Call Me Lumpy: My Leave It to Beaver Days and Other Wild Hollywood Life (34 page)

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Authors: Frank Bank,Gibu Twyman

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BOOK: Call Me Lumpy: My Leave It to Beaver Days and Other Wild Hollywood Life
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Page 169
It's like a second home to us.
But you don't have to be a gambler and you don't have to be a sucker to enjoy Las Vegas.
Not with all there is to do there now.
Omigosh, the places there are, one after another.
Siegfried and Roy are marvelous.
EFX with Michael Crawford is arguably one of the greatest shows you will ever see in your life.
These babies aren't cheap.
Sixty-five bucks a ticket.
I mean, 130 scoots to see a two-hour show. Not even two hours. That's a lotta scoots.
Then you go have an expensive dinner. You're talking about a $300 evening.
That's a lot of money.
But it doesn't have to be that way.
For 30 bucks they'll put on this really nice joust at Excalibur and it's fun.
Hell, I even shelled out 29 bucks to see Pauley Shore.
I know, a lot of people think his humor is too idiotic. But remember, I love idiots.
Something about the guy cracks me up.
I don't know what it is.
I guess I'm warped, huh?
But like Baskin and Robbins, there's a flavor for everyone in Vegas.
There's lots of shows you can go to in Vegas for 25 bucks or less.
And there are tons of great dinner values.
For 100 bucks you can have a marvelous evening of dining and dancing and shows and frivolity.
Maybe during the daytime you want to lay out by the pool at the Mirage.
Slide down the water slide.
Sun your buns.
Work out.
Go hit that maddening little white ball on a fantastic golf course.
Have fun.
Just don't let Vegas have you for lunch.
Stay away from those machines.
If you're gonna play a game, play poker.
If you get good enough, you can win.
No matter how good you get at the other stuff, you can't win.
It's that simple.
Hey, you're talkin' to the Iron Duke here.
The Duke knows what he's talking about.
 
Page 170
But even if you do get good at pokereven if you get better than Denny the Dog and Cigarette Mary and Wild Bill and Newman and Redford in "The Sting" and even if you're the baddest one poker-playin', grub-stakin', pot-takin', Cincinnati Kid, Cool Hand Luke and Bret and Bart Maverick all-rolled-into-one on the planetI want you to remember one thing.
My wall.
On my wall I keep a framed poker hand.
As anyone can plainly see, it is a nine-ten-jack-queen-king of clubs.
That's right, a straight freaking flush.
A sure winner every freaking time.
I lost with that hand.
It was after I got really good as an adult poker player.
I was what is called a "proposition" player.
Or you could also call me a "shill."
I was working at the Normandy Club. My job was to sit in and take up a seat until a live player came along to fill out a table.
And that was the hand you see framed on my wall.
A straight flush.
A loser.
I had nobody to blame but myself.
I was dealing and I dealt myself this hand.
Pat.
That's correct.
The first five cards I dealt myself.
Straight flush.
I dealt this kid in the game a three-card draw.
He drew three cards and I had a pat hand.
He beat me with five aces.
Yeah. That's right.
Five aces.
Four aces and a joker.
It's the best hand I ever lost with.
Luckily, I only lost $128.
If I'd had the deed to my house and my car and all my life savings I would have lost them, because I would have bet them on this hand.
Fortunately, I only lost what I had on me at the time.
I keep that hand framed on my wall to remind me of one thing.
There is no such thing as a sure thing.
And now, maybe the next time you're counting on changing your life with a run of luck at the gaming tableseven if it's poker where you can win, and where your skill can come into playmaybe you'll remember.
Lumpy's wall.
 
Page 171
Remember those five clubs in a row.
And don't bet your house or your car or your wife or your kids on a hand of cards.
Take the game of poker for what it can be. Just a little entertainment.
Let that ride.
Let it go at that.
Take the money and take your wife on a cruise and be a real Caribbean stud.
Don't gamble.
Or, you can do what Beeky and I do.
I call her ''Beeky" whenever I want to hack her off.
I mean, I love that nickname "Beeky."
I think it fits her.
But for some reason she doesn't.
Whenever she hears me, she says, "Don't call me Beeky."
Sort of like someone else you may have heard once upon a time going, "Don't call me Lumpy."
Anyhow, do what me and Beeky do.
Gin.
Yep. We have what has to be the world's longest-running gin rummy game. Or at least a contender for the title.
It's 16 years in the making.
We play everywhere we go.
Anywhere we travel.
To the park.
Just sittin' at home.
The next thing you know, the cards may come out.
We have a running tally.
And we keep the sheets.
We've got boxes and boxes of score sheets around here.
And they will always be with us wherever we go, forever.
A quick glance at those scoresheets will tell you one thing.
It will tell you who is ahead in this world's-longest-running gin game.
That's right, baby.
The Duke.
Me.
I am up, something like 2,137,428 points (I expect payment, in full of course, some day).
But me and my baby playing gin rummy?
Now that's a sure thing.
Oops.
Gotta go now.
I think I hear Beeky . . . I mean Becka . . . comin'.
 
Page 172
Chapter Nine
Desperately Seeking Mayfield
Dawn.
The No. 2 tee box at the Springs Country Club in Rancho Mirage, California.
Back of our house.
Rebecca and I are draped across some lawn chairs on the tee. Blankets wrapped around us.
Scraping the crust from our eyes, which must have looked like four badly raked sandtraps, after being awakened before daylight by an earthquake.
I looked at Rebecca.
Rebecca looked at me.
California had taken another huge divot out of our psyches.
"What the hell are we doing here?" I said.
"What are we doing here" she said.
At that very moment we decided to move.
What kind of a place is the second hole at the Springs Country Club to make a decision about where you are going to live?
Well, let me tell you, it's a helluva good place to make that decision when you're afraid to go back into your house.
We couldn't sleep in our house because we were just a little bit afraid it would fall down on us and squash us flat.
We were afraid it would make Bankcakes out of us.
I mean, this earthquake wasn't the big one.
But it was a big one.
One of the biggest.
To be more precise, it was two.
These were the twin earthquakes, Landers and Big Bear, which cracked Southern California like a hardboiled egg on the stove a few years too long.
The first measured 7.5 on the Richter Scale. The second 6.9.
Which is shake-rattlin'-and-rollin' pretty good.
 
Page 173
And California's temperamental geology had been serenading us to sleep with "We will, we will rock you" for years now.
Too damn many years.
We decided we couldn't take it anymore.
Just like we couldn't take the fires anymore.
Or the mudslides.
Or the riots.
Or the freeway shootings.
It was like living with the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in your guest bedroom.
Every morning you'd get up to the announcement that yet another holocaust was being visited on Southern California.
Suddenly, this place in which I was born, this cool jewel of a place I grew up in, this place I loved working and partying and planning and dreaming inthis place that I thought was the place on earth . . .
. . . well, it wasn't me anymore.
It was like a 5,000-year-old gypsy curse had been placed on it and we were doomed to dance endlessly with disaster every day.
You get up one morning and the people of Malibu are standing in the Pacific Ocean, and it isn't because they're trying to fix those annoying tan lines.
They are hoping they don't die because the hills across the Pacific Coast Highway are Dante's Inferno, a blaze sweeping through the dry chaparral and overpriced homes, bearing down on the beach.
And the sea is their only hope of surviving as a funeral pall hangs with blinding blackness across the Malibu Hills.
You wake up another morning and watch the police beating some citizen senseless on national TV.
Another morning and citizens are pulling fellow citizens from their trucks in the middle of intersections and beating the hell out of them.
Suddenly we were a marred masterpiece painted by John Milton.
We were paradise lost.
Suddenly we weren't out there a-havin' fun in that warm California sun, to contradict the old Rivieras song.
So Becka and I decided to move.
But where?
We found that what we really wanted was to move to the most wonderful spot on the planet.
The most peaceful.
The most blissful.
The safest.
The sanest.

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