A letter to the Vegas Mob
Dear Fat Tony, Uncle Vinny, Mr. The Don,
I hope this letter finds you well. I am writing because recently there was a hurricane in Las Vegas. It dampened our plans, wink wink, and put a cyclonic stormfront into our fun, even larger more self indulgent wink. As a full card carrying member of the Las Vegas guild of gamblers, drifters, and run-away dads I feel it's my sworn duty to protect the city that I cherish more than my chidren.
When I was five years old I was brought to Vegas for the first time. I had been kidnapped by a rogue daycare worker named Pricilla LeDemonde. She was fleeing the country the nine children she tended. Luckily, her boyfriend and pimp, T-Bone demanded she stop in Vegas so she could hand over all of her "working girl" cash. She deposited us, unceriomoniously, at the Flamingo's little know Peackocks and Tots center for needy children while she, I assume, made sweet obligatory love to T-Bone. It was here where my deep profound admiration of Vegas sprouted.
The lights, the jangle of the slot machine bells, the human whales! Vegas was the Ophiocordyceps unilateralis fungus that consumes an ant's brain and turns into a lifeless zombie rendering it a mere husk of its former self. I was the ant, following the bidding of my sweet brain eating master, LAS VEGAS BABY!
At five years old I could not read or write and I still wore an extra thick wool diaper because my sphincter was adult sized, but I had a pernicious curiosity. When the kind older woman who was running Peakocks and Tots turned her back for mere seconds for her hour long smoke break I sqeezed through the four-inch thick stainless steel bars that surrounded the playpen and ran into Adam's paradise. It was beyond anything my simple white child mind could concieve. There were rows upon rows of lifeless robots pulling levers and men with dead fish eyes screaming at their wives that they had lost the house. I saw a woman the size of a VW bus on a scooter drinking from a cup that was taller than me, her shirt read "Thick Bitch Ride or Die", a tatto I later got on the small of my back.
Very quickly us children, who later became known as the T-Bone nine, were picked up by the police. The woman running Peackock Tots had called 911 on her smoke break because, as it turns out Peackock Tots was not a daycare but a strip club. Pricilla was only semi-litterate and had misread "Tits" as "Tots". The steal bars I had "slipped through" were the poles used by the girls at the club and the woman who had looked after us for about five minutes was Ethel the Hole. The oldest working stripper and fry-cook this side of the Mississippi. I later lost my virginity to the same woman, but that's a story for a different time.
These early memories shaped my life. I learned to deal cards and play every form of blackjack: rough jack, hot jack, slick jack, easy jack, jack it, jacket, all jack, all black, black and blue, and my personal favorite no jack all black. I met my wife in the underground tunnels that lie underneath the Ceasar's Palace Hotel and Casino. The tunnels of love because they were used by Frank Cinatra and his pack of rats to shangi men looking for prositutes and send them on to San Francisco to mine for gold for the Chinese.
They say Las Vegas is a city where what happens here stays here. What happened for me was I had a family, built an illustrius close up magic career, and met an Elvis impersonator who I'm sure to this day was actually Elvis. To see Vegas washed away by torrential downpours and 60 mile an hour winds is unthinkable. My cousin, and former fiance, is a flamingo girl. She walks the strip in bright pink feathers wearing only a nylon thong and two pasties she tapes onto her breasts with Blue Tack. She takes photos with the horny tourists and local perverts. How will she be able to make her living if her boa flies away or her diabetes flares up and her insulin is submerged in a flash flood. No, that is unacceptable.
You great men, the mobsters that built this jewel in the desert. The men that stole water, paid off senators, killed snitches, and drove off any indiginous people from the land cannot let climate change erase your indomitable legacy. I understand how, for the last twenty years you thought the science around global warming was inconclusive and filled with holes. I understand that even after years of gradually increasing temperatures, and back to back hottest summer's on record, and 99% of climate scientists telling you that if we don't stop now we'll never be able to go back, that you had your doubts. My ex-wife, who turned out to be a dirty cheating whore, had left signs all over our life but I, like you, failed to recognzie them for what they were, terrible omens of change. The hurricane in Vegas is me finding my wife in bed with my best friend, his son, and signer songwriter legend Meatloaf. It's undeniable and one must harden their heart and realize we must change.
I implore you to take action now. Help stop global warming. Kill or pay off as many senators and representatives who have their pockets filled with big oil money as you can. Purchase green energy and tell anyone else that you'd hate to see what happens to this nice refinery if they don't shut it down. Use the tactics that made you men of power, prestige, and wealth. Otherwise, Las Vegas might turn into Florida and that's a fate worse than drowing.
Yours, basking in Las Vegas' light and grace,
T-Bone Jr (adopted).