Essays

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The office park sat in a patch of desert eight miles off the Strip. I pulled the address out of my pocket. I hadn’t imagined gamblers doing business alongside divorce lawyers and accountants. In my denim miniskirt and Converse sneakers, I felt more like a teenage runaway than an interviewee. I pulled my hair out of its ponytail so that it fell over my shoulders and hid my bra straps.

I was twenty-four and had moved to Las Vegas to be with a guy I had been dating for a few months. We broke up soon after I arrived. I didn’t know a single person in town. But no one else seemed to either. It was 2001, and Vegas was the fastest-growing metropolitan area in America. Almost fifteen hundred people were moving into the city each week. Everyone I met was very much like me and had just ended up there.

After the breakup I rented a room in a motel just north of the Strip in a neighborhood known as Naked City. In the fifties it had been home to strippers who sunbathed in the nude to avoid tan lines. Now bail bondsmen, hookers, Vietnam vets, and irritable motel clerks added color to the place. My motel was within walking distance of the Little White Wedding Chapel and Johnny Tocco’s Boxing Gym and a short drive to the downtown casinos: Binion’s Horseshoe, the El Cortez, and the Aztec—home of the fifty-nine-cent strawberry shortcake. The cigarette burns in the motel’s bedspreads were big enough to fit a leg through, and the staccato of stilettos across the floor upstairs made it hard to get a good night’s sleep. But at seventeen dollars a night, it was affordable, and it allowed dogs. So Otis my sixty-pound chow chow and I moved in. The wooden nightstand showcased the room’s only decor: a Rand McNally Road Atlas and a Magic 8 Ball.

My odyssey through the sports-betting underworld, however, would considerably change my lifestyle. Though broke and having no idea how to place a bet, in four short years I would be working fifteen hour days as a figures girl at an offshore sportsbook in the Caribbean, living in a ranch house with a maid and a cook, taking meetings in an open-air strip club, and wiring money across international waters. But today, I just needed a job.

In a row of offices with signs like NEVADA INSURANCE and COLDWELL BANKER stood a suite with no sign and white plastic blinds covering its windows. Next to the door was a square address plaque and scrawled in its center, in Wite-Out correction pen, was DINK INC. From inside, a television blared. The sound of a bugle summoned horses to the starting gate at a racetrack. I knocked.

The door opened, revealing a guy about six foot four, 280 pounds. His hair was a heap of shiny, springy brown curls, the kind you see in ads for home perms. Tucked into his armpit was a Daily Racing Form, and in his hand was a puffy white bagel overstuffed with lox. He introduced himself as Dink, then took a bite of his sandwich. With mouth full he asked if my dog had an opinion on the Yankees game.

Dink was in his late forties, but his bashful smile and distracting habit of twisting his curls around his pointer finger made him appear much younger. He dressed like the adults with mental retardation I had met while volunteering at a group home. His Chicago Cubs T-shirt was two sizes too small for his expansive frame. Royal-blue elasticized cotton shorts were pulled high above his belly button. White tube socks were stretched to the middle of his pale, hairless shins.

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