The Ace of Spades

Thursday - We had a lovely trip on the coach to the Grand Canyon, did the glass-floored "Sky Walk". Lots of tourists alternating from fear and trepidation, to confidence and stomping around to prove their strength of belief in the engineering with steel and glass.
Then some brat aged around 10, sky high and hyper on the non-stop sugar he had been fed on the coach, not to mention the three or four ice-creams he'd been bought since arriving, decided he was a World Series pitcher and my groin was the strike zone. Never mind three strikes - just one and I was out. Not had that awful knotted twisting pain/sickness feeling since I got hit in the spuds with a conker that pinged off its string, back at school around 1994. I did the obligatory turning purple, rolling around, squeaking and gasping. My hearing faded out then started ringing, and I swear I heard someone call out that I was choking, and needed the Heimlich manoeuvre. Somehow I made it to my feet, indicated I was fine, and gradually regained a more human colour, all the while giving that little brat the evils. I swore I would get my revenge somehow, but knew I'd never get chance. Petty vengeance usually turns out to be illegal, especially if it involves cuffing a minor across the head, and I didn't fancy my chances. The planning wouldn't be quite as much fun as the execution would have been but it would have to do.
Coach ride home, Chappers and I finalised our plans for where to head next.
Then a lucky break. When we got back to The Strip, I got an early jump from my seat, and as I walked past the kid, I lined up and executed a perfect ear-flick. Nice and fast, good sound of fingernail leaving thumb-print at high speed, and a quiet but audible *crack* as it made full contact with shell-like cartilage, and all the while I was in smooth forward motion. There was a sharp intake of breath to the side of me, moving behind as I carried on forward and the rustling sound of someone's clothes as they reach up to grab and protect something that just suddenly hurt. A pre-pubescent male voice then squealed "Bitch!", and I started to turn around in fake horror at hearing such impudent language. I was just in time to see the little git launch forward feet-first from his seat in some kind of reflex banzai kamikaze revenge assault. He fell short by a satisfying foot and a half, full and flat on his arse. I had no doubt it must have hurt, and rattled his sugar-addled brain inside his head, because after a full five second delay, the bottom lip began to quiver, the waterworks turned on, and the trilogy of sweet retribution was complete with a high pitched wailing. I'm not above pettiness, and I don't care if my enemy is only about a third my age. A victory is a victory. Result!

So, now you hate me. Great. Well, karma is a fickle mistress. It appears the baseball must have been a gimme for the kid, since the cosmic response to flicking a sprog's tab appears to have been many-fold.

Chappers took us to another friend's soiree on the lower east side of town. Two friends of his parents, named John and Eve, were holding an 18th birthday party for their daughter, Poppy. Apparently there's the annual family and friends one, to which we were invited, and there's a huge bash happening in a couple of weeks that will be like something off an MTV show. Oddly enough Poppy seems quite embarrassed about the impending fuss, but John and Eve won't have it any other way for their princess. Any way up, cold drinks and smoky food is always a welcome sight for weary travellers, so birthday or no, I was jolly happy!
We decided to indulge ourselves with a cab ride back to the hotel and collect the bikes in the morning so we could enjoy the rather seductive looking mojitos Eve was serving up. They were indeed lovely, and were chased swiftly with a few cold German beers imported, apparently, at great expense to John. We played a little pool, I lost my new snake-skin cowboy boots to Poppy, who it turns out is quite the hustler and likes to play men for their shoes. No, I've no idea why either.

The party wound down, guests drifted away, and there were 7 of us left. Our family hosts, a guy whose name I never caught but I know he's an air conditioning engineer, and a window-dresser called Rene who Poppy is shadowing for some sort of vocational thing that I couldn't make head nor tail of (though Rene is actually Richard, but he hates having such a bland name). We were all invited to play some cards, eat some more, drink some more, and play for matchsticks and pretzels.
Around 1am, Chappers suggested we should make things interesting. Out came some rather fine looking painted mahogany chips. After an hour of pretty fun play, and smallish stakes, Chappers was $5000 better off, I was about $250 poorer. I was also pooped and needed to protect my spending money so I retired from the table, along with Rene who was by now flirting outrageously with me. Despite his keen attentions, I was alternating between falling asleep in my nacho cheese dip, and sipping on tumblers of Jack Daniels brought out by Poppy, trying to remain reasonably awake/coherent, but also politely disinterested in Rene's increasingly obvious advances.
Then came the big hand of the night. Rene woke me up to take notice as the stakes were creeping up and up. Chappers kept raising and raising in fair old wedges of money until his entire winnings so far were staked, and then started staking lumps into his original stash too. On and on he was raising rather than just calling. Presumably he had an awesome hand and wanted to put up a nice fat pot and call it a night once he'd cleaned everyone out. I've seen him do it before, cleaning a flat full of 14 students out of their month's pot noodle money, and he had that glint in his eye. Chappers went all-in. $12,500. The tension was unbelievable. All the chips gone, John raised another $10,000 with an IOU. Air Conditioning guy folded. Chappers put the keys to his bike on the table. Finally John checked. Chappers checked. Leaning back in his chair Chappers laid down a flush. Pleased as punch, he drew his elbows back to his side, and laid his palms on his stomach, smiling. John calmly laid down his hand, looking only at the cards. He had a royal flush, the ace of spades somehow laughing at me from the table.
"You win some, lose some, it's all the same to me."
So spaketh the great warty Lemmy, in the holy gospel of MotorHead. And so it came to pass. John had just taken the lot.
And then came the sucker punch.
John offered a final hand to win back the bike, and he'd take 'my' bike (relative term I know since it's not me who owns it) against Chappers' own now ex-bike. He took the bet. He lost. Three of a kind versus John's straight. Two unlucky hands in a row, and he had not only wiped out his entire cash reserve for the trip, but our means of transport too. I felt rather sick to say the least, having felt karma deliver a second smack in the nuts within 24 hours. Poppy softened the blow with a double measure of JD. John took pity and offered a thousand dollars back to line Andrew's wallet, but his pride refused to allow him to accept the offer.
John seemed quite unfazed by the night's events as did Chappers, but Rene and Air Conditioning Guy bade goodnight then made pretty swift exits by cab. Quite extraordinarily Chappers started playing hands for pretzels and match-sticks again, chuckling away like nothing had happened, talking about old times when the two families had taken holidays at each others homes, and around the world. I meanwhile retired to the den to get some much needed and, it has to be said, rather drunken sleep. Eve brought me a blanket and I was conked out quite quickly. The excitement was too much for me.

Around 6am I was woken, a cab was on its way. I had been fast asleep on the sofa for a good few hours while John and Chappers played through the night. John was scowling down, looking mightily pissed off. As I tried to stretch and couldn't move my arm, it dawned on me that Poppy had curled up in front of me, under the blanket, and the situation did look rather compromising. Fortunately he was pissed off with her. I must have been so out of it that he didn't even try to wind me up and make me sweat! She wasn't escaping so lightly though, and he proceeded to tear off the blanket that covered us both, and then to tear off a strip from her, pointing out that she may now be 18 but he's still his daughter, living in his house, and she can't just curl up with strange men as she pleases - Strange? Thanks very much John!
Much to my relief she sat up straight and argued with her dad on the spot rather than having a stand-up spat, since she was masking a rather embarrassing and prominent episode of morning glory that was refusing to go away. Argument over, he ordered her to apologise for having caused an embarrassing scene in front of guests. She fussed over straightening her hair, yawned a bit, did some seated stretches, shuffled around a bit (which made immediate matters somewhat worse for me!). She re-straightened her hair. She pressed back and bent double to adjust her new and far-too-large snakeskin boots, back to her hair, and so on until her dad gave up huffing and puffing and left the room. Clearly she had realised my predicament, and wanted to spare me my blushes from her father - yet couldn't resist increasing the agony of the situation at the same time with shuffles and squishes. She'll go far, that one! Cheeky madam then grabbed a handful of horn and gave it a squeeze as she stood up to leave the room. THAT wasn't going to help it go away any quicker! Perhaps karma had realised its accountancy errors and was redressing the balance? Poppy skipped away, paused at the door from the den to look over her shoulder, delivered the apology her father had demanded, winked and blew a kiss goodbye.

Twenty minutes later, I was sat shoeless in a cab with Upper Class Twit of the Year, taking a quiet ride back to The Venetian. It then dawned on me we had a problem. No money. I relayed my fears to Chappers, who simply dismissed the issue as a logistics hiccough. He would call home from the hotel, and transfer some extra cash onto his card account before settling the hotel bill, hiring a car, and we'd then carry on as planned. Great. Forgive me if I display a lack of excitement, and merely relief. He lost more cash last night in one sitting, including the value of the bikes, than I earned last year. I truly wish I could somehow just impart a tiny bit of the value and relative scarcity of money from my point of view so he could at least appreciate why I'm so exasperated and was finding it difficult to communicate at the time.

And so we're staying our final night in Vegas, and tomorrow we are heading out in the general direction of Albuquerque. Our next main destinations are Dallas, Houston, and New Orleans.

It's been an eventful 24 hours or so, and I think I've earned the right to order food in from room service tonight, enjoy a nice comfortable bed and some cable TV. At least it's safe in here!