But it’s not here on this old Wurlitzer. I’m stumped. No Sinatra, no Broadway, no Motown, no bubblegum, just tons of glum college-radio alt rock and overproduced AM country and—it’s so wrong—much melancholy yet strident sixties protest crap. I may as well just punch stuff up at random; a dangerous thought, since that’s what I’m now doing, as though my ideas are now starting in my fingers and traveling upstream to my cerebrum. Out slides the arm and the record from its rack and up comes, at a volume I can’t lower because I see no knobs or dials anywhere, “If I Had a Hammer” by Peter, Paul and Mary. It’s just the tune I didn’t want to hear and of course it’s also Alex’s cue to open the door, spread her arms, and say “You like?”
She takes the catwalk. She’s dipped herself in black lacquer that still looks wet and tied her straight hair back in a whiplash ponytail that she swings around in a slashing full rotation while bowing her head, and I’m really not sure why. Her shoes are the kind you don’t notice, you just see legs, and the whole effect is pure campy female cutout, like those busty silhouettes on truckers’ mud flaps.
“Rate me,” she says. “Be vicious and be cold.”
“Ten is inhuman and never sounds sincere, so I’ll say nine point seven. Nine point eight.”
An abrupt Bond Girl pivot, hand on hip. Reverses it.
“This music’s awful.”
“Do something about it. There’s not much there.”
“I don’t make decisions tonight. I’m full-on Barbie. Just pretend they never burned the bra and you’ve never heard the word ‘empowerment.’ That’s hard in your line of work, but just pretend.”
“Last time you wanted to talk. Now this,” I say.
Cocks a hip, trails her fingers up her sides. Ooh, that tickles. Oh, but it feels good. Pouts and half closes those lashes and strokes her cheeks. “Now this. One request only: a very long black car. Like something you’d see at a Playboy Mansion funeral.”
“The phone book’s already open to that page.”
We’re riding around and still talking destinations when it strikes me that what would ruin things forever would be for Ryan to get flashy with his credit card—the one that earns miles and the only one not hacked, because it already was and he replaced it—and prematurely hurtle over the goal line down here on Las Vegas Boulevard with a woman dressed as a Bahraini sex slave and him so zonked on prescription everything that he won’t remember his big finish. That’s never been the picture and mustn’t happen. The picture is specific and very dear to me. One, I’m alone or with a total stranger, which represents my customary mode. Two, there are fields below, even if I can’t see them. There’s more, a score of picky stipulations that have barnacled onto my skull over the years, but lately I’ve been rationing the previews so as not to pre-empt the real hit show.
“Driver,” I say, and not because I like it but because the old guy insisted on being addressed this way, perhaps from some creepy role-playing addiction, “I need a bank. I need a cash machine. I’m only spending fresh green bills tonight.”
“All the casinos have several ATMs, sir.”
“I can’t explain why but I’d like it from a bank.”
The gentleman already knows we’re freaks back here. The pills are out and a bunch rolled under the seat and it probably looks to him in his rearview mirror like we’ve been bobbing for apples these past few minutes. In the limo’s doors are insulated wells stocked with pop and beer and crescent-shaped ice cubes, and we’ve made a mess of these as well. We sip once from a can and decide it’s not our flavor and thrust it back into the ice pile and it spills and we crack another and fancy it even less and it tips and gushes, too, and we’re all sticky, so out come thick wads of multicolored napkins that we’re just too lazy to use singly, and plus we’re paying for them, so who cares?
“You up for a good mimic, Alex?”
“As always.”
“So why did you quit PR?” I feared this subject, but as is my habit I’m rushing right in toward it because I don’t want it crawling up behind me.
“I got let go.”
“For cause? I’m sorry.”
“Shrinkage. Not enough desk chairs to go around one day, but they tried to be sweet about it. You know. Help us.”
“Why did you say ‘you know’ like that to me?”
“Because you know.”
I swing around to Driver like I’ve been kicked and do what he told me earlier I should do: ask him anything. What arises from this are two tickets and a firm price—we just have to give the box office a note that Driver’s now scribbling on a pad beside him while Alex watches the road because he isn’t and I can see she thinks this actually helps—for one Danny Jansen at some casino showroom. It’s ninety bucks per head. We find that bank. The machine is on an outside wall and hungry drifters lurk on every corner as I make the withdrawal, but vanish once I’ve made it.
In line for the act I say, “I
She doesn’t answer me until we’re seated and Danny swaggers on as Schwarzkopf—topical—and there’s no way out. Just fire exits.
“You honestly don’t remember me? Our sessions? It wasn’t a seminar, Ryan. You outplaced me. I was waiting for you to confess,” she says. “I thought you were playing with me by holding back. Then I realized you weren’t and didn’t know what to think. But you’ve really forgotten me, haven’t you? That hurts.”
“This started in Reno?”
“It started on the plane. I assumed you were playing chicken with this gal.”
