Slim Chance: A Las Vegas Adventure

By Burton Peretsky

Slim Chance is a fast-paced, hilarious story narrated by James B. "Slim" Chance, the slightly chubby PR Director of a once-great-but-now-struggling Las Vegas hotel-casino. The story takes place in1989 as, across the street, The Mirage hotel/casino opens its doors, signaling the beginning of the end of the Golden Age of Las Vegas and the beginning of the Age of the Las Vegas Mega-Resorts.

Slim's hotel, the Vegas Castle, represents all that was wonderful about that Golden Age. Those who have loved Las Vegas over the years will love "Slim Chance" for its nostalgic representation of Las Vegas of yesteryear! Everyone else will get a delightful chuckle from it and fall in love with the self-effacing perpetual loser Slim and the book's other zany characters.

"Everybody with ears, from the Strip east to Lake Mead, must have heard the bomb that killed Lefty Needham." Slim takes it from there!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Burton Peretsky
• Release date: Jul 14, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465899262

Burton Peretsky

Burt Peretsky is a highly accomplished, award-winning strategy communications and marketing executive with extensive experience in representing and helping to “brand” high-visibility organizations, both conventional and technology-driven. A former newspaper journalist with an additional 10 years in major-market TV, he is expert in media training, specialized writing, publicity, and marketing/branding techniques. A leader, team-builder, and teacher, he is one of America’s best-known communications practitioners.In Las Vegas in the early 1980s, Burt was Director of Marketing for the famed Sands Hotel & Resort and, before that, Director of Corporate Publicity for Del Webb Hotels, owners of Nevada’s three Sahara hotel/casino properties and the Mint Hotel in downtown Las Vegas.Today, as Principal of Peretsky Strategy Communications, he serves government and industry clients in a variety of fields, including lodging and tourism, non-profit and charitable organizations, legal services, technology, financial services, the environment, and higher education.As Senior Associate with FOCUS GROUP, one of the nation’s leading crisis and risk communication consulting firms, he is active in environmental risk communication and community relations activities for NASA at two of its Centers – the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA, and the Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, OH – and Fortune 500 companies and other government agencies such as the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, the Boston Public Health Commission, the Rhode Island Department of Health, Textron, General Motors, and Osram Sylvania.Burt served in recent years as Senior Counsel, Editorial Services & Marketing, for Miller/Shandwick Technologies, creating and directing the global public relations agency’s Editorial Services Department. He also directed the agency’s own marketing efforts. Earlier, he served four years as Director of Communications for Emerson College, three years as Director of the News Bureau/Assistant Director of Public Affairs for Brandeis University, and ten years as Director of Public Relations for WCVB-TV, Channel 5 in Boston. For eight years, he was the President of Immedia, Inc., a full-service Boston public relations agency serving such clients as the Sheraton Boston Hotel, the Sheraton Corporation, the South Shore Music Circus summer theatre, the New England Council of Optometrists, and the large trade association, the Northeast Retail Lumbermen’s Association.Burt is a former newspaper reporter and rewrite specialist, having served dailies in Boston and Miami. He is a Past President of the Publicity Club of New England and a former, long-time Board member of the Boston chapter of the Public Relations Society of America. Burt has won three Bell Ringer Awards from the Publicity Club of New England, four Gold Key Public Relations Awards from the American Hotel & Lodging Association, and a 2001 national SABRE Award in marketing.In the community, Burt served for 16 years on the Board of Big Brothers of Massachusetts Bay (known today as Big Brothers Big Sisters of Massachusetts Bay) and for five years on the Board of the Greater Boston Association for Retarded Citizens. He has also been active on behalf of the United Way of Massachusetts Bay.

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SLIM CHANCE(copyright)

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SLIM CHANCE(copyright 2011) is an original novel written by:

Burton Peretsky

62 Waterfall Drive, Suite H

Canton, MA 02021

Published by Burton Peretsky at Smashwords

Tel: [phone]

Cell: 781-696-5579

Email: [e-mail]

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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Foreword

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Nearly a quarter-century has passed since I experienced the events recounted here, twenty odd years since the fabled Vegas Castle Hotel, the most successful and best known of the original Strip hotels – The Place to Be! – faced extinction.

For me in that fateful year of 1989, Tiananmen Square, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the death of Emperor Hirohito, and the Dalai Lama winning the Nobel Peace Prize were events that all paled by comparison to what happened in the pages of this memoir.

That year – 1989 – was also, in retrospect, a year that changed Las Vegas forever, a year when the Golden Age of Las Vegas began to fade into memory. Yes, everything began to change for Las Vegas at about Noon on Wednesday, Nov. 22, 1989.

It happened like most everything else happens in Las Vegas – it happened with considerable ballyhoo and hype! I witnessed it from across the street with thousands of people at my side. The next morning’s Las Vegas Sun devoted many pages to it, but its front-page headline and two lead paragraphs said it all:

The Mirage opens its doors

It was just about noon Wednesday when Steve Wynn, standing outside the entrance of his new The Mirage beside junk bondsman Michael Milken, radioed security to Let those people in.

Both men watched as hundreds of people waiting on the Las Vegas Strip ran up the two driveways to the main entrance to be among the first to visit the elaborate, $630 million Mirage.

Sadly, Las Vegas would never be the same from that day forward.

James B. Slim Chance

Las Vegas, NV

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Chapter 1

Lefty Gets It. We Don’t.

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Everybody with ears, from the Strip east to Lake Mead, must have heard the bomb that killed Lefty Needham.

The explosion wasn’t as big as those they have out at the Test Site, and it wasn’t as big as the blast that blew that rocket fuel factory to smithereens last year in Henderson. But the bomb that killed Lefty was plenty loud. Every time I think of that sound, I shudder.

I was sitting in my own car, Miss Nomer, when the bomb went off. I had just finished work and was in the Vegas Castle employee lot, about to leave for home. It was a typical summer day in Vegas – hot as hell.

I hadn’t yet started Miss Nomer. I had just rolled down her windows. Even the rumble of the big air-conditioning unit that sits next to the building where I park wasn’t enough to mask the noise of the exploding dynamite that ripped Lefty and his Cadillac.

I vaguely remember thinking that even though Nellis Air Force Base was right outside of town, you don’t often hear sonic booms in Las Vegas. Not today anyway, not since the Vegas tourism honchos cracked down on the Air Force a few years back. The booms scare visitors, went the argument, and visitors in Vegas are everything.

In the old days, big booms were part of the allure of the town, or so I’m told. Back then, some tourists actually came to hear and even see the nuclear bomb blasts 75 miles away at the Test Site. Can you imagine? Las Vegas is the only city since Nagasaki that has seen a mushroom cloud against its skyline. But not since the 50’s has that happened, even in Las Vegas. For the past 25 years, ever since 1964, the bombs have been exploded underground. You can’t see them; you can’t hear them.

But, you sure could hear the bomb that killed Lefty!

I thought it was a plane out of Nellis. I figured the pilot wasn’t headed north like he should have been. Most of the planes head north after takeoff from Nellis, just so they’ll avoid creating those booms over town. North of Nellis, there’s nothing to disturb, nothing except sagebrush, a rattlesnake or two, or maybe a prospector who hasn’t heard that the low mountains of Southern Nevada had yielded their last silver nugget.

Lefty was killed on a Wednesday; it was the first of July; it was the beginning of a month I’ll never forget.

By the time I steered Miss Nomer onto the Strip and toward home, the subject of sonic booms was well out of my mind. I was thinking about pizza by then. Yes, pizza. The supermarket near my apartment house sells a super frozen pizza. They make it in their own kitchens, and all the consumer has to do is to heat it up in the oven. With a beer, maybe some potato chips, it’s my kind of meal.

So, I’m in my kitchen, and the pizza’s in the oven, and the phone rings.

Mr. Chance? It was Margaret, the night-shift hotel operator. My fate, it seemed as I heard her voice, was to be disturbed through eternity just as I was about to sit down to dinner.

Margaret, you sweetheart! How are you? What’s it this time, a potato farmer from Idaho hit a jackpot? Or did a jumper reach for immortality? Margaret was the senior operator at the Castle, as straight-laced as her white hair required. I had heard her a hundred times asking, in that formal tone of hers, Mr. Chance? …

She didn’t reply to my teasing. Instead, Please hold on for Mr. Purdy ....

Please hold on for Mr. Purdy, I didn’t expect. Why would George be calling me? What would a bean counter want with me? It wasn’t tax season.

Hi, Slim? George’s high-pitched, almost whiny, voice drove me nuts. Still does.

Yo, George ... Whatzamatter? You don’t see enough of me days, you gotta cal I me while I’m cooking dinner?

Slim, have you heard the ... uh, he squeaked in soprano, ‘the ... uh, news? There was an unusual urgency to George’s whine this time. On the word news, he unaccountably became a tenor.

What’s going on, George? My routine didn’t work with Margaret. Maybe it would work on George. Somebody beat the casino out of a couple of dollars? As soon as I said it, I knew better. It had to be more serious. Otherwise, a shift boss, slots manager, or a casino host would be calling me, and not George Purdy.

At the same time, I was cooking a pizza, and that was serious too! I strained to reach the oven door to check on my dinner, but couldn’t. Is that what it is, George? Can’t you tell Lefty your problems? I’m cooking.

I can’t tell Lefty anything, Slim. That’s why I’m calling you.

Whaddya telling me, George? It wasn’t registering. First, Purdy was calling me at home, which he never did before. Then, there was that change in the tone of his voice when he began the conversation. And now, he was giving me what could have been a punch line for a joke. I can’t tell Lefty anything.

I stopped leaning toward the stove and slowly came to attention, holding the phone tightly to my ear, straining to hear something in the background, something to tell me what was wrong. There was something wrong, very wrong.

Lefty’s dead. He was killed about an hour ago, Slim. They murdered him. Blew him up at Carla’s, in the parking lot.

My heart skipped a beat. What? What are you saying, George? What the hell happened?

It’s true, Slim. Nobody knows much of anything yet. I heard about it from a reporter from Channel 8. I was working late. He called the hotel and asked for the person next in charge to Lefty. So, the operator connected him to me. At first, I thought he was joking. But, it’s true, Slim. They killed him!

Who killed him, George? Who? I knew I was asking the wrong guy.

There was a long silence that passed between us then.

And after the silence, George replied quietly, I don’t know. His voice was breaking now. Slim, can you get over to the hotel? I’m not sure I’m gonna be able to handle this myself. And then, before I could answer, Can you come over now?

Like George, I wasn’t thinking too clearly at the time. But reflex took over. Don’t say anything to the press, George. I’ll be there in a few minutes.

I don’t remember whether I said goodbye to George or not. I stood in my kitchen for a minute, maybe two, immobile, frozen by the news. Shock, puzzlement, anger, and fear swept over me in waves. Lefty murdered? Lefty dead? This didn’t make sense. I had just seen him at lunch; he was sitting with George in fact, probably discussing the hotel’s latest overdue bill. I heard him paged for a phone call. He took it at his booth. He joked and flirted with the waitress. He waved to hotel guests he recognized. On his way out, he came over and sat with me for a while. He told me about another of his plans to expand the Castle, said he’d leave me a file with the blueprints he just had printed. Then, he gave me his usual ribbing, By the way, PR man, who’s dumping on us in the press today?

Lefty was alive at lunch, as alive as anyone can ever be, as alive as Lefty always was. Now he was as dead as can be! Murdered? Yes, murdered!

I shook my head, as if I could shake some sense out of what I had just heard. It didn’t work.

I was needed at the hotel. Reporters would be crawling allover the place, and a public relations man’s place is where the reporters are. This was no time to think about things. Perhaps it would be straightened out before long. But, Lefty dead? How could that be straightened out?

I turned off the oven, leaving my pizza half done. I grabbed my tie and jacket off the bed where I had thrown them less than an hour before, and walking toward the elevator, I tied my tie, realizing only then that my hands were shaking, and shaking badly.

Lefty Needham was dead.

I had eaten at Carla’s Ribs ’n Chicken Restaurant almost as frequently as Lefty had, and with him many of those times. It was one of the boss’ favorite spots. Lefty had offered Carla Simonetti a job at the Vegas Castle a hundred times, but a hundred times she had told him that all the money in the world couldn’t get her to give up her own place. I knew why Lefty really wanted Carla. It wasn’t for her ribs, but it WAS for her thighs and breasts. Carla was a good-looking lady in her mid-40’s, one of the most eligible, unattached – ribs not withstanding – women in town, and even though Lefty was married, he occasionally – like on days ending in Y – fooled around.

My guess, though, was that Lefty hadn’t yet scored with Carla. She was an independent lady who didn’t need him and the complications a married man would bring into her life. She told Lefty that being in business for herself allowed her to call the shots. The same held true for her personal life; she called the shots there, as well.

I headed for the hotel by way of Carla’s, down Maryland from my apartment house, all the way to Desert Inn. Through the dim twilight, I could see in the restaurant’s parking lot what must have been Lefty’s car. A fire truck, its red light slowly turning on its roof, was parked next to where the still-smoking hulk was sitting. A small knot of people stood watching as a fireman sprayed water onto the wreckage.

Beneath the car was a puddle trailing down the slight parking lot decline to the curb about 50 yards away. It must have been water, but I thought I saw the glint of redness in it. Lefty’s blood? Or was it the reflection off the fire truck light?

My car radio, always tuned to the all-news station, hit me with the reinforcement I didn’t need at the moment. "One man, who police identified as Lefty Needham, owner of the Vegas Castle Hotel & Casino, was killed instantly tonight, when a bomb attached to the starter in his automobile exploded. The explosion occurred in the parking lot of a Desert Inn Road restaurant. Details are sketchy, but a K-News news team has been dispatched to the scene.

In other news, Federal authorities in Los Angeles are denying reports that terrorists from the Middle East are in California ...

Sure enough, there it was, the K-News news team, one guy in a K-News news car, just pulling into the lot. He was showing a cop something through the driver’s side window. I assumed it was his press ID card.

I pulled into Carla’s lot on the far side of the wreckage where there weren’t any cops. I wasn’t going to learn much at the scene of this crime. Whatever remained of Lefty’s body had already been carted away. I walked toward the smoldering wreck that had been his Cadillac, but a uniformed cop stopped me about 20 yards away. Hold it right there, pal! he said, emphasis on the pal as if to indicate I wasn’t one.

The cop brought me over to a detective, a homicide detective who the patrolman said was Lieutenant Kearney. I didn’t catch the first name. He was taking notes in a notebook with a pencil stub that looked like the one Columbo carries with him on TV. When he had taken my name and jotted down the fact that I was the PR man at the Vegas Castle, he asked me where I was when the bomb went off. I told him I was at home.

We'll be in touch, Chance, he announced abruptly. I had obviously been dismissed.

I took the hint. The cops were dusting for fingerprints now and interviewing restaurant employees and patrons. I saw Carla standing nearby, staring at the smoking Cadillac. She looked like she had been crying. One of her waitresses had her arm around her shoulders, trying to comfort her. As I started over to talk with her, another detective stepped in front of me, also headed her way. I figured I wasn't going to get my chance with Carla, and anyway, I was needed more urgently at the hotel. So, I returned to my car and headed up Desert Inn and over to the Strip.

In the Vegas Castle lobby, Sidney, the head bellman, was talking to one guy in a suit who could have been either a detective or a reporter. The stranger was dressed cheaply enough to be either, but he must have been a cop, as I knew nearly every reporter in town.

By the cage in the casino, a uniformed hotel security officer and our chief Al Casey were talking to two guys I did recognize as police. They were Metro detectives whom I had seen in the hotel before on suicide investigations. After gambling, suicide was the city's most popular, albeit least publicized, sport, and over the years, the Vegas Castle had witnessed its share of jumpers from the two 16-story towers that held its 900 guestrooms and suites. Chief Casey was gesturing broadly to the detectives.

As I passed them, I overheard him in mid-sentence, almost yelling: It's gotta be Mob. Christ, you kids! We would have had the case solved already! The uniformed hotel guard looked pained. Casey was obviously embarrassing him. Neither cop, apparently, was going to get a word in edgewise, or otherwise, with the chief. I moved on.

To my complete surprise when I had reached my second-floor office, I found Pinky Dawson had also returned to work. Not surprisingly, she was on the phone, just as she was on most of every workday, mostly on personal calls.

Hi, boss! You heard the news? She looked up at me while covering the phone with her hand.

Yeh, I heard the news, Pinky. Is that for me?

She shook her head, and to whomever was on the phone, she said, It was good for me too. I've got to go now, honey. I'll call you back!

Pinky explained that after work that night, instead of going straight home, she had been at The Moat with one of her latest, when she heard me paged. When I didn’t answer the third page, she took the call. It was George Purdy looking for me, and he told her about Lefty’s murder. I told Mr. Purdy that you had gone home, Slim, and figuring you’d be coming right back to the office when you heard the news, I said goodbye to my date and came up here. You’re probably going to need some help with the press, won’t you?

When I first moved to Vegas from Boston, right after my divorce, I couldn’t believe my good luck in inheriting a secretary like Pinky. Not only was she well meaning, as she proved again this night, but Pinky was also beautiful! No, that wasn’t doing her justice. She was stupendous, a blonde bombshell extraordinaire, curvy where the curvies should be, looking every bit the former showgirl she was.

Pinky was somewhere in her 40’s; she wouldn’t say where. Except for her complete lack of secretarial skills, she was everything I could have wanted in a secretary. She was also everything that most men could have wanted in a woman.

Partly because of her great looks, and partly because she was so trusting, Pinky seemed to attract men that wanted to take advantage of her. Enough men had already hit on Pinky to make up a hit parade that Lucky Strike would be proud to sponsor. She had gone through countless boyfriends, and she had been married and divorced, officially, seven times – uncommon even in divorce-happy Las Vegas. In addition, she had lived with at least three more guys for at least six months each. If ever there was a girl who couldn’t say no, Pinky was that girl. Come live with me, Pinky. Okay! Marry me, Pinky. Why, sure!

Tommy Lake – I’ll tell you more about him later – is the resident comedian in our lounge. Some of his best lines are his divorce jokes, which he could have created in Pinky’s honor, were he as thoughtless as I am.

Did I say thoughtless? Yeh, that’s one way to describe someone who would use such jokes to talk about a real person behind her back.

‘We the People,’ begins her marriage certificate. Hilarious, Slim!

‘She owns a wash-and-wear wedding gown.’ Ha, ha!

‘She gets anniversary cards from the First Infantry Division.’... I gotta million of ’em!

And, like in The Moat, when Tommy tells ’em, they always bring down the house, or the party, or the bowling alley. I’m not so heartless anymore. Even back then, before I stopped with the Pinky jokes, I always felt more than a little mean afterward.

I swear I don’t do it anymore! I don’t tell jokes about Pinky. But, even now, I have a vision of me, 20, 30 years in the future, still a bachelor in my 60s or 70s, and Pinky, still answering my phone, still single, perhaps by then divorced for the 13th time. I have a vision of my asking her to marry me, and in my vision I am overcome with guilt about the jokes I told over the years about Pinky and her marriages. And then, at the key moment, after I’ve said, Will you? Pinky discloses that she knew all about my jokes, and she’s waited for this moment, all these years, just to tell me that she knows what I was saying about her behind her back. My vision of Pinky has her, suddenly nine feet tall, standing – no, lording – over me. Everybody in my life is watching our scene. And she’s telling me off, calling me a jerk, and that she would never marry such a jerk. I recoil in humiliation in my dream, because I know she’s right.

I never dated Pinky; I never even asked her out. It wasn’t because she was married so many times. Nah, that amuses me, but it doesn’t bother me. No, I never dated Pinky, because Pinky’s not too bright, and brightness is something I want in a girl.

It took me all of two hours of working with her to find out that she wasn’t a rocket scientist. And I like girls who know a bit more than the details of tonight’s prime-time TV schedule. Call me spoiled!

My predecessor, a PR legend named Duke O’Callaghan, liked to have pretty girls around him. He had cut his PR teeth in the era of press agentry, and pretty girls were essential in the way he practiced his craft. In my picture files are hundreds of pictures of pretty girls at the pool, pretty girls kissing entertainers, pretty girls presenting checks to slot machine winners, and pretty girls caressing the Vegas Castle sign. There are pretty girls in short skirts, pretty girls in low-cut evening dresses, and, most of all, pretty girls in bathing suits.

And don't you think that O’Callaghan’s pretty girl method of publicity worked? It sure did. Nobody got more publicity pictures into the LA papers or into the papers back East than did Duke O’Callaghan. Nobody!

Pinky, a very pretty girl, was hired without so much as a typing test. Lucky for her. Typing's not her strong suit.

I spent the remainder of the evening doing my job, dealing with the press, reading to them, until I had committed it to memory, the detail of Lefty Needham's official biography, and now his obituary.

But, no matter how I couched it, the morning papers and the wires, like the radio that night, would lead with the facts and land with the speculation: Lefty Needham, owner of the Vegas Castle Hotel & Casino, was killed yesterday, when a bomb attached to the starter wires of his car exploded. Needham, a reputed underworld chieftain ....

They'd shout those words that had always been