Control in Carpet Squares

Another night on the strip was always the same with giant, bright, flashing lights, too much noise, and glamorous people out for the Vegas experience. And in case the massive labyrinth of the adult arcade wasn’t enough stimulation, the place was pumped with oxygen. When people drink heavily and breath air like cashmere, money gets spent. It was impeccably organized, so that the place ran itself, organized chaos. Like alcohol induced delirium, the feeling of uncontrolled yet confident actions, but actions nonetheless, the casino was alive at all hours. It ran solely on it’s muscle memory made up of the bustling people that believed they were clever enough to get their own lives to run as smoothly.

Steady and reliable as a heartbeat, each Friday was 21 for the guys. The card table was surrounded with players and those waiting his turn for me to deal the cards. They made friends with me, and the sky view cameras watching and listening for card counts. Like a well-programed machine, the game play was automatic, each player constantly improving his game. Everyone knew the right moves; these were seasoned players. Lately the big guy was having a winning streak, and surly the lovely miss Cynthia would arrive shortly to claim the prize.

A woman of 21 herself, she always came to watch, well practiced in the game of seduction. Like intuitive clockwork, she showed up when the game was getting tight. She was always in a sexy little number with her sights on the winner. She looked like all the other ladies on the strip, all the show-girls and playboy bunnies, like a classic Vegas girl in curled extensions and false lashes, but always willing and knowing how to paint herself to fit any man.

Hour after hour the men rotated games, trying to beat me. The calls were smooth and quick; each play was already ingrained into the heads of the men. But I’ve been dealing in Vegas for years; I’ve become one of the cogs in the chaos. The combinations of cards had become so familiar; they should have been smart enough to know how to count cards by then. But it was beyond the game by now; Friday night gambling and free drinks from waitresses in corset uniforms were habit.

Like the girls in their uniforms the men spruced up their work suits, slapped on some cologne, and headed to the strip. Like all party cities the city itself, the people, the places, they were all carefully planned. So much so that the planners were built in, and this is what it looked like. It was card night, a game for men, a night to lose some money and get the women celebrating their 21st’s.

The game’s resident girl stood by the most recent reining champion, scoping out new wins. She was wearing a new dress, darker than her usual choices; backless, and cut below her chest to show the cleavage below her too round breasts. She became a variation of herself all the time; she became what her winner wanted, only small details away from the vision of a typical Vegas girl. She tried different hair, makeup, and styles of dress, all the way to augmentations depending on the success of her man at the moment. She was a different Cyn every night; whichever the man wanted to put his hands on while he called his cards.

She didn’t know any different though, being that this city was all she knew. One night a few of the guys were out of town so they didn’t have the usual game. She attached herself to me as a familiar face, but I didn’t mind, the dealing had become second nature; I listened to her as she drank throughout the night. She played the slots with the cash her most recent win gave her, and spilled her guts to me at the card table.

She was dealing with some recurring PTSD. The last guy didn’t treat her well and it reminded her of the foster families she grew up with around the city who gave her bruises like the ones on her arm that her frock barely covered. I never saw her with any girlfriends, but she expressed that she was sure it was fine. “It comes with the lifestyle”, she’d say. “How can any girl expect to live in luxury and jewels without the men who give it to you?” No one ever said so, but she was a prostitute of sorts. One guy wins, and she wins him in exchange for a night or whatever type of relationship he feels like.

The next weekend the games took place as usual, but there was a new face around the table. I saw him around the casino for a little while, maybe sizing up the place before getting to the real game. He approached the circle and at his turn he modestly stepped up to his place. He wasn’t very noticeable, like the other men he was dressed nicely, well groomed, nothing out of the ordinary. But when he accompanied the hand gestures with his calls, were hard to ignore. I noticed Cyn watching intently, subtly gliding her own fingers along the edge of the table, and ignoring the man with his arm around her tiny waist, claiming the communal girl who was inevitably fostered out to another guy within a few months at the most. Rough and subtly mangled, he didn’t have the hands of a paper pusher in an office job. His gestures were skilled, he signaled with smooth precision like a detail woodworker.

Too quiet for the taste of most everyone else in the building, carpenter hands killed each game with modesty. He was one of those nice guys, the ones with hard edges, and a warm disposition. He seemed like the kind of guy you could kick back and have a beer with at the end of a hard day. The longer he stuck around the more ill fitting that suit looked, but Cyn didn’t seem to notice. It didn’t make sense that this carpenter could keep dealing and dealing more chips. But he kept winning too. The rage around the table was palpable.

Slowly, Cyn inched toward the one with the carpenter hands. Her typical motive was the money, everyone knew that, but this guy was too different. There was some other force pulling that girl in. Even though she knew better, she could feel her bruises aching with warning as she moved away from the big one. With beads of sweat staining his white collar, his dumbfounded envy was unmistakable. Cyn’s bruises could well have been aching for what the carpenter was in for if he stole her from the big guy. Watching the dynamic at the table tonight was unlike anything I had ever witnessed in these casinos. The place ran because of the people that came here, unremarkable players with obvious agendas to win, modesty was left at the door and competition was understood. Carpenter hands, unlike his skilled movements, was like a wrench in a cluttered china case.

This guy was confusing; maybe he was someone that had it all figured out. Got the rough hands from pulling on his bootstraps for years until he had enough life to follow the shuffle of cards. Like the office jobs, these men did after hours what they did all day anyway, pushing paper; they made decisions all day that were really made by the company than ran them. Later, they made alcohol-induced decisions with smaller stacks; but everyone knows the cards play themselves.

Cyn took her place next to the new champion as more cards were dealt. He knew all too well what was going through the minds of the mindless men, and frankly, me. We wondered where he came from and how he could be disrupting the conveyor belt of a game. “What do you think, hands?” He was hers now, or the other way around. A silence fell over the table; we waited expectantly for him to respond to the standard routine. The casino continued it’s usual bustle, gamblers in sync with the perfectly random dance across the square carpet pattern.

Carpenter hands glanced at me as I tried to appear casual, Cyn began to squirm a little, not used to convincing men to take her home; she was a knock out. He stood up slowly, slapped a tip on the table for me, and softly kissed Cyn’s cheek. He left without so much as a passing look at everyone as he sauntered through the casino, seemingly disrupting the randomized program.

Cyn started showing up every night knowing that the guys would only be there on Friday night in the hope that she would run into hands again. Like always, she got what she was looking for. What she didn’t know is that he had been in the casino for at least a week before he came to the table; he couldn’t seem to get enough.

I watched her approach him in a lounge area away from the tables on the outskirts of the commotion. She wore a cropped halter, low and exposing her breasts as usual, with a longer lace skirt. Her hair looked undone, slept-on waves and fly-aways, and her face wasn’t so painted, she looked sexy. Matching her effortless look, she seemed more approachable, not filling her role of his trophy. I closely observed their behavior. Warily, he slowly warmed up her, the interaction steadily opening up, enjoying each other’s company, intensions breaking down. After one last drink and a few smiles they left together, I didn’t see either of them again until the next game night.

As always the players convened, including carpenter hands, the rest of the players still skeptical of his presence. Cyn was dressed down a little bit again, still in a slinky dress, but with less hairspray and lashes. The game was uneventful; the men seemed annoyed throughout the night watching carpenter hands. I watched the two of them share glances as the game progressed. The other men seemed distracted, unable to uphold the routine. Hands finally took that win and the men scattered, exhausted and frustrated with the inexplicable disruption. With a friendly farewell embrace and warm smile, carpenter hands left, leaving Cyn with a warm, satisfied expression.

“I saw the two of you leave together the other night. You looked nice” I probed her without subtlety. She let out a small “ha”, surprised by my abruptness, shifted in her seat and looked down at her drink with a small smile. Cyn looked up after a moment, more open.

“He’s not what you would expect. Those hands really do build stuff, but the guy is rich.” She explained, seemingly still a little unclear.

“What’s his story?” I pried

“Well he’s not too different from anyone else in this place, he shuffles around to casinos constantly, he was addicted to gambling.” She paused, thinking about how she would continue. “He doesn’t like it, though. He wants to build a house in the middle of nowhere and live like those lonely hippies, but he can’t get away from all of this. He said some thing like ‘I crave simple life and for a home to feel tangible, like you can get a grasp on it and know that it wont drop strings down to your wrists like the puppeteers that every other place has become’. I don’t know, something about the institution controlling us.”

I wasn’t surprised, the explanation made sense once I knew his story. He was right, everyone was pretending here, even Cyn, making herself a prize every week attempting to gain a better life. And the men coming to play, calling it a good time after a hard week. But they were just contributors in another system that ran itself.

The next week hands wasn’t there, and Cyn was in a tight dress with a high neckline and her hair in a chignon. She leaned on the men like she usually did, “where’s your friend, baby?” I asked what the men were all wondering. “He’s just a gambler boys, he went back home to his usual casino he was just passing through.” Relieved, the men proceeded with their previous Friday night game, back in the usual swing, smooth and seasoned like before.

The big guy won again, self satisfied he collected his winnings and slid his hand comfortably around Cyn’s waist. Flirtatiously she leaned her wait into his grasp, she whispered into his ear and he hesitantly stood up to get her a drink. She sat down and claimed her play, he returned shortly after “Keeping my seat warm baby?” he asked, waiting for her to stand up for him and to flatter his arm as he played. He slid his hand onto her shoulder and she shrugged him off.

“Deal” she told me sternly, and with a look of camaraderie. He was dumbfounded and speechless, I asked him to step back, as was table protocol.

“So he’s not coming back?” I asked, hoping for the rest of the story.

“He was just a passer through, nothing special.”

“Did you go with him that night?” The conversation was low at this point, between the two of us. The men confusedly gave up their seats to other players, slowly and without order.

“He wasn’t anything special, just good with his hands. Probably off gambling somewhere daydreaming about that house.” She said this disconnected, unconcerned.

She was confident, maintaining her sex appeal. The men seemed panicked about the break in protocol. Carpenter hands wasn’t any different than them, he just knew that we all were victims of the system, sometimes to the point of addiction. The casino runs like a well-oiled machine, and we’re all the cogs and gears that keep it going. Everyone figures that if your life can run itself, that’s when you have the extra time to find happiness, a companion, a house, a simple life, or luxury. But we don’t run our lives we organize them. We organize them so that our lives can run us. All of this is stuff people have organized in order to run us, to run ourselves. We do it to find happiness, but that’s not how it works. Maybe Cyn started to figure out that no one was special.

We’re too lazy to do it right though. And it’s too late anyhow; we’ve already lost control.