Mickey's Black Book

“Six. Six hundred. Six hundred dollars is all that I need. It’s all that I need by the seventeenth.” Mickey muttered this to himself over and over as the elevator rose, one slinking floor at a time, to the penthouse suite on the twenty third floor of Caesar’s Palace. “Six. Six hundred. Six hundred dollars is all that I need by the seventeenth.” The seventeenth, Mickey calculated, was five days away. “Five days to make six hundred dollars?” Mickey asked himself aloud, as he lifted his head and caught his reflection peering back at him from the glassy elevator wall. His panic paused for a moment as he caught his own gaze and wondered all at once how he had ended up here. His panic, as all panic is wont to do, quickly proceeded to slap him back to the most pressing issue of this particular moment. Closing his eyes and taking a deep breath in, then looking at his reflection with a resolved determination as he exhaled, he said it one more time. “Five days to make six hundred dollars.” Ding. The elevator door announced its successful climb. Mickey forced a fake smile as he entered the Penthouse.

He broadcasted in the most composed voice he could muster. “Hello? Housekeeping. Anyone here?” Silence. It was supposed to be all clear, of course, but he learned the hard way to always check for himself. So, one more time and a bit louder, he called out to see if anyone was in the suite. Leaning onto his toes, as if being two inches taller imbued his voice with more authority, he hollered out “hello.” Mickey fell back onto his heels, convinced he was alone. He let the fake smile fall away as it wasn’t helping his hangover. He took in the state of the space. It looked like animals and infants had the run of the place for the better part of a week. Not the worst he had seen, though, so he took a sip from his flask, and got to work.

Three hours and a half a flask later, it was lunch time, and the job of restoring the suite was half done. He started his break by peering out the window, knowing better than most how many secrets were held behind all those hotel windows. As he wandered about the details behind the lives of the tiny ant humans he saw below, it struck him once again that he had his own snafu to sort out. “Six hundred dollars in five days. Hmph.” He nodded his head at himself in disapproval of his current situation but did so with a smirk that acknowledged the fact that he had put himself there in the first place. For now, though, it was lunch time. Mickey didn’t feel like going through the trouble of finding something to eat, so he decided that a nap was all he would be having for lunch today. He kicked his shoes off and laid himself out on the as yet unmade master suite bed. Mickey always saved making the bed for the end of his workday, so that his work could at least in some way feel predictable and final. Exhausted, he drifted off to sleep rather easily, ready to leave the consciousness of his problems behind.

When he woke, the light didn’t hurt his eyes quite as much, and there was a small pool of drool where his mouth met the pillow. “Shit.” He only thought the word, but he still heard it somehow. It bounced back at him through that freshly blessed pillow which was wrapped almost all the way around his head. As Mickey lifted his head and peered over his shoulder with a grunt, he saw that he only overshot his break time by forty minutes. The day was still salvageable.

He had to make up for lost time though, so with a drawn out grunt Mickey rolled off the bed, stashed his flask in the empty bedside drawer, and then chugged water from the faucet of the master bathroom sink by cupping his hand under the spigot. He chugged until his stomach told him to stop. Stood up. Burped. Then chugged a little bit more. After wiping the extra water from his face with his sleeve, he let out a yell like Tarzan and began working with a ferocious speed. As Mickey continued to repair and clean the penthouse, he found it odd that for all the damages and discord, there was no trash. No trash in the kitchen, the bathrooms, on the floor or stuffed between couch cushions. No trash anywhere. “So be it,” he thought to himself. Mickey kept working at a feverish pace, determined to impress himself by the end of the day. He found a faucet for hand cupped chugs of water every half hour or so, and only stopped to pee when the pressure began to make him dance a little.

A few sweaty hours later, all that was left was the master bed. Mickey had paint drying on small wall holes he recently repaired, all the furniture was back in its proper spot, and broken light bulbs had been swept up and replaced. Not a single piece of standalone trash was ever found. “Hmph, weird, but whatever.” Mickey mumbled as he positioned himself at the foot of the bed. He could see a faint outline on the pillow where his drool dried. Being this close to the end of his workday, and having a nap for lunch, his stomach smacked him with a sharp and sudden hunger. It felt like he got kicked in the gut. Mickey rubbed his stomach in a few small circles. “Oh, okay, let’s take care of you.” Then he quickly replaced the sheets and pillowcases and made the bed so well the corners looked sharp despite the fluffy mattress underneath. With the final piece of work done, Mickey peered at the clock and saw that he had a few minutes left to spare. “Nice” he let out with a breath of relief, as he figured he could now polish off his flask all at once, in celebration of a job well done.

As Mickey pulled open the bedside table, his flask floated into view. When he reached in to grab it, he felt something in the shadowy recess of the drawer. It felt to him like one of those old tiny Bibles that used to be stuffed into hotel and motel rooms and given out in parking lots by zealots. As he pulled it out to toss it away, he saw that there were no markings on the outside, yet the leather felt as soft as velvet, in a way that betrayed the books age. No bigger than the palm of his callous and chapped hands, it carried that deep and dense smell of books that you can only find in the far corners of old libraries. Certain spots on the book carried a deep black sheen, but most of the leather had been worn down to a fuzzy grey. When he opened it and flipped its pages, Mickey’s intrigue doubled as there did not seem to be anything written inside. He checked the first few and last few pages deliberately and found nothing. Not a brand logo or any identifying mark whatsoever. Mickey wondered how the book could get so old and be overlooked for so long. He wondered if in the end he would become just as forgettable.

He decided to flip the middle pages under his thumb again, but this time a bit slower. Somewhere near the middle he stopped. There were two names. One written over the other, with a line dividing them in a lazy slant. Garvin, and Gillespie. Having found something, Mickey, without realizing it sat on the edge of the bed, and meticulously checked the remaining pages. Nothing more to be found though. So, he went back to the page with the names. “Garvin. Gillespie. Huh.” He said as his head tilted up from the book cradled in his hands. The light from the sunset flooding in through the suite’s windows bathed his face a pale orange. He sat still, with an expression resting on his face that said he was close to solving a riddle. Then a faint and steady growling noise began ringing in his ears. His head shook right and left, and he stood up quickly to check behind him as the growling noise grew. As the growl hit it’s crescendo and suddenly stopped, he realized it was his stomach, slapping him back into reality.

“Ah, let’s get outta here.” Mickey said to himself as he stashed the book into his back left pocket without a second thought. Checking the time and seeing that he still had a few minutes to spare, he twisted his flask open and walked over to the window. His skin was bathed pink now. Mickey hoped that the sunset of his life would be as colorful and ever changing as the ones the dessert sky threw over him on most nights. He felt a rare but immense satisfaction with this moment, as it was, and he knocked back all of what remained of his whiskey. As he twisted the flask closed, the liquor hit his empty stomach. It shot warm and numbing tingles to his fingertips and his toes by the time he made it into the elevator. Mickey planned to check out with the hotel manager and immediately make his way to one of his dives. He needed to think, and nothing cleared his head like a bacon cheeseburger with a double order of fries.

Half an hour later, sitting bar side and awaiting his burger, Mickey found himself staring at the names of Garvin and Gillespie as he held the old leather book. His aimless thoughts were interrupted by his waitress. “Hey hon, your burger is about to come out. You gonna want some tobacco sauce or anything?” Mickey piped up with “Tobasco sounds great, actually, and hey can I ask you something? You ever heard of these names?” As he held the notebook up the waitress squinted to read the names while she simultaneously grabbed a napkin-wrapped roll of silverware and set it in front of Mickey. “Yeah actually, those boys are fighting tonight. And Garvin is the favorite by a mile. I think Gillespie is like +600 or something ridiculous.” The kitchen bell let out a ding at just this moment, much like the ding of the elevator this morning, and Mickey’s burger was brought piping hot to his hungry hands.

He started eating as he stashed the book away and thought about the serendipity of the odds on this fight. Before the tabasco splashed fries were finished, Mickey had made his decision. After eating, he went home to grab his last one-hundred-dollar bill. The one he kept in an envelope in a small box under his bathroom sink. You know, for emergencies. He placed his bet but felt too tired to stay up and watch the fight. The next morning, when Mickey woke, before he checked to see if he had won the bet, he reached for the book. He wanted to feel it again. He opened it up and saw that the name Gillespie had a circle around it now, and the page behind the names now had the words “Black 33.” When he got to the casino and found that he had won six-hundred dollars in his sleep, he knew what to do next. He took those winnings and let it all ride on Black 33 at the nearest roulette table. It hit, and Mickey was sitting on twenty-five thousand dollars. He opened the little black book again wondering how rich he may be by the days end. The words Garvin and Gillespie, and Black 33, had all disappeared, and Mickey instead found the words “Go Home.” So, Mickey packed up, and bought a plane ticket.