Beautiful Children Read online

  Business may have been slumping that year with terrorism threats, a free-falling economy, and airline bankruptcies combining to drive most hotels’ weekday occupancy rates to dangerously low levels. But on weekends, the city still overflowed as in the boom times, with occupancy rates spiking to above 90 percent. On Saturday nights, the price of a hotel room more than doubled. The cheapest blackjack tables were bumped from a two-dollar minimum bet to twenty. If you wanted to see Bill Cosby at Caesars, Bob Dylan at the Mandalay Bay, or Nudes on Ice at the Union Plaza, tickets were not only twice as expensive, brokers would tell you, but also twice as difficult to get. Everything cost more on Saturday night. On Saturday night everything was worth more. On Saturday night more was at stake, for players as well as the people serving them. Thus, the guy in the chef's hat at the buffet was more than happy to slice you an end cut. The bathroom attendants lowered their heads an extra subservient notch while offering selections of cologne.

  Five out of ten livelihoods in Clark County depended on keeping visitors happy, and four of the other five were indirectly dependent. Which meant that at approximately nine thirty-five P.M. on the Saturday night of the second week of August, the blackjack dealer did not so much as raise his eyebrow at the prematurely balding guy who strained at the confines of a shiny lamé shirt (if the dealer had to guess, he'd say the shirt had been purchased especially for this trip). It meant that the dealer retained his poker face as this guy was dealt four consecutive hands of thirteen or fourteen; and that when this poor schlep, as per the instructions of his Get Rich Quick Players Guide, hit on the first three hands, and each time received a face card, he received the dealer's sympathies. It meant that during the fourth hand, when this guy stared at his cards, let out a deep breath, took off his thick black eyeglasses, and rubbed at his temples, when he said, Okay, I'm good, hold, and promptly watched what should have been his seven go to the next player, the dealer did not laugh out loud. And, too, it meant that when Bing Beiderbixxe, angry and dejected and more than a little abashed, left the casino, and asked the valet parking guy about the nearest strip club, he was not met with any sort of judgment. Just a sly smile, the wink of the complicit.

  But remember, it's also Saturday night for residents of Las Vegas. And while a great many of the locals are busy dealing the wrong cards to the right people, there remain a large number of folks whose weekdays have been spent performing such tasks. When Saturday hits, these people are more than ready to let loose. Top tier pop acts perform at the university basketball arena. The city also is home to minor league teams in hockey, arena football, and baseball, as well as professional drag and stock-car racing tracks. Don't forget the drama companies, repertory ballet, the museums (art, natural, and regional history), or the zoo. All have their merits. Yet like the infamous founder of the Hair Club for Men, who on late-night commercials happily proclaimed himself to be not only the president of his club, but also a client, a great number of the people who live and work in Las Vegas are most captivated not by zoos and ballet, but by games of chance. On weekends, they leave the Strip to tourists, downtown to the unfortunates. The action heats up along the city's perimeter, adjacent to its many suburbs, inside the many casinos that specifically cater to locals, places like Sam's Town and the Palace Station, warehouse-size halls whose hotel rooms usually sell because the Strip has been overbooked. Here, the vibe is tangibly different from on the Strip: all the overblown pretenses and fantasies have been stripped away. Frequent-player slot clubs provide senior citizens with rebates at area grocery stores, and pick-the-parlay football contests require a Nevada driver's license to enter. Money still flows through the casinos; there's still enough energy in the air to rival any big-name joint, but out here the energy is shaded with blue-collar pragmatism. Career dealers and waitresses occupy untold seats around blackjack tables. Logrolling is constant, as is the business of watching, and washing, backs. You never know, the guy you broke in dealing poker with ten years ago could show up as a pit boss; the husband of your former secretary might end up a head waiter.

  Lincoln Ewing happily thanked his old buddy with an arm around the shoulder and a twenty-dollar bill folded inside a handshake. A chair was pulled out for Lorraine. For more than a moment she allowed herself to be charmed by the dark and intimate table in the restaurant's far corner. Her husband's charisma impacted her as it had in the old days, his seemingly endless connections reminded her just how likeable he could be. Instead of checking her watch, she reached across the candlelit table, placed her hand atop his. The wine steward would be around shortly.

  Hey, Kenny had asked, what are you doing later? And if Newell hadn't known what exactly a Saturday night entailed, he had known that Saturday nights were fun. What kind of fun, what exactly fun consisted of, what it was that made fun so damn fun as opposed to say, neat, or nifty, those were for someone else to worry about. Someone besides the N to the E to the dub to the E to the L to the L. And isn't that the essence of being twelve—being impressionable, blissfully ignorant of ramification? But Newell Ewing was also learning that, often, getting what you asked for meant getting more than what you asked for. He was on the Strip, hell yeah, descending the poorly lit stairwell reserved for employees of the Circus Circus Hotel & Casino and Family Entertainment Emporium, his footsteps resounding on the corrugated metal. Newell took another two steps in one leap, no longer fretting about the way his oversize and unbelted shorts kept slipping below the placement generally acceptable for a homeboy sag, nor the quarter-size nacho stain that his mom would blame him for getting on his fifty-dollar T. The concession stand of overpriced and undernuked cardboard foodstuffs. The arcade of video games that had malfunctioned and eaten his quarters. The rigged carnival games. The barkers who, whenever they'd gone on breaks, had made sure the stuffed bears were attached to the booths with metal hooks, so he couldn't ever snag one. These were behind him now. Oh he was runnin’ with the big dawgs, strutting like a mack daddy, heading for fun of the serious and monumental and three-sixty-degree-slam-dunking variety. Fun that got blacked out by V-chips. The grade-A jollies he not only deserved, but was entitled to. The fun that was supposed to be the whole point of a Saturday night out.

  Head start or not, Kenny wasn't about to let his friend get the best of him. His legs were longer than Newell's, and even if his strides were ungainly, he quickly made up ground, pulling even with Newell now, the pair of them running side by side for one, two, three steps down the stairwell. Kenny did not look over at Newell, he did not need to, for he felt his friend's breath rise and fall in syncopation with his, felt their legs moving to the same cadence. Kenny had an inkling to turn toward Newell and smile, but it also seemed that acknowledging the moment would ruin it. Bangs whipped into his eyes but Kenny did not brush them aside. He pushed off a step with his right leg and with an awkward leap pulled ahead—clearing the bottom three stairs, spending one blissful moment suspended, his legs spread wide and bent at the knees, his body pressing forward, feeling graceful and light, released, weightless.

  With a thud like a baseball bat against the side of a car, he landed on the small steel platform, his momentum carrying him forward now, propelling him first into the maintenance door, and then into the great hall. Air glittered with nicotine and conversation; it dripped with hope and desperation and designer perfumes. Through the vague and blinking distance, keno ballasts flashed, the digital figures of progressive slot jackpot reader boards were in perpetual motion; the waterfall of coins into metal tins was resonant, continuous, an orchestral hymn.

  Meanwhile, halfway across town, a girl sat in an ice cream truck.

  If only it were possible to place her in the comic book shop earlier that day, to have her perusing the racks with a combination of fascination and haughtiness, to have her idly flipping through issues whose covers caught her fancy, then checking to see how fast the line was moving. She would have been bored, anxious to blow that metaphorical taco stand, hightail it over to the four-dollar matinee in time to buy popco
rn and still make the previews. Absently she would have been fingering some of the stray fringe from where she had cut the sleeves off her Cub Scout shirt. She would have been shifting her slight body's weight from one sunburned sapling of leg to the other, then peeling small, transparent flakes of skin from the meat of her freckled arm, and then yanking on the back hem of her thrift-store skirt; maybe thinking about giving voice to her dissatisfaction with the slowness of the line, or simply plopping down onto the carpet, sitting on her knees and losing herself in one of the illustrated fantasies. She would have been weighing all these options, choosing none of them, simply killing time, her jittery, girlish mannerisms drawing just enough attention to get her noticed.

  What can you do? The girl didn't like comic books. Punk Planet was more her speed. The Anarchist Cookbook. Moreover, there's something cosmically wrong with the girl being introduced by way of her location and activity. It is more appropriate to her personality that you meet her through negation, based on precisely where she was not. To wit: the distinction she insisted upon when discussing her skull. Not bald, but shaved. Like a sprinkle of pepper atop an egg, is how she phrased it. Like the blades of grass that certainly will reclaim our scorched earth in the days following Armageddon. The girl was more than happy to explain that the chickens raised at farms owned by Kentucky Fried Chicken had been genetically mutated—did not possess beaks, wings, feet, or feathers and, ergo, did not qualify for the Oxford English Dictionary definition of the word chicken. Easily and at the drop of a hat, she'd pontificate on the evils of red meat, dairy products, hormone-affected poultry, pesticide-sprayed fruits, genetically engineered vegetables, sugar or bean products gathered by exploited Central American workers, and any other foods she thought were connected to the worldwide conspiracy. Anyone who cared (and many who did not) had heard the girl with the shaved head explain that she'd pretty much existed on wheat and bottled water for three months now—and wheat was on shaky ground depending on how much she could download about this administration's policies toward corporate farm subsidies, and as for bottled water, two dollars for fucking water? Totally elitist. Another scam.

  Can you hear the lilt in her voice? The musical insouciance that coated her doomsayings?

  ——

  They were pissing away their Saturday night. Cruising the road to nowhere. Francesca had picked her up and they had landed in this dented old ice cream truck, which was parked across three spaces of the student lot at Edward W. Clark High School. They were hanging in the back—the girl plus Francesca plus a few others back there, seven or so. Self-proclaimed misfits whose indignation had at some point attracted hers. Like-minded thinkers whose interests extended into different subjects. Blokes who went out of their way to use the word bloke, calling each other at outrageous hours of the night and filling the dead air with whispers, who traded personalized mix tapes culled from hidden tracks on their favorite compact discs, delighted in the fact that the cassette tape was an ancient and disappearing species, and made sure to take special time and effort in their hunts through vintage shops for the forgotten postcard that would have a special, though not overt, significance to the receiver of the tape, thereby serving as that tape's perfect piece of cover art. Who played tag in graveyards and haunted the matinée shows at two-dollar theaters and made out with one another at random when there was nothing else to do, cutting class and sitting on top of their cars in the school parking lot, sneering at anyone who dared walk by, and loudly championing obscure bands because they were obscure, because they were signed to independent labels and run out of some garage and therefore removed from the drive-time prime-time socio-corporate-conspiracy: Be Yourself, Buy Our Product. The latest incarnation of suburban anarchists, their appearances painstakingly vandalized to reflect not an opinion of themselves but of the world; their respective and collective existences devoted to the embrace and celebration and exaltation of any fad, fashion, font, diet, drug, gossip, glyph, golden calf, black magic, method of self-mutilation, chat room signature pic, necromicon, exotic cosmetic accessory, erotic Universal Resource Locator, and/or generalized lifestyle choice that beyond a shadow of doubt proved they were not in league with this fucked-up world.

  There was beer, a watery brand of dog piss that had been obtained through whatever machinations teens go through to get alcohol. There was a dime bag of really weak hash that had somehow gotten the nickname Tijuana Worm. Zydeco music played on a scratchy LP, though nobody was paying it attention, for they were too busy talking, of course, a bunch of teenagers slinging shit, would-be immortals in conversations that were destined to be carved on the sides of mountains. Voices still in the process of maturation cracked and reverberated off the metal hull, merging together; sentences overlapping, their echoes becoming jumbled, mixing in with the fiddles and banjos, this complicated, irrepressible tune.

  The girl was in the far back, sitting on some sort of off-roading tire. Jagged treads were digging into the back of her thighs and she was squirming in place, trying to look like she was not squirming, pretending she did not care about getting her skirt dirty. A black plastic trash bag had been duct-taped where the rear window should have been, and shards of light were filtering in through the holes in the bag, creating columns of illumination, which fell upon her like water from a shower nozzle, this almost angelic effect.

  This place sucks, she said. I can't stand it here.

  She yapped intently, obliviously, as if she were the first person to come up with her idea, as if the notion of flight—I can't wait till I'm old enough to blow this hole—were not part of being young, as if the idea of running away were not part of the romance of youth, as natural as imagining your own funeral, telling yourself, When I'm gone, won't they be sorry.

  Specifically, she was bitching about her home, the eggshell-and-puke piece of cardboard her mom kept her trapped in. Most definitely not her home, according to the girl with the shaved head. Vegas was not the girl's home. Vegas was a black hole. A total fucking conspiracy. The girl had done her research on this matter, and this research had fed her outrage, led to more researching, more uncovered transgressions, every one of which she'd dutifully transcribed into her diary, looping four-page sentences done with black marker: how each resort put the front entrance on one side of the ground floor, the hotel elevators on another, the restaurants on the third, and the shops on the fourth, so every time Mr. and Mrs. Tourist Suck wanted to do anything, they had to walk across the casino floor. How oxygen got pumped into the casino so gamblers wouldn't get tired. How there weren't clocks, so you didn't know how long you'd been playing, and didn't care if it was day or night. How poker chips replaced money so that after a while you wouldn't see the monetary value of what you were doing, but maybe got bored with playing only the red chips and wanted to play some blues, which were worth like twice as much. How waitresses gave out free alcohol-soaked drinks so the gambler would make good and sober decisions with all those chips that were not quite being seen as money. How oxygen, liquid, night, day, animal, vegetables, minerals, every and any single aspect of the casino resort environment, how all of them were skewed to keep a person on the floor of the gambling house—all so you could win money from the casino.

  It galled her, the way her mother always harshed her flow, tried to get her to calm down. Sitting at the kitchen table, waving some sort of health food cracker at the girl. Saying, “Oh, sweetie. SWEETIE.”

  Sure her mom was a single parent, working full-time and trying to raise a kid and adjust to a new city and build a new life, doing the best she could with an English degree in a cheap frame and a shitload of debt on her mind. The girl's mother was prone to crying jags and panic attacks, and whenever the girl got rolling about everything that was wrong with their new home, her mom would cut her off, shouting back: “What do you want me to do? It's a miracle if we get an alimony payment. I moved here for a teaching job and the school district goes into a hiring freeze. The temp service hasn't called since the last time that spreadsheet progra
m crashed. These are the facts, sweetie. So tell me what to do here. At least gaming school guarantees a dealing job when I graduate. It gives us a way to pay the bills. NO, THEY DO NOT STORE NUCLEAR WASTE ON THE STEPS OF CITY HALL. AND NO, I DON’T CARE WHAT YOU READ. THEY DO NOT STILL TEST HYDROGEN BOMBS RIGHT OUTSIDE CITY LIMITS. Oh, sweetie. SWEETIE. Please. Baby. You are asking the right questions. There's nothing wrong with the way you feel—I feel it, too. It's part of being alive. There's not any grand conspiracy. I mean, yes, but . . . Oh, baby.”

  The conspiracy of human frailty, was the phrase her mother used. And this usually seemed to have an effect on the girl. Like some magic elixir had been released, the tension would break, the two would embrace, the girl letting her mom cradle the sides of her skull, kiss the crag near the top of the back, letting her mother plant another one on her forehead, the girl finally breaking the embrace and holding her mom's hand for a count or so and then getting back to doing the dishes, or taking out the trash, the girl doing her chores and quietly telling herself things would be okay, trying to convince herself. Seriously. Just like she tried when they'd packed up the U-Haul, driven their crap in from Long Beach. Like she tried when her father called and explained that he was going to get married again, but of course he still cared about Mom. When he said that just because his schedule did not let him come down and visit, it didn't mean he didn't love her. Like with each guy her mother dated for longer than a week. Every bleeping time: the inevitable arrived and the girl dutifully stopped working on her latest poem or rant, she put out her cigarette (Death Cloves®, the profits of which went to a foundation dedicated to the abolition of smoking), made sure the ashes were hidden in the window frame, and lit up one of those incense candles endorsed by Amnesty International. She promised whoever was on the phone she'd call right back, muted the idiot box, put the stereo on auto select, saved and closed whatever file was open, undid her door chain, and let the poor schmuck enter. And never ever did she roll her eyes when he took a seat on the corner of her bed: Um, hey, hey there. You know, your mom's a little concerned about your eating habits.