Greg Baxter - A Preparation for Death

After shopping, I drove the old roads — stringy, narrow, roller-coaster — that my best friend and I used to race around: Old Babcock Road, Cielo Vista, Boerne Stage Road. We had spectacular races, squealing corners, risking empty outside lanes with no visibility, daring overtakes through soft shoulders, burying each other in dust. I was timid in everything else: this fearlessness is a mystery. Back now, driving my father’s four-cylinder, hybrid Toyota, I took the roads slowly. I was out of practice anyway. Those back roads are still largely undeveloped and unchanged. I had driven them a thousand times during the period of my life in which every thought was a heart-pulverizing epiphany, but I felt nothing, not even the warm vacuity that fills the shells of old epiphanies. I was there for the first time, with that amnesiac pain of knowing it ought to mean something. I stopped for some barbecue in Leon Springs, a place with outdoor benches. Sometimes you are lucky and get bikers with handlebar moustaches, but mostly it’s retirees and fat grandchildren. I wasn’t hungry, but I always go there for a few strips of brisket smothered in barbecue sauce. I took the long way home, through my first girlfriend’s old neighbourhood, past some of the houses my family used to live in. There was no effect. I returned to find my father standing curiously still beside his large grill, drinking beer. I was starting to come down with something, a chest cold, so we got takeout rather than cook, and watched a few bad movies. He drank himself peacefully to sleep on the couch. A few hours later, I did the same.

We boarded the plane mid-morning Christmas Eve, and I could already feel my heart tightening. My father had a dozen free-drink coupons and told the stewardess, Keep ’em coming. Then he winked at her. She said, You got it, baby. She did not know that we actually meant it, however, and by the fifth or sixth order, she said, surely lying, You drank it all, there’s no more.

My cold had worsened: earache, coughing, sore throat and head. I couldn’t get comfortable. My father had started me on Cipro — he has a tendency to overmedicate — and I knocked the beer back in gulps, because sipping was too painful.

It was warm and sunny in Vegas, but the weather in Vegas is irrelevant. We took the interstate downtown — the Strip is for Disneyland gamblers and Gatsbys, and though I admit the cocktail waitresses are worth the high table minimums, splendour doesn’t suit me; and it doesn’t suit my father. We prefer dereliction. The Horseshoe is the kind of place that, if you are not ready for the stink, the chipped paint, the ugly waitresses, the nicotine smog from bad ventilation, the rancid bathrooms, and the super-elderly, will sadden you back to the airport. But if this is what you have come for, then you are in paradise. We arrived mid-afternoon. Barbara had checked me in already, so I dropped my bag off, reapplied some deodorant, and was at the bar in less than ten minutes.

I ordered a beer and a guy next to me struck up a conversation. I told him I live in Ireland. Well, fuck, he said, Ire land. And then the bartender said he’d like to go to Ireland with his family and started calling me Irish . The whole place smelled like morning bar mist — the scent that is half mildew and half stale beer, which ripens in the light of day.

My father goes about his gambling ritualistically: he plays his four or five favourite slots for a few hours, warming up, before two long sessions at craps interrupted by dinner, then a long warm-down at a few progressive slots and finally Bobby’s bar for a nightcap. Barbara plays video poker and slots, never tables, and she is always lucky. It is as though the gods sprinkle gold dust on her fingers. The next day, for instance, she would take over my poker machine at the bar so I could play roulette, and the first hand she got was a royal flush worth a grand. I am not lucky, and gamble like a cowardly scavenger. I sit at the front bar, which used to be Po’s bar — Po was a tiny Vietnamese man who knew the injury status of every Division 1 football quarterback in America — anxiously pacing the room with my eyes. I try to be cool, because I know that tables and machines sense fear. That day I played twenty-five-cent video poker for free drinks, building a mountain of snot-soaked tissues and checking over my shoulder. After three or four beers I became drunk again, and I became invisible: for lack of interest the tables had looked away. I stood, cashed out, and felt for my wallet. Barbara, a hundred bucks up beside me, like it was nothing, said, Good luck!

I found my spot: an empty roulette table. I assumed she was lonely and unhappy, and would give herself freely. In hindsight I should have picked a full one, one already giving it up. I sat down and got a hundred dollars’ worth of chips. The dealer, a tall man with a giant salt-and-pepper moustache, said, Which colour would you like? I hadn’t expected the question, and I was stumped. Which was the luckiest colour? I saw myself at the edge of a great crashing whirlpool and rowed on in like an idiot. Orange, I said. Ten minutes later I had nothing, not a single chip. I hadn’t hit one number. The dealer said, Better luck next time. Humbled but alive with defeat, I went back to Po’s bar and sat beside Barbara, who was up another fifty. How’d you do? she asked. Not good, I said. And the whole process started over again.

A man beside us was telling dirty jokes. No one of common decency joined the bar. Everybody was a jack of some unhappiness, some dispossession. There were some thugged-out black dudes who were trying to order drinks with loud Yo s and throwing large-denomination chips at the bar. Downtown, for a short time a decade before, had become a hot spot for the B-list hip-hop crowd — outside of rodeo week they had free rein there, and could act like kings — but there was no point flashing power and beauty around people who were trying to crawl back down the social ladder, or were entirely off it. All hope and prosperity flowed toward the Strip. People sometimes come downtown to sightsee the old Vegas, and they look upon it with disbelieving interest — why would someone pick this dump with the Bellagio only twenty minutes away?

We had had a plan to get prime rib and lobster at the top-floor restaurant, but Barbara wasn’t hungry — she had not slept the previous night — and my father and I agreed that the prime rib in the downstairs diner was the same as you got on the top floor, at one-fifth the price, so we ate there.

I was down about three hundred dollars by the time midnight rolled around, Christmas officially, but my nose had stopped running and I felt fine. I had lost all that money at roulette. I found my father and Barbara at about half past twelve standing at Bobby’s bar, talking to Bobby, a diminutive and ebullient Italian man who’d been there almost fifteen years. The barback — I’ve forgotten his name — looked as out of place as he could’ve been beside Bobby, recalcitrant and disturbed. Tall and hunched, he never smiled and spoke only to curse at small tips. Barbara said, Your dad almost got in a fight.

My father smoked his cigarette and grunted with indifference, saying: Fucking asshole.

He, my father, had been sitting beside Barbara at Bobby’s bar, though Bobby hadn’t been there, when a guy on the other side of him said, Hey, do you have to blow that smoke in my fucking face?

My father, who might have apologized if the guy had asked politely, said: Move to the non-smoking bar, you fucking asshole.

I had come too late to see what this guy looked like, but Barbara said he was huge and my father said he was fat. Either way, my father was too old to get into fights, and he had a cage surgically installed in his neck because his spinal cord, from arthritis, had started to fuse together. The guy continued to mutter insults until Bobby arrived and Barbara told him the whole story. Bobby told the guy and his friend, You just fucked with my best customers, get the hell out and don’t come back. They refused, and the barback said to Bobby, I’ll throw their asses out. Eventually they left, calling back to the whole scene, Downtown trash! My father’s parting gesture was to give him the finger and shout, Goodbye!