The woman beside him was playing three slots
at once, moving between them with the dexterity of an assembly-line worker. The taut line
that was her mouth made her look as determined as someone assembling war munitions. She
was a war munitions, assembly-line worker--on her annual one-week vacation that she spent,
annually, keeping the wheels of three slots spinning. Not for the money, Jimmy knew, but
for the OM of glamor where night was day and day was day too, winter, like the poor, a
distant fiction never heard in this Scotchgarded Garden where eternity was a constant 72°
and every wedding officiated by Elvis. Jimmy knew, because he recognized in the woman the
same determined exhaustion that he faced each day in his morning mirror and faced each
night in his evening mirror and met throughout the day in the faces of everyone whose
defining moment had become the answer to the question of whether or not they were going to
keep marching to the beat of a different drum machine.
The woman pushed the PLAY button on one slot machine,
simultaneously scooping coins from the hopper of the next to feed the third. 'To win you
got to play,' Jimmy thought, watching her. Her hands were black from the money.
He grit his teeth. Tomorrow was another
audition. Tomorrow, the dog would talk. It had to.
He put in two
of his three silver dollars, held back the last, then pulled the bandit's handle.
Whirr...
The Cherries
Cherries
Lemon that snapped up were as painful as a poke in
the eye. He swooned when he saw the row of Bells on the
$3 Play line: if only he had played all three
coins, he would have won $8,000!
"Grrrrr!" he
growled, fumbling to stuff in his last buck. But the audition he had tomorrow froze his
arm. His hand shook--if he didn't feed the Dog, it wouldn't even go to the audition, let
alone speak. Speak words--his siren, his savior that had turned to bite him--words that in
the mouth of the Dog were gold but in his only clay. A sickness came over him like he
hadn't felt since the time he tried to kick his drinking habit. Trembling, he stepped
back.
"The Dog! The god-damned Dog!" he swore, storming away. He
tromped past the piano-bar, past Caesar's Banquet--Lavish Buffet Dinner, 99¢!--past
a body builder dressed like an Egyptian slave. The show girl Jimmy tried to sleep with the
other night was also there, posed as one of the human statues Caesar's always had in the
casino. The star of the statues, she was dressed in a Cleopatra costume and stood on a
tall pedestal at the center of the room, rotating.
