Chapter Twenty-One
Better an ounce of luck than a pound of gold.
(Yiddish proverb)
Arnie Garth has a pretty good idea that no one he knows (or, more critically, who knows him), especially no one here in Vegas for the prestigious NECA awards ceremony this evening, will be gambling their lives away in the tiny For Luck’s Sake Casino, just a few short yards down the dingy alleyway from their motel.
Or, indeed, would be seen dead anywhere near this part of town (although this is a notion that, right now, he doesn’t care to examine too earnestly).
He is, of course, all too aware that in even the most rarefied and sumptuous of establishments in this unique city, the level of glamour rarely approaches those heights that the great unversed are led, from movies and beach reads, to expect with all their yearning hearts.
Casino Royales they are not – with handsome, tuxedoed men making lickerish eye contact over roulette wheels with glamorous women dripping in diamonds, Valentina and unbridled lust. Yet Arnie still realises that in this less-than-royal casino, his country’s legendary oasis of neon and kitsch has struck a new, depressing low.
At first glance, a visitor might believe that they have stumbled into the annual convention of morbidly obese geriatrics, Middle America chapter.
The fat is almost moving on its own, as ageing players attempt to fit their massive legs under gambling tables or squidge onto tiny, groaning stools, like human blueberry muffins.
Noreen can’t help but notice the bulging body of an elderly man being wheeled out of the room on an extra-large gurney, his pale and rigid hand still gripped vice-like onto the now severed handle of a slot machine.
His wife, remaining seated at her own machine, watches him in sadness, until the sound of dropping coins lures her back.
“It’s how he’d have wanted to go,” she tells the oddly dressed and gawping Englishwoman.
Noreen isn’t even listening. Not that she can hear much above the cacophony of bells, balls and bullshit.
She simply stares around her, as the South American natives must have stared when they first saw the Spanish galleons emerging out of the mist. This is so outside anything we have ever seen or could reasonably have imagined, therefore it cannot, in fact, be real.
“I don’t understand, Arnie. Are these people gambling?”
“I’m afraid they must be, Noreen. I am so sorry, I had no idea,” he apologises. “I thought it was a clothes shop. But now that we’re here…”
“My poor mum always told me gambling was wrong.”
“It kills me I’ll never meet her,” mutters Arnie, at the same time squatting down a few inches.
“In fact, one of my charities is… What are you doing down there, Arnie?” she asks, glancing floorwards to his balding head.
“Eh? Er… your handbag – well, shopping bag – was coming open. There are some bad people here.” He smiles up at her and talks softly, then realises that this is impossible, as the noise around them is almost deafening.
So, he shouts upwards in the direction of her ear.
“Hey, gambling is wrong, Noreen. If you lose. But we don’t have that luxury.
” He pulls out a reasonably impressive wad of British five-pound notes from whatever is lurking in the stringy, home-knitted cave.
“Awwww shit! What’s this? Don’t you have any real money? ”
“Arnie, please don’t touch that money! It’s for the new hydrotherapy wing at the Ullswater Hospital for Serious Childhood Diseases.”
“Now, you just made that up,” he tells her, as he flashes the wad to a passing cashier. “Hey, toots, what can I get for this?”
Moments later, Arnie and Noreen are sitting beside the frayed and fading cloth of a crowded blackjack table. As ever, it is occupied by frayed and faded people, obsessively guarding their piles of chips like bloated squirrels.
Noreen clasps her bag tightly into her woolly cardigan, mindful of Arnie’s warnings.
As all of her cash, however, is currently sitting in little plastic discs on the table, she now has precious little remaining on her person to be stolen, except perhaps for her virtue, and that is looking pretty safe right now.
The dealer, a swarthy, cadaverous man who seems as if he is on a starvation diet just to make his customers feel bad, deals them their first card.
“Thank you very much, sir,” says Noreen with a smile, causing the dealer to glare at her, sensing some sort of dangerously foreign sarcasm beneath the almost impenetrable accent.
She starts to examine the card with an embarrassed smile, as if she has just been handed a billet-doux and is attempting to decipher its intent.
“The object of the game, Noreen, is to get as near to twenty-one as you can,” explains Arnie, “but not more than twenty-one. I know it sounds complicated, but—”
Noreen is suddenly beside herself with giddily grateful excitement.
“It’s Pontoon!” she shrieks. The perspiration already on her brow, perhaps from wearing an excess of cardigans in the desert, begins to glide down her face, intermingling with very tiny tears of joy.
“Oh, Arnie. I used to play it with my mum for peanuts.”
“Nothing changes, does it?” says Arnie.
Noreen stares at the dealer with an intensity that Arnie has never seen before, taking even the gaunt employee and his corpulent patrons by surprise.
“Twist!”
The dealer looks confused.
“Hit me, Noreen,” explains Arnie, pushing the chips out onto the table.
“You really are a pervert, aren’t you?” she mutters, before asking the dealer to twist again.
“Like I did last summer,” mutters an elderly gentleman sitting nearby, smiling leerily at Noreen, which she ignores, as he is being odd.
Robotically, the dealer delivers a third card. He and Arnie can see instantly that she has reached the magical number, and pretty soon Noreen is up to speed.
“Pontoon!” she screams, which means absolutely nothing to anybody around the table, who all wonder why she is into bridges.
Having screamed sufficiently, Noreen Millburn now begins to jump up and down, clapping her lake-ravaged hands in delight.
Arnie simply stares at her, not quite believing his eyes.
He has seen elements of this fervour before, when Noreen has been droning on about all the noble things she would like to do in this world, most of them involving colostomy bags or prosthetics, but he never expected to witness it at a worn-out blackjack table in the ass-end of Las Vegas.
Whilst it may not be bringing her any closer to loving him, or saving his miserable life, he finds himself strangely warmed by this. And surprisingly heartened.
Shepherding the precious pile of winning chips closer towards them, he grins at her.
“See, Noreen? Gambling is a wonderful thing. Think of all the good you can do with this.”
Her pale-blue eyes begin to sparkle. “You’re right, Arnie!”
For some reason, Noreen begins to look around the drab casino.
Her glance falls on a glassy-eyed, raddled-looking woman in her forties, hovering some distance away.
She is wearing a glitzy, very low-cut top, an extremely short, tight skirt and black fishnet tights that end in bright-green high heels curling dangerously into each other as she manoeuvres between the tables and the human lard.
The woman smiles hopefully but unsuccessfully at various men in turn as she approaches Arnie’s table. Noreen immediately grabs all her chips and thrusts them into the stunned woman’s vermilion-nailed hands.
“Here you are, dear. You buy yourself some good warm clothes. I have heard that even deserts can get cold at nights.”
Before this lady of the desert night can fully grasp the kind sentiment and, more importantly, its physical manifestation, Arnie briskly grabs the charity chips back from her and scurries off with Noreen to the nearest cashier.
Once he has the winnings safely stuffed deep in her bag, he hustles a bemused but considerably richer Noreen out of the casino and into the darkening alley. Cries of ‘Indian giver’ and ‘asshole’ ring in his ears.
“I forgot to tell you, sweetheart,” he explains to his charge, “helping the downtrodden is frowned upon in Vegas. It’s the American way. Go figure.”
Noreen simply nods, prepared to be surprised by nothing in this strangest of all possible worlds.
“Now let’s go and get you all dolled up. As befits a companion of Arnie Garth.” He pauses for a moment. “And there are… perfectly adequate places right around here.”
He suddenly finds himself, with a shiver, recalling the poor fat guy on the gurney and wonders what he, Arnie Garth, will be gripping onto when it’s his turn to die.
Which looks like it could well be in just a couple of days.
He really hopes it’s something softer than the handle of a flashing Las Vegas slot machine.