“There’s a hold up in the Bronx, Brooklyn’s broken out in fights.

There’s a traffic jam in Harlem That’s backed up to Jackson Heights.

There’s a scout troop short a child, Kruschev’s due at Idlewild

 — Nat Hiken, theme from “Car 54 Where Are You?” (and a typical slow day for a casino executive)

On any given day there are a lot of things…a whole lot of stuff… that is constantly juggled through the brain of a casino executive. No day is a typical day; and every day is typical.

We had rented one of those big black stretch limos for Donald Trump’s arrival (with his then soon-to-be wife Melania Knauss —damn she is tall!). Season One of NBC’s The Apprentice had just ended and Donald Trump was a bigger “star” than he had been even in the 1980s with his Art of the Deal fame.

Even I was riding some of the show’s fame because, for the final episode in April, KNBC in Los Angeles did a live-remote from the Trump Casino in Palm Springs with me as their featured color commentator — a celebrity-for-15-minutes adventure (ok, an hour) that had also landed me the gig as the guy who did the countdown for the west coast New Year’s clock on December 31^st. (By the way, I had a childhood Times Square illusion shattered by that countdown: there is no “official clock”; the “celebrity” counter just starts counting whenever. There is not even a teleprompter or a big second-hand or a director. I just made up the numbers and if you set your clock by me, then your life may be a few seconds out of kilter.)

Trump’s gaming CEO, Mark Brown, had flown into Palm Springs with the celebrity couple to be met by his Operational Vice President (and my immediate boss) Vince Mascio, who had gone to the airport to brief Trump (and Brown-ie) on the activities I had scheduled for the casino arrival.

Meanwhile, I was pacing back and forth (in my usual style) in front of the red carpet and the elephant-trunk velvet stanchions leading from the porte-cochère to the casino entrance. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the roadie trucks for Charlie Daniels unloading for an unrelated concert that night in my auditorium. At the same time, I glanced back inside the casino toward my high-roller room to make certain that my man Larry from Iowa was obliviously playing those $25-slots at $75 a spin.

Ostensibly (and for the press), “The Donald” was arriving to challenge Ginger, my tic-tac-toe playing chicken, to a $10,000 game for charity; but in reality, he was making a token appearance to appease the thirteen-member Indian tribe that actually owned the casino. Trump Hotels and Casinos had a management contract with the tribe. (That management contract is really important in the big-picture of how Indian Casinos work and the direction I decided to go; and for that reason I have included it in the Endnotes to this book;( it is public record[i]. But at the time, that contract was of very little interest to me.)

When I arrived at the casino, a few months earlier, it was averaging “only” $45-million-a-month in slot machine play (“coin in”), but now that the property was pulling in $100-million in slot machine “coin-in” every month, the Tribe had tired of Donald Trump’s expensive monthly fees. (I will have more to say a little later about that 13-member tribe and the six-member “tribal” ownership of a nearby casino.) But, I wasn’t really concerned about all of that now. I had a casino event to operate.

Since the success of The Apprentice, the press (and especially the paparazzi) followed Trump everywhere ― and I recognized the fame-wave as the ideal time to stage a “media event”. After all, I had a long history of staging bullshit media events. Twenty-one years earlier Time^®, Newsweek^®, the Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun had all criticized me on the same day for setting up a photo-op event of Presidential Candidate Gary Hart’s daughter making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for campaign workers. (Although it is most notable that no criticism was ever made of the media legion that showed up to film the sandwich making.) At any rate, I was psyched for a media event to draw hordes of gamblers to our casino. Publicity are us.

I rechecked all of the Trump arrival details: the showgirls were lined up along the entrance; the press was kept behind the ropes; Carson Daily’s mother, Pattie (a noted breast-cancer activist and Southern California television personality) was in front of the ropes for her promised “exclusive” with Don; my lead-showgirl/spokes-model, Kimmie, was waiting on the red carpet in her sequined gown to escort the VIPs; and my then-protégé, Will Wimmer (a former U.S. Border Patrol Agent), was ready to lead the security squadron through the packed crowd and to the chicken cage.

Yes you’ve got the picture: Donald Trump, a tic-tac-toe playing chicken, a couple of thousand gamblers, and a few hundred members of the national and local press corps. Juggled against a Charlie Daniels concert, angry Tribal (13 members) casino ownership, and a high-roller slot player’s $45,000 winning spree. You get the picture so far; just another day in paradise.

 §¨©ª

 The Chicken does WHAT? Enter Bunky and his chickens. My friend Bunky Boger from Lowell Arkansas made an entire life of wrangling all sorts of animals. After an appearance on David Letterman with his lifelong friend Cody the Buffalo (whom he allowed Dave to ride), Bunky’s latest wrangling was with a heard of chickens. Actually, it was a very cool gimmick designed for state fairs and the traveling carnival circuit. Despite initial trepidation from animal rights activists and assorted vegetarians (like myself), it made for a humane, clean, and fun promotion; and as Bunky likes to say “these chickens retire with me in Arkansas which beats the heck out of their cousins that work for Tyson or Purdue and end up in the Colonel’s bucket.”

Though Bunky had performed with Cody at hundreds of state fairs and arenas, his first career had been as a “bullfighter”—which I later learned was colloquial for rodeo clown (as opposed to a matador).  Rodeo clowns, while dressed to entertain, are the heroes (or fools) who attract a charging bull’s attention once it has bounced a rider in less than the eight-seconds to qualify for a rodeo ride. Bunky spent more than 30 years getting bones broken, skin gored, and saving the lives of dozens of bull riders.

Incidentally, I had no idea how long that eight-second bull ride could actually feel until a few years later I was asked to ride a bull for a casino promotion. I was operating an Oklahoma casino that had sponsored the finals for the PBR (that would be the “Professional Bull Riders”; and yes there IS such an organization). As part of the promotion to award the $10,000 check, I was decked out in a full tuxedo and escorted by two statuesque showgirls to a waiting bull. Although the poor Taurus-creature had been well-sedated and was long past his prime in life, it was still a harrowing experience to ride the bovine monster.

Though in his seventies, Bunky Boger was not past HIS prime in life when he undertook chicken wrangling. First, he built a gilded box about 10-feet tall with a glass-front birdcage embedded in the left side of the box. Inside the cage, he built a feeding tray (where food would be sent once the chicken performed correctly) and a metal shield hiding a small light bulb from view outside the cage. Bunky painted, on the side of the shield that faced the glass front, the words “THINKING BOOTH” (with a tic-tac-toe board drawn beneath). Just to right of the cage, also embedded in the box, he placed a computer touch-screen with a tic-tac-toe board.

A player would walk up to the screen, touch a spot where their “X” or “O” would be placed and it would appear on the screen. Touching the screen would also turn on the light inside the cage.

Bunky, his wife Connie, and their son Kelly trained the chicken(s) to understand that when the light came on the bird should look out the window at the computer screen then go behind the “thinking booth” and tap with its beak on a metal switch. When the switch was tapped, it would release a few pellets of food down a tube that led to the feeding tray. The bird would then get to eat.

More interestingly for the player, the bird’s tap on the switch would trigger the computer to calculate the next move in the tic-tac-toe game. For the player the illusion was that the chicken had looked at the screen, recognized the player’s move and entered the thinking both to determine its own counter move. Once the computer…ah, the chicken…made the counter move, it would be the player’s turn to make another move. This would continue until the chicken (computer) beat the player, or the game was tied, or the player beat the chicken.

Though the player saw one chicken at a time, there were actually 14 or 15 chickens with each bird working a three-hour shift before being replaced. Still, the promotion was booked as “beat the chicken” as if it were one chicken named Ginger. Who amongst us can tell one chicken from another, and who would know there were multiple “Gingers”?

As a variation of a less PETA-friendly sideshow of the 1940s, Bunky took this tic-tac-toe chicken on the road with him for the state fair circuit in the 1980s. Unfortunately, at a fair near Philadelphia (in the town of Bensalem) someone stole the entire coup of chickens. Apparently the city of brotherly love was also a city of chickenly love. The Philadelphia Inquirer had a field day with the story and turned it into a wire-service cutesy feed; and poor Bunky was out of business until he could train a new flock.

Meanwhile legendary casino regulator-turned operator Dennis Gomes and his marketing vice president, Vicki Tilton ―one of the industry’s best― spotted the story and wondered how the chickens would work as a casino promotion. They tested it and for years, it dominated the boardwalk at The Trop as the hottest promotion in Atlantic City. As recently as October of 2008 Gomes told Bunky that he considered his discovery of the chickens to be the high point of his career.

(c) 2010 gary green

“God help us, this is the life we have chosen.”

 — Lee Strasberg as Hyman Roth, the Meyer Lansky character in “The Godfather Part II” (via Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Cappola)

It was one more late night in a smoke-filled coughing-corner of one of Atlantic City’s first glitter-monster casinos; one of the 60,000 square feet of one-armed bandits, Big 6 wheels, and the table pits. Back then, the late 70s or early 80s THAT was a huge casino; and this was the biggest of all of them.

I was sitting at a green-cheque ($25-chip) blackjack table’s third base (last seat) trying to keep a true count as straight as my running count out of an eight-deck shoe. When the old man sat down beside me, slid the ashtray aside and began to give me the once over, I knew it was about time for me to leave.

His eyes started with the Stetson on top of my head, and at first I thought he was trying to read the hatpins — I used to put them in my hat like travel decals on an old steamer trunk. But his eyes followed the cut of my frock coat, the bib of my Victorian shirt, the strings of my tie and on downward to the toe covers of my boots. Then his eyes darted back up to my long brown hair with its Bill-Hickok-style ringlets falling on my shoulders. Maybe he just hated hippies dressed like 1880s cowboys.

“Who the hell would double-down on 16,” he growled at me in the tone of a disgruntled looser missing the third session of a boring convention a few doors down the boardwalk.

“Probably just a guy that knew there were no tens in a shoe that is rich in fives and low cards,” I smirked with my southern accent, trying to sound more like a suave Rhett Butler than a trailer-park Jeff Foxworthy. I had not lived in a trailer park in almost seven years, thank you very much.

I had already realized that he was just an obnoxious old punter and not from the “eye-in-the-sky”, but I also knew I actually had been made when the sweep of my hand brought a five from the dealer’s shoe and he called “shuffle” after that hand.

“Son, there is no Maverick Doc Holiday gamblers no more. Don’t you know you’re living out of your time,” the old man told me. I rolled my eyes and pushed back from the table, thinking that apparently there were no more English teachers either. But he was right; I was theatrically costumed for the role I had chosen in life.

“Where you going, cowboy?” a shill asked me as she put a cigarette in her lips and leaned toward me for a light.

I didn’t even bother to color-up. I just pocketed the stack of porcelain greens along with the others I’d been hording, ignored her too-powdered face and casino-paid smile, and walked past the old man toward the cashier cages. Just short of the cage, I shrugged and rather than cash-out, I walked toward a side door leading to the street (rather than the tourist-infested boardwalk). Outside I took a long drink of crisp air and started to walk.

I was thinking that I’d been on the road so long — since the day I was provoked to hit the road when a dissident student in a class I was teaching had said it couldn’t be done in the second half of the 20^th century — that I probably could never come back in. I had no clue that one day I would be running (and owning) glitter-place casinos twice the size of this one. As I stepped along in the darkness, for one loses track of light and dark when one travels in the glitter jungle, it happened.

I’m not really sure where he came from. I know he was young, Hispanic, and New Jersey tough. My stooped, already small, five-foot and nine-inch frame with its then-only-150 pounds probably looked like an easy hit for him, for in stature I am not the least bit imposing.

I begged him not to do it…at least I wanted to. But he left no time for that. It is much easier now to look back at what happened, to retrace the events and the thoughts, than to examine them in the midst of the action…of the violence…of the near tragedy of this man/boy’s foolishness.

My natural paranoia made me certain that he had given it some thought; there must have been some plan. He couldn’t have just chosen his target at random; he could not be that foolish. He called to me and I ignored him. Perhaps I was in a daze from the glitter, perhaps that’s what he wanted, or maybe I chose to ignore him.

But he crossed my path in darkness, blocked my way and made his demand. He pointed something at me. He might have had a knife and he might have had a gun; and he had no idea that at this point in my life, it really did not matter. And when it was over he had no idea why he had been spared.

My mind halted its racing with card-counting numbers and I felt my body recoil from the inertia of the braking. My reflexes snapped with the energy that had allowed me to survive all these years. I certainly knew what was going to happen before it came to pass and if he had just looked at my eyes he would have seen the hungry gleam spark there; I knew it was there, damnit.

In my stomach I felt a burning acid roll around and start to climb my esophagus to my throat. I felt the muscles in my back flex and my spine stretch me to my full height from my normal half-stooped stand. And I felt my feet lock into the pavement and dig deeper for a firm hold.

The first second had still not passed. Had any people stepped from the casino and had there been street lighting, they would have seen the blur of speed whip from my eyes and guide my body, but HE wouldn’t have seen it. For by the time that first second had passed, he had been frozen by that gleam.

But by then the scrounge of human technology, the implement of no purpose but to take another human life; that which I had often donned during those years — my gun — was drawn from the seeming-nowhere behind my vest and was leveled directly at his head.

Still he couldn’t see that the miles had indeed taken their toll and that neither his life nor my own meant anything to me; he had no idea how many murders I had been around, how many hacked, shot, stabbed, and mangled bodies were in my history.  He looked at my eyes and broke only to look at the gun. Seconds passed that seemed like hours to me. Then he spoke.

“You’re not the police,” he demanded more in a scold for daring to stop his robbery than in question or from fear.

“Face your God, child,” I warned in Victorian melodrama, breaking my own hard-learned survival law of never slowing to allow even motor actions, much less speech. (Years earlier when I had been riding in police cars at all hours of the night as a newspaper reporter, Sergeant Andy Strain had warned me, “never pull a gun without pulling the trigger; never point it and never take the time to talk –just shoot!”)

Yet I could see that he was stunned enough that I could continue and possibly not take his life. Besides, I had slowed now and perhaps 30 seconds had elapsed; maybe we were now on even terms. He was still alive and I had not used my advantage. 

“Your god forgives; I take revenge; CHOOSE,” I offered. I tried to echo-chamber those words as Lamont Cranston might have done before slouch-hatting himself to his The Shadow persona. It probably sounded more insane than threatening, but in either case it served the purpose. (At least I didn’t mock-laugh “who knows what evil lurks in the heart of men”.)

He backed away, slowly, but backing. His own weapon dropped from sight, back into its hidden pouch or pocket or wherever.

“Who the hell are you?” he asked. He backed some more, turned, and then he was gone into the same shadows that had borne him.

He had asked…”Who the hell are you?”

Me?

Hell, I am just a gambler.

• §¨©ª

I am a roving gambler, I gamble all around
Whenever I meet with a deck of cards I lay my money down.
 
I've gambled down in Washington, I've gambled over in Spain
I'm goin' down to Georgia to gamble my last game.
 

―Traditional Folk Song