There was a knock at my Motel 6 room door. If you’ve never stayed in a Motel 6, then consider yourself among the lucky. They’re the motel chain with the slogan, “We'll leave the light on for you.” More accurately that slogan should be, “We'll leave the light on for you so they can find the body. Your body.” Or more accurately, your corpse, since by the time they find you in the morning, you’ll be stone cold with rigor mortis setting in, ready for the slab at the county morgue. If you have to stay at a Motel 6, I have some advice for you. I wouldn’t stay very long since strange things will happen the longer you stay at a Motel 6. Long here is defined as more than a half hour. Just driving into the parking lot puts you at high risk. It’s one of those risk things, a probability type of thing with actuarial tables and everything. In other words, more than one day at a Motel 6 means you have a 99% chance of something strange happening to you like, let’s just say getting jumped by meth freaks or flat out getting robbed at gunpoint or witnessing a murder.

The knock continued. It was where it all started with Jim Ed and Wanda, the Stems, as I would affectionately come to call them which of course is short for Brainstems. I was trying to get my clothes together so I could get ready for my job interview with the casino software company. I walked over and looked through peephole but it was clogged with something that might have come off a human being so I didn’t dare try to excavate the peephole like one of those CSI investigators. Talking about a shitty job made glamorous by the magic of TV wardrobe departments and makeup and hairdos and fancy lighting. There was another more insistent knock so I sucked in a deep breath of hot and delicious Motel 6 air and flung open the door, thinking it might something important like a maid wanting to fluff my two-inch thick pillow or maybe a street person selling drugstore flowers so I could impress my Motel 6 lady or perhaps a prostitute offering her stunt hoeing services at nine AM, even though I have never indulged in such services and I’m not judging you if you have stuck your business in a hole that two -thousand other swinging dicks have dropped a load into. Standing there was a woman I’d never seen before. Her name was Wanda, the better half of the Stems, but just barely.

“You got a bottle opener?”

“No, sorry.”

I started to close the door but her pink tennis shoe was fast as a three-card Monte’s hands and she stuffed it in the door jamb.

“They ain’t got none up at the front desk. They said to head down Tropicana and get one at the dollar store, but our car’s broke down on account of the heat.”

“Sorry. I’m busy.”

“It’s so damn hot—too hot to walk. Maybe you can drive me when you head out. I know you can’t stay in a Motel 6 forever unless you’re retarded or something. I’ll give you some money. See I got this bottle of wine and it’s real good and me and my boyfriend want to celebrate. We’re going to get married here in Vegas.”

“Congratulations,” I said.

“Oh, don’t you know, you’re ain’t supposed to congratulate the bride. It’s bad luck.”

“For who?”

She cocked her head and stared at me. She seemed a little pissed.

“Sorry. Best wishes then. Excuse me, but I’ve got to get ready.”

I tried my best to close the door but her foot wasn’t budging.

“Where you going? You getting married too?”

“I’m getting ready for a job interview.”

“Oh, yeah. You gone be a card dealer. I hear they make a lot of money, especially on tips. I hear they make over forty-thousand dollars a year if they’re good at it.”

“It’s for something else.”

She stepped back on her pink tennis shoes and gave me a good look up and down. She winced when she got to my pants.

“Your pants don’t match your coat. You can’t go on a job interview like that. People notice them sorts of things. I worked in human resources once.”

“Really?” I said faking a yawn and trying to give her the idea that I wanted to be alone now. I noticed that all the cool air in the motel room had escaped into the parking lot. I swear I could see it making its way across the parking lot, sort of greenish-purple in color, vaguely keeping the oscillating shape of my Motel 6 room.

“It was a temporary job,” she continued. “I took out their trash but I learned a lot. You’d be surprised at how much you can learn from reading somebody’s trash. You can get some cheap pants at the Goodwill. They probably got one close by the dollar store. It won’t take me long to get my bottle opener.”

I looked around and thought about it. She seemed harmless, almost like some of the long-lost cousins on my father’s side who lived in Tennessee and some of whom seemed to be missing front teeth.

“And if your pants don’t fit, I can take them up. I used to be a seamstress before I worked at the screwdriver factory. I was pretty good, too. They closed the factory on account of Chinese people who are happy to make screwdrivers for 25 cents an hour and work 18-hour shifts. Guess them Chinese are gonna put America out of business before it’s all over. Won’t need no nucular war to takes us over with all the shit the Chinese stick in Walmart for stupid Americans to buy.”

She rambled on some more about foreigners and communists and the fact that her father had been a Marine in Vietnam and was an MIA. This short period of time made me consider her proposition. It sounded pretty good. I wanted to look sharp for my job interview and the clothes I’d brought with me were not doing the job.

“Okay,” I said. “Give me a minute.”

We rendezvoused at my car fifteen minutes later. She got in the front seat and thanked me. She was still finishing up a story where I’d last left her. The story was about coal miners in Kentucky who couldn’t find jobs because all the coal mines were computerized now and the miners ended up as Walmart cashiers. The way she painted the picture the entire eastern half of Kentucky was nothing but Walmarts with dirty-nailed coal miners on meth standing behind the registers. The image of middle-aged men with coal dust under their fingernails snorting methamphetamine in Walmart bathrooms between hits of Oxycontin and bathroom deodorizer stuck in my mind as I started the car and turned the air conditioning up as high as it would go. It was already hot, desert hot, Biblical hot. I heard a noise outside and suddenly a man jumped in the back seat of the car.

“Hey,” he said like we were old friends as he slapped me on the shoulder.

“I didn’t know you was coming, Jim Ed,” she said to him.

I turned to see Jim Ed for the first time, the lesser of the Stems in this story. My first impression was Elvis even though he really didn’t look very much like Elvis. Maybe it was from being in Vegas where you immediately get Elvis brain when you hit town, always on the lookout for the King of Rock ‘n Roll and every other sort of vice such as substance abuse and young chicks.

“Thought I’d go along for the ride since we getting married. Thought I’d get me a suit at the thrift store. The man in the office said they got one down on Tropicana.”

“How’d you know we were going to the thrift store? You taken up mind reading?” she said.

“I overheard through the wall. They ain’t too thick in Motel 6es,” he said with a wink to me and another slap on the shoulder. “Hey, I knew this old boy who liked to walk around motels, listening to people screw. He’d rent a couple rooms and walk around late at night, back and forth between each room. He won’t much on anything, his mind and all. They say he took a bunch of LSD when he was in high school. I used to see him sitting on the side of the road staring up at the sun. Imagine that. Some truck driver from St. Louis shot him. Took him a week for him to die in the Gravelburg hospital. It was on the six o’clock news. Wanda seen it. She knew his sister real good. I think he was abducted.”

“Yeah, she disappeared one day. Nobody knew what happened. Everybody thinks she went into the Lost River caves and never came out.”

Out on Tropicana Avenue, we rolled slowly in the traffic and passed an advertisement for one of the larger casinos and a Donny and Marie sign. Jim Ed studied the billboard like it held all the secrets of life as we sat at the stoplight and watched the faithful making their way west towards mecca—the Strip—overweight women with tattoos pushing baby strollers, gaggles of young women wearing bridal shower gear headed for Thunder Down Under half-naked spray-tanned men line dancing, hipster kids out to out-hipster each other all with assorted tattoos and piercings, whether fake or real. To be honest, it was all a bit frightening to a casual observer, such as myself. It was the town of mayhem and murder, like the quote from Werner Herzog about South America from Burden of Dreams—there was a harmony of overwhelming and collective murder on the streets of Las Vegas, just like in the jungle of South America. You could see it in everyone’s eyes, all the way from the old ladies taking hits off oxygen tanks duct-taped to their wheelchairs and Rascal scooters to the babies searching for a tattooed tit to slurp. It’s a place you can love but you can only love it against your better judgment, a dull desert town full of fornication and and cheap and broken eroticism. And we, the we being an average or somewhat above average sane person who just happens to be in Vegas on business, such as a job interview, we in comparison to that enormous articulation of human flesh, as Herzog said, and I paraphrase, referring to the jungle and I refer to the base and tawdry ugliness of Vegas, “we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban novel, a cheap novel.” Herzog came to love the jungle against his better judgment. I will never come to love anything about Vegas, I’m certain that is, that is unless I start liking cheap suburban novels. I think they call them Harlequin Romance novels, old lady porn, what women had—the only thing women had to diddle to except for their imaginations—before the Google porno internet came along.

Jim Ed and Wanda were totally hypnotized by the spectacle of sweaty human flesh that made its way toward the Strip, all looking like a line of Nosferatus headed for the gallows.. He finally tapped me on the shoulder as the light changed and I began to drive away from the crowd.

“Hey, I figured out how to beat the casinos.”

“It can’t be done,” I said.

“No, it’s called the Martindale system. I got a book at the library and read all about it on the way from Kentucky. If you lose, you double down on your bet and you keep doing it until you win. You can’t lose because you have to win sometimes. Right? You can’t keep losing. It’s an impossibility due to the odds,” he said.

I shook my head again.

“First you need a huge bankroll. Plus casinos have table limits. If you lose seven times in a row, you’ll be over the table limit,” I said.

“You just play at the high roller tables,” Jim Ed yelled with a chortle.

I looked back at him. He wasn’t sitting at any high roller tables anytime soon unless a miracle sprang out of the desert and gave him the makeover to beat all makeovers, a Wayne Newton cadaver reanimation type of makeover.

“I think they only let certain people at the high roller tables,” Wanda said.

He grinned and slapped me on the back, hard this time.

“You don’t understand my Martindale system. What you do see, is it’s real simple, you see you double your bet every time you lose. You can lose as many times as you want but eventually you have to win. And when you win, you win back all your money plus what you started with. You can do Martindale with either Black Jack or roulette. Roulette’s the easiest. Just bet black every time.”

“You already told him that,” she said. “He can hear.”

She looked at me.

“You ain’t hard of hearing, are you?”

“No,” I said. “And it’s called the Martingale system,” I added.

It wasn’t entirely true about being hard of hearing. I did have some hearing loss in my right ear due to an accident when I was ten-years-old involving an M-80 that me and my sister got on a trip to Myrtle Beach. There was a tourist trap just over the South Carolina border aptly called “South of the Border” where we always stopped and got firecrackers. My girlfriend called my hard of hearing problem selective hearing. I thought about the Martingale system and its South of the Border-like promises, promises to make you rich. It sounded like a sure thing but the truth was that casinos set table limits on how much you can wager. Plus, you can lose a lot of hands or rolls in a row. For example, if you bet a dollar and lose seven times in a row, you’d be up to betting over a thousand dollars. Most game limits are set at a thousand dollars so you’re going to lose in the long run. Worse, you risk your whole roll just to win back the original bet, which in this case, was a buck.

“You ever heard of this system?” he said.

I shrugged a sort of yes.

“It’ll work, don’t you think? It has to work, right?”

I nodded another sort of yes. I didn’t want to explain it to him again. I would hopefully be rid of him and Wanda soon. I was sure he’d never understand that no matter how you try, the house is always going to win unless you just have a flat-out run of luck and it didn’t look like luck had been visiting him in the past or that it might suddenly change its fickle fingered mind and start visiting him in the future. The thing in Jim Ed’s mind is known as the Gambler’s Fallacy. The Gambler’s Fallacy, also known as the Monte Carlo fallacy or the fallacy of the maturity of chances, is the mistaken belief that, if something happens more frequently than normal during a given period, it will happen less frequently in the future. It may also be stated as the belief that, if something happens less frequently than normal during a given period, it will happen more frequently in the future. In situations where the outcome being observed is truly random and consists of independent trials of a random process, this belief is false. The fallacy can arise in many situations, but is most strongly associated with gambling, where it is common among players. This type of thinking is also common in the midwest where unemployed UAW workers believe the American auto industry will sprout wings and rise like the Phoenix bird from the ash heap of Detroit, a place where the tight-lidded sarcophagus has descended and closed shut, and is now to spreading out to consume the whole of America, all because of one word: entitlement. But maybe I was way overthinking all of this, or was I? What the Stems thought, the ideas in the head, was not that different than what the average American thought—the idea that they were entitled to something better, greatness—greatness without doing any work, with no effort, just because they had been born in a land which made such promises. The lesser Stem, Jim Ed, fired on one dusty cylinder that hadn’t been oiled by the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz—ever.