17
WE DROVE ON through the night. The dark shapes of the Los Angeles hills gave way to flat nothingness, and then, after a few hours, an orange glow blossomed in the sky. It grew steadily brighter, and when the highway began its gentle slope downward, suddenly a vast ocean of glittering lights stretched out below us.
“Oooh, Las Vegas ain’t no place for a poor boy like me,” Robinson sang. Then he turned to me. “That’s Gram Parsons,” he said. “Did you listen to that album I gave you?”
I hunched down in my seat, shaking my head minutely.
Robinson laughed. “Doesn’t matter. I can sing the whole damn thing for you.”
“And you probably will,” I said.
Humming, he drove us down the Strip, which was lit up like Christmas times a million. It was as bright as day on the street, even though it was after midnight. We passed signs for the Bellagio, Bally’s, the MGM Grand—casinos I knew from Ocean’s Eleven set in a landscape I knew from Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
“So we have to gamble, right?” Robinson asked.
I nodded, suddenly resolute. “I believe it’s required.”
I cleaned myself up in a 7-Eleven bathroom while Robinson ate his ten thousandth Slim Jim. Then we went to the Luxor, mostly because it was shaped like a pyramid. It even had a giant Sphinx out front—an absurdity we just couldn’t resist.
The moment we stepped inside, we were in yet another world. The sound of pinging slot machines, the smells of air-conditioning and sweat, the flashing lights above the pits: it was total sensory overload.
Robinson put his arm around my shoulders. “You want to win big?” he asked.
“Yeah, we’ve got twenty bucks to blow.”
“Is that what your budget tells you? Well, that’s two games of blackjack with a ten-dollar buy-in.” He grinned. “That’s assuming we don’t win, which we will.”
“Twenty dollars’ll last longer at the slots,” I said, because sitting in a semicircle with a bunch of strangers and trying to decide whether to tell the dealer to “hit me” was more than I was up for.
Robinson eyed the blackjack table longingly. He probably thought he could charm the cards into falling the way he wanted them to. Not me. Maybe I wasn’t GG anymore, but I’d never be the gambling type. Because it was my babysitting money we were talking about, and I’d wrangled some serious brats to earn it.
Maybe it was just as well that a burly guy in a black vest came up to us as we headed for the slot machines. He wanted to see our IDs.
“Well, you see—” Robinson began.
The guy cut him off. “Save it. If you got an ID, you can play. If you don’t, scram.”
“Go on,” I said to Robinson. “Now you can play a hand of cards. I’ll wait outside.”
He shook his head. “No way, Axi, we’re in this together.”
I liked the sound of that a lot. “Okay, what do you want to do now?”
Robinson yawned so deeply I decided not to wait for an answer. I said, “Let’s go find a place to sleep.”
So we pulled into the nearby parking lot of Treasures, which at first I thought was a gift shop. “Why’s it open so late? Who needs a snow globe at two AM?”
Robinson laughed—at me, not with me. “It’s a strip club, you dope. This is Sin City, remember?”
I was too tired to take offense. I settled down in the backseat and pulled my sweatshirt over me. Robinson snaked his hand around his seat in the front, and I reached out and took it. Here we were in the car again, three feet of air and eight inches of foam between us. Why hadn’t I made a move at the hotel?
“Tell me a bedtime story,” Robinson said.
“Sing me a bedtime song,” I retorted.
“Flip a coin,” he said.
I agreed, and he lost. So I fell asleep to Robinson singing, drumming lightly on the dashboard.
There was a girl named Axi
who was a runaway.
Instead of taking a taxi
she tried to drive around LA.
She crashed her car and hurt her nose
and I don’t mean to brag
but who should rescue Axi
but a charming scalawag?
It was a pretty good lullaby, all in all.
The sound of ringing laughter woke me at 4 AM. A handful of dancers were leaving the club, done with their shift for the night.
One passed by the car and spied me in the backseat. “Hey, girl,” she said, leaning in so close I could smell perfume and sweat. “You can’t sleep here. They’ll tow your car and take you and your friend here to the pound.”
Robinson sat up, rubbing his eyes. “Huh?”
“Y’all need to be getting on home,” said another. I could hear her smacking her gum. “Wherever that is.”
Robinson leaned out the window and smiled at them like they were long-lost friends. “That is excellent advice,” he said. “And I thank you for giving it. But unfortunately it is not possible for us to follow it at this time.”
The women burst into laughter. One nudged the other with her bony hip. “Look at them! They’re as cute as kittens. Chrissy, you take ’em home with you.”
The blond one called Chrissy looked us over. She spent an especially long time looking at Robinson. “My car’s the white Chevy over there,” she said finally. “Y’all follow me out.”