Leaving Las Vegas Read Online Free PDF Page A

hit the street. Sunset, unctuous and alive, fertilized him again, sprayed a peculiar, twitchy laughter on him. He walked down the street; his dick got hard.
    Watching through a dirty windowpane, Sera, though instinctively proud to have survived this wrinkle in the bed of a Hollywoodmotel, wished that she had someone to tell the story to… no… that wasn’t it. She wished that someone would listen to her tell the story.)
    She soon discovers that she’s on a good streak, winning about two out of every three hands. With her aggressive splits and doubles she can win a few hundred dollars in no time, even though her bets are relatively modest. She sticks around and plays it through, mostly head to head with the dealer, as no one else has gotten comfortable enough to remain in any of the other seats. They remain mostly empty, occupied only temporarily by the players who lack either the capital or sincerity to endure prolonged play, who orbit the clusters of tables in any casino, fidgeting endlessly with their ever diminishing silver and red stacks of one and five dollar chips—never green or black, these players—sitting abruptly at a table as though they were plunging into a pool, and losing their nerve along with their money when the half-life of their stack is reached; then rising, they fight their way out of the tangle of too many chairs and back into the periphery, roaming again the aisles or, tiring of that, the larger scale territory of the gambling districts themselves. Sometimes briefly the seats around her are semi-occupied by the desperate tragedies who stand behind them with momentary resolve, putting at risk the last third, fourth, or fiftieth of the grocery money or the rent, next week’s paycheck or the remnants of a pawned wedding band. They are not shaking or sweating, but they create a tension thick with guilt and persecution. Their luck being inversely proportionate to their need, they always lose. Sera is disturbed when they appear, and turns away, not from the hopelessness of their situation, which they take far too seriously, but from the intensity of their suffering, which will forever make them victims in their own minds. Eventually her own luck turns, her newly created little stockpile of green, twenty-five dollarchips is now in jeopardy. She has already made and lost two bets on the dealer’s behalf, so when she stands and he sneers, she simply thanks him and leaves.
    At the cashier’s cage she exchanges her chips for money and finds that she has won almost, but not quite, three hundred dollars; proving, she thinks grimly to herself, that tricking is still, for her at least, a more profitable gamble. She knows, though, that this money is different from that money. This money was once, and therefore will be again, chips. She and the casinos both know that chips are a wonderful, pretty tool, and possess none of the stigma of dollars. Dollars translate too easily into hours or houses or cars or sex or food or everything, and so losing a dollar is a much more tangible experience than parting with a chip, an object that looks more like a midway consolation token than a medium of exchange. To Sera, chips are the perfect symbol, symbolizing other symbols. It is this extra generation, the picture of a picture, that lets one become totally abstract about wealth in any degree; rendering it without meaning at first cursory glance, and inevitably, upon closer examination, with its most profound meaning; tying itself not to nothing, but to everything at once. She puts the cash, the once and future chips, into her wallet, interleaving it with her trick money as she arranges her bills. She is meticulous: all bills facing forward, right side up; new bills in back to be spent last, old in front—naturally; singles ahead of hundreds, and so on. She is so wrapped up in this familiar procedure that she bumps into a fellow cashee, who only glares at her as he places two small multicolored stacks of chips on the