On the plane flying home I asked the stewardess if they had any old issues of Forbes Magazine up in first class. Somewhere over Colorado she brought me a stack of ten magazines including three Forbes. I’d seen the issue all over Minnesota because the cover featured a native (literally) son. There he was: a handsome Indian man, Matthew Birdsong, wunderkind business whiz who grew up on a reservation in Minnesota, went to college, and came home to help his tribe build one of the first, biggest, and most successful Indian casinos in the U.S.
I skimmed through the rags-to-riches story, or in this case, loincloth-to-loot. Finally, in a discussion of his business practices, I found the link.
“Rumors flew for weeks among employees at the Crow Wing Casino that layoffs were coming. Was business bad? Reports were that machines and tables were busy all day and most of the night. Busloads of gamblers arrived from Chicago and otherMidwestern cities. However, due to financial irregularities the management announced a quarter of employees would be let go and tribal distribution would be substantially reduced this year. Birdsong, now CEO of one of Las Vegas’s biggest casino hotels, said the auditors in St. Cloud had found profits to be exaggerated in the last quarter. Calls to Herbert Monroe, chief auditor at White Birch Accounting, were not returned.”
Were the Vegas Indians casino employees Herb had helped get fired? Or were they employees of Matthew Birdsong? Had Herb double-crossed the man he was cooking the books for? In the manner of life in general I was never to know exactly.
In November the Securities and Exchange Commission indicted Matthew Birdsong for fraudulent accounting practices, accusing him of skimming money from Crow Wing Casino to pad the accounts in Vegas to drive up the stock of the casino’s holding company. To celebrate I went up to Crow Wing one frigid night just after Thanksgiving to lose a few dollars in slot machines, to bet a few at the tables, to drink coffee all night with my kin. About three in the morning I spotted Louise, Cynthia’s old St. Paul pal, playing keno. We were both sober, an unfortunate byproduct of Indian gaming.
Louise looked tired, dark circles under her eyes. “What do you hear from Cyn?”
“You kidding? Vanished into thin air.”
She shook her head sadly and looked toward the gaming tables, as if there was something else.
“You heard from her, didn’t you?”
Louise frowned then smiled then burst out laughing. “You won’t believe it, Aaron. I can’t tell you where she is, she wouldn’t tell me. But guess what she’s doing?”
A vision of black leather hot pants popped into my head. She was my little sister. I just knew. “Singing in a band.”
The day before Christmas a letter arrived with Canadian stamps. No return address, a Winnipeg cancel mark. Inside were two 500-dollar bills, Canadian. A small note was fixed to the paper clip.
“Rock your world courtesy Matthew Birdsong. Go, bro. The music is calling.”
NICKELS AND DIMES by Ronnie Klaskin
Once upon a time, in the summer of 1973, there were two sisters who went on a car trip with their Mommy and their Daddy, who were both school teachers and thus had the whole summer off. They left from Long Island New York and were driving all the way to Los Angeles, where their Uncle Phil, Aunt Miriam, and their cousins Jon and Karen lived in the Valley. But Uncle Phil, Aunt Miriam, Jon, and Karen are not important to this story, so it’s perfectly all right for you to forget their names. Neither is Los Angeles or any of the other places, mostly Holiday Inns right off the Interstate, with game rooms and pools, where they stayed for one night at a time, or the dozens of Stuckey’s, where they stopped for bathroom breaks and root beer and an occasional pecan log.
What’s important is Las Vegas, with its neon lit Strip, big hotels and glittery casinos. They got a room at one of the moderatesized and moderate-priced hotels called Dollars Dreaming, which had a big flashing neon one-hundred-dollar bill as a marquee. The room had two queen-sized beds, one shared by the parents, Brenda and Jeff, and the other by the two girls, Laura and Julie. The hotel served a large and cheap buffet breakfast and lunch, and boasted a big outdoor pool. It had a casino, of course, filled with slot machines and all sorts of gaming tables, but the sisters were not allowed in there. They were too young.
Laura, the older sister, was ten, almost eleven. She was a quiet, studious girl who was always reading. She was a good reader and had graduated from reading Nancy Drew books to those by Judy Blume, which weren’t mysteries but told of things like menstruation and pimples, things that were of the utmostinterest at that time of her life. Then she discovered mysteries by Agatha Christie, of which her mother had an entire collection.
Laura was not sure about what she wanted to be when she grew up. Maybe a teacher, like Mommy and Daddy, so she could have the summers off, as well as Christmas and Easter and a bunch of other holidays. Laura was an extremely practical young person. Or possibly she could be a detective, but she wasn’t very sure how you went about that. Or a writer, or movie star. A year before she had considered becoming a ballet dancer, except that she wasn’t really very graceful, and more important, Laura had heard her dancing teacher say that ballet dancers had to be skinny, and she liked ice cream and cookies far too much. She was tall and slim then, with straight, dirty blonde hair and a totally flat bosom which she feared would never develop.
Julie, who was just seven, was not at all like Laura. She was small and wiry with short red curls and a spray of freckles across her upturned nose, and was always moving. Kinetic energy, Jeff called it. She wasn’t anywhere near as well behaved as Laura. She wasn’t a bad kid, but her teachers said she talked too much in class, and she didn’t always pay attention or finish her homework, and she didn’t get very good marks on her report cards. She had also been known to lie on occasion. But she was popular, with a lot more friends than Laura ever had. She knew all of the dogs and cats in her neighborhood and constantly begged Brenda for a pet, which Brenda said was nagging, and explained that they couldn’t get one because Laura had too many allergies.
One of the things that made Laura have itchy eyes and sneeze a lot was cat hair. Julie didn’t ever see Laura sneeze when she pet a dog, but Brenda said a definite no to any sort of furry pet. Even hamsters and gerbils, which Julie said could live in a cage in her room, and Brenda could tell Laura never to go in there and steal any of Julie’s things anymore.
Another thing that gave Laura allergies was lavender. She had found that out when Grandma Helen had given them each a small bottle of lavender perfume. Grandma Helen always gave them exactly the same thing, hoping that they wouldn’t fight over whose present was better.
Laura smelled the perfume and went into a sneezing fit. Soshe traded her bottle with Julie for a gold locket that Julie had found lying in the street. At first she told Julie that the locket was just a piece of junk, but after the trade, she said she thought it was real gold. Julie was really angry, and, after that, every time Julie was mad at Laura about something or other, she would put some of the perfume on a piece of tissue and stick it between the pages of the book that Laura was reading. When Laura opened the book she would sneeze for hours. But she never told on Julie because then Brenda would find out about what happened with the locket, and she’d probably be punished and not be allowed to watch her favorite TV.programs for a night or two.
They checked into the hotel a little after three on Thursday, changed right into their bathing suits and took a dip in the pool. Brenda made sure that the girls were well covered with suntan oil because it was very hot and sunny, 109 degrees, even that late in the afternoon, and she didn’t want them to get bad sunburns. Both girls had very fair complexions. Julie was the better swimmer, but she also enjoyed splashing Laura, who complained to Brenda, and then Brenda said that twenty minutes in that hot sun was enough for the first day in that awful heat, and it was time to go back to the room and take showers. Julie whined a bit, and Jeff gave her a light tap on the bottom of her two-piece bathing suit.