Lucky Palms - Part 3
I crawled into the metal stool and felt one of my slippers slide off, hit the ground with a soft thud. I kicked off the other one and perched both feet on a slim silver rung. I put my purse in my lap and placed the brochures on top. Thank the good lord I'm using that big Avon purse, I thought. The gun metal gray purse brochure tower covered my breasts, but I caught the man at my left sneaking a peak. He wore dark navy jeans and a polo shirt with a tan sport coat. His belly poked out from the jacket and rested on his legs like my purse. He smelled like drug store cigars and beer.
"This is a five dollar table. If you have twenty bucks we can play for a long time, the game moves slow." My teacher sat to my right. He pulled a red and white cigarette package out of an inner pocket in his black jacket and tapped out a smoke. There's no smoking in public places in California, even in poker halls, but he placed the cigarette in his mouth and his lips and teeth manuevered it into place in the right corner nook. He started to chew. I slid the Avon brochures between my purse and my chest and reached inside for my wallet. I had exactly thirty dollars, one ten and four fives, and I handed a five to the dealer.
"Honest, I don't know how to play. I'll play ten bucks total, that way if I bomb it bad then you only have to buy twenty bucks worth of Avon, ok? This is fun! Now! What do I do?" I sounded like a third grader on cocaine, my voice jumped and giggled and my fellow gamblers stared at me with middle-aged eyes, not a one of them under forty. I looked around the room and noticed a handful of other Pai-Gow tables, each staffed by a dapper figure in black tie, all full of gamblers, male gamblers, the only other woman a short blonde I could only see from behind, her short spiked hair head slightly bobbing up and down.
My teacher didn't introduce himself. He launched in to an explanation and I braced myself to follow.
"Now, Pai-Gow is a banking poker game. You know poker?" His cigarette wiggled as he talked, adding a slurping quality to his voice.
"Um. Well. I saw a lot of poker on Star Trek, so I think I know the basic rules." I thought about the episodes where the crew played weekly games, an opportunity to talk, discuss alien strategy, get little digs into one another. I could do this! I glanced around the table with a huge grin and saw six mouths hung open in disbelief.
"You learned poker from Star Wars?" The letch to my left raised his eyebrows and gestured around the table as if introducing me, probably the world's easiest mark, to the other players. "Goddamn woman, those better be lucky pajamas."
"Star Trek. Not Star Wars," I mumbled.
"Star Trek. Not Star Wars. Christ!" He mimicked my chipper voice and laughed, his ample belly shaking, slapping against the table. "Set us up!" He nodded to the dealer, who began laying down cards.
To be continued....
6:29:09 AM 
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