Page 14 of Marriage and the Midlife Crisis

We settled into our seats, and I reached for the menu as Mitch announced that he planned to join in on one of the games in the high-stakes poker room.

I shook my head at his comment as I wished him luck. “I’ll stick to the lower limit tables out on the main floor. I came to Vegas to watch the tournament, not to lose my shirt in the casino.”

“Aw, c’mon, dude. Live a little. I know Mel controls the purse strings, but you’re entitled to spend your own hard-earned money any way you please. Surely she doesn’t keep track of every dime you spend.”

I gritted my teeth at the familiar argument, then cracked my neck from side to side to ease the tension gathering there. I was getting pretty damned tired about his snide comments about my wife, and it was past time to tell him to shut the hell up.

“Knock it off, Mitch. It’s not Melanie’s fault that I turned down the opportunity to invest in those houses with you. I agreed with her that our sons’ college funds took priority, and I wasn’t about to risk their futures or put Mel and me in a tight spot financially.”

I was interrupted when our server stepped up to the table to take our drink orders. As soon as she left, Mitch held up a hand to stop me from speaking again.

“I was out of line, man. Forget I said anything, and let’s just enjoy ourselves, all right?”

I nodded grudgingly, a little surprised that Mitch had admitted fault. Accountability wasn’t always one of his strengths. The next hour or so flew by, filled with fantastic food and a glass of incredibly smooth Macallan that Mitch ordered for me. I knew him well enough to know that the gesture was his way of apologizing without actually saying the words.

We had a good time, mostly reminiscing about my dad teaching us how to play poker when we were in high school, making us use pretzel sticks in place of poker chips or actual money.

“I swear, Phil didn’t have a single tell when he played,” Mitch groused good-naturedly. “He could have bluffed his way through an FBI interrogation with that poker-face he had.”

I laughed as I recalled how aggravated we would get sometimes, playing with Dad. He would go all in, looking so sure of himself that we thought he must have a royal flush or something. We would all fold, only for him to gleefully reveal a pair of nines as he raked in our pile of pretzels. He was so convincing that we fell for it every damned time.

We split up after dinner, with Mitch heading across the casino floor to the private poker room filled with high rollers and professional gamblers looking for more action than I dared to risk. Since I wasn’t the least bit interested in losing my ass in the high-stakes room, I wandered over to the same blackjack table I’d briefly visited last night and took a seat.

I won the first several hands, then promptly lost all my winnings in the next few rounds, stopping when I broke even. After sliding my last twenty-dollar chip across to the dealer as a tip, I ventured over to watch one of the roulette tables where a decent crowd had gathered around an older lady on a winning streak. I got a beer from a passing cocktail server, then decided to check out the slot machines.

Spotting an opening at the end of the aisle, I sat down in front of the machine featuring dancing leprechauns and pots of gold and fed a one-hundred-dollar bill into it.

Mitch found me about twenty minutes later, right after I hit a small jackpot.

He glanced at the balance on the screen and asked, “How much did you pay in to get that nine hundred bucks?”

“Just under a hundred.” I shot him a satisfied grin, pleased with my eight hundred dollar profit. “How did the poker table treat you?”

His features morphed into a pained grimace. “Fuck, don’t ask.”

“That good, huh?” I snorted, hitting the button to cash out and grabbing the ticket as soon as the machine printed it.

“Let’s get out of here while I still have my shirt on my back,” Mitch grumbled, pointing toward the cashiers in the corner of the room. “One of the guys I was playing with mentioned that there’s a place a couple of blocks over that has a pretty good Guns N’ Roses cover band tonight. I thought we could go have a few drinks in honor of Grady.”

My chest tightened at the sound of Grady’s name, the way it always did when I thought about the man who had been more like a brother than a best friend. Grady and I had met in the seventh grade and had become fast friends. Mitch moved into the school district our freshman year of high school, and the three of us were practically inseparable after that. We’d even shared an off-campus apartment during our last three years of college. Those days seemed like a lifetime ago. It was hard to believe that Grady had been gone for almost two years now.

“Guns N’ Roses, huh? Shit, he would have loved that.” Grady had shared a startling resemblance to Axl Rose in his heyday and had even grown his hair out to capitalize on it for a while. He also had a great singing voice, and he’d regularly put both assets to good use on karaoke nights at various bars around the city when we were in our early to mid-twenties. He’d get up on stage and belt out their greatest hits, and it had invariably ended up with him getting laid every damned time.

Mitch had come back for a visit for Grady’s thirty-fifth birthday, and the three of us had hit up a karaoke bar for old times’ sake. The long hair had been traded for a more traditional cut years before, but the voice was as good as ever, and the ladies in the bar had noticed. It was actually how he’d met the woman he was planning to marry before a five-car pileup on an icy highway overpass had claimed his life three years later.

Mitch interrupted my thoughts when he said, “Cash in your ticket and we’ll head out, then.”

After a quick detour up to the suite to stash my winnings in the safe, we bypassed the casino floor and exited the hotel through the main lobby. The night air had cooled considerably once the sun went down, and it was almost chilly as we walked down the still-crowded sidewalk, dodging the street performers and throngs of gawking tourists until we reached our destination.

We drew to a stop at the end of a short line to get in the door and I glanced up to read the neon sign on the building, proclaiming the name of the place as “The Sight and Sound Lounge”, with the tagline “Beautiful women and incredible music to stimulate all of your senses!” A sense of unease filled me as I took in the logo on the sign which featured the silhouette of a curvaceous woman wrapped around the neck of giant guitar as if it were a stripper pole.

“What the hell kind of place is this, Mitch? You know I don’t do strip clubs.”

He glanced at me and shrugged. “It’s not an actual strip club. It’s a live music venue that happens to have topless dancers because it’s Vegas, man. It’s not gonna kill you, just this once. It’s not like your wife will ever know. Besides, we’re here for Grady, remember?”

The faint beat of the music from inside the building grew louder momentarily as the club’s doorman, a heavily muscled man with a platinum blond mohawk, opened the door for the small group of people in front of us. Before I could say anything more to Mitch, the man turned to us and gestured to his hand-held credit card reader.

“Cover charge is eighty dollars each, unless you want to upgrade to a VIP table or bottle service,” he recited in a bored tone, likely due to the fact that he had to repeat the line hundreds of times a night.