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“Yes. Frankie Limback. He doesn’t think it sends the right message to his own children to move to Las Vegas and immediately invite a new kid into his home. I agree. His son has been through so much already.”
“Is he paying for your and Marisa’s apartment?”
“I told you, the company gave us a generous moving allowance.”
“But this Frankie person is paying the rent, isn’t he?”
“Yes.”
A thought came to me. “What color is your hair?”
“Not Diana’s, don’t worry.”
“But blond?”
“Strawberry blond.”
That was too close. “Grow it out. Please. Please dye it black.” That was our hair’s natural color: dark as stovepipe.
“Sis, forgive me, but your kookiness is showing. Get over—”
“People are going to think—”
“I won’t embarrass you, I promise.”
“I don’t want people to mistake you for me.”
“We’re sisters. We look alike. We look a lot alike.”
“Which, thank God, is only skin deep.”
“That’s not true.”
“Dye it black!” I said, this time a small rant, and then I said I had to go and hung up. It was dramatic, and I have, for better or worse, a flair for the dramatic. Diana did, too.
But it was apparent that Betsy was about to be back in my world—literally my world, Las Vegas—which perhaps justified my pressing the red button on my phone and terminating our call with such extreme prejudice. She was coming here soon, and there was nowhere for me to run, because there was no place in the world other than Vegas weird enough to sustain a Princess Diana tribute show. Besides, this was my town. My town.
When I saw Lily, the poolside waitress, I cleared my tab, and asked her to please have room service send an avocado toast to my room. I honestly had no idea whether, to use the blackjack metaphor, it would stick.
* * *
That night, after my second show, I was accosted on the casino floor by Dicky Sherman, onetime child actor superstar, now over-the-hill QAnon crazy, and two of his handlers-slash-bodyguards-slash-entourage-slash–laugh track. Let’s face it, you see a lot of famous or quasi-famous people in Las Vegas, even at a casino like the BP. I am ever so slightly renowned in my own niche bubble, but somewhere between less so and not at all in L.A. or Manhattan, and so when some A-listers notice me walking on the strip or out and about on one of my nights off, they suppose I am merely a Diana-obsessed wacko and work hard not to make eye contact.
Of course—and please forgive this humble brag—there are also A-listers who make seeing my show part of their Vegas experience, and they detour from the top-flight casino where they’re staying to go slumming at the BP to see me. Having Tom Hanks or Regina King brought backstage and listening to them praise the cabaret was—to quote Larry David, who also liked the show and thought it so odd that he said he might work it into an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm—“pretty, pretty good.”
Dicky Sherman was fifty and change, and that number worked for both his age and his waistline. Same with his hangers-on. Between the two of us, we drew a crowd, and people on a casino floor at midnight are often raucous and drunk or maudlin and depressed, and quite possibly holding a plastic booze glass the length of a rolling pin with a milkshake straw so you can really scarf down that piña colada. It was clear from Dicky’s inebriated babble that he had been granted an audience that day with our far-right congressional rep, Erika Schweiker, a woman who’d never met a conspiracy theory involving pizza, child abuse, and space lasers she didn’t believe. Dicky recognized me from the casino show videos that dotted the shopping concourse and check-in corral, so he—it was inevitable—had to lecture me on what royalty was in America, and why the nation was going to hell. He told me that the Nevada senator with whom I had been sleeping, unbeknownst to him, was a woke pawn and Antifa tool. I nodded and said nothing because I was tired and he was insane and it was midnight, which is late anywhere but Las Vegas.
Just for the record, I don’t have a handler or bodyguard who trails me at the casino. I do at the cabaret, but he works for the Buckingham Palace and would be the muscle regardless of who was on the stage. I don’t need one, because I know a lot of the women and men in security—the obvious cops and the casino’s undercover enforcers—and they always look out for me. Someone comes on to me and it’s clear I don’t want them there? Casino cops are on them like the Queen’s Guard. Or, to use a more American analogy, like Black Friday shoppers on the last TV at Best Buy.
After I had extricated myself from Dicky Sherman’s demented discourse, I wandered through the casino with a club soda. A group of twentysomething gamblers were playing what I had come to call Covid Craps: they were blowing on the dice for good luck as if it were still 2019, and then tossing the germ-ridden blocks onto the felt, the high-walled craps table now a giant petri dish. Eventually I went to one of the poker rooms to watch a game unfold there. Most of the croupiers, surveillance observers, and pit bosses knew me, and so they never suspected I was helping a player with covert signals. It was merely a spectator sport for me, and that evening I picked out a table with sharps who knew what they were doing, and played Texas Hold ’Em along with them in my head. In the distance, I could hear the bells and whistles from the slots, but there wasn’t anything to see there, despite the spectacular graphics that marked the machines. Every so often, I wondered why some gamblers would gravitate toward machines with violent images from Lord of the Rings or The Walking Dead, and others would be drawn to childhood staples with less brutal iconography, such as Willy Wonka or The Wizard of Oz. Regardless, some days it just made me sad, all those people losing money quarters and dollars at a time, and a lot of the slots players couldn’t afford to drop twenty-five or fifty or one hundred bucks into the one-armed bandits in the course of an hour.
Roughly two-thirds of a casino’s revenue is from the slots and the table games. The rest is largely rooms and food and beverage. Entertainers like me? We exist to fill in the time when the guests aren’t on the casino floor. We are but blocks in the void, a line on the revenue sheet that, in some cases, might read only “other.”
I had gotten through both performances that night just fine, despite the doubleheader of Betsy’s unexpected news and Richie Morley’s suicide. Everyone who worked at the BP was shaken by Richie’s death. Artie Morley had sent employees an email in which he wrote that he was sad but standing, the business was fine, and he appreciated all of our prayers and good thoughts. He said there would be a memorial service in the coming weeks, and he would keep us posted. It was modestly reassuring. Nigel had offered to keep me company after our second show, but I thanked him and told him I’d rather be alone. I strolled aimlessly for about twenty minutes before settling on that spot of casino carpet in the poker room. I could feel my resolve to build a Berlin Wall between my sister and me here in the desert starting to erode, the imbricated scales shedding one by one, and supposed part of it was a desire to meet my niece. I had no idea whether this child was going to be in my life forever or never. Obviously, Betsy understood kids who’d been through hell: it was what she did for a living, God bless her. As frustrating as I found her, I never lost sight of her efforts on behalf of the sort of prickly outcasts who rarely got happy endings. But to be a mother? I found that unfathomable, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if this was her atonement for killing her own mum.
Our own mum.
Yes, I had my demons, but I knew in my heart that whatever succubus lurked inside Betsy made my ghouls look like kittens. I would endure. I heard in my head that old Gloria Gaynor song “I Will Survive,” and for a split second thought it was playing somewhere in the casino. It wasn’t.
