“That’s okay.” He squeezed my waist and looked around the table to see if anyone was watching. “I just want you to have fun, that’s all. Get me a drink, will ya?”
I signaled to one of the pseudo-Indians. She hadn’t been to the same Mouseketeer training as the front-desk people. Or maybe she just hated me on principle because I was better dressed than she was. “Yes, what is it?”
“A Chivas on the rocks, please.” Jerry had already given me a lengthy list of his preferences – sexual and otherwise – during our drive down from Boston. “And I’ll have a gin and tonic.” Might as well enjoy myself, I thought. Experience has taught me that being slightly buzzed can often be a good thing in an uncomfortable situation.
Jerry was getting twitchy. I waited until the drinks came and took a couple of chips from the pile he had left for me to use. He had told me about that, too, on the ride down: “Those chicks, they work their asses off and deserve something. I always tip them.” Like that was an extraordinary act of selflessness. Well, maybe for Jerry it was.
I tipped the waitress, which mollified her not one bit. Okay, I thought, fine, I tried, fuck you too. I put his drink discreetly beside him on the wooden rail provided for that purpose, sipped my gin and tonic, and tried to pay attention to the table.
Jerry, it transpired, was getting twitchy because Jerry was losing.
Even without knowing about blackjack, I could tell Jerry was losing. He didn’t have nearly the number of chips in front of him that he had had before. Worse still, it seemed that everybody else at the table had more chips than he did.
Now, what I do understand about blackjack is that you’re not playing against the other people. They’re just there. You’re playing against the dealer. You play, then the dealer moves to somebody else and plays against them, and so on around the table, all these separate little dramas acting themselves out in near silence, everybody just waiting for the moment when it’s their turn with the dealer. So it doesn’t matter in the least how the other people at the table are doing.
But of course it really does. Jerry kept looking at their chips, and with every hand he lost, he got a little more twitchy.
He finished the Chivas and looked around impatiently for more. He got irritable with me when I couldn’t get the Pocahontas-wannabe over fast enough. He started sighing, loudly, when other people were playing their hands. He was, in short, being a poor loser. And annoying the hell out of everyone.
“I’d be doing better if the other people here knew how to play,” he said to me, his voice loud enough to carry nicely to everyone at the table. I caressed his back and neck and murmured comforting things like, Baby, it’s okay, I’m impressed with you, the next hand will be the best; but he shook me off him and said, “What the fuck do you know about it? Some fucking bitch’s trying to teach me to play!”
I froze. Everyone at the table froze, except for the dealer, who must have been used to that kind of thing. What I was thinking was that I had never heard James Bond say anything like that to any of his slinky women.
Jerry glared at the other players. “It’d help if there were some fucking Americans here,” he snarled as an afterthought.
Long pause. I looked at the other players. Three were clearly of Asian nationality or descent. This wasn’t going to be pretty.
And I was quite certain that I was the only one to find irony in his reference to “Americans” in the context of a casino that had been thrown to the Native Americans much as one might throw a bone to a dog by way of reparations. And, having done so, had missed.
It was time, in any case, to take matters into my own hands. “Come on, baby,” I urged Jerry, again putting the seductive tone in my voice and the promising touch in my fingertips. “Let’s take a break. I miss you. Come on, just a few minutes…”
Man, I don’t care if Mary Magdalene wasn’t really a prostitute, I’m lighting a candle to her anyway: he actually left the table with me.
We found a dark bar (there seemed to be any number of them around) and I played with his dick under the table and talked as soothingly as I could while he downed two more Chivases, which didn’t seem like a good sign. He was convinced that others’ poor playing meant that the cards were lined up against him. Of course, “What can you expect from a bunch of goddamned Chinks? The whole place is full of them.”
Yeah, well, there’s just so much of this that I could listen to, even for a thousand dollars. I moved closer to him and slid my tongue slowly down his neck, my fingers still lightly fondling his dick that I could feel getting hard through the sweatpants. It’s not so much the having sex in exchange for money: it’s not being able to tell racist, sexist, self-absorbed assholes like this what you really think of them.
“It’s time for me, now,” I murmured against his neck. “Baby, I need you… please…”
He fell for it. Thank God I still had my touch. He grumbled about us always doing what I wanted, about how I really was a nympho and couldn’t get enough of him, I was lucky he was a real stud and not like some of those other losers I see, and I agreed with it all and pulled him into the elevator after me. Whatever it takes.
And that was just the first night.
By the time we were packing to go, I could barely speak civilly to him. He had embarrassed me in front of bartenders, waitstaff, card dealers, pit bosses, maids, and polyester-clad patrons. He had made loud boorish comments in the high stakes rooms and had felt up one of the Pocanatas cocktail waitresses. He had sent food back to the kitchen three times. He asked the African-American couple sharing our table at the Earth, Wind, and Fire concert to stop dancing around so much, and muttered something rather loudly about how “those people” had to behave like monkeys.
Fortunately, you don’t have to speak to your partner in order to have sex with him. Or at least you don’t need to have a conversation. Because I might have said any number of things that might have been regrettable.
I paid for the time I spent away from him at the promised spa session by playing prolonged games in bed. “Tell me I’ve got the biggest cock you’ve ever seen. Come on, bitch, say it again. Say it loud!”
He had me bring him to the brink of orgasm and then stop, over and over again, until I was dizzy with the effort and he lay back and said, “What’s the matter? Come on, kiss me here, I want some tongue this time.”
“I need to rest a moment,” I protested.
He grabbed my hair and pulled my head to his crotch with such force that it brought tears to my eyes. “You’re not here to rest, bitch, you’re here to do what I want, so suck me!”
We ended up having long sessions of increasingly violent sex, silent uneasy meals together, and lengthy hours gambling in the casino during which I cringed at his behavior.
Saturday night I fled for a half-hour, pleading the classic headache, and found myself in one of the dark little bars, the only person there. “What’ll it be?” The bartender, at least, was not dressed like a Hollywood Indian.
“Grand Marnier,” I said, thinking of the comfort of ten minutes of elegance, a balloon glass and a warmed liqueur, something to remind me that there was Life After Foxwoods.
“Sure thing,” he said, and a moment later handed me the drink. It was Grand Marnier – served in a plastic cup. I gaped at it, and at him.
“What’s the matter? Did you want ice in that?” he asked.
* * * * * *
By Sunday afternoon Jerry was desperate. He had had a short winning streak on Saturday, but had been losing steadily ever since then. Lots of credits on the Wampum card.
We had planned to leave at three, and it was now past four. Our bags were packed. Jerry was still hunched over his cards. “All right, Tia, all right,” he said crossly to me. “Just one more hand.”