2005: Once Upon a Time in Vegas

2005: Once Upon a Time in Vegas

By Garry White

Idelfonso Martinez plops himself down on a bench and looks down at his scuffed white training shoes. One of the laces is beginning to dangle loose, and he briefly contemplates tightening it. Before he can reach down, a man wanders past and utters something in Spanish. His words are short and clipped but jovial. Martinez half raises his head and lets out a thin smile. His words are inaudible but seem enough to keep the other man happy as he disappears into the crowd moving lazily around the lobby.

Martinez attends to the unfinished business of the lace and then shifts himself on the bench. He slouches insouciantly on its edge, his legs casually splayed in a way that makes passersby have to carefully navigate their way around him. At one point, he lets out a casual yawn as his eyes briefly dart towards assorted bum-bag-wearing tourists and fourth-rate proto-gangster fight-people. You know the sort, the people desperate to be ‘faces’ rather than the open-shirted, tight-t-shirted chancers and hangers-on that they inevitably are. Yet rather than actually being bored, Martinez elicits all the signs of a man trying to convince everyone else that he is bored. To let anyone who is looking know that ‘weigh-ins’ at Ceasar’s Palace are just a regular day at the office for him. That his regular habitat is not small shows in the type of South Texan border towns that typically only feature in Marty Robbins gunslinger ballads. Yes, Vegas and its bright gaudy lights do not excite him one little bit. To Idelfonso Martinez, this is no more than office water cooler bullshit. 

But I don’t believe him.

At one point, our eyes meet, but I quickly look away to study a fake Roman statue instead. His cropped black hair begins to glisten gently even in the exaggerated air conditioning. He looks athletic, but his scar-tissued features appear prematurely aged beyond their twenty-something prime. Sitting there, he looks like a contender… except he isn’t. Being the fiftieth best super featherweight in America carries few plaudits or dollars. But tomorrow night he’ll get his chance to get knocked out by the other guy, who ESPN is carefully building up as a future contender. 

At the ticket booth, they tell us that if we buy the big Saturday card featuring ‘Sugar’ Shane Mosely and Calvin Brock, then we can have the Friday night tickets for just twenty bucks. It’s a little papering of the house for the Friday night cameras and its selection of ritualistic beat-downs of fresh-faced contenders over anonymous travelling pros. Poor old Idelfonso, despite his pride, he is reduced to mere gratuity. As I greedily gather the tickets, I turn to see that Martinez has been joined by two more men. One middle-aged, the other silver-haired and wisened; his face wrinkled and gnarled by the beating Aztec sun. Their features are such that I decide that they are Martinez’s father and grandfather, but they really could be anyone.  They both wear black faux-silken tops, in the style favoured by cornermen and darts professionals. ‘Team Martinez’ is emblazoned in white lettering across their backs as they talk quietly with their charge. 

For the first time, there is no doubt to anyone that Martinez is a fighter. But nobody seems to care. He’s just a body, every bit as anonymous as those fibre-glass heroes of Olympus. After a while, the middle-aged man slaps him good-naturedly on the back, and they walk towards the exit and the strip beyond. I won’t see Martinez again until he enters the ring tomorrow night. 

For a while, we hang around, not quite sure where to go or what to do. We’d already been in Vegas for two weeks and had by now recovered from seeing our suitcases abandoned beside the runway at San Diego’s, Lindbergh Field. Then, on our first night, being forced to hit the casinos in dirty shorts and sweaty t-shirts. We needn’t have worried. Nobody dressed up in Vegas anymore. I wanted it to be like the glory days of Frank and Dean or of the hard-bitten cop played by Denis Farina in the TV series Crime Story, so I insisted on wearing a suit at the bars and tables in the evening. But even then, I was an anachronism, desperately trying to cling on to the coattails of a time that had passed into history a decade or two before I was born.

If you have imagination or something resembling a soul, you can’t stay in Vegas for too long. Eventually, the cold-hearted corporate banality that underpins its every lecherous breath will seep into you and leave you loathing its empty heart. Such deductions would undeniably come later, but for now, I was still in love with it. For me it was all about the faded glamour of places like the Sahara and the Riviera, or the old gambler haunts up on Freemont Street. The Sahara still had pictures of Cary Grant and Elvis in the lobby, what remained of the 50s doo-wop group ‘The Platters’ still appeared nightly in the Lounge, and down the strip at The Boardwalk an elderly Dean Martin impersonator belted out ‘You’re Nobody till Somebody Loves you’ to anyone that still cared to listen. The Sahara also had a five-dollar ‘All you can eat’ buffet at a time when there were nearly two dollars to the pound. Even Ceasar’s with all the memories of its big 80s fight nights was acceptable in my orbit in a way that many of the more modern places were not.

We were still holed up at the Sahara. As the weekend approached, we would need to ship out somewhere cheaper as the room rates multiplied. Either even further out to the dying ends of the strip where The Stratosphere and its rooftop rollercoaster meet the euphemistic wastelands of Naked City, or sad little off-strip locales like the Greek Isles or the San Remo. These were tired places whose ageing cocktail waitresses and combed-over dealers shifted nervously against the ever-present shadow of upgrade or wrecking ball. But when you want to save as much money as possible for stuttering ammunition at the tables, it is amazing what deals you can sniff out and the miles you can tot up walking up and down the strip trying to find them.

Walking aimlessly, we passed O’Shea’s green-clad, shamrock-fixated, and alleged Irish casino and settled on The Boardwalk. Behind the bar, they were cracking open cold bottles of Michelob for a dollar. They needed something to lure the punters into the small casino, lurking in the shadows of its more illustrious neighbours and long since passed the notion of its ‘best days’. Yet, in many ways, I preferred these places. They were honest about what they were. There were no fake distractions of Empire State Buildings, Venetian canals, or Disneyfied King Arthur Castles. They offered the same games as everyone else to the same unbeatable mathematics, and at least they’d throw you a cheap beer without the pretence of having to play Video Poker at the bar. But it was still early. Only two or three in the afternoon, which in Vegas terms, is akin to 5 am in the morning in the real world. The only patrons there were pensioners playing rock-bottom stakes on the blackjack tables and desperados in tracksuits, punting the slots. 

I didn’t want to play with these people. Not even a quick in-and-out job or a throw-away ten bucks played out in two-dollar increments. Even my old boy Nick ‘The Greek’ Dandalos would have classified it as ‘action’, of sorts. And you could kill hours this way, but the trade-off is that it is utterly joyless. I could play each hand in my sleep, but without any element of risk, there was no reward. Without any ‘buzz’ what would be the point? And that is often what lies at the empty heart of all these games. They are little more than bent maths puzzles. A form of crooked unconquerable sudoku for wasters and idle dreamers. Ah, but when you mixed them with rivers of booze and medium levels of risk and reward, they suddenly became transformed. Magical almost!

Eager to escape, we took our cold Michelob’s and wandered out of the open fire exit at the back. All that lay in front of us was a small carpark hemmed in by metal fences and a half-empty skip propped up beside it. It is tempting to think of this as a kind of Wizard of Oz moment; the one where Dorothy lifts the curtain and discovers that the eponymous wizard isn’t terrifying at all. A crude allegory of what lies in Vegas’s backroom once you stumble past the front of the house. But it is laughable to think of The Boardwalk as a location where Vegas’ neon-lit gaudy dreams come to die. The patrons shuffling their thin piles of chips had long since given up on fanciful notions of dreams. They were a young man’s game, wistfully forgotten somewhere out there in each of their individual past histories. No, this was instead a place for those who had long forgotten how to dream. Merely a place for those marking time, who had settled for these slim pickings being as good as it gets. And perhaps, when the elderly Dino impersonator would do his short Thursday afternoon stint, cradling a gratis whisky and ice, they would briefly allow themselves to remember. To linger on the old dreams and then inevitably wallow in the bitterness of tears and regret. Gambling and its tendency to be a souped-up microcosm of life does that to all of us in the end.

We sat on a bench, looking at the pot-holed, gravel floor, and without a prompt, we all started laughing. We came here to win big. But the shadowed car park that formed the venue for our impromptu beer perfectly summed things up. We were losing, but despite it all, we weren’t quite beaten yet. The unwritten missive suddenly hit everyone at the same time. And as the cold beer slowly eased my parched mouth from a two-month perpetual hangover, it was tempting to think about how we got here.

Mike had only joined us for the Vegas leg of the journey. In a day or two he’d be heading home. He’d arrived at McCarron with a wad of notes befitting someone who was half a dozen years younger than the rest of us and who had no rent to pay, whilst hoovering up lots of tax-free tips from his bar job. He still had money burning his wallet that he was desperate to call into action before the plane returned him to a provincial casino in Bournemouth and a selection of knackered betting shops and A9 races at Crayford.

And it was that provincial casino where it all started with Glenn, Derek, and me. I’d lost touch with them both since school until one night I bumped into them there. In those days, you couldn’t drink alcohol on the gaming floor, so I’d spend hours feeding the big jackpot fruit machine in the bar. And later, when I’d had my fill of their pound-a-pint Fosters I’d venture out to punt on Roulette and Blackjack. Back then, they would both only play quiet, little five-pound bets on red and black. The old-school mantra of I’ve got 20 quid on me, and once it’s done, I’m done. The same message that my parents used to give me when they gave me a quid to change into two pences at a seaside amusement arcade. But in these intervening five years, their ambitions had grown. Perhaps it was my fault. That I had collectively dragged them into my dreamscape, and we were now playing out its most pivotal moments together. Certainly, this had always been my dream, despite the nightmare of a gun being held to Glenn’s head in Memphis, it was still a live one.

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The sportsbooks along the strip offered nothing as we made our way to Caesars. In the end, out of desperation to have some stake in the game, I chucked a throwaway 15 dollars on Dominic Guinn to beat Nigerian Friday Ahunanya in the heavyweight main event. I had just about heard of Guinn, but Ahunanya was every bit as enigmatic as his birth name. They would go on to stink the place out later in a ten-round lumbering hugfest, in which the roulette ball rolled double-zero and the house collected on a majority draw. Guinn had now failed to win in three of his last four outings as his career was steadily aping his nickname of ‘The Southern Disaster’. Still, at least no real financial harm was done. 

It was something to watch the sun gradually fall and set from the outside bleachers at Caesars. Night follows day in Vegas, and quickly, everything comes alive. The visiting families and assorted oldsters find their hotel or a show, and the strip is left to people who understand each other. Some are drinkers, some are gamblers, and many are both. All are searching for some kind of thrill. The legendary uncatchable ‘big one’ or a more realistic fix of their preferred poison. Dreams of all shapes and sizes can and do come true, even if they only take the form of enduring memories rather than anything more tangible. Already, I am sounding like those patrons at The Boardwalk. But linger too long on them, and they can readily turn to nightmares and the lonely desperation that ends in Naked City and a ten-second acknowledgement on the morning news bulletin.

Before the ESPN television cameras were even fully set up, Terence Jett was helped back to his corner. The sun still beat heavily in the sky, and the arena was mostly empty as the Vegas-based 0-2 boxer hit the canvas and stayed there. In his black PE shorts, the diminutive Jett moved reasonably well but folded to the canvas in response to the first punch of any significance. Still, it was enough to earn his corn and move on to the next one. Like the tree falling in the empty wood, no one was there to see it, so what was the point in hanging around? 

By the time Martinez walked out, our group was already five or six deep into the ringside beers. It seemed appropriate to scream out the names of famous Mexican boxers as our boy made his way to the ring, then when these had been exhausted the names of all the stadiums from the 1986 World Cup, and finally some of the Mexican beers we had encountered in Texas. As the venue steadily filled to its half-full peak, portly cigar-chomping Americans looked at us with growing bemusement. “If only we weren’t out in the gods and Martinez could hear us’, I remember ludicrously saying. Facing him was a saccharine grandma’s apple pie of a fighter named Jason Litzau. He wore stars and stripe shorts and had the nickname of ‘The American Boy’. Perhaps, quite unfairly, given how long I had spent in the home of Uncle Sam, I wanted Martinez to utterly eviscerate him. For his part, the boy from the border town of Laredo fought well and gave as good as he got before the referee interjected early in the fifth. Through my boozy haze, I thought it was too early*, as Team Martinez led him back to his corner one last time. I shouted the injustice to the heavens without any acknowledgement. In Vegas, no one cares about losers.

To top it all off, a welterweight named Will ‘The Drill’ Evans from Auburn, Kansas, ended the night in a supreme act of futility. Entering the ring in a cowboy hat, atop his unapologetic mullet hairdo, and with his pigeon chest only partially hidden by a snake-skinned waistcoat, he epitomised the hopelessness of the everyman trying to beat the system. His face was prematurely lined, and his body had the tired, emaciated contours of a man who had seemingly spent forgotten decades partying with Keith and Mick. But more likely, it was from downing bottles of Jack at the Friday night hoe-down at his local saloon. Facing him was a musclebound Armenian with the scrabble-score name of Archak TerMeliksetian. What resembled a contest was done and dusted in 53 seconds. Evans inevitably ended it stretched out cold on the canvas. Everything about it was horrible. They should have carried Evans into the ring on a stretcher and then out again as soon as the first bell rang. We laughed about it as we stumbled drunk back out onto the strip. I bet the ESPN bosses loved it. But really it was no laughing matter.

We chatted animated nonsense as we made our way southwards towards our new weekend home at the unprepossessing San Remo. Our words disappeared into the humid night air. As the invisible clock rolled towards midnight, I had so far lost only fifteen dollars, along with multiple rounds of ringside Miller Lite’s. But I could at least offset this with the fact that my daily food bill had consisted only of a five-dollar chow down at the Sahara buffet. Any significant spend in Vegas outside of drinking and gambling takes the form of an unworthy extravagance. Yes, it’s not just time that gets turned on its head in this desert place. 

At once, what felt like a tiny flickering speck of rain gently brushed my face. A few seconds later, I felt it again and then again at a similar interval. It felt slowly restorative, and I hoped that the heavens might open and lend relief to the heat; to see great illuminated puddles radiating the all-encompassing neon light. It was only when the Bellagio came into view that, I finally realised it wasn’t rain at all, but just stray shards of water from the hotel’s fountains, enigmatically scatter-gunning their way into the ether. 

By now, I was separated from the group and perhaps from reasoned reality as well. I stood and watched as the fountains danced and meandered to the sound of Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman performing ‘Time to Say Goodbye’. Their recorded voices projected by loudspeakers from the faux grandeur of the spotless white visage of the Bellagio. It was canned and gauche, but at the same time amid the golden light, it was somehow moving. Perhaps it was the beer or the enduring memories of my beaten brothers, Will ‘the drill’ and Ildefonso. For a fleeting second, I wondered where they were now. Was Evans in an emergency room somewhere? Or hammering a much-needed stiff drink? Did Caesars at least shout them a room, or did they have to raid their purse for a grim off-strip ensuite? Maybe they’d even checked into the San Remo.

My mind numbed in response to all these pinballed thoughts. Like an end of the peer one-armed bandit, they had no hope of paying out, so what was the point? I just let the music and the haunting voices wash over me. Apart from the title, all the words seemed to be in Italian, so it could be interpreted however I saw fit. Yes, an omen or at least a prelude to something; no less a harbinger of good fortune. 

And with it, I suddenly felt a sense of calm and a feeling of drunken, unbridled optimism. Knowing in an instant that like T.S. Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding, “All will be well, and all manner of things will be well.” That tomorrow night without a doubt Jameel ‘Big Time’ McCline was going to beat Calvin Brock at Ceasar’s Palace, and the Vegas dream would be back on. It was written in the stars and sounded out in the faultless tones of Andrea Bocelli.

Never had a blind man possessed such vision.