About Work
A.J. Crame
Taking a taxi toward the Las Vegas Strip, Rosario caresses the business card in her lap. The driver says something about the university they pass. He drove some of the school’s basketball players last month. Nice kids. Talented. Tall. Told them to come back and get rides when they’re in the NBA.
Rosario laughs politely but doesn’t hear him talk about his son’s excitement at the story, how much the boy loves basketball. A corner of the card catches the web of her hand, bringing her attention to her unconscious rubbing. She tries to keep the memory of that last piece of paper, her last journey of hope, out of her mind.
Hope isn't the word Rosario thinks in the back of this cab. Neither is Love. Hope and Love are words for a child, a seventeen-year-old girl who thinks she understands men. Work is the word of a twenty-six-year-old mother carving out a life for her family in the First World. That’s the word she repeats to herself as the cab takes her up Flamingo to Caesars Palace. Work.
The hotel stands as a white monolith. The blue sky isn’t so much above it as next to it. The sun reflects off its windows, forming a yellow circle in the center of her vision. Heat tints the space below the sky so the very air appears red. This is the Las Vegas Rosario expected instead of the beige, stucco walls of her apartment building, the brown of dead grass and sand lots. Still, something’s different in the daylight. The facade stands out when she can see beyond it in the light of the sun, without the neon lights keeping attention only on this street.
The casino floor is the same day or night. Bright lights, loud sounds, obnoxiously patterned carpet. And people. Lots of people.
Rosario heads for the card tables. Her first night there, it took time to orient herself as she meandered through slot machines, lost among white marble and gold trimmings and moving bodies on the Forum floor. Today, her route is direct. She finds her spot—not so close as to attract the attention of security, but not so far that she can’t watch the dealer’s hands closely. She counts the number of times he shuffles between hands, observes the direction he cuts the deck, notes how the first cards are dealt with his left hand before all subsequent hands are dealt with his right. She doesn’t pay close enough attention to the way he handles payouts. She and her colleagues in Manila Bay prided themselves on mentally calculating the amounts with speed and precision, but Caesars has its dealers repeat a mechanical process every time: cutting the chip stack in two, hitting it three times. Regardless of getting the amount right, pit bosses scold for deviating from the process. This is a detail she’ll remember to tell her grandson in fifty years when someone decides they want to know about her life.
But she doesn’t know that now, doesn’t realize she should be watching the dealer’s chip routine. She’s counting beats as the cards come out, the snap of the paper a metronome in her head.
The players give the same cues they did in Manila and Davao and Bacolod. A lift of a finger, a tip of a head, a scrunch of a nose. She can tell who wants another card and who hopes the dealer will bust. The language of the table is universal.
She can’t bring herself to use the card in her hands. She watches the game for another half hour with her thumb flicking at the stiff paper, rubbing across its bold letters, trying not to notice the way the printed words feel different from the handwritten ones on the thin page she carried on the train nine years ago. Part of her wants to notice, to believe that this difference means things will be different for her this time, this business card will yield successful results compared to the shame of the letter. But Believe is a child’s word too. Work is her word. Work.
A woman at the front desk lets Rosario use the phone. Another woman answers after one ring.
“Hello. I am Rosario Crame. I am to meet Mr. Cohen about work.”
Fifty years from now, Rosario’s grandson will not believe it is this easy, that she can call the vice president and walk upstairs to his office. But nothing about it feels easy now. Nothing’s been easy for years. Maybe ever. Her belief that things could be easy disappeared when she let go of her belief in Hope and Love, when she let go of Belief. At least in this life.
She tells herself that this elevator is nothing like those stairs at the train station, the cab ride was not just an updated version of her train ride, this piece of paper in her hands is not cut from the same tree as the letter, was not handed to her by the same character of man. Still, the memory replays when she gets to Mr. Cohen’s office and is met by a woman with questions. “I am to meet Mr. Cohen about work.”
“Yes, you said that on the phone, but I don’t have your name on his calendar. I don’t have your name at all.”
Rosario hands over the business card, not sure how to stop her hand from trembling. The woman takes the card, but nothing changes in her face. This card changes nothing for her.
At the train station, handing over the letter resulted in Rosario’s being beaten, smacked with a purse and a hand. A hand with rings. That woman had a husband and a daughter and a home whose address on the letter sent her into a rage. Or maybe it was her husband’s signature that did that, his invitation to come to their home, his declaration of love for Rosario. Or was it Rosario’s letter, which the woman had intercepted and was holding when she met Rosario at the station, the letter announcing her journey to this man, her choice to use his money to buy a train ticket? Any of these would have justified a wife’s rage.
This woman in Mr. Cohen’s office doesn’t fly into a rage, though. She sticks out her chin, imploring Rosario to say more, to explain why she’s handing a small card to a woman who probably has thousands in her desk drawer. Her face asks why Rosario is interrupting her life.
“I meet Mr. Cohen in the Philippines. He give me that and tell me to come. I am here to work.”
These sentences do change something in the woman’s face, though it is not a look that gives Rosario relief. It’s a look of skepticism.
“What did you say your name was?”
“Rosario. Crame.” She almost forgets to add her last name, but she does remember to pronounce it the way everyone in this country does. That’s the way it will be pronounced for the foreseeable future. The old pronunciation will become a novelty, a word her grandchildren will stumble over because they’ll get accustomed to this new way, this American way.
The woman walks through another door, comes back to tell Rosario that Mr. Cohen will be out soon. She sits at her desk and offers Rosario a drink, waving toward a chair where Rosario can wait.
Rosario chooses to stand.
When Mr. Cohen comes out his door, she steps up to him. “Mr. Cohen. You give me your card. Said I come see you when I move here.” She glances at the woman at her desk, who looks startled. Rosario wishes she had taken the card back. But what would a piece of paper prove? Rosario brings her eyes back to him. “I have one month here now. I am ready to work.”
Mr. Cohen is at ease in his blue sport coat and red tie. His smile accentuates the loose skin of his chin and cheeks. He smiles all the same. “Linda,” he says to the girl at the desk, “can we get Rosie here something to drink?”
“I offered sir, but she—”
“Mr. Cohen, I am here to work. I know the games. I can work. You tell me to come.”
“You were on the floating casino,” he says, though not as if he’s remembering. It is as if he were waiting to reveal his awareness. “Glad you were able to get out of that situation over there. I heard this Marcos guy is really going after our industry.”
Politicians have been going after gambling for as long as Rosario’s known the industry. She just always felt the casinos were ahead of the game. They had the right people bribed and the perfect systems for evading notice—codes and corridors and compartments that meant every raid was a failed raid. Martial law would change all that. Marcos made it so the State became the House, and everyone knows about the House’s win-loss record.
But here in Las Vegas, Mr. Cohen runs the House. Mr. Cohen always wins. “I’ve actually got plenty of places for you,” Mr. Cohen says. “I know the El Cortez and the 4-Queens are both hiring dealers. We’ll give them a call.” He points over to Linda, who is already writing in a small notebook.
“Mr. Cohen,” Rosario says. “Those are downtown. You tell me I work for Caesars. Caesars is best.”
“Well Rosie, it is the best. And we’ll get you over here eventually, but we’ll start you over at the break-in house. Get you trained to move over here.”
“Mr. Cohen, I watch your games. I can work now. Here. I won’t work downtown. I work here.”
Mr. Cohen blinks quickly. A tell. A universal sign.
In fifty years, when her grandson asks where she found the courage to do that, if she considered how risky it was, if she knew how close she came to ruining her one connection in this city, in this country, what she would have done if Mr. Cohen had thrown her out of his office—when her grandson asks her all that, she won’t know the answer. She’ll know that she was given an audition that day, an audition she passed without a single mistake, because Mr. Cohen didn’t care how she calculated her payouts as long as she got them right.
What Rosario will know when her grandson asks, what Rosario doesn’t know after she passes her audition, is just how far she still is. Rosario will know—but doesn’t yet—that there are months ahead filled with waiting to get placed on the schedule, begging for shifts, calling a rotating list of other immigrants who might throw her one of their shifts every other week because they remember what it was like at the beginning. She’ll know how her husband will squander her hard earned money by gambling at the very casinos that deny him work because they can see his addiction, but she doesn’t know that now, though she suspects that it’s possible. She’ll know that her work will be worth it, because her sons will grow up in America, will build families in the States, where her grandchildren can get educations and pursue passions and dreams, can have Hope and Love and Belief. She’ll know that in fifty years just like she dreams it now. Her grandson, however, won’t know if it’s right. As he scratches words onto paper, Hoping that someday someone will care about these stories he Loves to create, that he Believes matter, he’ll think about his grandma rubbing a piece of paper thinking only about Work, and he’ll wonder what he’s doing for his unborn grandchildren.
About the Author
A.J. Crame is a writer and award-winning educator based in Las Vegas, Nevada where his parents raised his siblings and him after they fled martial law in the Philippines. He has an MFA from the University of San Francisco. His writing has been featured by Gnashing Teeth Publishing.
