One of the best things about America is that you can sing your entire way around it from ‘New York, New York’ to ‘San Francisco’. From ‘Highway 51’ to ‘Route 66’. From ‘Galveston oh Galveston’ to ‘Meet me in St Louis’. From ‘I’m Going to Kansas City, Kansas City, Here I come’, to ‘Kentucky Woman’. There is a song about every place imaginable. The road Pierce had chosen was measled with potholes, so we had to drive slowly, which suited me fine, ’cause I didn’t want this trip to end. Ever. As Pierce and I dodged ditches and warbled our way through a vast repertoire, it struck me that I didn’t know any songs about my own country. Dapto, Toowoomba, Wollongong and Wagga just didn’t have the same rock ‘n’ roll ring about them somehow.
The road to Las Vegas was what we called at home a ‘crystal highway’, which meant it was a long stretch of lethal bitumen where windscreen breakages were common. Every time a car hurtled past us from the opposite direction, I would lean forward and press my fingers on to the glass in case of a ricocheting stone. The rest of the time, I kept my hands firmly, possessively, on a part of Pierce. I snuck up next to him, like a teenager in a bad B-grade road movie and nibbled his neck and stroked his hair. To have Pierce caressing my cheek, kissing my fingers, cupping my chin, well, it was unbelievable. ‘Feel good?’ he asked me.
What I felt like was one of those army-survival ration biscuits – the dried ones that don’t expand until placed in water. I thought I might burst for joy, that’s how I felt. I nodded. ‘How ’bout you?’
Seeing him beam at me the way he did made me feel as though I’d won some kind of Emmy.
‘Where are we?’ I asked Pierce dreamily, about two hours and two thousand songs into our journey. Pierce, one hand on the wheel, the other draped around my shoulders, glanced down at the map in his lap.
‘Well, let’s see, we’re about between the “F” and the “O” of “California”,’ he told me.
‘Gee, well aren’t you the navigational whizz,’ I whispered into his warm neck. ‘Must be in your blood. America is an accident, didja know that? You were only discovered ’cause old Columbus went off course. No kidding. At least, that’s what my dad reckons.’
‘What did your mum think of your old man, you know, teaching you all his gamblin’ tricks an’ all?’ It was the first time Pierce had ever shown any interest in my past. I felt vaguely exposed and suddenly shy.
‘Not much, but then they didn’t think much of anything the other did. Take my mum. She was kinda keen on gardening, yoga, vegetarian food, that sorta stuff. My father likes drinking, gambling and red meat.’
Pierce laughed. ‘They must’ve had somethin’ in common for Chrissake.’
‘Well, they both liked going to the beach – but not together.’
‘Yeah. It’s totally beyond me why the world wants to live together as one big, happy, family. Families are fucked.’
But it was a different sort of family Pierce was currently preoccupied with. It was a horses-head-in-your-bed-no-knee-caps-type family. Pierce owed the local LA drug mafia a lot of money. He’d told me last night, after we’d made love, that they had generously offered to pump him so full of holes you’d be able to make a colander out of him.
I’d seen Latin mobsters on Hollywood Boulevard, brazen as all get-out, in their giant Rolex watches and waistband beepers. They drove Mercedes and white stretch Cadillacs with photos of Jesus dangling from rear-view mirrors. These were the guys Pierce owed money to. He admitted he’d ‘put the odd drug of theirs into his body’. (The odd drug? I’d say the Iraqis could open him up as a petro-chemical plant.) Which was why he’d got behind in his house payments, forfeited his three cars, hocked his prized $400 airpump Reeboks and been in hiding. It was why we were headed for the Nirvana Casino, Las Vegas.
Over the last year I’d rung the casino maybe four times. As promised, they’d answered all my questions. Yes, they would tell me the rules on doubling and splitting. Yes, you could insure against the blackjack. No, the blackjack didn’t pay three to two. It paid even money. That was a statistic I’d worked into my calculations and experimented with, over and over, in practice hands. I’d been working on a system all year, sort of.
A squadron of insects suddenly hurtled themselves up against the windscreen. I leapt back, startled, then looked at their splattered technicolour innards. ‘Pierce,’ I said, suddenly serious, interrupting his vibrato rendition of ‘Long distance information, give me Memphis, Tennessee’. ‘Listen, I’m going to win this money for three reasons: One, to pay off your debts. Two, to buy out your DINKS contract. And three, to give some to Tash. Not for drugs, okay?’
‘Relax,’ he said, with equal solemnity, ‘I’ve gotta quit coke. I know it. Yesterday I blew my nose and half my brains came out.’
‘But what about the other stuff? The pills and, I mean, Jesus Christ, if you need chemicals – breathe. This is California. Smog Capital of the Western World.’
‘I said, I’ll quit, okay?’
‘Rondah reckons you’re an addict. She said you ran out on the detox programme ’cause you couldn’t handle it.’
Pierce flicked on the windscreen wipers and the mangled insect bodies disappeared. ‘I’m not addicted, okay? And I’m not doing any more drugs. One of the reasons is that I want to know when I’m having a good time.’ He placed his warm hand on my inner thigh. ‘Like last night. No shit, Kat. I’m bored with dope. I’ve done every drug known to civilisation for Chrissake. From Aspro to Airfix glue. From marijuana to car defrosting fluid. There’re no more highs left now.’
‘Love is a drug,’ I hazarded, sneaking a glance up at his face. I should know, I wanted to say. In that department, I was speaking as a true-blue junkie.
‘Yeah?’ Pierce gave me a sidelong glance, then smiled his widest smile. The air around him seemed suddenly luminous. I looked at his hair, bleached golden on top by the sun. Even his eyelash tips were tinted blond. I devoured every detail of his face and form and I had never, ever felt so, well … Schmaltzy as it was, the only word was – happy. God. I almost gagged. I couldn’t believe such a word could come out of my mouth. It sounded so well … Californian.
And you know what? I didn’t care.
‘Let’s have happy childhoods,’ Pierce said suddenly, ‘except as grown-ups.’
Staring ahead at the white line stretching over the horizon, spumes of dust spiralling up behind us from our wheels, I was seized by an icy premonition. ‘I feel as though I’ve made you up,’ I admitted softly. ‘I think I’ll look over and you’ll be gone.’
Pierce, without warning, swerved his Bronco down a track on the side of the road. He turned off the ignition. ‘I wanna kiss you between your legs,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘When we made love again this morning, it was too fast. As though we had a great meal, but missed a course, ya know?’
We’d pulled up in a massive forest of cacti. As he stretched me out on the back seat, I saw them flanking the car, vegetable soldiers, their prickly green arms up in surrender.
Nevada was made up of the sort of landscape spaceships land in. After we arived in Las Vegas, parked the car, took to the pavement and met some of the local people, I realised that not only had the spacecraft landed but the aliens had taken over. Dinner-suited spruikers, sweltering in the midday sun, hustled passers-by to come inside their casinos. Scantily clad, middle-aged women, their swollen legs squeezed into support-hose, tried to lure us in to see shows. ‘Debbie Does Alice’ or ‘Naughty Natalie Needs a Nightie’ starring Bambi Jnr and the Bimbos. Walking the main street gave me the sensation of being inside a pinball machine – lights, buzzers, bells, flashing neon signs, large, luminous shapes and rotating figures, hub-caps rolling past like silver spheres. I grabbed hold of Pierce’s T-shirt sleeve, to anchor myself closer to him. Up above, psychedelic pinwheels of neon light transformed themselves into one cartoon character after another, each suggesting that you ‘try our hot slot spots’. That you ‘come on in and win’.
The one good thing about landing in such alien territory, was that no one recognised Pierce Reece-Scanlen Jnr (the Third).
‘Well, whaddaya think?’ Pierce asked me, when we reached the end of the main drag and turned to observe the chaos of lights under the harsh desert sun.
‘What I think is that this place must have the biggest electricity bill in the whole of America.’ Pierce laughed and kissed the palm of my right hand. I curled my fingers over the place where his lips had been and vowed not to wash off his lucky touch.
Every hotel in town was grafted on to a casino. Some floated, others revolved; one could only be reached by gondolier across a sea of pink bubbles. My favourite had elevators shaped like rocket ships. There was a countdown, before the zero of ‘take off’.
We hocked Pierce’s watches and rings, withdrew my meagre savings from the bank, and then counted up our kitty. $6,465 dollars. There was a flicker of guilt as I thought of Tash. But after I’d won at blackjack, I could give her all the money she needed to find her kid. Pierce squeezed my arm reassuringly and we headed off to find our hotel.
The Nirvana Casino was off the main drag. A ten foot billboard above the foyer advertised the day’s fun activities. It was blank.
We rode the lift up to the floor marked ‘Cloud Nine’ and found our room, ‘the Royal Flush Suite’. It wasn’t exactly what you’d call four-star accommodation – it was more like four exclamation marks. The bed sagged. The bedspread was mysteriously stained. There were cigarette scorch marks on the laminex counters and a dead cockroach floated forlornly in the toilet bowl.
‘What a goddamned honeymoon suite,’ Pierce laughed, drawing across the shabby curtain. The billboard opposite was flashing incessantly its promise of an ‘all-you-can-eat-for-$1.00 breakfast’. Next to that was a quickie wedding chapel called ‘Beautiful Beginnings’. We read the neon-lit list of the chapel’s twenty-four-hour-a-day services from the tux and gown rental prices ($50 an hour) to the ring bearer’s pillow ($10.00). There was a courtesy limo, to and from your hotel, a complimentary video, a penny for the lady’s shoe and a frameable copy of wedding vows. ‘What would our vows be?’ Pierce asked, resting his chin on top of my head and hugging my waist.
‘To have an orgasm every day,’ I said, ‘and to laugh at each other’s jokes.’
‘And to get a jukebox that plays all our favourite road songs. Done. I mean, we’ll need to celebrate, after our win and all.’
‘Yeah, of course we will.’
‘So.’ He looked at me provocatively.
‘So?’
‘So, let’s get married. Now there’s something I’ve never done before.’
Gobsmacked is too tame a phrase to describe my reflection in the warped glass of the Royal Flush Suite on the Cloud Nine floor of the Nirvana Casino, Las Vegas, Nevada.
Lemme tell you, the Nirvana Casino, with its plush carpet, and polished chrome and throbbing galaxy of fluorescent lights, was just a tad different from the illegal gambling joints in Redfern and Rozelle where I’d been with my old man. These were derelict rooms above greasy hamburger joints, with steep, dimly lit stairs and a cockatoo, usually a teenager, stationed on the corner, to look out for cops.
We crossed to the nearest blackjack table. There were seven players. A surely croupier shuffled four or five packs together. They rattled like automatic gunfire. For the first hour, I just stood and watched, gauging whether the bank was on a winning or losing streak. I’d roughly calculated how often the bank should win; usually about two or three per cent more than the punters. When I thought the bank was about due for a bad run, I would make my move, cool as a cucumber. At least, that was the plan.
But watching the game unfold, a spasm of dread went through my entire body. After all my zillions of practice hands, my meticulous calculations and phone calls to the pit boss, I realised, sickeningly, that there was one question I’d forgotten to ask him. Well, hadn’t even thought to ask, actually. See, usually in blackjack, when the player and the bank tie, the bet is void. Anyway, to compensate for the privilege of letting us punters take a quick squiz at the second card, the Nirvana Casino – the dirty, rotten, mongrel bastards – had ruled that when it was a tie, they won. I had a loaded feeling in my throat. This information was not incorporated into my calculations. I don’t wanna bore you with a whole lot of technical cardsharp crap, but I just want you to know why I was on the point of complete cardiac arrest. All my instincts told me to get the hell out of there. I had a sudden urge to go trekking in the Gobi desert, or, failing that, to sit and watch my bath water running out for about a year. Anything. Anywhere, but here. Just then, however, I felt Pierce’s hands softly cupping the small of my back, encircling my waist, squeezing firmly. I remembered his upcoming appointment for a Mafia shoe-fitting. ‘I wonder what size cement shoe I take?’ he’d mused in the car. ‘But, then again, I suppose one size fits all, really, huh?’ And, as though lowering myself into a cold pool, I eased my way slowly into the game.
The stool wobbled uncertainly as it took my weight. The other players, all middle-aged and all male, glanced at me with undisguised disdain.
‘These stools are reserved for players, liddle lay-dee,’ the croupier chided snidely. He had rancid breath, with a suit to match.
‘Draw,’ I said crisply, placing a pile of plastic tokens on the table.
Old Rancid-breath looked at me as though I was a laboratory specimen, glanced in bemusement at the other players and shrugged. He lazily dealt us all two cards from the metal, self-sealing shoe. He dealt himself two cards, and then, as advertised, flipped them both sunny side up. A drink materialised. I drained it.
I started low, tailoring my bets while testing my calculations. In the first game, I scored a picture card and an ace. Blackjack. In the second hand, I was dealt two eights. ‘Split,’ I told the croupier and started playing two hands against the bank. I drew another eight. ‘Split,’ I ordered. I was now playing three hands against the bank.
The croupier suddenly quit smirking and concentrated on the cards. All three eights drew aces. I stood on nineteen. The dealer, stuck on fourteen, had to draw again. Another eight. ‘Bank busts,’ he muttered and paid us all out.
Pierce stood behind me the entire time, a silent sentinel, his breath soft and regular on the nape of my neck. We remained like that for three hours. Begging off, on a pee-break, I sat on the lid of the loo and re-examined my calculations. I was still up four per cent. Okay, I’d calculated on six, but four was still good. It seemed to me that the number of tied bets was statistically very low in blackjack. It would take a little longer before Pierce and I could go into MM (Millionaire Mode) and put a deposit on that jukebox. But my system was still intact. Back at the table another drink surfaced at my side. I raised the glass and my bets. And my winning streak continued.
After five hours, Pierce nibbled my ear lobe. ‘How’s the blushin’ bride? You’re a genius,’ he laughed, collecting some chips. ‘I’m going over the road to book us in. Remember,’ he winked, ‘an orgasm every day and to laugh at each other’s jokes.’
Beaming, I watched him saunter across the shagpile, his hands sliding into his hip pockets before he was swallowed up by the scene – the middle-aged drink waitresses, their black lycra hot pants bucketing swollen buttocks, the gaggle of gawking tourists and the anti-gambling protesters, who’d suddenly appeared, bearing neon signs, saying ‘Jesus Saves’.
The guy straddling the next stool, an amateur player, but with a friendly, crooked kind of smile, swayed towards me. ‘Zat your boyfriend, honey? There’s over one thousand weddin’ chapels in this here town, ya know,’ he winked broadly. ‘Maybe you’ll get lucky, huh?’
But there were no ‘maybes’ about it. The luck I’d somehow lost since coming to America was back. It was all over me like a rash. Black cats, pointed bones, voodoo dolls, nothing could harm me. If there’d been a ladder around I would have walked right under it, no kidding. It seemed I could only draw picture cards, aces, doubles and splits. I skulled another drink and, for the next few hours, luxuriated in my success. I would cancel Pierce’s Mafia shoe-fitting. I would pay off Tash’s detective and get her a recording contract. I would fly all my old mates Stateside: Chook, Fang, Deb. I would finally be rich enough to ‘raise my tone’. I wouldn’t just buy a jukebox, but an entire orchestra to play road songs, day in, day out. I wouldn’t just hire someone to peel my pistachios, I would buy the whole goddamned plantation. I would purchase zillions of live cells and re-inject all the sheep Rondah had fleeced. And best, best of all, I could finally lop my family tree – my father’s branch of it anyway.
‘Ain’t you gettin’ a little tipsy there, hun?’ my neighbour asked, as I siphoned up the dregs of yet another celebratory margherita. ‘See up there,’ he said, little pinky extended to the ceiling. ‘That there is a transparent ceiling. Yep. There are catwalks up there. And they see every move we make.’ He leant back on his stool and gave a cheerful wave. I craned upwards too. The stool teetered precariously. ‘They ply us with drinks, see,’ my neighbour warned, restoring my balance, ‘while they’re pumpin’ the room full of oxygen. We’re totally shit-faced, yet wide awake enough to keep playing’. It really chaps ma hide! Clever turkeys, in’t they?’
It was true. Hypnotised by the croupier’s movements, dulled by the free drinks, intoxicated by my initial success, it took me another half hour or so to realise that things were slowly going wrong. Something seemed to have happened to my system. I had calculated a few losses into my scheme, but not a losing streak like this. Every second hand seemed to be a tie. That question I’d forgotten to ask the pit boss gnawed at my drink-sodden brain. To compensate, I started betting too high. Time skidded past, as did my life-savings.
‘Las Vegas,’ my inebriated companion droned, as much to his drink as to me, ‘has to put out two goddamned phone books every year. Didja know that? Most transient place in the world. See, they come to make their fortunes, get shafted and then they’re stuck here till someone bails ’em out.’
Seized by panic, I then did what my old man had drilled me, over and over, never to do. I abandoned my system. I could hear him now. ‘Rule number one – ignore your winning and losing streaks. Resist. Stick to your system.’ But I doubled, I tripled, I quadrupled bets. Like a classic losing gambler, I hadn’t quit when I was ahead and now I was trying to recoup by pulling stunts both dangerous and dazzling.
The truth dawned on me about four a.m: I was skint. Broke. Busted. The air seemed to shrivel. The croupier drummed his tobacco-stained nails on the tabletop. The other players were waiting for me.
‘Can I play a credit?’ I pleaded.
But old Rancid-breath just yawned as he examined something his forefinger had excavated out of his earhole. He flicked the foreign object at the floor.
I got up from the table and wandered unsteadily through the hotel. I could imagine the mysterious men above me on the invisible catwalks, laughing convulsively. My reflection loomed out of countless light-studded, gilt-edged mirrors: someone dispossessed, lost, awkward. To escape the maze, I blundered into the ballroom. On stage, a tuxedoed MC was wise-cracking into the microphone. I stood and listened to his spiel, as he introduced a ‘cunt-tree and west-stern’ singer called Crystal Gayle. To drunken, tumultuous applause, all six foot two inches of Crystal swept on stage. Her hair came down to her knees. Even though I had just lost my entire savings and Pierce’s most treasured possessions, all I could wonder was whether she had pubic hair to match. ‘Howdy you all,’ she said, before launching into ‘Don’t it make your brown eyes blue’, a ballad, I supposed distractedly, about contact lenses. Why had I told the croupier that, yes, I wanted to keep playing? That wasn’t just a slip of the tongue … that was a slip of the whole mind.
Overcome with weariness, I squeezed into the elevator. I watched the floor numbers blinking by as though it were a nuclear countdown. But, by the fourth floor, I was already formulating an escape plan. Ideas bubbled into my brain. I grasped at the thought of running away. We would just keep on driving. We would get odd jobs here and there. We would live on sex and margheritas. We would have endless adventures and tell each other all our secrets. We would laugh at each other’s jokes and make love every day. We would just keep on driving until we’d been to every nook and cranny of America. I mean, we had zillons of songs to sing yet.
The door to our room was open. I nudged it with my foot. The room was crawling with cops, all of whom wore guns. They were shredding pillows, pulling apart clothes, decapitating bottles and pouring the contents down the sink. Most of them were under-cover officers – tanned, tightly jeaned, sneakered. They watched me narrowly. A policewoman patted me down. As she did so, the head Detective explained to me that they were a SCAT squad – Street Corner Apprehension Team, and that Pierce had been picked up by an undercover officer buying two grams of speed and a vial of cocaine. Pierce sat in the corner of the room, huddled up like a drab, abandoned parcel. He wouldn’t look at me.
‘I don’t believe it,’ I told the D, my strangled voice two octaves higher than usual. ‘He’s straight!’ I spun towards Pierce. ‘You’re straight. Aren’t you?’
‘Answer the lady, punk,’ ordered one of the tough, leather jacketed young cops.
Pierce shrugged and closed his eyes like an angel.
‘You’ve made a mistake officer.’
The Detective tapped the breast pocket of one of his subordinates. ‘Ma’am, O’Conner here was wired for sound.’
‘You didn’t!’ I pleaded with Pierce, ‘Did you?’
I watched him calmly unseal his packet of Drum, fold the paper, fill it with tobacco, roll it adroitly, lick the seal, place the cigarette on his bottom lip and light it. ‘Are the Kennedys gun-shy?’ was all he said.
The breath left my body. Blood beat in my temples. I felt cool, wet sweat in the small of my back. It was true. He was just like my father. He set himself the lowest standards possible – and then failed to live up to them. It was useless betting on either of them. They were both wild cards.
I glanced at him. He looked demolished. The urge to hold him in my arms was overpowering, like a desperate thirst. I concentrated hard on not throwing up (what Pierce called ‘enjoying yourself backwards’). I focused on the warped glass of the windowpane. I concentrated on the illuminated, revolving donut on the breakfast sign opposite. And next to it, the marriage chapel. I reread the neon list of what was on offer. ‘Economy – $125. Regular – $175. Deluxe – $225. Joan Collins Special – $300. No blood tests required.’
‘Kat.’
‘What?’ Although I wouldn’t look at him, the thirst came back, searingly.
‘I, ah, I guess this means the wedding’s off, huh?’
‘You’ve got the integrity of, of – Abe Epstein,’ I detonated. ‘Do you know that?’
‘Kat, hey, I was joking.’ There was a throb in his voice which I’d never heard before.
‘Go bite your bum,’ I said profoundly, and went into the bathroom to throw up. After scrubbing the palm which he’d earlier kissed, almost scalding myself in the process, I left without looking back.
As I crossed the hotel room Pierce made a move towards me. ‘Kat, wait!’ The darkly dressed men closed in around him like beads in a kaleidoscope. ‘Fuck off, pigs,’ he howled, flailing, trying to push past them.
‘These Hollywood types,’ the Detective drawled, strong-arming Pierce. ‘Think they’re too good to crap. Ya ain’t above the law here, punk.’
I saw him then in the mirror, haunted, hollow-eyed. ‘Face it,’ I said to his reflection, addressing myself as much as him. ‘You’re an addict. You need help.’
When I got back to the Bronco, it had been almost totally stripped. The radio and tape deck were gone, the leather seats slashed, the chrome trimmings and personalised numberplates wrenched loose. The tail lights were smashed and a scratch like a hairline fracture ran the entire length of the duco on the driver’s side. Hoisting myself through the shattered windscreen, I revved the engine, gritted my teeth and lurched uncertainly out into the road. The improvised ventilation made my eyes water. There was a muffled clackity clack as the axle came loose. Sparks flew. It trailed behind, like the tail of an injured animal.
On the way home to LA I noticed all the dead things on the side of the road, which I’d somehow not observed on the drive up. Large dogs, small dogs, decomposing cats, huge furry piles that could be beavers or skunk or small bears. It hit me then that I’d been so busy, so desperate not to turn into my father, that I’d become my mother instead – faded, jaded, bitten down, in love with a lying bastard. I glanced into the rear-vision mirror. The fabric of my face was pinched, my lips pursed as though I was sewing and had a mouthful of pins. I didn’t need a doctor for diagnosis. I knew what I’d contracted. A terminal case of the Pierce Scanlens.
‘A mess of dead animals bleachin’ in the sun …
All squashed out on Highway 61,’ I sang sadly.
They looked how I felt.