Jimmy Diamond--or rather, Jimmy Diamond!--stared
at the Cherries, Cherries, Lemon displayed on the slot machine he was pumping, his
stomach clanging from the row of Bells on the $2-Play line: if only he had played
two silver dollars instead of one, he would have hit an $800 jackpot!
He tried to talk himself into believing that the machine was now primed for the
next pull, the very next one. But its grill work grinned back with the same smart-assed
muteness of the Dog and he knew that nothing he could say would change its unrelenting
"thingness," deaf as a statue and for that reason a heckler of words.
"Play me! Play me!" screamed his last dead presidents, their
metal faces hot in his fist.
If he lost them all, he wouldn't be
able to feed the Dog. The god-damned Dog! Already he'd blown auditions at half the casinos
on The Strip, trying to get the Dog to talk--as it did back in East St. Louis. As it did
everywhere except on stage. If only he had auditioned his own comedy routine as
he'd originally planned, he'd be booked into a swanky room by now. How could he have been
so dumb to trust fame to a dog!
As though in answer, the words WORLD'S BIGGEST
BILLBOARD drifted through his mind. He hadn't been out of the Vegas airport ten
minutes when he'd seen them: skyscraper-high words--Watch This Space!--plastered
across, if not the world's biggest billboard, then at least a really big one, and if only
the Dog would talk, his face--Jimmy Diamond's face!--would be the first to grace
the newly erected sign. Some swanky hotel on The Strip would construct a swanky stage for
him the way they all did for swanky acts that were expected to play into the next century.
It's what he'd always dreamed of--pure swank. So he'd gambled. He'd thrown his act down
the crapper in order to showcase the Dog. The god-damned Dog.
