note to king feddy

(who the hell knows how this is going to turn out. i’m typing this at DEN on my laptop, but have failed to connect to their free wireless here ... so this is a cut/paste job into blogger at some “later date” which almost certainly means i’ll pull up in the continual car in front of some god forsaken place early tomorrow to do the deed. all that and the format probably won’t be right. when it comes to technology, the future always isn’t as great as you’d hoped.)

your Highness,

in order to properly give you the restaurant review for today, i have to tell a back story.

now, i’m the first to admit that it’s only sort-of related, but my pal (and your acquaintance) CD, once said that he felt i should put together my ten best stories and sell them as a book.

my response was, “oh, that sounds great, except who’s going to read it?” (honestly, isn’t that always the rub?)

just for the record, you should title this: “the strangest day of my life.” now you know me well enough to know that’s pretty strong wording -- even from an extremist such as myself. but hopefully by the end you’ll admit it’s not that far removed from the truth.

of course, as you’ve probably already guessed, this story takes place in las vegas -- as all “strangest” stories always do.

it was three or four years ago during the memorial day weekend. i was in vegas for reasons i don’t remember (i never go there “just” to gamble -- it’s always traveling with someone else, or going for a specific event or some such) and i noticed that it was the perfect storm of 80’s super-stars over the weekend -- meaning both prince and madonna were appearing.

this was early-on in prince’s big comeback tour (the same one that you and i saw kick off at the filmore), and at $125 a ticket in the mandalay bay arena, the show was already solidly sold out.

madonna was a slightly different story. tickets were $65-$400 and still available in the super-cavernous MGM arena -- the same place i’d seen britney spears the year before. (and yes, she was awesome. don’t you ever bad mouth britney to me.)

{i’m having trouble writing here. there’s a great looking brunette standing nearby -- she reminds me very much of what your wife looked like before she started hating you. it’s throwing my writing mojo off a tad.}

to my mind, anything over $25 for a concert ticket is unreasonable. and over $50 is intolerable. i always compare the “concert experience” to how much physical music that same amount of hard currency would buy me. or in other words, $65 would get you madonna’s greatest hits and three of her dancey/trancey cd’s. (that’s if you’re paying face value new, of course, which i don’t). a concert that she’s capable of putting out won’t hit that level of compensation -- unless, of course, i was allowed to feel her flesh/torpedo bra. and we both know that’s not gonna happen.

of the two, i’d rather see prince, but those tickets are going to be harder to come by and will be expensive. true, he’s playing with maceo in tow, but the venue cancels out any inherent coolness he has in his band. i’m pretty sure i could go kutrate (buy tickets under face value from people who have extras -- typically scalpers who have tried to speculate and missed) madonna, so that seems reasonable. and at this very second is probably the best point of action.

but i might be able to sidestep everything. craigslist is often a solid standby for situations such as these. as we say in the KKK (kutrate koncert klub), i’m not looking for an arena full of tickets, just one (that, along with “never pay face value”). there might be an odd ticket waiting out there. in a place like vegas you’re just as likely to find an extra free ticket as you are something marked up 10x over face value.

as with everything in life, patience counts.

i poke around a bit and find the flakes, scammers, scalpers and drifters who are all trying to shake a few bucks out of the situation with tickets that they may or may not have. nothing’s too interesting until i come across an ad something akin to:

wanna go see madonna?
SWF 40, has an extra ticket. let me know.

this has been posted only a couple of hours earlier on that friday with the show the next day. so i fire off an email saying that i’m a solid madonna fan, but tack on that i mostly only know the hits and the pepsi commercials. i add that i’m not a maniac and will at least be funny and a good conversationalist. as a point of authenticity, i stick my phone number. (and to be very clear, i did not say i was hung like a hebrew national or anything like that.)

the poster calls almost immediately. we have a long conversation and she says, “well, i’ve already promised the ticket to someone else, but we could have coffee together tomorrow if you’d like.”

why not? if you think of life as being nothing more than a pinball machine, and the only way you accumulate points is by vibrating between the bumpers, you’ll never get high score by saying “no,” right?

she sent me a somewhat-hard-to-make-out photo and said she’d be at the roulette wheel at new york, new york (NYNY). we’d meet something close to noon.

the next day i put on, as johnny cash says, “my cleanest dirty shirt;” along with a pair clean underwear (as your mom says, “in case you get in an accident”) and headed to the strip from CD’s place in henderson.

little did i know then, i would not return for 42 hours.

i quickly found my craigslist poster at the NYNY roulette table, and as promised, we head to the casino’s coffee shop. the immediately striking thing about my new-found acquaintance is that every casino employee we come across knows her by name. not some of them. all of them.

she gets a coffee, i ask if i can go one better and order breakfast. no problem.

i get an egg white omelet with sourdough toast and after adjusting the tines on my fork (because they looked like they’d been modeled after british dental care) we have a long talk-see. she’s stretching my brain just a bit because she’s the curator at a southern CA art museum, and before that worked at the met in new york city. as you already know, i’m a big fan of modern art, but really i only know the top tier popular artists -- if you get a little below the surface, i’m not as strong.

somewhat sardonically, one of the pit bosses here at NYNY used to work with her there and is a good friend of hers. in fact, it’s the biggest reason she plays here.

we’re nearing the natural ending part of the conversation and when i go to pay the bill she shakes it off. “the casino’s picking it up.”

aha.

i’d watched her play for awhile earlier. she’s a medium roller and from everything i can tell, fairly regular here. that explains why everyone knows her. it also explains why the meal is complimentary (“comped” in gambling parlance).

“great. thanks.”

i say my goodbye and head to the valet for my car. as the car is being pulled up, my phone rings. it’s the curator.

“howdy.”

“hi. my date for the evening just backed out. you still wanna see madonna?”

“of course.” we’ve blown enough time this afternoon that it’s now only a couple of hours before showtime. i get a nasty glare from the valet when i send him back from whence he came and make a 180 back into the casino.

the curator and i go up to her room. she changes while i take in the surroundings -- this being my first time in NYNY. it’s nice (enough) and quasi art deco. a little vegas flashy-trashy which is not only what you expect, it’s what you want.

after a short wait (including a long shoe selection process on her part) the curator’s ready and we go to her (comped) seats. they’re way in the back of the MGM, but dead center. not good for seeing the performer up-close, but really good for the spectacle as a whole. the sound is as good as you could hope for a giant concrete cave.

the show itself is everything you would hope from madonna. a little in your face. a little posture-y. tacky in more ways than one. lotsa costume changes. multi-media out the wazoo and a whole lot of groove.

i like it.

we walk out and the curator is unimpressed: one, the show lacks cohesion as an artistic piece; and two, in case i hadn’t noticed, madonna sucks.

i’m just getting ready to explain how much the curator needs to lighten up when she says, “hungry?”

sure.

we go to NYNY’s chop house. i order clam chowder and king crab. she has a filet.

the food’s good. the service is very attentive.

we talk about gambling (she’s interested in the fact i’m a card counter) and modern art (she’s impressed with my knowledge of it, but i suspect she’s just being kind for me even trying to engage the conversation at her level) and madonna (bad bad bad vs. pretty damn good) and britney spears. she noticeably flinches when i bring the latter name up, so i make sure to spend extra time talking about that.

and no, it’s not that i hate the curator. i like her, in fact. she’s smart, interesting, hyper-educated and a fisherman. it’s damn hard to find a woman with all four of those traits. but that’s not going to throw off my conversation, right? britney spears needs to be “understood,” and i have precisely the level of mind to bring that comprehension to the masses, so i do.

we finish the meal. the tab, without booze or desert, is $125. the casino picks it up.

now this is a life i can get used to.

she asks, “you wanna play?”

“no. i have this thing about losing. i don’t like it and it puts me in a bad mood.”

“oh ... you wanna watch me play?”

“sure.” my brother is a big martin-galer (someone who doubles their bet every time they lose) on ultra-low-limit roulette so i’ve watched a fair amount of the wheel in my life. i understand the gambling hook involved. but for me it’s just fun to watch, i have no interest in playing.

i watch the curator for a few hours. she’s up and down, but as you’d expect, slowly trending downward. on those spins that she does hit, she’s what’s known as a “george” -- a heavy tipper. over the long run that’s gonna make beating a game like this even more impossible, but it does go a long way to explaining why she’s so famous.

the crowd on a saturday night is interesting. NYNY isn’t drawing in the well-heeled glammerati like other strip joints do -- it’s more of the 20-something’s trying to look cool. but the house clearly making money hand-over-fist. the curator’s table is jovial and fun.

the table’s crowded enough that i’m forced to stand behind the players’ barstools to make sure all the bettors have room to act. unfortunately this also puts me right at the edge of the (heavy) pedestrian flow immediately behind my back.

i endure the occasional jostle, until unngha, it feels like i’ve just been punched in the kidney. not hard, but absolutely deliberate. i ignore it.

then unngha, i’m hit again.

i turn around to see some little gourd-headed filipino guy grinning at me. my adrenaline starts to fire up.

why you little bastard. i’ll mash you through the pad in this carpet ... but wait. his look isn’t one of aggression. it’s one of familiarity. i dial quickly through the zillions of people i’ve ever known who might blind sucker punch me in vegas. and then it’s my mind takes the blow ...

good god, this is my dear friend the punkin. the punkin dropped out of the hell hole of a university that i went to and essentially became a full-time record store clerk. his musical knowledge is top notch and i’ve spent countless hours talking to him in the record store with solid goldstein. we’ve played on trivia teams together -- always winning, always brutally vicious to the losers.

i could tell you a million things about the punkin, but three will suffice for now. one is, aside from my wife, he’s the only person to wear her wedding dress (he looked remarkably good in it too: white’s a good color for him; lace, a nice pattern); another is i gave him a ride back from a blasters show in fort collins one time, and upon finding out i didn’t have a car stereo he (along with solid goldstein) proceeded to sing acapella versions of ABBA songs all the way back; but the capper is this guy was my original source of that copy of prince’s black album i got for you (way back before it was “legal”). so seriously, what’s not to like about the man?

i ask the obvious, “what the hell are you doing here?” because the punkin essentially lives on a low form of high minimum wage, and has for decades. going to vegas from CO is not something you’ll just do on a whim; unless, of course, you wanna get real, real good with that hitchhiking thumb.

but wait.

of course i know what he’s doing here. he’s here right this second for the same reason i am. he’s here to see madonna.

“i’m here to see madonna,” adding the punkin essential, “she was awesome.” there are few people in the world that can tell you every debbie gibson album, in order, and follow that info with every b-side the sex pistols ever released. but the punkin is one of them.

it’s good to see him. we talk for a couple of hours as the curator plays at the table.

not long after the punkin has wandered off, two 20-something males step up to the roulette table. they’re goateed, mildly fashion conscious and overly cool. they don’t have that smell of the genuine “stud” article, certainly not in the way you do. they probably have a ’72 firebird with a primered fender sitting just outside.

one of the them puts a c-note on 1-red (i don’t remember now, but this may well have been the table limit for a single number), while the other stands stupidly slack-jawed (yet cooly slack-jawed).

i’ve never seen anyone bet that much on a single roulette number, so i watch this spin with a closer eye than most.

the ball drops out of orbit. click, click, clunk. 1-red.

ah. too bad. it would have been cool if he’d hit it, but he bet on ... wait a minute ...

i look back at his bet. sure enough, he’s hit it.

i won’t go into a lot of detail, here, but as an aside let’s just say i’m a casino hater. i hate them because they offer games that mathematically cannot be beaten and on the very few that can will treat you like a criminal if you do so. which is to say i love a winner.

i shout and shake my fist in the air. “all right! alllll riiiiight!”

and i am, quite literally, the only person at the table excited or shocked in any way. the dealer doesn’t flinch or care. no one else at the table has even seemed to notice. and the guy who has just won, who is having $3500 pushed toward him at this very moment, who has just hit the only mathematical possibility of winning (a 1-in-38 shot) at all, has no response. none. i mean it’s the same kind of expression you would have if you were driving past an automated car wash in heavy traffic. he acts like this happens to him every day.

and there’s simply no possible way that’s true.

he hands $400 to his slack-jawed pal and tells the dealer he wants to see a pit boss.

his pal bets $100 on black while he bets another $100 on 1-red and the dealer spins. the wheel hits black, the slack-jawed pal doubles his money. the original bettor looks just the tiniest bit surprised, as though he can’t believe he hadn’t hit back-to-back numbers.

a pit boss wanders over and the kid says, “i just won $3500, i want a suite. not a free room, a suite.” this on the “sold-out” memorial day weekend.

in the meantime the slack-jaw has let the $200 ride on black and has hit twice. meaning he now has $800. he moves the $800 stack from black to red and hits, advancing to $1600. he hands $400 back to his cool pal at the same time the pit boss hands him a room key.

slack-jaw puts $200 on red, misses, and cashes out his $1000 in chips as his pal says to the pit boss, “make sure to throw in a bottle of your best champagne.”

before i can take in everything that’s just happened, the curator’s old friend from the met steps up. it’s 04:00 now, he’s just gotten off his shift, so we head back over to the coffee shop giving the curator and the pit boss can catch up.

he eyes me with suspicion, as well he should, but we get along good enough. he’s pleasant and well-spoken, which by default puts him in the top 2% of pit bosses without him having to actually do anything else.

after four hours of conversation, the sun is well up and we’ve run out of things to talk about. the boss excuses himself. the casino picks up the tab for the drinks. as i’m getting ready to leave, i make an off-handed comment to the curator about prince being in town and how it’d be nice to see him.

she lights up. “i’ll buy us tickets.”

i fire back, “no you won’t.”

“why not?”

“because, one, tickets are expensive. NYNY isn’t part of the mandalay bay chain {b1: they weren’t then, they are now} which means that your casino won’t comp them since they’d have to pull real money out of their pocket to buy them.

“and two, you don’t know me. we’ve met. we’ve seen madonna. but you know nothing about me, really. i won’t accept a gift of that size from you, when we really don’t know each other at all.”

she’s puzzled but accepting of my strange explanations. there’s an awkward pause, but really it’s only awkward for her. i’m dazed from being up 24 hours, having seen madonna’s pointy bust, being punched in the kidney by the punkin and seeing tiny nimrods win fairly big money.

“well,” she says, “you’re a card counter, right? you could just win the money for tickets.”

now this is an angle i hadn’t considered. i roll it around in my head a bit and then start up. “well, it’s a possibility, i guess. the important thing for you to understand is card counting isn’t like it is in the movies. the edge you have is incredibly thin. you can win, in fact you are a favorite to do so, but there’s a big chance you’ll bust.”

i roll it a bit more. “ideally we’d play for something big, like black {$100 chips}, but the risk of losing the bankroll is too large. we’d have to play for something less ... say, green {$25 chips}, and hope we just have a good quick lesson in expectation ... we win the money we need, maybe get lucky and win a bit more quickly than we should ...

“... but we have to start out with a pretty good size stake. say, $200 apiece, and agree that if we lose it, we lose it; but if we double it, we have enough to buy tickets.”

the curator quickly agrees but shows some puzzlement. “well, if we’re putting in $200 each, why not just buy the tickets straight out?”

“because this isn’t about us buying the tickets. it’s about a casino buying them for us ... oh, and we’d have to go downtown because the blackjack rules are better there.”

she just lights up, “downtown? where’s that?”

this is a question i’ve heard a zillionty times in my life, and aside from the “who’s buried in grant’s tomb?” aspect of the question (it’s both grant and his wife, by the way), the thing that surprises me is how unknown downtown is. it’s a purer, rawer, more original form of las vegas.

“you’ll find out. but we can’t play now. i need to be as sharp as possible, and that means i need sleep.”

“you could just crash in my room if you wanted.”

“sure.”

which is how i found myself in bed with a woman i’d never known a day earlier. and to be clear; no sex, just sleep.

we wake up at 14:00 and head down to the coffee shop for quick (and comped) breakfast. i start giving the curator card counting theory along with casino attitude toward play and the things i need her to do as to help disguise what’s actually going on as my sidekick. she’s loving it. “it’s like being a spy!”

well sorta. except there’s no glamour, no terrorists and if you get black booked you’ll probably never be able to walk into a casino again.

we go downtown with the intention of starting at the plaza and working our way down. it’s 15:00 when we walk through the door, prince is scheduled to start in three hours. in long proposition mathematical terms, with $25 base units, we should expect to win around $40 an hour. not enough money to make the target of $400, but if we start winning, i’ll press it a little.

we’ll see.

i’ve always been a very low stakes card counter only because i don’t like the idea of having the amount of money i gamble influence my play. it’s much easier to be cold and calculating when there’s a few bucks riding on the table than thinking, “you know, if i lose this bet, i won’t have a roof over my head any more.”

we sit down at a double-deck table by ourselves (that’s desirable -- such are the joys of playing downtown), breaking even after several shuffles. and then the deck starts warming up. we hit several hands in a strongly positive deck (more big cards than little cards are left -- that’s also desirable) and are starting to get enough casino heat that it seems like a good time to leave.

i have the curator cash out while i make my way to the horseshoe. immediately the deck at the table i’m playing goes positive and by the time she’s caught up to me, i take a break to add up the money we’ve won so far. in a mere 25 minutes we’ve won $490. we almost certainly have our tickets.

i tell the curator we’re all set and hand her $45.

“what’s this for?”

“that’s your half of the amount we made over target. you’re getting paid $45 to see prince.” she goes berserk. much in the same way housewives do when they’ve just guessed the correct cost of a vacuum cleaner on “the price is right.”

we now have the luxury of a couple of hours to burn so i show her the beauty of downtown, including playing 10cent chips on the roulette wheel at the el cortez and snarfing a 99cent shrimp cocktail at the golden gate.

about an hour and a half before the show we make our way back up to mandalay bay. i can seen several people with tickets for sale, but not a lot of buyers. this may be pretty easy.

i approach one guy, but he’s asking twice face and clearly isn’t interested in negotiatin, so i step up to another. every one of these guys is going to have the same problem, namely the hoity-toity vegas types will already have tickets. it’s not cool to take your girlie and buy tickets from some shark at the door.

and they’re going to have this problem in much less than an hour. this, of course, means we’ll get in.

i pull my latest target aside. “how much for two?”

“$150 each.”

we certainly have that much money budgeted here, but i’m not about ready to let this guy take a profit from me -- especially when he’ll be choking on those tickets in a mere 20 minutes. he knows that’s going to happen, but he doesn’t know that i know that’s going to happen.”

“i’ll give you $200 for a pair.”

he laughs, “dude, this show is sold out. they have a face value of $125. you think i’m going to sell them to you for less than face? you’re crazy ... in fact, it’s insulting.”

“well, i’ll tell you what ... when you get over being offended, if i haven’t already got tickets,” i point across the floor, “you’ll find me standing over in that corner. but be warned my price drops $5 every minute past 20:00, whether or not prince has come on by then.”

i don’t walk three steps before he grabs me by the shoulder. “okay, okay. you’re gettin’ a good deal here, you know that.”

oh, we both know what the deal is, pal.

i give him $200 and he gives me two inner-circle tickets.

the show is spectacular, but the crowd isn’t into it, which somewhat dampens the experience. the high point may well be maceo singing “wonderful world,” followed closely by prince doing “peach.”

when the show gets over, the curator is very pleased. prince was much closer to the mark she was hoping for than madonna. we head back to NYNY and grab (yet another) comped meal.

there’s a couple of hours still before her pit boss pal gets off work. she wants to play some more roulette, but my body clock needs a serious winding before it grinds to a standstill.

i bid the curator adieu.

while i’m waiting for my car, i add it all up. in the last day and three quarters i’ve:

* been kidney punched by a pal i haven’t seen in over a decade.

* seen the biggest roulette win of my life (and have been the only person even remotely excited about it).

* had four free meals totaling about US$100.

* seen both madonna and prince.

* had a free night (of sorts) at NYNY.

* $245 more in my pocket than when i started.

it may not read strange, but that’s certainly the way it felt. certainly stranger than the next trip to las vegas: where i find myself unconscious on the floor of the flamingo, and the curator’s pit boss returns me from the hospital at 04:00 in the morning.