I dutifully agreed, but my heart wasn’t in it. I was still worried about my dress.
Jerry pursed his lips. “Bet she digs chicks. I can always tell. She was checking out your tits.”
Small wonder, as mine are the only ones showing within, oh, a ten-mile radius. She was probably wondering how much my dress cost. I said half-heartedly, “Do you think so?”
He nodded vigorously. “Hey, I wonder. Maybe she’d like to join us later, when she gets off work. I’ll bet she’d get off on me watching her tongue you.”
Okay. We need to interrupt this broadcast. I’m going to say something that may burst a few bubbles, but what the hell. You know how there are all these urban myths out there, like the alligators living in the sewers and the kids who put the cat in the microwave and it exploded? Well, there are specialized urban legends. There’s a Catholic urban legend that says Mary Magdalene was a prostitute (I looked into this one; thought I could use a patron saint). News flash: she wasn’t, but we like believing it so much that we ignore little things like facts, evidence, that sort of thing.
Well, anyway, there are sexual urban legends, too. Different ones for men and for women, of course. And, guys, I’m here to tell you: We don’t get off on you watching two of us having sex together. In the privacy of our own intimate moments, we generally do not strap on oversized dildos and encourage our partners to engage in a plastic blowjob. I know that’s what you like to see. I know that’s what you want to believe. But if you are ever sitting and watching two women doing that, you need to know that they’re doing it solely for you and you’d better ask yourself why. You’ll pay for the show, one way or another.
At least when callgirls do it, the payment is unambiguous.
So I looked at Jerry and said, doubtfully, “Uh-huh.”
“Yeah,” he said, addressing his steak. “We’ll have to check her out.” Please God, I thought silently, please God, don’t let him make me ask her.
As it turned out, once dinner was over, Jerry had other things on his mind. Maybe there is a God, after all. “Time to win some serious cash,” he informed me, and we proceeded into the casino proper.
I thanked Mary Magdalene for my reprieve, just in case.
* * * * * *
I know a little less about blackjack than does your average five-year-old. It’s cards, okay? It’s one of the games that the steely-eyed men in dinner jackets used to play on my VCR.
It became obvious very quickly that my understanding the game was fortunately not necessary. I was there in a strictly ornamental capacity. And if I had misjudged how others were going to be dressed, at least I wasn’t far off in their responses to my choice of clothes. Of those people who were not intently absorbed in the play of cards on the tables in front of them, it became immediately clear that the men all wanted me and the women all hated me.
Par for the course.
So I watched Jerry settle at a blackjack table and nod to the dealer; the cards were dealt and I tried to look slinky rather than bored. I have to say that Jerry seemed to do rather well, so well in fact that he turned to me soon and gave me a hundred-dollar chip. “Here,” he said, loud enough for the table to hear, “go have a little fun for yourself.”
I took the chip – I’m no fool – but hesitated. He looked up impatiently. “Go play roulette,” he urged. “You’ll have fun. Come back when you’re finished.”
“If you’re sure, baby,” I said automatically, but I was starting to walk away even as I said the words. Three hours with him and I was already needing space.
I didn’t play roulette. I cashed in the chip and put the money in my bag (small and sexy and expensive, another faux pas, since most of the women I saw were carrying large vinyl bags into which they could pour their winnings from the slot machines) and wandered around to satisfy my genuine curiosity about the casino.
My friend Irene had had a lot to say about Foxwoods when I told her I was going (“just with a friend, nothing special”). “Oh, my God, Jen, do you know about that place?”
I think I’ve made it fairly obvious that I did not. “No,” I said.
“It’s supposed to belong to this Indian tribe, they got all this land and these loans because of some sort of payback for white people having taken everything from them.”
That much I knew. “So? That seems fair.”
“Maybe,” Irene continued, excited now. “Except that it turns out that the guy who started the whole thing was a dirtbag. There aren’t any Pequots, they died out years ago, and this guy – Skip something – got his family declared a tribe without having to prove it, the way all the other tribes had to.” Irene shrugged. “I actually think the idea is good, too,” she said. “I think that there should be some accounting. It’s just that the right people should benefit, not some scumbag out to make an easy buck.”
I was thinking about that as I walked around. I saw a lot of pseudo-Indians, that was for sure: all the cocktail waitresses were dressed in colorful fringed suede dresses and had headbands with single feathers stuck in the back of them. I’m not sure about the authenticity of the feather, but I am pretty sure that no Native Americans would have recognized the length of those dresses (as in barely covering the ass), nor certainly the fishnet tights and high heels that went with them.
Hiawatha meets Moulin Rouge.
I wandered in and out of several rooms filled with people intently staring at cards or dice, and eventually I got back to Jerry, only losing my way once, which was a pleasant surprise. He hadn’t moved, although I saw that several faces around the semi-circle of gamblers had changed.
He noticed me peripherally. “There you are. Get me a drink, will you, hon?” he asked. Then, as an afterthought, “How’d you do?”
I looked contrite. “I lost it, baby. I bet on my birthday and lost.” Or I would have, if I had been foolish enough to play.
“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