Greg Baxter - A Preparation for Death

I would’ve kicked his motherfucking ass, said my father, though he was already yawning and checking his watch. Not long after, he announced his departure. He wagged his finger at me: Don’t stay up too late, we’re starting early tomorrow — breakfast at eight.

Barbara and I chatted for a while at the bar, with Bobby intermittently joining us. There was no discernible evidence that Christmas had arrived, except that the casino was almost empty — nothing but Asians and the really really down-on-their-luck, the guys playing roulette and blackjack with drawn grey faces, rubbing their eyes heavily with the balls of their palms after big losses, or pulling their baseball caps very low.

Barbara said she was going to hit the sack as well. Your luck getting any better? she asked.

Worse, I said.

She grimaced. What are you playing?

Mostly roulette.

Maybe you should play some craps.

I think I’m done gambling for the night.

She started digging in her purse and I told her not to bother. I’ll just lose it, I said.

That’s the point, she said. She handed me three hundred dollars — all crisp notes, fresh from the endless wellspring of her unbelievable luck.

After she left I sat at the bar by myself wondering what I ought to do with what seemed to me a half-divine offering, a hand right out of the clouds — save it for the next day, try my luck again, or not gamble it at all, just take it back to Dublin, since outside of this surprise excursion I was a hundred kinds of broke. In a few months I’d be on an all-potato diet. I rolled this question around my head for a long time — maybe five minutes — before I decided to get up and walk around the casino and see what might happen. Maybe there’d be some girl to talk to, I considered, before discarding the idea. No girl worth chasing would be haunting the Horseshoe at one a.m. on Christmas morning. I sat down at Po’s bar and the guy who called me Irish was working: he’d be there till five. He asked how long I was married. Seven years, I said. Any kids? Nah, I said. Jesus, that’s crazy; I love kids; couldn’t live without them. I nodded. He started to talk about his kids and I changed the subject to football. He took offence and walked away. Then suddenly I was up on my feet again and passing through the doors into the street outside, listening to loud piped Christmas music which was full of xylophone simplicity and sweet voices and the reassurance that one man loved us and suffered so that all men would be free. I was alone and drunk and five thousand miles from my house, and I could have crawled against a wall and slept for a week. I had nothing in my stomach.

I turned into the only spot I knew downtown where you could pay to see naked women — the Glitter Gulch. I’d never been inside: even the times I’d come with groups of guys, no one would enter. Ten years ago the outside was covered in hazy portraits of topless women posing temptingly. Now, as part of the attempted familification of downtown, all that was gone, including the guy outside who tried to lure you in.

In a dark sparse velvet-walled anteroom I paid the twenty-dollar cover. I could see the main stage from there. The woman dancing was old and unshapely, and there were only a handful of men watching. The air was oil-dark and loud — I think it was AC/DC. The girl behind the desk said, Thanks, enjoy yourself. I remember she had glitter all over her eyelids. Another woman, who was slightly haggish and sun-wrinkled and fat around the belly, took me by the arm and led me past thick black curtains. She asked me where I’d like to sit. The bar, I said. She asked if I’d like a dance and squeezed my arm and I realized she was offering. I told her I wanted to take it slow, which was not the truth.

The room was a large rectangle with a long bar in the middle. Green lights in the ceiling cast an atmosphere of radioactivity. It was not as empty as the first glance had suggested. There were several lone men at tables, some talking to dancers, others falling asleep. The girls were, for the most part, unsightly — some fat, some far too skinny, some wretchedly old and worn. The men were worse — they shined dismally in the green light and the roving white spotlights. They drank and flashed money. The girls came by and rubbed their shoulders and hair and whispered to them. Soon the dancers undressed and began to dance, asses on laps, arching backward, squeezing their tits together, making eye contact with other men. Meanwhile the girl on the main stage was nude and lying with her legs spread wide in front of some unenviable man, her fingers pulling her cunt open so that he could peer inside. On another part of the stage a woman hung upside down from a pole with her old tits dangling into her face. Here, yes, this was it, humanity like a cadaver, a cold corpse in a lab, cut open, ribs pulled out, organs dumped in a bin.

I sat at the bar, which was empty, and made friends with the bartender, Martin, a plump-faced, loquacious Latino who served me a beer for six dollars and a shot on the house. We talked for a long time about Ireland. He was taking advantage of the slow night to experiment with new cocktails, and we tried one after another — he made big ones for the girls and we drank the remainder in small glasses. During this time, which may have been half an hour, I wasn’t approached by a single dancer. They walked past me as though I were a permanent fixture. I told Martin it was giving me a complex.

I can get one for you, he said.

But they’re all fucking ugly, I said.

But, you know, it’s Christmas morning.

And though it seems somewhat fibbish to say so, somewhat novelistic, it was around that time that a young, good-looking girl took a seat at the bar, about five spaces away, and ordered a drink. She had dark hair and white skin and started checking her phone. Martin made her something fruity and I told him I’d pay for it. When it came to her I called over, Can I join you?

Sure, she said.

Her name was Jackie. She had pretty, light-brown eyes and freckles. We made chit-chat — there seemed to be no rush. She was nineteen and studying literature at UNLV, or would continue as soon as she could afford to. Before she could afford to go to college she needed fake tits, so that she could work a little more and really afford to go to college. She missed her English courses. We got on to the subject of dead authors: her favourite Dostoevsky novels, Hemingway, several others that have slipped out of the grip of my memory. She said she wanted to become a writer. If she had not said that, I would’ve assumed the literary references were lies for my benefit, something out of a stripper handbook: how to talk to bookish men.

She said, Would you like a dance?

How much?

Here or in the private room?

The private room.

A hundred bucks for three songs, or three hundred for the hour.

Let’s start with three songs, I said, because at the time it seemed the perfect balanced solution to the problem of this money: spend a hundred on Jackie, blow a hundred on roulette, and save a hundred for the morning.

She stood and took my hand and said, Follow me. Martin nodded — not ostentatiously, not creepily, but as though to say, See you in a bit. Jackie led me to a small space separated from the main room by dark but half-transparent curtains. In it was an L-shaped couch against the wall and a few tables. She picked a spot and sat down, crossed her legs, and lit a cigarette. Do you mind? she asked.

Not at all, I said. I lit a cigarette and leaned back into the seat and put my hand on her back. It was cool and muscular. She looked up, presumably at a camera, but said nothing.

What kind of stuff do you write? she asked.

All kinds of stuff.

A book?

Maybe.