I had every intention of trying one last time to talk Jed out of it, but I couldn’t muster the energy. Every muscle of my body ached from having tightened up so tensely in anticipation of this moment I had been dreading.
Jed paid for his chips. The audacity of the several towering piles in front of him drew in a small crowd. The two blond women looked intrigued, almost aroused.
The croupier called for bets. Jed pushed all of the chips over to red.
A wise guy behind us cracked, “I would have gone for black.”
I wanted to slug him. If only I’d been ten years younger…
The roulette wheel began to spin, the ball deposited. “No more bets,” said the croupier. Everyone leaned in. Everyone stopped breathing. The clockwise spinning of the roulette wheel, the counter-clockwise circling of the ball — it seemed to go on forever. And then the ball began its skip and skitter among the number slots as the wheel slowed, finally settling into its final numerical resting place. The number wasn’t red. The number wasn’t black. It was green. A zero. Zero was the house’s number — one of the two numbers (the other, the double zero) that helped the casino to make a profit in this game of otherwise pure chance. It was easy to calculate the payout that Jed would have received had he put all his chips on the house’s zero rather than red: seven hundred thousand dollars. Enough to buy several Montana ranches in 1967. But I would have blown up the building before allowing him to put all of that money on a thirty-five-to-one shot.
What did my stepson do in that next moment? He smiled, he shrugged, and then he said, “That’s what you call a bust, Pops.”
Several months later, Robert — otherwise known as Evel — Knievel, of Butte, Montana, played even longer odds when he convinced the CEO of Caesars Palace to let him (at the time only a semi-famous daredevil) jump over the casino’s fountains with his motorcycle. Knievel came up short, lost control of his bike, and ended up with a crushed pelvis and femur, several fractures, and a concussion that kept him comatose for almost a month.
Nor was the “Vocal Vesuvius” immune to the vagaries of boom and bust, although his bust was of the permanent variety. After an eight-year career as a popular vocalist and recording artist, Rouvaun, a.k.a. Jimmy Haun of Bingham, Utah, erstwhile boomtown, now vacated ghost town, died suddenly in 1975 of a rupture to the esophagus from all the strain he’d been placing on his Vesuvian vocal cords.
My stepson Jed and his wife Babs won the California SuperLotto in 1993 (boom!) after years of struggling to come back from the Dunes Casino loss. The lottery, which has much in common with the casino game Keno (which was born in Butte, Montana’s Chinatown), awarded the couple enough money to share a little with Jed’s aging parents (such a good boy) and to pay for a trip to Las Vegas, where Jed and Babs and their adopted daughter Tian planned to stay at the famed Dunes Casino hotel (for old times’ sake). Unfortunately, the casino, having been out-razzle-dazzled by the bigger, better-capitalized newer generation of casinos, was due for demolition on the weekend of their visit. They stayed at Treasure Island instead, and, along with two hundred thousand other spectators (who were there for the biggest show the Dunes had ever put on), watched with wide-eyed wonder the deliberate imploding of the casino that had taken twenty thousand hard-earned dollars from them back in 1967. There were fireworks and “cannon blasts” from Treasure Island’s pirate ship, and then the Dunes’ North Tower came down in fittingly dramatic fashion.
Jed held his wife tightly around the waist as the crowd gasped and squealed and hooted with delight and Tian covered her tender teeny-bopper ears. Then Jed smiled at a thought which he later shared with his grizzled old man — the stepdad label having long been replaced by dad-in-fulclass="underline" “The Dunes was the first casino on the strip to offer showgirl tits (literal bust). And when it went out, it went out with a big ol’ bang (literal boom)!”
I’m telling you — you just can’t make this stuff up.
1968 HIERATIC IN KANSAS
Nearly every Saturday night for the last five years, Father Mullavey had driven from his parish in Kansas City, Missouri, across the Intercity Viaduct Bridge, and into the Strawberry Hill neighborhood of Kansas City, Kansas, to visit his childhood chum and fellow altar boy, Herman Klar. The two men, both in their late forties, drank Schnapps and sometimes Scotch whiskey, and if the priest drank too much, Herman and his wife Jelena would play chauffeur and even tuck him into bed in the rectory — ever so quietly — so that Mrs. Davies wouldn’t wake and give him a dressing down the next morning for his shameful un-priestlike inebriety.
Father Mullavey was fond of the widow Davies and would have married her if the Roman Catholic Church ever came to its senses on this whole celibacy matter. This is what Herman’s wife Jelena believed. Jelena was of every sort of opinion under the sun, including how to make the world a better place on her own terms. She was in her mid-forties, the mother of twin daughters, each recently returned to college in Ohio on this early September weekend. The daughter of Croatian parents, Jelena Lisinki Klar had grown up in Strawberry Hill among Croatian meatpackers and their bustling, garrulous wives. Jelena inherited her big hands and large frame from her father and her assertive tongue from her mother. There was no debate to be brooked on the decision to buy the little gingerbread house on Thompson, which sat on a bluff overlooking the Kansas River. Because Jelena’s roots were there.
And she wanted her roots back.
The two men sat on the back porch, cocktail glasses in hand, itemizing aloud all of the things that over the years had rolled down the steeply sloping backyard and into the river. “The girls had a beach ball when they were four, five years old,” Herman recalled with a chuckle. “JELENA! COME OUT HERE FOR A MINUTE!”
Herman’s wife stepped out onto the ancient wooden porch that she and her husband and their two girls had shared for over fifteen years with intermittent colonies of termites and intermittent tank-sprayer-armed employees from the Smithereen Exterminating Company. “I was about to pop up some Jiffy Pop, Herman. Miss America starts in ten minutes.”
“They were b-burning bras this afternoon,” said the priest. He peered off into the distance as if focusing his gaze on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, the site of that day’s acts of undergarment mischief.
“Who?” asked Herman. “The contestants?”
“Of course not. The — the — the protesters. The women’s libbers.”
Jelena put her hands on her hips and tapped her foot. “What did you want, Herman?”
“That beach ball we used to have — whose idea was it to leave it in the backyard so it would roll down the hill?”
“I don’t know, Ljubavi,” said Jelena, employing her favorite Croatian term of endearment for her husband. “How can I remember something from that far back? And they didn’t burn their bras, the protestors. The police wouldn’t let them. They said the fire would engulf the whole boardwalk. It’s made of wooden boards, you know.”
“Why would they want to burn their bras anyway?” asked Herman.
“Do you mean that, Herman? Do you mean that question? Tell him, Father. Tell my husband, who is still stuck in the year 1946, why women would protest the Miss America pageant.”