Chemistry of Fire Read online

Indeed, he had beaten the odds in the only game where it’s actually possible to invert the house advantage. First of all, you can make decisions about play during the game. In craps, roulette, and slots, the only decision is how to place a bet, after which an event occurs by chance. In addition, blackjack is the only game in which one event depends on another. The chances for a good hand change constantly as the composition of the deck changes. Some people can learn to keep track of what cards are dealt and then change the way they play accordingly.

  One of my goals had been to conquer my fear of blackjack. I had lived in terror of that moment when the dealer would give me a supercilious glare and wait for my decision: Hit or stick? Split or double down? Do I scratch the table like a cat in heat? Do I pick my nose? Of course, I didn’t want to lose. Losing was, well . . . for losers. But more than anything, I didn’t want to be embarrassed. If I was doomed by the house advantage, at least I could look cool while getting skinned.

  Don gave me a three-by-five card on which he’d written the crucial hands and how to play each. The dealer allowed me to put my little card right on the table and take my time reading it. She even let Don coach me on how to play. Soon I didn’t need a coach for most hands. And it became obvious that our friendly dealer was more than willing to help me play my hand, telling me at each deal of the cards when to stand, when to hit, when to split, and even when to double down. As the pit boss had said, they want you to win. Moreover, once a good dealer sees that you are playing standard basic strategy, she’ll let you stand or make the hits for you automatically. You hardly have to signal. After a weekend of playing blackjack at Don’s elbow, I was able to stand at a blackjack table and witness for myself exactly how many people were wagering significant money (hundreds, even thousands, of dollars) without a grasp of basic strategy. These players would wipe out in an evening. Jan and Don each started with $500 and were able to play a lot for the entire weekend.

  But Don did something no dealer could do for me. Before we went to the table, he said, “When I start raising my bet, you raise yours the same amount.” As the six-deck shoe gradually diminished, I’d notice Don going from a $5 bet to a $10 or even a $20 bet. I always bet what he bet, and when the bets got big, we’d start winning. The crucial effect of this practice was that when we lost, we lost in $5 increments. But when we won, we won in $10 or even $20 increments. By losing $300 the night before, Don had proved that when the cards are against you, there’s little you can do. But winning it back, he had proved that this system can be made to work. Don is a card counter. Not big enough to be a threat to a casino. But a card counter nonetheless. And a good one.

  By the end of the weekend, seven people had joined me there. Some of them had come and gone, but five of us were hunkered down dominating a blackjack table on a Sunday afternoon. The casino rose and rumbled and shrieked like the halls of hell. Music spit and crackled and crashed, while the din of bells and of coins clattering into metal buckets raked our nerves, and beneath it all: the low, strumming reverberation of human voices on the brink of combustion, a tremendous pulsing energy, which I could liken only to the sounds I’d heard in the biggest of the maximum-security prisons I had visited during my journalistic career. Brushy Mountain, where I had visited James Earl Ray. Marion, where I had met mass murderers.

  David Klass, a friend from Hollywood, sat on my left. Beyond him were our agents, Rich and Howie. On the other side of Rich, Tony Bill (Oscar for The Sting) sat betting green twenty-five-dollar chips with dark concentration. The rest of us were betting red fives, and David grumbled about “not being man enough” to bet twenty-five dollars as Tony was doing. David had written many movie scripts, so he could afford the bet. TB was a skilled blackjack player, but he was losing. He was coaching me on my moves, and I was winning. Now that’s gambling.

  So it was that we settled in for our last quiet game of blackjack before they had to leave. When Tony’s green twenty-five-dollar chips were gone at last, he pushed back from the table, dusting his hands off, and said, “I like that clear feeling. No money. No chips.” And then we all pushed back and wandered out into the casino crowd. David was grumbling about not having the balls, not being man enough, to make the big bets when he should have, and as we passed the Wheel of Fortune, he stopped, transfixed by it. “What the hell?” he said with a shrug.

  “Uh-oh,” Howie said. “He’s hitting the leather.”

  David put two dollars on a really bad forty-to-one bet, and the woman spun the wheel. We all watched as the rubbery dildo on the giant wheel flipped past the pins, the great rotating disc slowed and then miraculously came to rest on the bet David, in his despondency, had selected. David walked away with the eighty dollars he had lost at blackjack, but more than that, he had regained something else he’d left at the table. Perhaps it was his pride. Perhaps it was the world’s largest human penis. Whatever it was, we all instantly understood it and cheered as he collected his bet.

  I drove them out to the airfield, and over the wing of Tony’s Cessna 310, I saw the moon rise, scorched and brown and yellow like a disc of crème brûlée. They climbed into the twin Cessna and took off into early starlight, Santa Monica bound.

  The Indian brave’s rite of passage was three days fasting in the desert waiting for a vision. Mine was four days of eating at Spago in Caesars Palace waiting for a vision. I came out here in the desert on the fourth day. Chalk hills and accidental temples of stone where signs pop out on the path: “Climb to safety in case of flood.” When the monsoon comes, there’s nothing to soak it up, and it comes as a ripping, hell-bent cataract through the crack of this canyon. Other signs directing me to “bay” or “cove” or “beach” set up reverberating paradoxes in this desert.

  When going to Las Vegas to gamble and play, it is important to whip out of town going south on Interstate 15 and look back at the creation of Vegas, how it fills the valley with wine-colored smoke and steel reflections and the white snail’s tracery of cast concrete. It takes only minutes to shake off the rhinestone cloak of lights. Soon the dark prows of mountains draw athwart. To the west a single wall rises, faint and forbidding in the smog, a beckoning wilderness.

  The Valley of Fire erupted as if it were still molten. The moment I saw it I understood the name. Dunes, bare and red as anthills in that raked Sahara, and the pale silver-green sage in endless undulations, and the impossible glassy lake of mercuric slag, with misty peaks gathered all around in hoards for hundreds of miles and tilting into the vanishing distance. Even with a road, escape seemed impossible from this ripped and creased and sandy earth, which slid away, littered with upturned plants and shadowed by immense caldera peaks. It was the density of the vision that made the elephant stand on my chest. And Lake Mead gleamed out of those wastes, an insistent, incongruous hallucination, deepening to royal colors as the sun drew high. There’s no limit, it seems, to what the eye will accept. Unlike the stomach, it does not fill up. No matter how much of this landscape we put in, the eye takes it all, and we become euphoric on it, and yet we’re just as hungry as before.

  I came on a tremendous triceratops of red stone erupting out of the earth and stopped and climbed it and stood atop its fifty-foot peak above the desert floor and took it all in, wondering what kind of test it was of myself to guard this $500 I’d been given for gambling. What did I have to prove by not losing all the money? It was something to do with a story I told myself about who I was. And in the story, I was the good guy. I could have taken the $500 and pissed it away and laughed and said, “Hey, cool: they gave me five-hundred dollars to gamble with. Easy come, easy go.” But no. I’d been guarding it. Hoarding it. And now the fact that I was still down almost $250 gnawed away at my miserly innards. “Loser, loser, loser,” it taunted me. Even though all the books I’d read had told me to expect that kind of loss—more, really. The house advantage makes it inevitable: as long as you expose that money in a game, the odds will slowly eat it away as surely as this desert will suck the life out of you. Given the amount of a
ction I’d laid down, I was doing pretty good to have gambled for four days and lost only $250. Howie and Tony had lost that much in an afternoon.

  All around me on my windy perch the land was green and pale and silent. Gravity and light from the mountain ranges tried to pull me off the rock, but I held on tight. Monuments of stone. The red road silted out in ancient seas and froze like this, and millennia ago salts crystallized and formed the concavities, called tafoni, in the iron-red sandstone.

  I climbed and scrambled down and went back with my jeans and jacket covered in red dust. I crossed through alkali heaps and green slag hills left over from the manufacture of the world. The team of ghastly gravel visages leaned in to inspect me from the sun-freaked shadows of this arid domain. This nearest rank of faces seemed scarcely credible, yet beyond was another and beyond that another misty enfilade of stone creations.

  I caught a tour bus to the cafeteria on top of Hoover Dam. I dismounted and crossed the road that ran along the rim of the mammoth structure. This was where Superman almost lost Jimmy Olson. When the dam was being built, workers began pouring concrete one day in the 1930s, and they poured around the clock continuously for the next two years. I was surprised at how little stood between me and the parabolic slide to the gorge more than seven hundred feet below. One quick hop, and I’d be on a broad rim. Scoot less than a meter, and my feet would be dangling over the edge. Then just let go. What a ride that would be. The gorge was magnificent, rent and blown apart in wild striations like the birth canal of the world and now cleated with a cruel chastity belt of high-tension towers. So this was where the power came from to light the strip. To power the false volcano.

  I crossed through traffic and crowds of sightseers to the Lake Mead side: tremendous fish like docile silver calves held steady in the stream among pilings big around as houses. Beyond: the lake like a bowl of mercury creased by the wake of a single boat.

  The tour bus let me off at the parking lot. I drove back, watching Las Vegas swim in its own urine. Las Vegas: a sea of foam, a basket of snakes, a newborn volcano that erupts every half hour.

  All of my friends had gone home, and I was alone in Caesars Palace. As alone as you can be when a thousand people are playing slot machines. A few more careless bets, and my $500 had dwindled to $200. I wandered the booming casino trying to decide what to do. There was Steve Schiff, straight-shooting New Mexican congressman, a fiscally conservative Republican from a largely Democratic state. A man who spends a lot of time talking all that right-wing belt-tightening stuff. Week before Christmas, and he’s all alone, looking out of place in an ill-fitting sport coat and slacks and no tie, like a Catholic prep school kid who’d put on the coat because he had to. He sat at a blackjack table, placing $25 and $50 bets and looking bored and forlorn.

  I decided to win back my $500. It was a strange decision, I realized, given what I knew about the odds, but I thought: If Don can do it, I can do it. If David was man enough, then so am I. I took my last $200 and went to the craps table and dropped it on the felt. A moment later I had a wooden rack filled with glorious soft red and green chips, and I was playing the odds once more. I didn’t bet continuously. I bet with certain shooters and not with others. I felt my way along, my hands out before me in this dark hallway of randomness. As I was waiting out a round of losing deviations, a tall and handsome African American man came up beside me, wearing about $2,000 worth of colorful sporty nylon stuff. He dropped a long stack of $500 chips into the rack and calmly began placing them all over the layout. The dealer looked up at him and his stash and said, “You want to be rated?” The man said nothing but shook his head slightly: no. I’m guessing, but he probably lost $10,000 in less than ten minutes. I was transfixed. I didn’t even place a bet. I just watched him. He was beautiful. He appeared to be in a trance, some misplaced football star wandered in here and this God’s way of telling him he’d made too much money.

  When he left, I started betting again and won $100 in about as much time as he’d taken to lose $10,000. I was finding it hard to breathe. I pushed my chips over to the dealer and said, “Color me,” and he gave me three black hundreds and change. I didn’t want to wear out my craps luck and get on the wrong wave. I walked around the casino, thinking, watching, wondering how I was going to make up the rest of my $500 stash. Everywhere I turned, they were giving it away. How to get them to give me some . . . ? Of course, anyone who knows gambling will tell you that this is absolutely the wrong approach. Accept the gift: you lost $200, not $300.

  On an impulse, I put one of my silver $1 coins into a slot machine and won $25. Amazing. Already things were looking up. I crossed the casino again and stood watching a roulette game for a while, a perfect picture of random play. It had come up red about six times in a row. I put $15 on the black, and the dealer spun the ball. It clattered into the black, and I picked up another $15 and walked away. I hit a blackjack table for $30. I returned to craps for about $50. Another round of roulette paid $25. Thus I circulated around the casino in a kind of psychic trance, retrieving the money I’d scattered there during the long weekend. You see strange and subtle things in a casino like Caesars. A young thin Mediterranean-looking man with tragic good looks and black hair hanging half in his eyes. Walking with a cane, he came up during one of my roulette sessions and began placing $1,000 yellow chips all over the layout, perhaps a dozen of them cast randomly on the numbers. He wore a serious expression and an expensive light gray suit with a dark shirt and no tie. He leaned heavily on a stool as if his leg hurt him. When a spin of the wheel took all of his chips, he pushed himself up on his cane and, with no expression whatsoever, struggled through the turbulent domain to one of the many cash machines and withdrew more money and came right back.

  It was nearly midnight when I retired to my room. I had recovered all of my lost money. I was going home the next day. I felt as if I had achieved my goal. I took off my shoes and started running the water in the huge jacuzzi in the fishbowl bathroom. I’d take a bath and watch TV and go to sleep. And yet something gnawed at me. Something was dreadfully wrong. Why had I guarded that money so jealously from the start? Why had I felt such a tremendous sense of ghastly failure at losing half it in four days? I had been treating the money not as a free gambling stake, a bonus, but as if I had a fiduciary responsibility toward it. I had been behaving like an investment counselor. Indeed, the thought of leaving Las Vegas a loser had filled me with a sickening discomfort.

  I turned off the water in the jacuzzi. I put on my shoes. This is bullshit, I thought. I don’t care about the money. I took five hundred-dollar bills. I locked my wallet in the small safe in the closet. I rode the elevator down. The casino seemed to explode with a shrill and stinking slo-mo violence, the gaudy flickering, the cigar smoke like burning insulation. People were swimming everywhere, cackling madly or sitting frozen in grim concentration. Was it a fire drill? Was it Thorazine? It could do anything but stop.

  I crossed through, shouldering people out of my way, and approached a bored-looking dealer, who stood flicking the ball around and around the idle roulette wheel. I dropped the five bills on the felt. “Can I have a purple chip?” I asked.

  “You gonna place a bet?” he asked.

  My heart was going like crazy. I couldn’t do this, I told myself. I just couldn’t. Something in my upbringing. You don’t want to throw money away. Even if it’s not your money. “No,” I said.

  He called the pit boss over with a wave of his hand. “He wants a chip,” he said.

  “Give it to him,” the pit boss said and turned away.

  The dealer took my five bills and gave me a single pale purple chip, and I walked off into the crowd with my heart in my throat. What was this inhibition? I was a winner. But if I did this reckless thing, I would leave Las Vegas a loser. Was that it? What’s the first thing anyone asks when you return from Las Vegas? Did you win?

  These are important definitions. This is who I am. My stomach had been in knots for days over this very question. Why
else would I have stayed up all night trying to win back what I’d lost? My old friend Marc, a shrink, would say it was a weird Freudian thing, but I was too rattled at that moment to recall much about my potty training. It didn’t help any that all around me people were slinging $500 and $1,000 chips like they were Girl Scout Cookies. Why could I not simply bet the money given to me and go to bed and go home? Why did I always have to take everything to heart? God, was I really this serious? How boring.

  I wandered the casino in complete confusion, clutching my precious little purple chip, feeling as if I stood in the door of an airplane with something strapped to my back that might have been a parachute or might have been some hippie’s backpack that I’d picked up by mistake. And a little voice in my head was shouting, Jump! Jump! Yet I could not. Was I not more of a loser for my inability to take the risk? David had said it at the blackjack tables: “I wasn’t man enough.” Of course, it had nothing to do with being a man. That was nothing more than an expression. It had to do with evolution. It had to do with the ape experiment. It had to do with choosing the smaller pile of candy in order to get the bigger reward.

  I had arrived at another roulette wheel far across the casino, where a lone and tired-looking young man was putting green $25 chips on the black and losing with every spin of the wheel. The weight of it was on him, I could see. I watched his play, fingering my chip. It was smooth and looked as if it had been hand-painted. The chip showed a man lashing the horses that pulled a chariot. It had pink and white hash marks on its edges and columns etched in its rim. It was a grand and pretty chip, and I was going to say good-bye to it and go away and not ever have this chance again. I cradled my chip. Good-bye, beautiful little chip. How I have loved caring for you. I have tended you so well on our weekend together. I had my notebook out, taking notes, and I outlined the chip on the page before me: a memento of our weekend in Las Vegas together.