I’m too fat and I’m too old.”
Vince ordered vodka. I had a club soda. From the showroom came disco music with a booming bass and a crisp piercing treble. Apparently, I gathered as he and the bartender discussed it, an amateur striptease contest was in full swing. The several young women around the place may have been amateurs, but they looked like professional strippers on break in their silken dressing gowns, kissing their cigarettes so as not to endanger their lipstick, guiding their gestures so as to protect their long false nails.
The blipping of video gambling games underlay everything. To one side we had the entrance to the dance competition, and on our right the barroom gave way to an acre of space ranked with electronic slot machines. I saw no crap tables, no roulette, only these instruments sounding like young waterfowl. Vince assured me they kept three tables in the back where live blackjack was played.
As soon as we had our drinks in hand, Vince, talking over his shoulder the whole time, led me into the back room toward the dancing in which he’d claimed to have no interest. He stood well under six feet, but he had tremendous mass and solidity and moved like an ocean liner among the small tables. Just following his silhouette in the near-dark I had the impression that all of his life whatever he’d approached had given way, that if he chose to keep walking now he would explode, if very very slowly, right out through the opposite wall. He got to a vacant table and sat with his back to the stage, where a woman in a thong and nothing else shook her hips and raised her arms and wobbled her breasts. “Skin to win!” somebody shouted, and others took it up, but the loud canned accompaniment stopped abruptly and she danced offstage smiling and bowing.
During the next ten minutes two more women came out heavily clothed and got down pretty quickly to their bare chests and G-strings. Meanwhile Vince kept on in a voice not loud and clear but certainly audible. Lots of his acquaintances, he seemed to be saying, had an inexplicable natural knack for gambling. “Or my brother. Take him. The sonofabitch bastard is just plaindumb-lucky. What can I say? Some people. If he buys a lottery ticket, it’s gonna hit. Not the big hit, but just enough to where, I mean, he’ll come home with twenty tickets and a six-pack and scratch off enough of them ten-dollar jobbies to drink for the next week. Then he’ll sit around stupid drunk on three beers and say such ridiculous stuff I just wanna drop the sonofabitch. I mean just slap him till his eyes bleed. I mean, the question has to be answered: How long can two guys, two grown-ups, live in one single trailer? It was Mom’s, and she left it to him, at least that’s the way the will was written, but it’s mine just as equally, I think he understands that. Anyway, the point is,” Vince said, “mankind was not bred for the close confines. You can get trained to it, but one day you might just shoot somebody. Oh sure, yeah, it works in the military, or in jail, but there they got you locked up, they got their finger on your spine.”
I doubt there were more than a dozen others at the tables around us. All men. Middle-aged, middle-income, midwestern. Golfers. In this twilight they were more imagined than seen, but I felt surrounded by the practitioners of a sacred mediocrity, an elegant mediocrity cloistering inaccessible tortures. I don’t know quite how to put it. People, men, proud of their clichés yet full of helpless poetry. Meanwhile the music whamming and bamming. The women shaking themselves almost shyly.
Vince spent a good half-minute lighting a cigarette while the MC came onstage behind him. This was a small Asian or Native American woman in a black pantsuit who introduced each dancer again—there had been nine total—and deliveredthe decision of the judges, who were nowhere to be seen, and summoned forward the winner, a woman in a black Cleopatra-style wig
Vince ordered vodka. I had a club soda. From the showroom came disco music with a booming bass and a crisp piercing treble. Apparently, I gathered as he and the bartender discussed it, an amateur striptease contest was in full swing. The several young women around the place may have been amateurs, but they looked like professional strippers on break in their silken dressing gowns, kissing their cigarettes so as not to endanger their lipstick, guiding their gestures so as to protect their long false nails.
The blipping of video gambling games underlay everything. To one side we had the entrance to the dance competition, and on our right the barroom gave way to an acre of space ranked with electronic slot machines. I saw no crap tables, no roulette, only these instruments sounding like young waterfowl. Vince assured me they kept three tables in the back where live blackjack was played.
As soon as we had our drinks in hand, Vince, talking over his shoulder the whole time, led me into the back room toward the dancing in which he’d claimed to have no interest. He stood well under six feet, but he had tremendous mass and solidity and moved like an ocean liner among the small tables. Just following his silhouette in the near-dark I had the impression that all of his life whatever he’d approached had given way, that if he chose to keep walking now he would explode, if very very slowly, right out through the opposite wall. He got to a vacant table and sat with his back to the stage, where a woman in a thong and nothing else shook her hips and raised her arms and wobbled her breasts. “Skin to win!” somebody shouted, and others took it up, but the loud canned accompaniment stopped abruptly and she danced offstage smiling and bowing.
During the next ten minutes two more women came out heavily clothed and got down pretty quickly to their bare chests and G-strings. Meanwhile Vince kept on in a voice not loud and clear but certainly audible. Lots of his acquaintances, he seemed to be saying, had an inexplicable natural knack for gambling. “Or my brother. Take him. The sonofabitch bastard is just plaindumb-lucky. What can I say? Some people. If he buys a lottery ticket, it’s gonna hit. Not the big hit, but just enough to where, I mean, he’ll come home with twenty tickets and a six-pack and scratch off enough of them ten-dollar jobbies to drink for the next week. Then he’ll sit around stupid drunk on three beers and say such ridiculous stuff I just wanna drop the sonofabitch. I mean just slap him till his eyes bleed. I mean, the question has to be answered: How long can two guys, two grown-ups, live in one single trailer? It was Mom’s, and she left it to him, at least that’s the way the will was written, but it’s mine just as equally, I think he understands that. Anyway, the point is,” Vince said, “mankind was not bred for the close confines. You can get trained to it, but one day you might just shoot somebody. Oh sure, yeah, it works in the military, or in jail, but there they got you locked up, they got their finger on your spine.”
I doubt there were more than a dozen others at the tables around us. All men. Middle-aged, middle-income, midwestern. Golfers. In this twilight they were more imagined than seen, but I felt surrounded by the practitioners of a sacred mediocrity, an elegant mediocrity cloistering inaccessible tortures. I don’t know quite how to put it. People, men, proud of their clichés yet full of helpless poetry. Meanwhile the music whamming and bamming. The women shaking themselves almost shyly.
Vince spent a good half-minute lighting a cigarette while the MC came onstage behind him. This was a small Asian or Native American woman in a black pantsuit who introduced each dancer again—there had been nine total—and deliveredthe decision of the judges, who were nowhere to be seen, and summoned forward the winner, a woman in a black Cleopatra-style wig
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