Keep the Change by Dublanica Steve

Author:Dublanica, Steve
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-11-02T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

King George and the Flea

Casino Hosts, Card Dealers, and Cocktail Waitresses

There is a scene in the 1984 movie Oh God! You Devil that always rattles around my brain. The film’s protagonist, a down-and-out musician named Bobby Shelton, abandons his pregnant wife and sells his soul to the devil in exchange for seven years of fame and wealth as a rock star. The only catch? At the end of his “contract,” he has to give up his immortal soul. After unhealthy doses of fame, drugs, and groupie sex, Shelton realizes his life has become full of empty pleasures and he yearns to get his old one back. But since he’s made a deal with the devil, only God almighty can get him out of it. After talking to several clergymen whose only response is to try locking him up in a psychiatric facility, Shelton runs into a mad street preacher and desperately asks, “Where can I find God?” The deranged holy man looks him straight in the eye and says, “If you want to find God you must go to the desert!” And what part of the desert would any self-respecting rock-and-roller in a George Burns movie go to? You guessed it: Las Vegas. Like the devil, God must like dry heat.

When I was a seminary student I was well acquainted with the idea that you could commune with God in terrain with less-than-average rainfall. There’s nothing like being in the silent and forbidding environs of a desert to free your mind from distractions and help you focus on the big picture. Before setting out on his public ministry, Jesus spent forty days and nights in the desert wrestling with Satan’s temptations—a discipline many of his followers would later emulate. My godfather, a Catholic priest, used to tell me the story of one such devotee, St. Simeon of the Stylites. Like an ancient David Blaine, Simeon tried isolating himself from the world in the Syrian Desert by climbing on top of a pillar, known in Greek as a style, and living on a platform only a meter square for thirty-seven years! What did Blaine do: thirty-five hours? Pussy.

My quest to become a tipping guru is not a religious pilgrimage, thank God. My seminary days gave me a real distaste for austere surroundings, constant bad food, and the occasional pervert. But since I’m on a journey to understand the mysterious ways of tipping, I’m reminded of that cinematic holy man’s words: “You must go to the desert!” So, like Bobby Shelton, I have to go to Vegas.

I don’t know the first thing about Sin City. I’ve never been there. I have no contacts. Luckily, my accountant in New Jersey does a professional gambler’s taxes, and after a few phone calls he hooks me up with a hotel on the Strip and a VIP manager at a high-end casino who will give me the inside scoop. Before you know it I’m white-knuckling my coach seat’s armrest as the jet I’m traveling in rattles against the high-altitude winds on its way to Nevada.

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