“Yes, thank you. I just needed to get a check out today for my tuition.”
“You down at LSU?”
“No, I’m staying up here for a semester or two first.”
“Well, I’m sure your parents like having you home. And LSU-Shreveport’s a fine school, too.”
“Yeah,” says Cam, deciding that this man’s assumption isn’t necessarily his lie.
“Well, give your Munna a kiss for me and give your folks my best.”
“Will do,” says Cam, as he gets a brittle goodbye pat on his shoulder.
Cam nods his goodbye and joins the flow of people pocketing their deposit receipts and filing out through the echoing marble and glass vestibule. He jogs across the street to get his check in the mailbox a few minutes ahead of the 5pm collection, then strolls back across and unlocks the bike.
Somehow the road home doesn’t hold any appeal now that he’s got twenty hundreds in his pocket. He hasn’t had a dime to his name since he got home from California. And he wasn’t about to ask his mom for any, so he hasn’t gone out much. If he does go out, he can only drink through a trade with the kid brothers of his old high school friends that he runs into anywhere he goes. They buy him a beer and he has to nod through accounts of his glory days. He tries to always finish the beer before they get around to the present tense.
Other than this routine on the weekends, Cam’s nights start with a dinner based on whatever diet plan his mother read about lately, usually just a variation on chicken breasts and vegetables. Followed by the only vice she has that no diet guru will ever be able to sway her from––Blue Bell mint chocolate chip ice cream.
After dinner, they watch TV on the couch that still has a stain on the arm from where he spit up breast milk as a baby. It’s not that she can’t afford a new one, but putting the scraggly plaid beast on the street for bulky pickup day would give her more shame than a new one could ever bring her joy. After the ten o’clock news, his mother retires to get her eight hours before the buzz of the alarm clock she’s kept set for 6 a.m. ever since she took the teaching job at his old school. When the late night guys come on he watches Letterman, because Carson’s dead and Leno did commercials for Doritos. He doesn’t go to his room until he starts nodding off.
Tonight, his mother won’t be home to cook dinner. She has a women’s group on Friday nights that he’s come to learn means “spurned” women’s group. Fending for himself on Friday nights usually means nuking some frostbitten Stouffer’s offering from the back of his mother’s freezer. But tonight he’s got a taste for prime steak and the funds to indulge it, so he muscles up Louisiana Avenue to a place even the banker said was too rich for his blood.
The Village Grille is, or at least was once, the most coveted reservation in town. Kids Cam knew whose parents took them there would drop its name as smugly as they would that of the new country club, Southern Trace, when it opened up and lured the “who’s who” away from the original country club with forty-thousand-dollar memberships that weeded the rich out of the rich and the tenured.
He stashes Andrew’s bike behind the restaurant next to the trashcans and waits a minute to catch his breath and let the sweat dry on his forehead. Then he pulls his hem out of his right boot and presses his face against the one-way-glass door until somebody unlocks it for him.
It’s a tiny place, but there’s plenty of seating for anyone showing up at 6pm. Cam doesn’t know what exactly he was expecting, but the mirrored walls and glossy black tables and chairs are a decade late for the edginess they seem to be going for. The busboys are still folding napkins on the bar, and the hostess dims the house lights for him after showing him to his booth. While the busboy clears all but one place setting on his table, the hostess knocks on the kitchen door and calls out a waiter.
A cheery middle-aged man comes out from the kitchen still chewing on a bite of his staff meal. He delivers the verbal menu like a soliloquy, peaking on the rare and pricy items like de-boned pheasant and seared foie gras. Cam stops him on Oysters Rockefeller.
As a kid, Cam thought oysters looked and tasted like loogies, but he developed a taste for them after his grandfather talked the secret recipe for Oysters Rockefeller out of a sous chef at Antoine’s in New Orleans, the place that invented them. His grandmother used to brag about how the real ones have watercress instead of spinach, but all that mattered to Cam was that they were covered with melted cheese.
For his entrée Cam orders the first thing that sounds like surf n’ turf. And he lets the waiter talk him into a fifteen-dollar glass of Bordeaux to wash it down. An hour later he’s got a queasy stomach, an eighty-dollar tab, and the hostess’ phone number. He gives the waiter a twenty-dollar tip, the hostess a hug, and limps back outside.
He pulls Andrew’s bike out from behind the trashcans feeling more full than satisfied. And mapping out the road home in his head doesn’t help. He takes a look over his shoulder at all of downtown stretched out behind him. The brightest thing in the skyline is a neon horseshoe from the Horseshoe Hotel and Casino, just over the river on Bossier City’s casino row. And the sight of it gives Cam a noticeable lift.
Chapter Two
“How much are your rooms?” he asks, after waiting behind yellow velvet ropes for a loud Texan couple slurping drive-through daiquiris to check in.
“Only have suites left,” snaps the guy behind the front desk.
“What do those go for?”
“They start at one-ninety-nine.”
Cam pulls the thick bank envelope from his pocket. “Make sure it has a Jacuzzi.”
The man eyes the cash and goes to work on his computer keyboard with newfound humility. After ignoring a few things about checkout time and incidental expenses, Cam signs something without reading it and trades three bills for a credit card key and about fourteen bucks in change.
The key gets him into a two-room suite on the tenth floor with His and Her robes in the closet, six feather pillows on the bed, and a second phone by the toilet. Cam fills the Jacuzzi tub, strips naked and puts on the robe. He didn’t get a key for the minibar because he paid in cash and didn’t want to leave a deposit. So he orders up a Jack Daniel’s with a side of rocks from room service while he’s sitting on the toilet, just because he can.
Ten minutes later, he’s sipping a ten-dollar glass of whiskey and adjusting his back to the tub jets. The bathroom door is open so he can look across the room at the window––with curtains pulled back––and out at downtown Shreveport. He’s about even with the giant clock on top of his grandfather’s bank, which catches his eye every time it flickers between the time and the temperature.
He’s never had any real privacy in his life. He grew up sharing a room, moved away to share a barracks, then moved back home to share an apartment. When you make yourself a little privacy, he decides, is when you make yourself a man.
When he gets to the bottom of his whiskey, the fingers cradling the glass are prunes. He climbs out of the tub and drips across the marble floor––enjoying the luxury of knowing someone else will have to wipe it up––and then lays diagonally across the king-sized bed to dry himself on the sheets and channel-surf on the big screen TV. Pretty soon it’s a back and forth between the same channels he watches with his mother at home. He gets out of bed and dresses for a trip downstairs.
He’s bored by the gambling after winning forty dollars in three hands of Blackjack, and wanders the casino on a search for girls to talk to. The only cute ones are attached to weekend cowboys and Barksdale airmen who look like the only thing they enjoy more than drinking and gambling is fighting over their girlfriends.
Cam leaves the casino boat through the wide covered gangway to a western-themed cocktail lounge hosting a Karaoke night, where men in Wranglers sing Johnny Paycheck and dance with each other’s wives. All that’s young and female in the bar is sitting on