TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 88

[Tobie Shapiro]

December 13, 20000006


Dear Ones,

	I got up early this morning again.  I 
looked at the clock, and found there was not 
enough time to go back to sleep before the alarm 
rang.  So I yanked myself out of bed and dragged 
myself into the bathroom, stared at myself in the 
mirror.  This is not a favourite thing to do 
lately.  The person I see staring back at me is 
not at her best.  Especially my hair.  I don't 
usually worry about things like that.  At 59, I 
figure I'm no longer trying to look fetching. 
But this is beyond that struggle.  This is a 
fright.  So, in a desperate act to do something 
nice for myself (something my shrink and I are 
working on) I made a daring appointment with the 
hair dresser.  Yes, today I am going to have my 
hair treated and clipped and trained into better 
behaviour.  It may or may not make a big 
difference in my life.  We'll see.

	I saw.


 
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	I did many things for LABINDUSTRIES, 
inc., my parents' business for thirty something 
years.  One of the sacrifices I made was to go to 
a convention for them in Las Vegas.  I say it was 
a sacrifice, because Las Vegas is not my kinda 
town.  I don't even tolerate the glitter factor 
in Los Angeles, so you can imagine what Las Vegas 
does to me.  However, as a caricature, it has its 
points.  The three hundred topless women with 
their six hundred identical topless breasts all 
shimmying down a gangplank to very loud music 
does have something awe inspiring to recommend 
it, and don't forget the feathers!  The 
underlying truth held in Las Vegas that drives 
and motivates all the splendor of women's nudity 
is based on the presupposition that nudity and 
sex are naughty, and the audience is being 
dreadfully risque just watching it.  If it's 
forbidden, it's attractive.

	Gambling is not my drug of choice.  I can 
have five nickels to put in a slot machine and 
stop after the fifth nickel, whether I've won or 
lost.  The allure of losing your shirt by 
volition has no sway with me.  But in Las Vegas, 
the gambling and the shows go on round the clock, 
and there are indoor lights that make all hours 
seem like three in the afternoon.  What goes on 
in corporate headquarters in Las Vegas is another 
unappealing factor.  But in spite of all this, I 
went to Las Vegas for a convention, armed with 
Repipets®, Dilutors® and Labquakes®, schooled in 
demonstrating the instruments to curious lab 
techs and directors of laboratories, fielding 
complaints, collecting accolades.  I'd done it 
before, and I could do it again.

	The heat was the first thing that got to 
me, but that was only between the airplane and 
the taxi, then between the taxi and the confines 
of the hotel.  The convention hall was connected 
to the hotel via underground tunnel, and this 
obviated the need to walk in the heat, or show my 
face to the sun.  After the first day of the 
convention, I ate my late dinner, and went up to 
my room to bed.  I'm not much of a fan of 
television, so I called home and talked about the 
goings on at the convention, what sort of 
business had coursed through the booth.  But when 
everyone was satisfied, it was time to hang up. 
I sat there for a while going through what I 
could do to amuse myself in Las Vegas.  It was 
too early to go to bed.  But I went to bed 
anyway.  I slept until about two thirty in the 
morning, and woke up, sat up in bed, and realized 
I was not going back to sleep any time soon.  So 
I got dressed, grabbed my journal and a good pen, 
and headed down to the casinos to watch the 
traffic.  Watching people go about their business 
in the all night pleasure palace might inspire 
some unique writing.  I weaved my way among the 
crowd of people, no thinner than at two thirty in 
the afternoon.  The place was still packed. 
Scantily clad barmaids scurried around bringing 
drinks to revellers and taking orders. 
Everywhere, the slot machines were ringing and 
clacking.  The lights lit up.  Bells went off. 
People celebrated or walked glumly off the floor 
to their doomed lives.

	I chose a spot on an expanse of raised 
carpet under a brass bannister overlooking the 
slot machines.  I hadn't been there a minute when 
an elderly woman in a wheelchair came gliding 
down the aisle.  She stopped in front of a 
machine that was occupied at the moment by a 
young man who had a few quarters to put in.  When 
he was done plugging in his last quarter, the 
woman moved in on him.

	"This is my machine," she told him.

	She had tightly sprayed hair like a 
helmet of curls, her purse was squeezed between 
her thigh and the arm of the wheelchair, and a 
cane was hooked over the back.  Her left hand was 
gimpy and lay there pinched between her purse and 
the side of the wheelchair, her fingers growing 
out of her palm at all angles, her wrist bent in. 
With her right hand, she operated her wheelchair 
and steered herself in front of the one armed 
bandit.  She reached over into her purse and 
brought out a roll of quarters, smacked it 
sharply against the edge of the chair and opened 
the seam.  Then she started feeding quarters into 
it: one quarter, pull the handle -- nothing; the 
next quarter, pull the handle -- nothing; the 
next quarter, and the next after that.  Every 
once in a while, shed get a quarter or two back, 
but she just let them sit in the little trough 
and plugged in the next quarter.  She went 
through the whole roll and then fed her proceeds 
into the slots.  Nothing.  Without a pause, she 
reached over into her purse again and brought out 
another roll of quarters, smacked it on the edge 
of her chair to open the seam, then fed the whole 
roll into the slot machine without a single 
return on her investment.

	She sat staring at the machine for a few 
seconds, then reached around in back of her and 
unhooked her cane from the back of her 
wheelchair.  She raised it and brought it down, 
hard, on the top of the slot machine.

	"Fuck you!  Fuck you!" she shouted at it. 
WHAM!  "Fuck you!  Go to hell!"

	At this point, a guard came up to her and 
admonished her loudly, "Hey! Stop that!  You 
can't damage the property."

	She stared at the guard, a young man, 
portly, with greased hair under his official cap. 
"Make me," she said.  She turned to the machine. 
"Fuck you!" and she hit the slot again.

	The guard was stuck in a quandary and I 
could see it on his face. What was he going to do 
to this octogenarian in a wheelchair?  Wrestle 
her to the floor?  Pin her good arm in back of 
her?  Confiscate her chair?  He stammered, and 
spit out, "Well, you're just not supposed to do 
that.  Get away from the machine."

	The old lady laid her cane across her 
lap, backed up and, under the watchful eye of the 
nice guard, retreated down the aisle toward 
another slot.  She turned her head and glared 
back at the errant machine.  "Fuck you!" she 
shouted, and continued down the row of bandits.

	The guard took his hat off and ran his 
fingers through his short hair, from the crown to 
the nape of his neck.  He saw me looking at him 
with my tablet of paper and my pen.  "That's Mrs. 
Peterson," he told me.  "She comes in here all 
the time."

	It is amazing what people do with their time, with their lives.


 
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-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net