After the late shows let out we always had a rush, and working alone, I scrambled to pump gas and wash windshields. Occasionally someone who'd won at the tables would tip me a couple singles or a five. Except we didn't call them tips, but tokes or comps: "You see that old bat in the pink T-Bird? She toked me five."

There'd be another smaller rush when the dancers, musicians, and stagehands started home. They were nice, but seldom tipped unless I'd done a quick repair or jumped a dead battery.

But it was a decent job for a high-school kid, better than digging ditches or hanging drywall in the heat of the desert day. That was my last summer there, working from midnight 'til 8 AM. During the school term, I'd worked afternoons and evenings, saving for college. I was a good student, but not outstanding, and wasn't sure I'd earn a scholarship.

My Mom lost the ranch a few years back, after Dad died when his pickup rolled off a dirt road, to a couple generations of mounting debt. After paying off the debt, she got almost nothing from the sale and we ended up in Vegas. I never got used to the heat.

I remember riding my motorcycle to work a graveyard shift when the time-and-temperature sign on top of the Sahara Hotel read 11:42PM/102°. Summer days could reach 120° (in the shade) and I preferred the nights. At least you never had to walk out from under the canopy over the gas pumps and feel that sun slamming down on your head, like the door of a trap.

From about 3:00 am 'til dawn was quietest and coolest. Then, above the neon dazzle, the sky lit up and the mountains rose from their pediments, dark purple, then oceanic blue, like a strange new world, before dulling down to their daytime grey and umber. Morning traffic filled the air with dust, that turned to floating gold as the first sun struck through.

That was when Tammy showed up at the station, on foot, mascara running down her cheeks with the tears. She didn't have her bag, which was a bad sign. All the hookers had big shoulderbags, loaded with their essentials.

Tammy was upset: besides crying, she had marks on her brow and cheek and a bruise on her forearm.  "My last trick rolled me," she said. "Took my bag. All my cash and keys. My car's in the Caesar's lot. Could you break into it?"

"Can't leave. I'm alone."

"Christ, you gotta. My dog Blackie's locked in the car. Windows are up."

I looked at the white tangle of light edging over the peaks, and felt the first sudden heat on my face. Locked in a car under that sun, a dog would be dead in an hour, tops.

Dreading the consequences, I hung the little sign with the clockface on the inside of the window, shut off the pumps, and locked up. The morning rush was about to start. If the boss came by I'd be in a world of hurt, but not as bad off as Tammy's dog, that was for sure.

I snagged my toolkit and drove her down in the tow truck, so the cops would know we weren't stealing the car. Not that it was worth stealing: it was a baby-blue Mercury Comet with dented hubcaps, grimy from the drive from LA. As I shut off the truck I could hear barking.

It was already warm— the sun promised our daily whipping. She went over and started trying to comfort her dog— Blackie— through the window while he yammered. I flexed the spring-steel jimmy and slid it between the glass and the rubber gasket, hooked the button, and bingo! I opened the door, feeling strong, brave, true— all the good stuff.

Blackie jumped out and she caught him up as he licked her face, taking off the streaked mascara. Ugh, I thought. It was already hot in the car, so I cranked down the windows and poured water on my bandanna and handed to her.

"Put this over his head— cool down his brain. Or put it on his belly— that works, too."

He was panting, but didn't look heatsick. "I think he's okay," she said, pouring some water into his bowl as he lapped it up.

"Could you drive me to my room so I can get my spare keys?"

"Like to, but I'd get fired. But I'll get the car started so you can drive." Another little device from my kit, plink-twist, and the engine sputtered into life. "I need this back. And your car needs a tune-up. Bring it in, okay?"

"Jeez, thanks. I owe you. Really— I won't forget."

How many times had I heard that? On the Strip, people were always promising something or other. But I liked Tammy. She was pretty and seemed soft, for a hooker: not physically, but in her way of looking at me and talking. Some people can have hard lives without being hard, suffer bad luck without becoming bad. We'd talked a bit, when she stopped for gas. She'd tried to give me her cards, but I wouldn't take them.

"I don't do that," I said, and she took the cards back and rather than cuss me out, like most hookers would have done, she said she understood.

It was common practice for gas pump jockeys to get questions from the customers: "Where can a guy find some fun in this place?"

"Here's a number you can call."

Your initials on a card would get you a five or a ten, your toke, your juice, when the girls or their pimps made the rounds at the end of the month. I had school friends who started with small rackets early on, and were involved in heavy lifting by their senior year, and it scared me. Vegas seemed like a big, shiny trap, and I didn't want to get caught.

I watched her pull out of the lot onto Vegas Boulevard and then climbed back into the truck and drove to the station. There were cars lined up at the pumps, honking. An emergency call, I explained, twenty or thirty times. By the time I got off, at 8:00, I was soaked in sweat. It felt good to hop on my motorcycle and run up the gears, roaring onto I-15, making my own breeze.

By my last year working nights on the Strip, I was in some ways tough. I could sort the tourists—players and gawkers— from the locals: food service folks, housekeepers, cocktail waitresses and bartenders, dealers, stagehands, performers, hustlers, pimps, and petty crooks. I could spot a punk casing the station, planning to rob the till, and I had a routine. There was a huge chrome wrench, a one-and-a-half-inch box/open end, that was long as my forearm and heavy as a Viking sword. I'd carry it out under the canopy fluorescents and flip it, up with my right hand, spinning as it chopped the light into warnings, and catch it with my left. Flip it up, catch it behind my back, and then stare the punk down. I'd never been robbed or even threatened.

In other ways, I was way too innocent to be there, in the bright-lit jungle, among the beasts of prey.

I didn't have much social life. Didn't go out for sports or go to dances, or go cruising on weekend nights, like my classmates did. I missed the ranch so badly it ached. I went to school, studied, worked, and slept. I also did most of the cooking and nearly all the housework, because my Mom, who'd been a staunch, dedicated ranch woman until I was in my early teens, had pretty much fallen apart.

She missed my Dad more than she could stand. She managed a bingo parlor, hated it. Hated the old, weird people who doted on bingo, and came home from her shift sick and coughing from the cigarette smoke. I'd cook her something from my limited repertoire—fried eggs, bacon, potatoes, frozen fish sticks, hamburgers, canned corn or peas, a basic salad— and she'd hole up in her room with the TV and vodka tonics. She'd taped aluminum foil over the windows so she could sleep days. Even in summer, when I'd have to sleep in the afternoon, I could never bring myself to do that: wrap myself like a TV dinner, shutting out the light.

She pushed me hard to get out of Vegas and go to college. But I worried about what might happen to her when I was gone. Remembering the days when she taught me to ride and fix fence and recognize when a cow was sick or about to calve, I knew how sad she felt to be trapped in her present life.

Knowing her, knowing that, gave me a tenderness towards women in general.

When I went on a rare date and got excited and the girl said I was hurting her, I stopped. I dreamed and lusted and was terrified by it. It got to the point where I was almost afraid to kiss anyone. So by my senior summer, I was still a virgin, which was not a word that guys used back then. Girls were virgins.

Or, like the girls I met at work, hookers. My last year at high school I knew way more hookers than I did cheerleaders. But I was cautious, maybe frightened by the hookers (who knew things about sex I could only imagine) while I lusted after the cheerleaders, and what they represented, not just sex but respectability and status and. . . America, dammit.

But America had some drawbacks. Johnson was bearing down in Vietnam and the coffins were coming back to haunt us. The hero of our block, Larson, went over there and got killed right away. At his funeral the casket was closed and the word was that there was barely enough left to identify. It hurt all of us. His dad grabbed a bottle and never let go. We'd hear yelling and things breaking over there. We never called the cops, but someone did. A year on his parents divorced. The next summer, I saw his kid sister Dar, who'd been one my my first crushes, out on the Strip with a short, fat guy: hooking.

Night is when things happen out there, and they did. A carful of drunks sheered off a signpost, pulling into the station, and poked a hole in their radiator. I called the cops. One of the guys threatened me and I showed him the wrench and made them get back in their steaming car and wait. They said they'd be back to teach me a lesson, and I hoped they'd reconsider when they got sober.

An old guy who drove a pearl-white T-Bird and dressed in womens' clothes tried to pick me up. I turned him down, as gently as I could, and he pounded the dash of his car and then started crying. After five minutes that seemed like forever, I pulled a bunch of blue windshield wipes out of the dispenser and tapped on his window. He took the towels, cleaned himself up, and drove off before it registered with me that he hadn't paid for his gas. I wrote it on my charge sheet, swearing under my breath.

A really drunk woman barfed and passed out in the restroom and her husband was too drunk to retrieve her, let alone drive, so I had to call the cops a second time that week.

By Friday I'd forgotten about Tammy and her dog, when the ratty blue Comet rolled up to the pump about half-past midnight, with Blackie doing flips on the passenger seat. She rolled down the window and he stuck his head out and licked my hand.

"You're his hero," she said. "Mine, too."

I blushed, and went for the gas cap. "Fill it?"

"Yeah. I've got a proposition for you," she said. "Not that."

"So— what?" Working nights out there had given me a healthy suspicion. Quite a few of the guys I worked with had gotten into trouble in various ways.

"Could you, like, take care of Blackie tonight? I've got a dog chain and a bowl for water. His blankie. You can tie him behind that wall out back and just check on him every once in a while."

"I don't know. The boss is on the warpath about. . . you know." A couple guys on swing shift had been trading batteries and tires to hookers in return for professional services. One guy's wife had stormed in demanding his paycheck and the boss had to show her his charge sheet: sets of tires, batteries, shocks, tanks of gas. He actually owed for the month.

Tammy got an upset-girl expression. "I can't leave him in my room— he chewed the drapes last time. And I'm scared to leave him in the car. After. . ."

Should I wait for the tears?

"Okay. But let's not make it a habit. Check?"

She gave me a kiss on the cheek. She smelled clean. I wondered how long she could hold onto that.

Blackie barked the first few times I checked on him, then settled down and snoozed on his folded blanket. At dawn there were crickets in his water dish, so I refilled it. Tammy showed up about six-thirty and loaded him into the car. She said thanks, no kiss, and in a businesslike way pulled a twenty from her bag.

"Half a night's wages," I said. "Too much."

"Not compared to what I make," she said.

Saturday she came by again, and Blackie camped under the stars. You could actually see stars from the shadow behind the wall, which blacked out the leaping neon glare of the casinos. I collected another twenty. Easier, the second time. Tammy drove up from LA to hook each weekend, renting a motel room and making more than she did in a week at her straight job, some drab office gig.

Next Friday she brought another LA girl along, Ginger, a tall redhead who said she worked as a receptionist for Universal Studios, with Sport, a terrier-looking frazzle of grey hair. Snarly. I tied him far enough from Blackie that they wouldn't get into a fight. When I checked on him, he growled, but was no trouble, really. Forty bucks, Saturday morning. Same again Sunday.

Damn! I had a racket.

It started out as a favor, but as word got around other working girls begged me to babysit their dogs, and I found it hard to turn them down. The gas station was set back from the street, with the huge parking lot for Caesar's Palace on the south and a vacant patch of desert on the north. Out back, to the west, it was dark and empty with the roar of I-15 a quarter-mile or so away. I cleared away the heaps of tumbleweed and windblown trash behind the pierced block wall, to make room. If a dog barked too much or tried to start a fight, that was it. I wouldn't take them again. I cleaned up all the dog crap before I went off shift. I couldn't risk complaints.

Before, after cleaning the service bays and the restrooms, I'd lolled between cars, passing the night hours with made-up games. The big neon signs for the hotels cycled up and down, and I'd try to keep count of the nearest two: Caesar's and the Dunes. Now, instead of counting, I'd go out to check on the dogs.

Weeknights, I might have two or three dogs out back, pets of the local girls. Weekends, there were more: ten or twelve, at the height of the season. I made about forty bucks a shift in wages and commissions, and a few hundred dogsitting. Some weeks I banked five or six hundred.

Pretty soon, I had enough for tuition and living expenses for a year, then two. I was acutely aware that the money I was banking had been earned through prostitution, which was a criminal offense in Clark County. But since when had dog-sitting been a crime? It seemed to me that I was doing something good, keeping the dogs, who were by any reckoning innocent, safe and fairly happy. What their owners were up to was not my lookout.

I never knew who tipped off the boss. When he busted me, at 3:15 AM on a Sunday morning, there were eight dogs tied out there. One hundred and sixty dollars worth. He pulled in, got out of his car, and walked out back, just like that. No questions.

He came back and said that it had to stop.

When I explained how it got started, he raised an eyebrow. "I know about Harry and the other guys, loading up their charge sheets, stealing from the till. One reason I trust you here alone is you don't do that."

I offered him a cut. Vig. Juice. Vegas runs on juice. Caesar's Shell Doggie Parking: a business opportunity. Bad move: he gave me a disappointed glance and shrugged it off.

"When you're here, you work for me. And I'm not in the business of providing an open-air kennel for ladies of the evening. Understood?"

He was a Mormon and didn't use words like hooker or pimp.

"Sure. Got it. I'm really sorry." I said, even though I wasn't.

He went out back again and leaned over the wall to look at the dogs. They woke up and peered at him and didn't bark, bless their hearts. I joined him.

"I've got nothing against the poor dogs. You've been really good at your job and I'm not firing you. But— no more dogs."

He patted my shoulder and drove off—a decent guy— to catch a few more hours of sleep, have breakfast, and then go to church, I guess: a normal life. God, I envied that.

The office was locked at night, so I went into the stockroom and leaned on the sink and cried, quietly, watching my tears make wiggly tracks toward the drain. Then the bell dinged as a car pulled up to the pumps. I doused my face and dried myself with blue paper towels before going out.

"Evening, sir. Fill it up? Super? Check the oil?" The blue towel squeaked on the windshield as I polished it, lifting the wipers one by one.

Then I stood in the burnt-smelling night air and counted the ups and downs of the neon signs, into the hundreds before I lost track. The streets were almost empty but the signs stayed on until sunup. It was crazy.

Meanwhile, the mountains loomed out of the dark like watching faces, ragged, harsh, perfect: everything the signs were not.

All the dogs were asleep, just before dawn, when the blue Comet rolled in.

If you're my villain, I'm your villanelle:

the diminution of your ill intent

a fetching demon in your chosen hell.

Your paradise: what might and what befell,

Cold honeymoon to Greenland in a tent.

If you're my villain, I'm your villanelle.

This is a truth no crooked tongue can tell,

Nor parse with reason so severely bent,

Church tower with a broken bell,

Above an empty altar, captive to your spell.

That can't be rung, lest all its history be spent,

Our battle, on the Glengesh Pass of Donegal,

You gave the wheel to your sweet damozel

Insistent she, not to die upon the steep descent,

Nor afterward, you pissing feeble pimpernel,

You patriarchal puffed-up post-doc whining weasel,

Who stole the love that I, enraptured, lent,

If you're my villain, I'm your villanelle,

Your bitter, bitching, unrepentant jezebel.

In love's equation, how to value X,

And value you, who are the soul of X, times two?

A double beauty for my poor prospects,

My poor heart's bindings that you so undo—

The angularity of numbers makes the heart

More perfect in meandering, in staying lost,

In valuing the substance sensed, apart,

Unpossessed, untouchable. I know the cost

Of loving thus, an equal sign between

As if our being must have equal weight

As if we could be summed and split, a mean,

As if our crooked measure equalled straight.

For love's no calculation, nor is pain,

If we should come close once, and not again.

If I let the words

take me, flying over the brink,

falling as galaxies cluster and smash,

into pools of such sudden light

and rage:  there is no return. 

That I stand here, talking to you,

coffee warm in my hand, in a red jersey

and a gold scarf printed with ravens,

is an act of will. 

Nothing more.

Nor less.

Gather, my demons—

Delicious our substance, materialized thus.

You fangs, pierce. And swallow, you gaping, green mouths,

And you with bronze roots in the black stream, quietly, quietly

Absorb. Do I lend you the means? I think not.

You sharp ears, listen! And all eyes, watch.

How the world made you, the world

Only knows. Yet I am the keeper of colors,

The bearer of timbers, the framer of cowardly dreams.

Delicious. How soft stones and dead flowers

Confuse in the mortar, bloom in the oil.

For I am the artist of my age—

Of temptation, disaster, of the pear

And the egg. Good fortune is easily broken.

Be quicker. Impasto. Now leap in your infinite music

You rapid, spontaneous fires. The long grain of this wood

I shall darken, over my head, and close my two eyes

To your faces. So gather, O monsters,

now I must feed upon you.

Whose woods these are, I think I know.

He's never seen them, sun or snow.

They're just a line of numbers in his

Resource Play portfolio.

My little dog sits in my track

Sniffing forward, gazing back,

As I stand still and silent, mourn

That grasping bastards still are born,

Who buy and cut and sell and bleed

A world subjected to their greed,

Who turn earth's joy to barren grief:

Bole and branch and twig and leaf.

These woods are part of me, as true

As winter's cold or sky is blue.

And now I know what I must do,

Now I know what I must do.

Papa Robbit:  This is great.  So great that we've got the whole family around this table.

Mama Robbit:  We're blessed to have such loving, Christian children to carry on our. . .

Angelica:  So this is, like, the first time since Pookie killed herself?

Papa Robbit:  You would have to bring that up.  Why do you always try to ruin things?

Angelica:  Wasn't me ruined it for the Pook.  As I recall, you did your part, and how.

Mama Robbit:  Go to your room! 

Angelica:  What room?  You put in bunks and there are twelve undocumented farmworkers in what used to be my room.  Lucky to get the couch.  I should report you.

Papa Robbit:  Can't you contain yourself until after dinner?  This is a family thing.

Angelica:  Yeah, right!  Hormone-stuffed turkey slaughtered by semi-slave labor.  Do you think they have families, too?

Whit:  The turkeys or the workers?

They all stop talking and stare at him. 

Whit: Turkeys have mothers and stuff, right?

Angelica:  Don't be a dork, unless you can't help it.  Okay?

Whit:  Okay.  But humans are also animals.  So animal rights are, potentially, human rights.

Papa Robbit:  Where do you get that crazy liberal crap?  Not from us. . .

Whit:  Same place Pookie got the Gay Pride stuff.  Which you crapped on to the extent that she decided she'd rather be dead than live with you in this house.

Mama Robbit:  Still blaming us for her inability to overcome her illness?  Her sin?

Whit:  I blame you for seeing it as a sickness and a sin.

Papa Robbit:  So you think that sexual perversion is good?  We were trying to keep her from ruining her life, and the lives of other innocent people.

Mama Robbit:  The turkey is done.  Could we set this aside until after we eat?

Angelica:  Another couple glasses of wine and I could give a shit! 

Papa Robbit:  Could you treat this family with respect?  Please?

Whit:  I have a brief announcement.

Mama Robbit:  Can't it wait?

Whit:  I don't think so.  I want to tell you that I'm a werewolf. 

Papa Robbit:  You're a what? 

Whit:  Werewolf— I change into a wolf sometimes. 

Angelica:  A wolf?  Like, four legs, tail, fangs? 

Whit:  Just like that.  It feels good not to be human for a while. 

Mama Robbit:  Oh thank the Lord!  I thought you were going to tell us you're gay.