The Bet: Part Two

Remember, I rushed the Princess out of the house to make her ride in the passenger seat 10 hours straight to arrive at The MGM Grand after 2 AM. So, of course, when she awoke to a sunny Las Vegas morning with DJ Alesso peaking through our 21st-story window, there was a towering inferno of rage sparking up inside her that only needed a little more fuel to become a pillar of righteous fire inside my room. Here comes the fuel. She forgot her face wash. The flames roared. MORE FUEL! I forgot to bring her breakfast bars. Whoosh! I went out the hotel door like it was on the set of Backdraft and headed to the street for the nearest getting place. There was a CVS around the corner on The Strip, and I figured that the filthy sidewalk that bordered Las Vegas Blvd was survivable at this time of the day. It wasn’t just the heat I wanted to avoid, but the herd as well. Fortunately –D Gonzoni had not yet checked in yet so the mission was not hijacked by his waves of compassion and vanity. I had a chance to return to the hotel and put out the fire before the whole day was reduced to ashes. 

A pair of 6’2 “Showgirls” trolling for simps blocked my way so I might take pictures with them. Black Rockette styled stockings and corsets. Strong legs, capable of kicking the shit out of surly street menaces. One was swinging a black boa. I couldn’t evade because the travel lane was blocked by slow-moving traffic. This prey wasn’t for them. I was their sailor. 

“I like your hair,” said the red head. 

“Thanks,” I said, while picking up speed. 

But her partner roped me in with the black boa. It was futile. I just can’t help talking to the women folk when they speak to me, especially with terms of endearment. Maybe I am a simp. 

“Where are you from, honey?,” asked the one with the boa. 

I paused like an endorphin-overdosed jackrabbit hunched at the feet of a desert coyote. 

“Denver,” I replied. 

“Stay and play with us! Let’s take a picture.”

“I gotta see my wife!”

My legs kicked back on, and I squeezed between their sturdy frames and scrambled on towards the CVS Pharmacy. I cringed, realizing that I could have said something less servile. I’m pathetic. But, then again, I was fetching face wash with five hours of sleep. Being a pussy whipped husband seemed like the only way out. I escaped them that was the important thing.  –D Gonzoni would have been swallowed whole. They would have spat him out after squeezing five or ten dollars from him. It may have been his last picture. Further down the line, when that homeless woman tossed out her plastic cup across the sidewalk, ice cubes skidding from it, –D Gonzoni might have darted across Las Vegas Blvd. Or, not. He may have kissed the hood of a Lexus instead and been carried off by ambulance. 

But he had not arrived yet. On the other hand, I kept my cool and pressed on a few more yards into the CVS, where everything was locked behind security plastic. This place was more bolted down than the furniture in a prison cafeteria. They didn’t have what the Princess wanted exactly, so I spread my bets on a few alternates in hopes of a winner and headed back to the inferno of spousal fury in room 2125. 

I gave the showgirls a wide berth on the return trip. They were engaged with another schmuck. My lame excuse for escaping their grip still haunted me. Maybe they didn’t want my picture anymore.  

The fire was still blazing in the room like the Nevada sun reflecting off DJ Alesso’s forehead. He was quite the voyeur. He had company with him, too. Tyga. Other DJ Guy. All of these massive faces watched as I went to work selling these alternative products to The Pissed Princess. I danced with the fire. I’m a dragon, damn it. 

The heads watching us

I sought inspiration in –D Gonzoni’s art box. What would he have said if he were there, I wondered. Indeed, he’d be keen to point out that the infamously obscure author, G.A. Johnson, would have been drinking a malt liquor while chatting up those showgirls. He’d also have drank with the homeless person baking on the sidewalk. That degenerate had drank with the street population at every vacation spot he graced. Monterrey. New Orleans. Key West. Chicago. Definitely Las Vegas.  My best pal and travel companion, [Name Redacted], can attest to all this. He usually abandoned me on whatever street corner I was holding court on.

But, –D Gonzoni, if there at the time, would have also warned of the colossal fleecing that was about to take place. Except that –D Gonzoni was not there. I would be anxiously awaiting his arrival. There was no way we could leave the hotel property while his whereabouts were unknown. So we made our way outside briefly to watch for him. The Princess was happier too, now that she had taken time to see the Las Vegas sidewalk just long enough to take some deep breaths and check out the cleavage at the Hooters Hotel and Casino across the street. We both decided it would be fine to stay at our hotel casino all day while awaiting our magic moment with David Copperfield. 

There were too many potential hassles outside, anyway. Staying inside would be less work, I thought. All that was needed was to resist the old blackjack urge. I hoped to spend as little money as possible so that when Terrance Crawford won a narrow decision against Canelo Alvarez, I’d be able to pay for the whole trip and thus prove that –D Gonzoni is a genius. No booze, no serious gambling. I’d give The Princess $100 to make the lights flash. 

But in Las Vegas, you are just a genius in a crowd full of self-proclaimed geniuses. Gambling addiction, like all vices, judges all people as equals. Intelligence isn’t a sure-fire defense against reckless behavior. Impulse control is a separate function from your ability to count to twenty-one, or pick a number, or pick red over black. There’re games for everyone! If you don’t want to think about it, let the slot machines tell you when you win. There’s a game for everyone, so you'd better play! Those casino eclectic bills ain’t cheap. 

The brilliant social engineers at the MGM Grand and casinos all over the world were about to show me how expensive it is to be a lame-ass in Las Vegas.

We decided to check out the pool. We intended to spend time there rather than on the casino floor. Now I caught a glimpse of D Gonzoni.

He and his escort had stumbled into the feeble snares of an old woman behind a podium. She was dressed like a casino staff member. Like myself, Gonzoni was unable to be rude and not speak when spoken to by the sweet old lady type. She was tossing chum into the water, offering free food vouchers for the Casino restaurants…in exchange for…a timeshare presentation. Feeding his escort for free sounded good, but he didn’t expect a timeshare trap. She looked like a casino players' club or rewards program emissary. Those people were supposed just to give you free things to spend more money at the casino. The woman politely threw him back to the stream, though. Perhaps it was his missing front teeth that let him slip the hook so easily.  —D Gonzoni and his escort vanished behind a row of penny slots. If he had scored the $150 of food vouchers, he would have been disappointed to find out how little it’d buy him. 

The Princess wanted to continue the royal promenade and see the MGM empire before visiting the pool. There were several restaurants in the empire, of course. A food court, too. Even airport-style convenience stores are positioned at the gateway to the hotel towers. Here, the house exacted a serious toll on your passage to the elevators. You might win your money back when you double down on the blackjack table, but when you paid for food, you paid twice as much as it would have cost outside the casino, and you said goodbye to your money, knowing it was gone forever. To make things extra fun, there are no price tags on anything in the convenience stores, gift shops, or food courts. Whereas, every table game or gaming machine tells you how much you pay and how much it might pay you back. 

No exaggerations here: Wanna pay $10 for a small bag of Chips Ahoy? Think $35 is too much for one chicken sandwich, fries, and a drink at Johnny Rockets? How does $65 for a New York-style pizza sound to you? What’s that you say, you are going to see how much it is across the street? Fine.

Go wait for the valet to get your car. Then pay for parking at the other place and come back to pay us for parking again…

Or, take a walk outside and see how many times you can say “No Thank You” in a quarter-mile walk. Wearing flip flops? You might need a new pair once you’ve walked that puke-christened pavement. 

Or… how about paying us for a ride on our monorail to a different casino owned by our brand with similar, if not more expensive, food prices? 

I could hear the MGM lion roaring with laughter at my expense. G.A. Johnson would have brought handles of his liquor brand and thought nothing of spending a hundred dollars more on liquor-filled slurpees in novelty cups. There was no need for a food budget in those golden years of figuring I’d either be famous or dead by now, and hopefully both. 

We made our way back to the room after eating. If we could stay at the pool for hours and hours, we’d be safe from other purchases. Where the hell was –D Gonzoni? Only he could keep us safely distracted. We put on our bathing suits and headed back through the quarter-mile gift shop. I looked around as we passed by the Country-esque bar called Losers. 

Then I heard the song I’ve come to hate most in recent years; Too Sweet, by Hozier.

“I take my whisky neeeeaaaaattttttt.”

This song helps me stay sober. It makes money because the drunk girls love the bass line and the saccharine voice. So too did the walrus of a man swaying his flippers from side to side as he sang along and stomped in time behind me. He was one of a huge pod that had rolled into the MGM. 

"I take my whisky neeeeatttttttt," sang Mr. Walrus.

At some point, we must all take ownership of the way we present ourselves and expect to be commented on. I do not exclude myself from this; I own and cultivate the spectacle I often create. Besides, Walruses are regal creatures whose gorging on clams and other slow ocean life supplies the blubber that supports a precious ecosystem and the lives of indigenous people. 

Blue ink on the book

Flash forward to the David Copperfield Theater inside the glorious MGM casino. The marketing team at the MGM would like you to know I did spend time at the pool before making it to the show I booked as a 20th wedding anniversary present to my beloved Princess. –D Gonzoni waved to us as we bobbed around the lazy river a few times. We expected him to arrive at the theater. Our printed tickets had been stained blue. Back inside room 2125, someone had spilled water on our table, and the ink on the printed tickets had run, and also stained the copies of my book I’d brought. Now we waited for the ticket taker to usher us inside the mysterious theater beyond the bronze bust of the Greatest Illusionist of Our Time. 

David's first illusion happened at our house when I bought our tickets. On the booking website, the picture of the seating cart and the images of the David Copperfield Theater looked as large as the grandeur of the magical feats performed within. Obviously, David had some sort of time continuum abnormality inside there, too, because he had not aged beyond his dark and mysterious, handsome late thirties. So, of course, my paying $75 more per ticket to get seats at the long table in the second row was well worth the cost. It would most certainly increase the odds of The Princess paying out. 

Before leaving room 2125, I’d taken even more inspiration from –D Gonzoni’s art box and figured I’d be at least ten feet or more away from Mr. Copperfield. You know, in case of fire and pyrotechnics for safety and whatnot. That illusion dissipated as soon as we stepped down the carpeted stairs of the theater. Our seating was much more intimate with both the star and the audience than we’d imagined. 

Presto! There were times during the show when David Copperfield was standing over me and could fart on my head, and the Walrus man to the left of The Princess may have flopped off his perch with laughter.  

And look, I understand that Mr. Walrus was just as disappointed by how cramped the seating was. He may have paid more for his seats, thinking they’d fully accommodate his ass. His tickets were most likely bought with money earned by doing something more relevant to the economy than my cab driving or playing costume parties with folks. So who am I to poke fun at him? Maybe I won’t write a joke about his being packed between the tables tighter than the Pillsbury dough boy stuffed inside his cardboard tube. But I will point out that he practically fell into my wife while trying to maneuver his way into Section 1 Row 3B. Maybe he meant to get a closer look.

David Copperfield’s first trick [inside the theater] is to get you to sign a non-disclosure agreement and release him of all liabilities on a novelty-sized piece of parchment. His production staff, who are truly all-stars, brought the paper to those of us suckers in the front-ish rows to sign–he told us to make our signatures illegible. Only three out of the 12 or so of us did this. The production team member drew smiley faces next to our signatures. This paper would also be a pivotal prop in the grand finale at the end, although most of us completely forgot about it by the show's end. I can't remember what it was now, either. The second compliance test was the one where he asks you to email him your city and state before placing your phone in a special box on your table. As the emails rolled in, Kapow! dots appeared on a map of the world dangling before us. Shazam! We were now on his mailing list. David told us there would be a special gift for us in our inbox when we turned our phones on at the show's end. I declined to receive such a gift, figuring it to be endless marketing emails, and then took myself out of the running to be picked by Dave. But it was the third test, the practice standing ovation, that let Dave know just which of us might actually cause an insurance claim if we tried too hard to participate. 

I was already impressed with the show, and it hadn't even begun. Imagine getting a Walrus to first make his way down a narrow movie theater stairway to an even narrower walkway between the flimsy cafe-style tables in the “Golden Circle” at the front of the theater. Then make Mr. Walrus cram onto a bench seat designed by the interior decoration team at Southwest Airlines. And for a dash of danger, we [His Royal Copperfieldness] have had this bench seat built on top of a platform riser eight inches tall and extending less than twelve inches from the base of the bench. 

The show commenced as the Walrus adjusted to his perch. 

David told us a story about how he was a strange child who performed shows to the imaginary audience living on the wall of his bedroom. As a child, he dreamed of making an audience stand and applaud for his toy dinosaur, which he had brought to life! So we were asked to all stand and applaud at the mere thought of it.

Ta-Dah! The Walrus teetered on the edge of the ledge beneath the bench where his ass once sat. He teetered on the tip of his rear flippers and wobbled like a Jello mold of a doomed Jenga game. He clapped and tried to remain standing.

I saw the twinge of embarrassment on his face as we were then commanded to sit once more. Hell, I barely fit on the ledge and swayed like Captain Jack Sparrow. But Mr. Walrus was just one of dozens in the crowd who would be given the opportunity to become shamed submissives performing tricks for their despotic Daddy David. 

There is nothing that bonds people like being exploited together. Mr. Walrus was decorated in the midwestern vacationer style and most certainly on Team MAGA, but seeing him struggle not to cause his family further attention softened my general disdain for him. He would have his chance to make fun of my kind the next day. 

Meanwhile, I became a victim of Stockholm syndrome as I was truly entertained and at times dazzled by the Legendary David Copperfield. I shit you not. His production team and his showmanship are incredible. He brought the show into the audience space. No spot in the theater was safe. The tricks and laughs moved like a cartoon line of gunpowder struck by an acme match. Excitement raced from powder keg to powder keg, setting each off and igniting another sequence.

But, alas…we were too stupefied to really take it all in. All of that firepower was wasted…our attention spans were already blown. After all, at least a third of us were wasted before we got there. The elderly are the most cross-faded demographic of them all. Add intoxicants to the mix of a slew of prescription medications and deteriorating health, and it’s no wonder Grandma voted for Trump and sleeps with a Glock in a bedazzled holster. 

David Copperfield was also in the golden hours of his life. If –D Gonzoni were there, he might have accused the aged David of being a body double or stand-in. When not in the middle of conjuring things out of nowhere with his iconic poses, the set pieces seemed designed to prop him up between feats. The show was called “Live Impossible” and it was built around a nostalgic return to David’s childhood dreams, an homage to his beloved father, and the fear of death confronted in the melodrama of a little alien who appears to us in the middle of the show. At times, I felt that I was watching this iconic performer giving us his eulogy and life’s wisdom from the stage. He was pretty fucking tired. I felt some tears forming in both our eyes. 

Mr. Copperfield came of age in the last era of American mega-celebrity. Reaching the zenith of fame back then was like being assumed into heaven. His charming face was known by millions upon millions internationally. He used to have television specials before internet streaming fragmented the audience all to hell. He used to have a pristine advertisement for his show plastered across the top of the MGM. But the giant dinosaur and handsome face on the northwest tower were now blackened by the sun and fading at the edges. It reminded me of a sticker I put on the back of my truck and never bothered to scrape off after it faded. 

I was in spitting range of this man as I saw the look of disgust on his face grow as this crowd of shit faced and dementia stricken poor folk sat with our mouths agape from the moment we first struggled to comprehend simple instructions. 

By the end, almost all of us had forgotten about the toy dinosaur he told us about at the start. The whole show led to this moment. It was in all the marketing material. 

Seeing that most of us were either overstimulated, approaching diabetic shock, or desperately in need of a cigarette or beer…Dave basically sighed and said,

“How about one more?” 

We all nodded our heads like a glutton being offered his twelfth donut of the morning. We didn’t give a shit what flavor it was. Kablaam! Out came the dinosaur and our cue to stand once more and applaud with overtones of amazed, ‘gawd dang', and how da fuck did he’s in an uproarious recognition of The Greatest Illusionist of Our Time.

Mr. Walus actually slipped off the ledge and somehow landed on his feeble rear flippers. It was the last magnificent act of a solid show with an excellent production staff. The fat man had stuck his landing, so who the fuck was I to judge this man? Weren't we both victims of the same poor people trap? The MGM was the crab bucket of upper-lower-class working people just trying to feel important for a day or two. 

I did not feel jilted as I floated out of the theater filled with inspiration and goodwill toward all people. As the owner of a traveling Old West photo booth, I was inspired and astounded by how David Copperfield had orchestrated this show. There were so many movements and deceptive techniques at play. I wish I were that good. I don’t think he is getting proper respect from his audience or the MGM Grand. We’ve let him down. 

He still gets us to throw coins at the golden lion’s feet. He certainly is working his ass off, and he’s not forever young as MGM advertising would have us believe. What makes it possible for a performer to do the same show twenty times a week without losing his mind? Sure, there was lots of money. Yes, there was the power to humiliate people who were likely to have spouted all manner of hateful shit down at the Losers country-themed saloon. Maybe the amazed children in the audience were worth reciting the lines for. David Copperfield has entertained us all, from Royalty to Rednecks. He even does us the service of letting us know he was bullshitting us the whole time. He’s an illusionist, not a magician.

Meanwhile, outside of that theater, there is a world of illusion we’re being exploited by. David Copperfield’s faded sign looks out toward Trump Casinos' golden windows, blasting back a glimmering glow like flames in the forge of war. Social media and politically branded propaganda ministries that advertise as journalism have made anything seem so believable that a man pulling a 30-foot dinosaur out of a box isn’t sensational anymore. Chat GPT could tell you how to do it. The techno-pocalypse is near. May David Copperfield have mercy on our souls. 

I look out my window in room 2125. Alesso was peeping in on us again. His giant eyes met mine. A pizza box and various emptied bags of chips and candy were strewn about the floor and furniture. I’d managed to spend more on food than lodging. Where the hell was –D Gonzoni? There was a grocery bag filled with coin rolls that I needed to bet on Terrance Crawford. 

$100 to win

$100 to win by decision

$50 to win by stoppage

“That man survived being shot in the head! He was shot while driving! Took himself to the hospital and was fighting in the ring not long after the wound was finished closing. He won that fight. He’s a man of destiny!”  –D Gonzoni

Please, Terrance. I thought to myself. Please help me pay off this vacation. How could I survive another day at the MGM without financial ruin? 

TO BE CONTINUED