The Luckiest Man in the World

2/6/2006

Vegas. The beautiful blond let me light her cigarette, and then said “Look slow, you can only see something for the first time once.” I watched her walk away down the street, and she looked as good going as she did coming. Immediately as she turned the corner, I pulled out my Moleskin notebook and flipped it open, writing down before it faded, the words she had said. That’s the magic of words, of paper, of pen. Something magical happens and you capture a bit of it, just a bit of it, forever

2/6/2006

Vegas. In 1968, the year I was born, the casino known as Honest John’s was renamed “Lady Luck”. On 2/6/2006, the Lady was closed. Wherever you look and wherever you listen they’ll tell you she went bankrupt due to lack of business. But I was there, and I know the truth.

Las Vegas is a desert underneath, just waiting for the water to run out. Only madmen and drunks walk far here, and poets like me. The sun is like God up there with a magnifying glass and you are an ant, crawling fast as you can to get to the life support system of any casinos air conditioning. But I was walking far, and long down the Strip, looking for an address. 3150 N. Buffalo Dr. the Rainbow Library. A little bird had told me that the Kerouac original scroll of “On the Road” was here in town. The night before, I’d met a guy named James Canary, who travels with the scroll, wherever it goes, the caretaker of the holy relic. He saw me chickenscratching in my black moleskin notebook. I had been considering the possibility that the old lady waitress named Myrtle who brought me my BLT the night before was actually God. And that maybe possibly when she told me “Enjoy” she was letting me in on the secret meaning of life. Maybe that’s all there is to it, after all. No need to get knee deep in the old timey philosophy in any case. So this guy Canary tells me, off the cuff, laconically, you might say, if you like the 25 cents words, the bird man tells me that Kerouac’s scroll is there in Vegas, at 3150 Buffalo Dr, maybe I’d like to pop in and check it out.

So there I was walking down the Vegas strip for about a million years, under the sun going supernova. All the regular people were hiding inside like vampires during the day, when all their illusions are revealed by heat and hangovers. I had two buddies who I’d come to Vegas with, to be honest they dragged me along, promising adventure, and strippers and drunken nights of madness, none of which transpired for me, because I was broke as usual. I tried to get them to come along and see the great poets masterpiece. I invited them to partake in my holy pilgrimage. I told them Kerouac typed the scroll for "On the Road" in three weeks in a New York City apartment in single-line, single-space format. It was typed on large-scale tracing paper trimmed to 9 inches to fit in the typewriter. In some areas the paper is as long as 15 feet. They looked at me like I’m a turd that’s grown legs, jumped out the toilet and just finished doing a Sammy Davis Jr. style tap number. Obviously they wanted no part of the pilgrimage. And that was fine with me. A real pilgrimage has to be made alone. On foot.

3150 N. Buffalo Dr.

I had arrived. But it was 20 dollars to get in and I didn’t have it. I pleaded with the old lady at the door. I used all my best words, passionate poetry, veiled threats, emotional blackmail. No go. The blonde was there suddenly on the sidewalk, and I do mean suddenly, I’m usually pretty observant about the things I see around me, she was there, with these impossible green eyes, like a dream of emeralds or all the money in the world. Maybe that’s why I felt no shame in asking her for 20 bucks. She answered “ I don’t believe in money” Which is a strange thing to say at all, let alone in Vegas, and I’m not sure it meant she didn’t have 20 bucks, or wouldn’t give me 20 bucks, or was philosophically opposed to all currency in general. She didn’t ask but I felt compelled to tell her “I’d give anything to get in this place.” My whole life as an artist flashed in front of my eyes. The utter futility of it. All those days, stories, screenplays, plays, poems, a novel (sort of, almost) 32 years of diaries, 100 moleskin notebooks, lined up on an old piece of wood like a shrine to wasted time, a wasted life. I said “I sacrificed everything on the altar of art, and all for nothing. Love, children, financial safety, peace of mind, the respect of other people, a home. I wished I had never decided to be an artist. I wished I had decided to do anything else, even something useless, ugly and destructive as long as I received lots of money for it."

She said to me “write this down’. So I did. “Be at the Lady Luck casino tonight at 9 o clock. At the 14th slot machine, straight down from the furthest bar West in the casino. Teddy is the bartender. There will be a lady there named Marge Chapman. It will start with her.” She waited for me to light her cigarette, which I did, and then she walked away.

A bunch of insignificant things happened between then and 9 o clock which if I told you about them, it would be only to make you wait, to build suspense, and life’s too short for that,

so then it was 9 o clock….

I was standing by a lady named Marge Chapman, and had been for about 20 minutes. She never stopped yanking on that one armed bandit even for a moment. She had no hope in her eyes and the liquor she was drinking had no effect, just sank in the mud of her liver, which at once was dry again. Then precisely at 9. DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING! Coins started pouring out of the machine. Marge was laughing like a little girl and scooping it up into her beat up purse. The machine next to me went off. DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING! Then every machine in the row. Even machines where no one was sitting! I really didn’t know what to do so I just started walking around in a daze. You could almost see it spreading across the casino. Unholy screams of excitement erupting from the craps tables, people jumping up and down, money being thrown up in the air, chips flying everywhere. You know how loud it is in a casino, the infinite chaos of noise, imagine it shooting up to 11, louder even. A guy bet 10,000 dollars at the roulette wheel on Red 9. The wheel spun for five seconds and then stopped DEAD as if God himself has grabbed it. Red 9. The Head of security dropped his drink to the ground and fainted. Two cops tried to revive him. Pretty soon, the dealers saw what was going on and started to abandon their tables, wanting to get in on the impossible action. The players went crazy screaming in anger, and its Pandemonium on the field. The owner of the casino got a call upstairs telling him what was happening, and almost had a heart attack. He set off the fire alarms and the sprinklers trying to shut the place down, but everybody was just laughing and screaming and winning and winning, as the water poured down upon them. A old guy with a big stogie that stunk to high heaven, handed me a nasty old felt hat full of giant wads of cash, and yelled “ go buy yourself a car kid! Hell, buy yourself a house! He pulled a wad of cash out of his pants and shoved it into my hand. “Here’s 20,000 more!” That 20,000 smelled none too good, so I left it on a table, and picked up a drink.

I filled my pockets with money. My shirt, my pants. I grabbed the table cloth off a restaurant table and filled that with cash too, heaving it over my shoulder like a giant hobo bag. I walked out of the casino to see further chaos in front. People were running out of the casino waving handfuls of cash, and a bunch of cops had shown up, thinking it was a riot, or a mass robbery. They were yelling freeze at everyone. One started shooting, then they all did. Luckily no one was hit. Not one person.

I heard later the whole thing lasted only 15 minutes. The casino lost several hundred million dollars. At least. They weren’t destroyed by any means, there’s a lot more money in the vaults at a casino then on the floor in case some sort of disaster occurs. A natural disaster. But The Lady Luck casino closed soon after because the owner Tony Tompkins lost his nerve. Who could blame him? The house always wins, right? Or usually? At least in the long run. But what if all the laws of chance and statistics and probability could fly out the window at any time? That’s like walking down the street and gravity stops holding you down. You just float up in the air. That only has to happen ONCE for a guy to be a nervous wreck about the world. That’s what happened to Tony, and the Lady Luck casino. It closed later that year, in 2006.

Of course like all miracles, over time, people stopped believing. And things got back to normal. The Lady Luck changed its name to the Downtown Grand and opened back up in 2013. Nobody in that casino believes that what happened that fateful day in 2006 could happen again. Nobody speaks of it. And nobody says the name “Lady Luck” in that casino either.

I went back to the Kerouac exhibit the next day, having acquired the $20 dollars I needed for entry! (and then some) The beautiful blond was there to meet me. I could tell by her mysterious smile and her laughing emerald eyes she wasn’t going to let me in on any secrets. How it happened, who she was, etc etc, whatever a fella could come up with. I asked her name and even licked the end of my pencil, moleskin notepad open, as if she was going to tell me. “You decide.” She said “You’re the writer”. A guy could fall in love with a woman like that in an instant. But I fell in love with my muse long ago, and she has ruined me for all other women. She speaks only one word, but it is the most enticing one. Truth. Truth that is beautiful, whether it be painful, or ugly, or heartbreaking, or small or large. Little moments of truth, our own and the worlds. Jotted down and kept forever like butterflies pinned to a wall. But better. Because the moments are still free and alive and as full of magic as the day they happened or the day we imagined they happened. 20,000 dollars. 20 dollars. The color of your first loves eyes. So many kinds of riches in this world. To be collected and kept for as long of forever as we have in our little black Moleskin notebooks, and in our warm beating hearts.