spiky, but a stale odor emanating from her scalp makes me suspect that its body comes from a lack of washing rather than some salon product.
“What’s your name?”
“Tate.”
“Is your friend a lady, Tate?”
“Uh-huh.”
“A lady friend, like? Like a sex partner?”
I take a good look at her, trying to figure out exactly what she’s fucked up on. There’s glee in her face, childish and idiotic, and I can’t say whether it’s malicious or not.
“Probably not.”
“Cause I don’t want you getting any big ideas about me, cause I’m one hundred percent dyke, baby.”
“That’s okay with me.” I draw four clubs and a diamond, and trade the diamond for a spade.
“Aw, baby, that’s a heartbreaker there. Not that it matters when you’re betting nickels. You ever play one of those five-dollar machines?”
“No.”
“My girlfriend, the one who died, she won a cool two grand one time. She was trying to pay me back all the money she stole.”
The smart thing would be not to rise to the bait, but I’m finding her more fun than the nickel poker so I do the callous thing and bite. “How’d she die?”
Nicki leans toward me and hisses the answer in my ear, filling my nostrils in passing with a bouquet redolent of tobacco, stale beer, and gum disease. “I had her killed.”
“No shit,” I say, nodding, trying to strike the perfect balance between looking impressed and credulous and sympathetic.