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Life is a Gamble...
If you spent enough time in the desert, you were sure to find an oasis.
That’s what they say, right? Which would make this the oasis I had been looking for all this time.
As I stood in front of the apartment block I was going to call my new home, I sighed and wondered how I had managed to get myself into this place without doing a little more research on where I was going to be ending up.
Shit, I had just wanted a new start. That was the long and short of it. When I had told my friends I was taking off to Vegas, I could tell in the way they looked at me that they thought I was downright crazy, but I didn’t care. I never had before; why would I start worrying myself about it now? I knew I had to get out there and experience something new, and this seemed to be the best place to start.
I fumbled in my pocket for the keys that the landlady had given me when I had dropped by her office earlier that morning. The smile hadn’t dropped from her face the entire time, and I should have seen it as the attempt to cover for whatever it was she was trying to hide. Heading inside, I prayed it would look a little better from the inside out—but as soon as I unlocked the door, I knew I had been majorly duped.
It was my own fault, really. I had looked at this apartment ad online, seen all the flowery adjectives the landlady had used to describe it—cozy, modern, fresh—and I could see now that they had all been metaphors for the nastier parts she was trying to cover up. My eyes darted around the entryway at the peeling paint above the door, the scuffed carpet. Not exactly what I had been hoping for, but hey, maybe this place needed a fresh start as much as I did, right?
I wandered around my new home, trying to remember what it was that had coaxed me all the way out to Nevada in the first place. At the back of my mind, somewhere, I had envisioned myself in the desert, really coming into myself under a dark carpet of stars above me, maybe in a yurt or something like that. But when I had actually started looking for places to live in Nevada, Vegas had been way too tempting to turn down, and that was how I had managed to end up here, in this tiny little apartment that looked as though it hadn’t seen a fresh coat of paint since the seventies.
I carried my bags inside and dumped them down in the sparse living room, heading over to the window to check out my view—not exactly bright lights and big city; it looked on to the back of a restaurant where all the trash was kept, piled up and waiting for some industrial hauler to take it somewhere else. I pushed open the window to let in some fresh air and inhaled deeply as the rush of it flooded over me.
See, this was what I was looking for. That new smell in the air, something different, something that would make me feel really alive again. Sometimes, I felt like I got tied down to certain places, and I knew that if I did, the cement boots would seal around my feet and I would never get out.
Las Vegas had just sounded right to me. I had never been there before, but everything I had heard about it, I’d loved—glamour, glitz, the kind of place that people came to so they could forget who they really were for a little while and just enjoy themselves. That was the kind of thing I wanted, more than anything, to blend in with these crowds of social chameleons and leave whatever had happened before behind.
Plus, this place had a reputation as being seriously trashy at times, and I would have been lying if I said that wasn’t a part of it that appealed to me, too. Not that I considered myself trashy—well, not that I considered myself high-class, either, but you get the idea—but because I loved people-watching, and there were none as entertaining as those trying to live out their wildest, silliest fantasies away from real life for a change. I could already imagine myself, feet tucked under me at a coffee shop, peering around as I took everyone in, writing stories about them in my head as I filled in the gaps around them in the best way I knew how.
I could hardly wait to get started on it. Once I had unpacked the last of my stuff, of course—my car was outside, and I had piled it high with everything I could cram in there. This new apartment wasn’t exactly what I had imagined, but I would make it work. It wasn’t like I had much of a choice either way, anyway...
I heaved the rest of my crap up from the car and started to spread it out through this new home of mine, trying not to look too hard at all the details the landlady had so lightly skimmed over when she had been selling me the place. No wonder she had sounded so relieved on the phone; she was probably glad just to get rid of this place, make sure that she didn’t have to deal with selling it to anyone else any longer—it was only ever going to be some silly out-of-towner who thought it was worth the money, because anyone coming down here before they put their deposit down would have seen it wasn’t worth the cash.
The bathroom was particularly bad. There was this old tub there that looked fit to plunge straight through the floor the moment I stepped into it, and I hoped it would actually be able to sustain my weight without giving out. I gingerly balanced my shampoo and soap along the sides, hoping it wouldn’t tip it over the edge and leave me standing in my downstairs neighbor’s living room a little sooner than I expected. Well, I had to meet them sometime, didn’t I...?
The bedroom was sterile, but it looked at least like it could stand up to my weight. I flopped down on the rock-hard mattress, too tired to think about chucking sheets on the bed, and stared up at the peeling paint above me on that ceiling. I was going to be looking at this ceiling a whole hell of a lot in the coming months, and as soon as I got a little money, I was going to paint it up. Something nice and bright so that when the light hit it, it would look like it was sunshine in here.
If I could scrape enough of the grime off the windows to let the light in at all, of course. I tried my best to keep myself optimistic no matter what the world threw at me, but sometimes, it was harder than I would have liked to admit to keep myself on the straight and narrow. Times like this, when I knew that there was so much for me to do in this new home of mine, it was difficult for me to keep my head in the game, to stay focused on what really mattered. This was my new home, and that meant I was going to have to do everything that I could to ensure it felt like somewhere I could come home to after a long day of...
A long day of whatever the heck I ended up doing when I was here, whenever I got that job I had been promising myself I was going to find one way or another. I knew the stupidest part of this whole crazy adventure of mine had been running off down here without making sure I had a solid way of making money waiting for me at the other end, but when the need to get out of town had hit, it had hit hard—and with good reason, too. I knew I couldn’t sit around waiting for something as important as a job. I needed to get out, and whatever was waiting for me on the other side, I would deal with when I got there.
And now I was here, and I had to deal with it, didn’t I? I didn’t know where to start. What kind of jobs did people do in a place like this? Would I have to become a blackjack dealer or something? Did they even have dealers in blackjack? I supposed the fact I even had to ask that question would probably make it so that anyone who might have been considering hiring me would have thought twice...
Anyway. I could get out there and see what people were looking for tomorrow. I needed to make myself something to eat and get some sleep. I was starting to get dark outside, and I had managed to unpack a couple of the hastily packed bags and boxes I had thrown together before I had left, glad that I had managed to put some space between myself and the enormity of the work I still had left to do here.
I headed to the kitchen, planning on making something for myself, until I pulled open the drawer above the fridge and saw a stack of takeout menus. Hmmm, that could come in useful. I grabbed them and started leafing through them until I found something that looked good enough for me to risk a few dollars on.
I ordered a big pile of Chinese food and tried to get my laptop set up so I could watch something when it was here. I hadn’t actually found the time to put together my own internet connection yet, but there was something from the restaurant across the way that seemed to let me in. It was slow, painfully so, and I was pretty sure that whatever cheesy movie I chose to watch I was going to have to start and stop a million times over, but I didn’t care. That was what I got for not being better prepared for this to move into my new place, wasn’t it?
The food arrived maybe twenty minutes later—the place was a buffet, so I guessed they just scraped it all into a bag and drove over to give it to you—and I smiled warmly at the delivery driver, hoping that would make up for the fact that I didn’t have anything in the way of a tip to give to him. He practically tossed the food toward me, and the smell of it emanating from inside the plastic containers was enough for me not to notice his rudeness.
I couldn’t believe this was happening. Not the food arriving—I had expected that—but coming here in the first place. I had made this decision in such a rush that the shock of it now that it had arrived was almost more than I could take. I sat down on my new couch, which let out a long groan as I sank into it, as though it was protesting all that weight being put on it, and moved my laptop a little closer to the window to try and catch some more of that internet connection the restaurant across the street was giving to me.
I was here. I had really done it. Vegas—I still had so much to learn about this city, so much to figure out about the way I fit into it. Was I going to be one of those trashy types I had come down here to people-watch? Shotgun wedding at the Elvis-themed chapel or something? I couldn’t see it for myself, but I had no idea what kind of person I was going to be down here, how I was going to change. Maybe I was going to have some crazy marriage and get hitched to some guy I’d never met before after a wild night of drinking.
Not that I had much intention of doing that—and not that I was much of a prospect to marry by myself as it was, anyway. I knew that the first port of call was for me to find a job, something to sustain me now I was here and something I could use to confirm I could pay for this crappy little apartment that was going to be my home for the foreseeable future.
I needed to call the landlady, tell her that there were a few details that I felt she hadn’t been entirely honest about when I had called to ask about the place—if she even answered her phone anymore, that was. I got the feeling that now she had the money she wanted from me, she would do anything and everything she could to avoid running into me again. I doubted she had even come down to this apartment in the first place before she had given me the key. I doubted she could have looked me in the eyes if she had...
Or maybe I was giving her too much credit. Maybe I needed to be a little more brutal about the way I saw people down here. If this city was about gambling, good times, all of that, then it made sense that the people who lived here were ruthless in the way they went about things. And now I was one of them, now that I was amongst the residents here, I’d have to get there, too.
This was my home now. I had come here for a reason, looking for that oasis in the desert, and though this apartment might not look a lot like that right now, I knew that it could be—knew that it could be, if I just committed myself to turn it into something that really worked for me. It might not be easy, but when had I ever backed down from a challenge? This was how I had always wanted to live my life, and just because I was at the start of something here didn’t mean it wasn’t going to bloom into something amazing.
I was going to make sure of it. I’d do anything it took to ensure I got where I needed to go and to make sure this place in the desert was my safe haven and not just a mirage on the horizon.
