Luck Be a Lady Tonight

Luck Be a Lady Tonight - Part 3

In the moment that I walked through the doors to the casino and saw the huge neon lights, spinning wheels, showgirl-dressed hookers, the shiny tuxedos, the mirrors, the statues, the blinking, noisy, shrines to greed and stupidity…I realized that I had been there all along. The curriculum, the degrees, the marriages, the closeted relationships, the manicured grounds, the hats with tassels, the family names, the cashmere sweaters and giggles and grants, and bequests, and esoteric, irrelevant scholarship…it was all obscene. The faculty and administration were all pimps and barkers, pit bosses, whores, cashiers, bartenders, and bouncers. The provosts and debutantes were nothing but a pack of cards. The East Coast palette of autumnal splendor that welcomed us anew each fall was garish, and the bronze busts around campus were the utterly tasteless golden calves of casino owners. The pillars and the plaques and lecterns and addresses were dinner shows and strippers on brass poles writhing for money.

It struck me, my virgin epiphany as I stood in the grand archway entrance, an entrance magnificent enough to be a church or Roman amphitheatre, that the casino was the only place where everything was obvious for what it was, and everywhere outside the casino was just a casino masquerading as something else. There are winners and there are losers. Play by the rules and destroy everyone but you. Count your money and you’ll know what you’re worth. That was the way the world stage was set up for us. War. University. Casinos. Marriage. It was a mad world with different tables to play different games at, but they were ultimately all the same. I decided right then that I would never learn the rules, never play by the rules. I would win in a way that transcended the game.

It was so incredibly loud in the casino, a distracting cacophony to anyone but me, that I could hear a pin drop, if that makes any sense. It was much quieter to me than the exhausting din of a droning professor. I guess I had gone insane. I wondered if my grandmother had been insane after all. Maybe Harry Truman was Chinese. I was so triumphant in my isolation and inversion that I wanted to lay down and lick the carpet. Everyone was smoking, which caused me to imagine putting a cigarette on the lips of my aging, brilliant faculty advisor, Robert. I imagined lighting it sweetly, and then putting it in his mouth backwards, burning him and laughing. Something must have flashed across my face while I was having my mad epiphany, and then wanting to lick the carpet, and plotting my revenge on the man who stole my boyfriend…because my blind date, he (I still don’t remember his name) looked at me and asked if I was alright. I considered telling him how I was, then quickly decided to pretend I was Constance for a minute, instead. I took his arm and smiled, and said, it’s nothing, really. He smiled back and smoothed his hair the way men do.

It was dark and flashy in there, with lots of mirrors. At Radcliffe you imagine mirrors everywhere, here there just were. I could see myself, my skin in the mirror in that perfect casino lighting, for the shadowy blue corpse I was. Everything was so clean and clear. I felt like I had finally come home to a magical childhood world that I had forgotten was inside of me all the time. A childhood world that wasn’t happy, but that was strange, powerful, and dirty and selfish. That childhood world.

Alcohol was free and there to make you stupid, so I turned down the drinks. So did my date. We ate candy, even though we were twenty-one and could have provided legitimate identification. I could see all the whores, they were proud of themselves, they didn’t care about what their last name was, like the whores at Radcliffe do. In fact, these women probably made up their names, made shit up all the time. There were men, too, a kind that are in the closet at Harvard, but here, gigolos were gigolos, and you pay your money and you take your chances.

I had two dollars with me, because you never know when you need to get home in a cab if a date sours. My date volunteered that he had eleven dollars, but had a letter of credit that he could show the cashier if necessary. I leaned in, as if whatever I said was going to be the best line in the movie of my life:

“Save your money, baby.”

I said it in a deep growl, with what I imagined was a wicked smile, and grabbed him by the lapel like Rita Hayworth or someone would. I dragged him with me towards the game. Then I stopped and spoke in a normal voice again, not Constance, not Gilda, and he seemed relieved. In hushed conversation, we conferred and admitted we didn’t know how to play any of the tables. So, I just picked one and put down my two one-dollar chips, and left that table fifteen minutes later with over a hundred dollars. He was giddy and delighted. A little luck is inspiring. A lot of luck, I now know from experience, is terrifying. We went to another kind of table and I kept thinking that my dumb luck would run out, but it didn’t. I left that table with more. I literally could not lose. No matter how stupid my choices were, or how ignorant we were about the game, I did not lose one time. Not one single time. Not one.

I was calm, but after a few hours, my date didn’t seem to be breathing or speaking, he just stood there by my side, clinging to my blue wool skirt like a child. I didn’t care. I didn’t share his terror. It turned out that I was a woman with a different kind of child inside of me than he had. Little girl, alone in her room, narcissistic and desperate, living in a fantasy world where she was had amazing powers. The power to see through everyone and everything. The power to be a character instead of real. To be real instead of a character. What’s the difference between make-believe and reality to a little girl? I could be a superhero, a movie star, a witch, anything I wanted. I had always wanted to be a witch.  Definitely—in case you’re curious—a bad witch.

They asked us to leave when I got up around a hundred thousand dollars. Nobody likes a real winner. My date was shaking. He knew we came by it honestly, if you can say that, but the whole experience was incomprehensible to him. He was the only person in the world, the only person in there that night, who witnessed the fact that I actually did not lose once, and so, now he was becoming disoriented. His belief in normalcy, in reality, was disturbed to the point that he could not drive. I had scared him and now he tried not to cry, sitting in the front seat of his new car, in his date suit. He said his eyes were bothering him because it was so late, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t why, and it wasn’t late. It was early. It was 5AM. We couldn’t go to the bank, none were open of course, but also my bank was back in Cambridge, so I sat there with the couple of large canvas bags they had given me. He said he was petrified someone would follow us, murder and rob us, but I think he was more afraid of me.