Just fer the helluvit, I am gonna post sumpin I wrote for a magazine a half-century ago. Just accidentally found it. It was written along about the time that James Bond (original) was wrecking every Las Vegas police car as he drove through the Downtown part (now pedestrian only).
Loved that movie.
At least it increases the post count and I sure as beans don't make even 49c on it:
Las Vegas Lunacy
C Walt C. Snedeker
I was sitting there lost in thought (of
course I was lost – it was unfamiliar territory) when The Fabled PC came in grinning like someone with a fresh lobotomy to announce that we were “leaving tomorrow”.
“Unh? Where are we going to leave it?” Sometimes it takes a while for my questions to make sense, but I’m working on it.
“Our
trip, silly!”
I knew better than to say, “What trip?” even though as usual I had no faint idea what she was talking about. So I bluffed it a little while I tried to figure out what she was on about.
“Yeah, we’d better pack.”
“Everything’s packed.” A dainty hand swept around the living room, calling my attention to two little luggage bags – the kind with little handles and wheels on them. This did not help me. No matter where we go (even just to a local restaurant) my redhead always packs the same two bags.
“The tickets are in the usual place. Do you have everything ready?”
It was getting to be dangerous ground. I was being asked for specifics, and I still had not figured out what trip was in the works.
“Ummm…” I stalled.
“Do you have a copy of that matrix of Blackjack hands?”
Bingo! We were going to Las Vegas! I remembered now. We had planned on it several months ago. If things are to come to pass, the Fabled PC is the one who must follow through on our plans. And here she had followed through. Now that the memory was triggered, I vaguely recalled her mentioning it a few times in the last week or so.
I have a statistically compiled cheat sheet that tells you the best odds for what to do in Blackjack for every combination of hands. I was going to get to try it out in Lost Wages.
Airline tickets to Las Vegas are hard to come by. Therefore, ours delivered us to the Las Vegas Airplane Patch after a full 13 hours of dilatory travel. The handy carry-on wheelies made it so that we could avoid the luggage claim hassle and go directly to the taxi hassle. Strangely, cabs in Las Vegas are, by any impartial assessment, decrepit. Ours was worse. And our driver was proud of the fact that this was his first time out since prison.
We told him that we were staying at the brand new El Rancho Gomorrah. Although we could see this edifice from the airport, somehow it took $20.00 on the meter before we got there.
After checking in, we decided that we wanted to do a “memory lane” trip to Downtown.
The last time we had been there was when we were newly married kids with a $3 gambling budget. Our strongest memory was of how The Fabled PC could play slot machines and drink gin-atomics, but they refused to sell her a pastrami sandwich because she was underage (a true fact)!
My, how the place has changed! There aren’t even any cars in downtown Las Vegas anymore. The streets are now pedestrian walkways with souvenir kiosks in them.
And not only could we not find the Nevada Club (where Your Humble Obedient &tc. had won a $4 jackpot and free breakfast for two with that minuscule gambling budget) but nobody there had even heard of the place.
The big “Howdy Partner” sign was still and silent. We felt like aliens had taken over, leaving only a parody of the original place.
So we went back ($20 cab fare each way) to El Rancho Gomorrah. I got out my cheat sheet, and found a $5 table. With my darling at my side, I played for about two hours, winding up $15 in the black. YAY!
The next morning, I decided to get my lovely some coffee before she awoke. So I went down to the big casino and asked at a restaurant. They told me coffee is served in the bars located around the floor. Naturally, I decided to plunk a ten-dollar chip down on a Blackjack table.
The Assassin with the deck dealt me a pair of eights. The cheat sheet and common sense said to split – the dealer was showing a six. Oh boy! So he dealt me another eight (split again) and then a three. So I have 11, 8, and 8. I doubled down on the 11. Beelzebub then dealt me a two to go with my second eight. Yup. Double down again. Then he dealt me another eight for that last eight. Split again, then double down
again.
Might I refresh the Gentle Reader with the monetary status of this transaction? My original bet was $10. This was doubled when I split, incremented to $40 when I split again and yet again. Doubling down four times brought my bet for this one lousy hand up to $80.
Beetlejuice then proceeded to turn over a half a dozen cards, until he got a nice total of 21. I was suddenly out $80, and I hadn’t even gotten coffee yet.
When I staggered nonchalantly back into our room, The Fabled PC took one perceptive look at me and said:
“You look lower than a lizard with its legs shot off. What the heck happened to you?”
So much for trying to fool
her.
I explained the stinky rotten way they had beat me up. She said that she was going to go on down there and beat up their poker machines. Because they were much cheaper to lose on.
One must never underestimate the power of The Fabled PC’s grip upon the supernatural. She was playing the poker machine for five minutes when it ruptured itself, and began spraying nickels.
Four thousand nickels.
I took a picture of her holding several buckets of nickels, with the poor machine still spitting them out.
Then she said, “OK, now you get even with them. You can play a nickel poker machine and win, too.”
She’s serious when she says things like this. It took me less than five minutes. Then the Fabled PC took a picture of me sitting there bemused, with the poker machine framed in the picture with all the wheels lined up, spitting another 40 pounds of nickels.
“Now you can go play Blackjack and they won’t pick on you anymore.”
And they didn’t. We didn’t win a jillion dollars, but we didn’t lose any money in Las Vegas, either.
The moral here has nothing to do with gambling. It is this: Don’t
ever get The Fabled PC thinking that you have done her husband wrong. The penalty can be too awful to contemplate.
