2:18 am

I glanced back at my partner's fingers and saw that he'd locked all four fingers. I knew, right there, that I was fucked...not because I knew he'd hit quads, but because I could see the dealer's eyes right behind him. He looked at the fingers then looked at my eyes and saw that I'd been sneaking a peak.

"Gentlemen, hold your cards, please" he said abruptly, looking over his right soldier at the floor manager at the change station. He gave a quick "come here" signal with a hook of his finger and the manager began to approach. That's when I saw them...two huge, looming goons wearing fine tailored suits with t-shirts...no button-ups and no ties, because both could constrict fighting stances and motions and the tie provides a weapon that can be used against you. These two were clearly house security, but not the types who come to investigate; no, these two were here for one reason only, to bounce, to toss, to put you on your ass so hard that you
'd never dare think about coming back into their establishment to pull your bullshit antics ever again.

By now the house security cameras had zeroed in on both our faces, so we were up shit creek at any other MGM property from here on out, that much was done. It was what we chose to do in the next few moments that would define how the evening would end. The cameras might be on us, but the two thugs didn't know their marks yet and wouldn't know until the dealer told the floor manager of the situation.

"Gentlemen, good evening. We apologize for the interruption". The floor manager was calm in his delivery, as well he should be. He had nothing to worry about. There was little chance a cheat could get out from the casino thanks to the plethora of security, and he didn't have to do the heavy work, so there was no reason to create flase alarm with tension or nervousness. "What's the issue, Tim".

By this time, the two goons were standing directly behind the dealer, one right behind my partner, the other standing over the right shoulder of the dealer. Still, we weren't 100 percent fucked, but we were getting close. I was sitting on the end, as always, so I was good, but our chances of both of us getting out were diminishing.

"I think we might have two players signalling each other, Mr. Simmons". The dealer was more nervous. An improper spot could lead to dismissal from your job, because no casino likes to piss off customers. "I think the player in seat one has four of a kind, as he signalled to the player in seat 3".

"Okay, what are you going on here, Tim...tell me how". By now, it almost seemed that the manager was smiling, enjoying this like a kid watching how a trick is pulled off from a seasoned magician.

"Well, I noticed that player 1 always shifts his fingers throughout the games. Last hand he hit three of a kind and I noticed he had three fingers locked with his pinkies pointing up...I just couldn't figure out who he was signalling to, until this last hand".

My partner looked at me, and we both had that instant realization of what was about to happen. THe dealer was about to point me out...then, the other thug would get position on me and we'd both be lead out to the street by our collars. My partner rapped his fingers with his left hand on his two cards, which was our signal to get out of a hand; however, in this case, he was telling me we had to get out. He then laid his right hand flat on the table, which signalled he had a question, "how"?

In these situations, you have to work with what you are given. Any card player has no doubt spent hours upon countless hours in isolation either shuffling cards, checks, or working sleight of hand in their own room or during day-long poker marathons. One thing I had worked with, for a time, involved a gadget I'd seen CHris "Jesus" Ferguson work on WSOP broadcasts...he could sling a card so straight and hard that it's slice a banana. I could never get the banana part down, but I could stick one-quarter of an inch of a card corner into standard drywall, so I had at least two weapons in front of me. The other was slightly more unfortunate to use, but because of shit luck I didn't have many anyway...chips. I had about 3200 in chips in front of me, which was around 50 chips since some were black beauties and some were green 25s.

Any man, no matter how big, small, fat, or fit, can't control their most basic of reflexive motions to two areas...one is the face, particularly around the eyes, and the other is the crotch. We were in a bad spot for crotch kicks, but my partner's elbow was in the perfect spot. Unfortunately we had high-backed swivel chairs so the angle and the swivel would prevent swift and forceful enough shots to do any good for our purposes. One of the two guards was starting to make his way towards me, eyes on me, and the other was looking directly down at my partner. I knew what we had to do next...

I looked to my partner and rubbed my eye, and he knew what to do. In back rooms back home, this usually meant a cocktail to the face, specifically in eyes, which stung and stopped anyone pissed off enough from taking you down within a few seconds. We had picked the MGM specifically because the poker room was located close enough to a side exit that we could, theoretically make it to an exit if the shit hit the fan. We were 200 yards from the exit and neither of us were exactly slow...now, it was time to test the athletic ability fo the MGM security staff.

My hands went down quickly, separating the two cards quickly...in my right, I flicked the card at the head of the approaching security guard, while my left hand grabbed the second to make another throw at the floor manager. My partner grabbed his chips and threw them backwards into the goon's eyes with his left hand, and gave the dealer a swift shot to the nose with his right elbow. The dealer's nose didn't break or bloody, but it brought hsi hands to his face and not to my partner's arm, which did the trick. My partner's chair shot back into the guard, who was leaning backwards from the flying chips...his left foot was on top of the table when I grabbed my chips and slung them at the triad of security officials. We were both across the table and heading towards the door...no live tables were between us so we had no obstacles to cross in getting to our exit.

As we rounded the elliptical shape of the hallway, I glanced back and could see the two pigs running behind us, some 30-40 feet back. We had a jump, but it wasn't much. We knew we were getting close because the hallway lighting turned to red, a theme of a nightclub on the shit end of the MGM property. To our fortune, a tourist was coming in as we were going out, and my partner grabbed him and slung him back towards the guards, which tripped one and caused the other to change direction.

We exploded out of the south entrance of the MGM at a full run, the spinning doors reeling as we made our way out. As I looked back all I could see was the amber hues of the nightclub by the exit and the silhouettes of the two bald and suited men coming at us.

2:21 am

We exploded out of the south entrance of the MGM at a full run, the spinning doors reeling as we made our way out. As I looked back all I could see was the amber hues of the nightclub by the exit and the silhouettes of two bald and suited men coming at us. The El Camino was parked on the curb by the mini mall but the windows were up and the doors were locked...this would be close. In daylight, with one key, it'd take two to three seconds to get the monster open and to get the cylinders firing...and here it was, dark and wild with adrenaline and heart rates up, with the pigs closing in on us and me with blurred vision and a pounding head.

I hit the passenger door in full stride and put a good sized dent into the panel, but my body began to glance off and I had to slap my left hand against the window to keep me from flying to the curb. My door was unlocked, fortunately, and I threw the door open and slid sideways into the white, leather-upholstered interior. I reached quickly to the lock on the driver's side, trying vainly to lift it up, but couldn't reach it. As my partner flung the door open I looked down for a moment and saw perfectly formed sundrops of blood on the seats. It wasn't until then that I realized I had been bleeding from the hit I took a few moments ago.

"Fuck, this is going to be close," he said, jamming the key into the ignition and gunning the engine. He laid on the horn and hit the accelerator, causing the steel-belteds to scream just loud enough to drown out the yells of the approaching security swine. The crowd of people in front of us, walking in lines like cattle to the slaughter, turned with eyes lit with sudden excitement at this new Vegas street act...but we were no act. We were in deep and had moments to spare. If we could somehow turn right on the boulevard and hit a quick right to the back alleys of the Strip, we'd be alright. But we had to make it in under thirty seconds...and we surely couldn't do that with a pedestrian stuck in the wheel housing or in the undercarriage of the car if we were gonna make this happen. They had to move.

A cloud of blue-grey rubber shot up from behind the car, and the 440 roared as we parted the sea of humanity. We hit a right onto the Strip and made it a few hundred yards and didn't see any lights yet. We didn't anticiapte them, not yet, anyway...when they knew, we'd be gone. Still, my partner didn't look happy with the situation, and I wasn't helping matters bleeding like a stuck pig. If I left a blood trail they'd be on us and we'd both be in the state prison for years to come. I had to make it stop...but how...

HEY! What did I just say!

Quit running in the fucking front yard, Kim! And if you hit your brother one more time you're going to time out in Guantanamo!

THAT'S IT!

KIM JONG IL! Get over here right now! And put down that goddamned rocket!

YOU WANNA CRY? I'll give you something to cry about! Janice! Get me the scissors and the ugliest pair of glasses we've got! Oh, you asked for it, little man!

Cartwheels

The oblongata
Detatched
My brain did a cartwheel in my head
Looking left I felt it
Shifting

My mind blanks for just a second
A pulse shoots through
From ear to ear
A quick scream of a sound
Like the first hum of the TV when it's turned on

The picture
In front of me suddenly shifts
Blurs, not clear, running in color
Eyes liquified and runs over the lens
Making it streak by

Streaking lines
Into the back yard
Lines in the grass
Running diagonal
One swath of grass dark green
The other lighter
Like dad used to do
And still does

Remembering when I hit my head
Tackled by a garbage bag of grass
Went down hard, deep

Shaved my head
Nice rivets running down one side
From a football injury so long ago
It ended with a whimper
Or a whump, as I hit so long ago

I look right
And it happens again.
Blank, streaks, hiss, loud.
Wow.

I look back to the back yard
I see a ninja turtle
Fucking a beer keg
Strapped to the back of an ATV
Driven by a huge gerbil.

Damn lazy Sundays.

Goddamn it

Life is just a series of sisyphean struggles. The only interesting part is to see how the next hidden test of will and faith will make itself visible to us.

As tiring as all this is, I question why people fear death. If there were some mention of a mortgage or taxes in the afterlife, then I'd be scared...I've yet to see a theology that promotes this view of life after death.

Drizzle

Beating down on the windows
Raining down on my head
Listless, lifeless now
I lie in my bed

Waiting
For peace to come
For calm to be
For my breathing to come back down again
For each breath to bring serenity into my head

Why do I feel this pain
This strain
The ripple chords refrain
In my head
Wish I were dead
Or not
Confused

Pick a side
Take the ride
Vote or die
You must decide

Deride

Provide

Divide

Abide

Be in my head
Begone from my brain
That refrain
That drizzles on the dead
Echoing

hguorht

sega eht

ZYX
sex the vex
ABC
let it be

What's the name of that song
Tingling now in my elbow
Why does my hand shake
My head aches

Breathing slower
In hold to 5
Out for ten
Now I felt that on my right middle finger

That didn't make much sense, the ZYX
Soupy Sales backwards alphabet
Raise to 12, king queen suited
Someone raised call eight
All spades.
Fuck an ace.
Two dollars on a flush draw?
Why am I still shaking
I see straight heart rates normal, or above normal
Fold too rich for my blood

Have to leave
Too many empty seats
New room
Missed the buy in
I stopped for a second.
My lef thand just stopped working for a second.
Am I alright?

Breathe in, hold for five
Breathe out, nice and slow
Shaking again
Breathe in
out
in.....
out.........
in.....
out.........
check

Flow

Run down smooth, flouresce, glitter
That interstatial shine in the heavens above.
A streak, glowing through the night sky
Speaks of a cosmic game
To which there are no boundaries.

We seperate and flow
Our separate ways.
One towards the aether
The other towards hell.

Sing a song of journey
A psalm of trial.
Bring us back together, fates
For we have tried the true
And cast off the false.
And there never has been between the difference.

Shadow

A shadow was cast upon my wall,
Lingering there for me to see.
Testing me, to see if I knew,
The shape it was supposed to be.

I knew it, though it knew not me,
To be the darkness of another,
The creature comfort of a homestead,
The sadness of what was her.

There she sits, among the waves,
A shade of what once was great,
And there I sat, and spat,
At the calamity of my fate.

I watched the light

It separated.
It folded from the wall like ripples on a pond.
After a penny or a stone had been cast in.
It reverberated with the pulses of the tones of silence, telling me that there something lies within that I cannot understand nor comprehend.
It spoke, with but a whisper of a tone.
It's strangely tangerine hues hinting at a greater design.
What would you have me do, great light?
What purpose should you and I serve on this night?
Nothin'. it told me.
We are, and that's all we are to be.
Play away, young man, play away.
It;s all going to be alright.
Indeed.

Goalies

I watched a goalie for the Atlanta Thrashers make save after save, and he kept sliding his legs out wide, doing quick splits everytime a puck was slapped low and fast at the goal.

Sadly, the only thing I kept wondering was "how does it feel to have your balls keep slapping on ice? Won't they stick?"

The Aristocrats

Admittedly, I hate Atlanta.
I grew up in the Atlanta metropolitan area, spent the majority of my life there, and am still seeking ways to get out of the city...and it wouldn't be hard considering that I had selected education as my primary occupation. One of the few attractive options of being a teacher is that you can pick up and go anywhere and...presto...you’ve got a job opportunity. To be fair, it’s not that easy, because if you were a business major then you’d theoretically get a job anywhere a business is located, but we all know better than that, don’t we? The metro area offered the best pay for a teacher, as county supplements in the metro area complimented the already meager state base pay that an educator would receive in Georgia.
I had never been able to explain why I hated Atlanta, probably because I spent as little time as possible in the city to actually get an understanding of why I despised it so much. I think it has something to do with the overall depressing demeanor of the city, the very plain, blank facades of the buildings, the smog, the projects and low-income housing that borders the interstate leading in to the city. I found that the downtown area offered very little to me, and I still think it offers very little to anyone who was raised around a major metropolitan area that actually has a pulse.
Maybe it was because I spent a lot of time in New York, and after you’ve walked through Chinatown, Little Italy, and Soho all on the same street, never to see the same thing twice the whole way and walk through three cultures within three miles, any other place just seems, well, blase.
I think the biggest thing that bugged me about Atlanta was the absolute lack of any kind of identity. Outside of being a major airport hub and one of the largest cities in the southeastern United States, there’s not a whole lot to it. It’s just a whole bunch of restaurants, bars, and shopping areas, each pretty much the same, each one catering to the same level of pretentiousness. Most of the classic Atlanta has been swept away, making room for progressive communities or refurbishing the old bungalow houses in the Five Points area, a bunch of those cozy, run-down shit-boxes that had been inhabited by poor blacks over the past twenty to thirty years and have since been bought by realtors and resold for around 300 or 400k a pop. There’s no major epidemics in Atlanta, like drugs (outside of the homemade “cracker crack” – meth cooked up from over-the-counter meds), AIDS, or kidnappings. There’s a lot of crime, to be fair, but not on the monumental scale to earn a tag like Detroit or St. Louis.
What’s worse, to me, is that there’s no distinct culture in Atlanta, either. Atlanta’s filled with transplants, people from around the country who think that anyone with a remotely southern twang is a living, breathing carnival act to the tune of Foghorn Leghorn from the old cartoons. There’s some myth that all southern women are “belles” with quaint and traditional customs, all of them fanning their necks while blushing at a debonaire gentleman adorned in his formal attire. In fact, many of the women in Atlanta wear too much make-up, too little clothes, and have the manners and debauched countenance of an Atlantic City hooker. On any given night in Buckhead, you’ll see lots of dapper young gents sticking to the bars and nursing drinks because all the scantily-clad, upper-middle class white girls are grinding their asses and their holiest of holies into the crotches of sweaty black hip-hoppers wearing their finest FUBU jeans and white t-shirts. People think Georgians are one of two things: racist or lazy, which they’ve recently reworded into the more politically correct “backwards” and “casual”. I lived in the area for 32 years and knew lots of casual people, but not many racist people; however, if you drive in from rural Georgia and get an eyeful of Atlanta, you’d definitely become a little anti-social after what you’d see.
Atlanta has tried several attempts to establish itself as a major player among world cities, and the 1996 Olympics was their opportunity to do just that. To watch the opening ceremonies, you’d think Atlanta was nothing but a black metropolis, despite the fact the metro area in only roughly 1/3rd black. Many of the characters, if you will, that participated in the opening ceremonies were dressed as though they were straight out of the Congo or Kenya or some other third-world African village. It was as if the AOC had decided to lure more African-Americans (there, I said it, and it still doesn’t make any damned difference) to the games, despite the fact that the majority of spectators (and, therefore, dollars) were coming from domestic white patrons. Still, in the age of political correctness, I guess they couldn’t have begun the Games with a re-enactment of the Uncle Remus tales through a two-hour playing of Song of the South. Instead, the Atlanta Olympic Committee gave the world a slanted view of the city, a grotesque farce that portrayed Atlanta as a Mecca of black culture and history…in truth, there is little different about Atlanta from any other metropolitan city between the 25th and 48th north lines of latitude. There is a predominantly poor black community that lives within the cities, there are some middle class black families spread throughout the suburb areas, and a few fabulously-well-to-do that live in some of the higher end communities around the area. Sounds like any other major metropolitan city in America, save for maybe Seattle and San Francisco. In comparison to other Olympic opening ceremonies, the ceremonies were utterly forgettable from beginning to end. By the time the smoke had cleared and the Olympic Torch had been extinguished, the AOC had successfully found every loophole in the book and screwed the city out of lots of money, turned the games into a free-for-all sales opportunity which spelled lost dollars for lots of vendors. To make matters worse, the Aussies did it so much better four years later.
Today, Atlanta is no closer to being a world player on the major city scene. It will not be mentioned in the same breath as New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, London, or Paris. The latest effort to market the city resulted in the “ATL” campaign, derived from the airport code for Atlanta (I guess) or from the reference to the “ATL” in nearly every southern-bred hip-hop artistic endeavor. It’s obviously themed and aimed at other hip-hoppers and blacks throughout the nation, and the theme runs wild at the Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. On your first flight in to Atlanta, you’ll come up a long escalator to the baggage claim. At the top, you’ll se a huge mural of Atlanta babies (literally) at play in the Olympic fountains. Most of the babies are black. When you leave Atlanta through Hartsfield, you pass through their African art exhibit. For all intents and purposes, the powers that be insist that Atlanta is a black city.
Not that I cared, really…like I said, I already hated Atlanta.
+++++++
We were slowly riding on a moving walkway past the Hartsfield-Jackson Museum of African Arts when the joke popped into my head. My partner and I had made our way through check-in and security checkpoints with little scrutiny. This was uncommon, considering my name had been on the No-Fly list for more than a year, and that I usually had something on my person that tripped the metal detectors or something in my carry-on would raise some eyebrows. As I had found out on previous trips, someone with my same name had a fairly lengthy rap sheet and was banned from traveling via air or by car across any state lines. I knew this because his name had surfaced when I was trying to get my teaching certificate and a “misunderstanding” had occurred. I received further information from various employees working the check-in kiosks of airports across the country, from Atlanta to Vegas to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, all of which were more than happy to tell me of the details of this rather unsavory doppelganger. This, along with my inbred obsessive compulsive tendencies, caused me to arrive at the airport three hours ahead of the flight.
Since we had two hours to kill, we decided to take the moving walkways to our concourse rather than taking the tram. Since we departed from the E terminal, which was the farthest gate from the checkpoints, we had a little trip to make. Leaning against the rail, we sat back and allowed the walkway to do the work, shoving us along at a brisk two-mile-per-hour course. It was during the initial moments of our lethargic journey that we began admiring the various exhibits of deep ebony/mahogany-hued statues that stood in the middle of two parallel walkways. On the walls behind the statues were murals of African tribesmen, painted faces and spears and all, which caused an electric memory impulse to shoot a thought into my head:
The Aristocrats.
I had watched that movie on a Friday night. It was the same Friday night that my fiancée turned to me and said something that caused me to lapse into a psychosomatic stroke…right on the cusp of the Super Bowl weekend, no less. The Aristocrats was a movie produced by Penn Gillette, the giant and verbal pair of the comedic-magic duo known as Penn and Teller. The movie was all about the nastiest joke ever told, why it was funny (which did require great amounts of explanation), and featured various comedians providing their version of this improvisational joke. Of all the comedians, there was only one that I could truly remember after that foul Friday evening, and that was Martin Mull’s. Though he didn’t tell the actual Aristocrats joke, he did tell a joke that used the word “aristocrats” in it, and, due to the tribally festooned area of the airport, I suddenly remember it.
“Okay, I got one for ya…this one’s fucking hilarious,” I said to my partner as I began to step off one walkway onto another. My partner was just a little behind me, his head dropped down looking at his cell phone as he text messaged his girlfriend. Yes, even at 5:30 in the morning on a Sunday, it was never too early for love.
“Alright, let me have it,” he said as he flipped the phone closed and put it back in his pocket.
“Alright. There’s these three missionaries, one a Buddhist, another a Catholic, and a Jew, that have been caught by a clan of wild African cannibals in some remote jungle. They’ve been tied up and are standing in front of the chieftain of this tribe, who, remarkably, can speak very clear English. The chieftain looks at the men, and, after a moment of thought, begins to speak.
‘Alright, each of you has two choices. You can choose death, or you can choose the Aristocrats.’ He looks at the Buddhist and says, ‘Okay, you first’.
The Buddhist thinks for a minute, and says, ‘You know, I’ve done a great deal of good in my lifetime, but I haven’t reached nirvana yet and I think I can still do lots of good for my people. I will take the Aristocrats’.
The chieftain nods and says, ‘okay, fine’. With that, he signals towards a group of tribesmen hiding in the bushes, and out comes six of the biggest, most muscular dark men you’ve ever seen. Immediately they grab the man and begin to pound him mercilessly. Then, they turn to violating every orifice of the Buddhist, having their way with him in the most unspeakable of ways, tossing him up and throwing him down, until after about ten minutes of this violation they throw him into the bushes.
The other two men, aghast at what they have seen, have witnessed the whole cruel display. The chieftain turns to the Catholic and says, ‘okay, now you’. The Catholic looks at the chieftain and asks, ‘same deal?’ and the the chieftain says, ‘uh-huh’. The Catholic, being somewhat familiar already with some of the acts he just witnessed, replies, ‘well, I, too, believe that I still have much to offer my parishioners and I see that the man over there is still breathing, so, I’ll take the Aristocrats’.
The chieftain nods, and out come the Aristocrats again. Same song, second verse, except this time they’re even more voracious in their appetite for destruction. After this goes on for a while, they toss him into the bushes, and, just barely, he is still alive.
The chieftain looks to the Jew and says, ‘alright, now you, your choice’. The Jew, feeling comfortable that he has accomplished as much as he can on this Earth, knows exactly what choice he’ll make. ‘Okay, I choose death’.
The chieftain nods and says, ‘alright, death it is…but first, the Aristocrats!’”
With that, my partner burst into laughter that filled the whole hallway, only occasionally broken up with high-pitched, “the Aristocrats!” thrown in every few breaths or so. We were both laughing hysterically, mainly from a cocktail composed of giddy anticipation for the trip to Vegas and the early morning hour’s dew that still lingered in our tired heads. Still, it was a good joke, and, as it would turn out, would be the defining joke for the trip we were about to make.
As the writer once penned, “the best laid plans of mice and men…