The Characters of Las Vegas

It is the winter of 2006, and I find myself standing in the darkness of the Nevada desert, looking up at the neon illuminated tower of the Stratosphere Casino. It looms over the car dealership where I am employed as a salesman.

In January, on a whim I moved to Las Vegas from North Carolina, getting a cheap apartment sight unseen in a high crime area of the city. The nearest friend or family member is in Tennessee, and I am truly all alone out here. I do not feel alone, though, and aside from my worries about making enough money to pay my bills, I am pretty happy.

There is a vibe to Las Vegas, an excitement and energy, that gives me comfort. It is like no other place that I have lived. The characters, the people I meet, fascinate me as I enter this new chapter in my life.

The night is cold, and I have been at work since this morning. The salesmen stand outside, but the managers get chairs at a counter inside the heated dealership. There are no benches provided for the salesmen. Some of the older guys actually sit in the cars that are on display immediately outside the showroom, a habit which management has warned them about. The warning has no effect, though. A couple of the old guys are physically incapable of standing for the 8 to 12 hour days that we work.

The game we play is to for each salesman to stand in front of a specific parking space and wait for a customer to drive in. The salesman has that individual space until he abandons it or a car pulls in and he greets the customer. There are a couple of good parking spaces where customers always go first. I have one of these slots now. The rest of the salesmen form a line going down the sidewalk. The night is cold, and I notice that we are all wearing black- black leather coats or trench coats. We look like mafia hit men, and I think that a customer will be quite intimidated to park in front of any of us. It is so obvious that we are sharks with dollar signs in our eyes.

Having no friends or family in Vegas, I am glad to meet new people. To my left, manning the number one parking space, is Santiago. Originally from Mexico, he is a mustachioed man whom I presume him to be in his late 50s or early 60s. When I first started working at the dealership, Santiago did not speak to me that much and "snaked" me on one occasion (To snake someone in the car business, I learned, is to steal their customer).

As a few weeks have passed, though, Santiago has taken a liking to me. After we close the dealership tonight, he will go to the Venetian casino. Santiago is a professional poker player and enters tournaments every week. If what he tells me is true, he makes quite a bit of money from poker playing. He only works as a salesman because his family would worry about him if he just played poker all day.

Santiago is retired from the restaurant business where he also claims to have made a lot of money. Again, if what he tells me is true, as a young man in his 20s, he played on the Mexican National Soccer Team.

Santiago is a ladies' man, and about this I have no doubt. Despite being old, he has long wavy dark hair, and he is always carefully groomed. There is a polish to his way with people, a smoothness about him that female customers just go for. He is one of the best salesmen at the store, when he wants to be. In the middle of a deal, he will sometimes walk over to me and whisper. "Watch this. I'm gonna chop off his head like a Samurai." Sure enough, a few minutes later that customer is smiling and driving a new car away from the dealership. Santiago is smiling as well, but more from the satisfaction of closing the customer than from the money he just made.

Much of his time at the dealership, though, is spent in the back smoking cigarettes and talking to Rose,a pretty young woman from Nicaragua who works in the warranty office.

To all the salesmen, he brags regularly about his wife at home and his mistress in San Diego.
"My wife drops me off at the airport in Las Vegas," he says in his thick Spanish accent, "and Katarina picks me up in San Diego. Then when it is time for me to leave, Katarina drops me off at the airport in San Diego, and my wife picks me in Las Vegas."

Recently, he claims to have a new mistress in Las Vegas. As we talk in the cold air, he laughs in a raspy voice that comes from years of smoking, "You're gonna meet her tonight. She's younger than my daughter."

I ask him about his daughter, but he shakes his head and looks away for a moment. "She hasn't spoken to me in years," he says. I decide not to push him on the subject.

Santiago stands to my left. To my right is Rob, a young black man who just turned 20 years old. Rob thinks Santiago is full of hot air, whereas I tend to believe most of what Santiago tells me. Rob does not like Santiago, I think because he senses that Santiago is prejudiced against black people. From some of the things that Santiago has said to me, Rob's perception is spot on.

Rob enjoys talking with me because I am the only one of the salesman to have gone to college. He asks me lots of questions about what college is like and what living in North Carolina is like. Rob has a curious mind and his own fascinating life experiences, despite his young age.

Santiago, in addition to being a salesman, is a professional poker player. Rob, in addition to being a salesman, is a pimp.

I mean that literally. Rob has a number of prostitutes who go out on the streets of Las Vegas and make money for him.

To me, Rob is a nice guy and I just can not see him doing that sort of work. When I first learned this about him I asked, "How does one become a pimp?"

He answered me in detail, and it made perfect sense. From this we went on to have a number of conversations which would not be appropriate to repeat in polite company. Suffice it to say, I learned all about the prostitution industry in Las Vegas from a pimp's perspective, from how to handle a girl who is holding out on the money, to rivalries and turf wars, to protecting the girls from Johns who turn out to be dangerous.

Rob and I work well together in closing deals, and we often will split the commission on a sale. Our styles are totally different. He speaks a sort of street dialect to the customer, and I am the clean cut college boy. When one of us has stalled out in closing the deal, we switch off. The difference in approaches can startle the customer, but it is often effective in saving the sale.

A car pulls into the lot. The salesmen think it is a customer and we smile and wave.

"That's Viviana," Santiago says.

"That's who?" I ask.

"That's my girlfriend. You can have my spot."

Santiago steps off the concrete and walks toward the car. I move to the place where Santiago was standing, the best location to get a customer on the whole lot. Rob slides down to my number two position.

The driver of the car rolls down her window, but I can't get a good look at her. Santiago leans in and speaks to her for a few moments, then gets in on the passenger side. They ride to the back of the dealership.

A few minutes go by. I look in through the windows of the brightly lit dealership to the counter where the managers sit. This late, there is only one manager on duty. It is Rick, the manager who hired me. Rick is a tall, bald man with a beard. He is about the same age as Santiago or perhaps a little younger. Rick told me when I first interviewed with him that he is retired from the CIA. Rick is probably the most intelligent man at the entire dealership. I will talk more about him later.

Right now, I am actually more curious about Santiago's girlfriend than making a sale. Santiago has not come out to the front of the dealership, so I decide to walk around back to the smokers' corner where he spends most of his time.

Sure enough he is there, talking with some of the other salesmen. A woman with raven black hair has her back to me.

Santiago sees me. "Nathan, I'd like for you to meet Viviana."

Viviana turns around and smiles at me.

It is one of those rare moments in my life when I am really stricken. Viviana is one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen. Her face is like a precious jewel, her smile warm and inviting, her body full and voluptuous.

I have to look away from her. My senses began to tighten up and close off, but before they do, I see an expression on Santiago's face that immediately tells me he is my friend.

He sees my reaction to Viviana, and looks down in a mixture of awkward embarrassment and sympathy for me. To him, Viviana is an enjoyable but temporary toy. He is an old man and she is so very young. To me, she is the kind of woman who could make me happy for the rest of my life. She is one of a handful of women whom I have met and that I would propose to on the spot- if I could manage to say anything, that is.

Santiago can see this flood of emotions on my face.

I really do not know much of what occurs after that, as always happens when I encounter a beautiful woman face to face. I think Viviana can tell that I like her a lot, but I am not sure. At any rate, she and Santiago do not stick around for much longer. They go off together somewhere- the Venetian, I guess, and I am left in a fog for the rest of the evening as we close down the dealership on another Las Vegas night...

To be continued

Tennis

As a boy, I was not the greatest of athletes. I lettered for the cross country team in high school, but that was the height of my accomplishments in organized sports.

My two favorite sports have always been baseball and tennis. Dad taught me baseball as soon as I was old enough to swing a bat and throw a ball.

It was Mom, though, who taught the game of tennis to both my brother and me during the summer vacations in between school years.

My brother, Adam, learned the game fast, but it took me a while. When I first started playing, I literally could not keep the ball inside the court. Almost every time I swung, I launched the ball over the fence. Mom was very patient with me, though. We actually learned to play using her and Dad's old wooden rackets. Eventually, I was able to keep the ball inside the fence and inside the lines, but it was a couple of years before I began putting topspin into my swings.

Adam, after Mom bought us our own metal rackets, used Mom's wooden racket to hit rocks from our driveway out into the corn fields surrounding our house. He played whole imaginary baseball games hitting those rocks, the New York Mets versus the Baltimore Orioles in the World Series, sometimes. The rocks gradually busted the strings and chewed up the wood. He later said that he hated he messed up Mom's racket, as it really was a nice vintage wooden piece.

Adam and I played a lot against each other while growing up. He beat me most of the time, but my peak came when I was 19 years old. That was my freshman year of college, and I was in perhaps the best shape of my whole life. I took tennis as an elective course at Western Carolina University. The instructor was one of the football coaches, an old man.

He really did not teach us that much. I remember him telling jokes to the class like, "Do you know what the students cheer at Furman University games?...FU!"

Or "Do you know what the students cheer at Austin Peay University?... Let's go Peay!"

He gave us written instructions on how the game is played and how to keep score, but the only teaching of how to play was when he told us and demonstrated, "Remember, bend your knees when you swing, bend your knees."

For our final grade, he started a tournament pitting everyone in the class against each other. I easily won my first two matches. The coach stopped the tournament after that, as it was pretty clear that I was the best player in the class. I'm not sure that he liked me that much, as I think I acted pretty cocky on the court. He challenged me to game of ping pong, and it was closely contested. The old ball coach eventually won, though, and he seemed to take a good deal of satisfaction in that.

My freshman year, I met a guy named Thomas who was also a very good tennis player for someone who never played it in an organized setting. We spent many evenings competing against each other. It was about 50/50, who would win. My strength, he said, was that I could run everything down and get every shot back across the net.

Thomas was a nice guy. He and I were both from the eastern part of the state, and he gave me a ride home during the Christmas break of my freshman year- over six hours of driving. I was pretty naive during college, and it took me all year to realize that Thomas was gay. This sort of blew my mind, given my conservative Christian upbringing. I immediately cut off all contact with him. It is one of the regrets that I have from my life that I was such a homophobe in those years and that I cruelly abandoned a friend who had done nothing wrong.

My brother joined me at Western during my sophomore year, and we continued our matches against each other on the courts beside Reid Gym (courts that now no longer exist due to building expansion on campus). I remember that these courts played slower, and the ball bounced higher than on the courts beside the high school where Adam and I attended. The slower court helped my game against him, and I went on a long winning streak. Eventually, he stopped playing against me because I was trash talking too much.

One night we were playing against each other and got into a heated argument over whether a ball was in or out. Some guys playing on the court beside us stopped to watch in awkward silence.

Finally, I yelled at Adam, "I'm going to beat your butt! I'm going to beat your butt tonight!"

At that exact instant, the lights went out.

I think it was probably someone from campus security who was watching and was able to shut the lights down before things escalated even further. I never knew the lights to just suddenly cut off like that at any time before or after when I played tennis at night.

When Adam stopped playing against me, I would go to those same courts and hit a ball against a brick wall until I got blisters on my hand.

During my sophomore year, I took racquetball as an elective course. The course was fun and was taught by the quarterbacks coach of the football team. He would later become the head coach. He also started a tournament in the class matching the students against each other. I finished second.

Taking the course was a mistake, though, as it completely ruined my tennis swing. In racquetball, you break your wrist when you swing. In tennis, you should keep the wrist stiff.

Adam eventually started playing tennis with me again, but it was a pathetic show. I began launching the ball over the fence once more. It was like I had forgotten how to play, like I was picking up a racket for the first time. It was not enjoyable for either of us, and he could not understand what had happened to me.

In college, I had a pretty strong crush on a girl, and I remember her walking by the court one night and seeing me play. I hated that I looked so pitiful out there as she went by- if only she could have seen me before I took that darn racquetball course, maybe things would things would have turned out differently between us. But probably not. In my head, it was a very important thing at that time, though.

I never did get my swing back. Instead, I developed a method of basically just punching the ball flatly back across the net, without topspin, and using the other player's velocity. Adam said it was very frustrating to play against me and that he could not get better himself with me playing in that style. I never was able to get back to the level when I was 19 and playing almost every day against Thomas, taking full swings and hitting with topspin.

Now, in my 30s, I have not played in years.

On the professional level, tennis has arguably changed more than any other major sport in the past 30 years. This is due to the rapid increase in racquet technology, the change from wooden racquets to graphite composites to whatever material is used today.

It is really a power game, now. No one serves and volleys any more, and you do not see the strategy in building points like you used to. I quit keeping up with all the changes, but I remember when Goran Ivanisevic won Wimbledon in 2001, that was a turning point. Ivanisevic, 6'4", had a big serve, but that was about it. Since his win, tennis has increased the size of the ball by 6% and changed the type of grass grown at Wimbledon to try and slow the game down. The real solution is to just go back to wooden rackets, but that will probably never happen.

Now, the men's game is two guys standing at the baseline and just hitting the ball as hard as they can. The best players are over six feet tall, whereas before shorter guys had a chance. To me, the game is not that interesting to watch anymore.

Enough about how things used to be, though.

Tennis, like baseball, has given me a lot of joy. I can write more blog entries about individual matches that I watched or played. I can write about specific shots, even. Perhaps in the future I will do so.

"Angeles," a Water Gun, and a Rainbow

This evening in Miami, I walked from my apartment to the grocery store across the street. My apartment is on the third floor, the top level. As I made my way down the stairs, I saw that I have some new neighbors on the ground level. A young man and woman with a newborn baby stood in their fenced in courtyard. The woman held a bottle to the baby's mouth, watching the man spread bags of reddish brown mulch on the ground. They looked up at me as I came down the stairs, and I nodded to them.

I decided not to try and start a conversation, or to tell them that their apartment is in a bad location. The man was spreading mulch most likely because there was no grass in their courtyard, only dirt. There is no grass because I have noticed that every time it rains, water funnels off the roof and pours into that yard in buckets. Any vegetation is drowned out.

I felt some sympathy for them, new parents in a new home, trying to make a go of it in this world. I imagine that it was probably much the same for my own parents when they were getting started with me in a small apartment on Christa Drive in Wilmington, NC.

My first and some of my best memories come from this time- the early 1980s.

One day, I remember playing in the front yard with mom. I heard talking coming from the apartment next to ours. The window was just low enough that I was able to see over the edge, and out of curiosity I walked over and looked in through the window at the people inside. The woman sitting in her living room saw me and said hello.

Mom corrected me, though, and told me it was not polite to look in through windows at other people in their homes.

The woman who lived next to us was named Angela. My favorite TV show at the time was CHiPs, a show about two motorcycle cops for the California Highway Patrol in Los Angeles. Here is a video clip of how it came on each week:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6hzt9RA_VQ



Watching the show come on again with the music, the way the cars and the film look, reminds me that my childhood is truly a different era, now.

Anyway, I had picked up on the name of the city as a boy watching the show, and I identified it with the name of our neighbor. When I saw her, I said, "Hey, Angeles" instead of Angela. I remember her with thick glasses and a blue bandana in her hair.

The first rainbow that I ever saw was in the back yard there in Wilmington, too. I remember looking at it really hard, trying to discern where one color stopped and another one began. As I recall, it was not quite a complete rainbow. I've seen a perfect rainbow only a couple of times in my whole life.



Perhaps I am mixing the two memories, but it seems that the same day that I saw my first rainbow, I was also introduced to my first water gun. It was a small plastic pistol that Dad filled for me. Another one of our neighbors, a man with a dark mustache, was playing with his child in a kiddy pool in the back yard. I ran up to him and squirted him in the chest with the water gun. Dad told me to stop, that what I was doing might be fun for me but that the man probably did not want to play.

The man said it was okay, though...

Now, back to the present, where I sit in my apartment in Miami, typing this blog entry. It is almost midnight.

Earlier this week, I received the news that Mom has been diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease. The diagnosis explains some of the things that I observed last summer with her when we went on a family vacation out west. As I am learning, it remains to be seen how fast her symptoms will progress and how severe they will be. We are watching for how she responds to the medication she started this week.

Her condition has me thinking about a lot of things.

I value my early memories of my parents, and writing this blog serves an important function for me. My parents will not be around year after year. I finally began to grasp some of what that meant when I was a student in law school. The bad news from this week only confirms it.

Mom and Dad both have been pretty brave and cheerful about it, though, and there is hope that she can live with the disease for a long time without a major impact on her lifestyle. I am lucky that they have lived long enough for me to come to this new appreciation of them.

The Happiest Year of My Life

My job has been especially exhausting in recent days. I also have to work quite a bit this weekend to get ready for a slate of activities in the upcoming week.

I really do not have the energy to write a new entry just now. In the future, I hope to write about my many great experiences when I was a student at Western Carolina University.

For today, though, I will just briefly note what has been the happiest year of my life so far.

It was the summer of 2007 through the summer of 2008. During this time, I returned to Western Carolina as a graduate student.

My friend, Melissa, who was also President of the Graduate Student Association at WCU, asked me to take over writing a blog for them. She is the one who first showed me to how to do that on the internet, and it has been an enjoyable exercise ever since.

Here is a link to the blog that I wrote during that year:

http://wcugradstudentblog.blogspot.com/

I hope next weekend to feel rested and relaxed enough to write something original.