Maybe I’d pull a Rocky. I wouldn’t go home. I’d write my kids: Off traveling. I’m sure we’ll meet again someday.
I imagined stepping onto the tarmac and hailing a plane like you’d hail a taxi, a gag we’d pulled in Fly Boys, though this was the Des Moines International Airport, which meant I could only get as far away as nearest Canada. Who was I kidding, anyway? Of course I’d go home.
Not right away, though.
Nearly two decades before, when people asked me my theories on Rocky’s whereabouts, I couldn’t think of an answer. Mexico, I thought sometimes, speaking Spanish and getting brown as a berry. London: he loved the pubs there. Some big city where no one knows him. He’s gotten a crew cut, wears glasses. Once I’d outfitted him, I had to employ him. Bartender? Handyman? Gigolo? I remained unconvinced.
No: Las Vegas. Naturally Las Vegas. What kind of idiot had I been? He’d even said so, sort of, after This Is Your Life: he claimed he’d been booked there. Las Vegas was perfect for Rock, a twenty-four-hour town, free drinks, gambling, endless strangers. Girl singers in every casino. Strippers.
I bought a ticket from the weary agent in Des Moines, and on the flight to Chicago, and then to Las Vegas, I constructed his new existence. The crew cut and the glasses could stay. He worked at a casino, probably as a dealer. He told jokes as he took people’s money. Though he’d just turned seventy, he couldn’t afford to retire. After all, he’d recently been married for the twelfth time.
I almost expected him to meet my plane. “You figured it out!” he’d say, and he’d tow me to the airport bar and order me a drink. “What took you so long? Any day now, I kept thinking.” The bartender would set down two bright pink drinks and Rocky would pay in chips and soon we’d be two bright pink drunks and he’d raise his glass:
“To us! To me! Especially to me!”
There was nobody looking for me at the gate in Vegas. I took a taxicab to the strip, undeterred.
Picture me going from joint to joint, a double exposure of bubbly neon and bubblier cocktails across my increasingly bewildered face. Any cliché you choose will probably fit. At some point it occurred to me that I had come to Vegas so that I could get as drunk as I wanted, which is to say extremely. No: Rocky. He was here somewhere. I examined every dealer, every bartender, every cigarette girl. Mostly, I knew this was a delusion. I needed to keep my mind busy, that was all, so I’d invented this one-object scavenger hunt. What’s more: whenever someone died, I suffered from the belief that he or she was actually alive and living elsewhere. Well someone had died, that was true, but Rocky — as far as we could tell—was alive, did live elsewhere. Might be, in fact, found! How crazy was that?
To one confused but pretty cocktail waitress I claimed to be a private eye trying to locate an unsuspecting heir to a million-dollar fortune. I sat down at a roulette table and instantly won $350. Someone brought me another drink, and I threw half the chips on her tray and filled my pockets with the rest and stumbled on to the next casino, where I was sure I’d find Rocky. I went from the Dunes to the Sands to the Sahara: Moses in the desert.
According to my watch it was somewhere after midnight. I had to hold my wrist steady to see. Just this morning I’d been in Iowa. I’d buried my wife. I’d realized I would soon bury another sister. Only hours ago I’d been responsible and sober, a loved father and grandfather and brother. But not a husband, not a husband, and I sat down on the edge of a fountain in the lobby of a hotel and rubbed my face. That water would sober me up if I jumped in. Across the lurid carpet a security guard sized me up, wondering if I was a dangerous drunk or just an ordinary one. Dangerous, I wanted to say, because I was, and unlocatable, and drunker than I’d ever been in my life, looking for a man who seemed to be my only friend in the world even though we hadn’t spoken in nearly two decades.
It had taken years for Rocky to hit bottom; it had taken me fifteen hours.
I reached behind me to wet my fingers, splashed my forehead, and then somehow stood up and launched myself through the hotel lobby and into the casino behind it. I could hear a woman singing in a middle-aged and sexy voice.
My kisses are like cigarettes
Try one, you’ll want a pack
But you’ll find they’re killing kisses
I need a warning printed on my back
When the doctor cuts you open
He won’t know what turned your heart so black.
I tried to locate the source. Ah: tucked in a corner, a small bar and a stage, entertainment for people who wanted to sit down but weren’t willing to cough up the dough for the show. Me. I squinted at the figure onstage. Her chestnut hair shone cherryish from the red gels on the lights, and the microphone she gripped cast a shadow like a port-wine birthmark across her face. Sequins, of course, emerald-green against her pale skin.
The space between me and the stage was packed with small round tables on stalks and big round chairs on wheels. Barely any floor space at all, but the chairs were so huge you wouldn’t feel crowded once you sat, though it might be hard to get up if you’d arrived sober and stayed through a couple of sets: you could lose track of how drunk you were.
I knew precisely how drunk I was. See that old man? Pathetic. Where’s his wife? She should take him home. I instructed myself to marshal up some dignity, then found that I had none, so I held on to the backs of the chairs, apologizing to the few occupants I encountered, all the way to the little stage, at which point I fell over at the singer’s feet. I grabbed her by the ankle and looked up: Penny O’Hanian Carter.
A bouncer came to remove me. I was seconds away from being thrown out of a casino at one in the morning. Penny shook her head at him: I was fine, I could stay. She sang her next verse to me.
My love is just like bourbon
It’s so smooth that it’s a sin
The thirst runs in your family
Your parents called again.
They swear they’ll leave each other
Long as I will take them in.
Wotta professional. She made me part of her act.
Penny must have checked me into the hotel room. Everything was red and braided; it felt like waking up in somebody else’s stomach. Better his than mine. I went to the bathroom to vomit.
Hadn’t I grown up any? I found a note taped to my shirtsleeve from Penny, suggesting that if I was able, I should meet her downstairs at the buffet nearest the elevators, the elevators nearest my room, at ten o’clock. I wondered whether Rocky had ever told her of pinning a similar note with similar directions some forty years before. Okay, I had enough time to call downstairs to have a razor and toothbrush sent up. I’d have to go in the wretched clothes I was wearing, because I’d managed to lose my case. Thank God I had buried Joseph’s ashes in Des Moines. I saw myself placing the tin can on the roulette board. What would you win if you bet a corpse?