The Millionaire's Club

By: Kristen Lee Knapp
September 10, 2008

Jeff coasted down the desert road, hating the pillar of light that split the night sky. He loathed the Luxor Hotel’s obnoxious spotlight from the day he was old enough to know what that giant beam was. It, along with all the constant exhaust and competing spotlights, polluted the desert sky, like a truckload of mud poured down into a crystal stream. Once you got away from that light the sky became a breathtaking sight, like a barrel of diamonds heaved against a black velvet cloth.

His eyes sank shut. He shook his head and forced them open. He twisted the volume up. The radio burped and spewed a chipper beat. “…Cause I’m movin’ on. I’ll soon be gone. You were flyin’ too high for my little old sky so I’m movin’ on.”

The song diverted him from the twin stripes of yellow lane, breaking their hypnotic spell. He gripped the ancient leather steering wheel, cracked and warped yellow with age. He bounced to the beat of the radio, forcing himself awake.

“You had the laugh on me, so I’ve set you free and I’m movin’ on.”

He followed the bass. Thoom. Thim. Thoom. Thim. Every bass player had that special ear for the unappreciated half of the song.

‘Have you ever heard a song played without the bass?’ He’d ask people.

‘No,’ they’d respond.

‘Because it’d sound like shit,’ He’d assure them.

Jeff didn’t choose bass, it chose him. His adoptive mother said he was too fat, too delicate to run track with all the normal boys in his middle school. She bought a doctor’s note, wrote a permission slip and bang, he was in the school band. The instructor grimaced at the prospect of a student without the faintest semblance of a musical background. Jeff knew now the question, ‘What would you like to play?’ was more a formality than a real query. It was a foregone conclusion that a mongoloid like him would play bass. Jeff picked trombone.

No one expected he’d take to it. He took to it like a fish to water, a bird to the sky, Einstein to math. He’d spend hours figuring out songs, inwardly reading and writing the music, occasionally tooting out a test note to make sure he got it right. While the rest of his class struggled with Hot Cross Buns, Jeff was belting out Darth Vader’s theme, throwing the slide in and out like a boxer throwing punches. By the end of his sixth grade year he’d learned trombone, tuba and French horn. At the end of seventh grade he bought his first bass guitar. When he came to high school he was already in a band, making gigs and competing in school competitions.

“Shoulda done this three years ago,” he muttered, feathering the gas. Regret roiled in the pit of his stomach like the rumble of coming diarrhea. It sickened him that he’d spent the last three years nursing his ailing axe of a mother rather than living his life. She finally grew the decency to croak two months ago. Of course, he didn’t get shit. Some aunt in Reno got it all, and as far as he was concerned the bitch could keep the measly grand or so his “mom” had left over in her checking. She could even have the old house/shack/shithole for all he cared. He didn’t need it.

Eleven years ago, his adoptive father croaked and left him a casino. Not a billion dollar casino on the strip, not one of the old casinos on the old strip. The first casino, The Millionaire’s Club, founded almost two hundred years ago by a distant relative of his father’s. The dusty ruin of the 19th century casino and the ghost town that surrounded it was his ticket out of here. It all belonged to Jeff: the casino, the town and the surrounding desert. Tourists ate that kind of shit up, licked the plate and begged for more. All he had to do was sell it to some enterprising yuppie and he was an instant millionaire.

Just a quick check of the place. A deep down part of him feared a stiff wind had knocked the whole town over. He refused to acknowledge that prospect.

Tomorrow the first buyer was coming to take a look at the place. It occurred to him whoever bought it just might want to bulldoze it and build a day spa or a housing community, but he was fairly certain he didn’t give a flying fuck what they did with it, so long as he got paid.

I’m going out to California. I’m gonna be a rock-star.

“Mister Fireman, won’t you please listen to me? ‘Cause I got a pretty mama in Tennessee. Keep movin’ me on. Keep rollin’ on. So shovel the coal, let this rattle-a-roll, and keep movin’ me on.”

His fingers tapped the beat against the wheel of his egg-white Fairmont as he rode into the desert.



A faint light glowed inside The Millionaire’s Club. The orange yellow orb licked through the slats, flickering beneath the swinging saloon doors. Jeff stared out from the front seat of his Fairmont, considering what he was seeing.