Nit-tastic Tales
10-13-2018
, 06:04 PM
I'm sure theres another crazy story from your past and BBV wants to here it. IN for more stories 
10-13-2018
, 06:12 PM
10-13-2018
, 06:39 PM
Early November, after I get back from Japan and Taiwan, where drinking is enforced.
10-13-2018
, 06:51 PM
12-30-2022
, 04:21 AM
02-04-2024
, 09:35 PM
Prequel - Part I: Beauty
"Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot."
-Mark Twain, Introductory Note to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
This is my 10,000th post on 2+2. The original post in this thread was my 1,000th. So I thought I'd write something to celebrate this new milestone.
So why a prequel, when most of them are pretty meh?
Well, I've already covered my adventures from 1998 to 2018 here in this thread, and my subsequent House of Blogs thread covers everything from 2018 until today.
I've run out of tales; so like Jack in Lost, I have to go back, back to when things were still screwed up as hell, but in a different way.
So we travel back to the early 1990s, when yearly in-state tuition at the University of Connecticut was just north of $3,000. I was signing up for classes every second or third semester, and then spending the intervening semester or two working and playing blackjack to build up funds for the next go-round. Sometimes I swallowed my pride and hit up my parents when I was short on tuition money. To be honest, I did that more often than I liked.
I made $9/hour as the assistant manager of the Store 24 convenience store on UCONN's idyllic Storrs campus. I supplemented that income to the tune of around $12/hour whenever I made the 45 minute trip to the Mohegan Sun or Foxwoods to count cards, back when they still offered $5 minimums for blackjack at a few tables.
I didn't switch to blackjack full time because back then I neither understood nor could stand the variance. Long downswings wiped out my savings and my confidence in the game. Also, I knew that the casinos could ban me from the blackjack tables at any time. The steady income of the convenience store was a security blanket, plus the store offered good heath insurance for only $40/month.
Store 24 was a small southern New England chain owned by Bob Gordon, father of Phish bassist Mike Gordon. We had a plaque in the office signed by all the guys from Phish, with the epigram of "What's in store for the Store 24 in Storrs?"
Mr. Gordon opened his first Store 24 as a head shop in Boston in the late 1960s, then over the next 25 years the chain devolved into being just standard convenience stores that happened to carry an excellent selection of rolling papers.
Bob visited my store once while I was on shift. He opened our store suggestion box, which contained only one unsigned note. I happened to know that the note was from Tara, a witty whipsmart left-wing bisexual Wiccan woman whom I was dating at the time.
With me, my manager, my district manager, and much of the crew present, Mr. Gordon read Tara's anonymous demand out loud.
Tara was a lot of fun, and great to be with. I punted that relationship to hell by being an immature and emotionally unavailable dick. But that's a different tale.
This tale instead involves a future love interest, whom I met soon after the Suggestion Box Incident, when Trish—19 years old at the time and very pregnant—came into my store to buy a pack of cigarettes with two Eisenhower dollar coins and some small change.
That was Trish. I carded her, but I didn't give her any trouble for being pregnant and smoking. These were different times, and I was a pack-a-day guy myself who usually had a cigarette burning next to the register, right underneath the No Smoking sign. I got away with this because my manager was a four pack-a-day lady who took the sign as a suggestion, at best. Besides, I was struck by Trish's beauty.
People talk about pregnant women glowing; I was experiencing some sort of aura of angel light surfacing from and reflecting around Trish, some revelatory lighting magic cooked up by an otherworldly cinematographer. I could almost hear the hackneyed choir of angels chirping away in the background.
Trish was physically one of the most beautiful persons I've met in my life. She had some effortless Margot Robbie in her look, with a bit of a young Julia Roberts mixed in. Trish was not, however, a beautiful person on the inside. But neither was I, so who was I to judge?
I wouldn't see Trish again for another two years, during which time I would put the kibosh on my relationship with Tara, would attend only one disastrous semester at UCONN that would land me on academic probation, and would fall into a cycle of heavy drinking and drug use with my degenerate townie friends.
I also moved into a house 30 miles away, in South Windsor, Ct. Why so far away? I shared the space with two housemates and paid only $120/month plus like $30 in utilities. Even for back then, that was cheap as hell.
I hate to say it, but the rent was probably low because our house was in a Black neighborhood...a middle class, well-kept, safe, quiet and respectable Black neighborhood filled with tidy ranch houses, but a cheap option nevertheless.
The only time the cops were called into that neighborhood was on us, when one of our parties went a little too loud a little too late, with my housemate Ray blasting out the Kinks' Village Green Preservation Society album, of all things, at blistering volume on his top-of-the-line stereo system.
Could this song be any Whiter?
My housemate Ray was an insurance actuarial, one of the folks who use advanced probability and statistics to figure out when you and I are going to die. I'd met Ray in the dorms during my freshman year and we'd bonded.
Our dorm, Trumbull House, had a reputation for harboring a cult dedicated to Charles Manson, thanks in part to the boys on my floor taking out an advertisement in the UCONN Daily Campus for the "Manson Christmas Party! Our goal: one thousand! Bring your own farm implements!" and then throwing said party, and then getting damn close to a thousand visitors, before seeing the party broken up by the State Police.
The boys in our dorm were a close-knit group. I met my friend Will there as well, and we still hang out to this day, 35 years later.
There was a kernel of truth to the Manson cult rumors. I'll just say that I've read Charles Manson's reply to the Christmas card the Trumbull House boys sent him one holiday season.
Each sentence that Charlie wrote in his reply made some sense to me on its own, but when I tried to parse several of them together into a paragraph, I wasn't able to follow the narrative. I don't remember anything else about Charlie Manson's letter to the boys in my dorm. I think that even if I read it today, I still wouldn't remember it soon afterwards.
But those were my dorm days, and another tale. As I mentioned, I went on to live in a house with Ray and my other housemate Chad, who was Ray's co-worker at the insurance company. I don't remember what Chad did for work, but he wore a suit and tie and drove a nice Audi, so I suspect that his job was lucrative. Chad often talked about investing heavily in Microsoft, back in the early 90s. Hopefully he pulled the trigger on that and held on to it through its ups and downs.
Both of my housemates were high-achieving money and career oriented conservative types, and I was essentially the opposite: a heavy drinking, ample drugging college dropout, convenience store clerk and writer wannabe, but the three of us got along quite well in spite of our differences.
I was at a heavy drinking, ample drugging party thrown by my degenerate townie friends when I saw Trish—my beautiful, formerly pregnant Marlboro girl—for the second time. Her daughter was two years old by then, and away with either Trish's parents or with the girl's father's side of the family; she often parked her kid with one set of babysitters or the other.
Trish and her daughter's dad were not an item. Trish and her daughter were themselves an on-and-off item. Trish loved her daughter, but she also loved partying very, very hard.
Now here she was again, singing with the band at the Storrs townie party. She wasn't a member of the band per se, but she'd asked to sit in, and she'd gotten her way. Trish had an excellent voice, and I've always been a sucker for a female singer.
She and I didn't talk for long. I complimented her singing, and we established that we had a few friends and acquaintances in common, Storrs being a small town when the UCONN students were away on summer break. Part of me—likely the coked-up part—believed that Trish and I had found a spark, but the rest of me figured that she was just being polite.
I had no doubts that Trish had guys hitting on her all the time, and that she'd had a lot of practice being gracious about it. Still, I was smitten, and I left the party on a high note, in more ways than one.
A few days later, I found myself down on a low note, one that I'd played upon myself in the form of a terrible acid and beer hangover. My LSD hangovers could be quite manageable on their own. Good trips would give my mind a sort of power wash from the inside, leaving me feeling light and emotionally tidied-up the next day, assuming that I hadn't drank too much during the trip. But if I had, the acid hangovers didn't mix well with the booze hangovers; the lightness and clarity of the former only sharpened the alcohol withdrawal's dizziness and nausea and pain.
I could not call in sick for work that day, as I was filling in for the manager while she was on vacation. So I slunk into the office, barely bipedal, to find and then post the employee work schedule for the next week. Unfortunately, I could not do that, because on the day before, I had accidentally thrown away that paperwork, and the schedule in turn had been taken out to the dumpster.
Our Store 24 location had 8 or 9 employees, most of them part-timers, and we ran for 24 hours every day. There was no way I could reassemble that schedule from memory, even if I hadn't been so badly hungover.
After calling two employees and asking them when they thought they might be working that week, I deduced that not many convenience store workers commit their weekly schedules to memory. Many of them only know for sure when they are working next.
We had a computer in the office, but it was entirely for show. My manager was old-school and did everything on paper. There was nothing for it but for me to go out and search the dumpster for the schedule.
Thankfully, the trash had been picked up recently, but not too recently. Only 6 full trash bags sat in the hopper, albeit bags full of coffee grounds and food waste and several species of unspeakable things that members of the public had thrown into our bin on the outside of the store.
I took an empty bag out with me and proceeded to search through and transfer the waste out of each full trash bag. More than a half an hour later, at the bottom of the 6th and final bag, I found the schedule, soaking in a nightmare concoction of rancid garbage juice, but still barely legible.
And that's how Trish found me, sitting on the sandy parking lot asphalt with bags of trash strewn all around me, holding our work schedule at full length and flicking garbage juice off of it.
She drove up to me in a borrowed car and hailed me, and she didn't say a word about the trash or me sitting amongst the open bags. She asked me when it was that I got off work, and if I wanted to hang out with her later.
I think I remember being cool enough to say yes without sputtering or acting like a dumbass. And just like that, I had a date with a beautiful young woman, though I assumed that I would be joining her at a party or a get-together at her place.
When I showed up at Trish's apartment with a twelve pack of beer in tow, I found that I had assumed wrong. Trish was alone, and she already had a beer in hand. This was a good sign: a very attractive girl, possibly interested in me, who appeared to be a kindred alcohol enthusiast.
Three beers each and one hour later, a young man named Rob showed up to our tête-à-tête. Rob was Trish's on-again, off-again boyfriend. The couple were currently into their off-again stage, but no one had informed Rob of this state of affairs.
At least that's what I ascertained from the situation. It turned out to be a lot more complicated than that, but let's go with "off-again" for the time being. Trish and Rob had a big fight right in front of me that quickly devolved into a yelling match, and it was starting to look like Rob was going to hit her.
I had been a committed pacifist since high school. Before that—to my great and lasting shame—I had been a schoolyard bully, so bully posturing was still a part of my muscle memory, and I engaged in that, and it scared off Rob.
After Rob left, Trish and I put on a good buzz, and we ended up sleeping together that night, capping off an extremely high variance day for me.
In the morning, Trish asked me if I wanted to go in with her on some heroin.
I tanked for around 30 seconds, then I told her that I didn't do needles.
"No, no, no, no. We don't do needles. We only snort it. We can go in on a bag; it's like 30 bucks." she said.
"I don't know." I said. "That's pretty hardcore. I mean, it's heroin. It's not like..."
"It's not like you weren't doing lines with Pete in the bathroom last week." she countered. "You think I didn't know about that? And how come you didn't offer me any?"
"Wasn't my coke; and I didn't know you, hardly. Sorry."
"...Well?"
"Well...I guess hard drugs is hard drugs. And I'd hate to be a hypocrite. So let's go get us a bag of dope."
If you're familiar with this thread, you'll recognize that once again I've rambled on way to long with my tale, and I'll have to stop here and write a Part II at some point. When that's done, I'll post it here and drop a link to it in the blog thread.
"Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot."
-Mark Twain, Introductory Note to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
This is my 10,000th post on 2+2. The original post in this thread was my 1,000th. So I thought I'd write something to celebrate this new milestone.
So why a prequel, when most of them are pretty meh?
Spoiler:
Well, I've already covered my adventures from 1998 to 2018 here in this thread, and my subsequent House of Blogs thread covers everything from 2018 until today.
I've run out of tales; so like Jack in Lost, I have to go back, back to when things were still screwed up as hell, but in a different way.
So we travel back to the early 1990s, when yearly in-state tuition at the University of Connecticut was just north of $3,000. I was signing up for classes every second or third semester, and then spending the intervening semester or two working and playing blackjack to build up funds for the next go-round. Sometimes I swallowed my pride and hit up my parents when I was short on tuition money. To be honest, I did that more often than I liked.
I made $9/hour as the assistant manager of the Store 24 convenience store on UCONN's idyllic Storrs campus. I supplemented that income to the tune of around $12/hour whenever I made the 45 minute trip to the Mohegan Sun or Foxwoods to count cards, back when they still offered $5 minimums for blackjack at a few tables.
I didn't switch to blackjack full time because back then I neither understood nor could stand the variance. Long downswings wiped out my savings and my confidence in the game. Also, I knew that the casinos could ban me from the blackjack tables at any time. The steady income of the convenience store was a security blanket, plus the store offered good heath insurance for only $40/month.
Spoiler:
Store 24 was a small southern New England chain owned by Bob Gordon, father of Phish bassist Mike Gordon. We had a plaque in the office signed by all the guys from Phish, with the epigram of "What's in store for the Store 24 in Storrs?"
Mr. Gordon opened his first Store 24 as a head shop in Boston in the late 1960s, then over the next 25 years the chain devolved into being just standard convenience stores that happened to carry an excellent selection of rolling papers.
Bob visited my store once while I was on shift. He opened our store suggestion box, which contained only one unsigned note. I happened to know that the note was from Tara, a witty whipsmart left-wing bisexual Wiccan woman whom I was dating at the time.
With me, my manager, my district manager, and much of the crew present, Mr. Gordon read Tara's anonymous demand out loud.
Spoiler:
Tara was a lot of fun, and great to be with. I punted that relationship to hell by being an immature and emotionally unavailable dick. But that's a different tale.
This tale instead involves a future love interest, whom I met soon after the Suggestion Box Incident, when Trish—19 years old at the time and very pregnant—came into my store to buy a pack of cigarettes with two Eisenhower dollar coins and some small change.
That was Trish. I carded her, but I didn't give her any trouble for being pregnant and smoking. These were different times, and I was a pack-a-day guy myself who usually had a cigarette burning next to the register, right underneath the No Smoking sign. I got away with this because my manager was a four pack-a-day lady who took the sign as a suggestion, at best. Besides, I was struck by Trish's beauty.
People talk about pregnant women glowing; I was experiencing some sort of aura of angel light surfacing from and reflecting around Trish, some revelatory lighting magic cooked up by an otherworldly cinematographer. I could almost hear the hackneyed choir of angels chirping away in the background.
Trish was physically one of the most beautiful persons I've met in my life. She had some effortless Margot Robbie in her look, with a bit of a young Julia Roberts mixed in. Trish was not, however, a beautiful person on the inside. But neither was I, so who was I to judge?
I wouldn't see Trish again for another two years, during which time I would put the kibosh on my relationship with Tara, would attend only one disastrous semester at UCONN that would land me on academic probation, and would fall into a cycle of heavy drinking and drug use with my degenerate townie friends.
I also moved into a house 30 miles away, in South Windsor, Ct. Why so far away? I shared the space with two housemates and paid only $120/month plus like $30 in utilities. Even for back then, that was cheap as hell.
Spoiler:
I hate to say it, but the rent was probably low because our house was in a Black neighborhood...a middle class, well-kept, safe, quiet and respectable Black neighborhood filled with tidy ranch houses, but a cheap option nevertheless.
The only time the cops were called into that neighborhood was on us, when one of our parties went a little too loud a little too late, with my housemate Ray blasting out the Kinks' Village Green Preservation Society album, of all things, at blistering volume on his top-of-the-line stereo system.
Could this song be any Whiter?
My housemate Ray was an insurance actuarial, one of the folks who use advanced probability and statistics to figure out when you and I are going to die. I'd met Ray in the dorms during my freshman year and we'd bonded.
Our dorm, Trumbull House, had a reputation for harboring a cult dedicated to Charles Manson, thanks in part to the boys on my floor taking out an advertisement in the UCONN Daily Campus for the "Manson Christmas Party! Our goal: one thousand! Bring your own farm implements!" and then throwing said party, and then getting damn close to a thousand visitors, before seeing the party broken up by the State Police.
The boys in our dorm were a close-knit group. I met my friend Will there as well, and we still hang out to this day, 35 years later.
There was a kernel of truth to the Manson cult rumors. I'll just say that I've read Charles Manson's reply to the Christmas card the Trumbull House boys sent him one holiday season.
Each sentence that Charlie wrote in his reply made some sense to me on its own, but when I tried to parse several of them together into a paragraph, I wasn't able to follow the narrative. I don't remember anything else about Charlie Manson's letter to the boys in my dorm. I think that even if I read it today, I still wouldn't remember it soon afterwards.
But those were my dorm days, and another tale. As I mentioned, I went on to live in a house with Ray and my other housemate Chad, who was Ray's co-worker at the insurance company. I don't remember what Chad did for work, but he wore a suit and tie and drove a nice Audi, so I suspect that his job was lucrative. Chad often talked about investing heavily in Microsoft, back in the early 90s. Hopefully he pulled the trigger on that and held on to it through its ups and downs.
Spoiler:
Both of my housemates were high-achieving money and career oriented conservative types, and I was essentially the opposite: a heavy drinking, ample drugging college dropout, convenience store clerk and writer wannabe, but the three of us got along quite well in spite of our differences.
I was at a heavy drinking, ample drugging party thrown by my degenerate townie friends when I saw Trish—my beautiful, formerly pregnant Marlboro girl—for the second time. Her daughter was two years old by then, and away with either Trish's parents or with the girl's father's side of the family; she often parked her kid with one set of babysitters or the other.
Trish and her daughter's dad were not an item. Trish and her daughter were themselves an on-and-off item. Trish loved her daughter, but she also loved partying very, very hard.
Now here she was again, singing with the band at the Storrs townie party. She wasn't a member of the band per se, but she'd asked to sit in, and she'd gotten her way. Trish had an excellent voice, and I've always been a sucker for a female singer.
She and I didn't talk for long. I complimented her singing, and we established that we had a few friends and acquaintances in common, Storrs being a small town when the UCONN students were away on summer break. Part of me—likely the coked-up part—believed that Trish and I had found a spark, but the rest of me figured that she was just being polite.
I had no doubts that Trish had guys hitting on her all the time, and that she'd had a lot of practice being gracious about it. Still, I was smitten, and I left the party on a high note, in more ways than one.
A few days later, I found myself down on a low note, one that I'd played upon myself in the form of a terrible acid and beer hangover. My LSD hangovers could be quite manageable on their own. Good trips would give my mind a sort of power wash from the inside, leaving me feeling light and emotionally tidied-up the next day, assuming that I hadn't drank too much during the trip. But if I had, the acid hangovers didn't mix well with the booze hangovers; the lightness and clarity of the former only sharpened the alcohol withdrawal's dizziness and nausea and pain.
I could not call in sick for work that day, as I was filling in for the manager while she was on vacation. So I slunk into the office, barely bipedal, to find and then post the employee work schedule for the next week. Unfortunately, I could not do that, because on the day before, I had accidentally thrown away that paperwork, and the schedule in turn had been taken out to the dumpster.
Our Store 24 location had 8 or 9 employees, most of them part-timers, and we ran for 24 hours every day. There was no way I could reassemble that schedule from memory, even if I hadn't been so badly hungover.
After calling two employees and asking them when they thought they might be working that week, I deduced that not many convenience store workers commit their weekly schedules to memory. Many of them only know for sure when they are working next.
We had a computer in the office, but it was entirely for show. My manager was old-school and did everything on paper. There was nothing for it but for me to go out and search the dumpster for the schedule.
Thankfully, the trash had been picked up recently, but not too recently. Only 6 full trash bags sat in the hopper, albeit bags full of coffee grounds and food waste and several species of unspeakable things that members of the public had thrown into our bin on the outside of the store.
Spoiler:
I took an empty bag out with me and proceeded to search through and transfer the waste out of each full trash bag. More than a half an hour later, at the bottom of the 6th and final bag, I found the schedule, soaking in a nightmare concoction of rancid garbage juice, but still barely legible.
And that's how Trish found me, sitting on the sandy parking lot asphalt with bags of trash strewn all around me, holding our work schedule at full length and flicking garbage juice off of it.
She drove up to me in a borrowed car and hailed me, and she didn't say a word about the trash or me sitting amongst the open bags. She asked me when it was that I got off work, and if I wanted to hang out with her later.
I think I remember being cool enough to say yes without sputtering or acting like a dumbass. And just like that, I had a date with a beautiful young woman, though I assumed that I would be joining her at a party or a get-together at her place.
When I showed up at Trish's apartment with a twelve pack of beer in tow, I found that I had assumed wrong. Trish was alone, and she already had a beer in hand. This was a good sign: a very attractive girl, possibly interested in me, who appeared to be a kindred alcohol enthusiast.
Three beers each and one hour later, a young man named Rob showed up to our tête-à-tête. Rob was Trish's on-again, off-again boyfriend. The couple were currently into their off-again stage, but no one had informed Rob of this state of affairs.
At least that's what I ascertained from the situation. It turned out to be a lot more complicated than that, but let's go with "off-again" for the time being. Trish and Rob had a big fight right in front of me that quickly devolved into a yelling match, and it was starting to look like Rob was going to hit her.
I had been a committed pacifist since high school. Before that—to my great and lasting shame—I had been a schoolyard bully, so bully posturing was still a part of my muscle memory, and I engaged in that, and it scared off Rob.
After Rob left, Trish and I put on a good buzz, and we ended up sleeping together that night, capping off an extremely high variance day for me.
In the morning, Trish asked me if I wanted to go in with her on some heroin.
Spoiler:
I tanked for around 30 seconds, then I told her that I didn't do needles.
"No, no, no, no. We don't do needles. We only snort it. We can go in on a bag; it's like 30 bucks." she said.
"I don't know." I said. "That's pretty hardcore. I mean, it's heroin. It's not like..."
"It's not like you weren't doing lines with Pete in the bathroom last week." she countered. "You think I didn't know about that? And how come you didn't offer me any?"
"Wasn't my coke; and I didn't know you, hardly. Sorry."
"...Well?"
"Well...I guess hard drugs is hard drugs. And I'd hate to be a hypocrite. So let's go get us a bag of dope."
Spoiler:
If you're familiar with this thread, you'll recognize that once again I've rambled on way to long with my tale, and I'll have to stop here and write a Part II at some point. When that's done, I'll post it here and drop a link to it in the blog thread.
Last edited by suitedjustice; 02-04-2024 at 10:03 PM.
02-06-2024
, 01:29 PM
in b4 Naloxone shot in the sternum! 
02-08-2024
, 11:11 AM
02-08-2024
, 12:09 PM
Spoiler:
The movie's from pre-Naloxone days, I believe, so Adrenaline cut with a dash of movie magic.
02-08-2024
, 02:56 PM
02-09-2024
, 09:35 AM
02-09-2024
, 09:43 AM
02-09-2024
, 04:28 PM
02-09-2024
, 05:03 PM
02-09-2024
, 05:51 PM
The Adventures of TinTin in the Golden Triangle
Quote:
Meh, I mean, maybe it's just me being an idiot as usual but I think the concept of red flag has to develop in life first of all. I mean me and prolly you and many others at the age we're talking about here were pretty much the definition of a red flag so naturally we were hanging out and meeting and intimate or whatnot with other red flags. Sure there are enough peeps who are not like that at that age, but you prolly don't find too many of them in this forsaken part of the internet. Maybe in the Health and Fitness forum
02-14-2024
, 12:59 AM
02-17-2024
, 03:13 AM
Quote:
All right. Here's one that's not so terribly tl:dr
Part V: Shipping the Nickels:
As the weeks and months passed and my meth addiction strengthened, my social life gradually deteriorated. Tom, my old boss and best friend in town, moved away to LA, and I couldn't be bothered to keep in touch any longer with our mutual friends, all of whom were great people who had taken me into their circle, and all of whom I let slip away after Tom left.
Instead, to fill up the time, I picked up a video poker addiction. Video poker is a big leak, even for a steady drinker with access to an endless fountain of the fanciest free drinks. You can find dozens, maybe hundreds of bars in Las Vegas that do perfectly well with having just two or three regulars in an otherwise empty joint...they turn a nice profit, as long as those regs are players.
VP and alcohol are a powerful combination to begin with. To add to that, VP and methamphetamine seem like they are made for each other. It seemed inevitable that I would be hooked in. The machines are everywhere in Las Vegas. It took five years of being a local, but I succumbed in the end.
But even at this low point in life, I couldn't stand putting my money in bad. I found a nit's compromise at the Gold Spike Casino's five cent 9/6 Double Bonus progressive carousel. Once I'd memorized the basic strategy, there wasn't much in cash that I could leak at those stakes. I tipped a dollar per drink, which was the gold standard for a nickel VP player, so the waitresses were always coming around for me. For many months during the height of my addictions, I spent my free time at the Spike for hours on end, snorting meth in the bathroom, punching buttons furiously and getting good and ****faced, and all without hurting my roll.
The royal flush on the DB 9/6 nickel progressive starts at $200. Early one night during a vacation from the bookstore spent going nowhere and doing nothing but getting drunk and tweaked out and playing VP, I walked in to the Gold Spike to find the royal progressive up to $430--a promising start. The carousel had 10 seats, and one of them opened up just as I walked in. I recognized the departing scarecrow outline of the former occupant as she shuffled off, having just gone busto again. She would soon be asking for change at the edge of the Fremont Street Experience, until the security guards moved her along. Bully for me, I had a seat now.
The next 8 hours passed like a fever dream at 720 hands per hour. I was hitting especially good that night, and more than keeping up. I was hitting regular four-of-a-kinds; good ones: low quads and aces. This was the era just before cashout tickets, so I'd twice emptied my machine of its nickels. Some of the other carousel regs were mumbling to themselves about my success. By 2 AM on that weeknight, the progressive stood at $550. Every seat on the carousel had been filled for hours, and other folks were sitting around just waiting for a spot.
That was when a sudden case of the chills poured down the back of my shirt, as if an AC unit had just cranked on to full power directly above me. I shivered, looked up, and I saw The Man making his way across the casino floor. I recognized him right away, and a wave of simultaneous terror and greed swept over me and took my breath away.
The Man in question was James "Whitey" Bulger. I knew him from a book I'd taken home from work. Bulger was a fugitive on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list. If I remembered the book correctly, the reward for information leading to his capture was up to $100,000. The last known picture of him had been taken more than 10 years before, but this was him. He was older, but just as offhandedly menacing as in the pictures.
I looked down and noticed that I'd already pulled out my phone and had flipped it open. After some quick thought, it didn't seem to me that 911 was the appropriate number for this instance. What if I was wrong? The cops would show up, and as per usual I was half-drunk and had drugs on me that I did not want to ditch. I had no number for the FBI, and cheap phone plans did not come with search engines back then. I thought that the FBI's Las Vegas headquarters might be right down the street but I wasn't sure.
Would anyone be at the building at 2 AM? Not to mention that Bulger had been very close with the Boston branch of the FBI before he'd gone on the lam. What was the story with him in Las Vegas? It could cost me my life to find out. Back East he'd been the FBI's number one informant there for years, and had gotten away with all kinds of terrible things in return for snitching on other mobsters, until he'd finally crossed the line with performing a number of murders--not all of them strictly business related--and two of them being women whom he and his partner had mutilated horrifically. I looked up from my phone and Bulger was staring right at me.
Previous to this moment, I'd worked in retail for 15 years of my life, and many of them at a register, helping hundreds of customers a day. So I have interacted with hundreds of thousands of different people, maybe a half million or more people. This man, Whitey Bulger, had the coldest, darkest, most terrifying stare I have witnessed in my life. This old, frail man, maybe 5'8" and 140 lbs (173 cm, 64 kg), fixed his gaze on me and scared me right down past my bones.
I dropped my eyes down, and I shut my phone and put it away. What did I want with $100,000 anyway? Even if I could collect--which wasn't a lock by any stretch--I'd keep maybe $60,000 after taxes. I knew what I'd do at that point in my life: I'd quit my job at the bookstore to tweak out full time, and be dead within 6 months.
I played for a few minutes, then I chanced a quick look back up and he was still staring at me. He hadn't moved an inch. Just so we're both on the same page here, his glare said to me. You are nothing but a spider in my bathtub right now. You think you might be able to hurt me, but you have no idea what you'll be getting yourself into.
I snapped my head back down and played for half an hour straight. It was a very long 30 minutes. It seemed like a day and a half. Finally, when I couldn't stand it any more, I looked up and Bulger was gone.
Some time past 2 PM the next day I found myself at least breaking even after more than 14,000 hands, through some minor miracle of variance. The royal progressive stood at $740: the highest anyone playing or hanging out there had ever seen it. Arguments started breaking out whenever a seat would open up. One of these arguments was in progress when I picked up a Kc and four junk cards. I kept the king and drew four perfect for the royal flush in clubs.
"BOOM. EVERYBODY OUT OF THE POOL!" I yelled, without thinking, as my machine tootled out its 8-bit version of "We're in the Money." This was the only period in my life when I was prone to outbursts of yelling. I'm generally a quiet person. The stares I got from my carousel mates were priceless. I smirked back at them, each in turn. Hell, I had borne witness to the direct evil eye from Whitey Bulger. These losers had nothing on him.
Two slot attendants showed up and paid me off. I gave the attendants each a ten-spot, stood up, and fell over sideways, heavily, into an adjacent bank of slot machines, banging my hip on the low counter between machines.. "I'M OKAY." I announced. "I'M NOT DRUNK...I JUST...MY LEGS..."
I had been hunched on the seat fixed to the VP machine with only tiny bathroom breaks for 20 consecutive hours, and I hadn't felt the need for a break for the last 7 of those. My legs were shot. When I picked myself up and tried to walk, it felt like I was in my first week of trying out new prosthetics. Nevertheless, I toddled my way out of the Spike, waving away the security guards.
Out on the sidewalk, I made it about 50 feet towards the bus station before I realized that my legs were not getting better. I sat down on the sidewalk. Now, I owned a car and had a license and insurance, but the car was temporarily off the streets due to its expired and cancelled license plates from the previous owner not being good enough for THE PIGS, and from me not yet being arsed to register the thing properly.
It came to me that five years before I had crumpled down on this sidewalk no more than 100 yards from this place. Back then I'd been busto, my dreams crushed, and I'd been weak from hunger. "BUT JUST LOOK AT ME NOW!" I yelled, again, to no one. I closed my eyes and I laughed for a while.
After about 15 minutes of rubbing my legs and stretching them, the feeling in them returned and I was able to walk again. When I'd made it home, I hunted down my FBI 10 Most Wanted book. I flipped through to the Whitey Bulger chapter. It turned out that I'd remembered things wrong: there had never been a $100,000 reward out for information leading to Bulger's capture.
Part V: Shipping the Nickels:
As the weeks and months passed and my meth addiction strengthened, my social life gradually deteriorated. Tom, my old boss and best friend in town, moved away to LA, and I couldn't be bothered to keep in touch any longer with our mutual friends, all of whom were great people who had taken me into their circle, and all of whom I let slip away after Tom left.
Instead, to fill up the time, I picked up a video poker addiction. Video poker is a big leak, even for a steady drinker with access to an endless fountain of the fanciest free drinks. You can find dozens, maybe hundreds of bars in Las Vegas that do perfectly well with having just two or three regulars in an otherwise empty joint...they turn a nice profit, as long as those regs are players.
VP and alcohol are a powerful combination to begin with. To add to that, VP and methamphetamine seem like they are made for each other. It seemed inevitable that I would be hooked in. The machines are everywhere in Las Vegas. It took five years of being a local, but I succumbed in the end.
But even at this low point in life, I couldn't stand putting my money in bad. I found a nit's compromise at the Gold Spike Casino's five cent 9/6 Double Bonus progressive carousel. Once I'd memorized the basic strategy, there wasn't much in cash that I could leak at those stakes. I tipped a dollar per drink, which was the gold standard for a nickel VP player, so the waitresses were always coming around for me. For many months during the height of my addictions, I spent my free time at the Spike for hours on end, snorting meth in the bathroom, punching buttons furiously and getting good and ****faced, and all without hurting my roll.
The royal flush on the DB 9/6 nickel progressive starts at $200. Early one night during a vacation from the bookstore spent going nowhere and doing nothing but getting drunk and tweaked out and playing VP, I walked in to the Gold Spike to find the royal progressive up to $430--a promising start. The carousel had 10 seats, and one of them opened up just as I walked in. I recognized the departing scarecrow outline of the former occupant as she shuffled off, having just gone busto again. She would soon be asking for change at the edge of the Fremont Street Experience, until the security guards moved her along. Bully for me, I had a seat now.
The next 8 hours passed like a fever dream at 720 hands per hour. I was hitting especially good that night, and more than keeping up. I was hitting regular four-of-a-kinds; good ones: low quads and aces. This was the era just before cashout tickets, so I'd twice emptied my machine of its nickels. Some of the other carousel regs were mumbling to themselves about my success. By 2 AM on that weeknight, the progressive stood at $550. Every seat on the carousel had been filled for hours, and other folks were sitting around just waiting for a spot.
That was when a sudden case of the chills poured down the back of my shirt, as if an AC unit had just cranked on to full power directly above me. I shivered, looked up, and I saw The Man making his way across the casino floor. I recognized him right away, and a wave of simultaneous terror and greed swept over me and took my breath away.
The Man in question was James "Whitey" Bulger. I knew him from a book I'd taken home from work. Bulger was a fugitive on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list. If I remembered the book correctly, the reward for information leading to his capture was up to $100,000. The last known picture of him had been taken more than 10 years before, but this was him. He was older, but just as offhandedly menacing as in the pictures.
I looked down and noticed that I'd already pulled out my phone and had flipped it open. After some quick thought, it didn't seem to me that 911 was the appropriate number for this instance. What if I was wrong? The cops would show up, and as per usual I was half-drunk and had drugs on me that I did not want to ditch. I had no number for the FBI, and cheap phone plans did not come with search engines back then. I thought that the FBI's Las Vegas headquarters might be right down the street but I wasn't sure.
Would anyone be at the building at 2 AM? Not to mention that Bulger had been very close with the Boston branch of the FBI before he'd gone on the lam. What was the story with him in Las Vegas? It could cost me my life to find out. Back East he'd been the FBI's number one informant there for years, and had gotten away with all kinds of terrible things in return for snitching on other mobsters, until he'd finally crossed the line with performing a number of murders--not all of them strictly business related--and two of them being women whom he and his partner had mutilated horrifically. I looked up from my phone and Bulger was staring right at me.
Previous to this moment, I'd worked in retail for 15 years of my life, and many of them at a register, helping hundreds of customers a day. So I have interacted with hundreds of thousands of different people, maybe a half million or more people. This man, Whitey Bulger, had the coldest, darkest, most terrifying stare I have witnessed in my life. This old, frail man, maybe 5'8" and 140 lbs (173 cm, 64 kg), fixed his gaze on me and scared me right down past my bones.
Spoiler:
I dropped my eyes down, and I shut my phone and put it away. What did I want with $100,000 anyway? Even if I could collect--which wasn't a lock by any stretch--I'd keep maybe $60,000 after taxes. I knew what I'd do at that point in my life: I'd quit my job at the bookstore to tweak out full time, and be dead within 6 months.
I played for a few minutes, then I chanced a quick look back up and he was still staring at me. He hadn't moved an inch. Just so we're both on the same page here, his glare said to me. You are nothing but a spider in my bathtub right now. You think you might be able to hurt me, but you have no idea what you'll be getting yourself into.
I snapped my head back down and played for half an hour straight. It was a very long 30 minutes. It seemed like a day and a half. Finally, when I couldn't stand it any more, I looked up and Bulger was gone.
Some time past 2 PM the next day I found myself at least breaking even after more than 14,000 hands, through some minor miracle of variance. The royal progressive stood at $740: the highest anyone playing or hanging out there had ever seen it. Arguments started breaking out whenever a seat would open up. One of these arguments was in progress when I picked up a Kc and four junk cards. I kept the king and drew four perfect for the royal flush in clubs.
"BOOM. EVERYBODY OUT OF THE POOL!" I yelled, without thinking, as my machine tootled out its 8-bit version of "We're in the Money." This was the only period in my life when I was prone to outbursts of yelling. I'm generally a quiet person. The stares I got from my carousel mates were priceless. I smirked back at them, each in turn. Hell, I had borne witness to the direct evil eye from Whitey Bulger. These losers had nothing on him.
Two slot attendants showed up and paid me off. I gave the attendants each a ten-spot, stood up, and fell over sideways, heavily, into an adjacent bank of slot machines, banging my hip on the low counter between machines.. "I'M OKAY." I announced. "I'M NOT DRUNK...I JUST...MY LEGS..."
I had been hunched on the seat fixed to the VP machine with only tiny bathroom breaks for 20 consecutive hours, and I hadn't felt the need for a break for the last 7 of those. My legs were shot. When I picked myself up and tried to walk, it felt like I was in my first week of trying out new prosthetics. Nevertheless, I toddled my way out of the Spike, waving away the security guards.
Out on the sidewalk, I made it about 50 feet towards the bus station before I realized that my legs were not getting better. I sat down on the sidewalk. Now, I owned a car and had a license and insurance, but the car was temporarily off the streets due to its expired and cancelled license plates from the previous owner not being good enough for THE PIGS, and from me not yet being arsed to register the thing properly.
Spoiler:
It came to me that five years before I had crumpled down on this sidewalk no more than 100 yards from this place. Back then I'd been busto, my dreams crushed, and I'd been weak from hunger. "BUT JUST LOOK AT ME NOW!" I yelled, again, to no one. I closed my eyes and I laughed for a while.
Spoiler:
After about 15 minutes of rubbing my legs and stretching them, the feeling in them returned and I was able to walk again. When I'd made it home, I hunted down my FBI 10 Most Wanted book. I flipped through to the Whitey Bulger chapter. It turned out that I'd remembered things wrong: there had never been a $100,000 reward out for information leading to Bulger's capture.
Spoiler:
02-17-2024
, 06:14 PM
02-19-2024
, 01:00 PM