THE OLD YEAR (Part 2)

I draw three queens and hit the button as I hope for a fourth. No luck. I know the microchips that sit beneath the bar counter are against me. The random number generator has a conscience but it is evil. I find hopeful amusement and subsequent despair in the heavenly wagers I make with the universe, ‘if I hit this flush everything will be fine.’

“Intelligent design is an excuse, a candy-ass way, to circumvent the constitution and proselytize the masses.”

“Right. It’s Christianity’s way of combating Darwinism. That’s all.”

The men next to me in faceless voices (because of my trance on the video screen) are raving like Ivy clad intellectuals. I imagine elbow patches and manicured nails at the end of soft white slender fingers. I see corduroy and plaid and clean virgin white pressed shirts. Finally, due to the fact that my eyes are beginning to sting, I look over and see desert kids – dirty in jeans and t-shirts, with brown faces of stubble and blood shot eyes. They are young but made worn by the unyielding current of poverty. One is short with a chubby face and short brown dirty hair. He has acne like little volcanoes in a ring of fire lining his chin and jaw. He appears to be in his mid-twenties. Roughly the same age, a tall fresh faced boy is wearing round thin-rimmed glasses and has shoulder length brown hair. He is skinny with sharp angles to his joints. A robust blond with a smushed face sits between them gambling and interjecting from time to time. I turn pack to the video poker laid before me like a plate of bright colors; rays of light exploding up like a fountain.

“Science is the future. It will solve all our problems. And Christians refuse to believe that. They paint Darwin like some lunatic. It’s fucking disgusting man.”

“I know. I’m so sick of the rhetoric.”

As people, our relationships are thin strands of onion made of paper dipped in water colored by ego. We hear what we want and jump ship often. Connections are not real. They can stop at any moment, through death or stupidity or ignorance, but most often they end through weakness. When I look too closely at people, into their eyes (the starving), at the shape of their bodies (the loneliness), I am overwhelmed with despair and want to plunge knives into my pin cushion abdomen.

I play for the straight. No dice.

“It’s like with freemasons, they were born from the oppression of Christianity.”

“I once heard the Red Cross are the freemasons in disguise because the symbol for freemasonry is a rose wrapped around a cross”, I interject.

“I heard that too.”

I turn back to my plate of hearts, spades, clubs, and diamonds. I hit two pair and follow it with four jacks. A swirl of satisfaction balloons in my chest. A house built with electronic cards.