Viewing her that way, seeing first her face,
then a profile of her tits, then her jazzercised butt, Jimmy wished he'd been born with a
body that may as well have been made of money. Then, instead of being one of the nooges
getting squeezed in the casino, he'd be in the biz, like her. He'd put on a sequined
g-string and parade around in one of the hundreds of Naughty-But-Nice, Direct-from-Paris
reviews that played all over town. Wistfully, he took off all but her Egyptian hat with
his eyes, then imagined the two of them doing it doggie style back in his hotel room. The
fantasy lifted his spirits and on her next revolution, he stepped forward and grinned to
attract her attention. Her beauty swept past like the beacon of a lighthouse; her
gaze--worse than insulting!--looked through him in profound unrecognition. He seeped away.
The Dog was waiting for him in the shadow of a faux-marble chariot. By
torch light, only its canine teeth could be seen. "Psst, pssst, Jimmy,"
it said, rising. "You're not gonna solve anything by pissing away my dog-food
money." The runt came slowly out of the darkness.
Jimmy
Diamond ignored it and began to walk. He was drunker than he thought--at least he'd scored
on the complementary drinks. The booze had dehydrated him, though, and he wished that the
moving sidewalk that had carried him past the flaming torches, past the holograms of
Caesar and his nymphs and into the casino also went back out to The Strip. It had to be
over two hundred yards away. He looked around to see what other suckers didn't have enough
dough for even the shuttle bus, but found that he was the only one taking a hike up the
long, long drive.
The Dog trotted to catch up, then stayed at his heel like an obedient
pet. "You've no reason to be cross with me," it said.
Jimmy stopped abruptly. "Are you going to talk at the audition
tomorrow?" he demanded. The Dog looked back with the stoic silence that only a dog
could have. When it began to lick its own bung hole, Jimmy felt a great urge to kick it.
He would have kicked it except high above, tourists were watching him as they were carried
toward the casino by Caesar's moving sidewalk. "Welcome to my empire," Caesar's
recorded voice said over a fanfare of trumpets.
Jimmy, then the Dog, walked on.
When they
were out of ear-shot of the tourists, it asked, "Did you hear the one about the blind
piano player and his seeing-eye dog?"
The first time the Dog told him one of its corny jokes, Jimmy laughed
till tears rolled off his cheeks. It was the shock of hearing a dog talk that made the
joke so funny, he knew. In fact, as they began to rehearse together, the Dog seemed to be
the four-legged essence of comedy itself, words fused with body, a sight-gag telling its
own continuous punch line. At the Dog's insistence, Jimmy had willingly recast himself as
straightman. He'd humored the Dog's conception of itself as a comedic genius, drawing on
method acting to fake interest in the Dog's boring theories on why it was so
hilarious--"an understanding that the real appeal of jokes was in their unspoken
pathos"--theories so screwy that they really were funny. But as weeks ground into
months, and months blurred into a year, Jimmy's smile grew more and more forced. He
groaned to think how lately he'd been disguising fits of frustrated anger as hysterical
laughter in the hope that he could coax the Dog into repeating one of its rotten jokes at
their next audition. Then their next. And the next. Now, down to the single dollar in his
pocket, he no longer had the strength to pretend.
"...one day," the Dog was saying,"the
seeing-eye dog jumped up on the bar and sat on a patron's martini."
"Don't tell me," Jimmy snapped, "tell it at the audition!
Tomorrow!"
"The patron stormed over to the blind piano player..."
"I'm not listening."
"...and said, 'Do you know your dog has his balls in my
martini?'"
"And the piano player said, 'No,'" Jimmy said, determined to
spoil the joke by spilling the punch line: "'But if you hum a few bars maybe I can
pick it out.' Yuk. Yuk."
