lady face and lizard luck. how not to win at a casino.

Pretty much the last thing that I figured would happen while driving North on interstate 95 during a torrential downpour was being distracted from the road by a gray blur rolling across my dash just as my rear wheels began to lose the lust that they had once had in their relationship with the road.  As I steer into the slide I take my foot off of the gas to get back control of the car, things are going smoothly.  Then I think to myself  “Oh shit, my Ipod that was sitting on the dash is currently shooting out the window!” and I immediately begin to panic.

Let’s back up.

For the majority of the boat trip (covered in other entries) I had been accompanied by a Scotsman named Frazer, which incidentally is pronounced as it sounds, not however like the name Frasier, which is the name of a once popular sitcom that has seemingly rendered the name Frazer impossible for Americans to say properly.  Frazer and I met in undergrad playing Rugby together while he was on a year exchange in the states and have been partners in crime ever since.  These crimes would often include two other foreign partners, another Scotsman and an Englishman, but sadly they did not make this trip and will have to be introduced thoroughly in later writings.

Frazer and I had many adventures on the boat trip and a few in the weeks following but now his visit was coming to a close. It was time for him to return to Scotland, which made him very sad because he would soon be losing his “incredible tan.”  In fact this was the last night that he would be staying before heading home and we wanted to do something special.  As we pondered what to do we consulted a napkin that we had been keeping tally of all the things that were necessary to accomplish while Frazer was on his visit to the states, a cocktail napkin that would ensure that nothing was over looked.  On one side of the napkin were all the dates from the start of the trip (with Friday’s, and Saturday’s highlighted and marked) further to the right was a list made up in many various fonts and colors of things that needed to be accomplished while on our journey together.

Crossed off that list were as follows:

1. Spear a fish (eat it)
2. Make out with India Waters
3. Surf
4. Visit assorted friends in Columbia/Charleston SC
5. Play with Dolphins
6. Sing Garth Brooks’ “Standing outside the fire” live at a karaoke bar
7. Ocean sailing
8. Get shot with a pellet gun
9. Go “Fight Club” golfing
10. Accidentally set the yard on fire with mortar shells

Not crossed off of the list:

1. Visit a strip club
2. Gamble
3. Have a near death experience.

Life is always easiest when the decisions make themselves.  For Frazer’s final evening in the states we would be heading south to Savannah, joining a fairy boat casino for the evening and then with our winnings we would head to a nearby strip club taking two of the final items off of the list.  As for near death, I had recently had an incident with a submarine that I felt could have cost me my life, but Frazer was not there for it and so it remained.

Just in case you aren’t familiar with casino theory, this is about how it works.  Free drinks with no clocks.  That simple.  Now why does this work?  Because a normal person would go into a casino with limits or a strategy like a set amount of time or money.  But a drunk person without a clock, well, they are just as likely to find another blackjack table as they are the bathroom.

Yes, the casino theory is brilliant, but the theory behind boat casinos is far superior.  In the boat casino theory not only do they have free drinks and no clocks working for them, but once you have left shore you cannot leave the fucking thing until you get back, so even if you came for something so simple as a . .poker tournament. .once you are out of said tournament you are then locked on a floating casino with nothing to do but drink and stare at the floor.  This is fine until you get drunk and bored, and then what the hell do you think people do?  The premise behind a boat casino is so brilliant that it should be illegal.

So there we sat, a few miles off shore in the Atlantic waiting to drink enough that we could justify making some bad decisions.  Waiting, just watching the lighthouses off in the distance from the smoking deck of the boat and talking about all of those people back on land taking their freedom from vices for granted.  After a few drinks I cracked easily from the boredom and happy that he hadn’t been the first, Frazer followed me to play roulette.

We rode the rollercoaster on through the night, up and down, more drinks, blackjack, up and down, video slots, more drinks, bigger bets, up and down until eventually one vice gave way to the other and all logic was lost.  We found ourselves sitting on the smoking deck again watching the lighthouses move slowly in our direction as the boat headed back to shore with precision timing.  Our pockets had been emptied, what more would it need us for?

“Strippers?” I said as I finished my last free drink for the evening.  I seemed to have said it as though they were the only cure.  “I feel bad enough for what I’ve done already.” Frazer said. I began to think about how doing the bad things make us feel the best right up until they are over, and then about how we have that long journey home to think about it with nothing or no one left. Or if you are like me in so many instances, we have all of Sunday morning to think about it with nothing or no one left.  And then I sort of figured that if we kept on doing bad shit that we wouldn’t have to worry about it until later so I said again, “Strippers?  Really hot strippers?”  In my most convincing voice.

Frazer laughed a little bit and we talked about how the system had planned for this all along and I knew the night was over.  But I knew that it was just this night and that tomorrow would come and mean a new day even though I lost some cash and one of my closest friends would be heading back across the world the next day.  Sometimes that is just what close friends do, they’re the people that remind you that it is all going to work out.

As I looked around us though there weren’t so many people that were sure that it was all going to work out.  The tired and broken faces of repeat boat visitors looked as though they had been trapped for years on this ship.  There were so many faces looking down, so many stories you could hear being exchanged about impossible odds and rigged tables that it felt as though the ship were heading directly for an iceberg.

Just then out of the door and onto the smoking deck stammered a man with a lady face, or a lady with a man’s body, and attached to it’s hip was what looked like a 14 year old girl smoking a Newport and tugging at her exposed bra.  I sat stupefied as the two made their way laughing across the deck talking loudly about how all the “Ching in der pockets gonna git dem whateva bling dey need sista.”  I thought about mentioning some grammar lessons as a reward to themselves but I kept my mouth shut as they continued.  “I knew I was da best.” The lady faced man, or woman with a mans body, said as she leaned down to make out with the child or midget.  She must have caught me staring at the scene because she made a comment about how it “felt ta lose in a poka game.”  I felt it was unnecessary to say such a thing seeing how I had already lost and how anybody would stare at a transvestite making out with a midget.  I must of looked a little shocked though because one of the faces that had been looking down had taken noticed and said me, “Don’t you worry boy, she loses every week.  There is only so much luck and today was her day.”  I nodded to the man and looked at Frazer, we went downstairs to make sure we were the first people off of the boat.

We never made it to the strip club, we were getting tired from lurking sobriety and knew that the core value of a strip club is being able to pretend that those women could want you like you were the king of fantasy land. But our fantasy had been taken away by the trolls on the ferry across and in a sober state now we couldn’t believe in it.  As the tinted windows and neon signs that would have marked our destination slowly began to fade into the distance the realization came creeping in that our journey was drawing to a close and the car fell quiet.  Nothing except the wind full of salt surrounding us and making us stick to our chairs filled my mind.

The next day we got up early and headed south on last time, this time for the Orlando International Airport.  We got lost several times and Frazer commented on how saddening it was that we hadn’t been able to cross everything off the list.  “We will try harder to cheat death next time.” I said as I dropped him off at the terminal.  “Next time then.”  And like that he was lost in a crowd of people headed for the other side of the world and I felt alone.  And then I thought a little bit about our seven-week journey and how you only feel bad when things are over and then I thought about the people on the boat and I felt like I was fine again.

A few hours later as I drove north in heavy rain my car began to fish tail, and I began to panic as what I thought was my Ipod began to shoot across the dash headed for my partially open window.  Up to this point I had been regaining control of the car, but lunging with my left hand to smack the Ipod in the other direction caused me to veer a little out of my lane and I had to switch to the right hand lane and then veer over into the shoulder a little bit to get everything back under control.  As this happened I realized two things.

A.  Had I not reached over to divert the Ipod from heading out of the window which had eventually caused me to change lanes, I would have smashed into the car in front of me while I was busy trying to get the car under control because the car there which I could see as I passed by, had just crashed into the back of the truck in front of it.  As I sat on the shoulder looking over to see if everything was alright, I had a second realization.

B. I hadn’t reached up to save my Ipod at all, my Ipod was in the cup holder.  What I had smacked as it rolled across the dash was in fact now sitting on the seat beside me looking at me straight in the face without blinking.  What I had actually smacked away from shooting out a window at 80 miles an hour onto the highway and in doing so accidentally resulted in the saving of my life was a 4 inch long grey lizard.

I sat for a minute there on the side of the road in the rain with my new lizard friend just sort of contemplating the last minute or so of my life, and then for a short while where in the fuck the lizard might have come from.  It occurred to me shortly there after though that when Frazer had gotten out to get his bags out of the trunk he had left his door open, and in popped his replacement.  Frazer shut his door once he had his bags and I was to focused on other things to notice a lizard on the floor.

I put my new-found friend in a large Gatorade bottle that was sitting on the backseat.  The lizard put up surprisingly little fight and I attributed this to either A. Just having the shit smacked out of it when I tried to stop it from going on a suicidal trip out the window, or B. the realization that it was half a second away from getting tossed towards pavement at 80 miles an hour but instead saved us both.  I strapped the bottle in for safety, by now the driver of the other car was exchanging insurance information with the driver of the truck, and we were on our way.

A while later the rain cleared and driving became easier.  After an hour or two the sun began to set against a backdrop of breaking storm clouds, burning the sky with an intense orange that scattered a backdrop of dark blues as though the sunset and the storm had been fighting all along.  My little passenger was still belted in beside me and I felt it unfair that he missed one of life’s greatest natural phenomena’s even if he had tried to kill me while almost accidentally taking his own life. I was sure with all the emotions that must be rolling around his head he would appreciate the simplicity and so I moved his water bottle from the seat to the dash where it could sit, and he could peer out the windshield and at the sky as we drove on.

By the time the daylight faded I needed to pull off the interstate and get some gas.   I was only a short while away from home now and I began to wonder how far across the ocean Frazer had made it at this point.  I filled the car and paid the attendant and as I got in to leave I looked at my passenger and wondered how far I had already managed to take him from where ever his home might be and so I picked him up and set him free near the woods behind the gas station.  When I pulled my little would be assassinator slash savior out of the bottle he looked at me and still did not panic, just jumped off of my hand and ran into the grass to tell all of the other lizards about his near death and heroic experience.

I walked back to the car thinking that I had just accidentally saved a lizard from shooting to certain death, which in turned stopped me from hitting a stopped car at 80 miles per hour.  “Today was my day” I thought, and since Frazer had left the door open to let the lizard in I figured both of us were in on it, and scratched the last item off of the list.