Casino Moon

16

AS WE PULLED OUT of Rafferty’s parking lot, the redI-Roc behind me flashed its high-beams in my rearview mirror. I should’ve recognized it as a danger signal.

“How’s the fight?” Rosemary asked as she settled in on the passenger side and fixed her seat belt.

“Which one? My whole life’s a fight.”

“You know.” She crossed her legs under the glove compartment. “The one you were telling me about.”

“Oh.”

It’d been so long since Carla was interested in what I was doing that the question caught me off guard.

I ignored the way the I-Roc followed us out of the parking lot. “I was just over at the Doubloon the other day, talking to some people.”

I mentioned the name of Sam Wolkowitz’s company and Rosemary nodded as if she was impressed. After the last fight I’d had with Carla, it was a relief not having to explain everything.

“You know I was making fun of you the other night,” she said. “But then I thought—when was the last time you ran into anybody with any goals around here? My ex-husband Bingo, he was a degenerate gambler—actually he was just a degenerate, he’d show up at the party already wearing the lampshade. Anyway, he’d gamble on anything. He would bet on the sun coming up in the west if he could get the right odds. He never understood how you have to work toward something.”

Listening to her was like hearing someone speak my language for the first time. I turned the corner onto Atlantic Avenue and a casino billboard practically screamed from ontop of one of the buildings: DREAMS COME TRUE AT OUR SLOTS. The I-Roc was still on our tail.

“You mind if I turn on the radio?” Rosemary asked.

I flipped on an oldies station for her. I was in the mood for one of those old doo-wop songs from the fifties, with the singer’s voice rising out of his throat and climbing to the top of the night to light my way. Instead, I got a forlorn lady with an orchestra. I started to change the station.

“Leave that,” said Rosemary. “It’s Billie Holiday.”

I’d heard the name before, but I’d never really paid attention. Billie Holiday didn’t sound happy. We pulled up at a red light. All she had left was a bare ruined choir of a voice that made me think of empty bottles and old roses. Every time she’d reach for a high note, her voice would start to crack and she’d move away from it the way a girl would move down the bar from a guy who’d broken her heart too often.

Still you could tell she’d once been a great singer, same as you could tell Atlantic City was once a great town. There were little hints everywhere if you knew where to look. Over on the corner of Missouri Avenue, a sign said this was where the 500 Club used to be. Where Dean Martin met Jerry Lewis, where Frank Sinatra, the Chairman of the Board himself, would drop by unannounced and riff the night away with Sammy Davis Jr. or the Pete Miller Orchestra or whoever else was around. Now there was just a parking lot. Back a few blocks, there were vacant, rubble-strewn lots where grand old hotels like the Traymore and the Shellburn once stood.

Up closer to Texas Avenue, where I lived, Jack Cashard’s Steakhouse was a cinder with a name on it, and the dance hall next door hadn’t survived the fire either. In the old days, when all the celebrities and businesspeople came down here, a kid could make forty, fifty dollars a night just parking Cadillacs and Lincoln Town Cars around back. Now all you had was Pick-a-Flick video across the street and dozens of pawn shops with neon WE BUY GOLD signs out front.

“You’ve changed,” Billie Holiday sang in that broken bell of a voice she had. “That sparkle in your eyes is gone/Your smile is just a careless yawn/You’re breaking my heart/You’ve changed.”

“You know what I think sometimes?” I said as the traffic light turned green and the blue-and-red neon from the Doubloon down the block flashed over my windshield. “I think the casinos might have been the worst thing that ever happened to Atlantic City.”

“How’s that?” Rosemary asked. “The place was a dump for years before they came in.”

“I know, and then they came in and everyone thought the streets would be paved with gold. But look at this place. Me and my family could never even get a contract to replace the toilet paper dispensers at the casinos.”

Rosemary closed one eye and put a bobby pin in her hair. “You know, Anthony, I don’t understand something. You’ve got all these balls in the air. First you say you don’t have anything to do with the people who run the club. Then you say something about getting in the fight game. Now you’re telling me you couldn’t get a contract from the casinos.” She touched my wrist and in a half-ironic voice she asked: “Are you trying to tell me you’re in the Mafia or something?”

In the rearview mirror, I saw the silhouette in the I-Roc combing his hair. “Why do you say a thing like that?”

Billie Holiday was still singing on the radio: “You’re not the angel I once knew/No need to tell me that we’re through/It’s over now/You’ve changed.”

I looked up and saw there was a half-moon hanging over Bally’s Grand. It was what I used to call a casino moon, because the yellow casino sign was so bright, the moon looked cheap and unimpressive by comparison. That was Atlantic City. You couldn’t trust anything about it.

“There’s no such thing,” I said.

“What?”

“No such thing as the Mafia.” That was what my father taught me to say whenever outsiders asked you about the Family.

“Yeah? So what do you and your father do for a living?”

“We’re businessmen trying to get a little something for ourselves. Just like these people running the casinos.”

She laughed as we went by the Italian Dimension clothing store and neared Our Lady Star of the Sea, the old yellow church my mother dragged me to once before she died. I was feeling all these emotions I didn’t know what to do with, so I just kept them inside.

There were stragglers out on the sidewalk in front of the 7-Eleven. Hookers and low-level drug dealers mixing it up in the glare of the red-and-white sign. They weren’t human really. They were more like shadows of what other people wanted at midnight. You put a light on them and they’d disappear.

“Look at these women, will you?” I tried to change the subject. “Any one of them would give you a blow job for ten dollars.”

“Twenty-five dollars.” Rosemary told me with absolute assurance.

I started to ask how she knew, but then the street light changed and I had to hit the brake.

“I was wondering if I could buy you a drink somewhere.”

The I-Roc had pulled in so close behind me it was almost nudging my rear fender. After a few seconds, the traffic light turned green.

“Yes, I suppose that would be all right,” she said. “But I can’t make too late a night of it. I’ve got my mother still watching my daughter.”

We headed south toward Ventnor. I tried to think of some out-of-the-way place where they at least washed the glasses, but it’d been so long since I’d been out with anybody besides Carla that I had no idea which bars were still standing.

I saw a familiar old crumpling tenement on North Carolina Avenue, facing a funeral parlor with silver tinsel around its front sign. “I think Dan Bishop grew up there,” I said. “Before he went out to Vegas.”

“Dan Bishop.” Rosemary got a faraway look, like she was trying to place the name.

I showed her the magazine clipping I carried around:

The secret to Bishop’s success is his bold conception of the Horn Hotel and Casino as a kind of adult Disneyland. He eschews the traditional stark single light over each table that reminded players of Jimmy Durante saying, “Goodnight Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are.” Instead, he splashes the walls with pastels, electric blues, and vibrant yellows and dresses his cocktail waitresses in skimpy satin wench outfits. Players are greeted in the lobby by a three-dimensional hologram of Blackbeard urging them to blow their life savings at poker. The elevators sing the winner’s theme whether gamblers are going upstairs to bed or coming down to play. And once an hour, a full-sized replica of a pirate ship explodes in the middle of the casino floor with thirty barely clad dancers doing the boogaloo on the poop deck, at a cost of $50,000 a day.

“What we’re offering is the total entertainment experience,” says Bishop, 49 , a gruffly charming man with the air of an East Coast gangster mixed with the civility of a Mediterranean maitre d’. “We’re not trying to remind people of what their lives are like at home. What we’re about is testing the limits, scraping the sky.”

“He was a local kid like me,” I explained to Rosemary. “Now look at him.”

That article was my talisman. Whenever I looked at it, I felt like I had a shot in life.

“You know what his secret is? He understands no one wants to be a square. Everyone likes to take a chance and gamble once in a while. That’s why you get lines around lottery places and casinos in the middle of the desert. Gambling’s the way of the future. That’s why I’m in boxing.”

But Rosemary glanced at the picture of Dan Bishop standing by a swimming pool wearing a tuxedo with a ruffled shirt underneath and said he looked like a pastry with hair on it. I took the article back from her.

“You know, you shouldn’t make fun of other people’s dreams.”

We were almost at the edge of Atlantic City when we hit one last stoplight at the Memorial Circle. The statue of old Captain O’Donnell had his back only half turned to my side of the car, as if he didn’t trust me entirely.

Rosemary put her head on my shoulder and ran her fingers through my hair. “Hey, Anthony. Look at me.”

I turned my head. Rosemary was giving me this deep soulful look with her bruised lips and her full dark eyes. I felt something rise in my pants and knew my life and wedding vows would never be the same.

“I am almost thirty-eight years old,” she said in that very proper way she had when she was trying to make a point. “You don’t have to tell me any stories about Vegas and light shows. I don’t make judgments. I have two jobs, a daughter at home and my mother waiting up to chew out my ass. I’ve been divorced, I’ve had two abortions, plus the one I lost, and I must have danced on top of every bar from here to Admiral Wilson Boulevard in Camden. Now I am aware you are not taking me to the Waldorf-Astoria. Things are what they are. So if you or your family have done some things maybe you aren’t proud of, I really don’t care. I haven’t met anyone who’s lived the perfect life yet.”

“Well it’s not too late to start trying,” I said.

I was going to kiss her right there, but then I looked up and saw that red I-Roc pulling up beside us. At the wheel, with his long dark hair and nonexistent chin, was Nicky DiGregorio. He’d been following us since the club. My breath caught in my throat and stayed there.

“Oh my God,” said Rosemary. “Look at that guy, Anthony. I can’t believe how ugly he is. He doesn’t have any chin.”

The light was still red and traffic flowed freely through the intersection in front of us. It was too dangerous to just step on the gas. Instead, I tried to sink under the dashboard, pretending to look for something. But then I heard the I-Roc’s door open. I looked up and saw Nicky standing next to my window, glaring down at me.

“That’s right, you cocksucker,” he said. “Crawl down on the floor where you belong.”

I started to roll up my window, but he reached inside the car and grabbed my hand. “That’s very rude, Nicky,” I told him. “Didn’t your father teach you any manners?”

Some gritted teeth appeared in his mouth. I thought he was about to start crying. But instead he smacked the door frame with his fists. Everything shook, including the kids’ roller skates in the back.

“I oughta blow your fuckin’ head off right here and now.” He put his face right up to mine so I could smell the Sambuca he’d been drinking. “But that would be too easy. So you know what I’m gonna do now, Anthony? I’m gonna wait, and I’m gonna hurt you the way you hurt me. All right?” He stuck a long fingernail in my face. “Because I’m not just gonna hurt you. I’m gonna hurt your whole family.”

He flicked the fingernail and took some skin off the end of my nose. My hands flew up toward the stinging sensation.

“Excuse me, ma’am.” Nick leaned in to get a better look at Rosemary. “I didn’t mean to interrupt a pleasant evening.”

He went back to his car as the light finally turned green. I stepped on the gas and got out of there as fast as I could.

“Jesus,” said Rosemary. “What was that all about?”

“Bad tile job,” I told her. “He thinks I charged him too much.”