My Best Man by Andy Schell (top 10 novels TXT) 📕

through the clanging casino and catch the burdened elevator to the fourteenth floor, which is really the thirteenth floor, but since nothing is unlucky in Las Vegas the number thirteen is wiped out and replaced. Even the children in this town skip it the next birthday after twelve is fourteen.

I change into my swimsuit, grab my sunglasses, and my Walkman, then head for the elevator.

At the pool, Julie is waiting. In her neon pink bikini, she’s already given the pool boys a hard-on and quickly procured us two

longue chairs, towels, and ice water. As soon as I lie down she slips me the pill. “Here.”

“The whole thing?” I ask.

“Sure.”

We both have portable Walkmans; all the flight attendants rushed out to get them so that they don’t have to listen to pilots sit around hotel pools and talk about how the airline should be run. Julie and I listen to music for a while, bake in the sun, drink water. In about twenty minutes I realize that I’ve left my body and I’m hovering over the whole hotel. I pull my headphones off, look at her.

“Oh my God, Julie.”

She smiles, pulls her headphones off. “Nice, huh?”

“I think I’m going to fly away.”

She moans peacefully. “Call me from the Grand Canyon.”

I can’t hear very well. The public address system is piped out to the pool, and a woman is constantly paging people. “Mr. Rigglepert, Mr. Jerry Rigglepert, Mr. Court, Mr. Lobbler Court, Miss Koob, Miss Mary Koob, please pick up a white paging phone.”

I start adding names to the list and saying them aloud. “Miss Peters, Miss Fonda Peters, Miss Quivers, Miss Virginia Quivers, Miss Muff, Miss Candy Muff, please pick up a white paging tele phone.”

It’s not like pot where you laugh uncontrollably. It’s like being on acid. And Quaaludes. And just a little bit of coke. So Julie and I start floating this name thing with quiet amusement.

She adds, “Miss Horse, Miss Rhoda Horse, Miss Skank, Miss Lotta Skank, Miss Case, Miss Charity Case, please pick up a white paging telephone.”

A pilot shows up. A pretty-boy captain. Young and studly.

He’s married but dates a stewardess at the airline. So cliche. He automatically has the pool boys line his chair up with ours. He tries to educate us about the economics of substituting DC-10’s for the

747’s on the Hawaii routes. We’re into the name thing. He doesn’t get it. We leave.

Burdened elevator. Sunglasses on. Ride with the masses. Are those earrings or chandeliers? Freckles or bits of bacon? Fresh flowers. I smell fresh flowers.

The hallway now, floating forward, not really walking. We separate to change into clothes, then meet again.

Burdened elevator. Clanging casino. Doormen. Sidewalk. One hundred degrees at least. Into the nearest hotel. Two vodka and grapefruits to go. We raise the plastic cups of booze and citrus to our mouths. Float down the sidewalk. The sun melts our heads. The sidewalk liquefies our shoes.

“Caesar’s,” Julie says. “I love those things on those chicks’ heads.”

I see them in my mind: casino waitresses who walk around carrying trays of smokes and battery-operated earrings and call out, “Cigars, cigarettes, electric jewelry.” Ancient Roman hairpieces, beehives of shit on their heads.

Cocktails evaporate. We beg the plastic cups to replenish, but they deny us. The gates of Caesar slide open. We exit hellfire and glide into Antarctica. We’re polar bears craving cocktails. The grapefruit at Caesar’s, a different hybrid, taps on our tongues. Surrender the twenties for quarters and sit.

Drop the coin. Pull the handle. Drop the coin. Pull the handle. Bang. You win.

The floor has disappeared. Ceiling too. Everything in between colored slightly outside the lines with thick Magic Markers offering a toxic high. Amplified living. Soundtrack traveling through our heads, flossing the cochlea. Tokens falling into trays, the sound of a thousand cymbals in an orchestra. Nerve cells in our skin on alert. A bald guy smoking, smoke washes over my skin, mixes with the cold oxygenated air that shoves me on the shoulder.

An0y

Julie has to pee. Myself. At the urinal, no dick. It shrank. To nothing.

We leave the casino, no genitals, but wealthy with quarters. The Pink Flamingo. It’s pink. We see flamingos. This must be the place. Grapefruit. Vodka. Cash money.

Stand on one leg. Laugh. Drop the coin. Pull the handle. Drop the coin. Pull the handle.

Again we win. Time to go.

The MGM Grand. The catastrophic fire a few years earlier. The grapefruit and vodka will be excellent because they have to try harder people were burned.

Drop the coin. Pull the handle. Drop the coin. Pull the handle. It must be nighttime. Who knows from the inside of a casino? We sit on our stools, our quarters all eaten by the system. “So you’re going to be Amity’s next husband,” Julie says.

I’m drunk and heady, but far below my earlier cruising altitude in the ionosphere. “Sort of.”

“I heard she finally had an honest arrangement that you knew about her past and that you guys were straight with each other.” She starts laughing. “Get it?”

I laugh and realize I’m starting to feel my head again. “Straight as I’ll ever be,” I answer. “Yep, I know about Aden and how she fucked up the marriage.”

“I know it’s none of my business, but did she ever go into detail about the money? I mean, the rumor was it was like a half a million or something, and then the next thing we knew, it’s like six months later and she’s left the cowboy and been taken down by that lawyer, Victor, and she’s broke and in the treatment center.”

My face is burning. I’m on fire within all this air-conditioning. I chuckle, act as casual as possible. “Cocaine makes you do fucked up things.” Treatment center? Was it that bad? I didn’t get a penny, she told me. I think that’s what she said, but my head’s not so

clear. “I’m not sure where the money went. She doesn’t like to talk about it,” I state, groping for the truth.

“I don’t blame