Death Comp
By Jennifer Battisti
My father was made of felt and neon, mayor of the city of Jungian Poker. Director of the World Series at the first carpet joint—Binion’s Horseshoe. When he died, Las Vegas apologized. After my father died, we received a death comp. In Las Vegas you can get comped for just Bocelli anything: food poisoning, technical difficulties, slot fever, bad beats, bed bugs, ATM fondling. A comp is a way to say leave me alone; a 1965 Lincoln Continental with suicide doors sailing the highway of drawn butter. A comp is like make-up sex, the bribe of a winking bartender—nostalgia.
We stood in the manufactured air of show water. A dopey blue clown trotted through the mezzanine. My mother was helium in a burgundy dress. Still airborne from shock. My sister held the string of our mother to keep her. I felt the aquatic bulb forming in my throat. The death comp swept me from the 4th floor of UMC hospital and onto a flying ship over a million gallon pool. When my father died, we were given a spectacle, immersion, a two-bedroom suite with a permanent blowing pin to hang our Valium.
I liked the way tourists erased my homeland so that my face could be a Deuces Wild hopper, a place for college boys to drown their hungry hands. Everything real and true could be cliched into a scene from “Swingers” if you knew the extension to Casino Marketing. This was my best idea at twenty-five—to be a payout machine with tight odds. I liked the synchronized handout, the high stakes diving board which numbed my grief contortion. All those pinstripes bleaching my hair with attention.
For brunch, we marveled at the fanfare of foreign flowers flown into the conservatory (horticulture holograms in the shadows). The foghorn of their trumpeted throats filled me with upper class melancholy while the waiter dripped excess hollandaise onto my English muffin, achy breaky eggs and bacy. I was not yet through with Bebe rhinestones or emergency exits. They’re all hand-watered, the waiter offered, taking my gooey napkin. I looked at the huddle of numbered violets; their nourishment like a knife. I did not know how to be the girl who takes care of people. I did not know how to be the girl who takes care.
A death comp is another way to say, I don’t speak the language. Pit bosses and poker dealers did not know my father, the fish gutter, stained glass maker in the Sunday garage—did not know his Chevy Chase face or pickled okra. They only knew his stud games and ESPN whisper, hole cards twerking suspense. The death comp was bringing us all together. I was a satellite everyone had just begun to notice.
When my father died, he lived inside a hallway called Fame. We all sat Texas hold ‘em round an oval table, soaring walls to keep the sea from breaching the dealer’s button. We held up a framed picture of him. He was inducted moments before a multi-deck dealing shoe spit cards from a random number generator. My father was father of the shuffle shoe, much kinder than the metal shoe he wore for his lap pool polio.
After it was over I rode away on my big wheel, eyeliner splatting the dirt-clogged zigzag tread. How could I keep the planets of his moles, dotted whiskers after murder? Where would my mother drape her dustpan rescue? He was the knuckle sandwich of my childhood.
A death comp is a signature for time suspended from calling the creditors to say, Equifax isn’t approved for afterlife. It’s turndown service for the leftover crumbs in their collared shirt, fingernail clippings in the cupholder, the leg brace filled with only air in the corner of his bedroom. I could smell the nitrate of my father, that Pac Man in the Pizza Hut. Death gives you inertia. Vegas gives you a moving walkway.
I rolled my dead dad in casino carpet, placed warm dice over his eyes. We were given a zebra and two free Coronas. I plugged the spout with my thumb and turned the bottle upside down. The lime wedge drifted away from me. I called it abandonment. The death comp was working; blotting out the Puggy Pearson Eulogy, casket sticker-shock, the beige woman who extended pamphlets I wished were benzos.
Bereavement turned out to be a kingdom of aftertaste you could scuba with whimsy. Mom’s shoes went squeaky, two daisies pushed up through her eyes and dripped whiskey. My sister sawed her cleavage in half, became the new strong man of the house. She rode bareback on a new Lexus ES, the Kelley Blue Book kicking in to seduce her with forgetfulness. As for me, I used cocaine as a metal hoop, my pouty mouth as velocity.
Las Vegas kept us, swung us in its relentless hospitality, held our family, gave us gasoline on a nameless desert road, fool’s gold we fed to Coors Light carp. This was our heritage—glitter, glitter, glitter. An aerialist flew, caboosed by the body’s balloon: a yellow liver powered by a search engine. We arched back, crushing the velvet of our chairs. This was better than the 24-hour Kinko’s—the strobe that cloning makes at midnight.
The death comp took us by the hand. We were being ushered into a third realm called ENTERTAINMENT. There were no forms here, no meal trains or inconsequential flowers, only a funeral bird and a pyromaniac who hooked me up to water radio called The Neptune System. An old man in a sinking canoe waved at me as he went under. There were oxygen tanks we could not see. Even breathing was a Colorado River trick.
