Jackpot

When I woke I had something akin to a hangover, though I’d only had one beer the night before. I suppose I inhaled a bit too much in the way of smoke bomb effluent, floating cinders, and the abundant byproducts of fireworks explosions.

Mike was already up and making a natural fire while Kristen and Rylee sat in fold-up chairs by the fire ring, watching him; both were still in their pajamas. The morning had started cool but was warming fast, headed for the nineties again. I went to a pile of dead pine limbs and broke up some more branches, so Mike would have fuel when he needed it. He said, “I love cooking on the fire.”

When he had some coals, he put a fold up grate over the fire, a giant iron pan on the grate, two packages of bacon in the pan. When the bacon was cooked, he made a single fried egg for his daughter, then a large batch of scrambled eggs for the rest of us. We sat around the fire pit and ate off paper plates. For a follow-up, Rylee had a left-over piece of pizza, heated up in foil on the fire.

I would’ve liked to stay, but I had to get back to town and undertake a long list of last-day-in-Boise tasks….

In the evening, I went out to the rehab center to see Grandpa, riding the bike one last time. A temperature of 96 held steady, though it was seven o’clock.

Grandpa and I talked about my drive down to Bishop. He knows the route well, having driven it dozens of times between 1956, when he moved the family to Long Beach, and 1984, when her retired and returned to Idaho. They rarely—maybe never—went on any other vacation.

He struggled to remember place names, the major towns along the way, lakes and rivers, the numbers of the highways…. The towns of Hawthorne and Fallon, in Nevada, were most significant, because they would usually spend the night at one or the other, or maybe have dinner before driving into the night, anxious to get north to home.

After some effort, he came up with “Hawthorne,” then the word “casino,” both necessary to an anecdote he wanted to tell. He described the layout of one of the bigger casinos in town: “See, when you walked in the door, you could go right”—he gestured—“into the casino, or you could go left”—another gesture—“into the restaurant.” He pronounces the last word “rest-rint” (An aside: today is the 100^th anniversary of Woody Guthrie’s birth; in recordings, I’ve found that Guthrie, who came from Oklahoma, and Grandpa, who grew up in Nebraska, have a similar accent).

“It was me and Mom, and Grandma Scott, and Rosemary and Kelly, who were just kids. Kids weren’t allowed in the casino. When we came through that door I said, I’m just going to step in her for a moment, and I went into the casino, while the rest of them went the other way…. I moved into this…sort of back part…a little secluded…and I played one of the…what do you call them, the things with the arms and the cherries?” I correctly suggested slot machine. “Yeah, that was it. Well, I got a … it paid out the first time, a pretty good amount too….”

After a few minutes he hit another significant jackpot. And he was hitting small ones too, making money. “One of those attendants came over… and she tried to turn off the machine. But I wouldn’t let her…. They’re not allowed to do that as long as you keep playing the machine…. Well, I was really on to something.” He laughed. “And I’d never really won much doing that sort of thing….”

But it didn’t last; family intervened (in unfortunate combo with what struck me as excessively slavish devotion to the house rules). “Grandma Scott came over to the edge of the casino floor, and she had Kelly by the hand…. He had to go to the bathroom, but the bathroom was across the casino, and she wanted me to take him…. See, he wasn’t allowed in there…. I was trying to wave her off, ‘cause I had that machine and I couldn’t leave it…. But he had to go, I suppose, and finally I went to take him…. And the moment I walked away…the very moment…that attendant came over and turned the machine around to the wall.” He shook his head at the lost opportunity….

The television was on, and while he spoke the film She’s Out of My League was finishing. Then E! News started, devoting the first ten minutes to the Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes story. “You know,” Grandpa said, shifting topics, “on Sundays we would go driving up into Hollywood…. It was real nice in there.” This would have been in the late 50s, maybe later too.

“What was that young fella’s name, he died, in a car crash maybe….” I figured it was James Dean, but it seems better to let him work out these efforts at recall, if he can. “He was with Rock Hudson and … Taylor…. He was bitter over some…acreage, but then he hits it rich, in oil…. Giant, that was it.” He told me more of the plot, then, the set-up complete, he described how on one of their Sunday drives in the Hollywood hills they had come to “this sort of conjunction. We was coming one way”—he drew a line in the air—“and the other road was coming from this direction. To this conjunction. And this was a rural road, though partly oiled. Anyway, you could see some dust coming from that other direction, and then a car coming like a battle, like a bat out of hell.” The car came to a skidding stop at the junction. “It was an open car, and it was him, that Dean fella…. He took off again before we had a chance to speak.”

Grandpa regularly spotted celebrities in L.A., most often at either the airport or Disneyland. He wasn’t interested in autographs, but he did feel it socially appropriate to stop them for a chat. For example, he buttonholed Ed McMahon at the airport in 1973, Tony Curtis a decade earlier on the curb in front of Grumman’s Chinese Theater (Grandpa pulled up next to him and stopped and had a conversation through the passenger’s window’ “maybe he was getting his feet in the cement there, I don’t know”). He told me about meeting Lawrence Welk’s lead singer (who was eating a hamburger at Disneyland) and having a talk with his trumpet player too, on another occasion…. The Welk band members got him onto big band shows in L.A. during the war, when he saw Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, and Glenn Miller, and lots more, though he could remember no other names….

When he had played out his celebrity anecdotes, I said I had to go, and that I’d be back in a month. “Well, I hope I won’t still be in here,” he said. The staff this week says two more weeks, but they’ve said that before. “I don’t know why it’s taking so long,” he said, discouraged.  He’d had an appointment with the surgeon earlier in the day, and the doctor was satisfied with his progress, though it’s been slow. Grandpa is less complaisant.

On the way home I stopped at the Sonic for one more half-priced medium milkshake. The same  dark-haired girl brings it out each time, on rollerblades, her face sweaty from moving about among the cars with food and ice cream orders. We hadn’t spoken before, beyond the necessaries, but I felt compelled to tell her I was leaving town. She said, “You should have got a large!” I told her I’d had the same thought right after I finished ordering.