“Come on, Jesus! Come onnnn, Jesus!”
William, or Willy B. Casino King, as he liked to call himself, watched the
wheels of the slot machine spin, spin, spin.
Nothing else mattered. Not the complimentary drinks plied by friendly
waitresses, not the din of other gamblers or the chink of their chips, not even
the muffled excitement of the unbridled make-it-rich-quick avarice on the floor
of the House Rules Casino in this great metropolis of Atlantic City. William’s
entire universe had collapsed to those three little wheels.
He was going to win the big one. He knew it. Could feel it in his bones. He
was due. He couldn’t have dropped ten G’s on this machine tonight for nothing.
True, he’d lost a little money here. But he was a smart man. Over the years
he had broken even. If he hadn’t, yet continued to gamble, then he would in
fact be pretty stupid.
Unfortunately he was actually feeling pretty stupid right now, camped out in
front of a slot machine with hypnotic blinking lights, his fat rump sorely
perched on a skinny stool beneath the perpetually sunny afternoon lighting near
a cardboard sign which read “Our slots are looser than our sluts”.
Wiliam’s luck, good or ill, would now be determined by these last rotations of
the one-armed bandit’s three wheels. He had dropped his last quarter in the
slot, and it was now deep within the bowels of this machine.
His heart raced. Sweat matted his brown hair to his brow. He was on a
gambler’s high. He could feel the power, the sure thing, coursing through his
body, through his loins, giving his groin a stiffy which could hammer nails.
He would break the gambler’s fallacy.
One cherry.
Two. Two cherries!
Two cherries and… a pear?
A fucking pear?
“Jesus fuck! Jesus fucking Christ!” William wailed at the machine.
He stood suddenly, knocking over his stool, causing the now empty plastic
quarter-holding cup, which he had purloined from the DOE during his education
czar days, to bounce off the tiled floor.
He bent to better yell at the slot machine.
“Give me back my goddamn money!”
“Excuse me sir?”
William was startled out of his rage. He blinked as he looked at a man with
short-cropped hair and an expensive suit who was flexing muscles gained from a
prison weight lifting program. Another equally well-built and well-groomed
security man stood behind him.
“Would you come with us, please?” the first security man said.
“Why?”
“There’s some discrepancy with your bill,” the security man replied.
Fear nibbled at William’s copious entrails. As he followed the two men to a
private casino elevator, he tried to calculate his win-to-loss ratio throughout
the years.
He had lost a little money tonight, true. But, if you tallied up all the wins
and losses over the years he had been gambling, he had really broken even. And
hell, he was bringing the casino valuable revenue, so they owed him, damn it.
“Where are we going?” he asked, his chest swelling with righteous indignation
as he followed the two security men like a little unhousebroken puppy.
The security men ignored him, but made certain he entered the elevator with
them. One pressed the button for the penthouse suite.
“I said, where are we going?” William repeated. He used the steely-toned voice
which had brought addicts to their knees during his drug czar days.
One guard eyed him like a fat sack of smelly trash he would really rather not
deal with. The guard slowly flexed his mammoth hand, casually cracking the
knuckles as he made a fist every bit as wide as William’s mouth.
William, with as much dignity as he could muster, gulped and stared at the rug
on the floor. It had a nice floral pattern.
Finally one of the guards spoke.
“Hey, aren’t you that fat douchebag? You know, the one always yapping about
moral responsibility and shit?”
“I am a nationally renowned speaker on virtue,” William said, slowly and
succinctly.
“Right,” the guard said. He and his partner exchanged glances and snickered.
“And yet here he is, Mister Virtue, on his way to see the Odd Father.”
“You know,” the other guard said. “I think I read one of your books during my
penal experience. But I don’t remember you ever talking about gambling.”
“Well, gambling isn’t really one of the seven deadly sins which we must all
guard against to make our nation great,” William said.
“Yeah? Well I seem to remember gluttony was one, and you sure are a fat
porker.”
“He’s fat, and he’s on his way to see the Odd Father,” the other guard said.
“He’s screwed.”
“Not yet he isn’t.”
Both guards started laughing at that. William grew very, very uncomfortable.
Finally the elevator arrived, a small ding announcing the penthouse foyer had
been reached. The two guardians exited the elevator, one holding the door for
William while the other opened a pair of ornate oaken doors at the end of the
foyer.
“The don will see you now,” he said.
William walked past. His knees felt very week.
He walked into a wonderland of pastel, floral prints, jasmine scents and throw
pillows. Dominating the creamy drapery was a boulder dressed in a topaz jump
suit.
The Odd Father was a middle-aged man with long jowls, a doughy nose and no
neck. Loose, wiry gray hair which was well groomed sat atop his slowly
encroaching forehead. His heavy-lidded eyes made him look half asleep, but
glowed with animalistic cunning.
“Billy, Billy, Billy,” he said. His voice was like a low grumble mixed with an
articulate nasal wheeze. “Do you mind if I call you Billy?”
“Actually, I prefer Mister William.”
“Billy, Billy, Billy, do you have any idea of why I called you here tonight?”
“Because I lost a little money tonight?” William said, hope in his voice.
The Odd Father smiled, his jowls splitting into two cottony cheeks.
“Billy, Billy, Billy. You owe us a lot of money. And not just for tonight.
If you don’t mind me saying so, I think you have a slight gambling problem
there, Billy.”
“I don’t have a gambling problem!” William said, thinking this jerk sounds just
like my wife.
Once again the Odd Father gave a slow smile.
“You’re into us for $8 million, Billy. I call that a problem.”
“I’m good for it!”
“Yeah, but that stupid book of your virtues isn’t selling like it used to, so
some of us are getting a little worried.”
The Odd Father draped an overly friendly hand across William’s shoulders.
“But I’m not worried,” the don said. “In fact I invited you here to help you
pay off a little of that debt.”
William ignored the Odd Father’s finger, which lightly caressed the hair by his
ear.
“As a moral leader,” William said, “I cannot condone your lifestyle and find it
morally repugnant.”
“Yes, but it doesn’t hurt anybody but me. Unlike your gambling.”
“I object to that. I don’t gamble away the family milk money. What I do with
my money is my business.”
“Ditto with my schlong. And, as long as it only enters consenting adults, what
I do with my schlong won’t destroy the country. But I like you kid, so I’ll
give you a sporting chance.”
The don reached into a pocket in the hip of his jump suit and pulled out a
silver coin.
“I’ll flip this coin. Heads, you win. Tails, I get your tail. Capice?”
“OK,” William said. He had difficulty choking out those syllables around the
heart he suddenly found lodged in his throat.
The coin flipped through the air, its sides glinting in the light. It fell on
the plush rug, bounced, bounced again, and sat. Tails stared forlornly up at
William.
“Why don’t you bend down there to pick that up?” the Odd Father said.
William did so, giving the Odd Father an eyeful of ass.
“Hey! This coin has two tails!” William said. “You tricked me!”
The Odd Father threw back his head and laughed, his body shaking with the
effort.
“This is a casino, Billy, built on the proceeds from other casinos. And the
one, overriding rule of every casino is that the house always has the edge, and
the mark, err, I mean patron, never breaks even.”
“That’s not fair!”
“We’ll just have to agree to disagree,” the Odd Father said. “Now, if you’ll
bend over and grasp your ankles, we can get started. Ohh, before you do…”
The Odd Father reached over to a table containing a large bowl of plastic
margarine packets mixed with ice. He picked out one packet and tossed it to
William.
“This will help,” he said. “Now, let’s do one last tango for Paris.”
William sighed. He dropped his trousers slowly and reluctantly, opened the
packet, smeared some of the yellow lard on his finger, and goosed himself till
he leaked olea.
The Odd Father got behind William, saying “Open wide. But not too wide, ’cause
I like it tight.”
William grimaced as he felt the blunt, hot fleshy edge of something poke
against his puckered starfish.
“Shit!” he said.
“That’s the best part of sodomy,” the Odd Father said as he thrust like a
runner sliding into home.
***
Two hours later, William waddled to the podium in front of an audience of three
thousand, all of whom waited with breathless anticipation for his moral
guidance.
William did some calculations in his head. Three thousand, at $10 a head.
Whatever his take, he would soon be back at the House Rules. And this time
he’d win! And win big, gaining back everything he’d ever lost.
He waited for the applause to die down, then addressed the crowd.
“Good evening. Tonight I’d like to talk about loose living, hypocrisy, and the
evils of homosexuality.”
William only hoped no one in the crowd would notice how full of shit he and his
trousers were.