Writing Samples

Short Stories by Jon Raasch


Denny's Casino Royale

He had heard that the Denny's Casino Royale on Las Vegas Blvd had quarter roulette. [He had got there in under an hour and was happy for this. In the Denny's, amongst Pancake Surprises, there always slept a bum in the far right booth. Not that the same bum always slept there, but there was always some bum sleeping in the same booth. But he didn't have any time for bums, so ] he took his girlfriend by the hand and ventured further. She was very pretty.

When she was younger, acne had scarred her face and left little divots inset into her ruddy brown skin, which looked somehow cute. It was all in her smile, wide and pointy like the 4th day of the lunar cycle. Her teeth shone Wayne Newton-white against that dark cocoa skin and her tiny snaggletooth still made his palms sweat. He longed to clean her teeth with his tongue like some perverted dentist. But that was for later. Now he was on a mission to teach her how to play roulette, and what better place than the Denny's Casino Royale.

Her full thighs rubbed against each other as he bade her to move faster, still in hand. Now they were moving too fast to be wandering, and they dodged plates of eggs and grapefruit, searching for that mythical 25 cent roulette table. Later, he would remark on how young she made him feel, but he would always remember, and much more prominently, how her perfect brown skin made his shine so white. And here, in the Denny's Casino Royale, she shone so much more than anybody; in her soft white plain shirt she looked like royalty. Perhaps her cheekbones did it.

But the 25 cent table was nowhere to be found. A wave of euphoria crept up his chest and caused his shoulders to round forward as she came close and whispered "I don't see it." Her voice felt like peach cobbler in his ear, and for a moment he forgot he had toes and fingertips. Her breath always had that effect on him.

By this time her hand was around his arm, and he knew she was ready to leave when her grip loosened and he felt her thumb move sensuously along his inner elbow. But they had come here for a reason, and it wasn't the Banana Waffle KABOOM!.

He walked up to ask a pit boss. The suit had a normal haircut, a mustache, and those big glasses with aviator rims. He looked like one of those guys who shocks the neighbors when he turns out to be a serial killer. The likely psycho informed him, "No we shut those down about six months ago."

Not wanting to play the dollar roulette or leave unrequited, he pulled his own arm and her to the craps table. When she freed herself and leaned over to look at the various betting boxes, he noticed how thin her arms looked, bent against the giant table. The dealer also had a mustache. There must be some correlation between casino employees and mustaches. When the dealer finally took notice of this perfect specimen of womanhood, he exclaimed "Lady Luck!" with a sincerity unknown in the service industry.

The gamblers instantly agreed that she should be next to roll, and she beamed her eyes big at her man, with a mixed expression of excitement and nervousness. She looked as if to say, "Should I?"

She had a habit of always asking permission, which was perhaps because he had a habit of controlling her. But now he was more than content to observe her awesome presence. She grabbed the dice decisively in her long skeletal fingers and drew back. She rolled, and he imagined the dice smacking together like her breasts did as she completed the motion and released. The dice soared down the length of the table and CLACK! scattered like the pigs showed up.

Even though she hit snake eyes, the dice didn't knock over any chip stacks, so all the gamblers agreed that that was just first round jitters, and she should roll again.

Stanford Wong, the renowned card counter and blackjack theorist claims that he has devised a way to roll dice to produce non-random results. It has something to do with rolling the dice perfectly along their axes (sp?), so as to eliminate two of the numbers. Eliminating two of the six numbers may not seem like too big of a deal, but consider how casinos keep only a small edge to entice the compulsive gambler, and you will realize how any departure from randomness translates into real dollars quite quickly. As Stanford Wong writes in the intro to his illicit book, Professional Blackjack, "If Mr. Wong doesn't want to do something himself, he hires somebody to do it."

Mr. Wong made a name for himself in two ways. First, he created his pseudonym by taking his alma mater and combining it with a smart-sounding asian name. More importantly, he was the first to use computer analysis to study card-counting, probably with punch cards and a computer the size of a room.

In the early eighties, when commercialism and science woke up next to each other, the casinos analyzed which coins made the loudest and sweetest sounding ring when they dropped from the slot machine. Today the slots have pieces of metal glued over their coin slots, and you're expected to feed in bills, or your players club card. The old people use a retractable card pinned to their chest so they look like extensions of the machine. The machine bells and whistles and they groan, but never seem happier with success than they seem saddened by failure.

2006