Going Native (21 page)
The Happy Chapel was a white, heart-shaped bungalow with heart-shaped windows and a heart-shaped door conveniently located north of the Strip directly across the boulevard from Stowe, Eyck, and DeKeeler, Bail Bonds. Out front on the green cement lawn a tiptoed Cupid, wings aflutter, squirted from pouty lips an eternal stream of blue-colored water into a marble pool deep in good-luck coins and casino chips. Ruby neon script said WEDDINGS
in one window, OPEN in the other. Like the fountain, neither sign was ever turned off. Every inch of the interior (except the four chapel rooms, which were designed to individual motifs: Traditional, Grecian, Medieval, and Futuristic) had been decorated in some variant of red, exotic furnishings of silk, satin, velour, damask, and leather all dyed a mad fiery hue. Jessie worked in the left ventricle, The Bridal Shoppe, peddling rings, flowers, cakes, garters, intimate honeymoon apparel, and assorted local souvenirs of dubious taste, and renting gowns and tuxedos to anxious unprepared couples. In her duty heels and tight skirt and sucking on a cinnamon lollipop, she often referred to herself as Suzi Sugargram, your glazed Kewpie tart. She hated Valentine's Day with a passion.
Jessie toiled in "nuptials" because Nikki did, too, and Nikki was there because The Happy Chapel was owned and operated by her parents, Bud and Glenda Hardwick. Bud, or Reverend Pop as he was known to family and trusted friends, had been one of the true Vegas pioneers. Classified 4-F in 1942, having lost his trigger finger in a suspicious farming accident the year before, he had drifted out from Barstow to work at the magnesium plant in the Valley, making flares to help illuminate the American war effort. The hand his country had rejected was, nevertheless, sound enough to wield a hammer, and in the late forties he was part of the construction crews that built the Thunderbird and the Desert Inn. Money was flowing into the Nevada basin like water down a spout. Bud wanted some of it. He positioned himself in conspicuous places where he was eventually seen by Gus Golden of the Scheherazade, who hired him largely to follow Gus around and maintain a certain background presence, the missing finger contributing a useful defining note to intricate business negotiations. Prosperous for the first time in his life, suit pockets jingling, he married a local girl he met at an auto dealers' convention at the hotel, Glenda, Miss Atomic Blast of 1956. In 1957 Gus Golden was found in a trunk at the Trenton train station and Bud Hardwick found religion. It was a traumatic conversion: Jesus broke his life in two, tossed the first half into the fiery dumper. Bud staggered around penniless for several years, handing out Bibles to hell-bound tourists. Former business associates passed him on the street without a flicker of recognition, the old Bud was gone, it was as if the plasma of his identity had been abruptly extracted, exposed to a new type of light, then thoughtlessly reinstalled with the unprospected flats thrown into rough relief, familiar prominences reduced to background shadow. Thus was born Reverend Pop, an apostle in white shoes, green pants, and silver jacket, who smoked fifty Kools a day, sported a diamond cross-shaped pinkie ring, cursed like a private but wouldn't tolerate it in others, a tacit connoisseur of the visual splendor of big-breasted brides. He understood why, as a malnourished choleric five-year-old, he had been abandoned by his divorced mother to senile grandparents he barely knew -- the way to the holy city was laid with bricks of pain. His ministry had been set by the Lord at the beginning of time. He would celebrate the sacrament of marriage in a desert of sin.
And so he had, but not without, on several occasions, endangering his own. Glenda, whose highest aspiration had always been nothing less than a spotlighted lead in the enchanted world of showgirldom, didn't know what to make of this access of religious fervor into their lives. When it was accompanied by an exodus of cash, she threatened to leave. Preaching was a loser's game, a break-even proposition at best, as far as she could determine, and she hadn't planned in her life on putting in time with losers. It rubbed off on you, she'd seen it happen again and again at the gaming tables. Losing was a virus you inoculated yourself against with a many-digited bankroll. Now suddenly she seemed to be getting sick and she was not happy. She cried, Bud prayed. Then she discovered she was pregnant, too -- the virus was mutating -- and, abducted by a mutinous heart, Glenda sailed off into the siren archipelago of serial affairs. Bud waited and prayed, a rock to come back to. Turned out the loose change she was able to gather on these extracurricular excursions amounted eventually to a pile large enough to trade in on the famous white bungalow where Bud and Glenda had been herding couples down the aisle now for more than thirty years, and if the smooth functioning of this matrimonial machine required certain emollients obtainable only in certain nondomestic locales, then Glenda's periodic absences were a demanding but vital sacrifice. Age had not changed Glenda so much as gently baked her; the skin was more creased and closer to the bone, but she retained her beauty, her animal spirits, her magnificent head of curly red hair that trembled like a charged helmet of metal shavings as she hustled impatiently about the chapel, charming her customers, badgering her employees, dosing each room with her trusty can of rose air freshener. Everyone said Nikki was just like Glenda, an accusation denied without much tact by mother and daughter alike, but both parents obviously loved their grownup wayward child -- their only heir -- and they liked Jessie, too.
The women had been granted complete operating supervision of the graveyard shift, Nikki out on reception, Jessie in back with the trinkets. Usually there was more than enough "action" to maintain that nice steady hum of profitable enterprise and engaged labor (in this case a fun-loving staff of organist, photographer, limo driver, and assorted on-duty ministers who tended, whenever the pace slackened, to gather in unproductive clumps about a beguiling pack of cards), so the boredom quotient remained relatively low. For Jessie the people were her entertainment, this unending procession filing past her counter two by two, nervous, awkward, the sense of exposure painfully acute, each hoping they were not going to get dumped overboard before reaching the Mount Ararat of nuptial bliss. Everyone knew the odds, you'd have better luck betting on the Super Bowl, yet still they came and Jessie loved them all, though her daily astonishment at many of these hopeful matches was a reflex she doubted she could ever lose. Her naï
vet
é
over the choices people made seemed virtually indestructible. What could this one possibly "see" in that one? Of what did this "seeing" consist? Important questions in her own life, complete enigmas in someone else's. The wisdom she had expected to gather at her listening post on eros's perimeter amounted so far to this: love is blind; hope springs eternal; you can't judge a book by its cover; monkey see, monkey do; etc. Which could be, for all she knew, exactly the tacky guise wisdom would delight to clothe itself in.
What she knew she did have in place of a higher understanding was a storehouse of tales, anecdotes, snapshots, punch lines, and plaints from assorted humans at their most vulnerable and bizarre. The primitive force field generated by a bona fide wedding ceremony was of sufficient authority to dampen the apparent magnitude of a superstar. Of which The Happy Chapel had seen its share. Jacqui Best was married here (both times), as were Phil Jakes, Rhoda Darling, and the incomparable Tara, who arrived with her complete entourage of eighteen in two white stretch limos moments ahead of a frantic press convoy of at least a dozen trucks, vans, and rented cars, precipitating a traffic jam and near riot that lasted until long after the giddy bride and her eighteen-year-old bodybuilder groom had been whisked surreptitiously away in the backseat of Nikki's Hyundai, where their marriage vows were clumsily yet effectively consummated before reaching McCarran Airport.
But in a democratic enterprise such as this, fame mingled routinely with anonymity, and the memorable was a haphazard compound of the two, its greater portion proving to Jessie's satisfaction the absurdity of that oxymoronic phrase "the average person." There was, for instance, the obnoxious pig who, ten minutes before the ceremony, offered to ditch his shocked bride and marry Jessie instead. Or the Englishman with his arm in a cast and his right eye goggled behind a superfluous monocle who said he was getting coupled because "everyone dies, right?" as if the remark carried indisputable heft while the woman with him, dazed and silent, appeared woefully uncertain of her whereabouts. Or the busload of Korean tourists who pulled up unannounced one busy night, got married en masse, then couldn't stop joking about doing it all over again, as if the Vegas chapel experience were a variety of amusement park ride. Or the high roller with the low forehead and diamond-embedded incisors who tipped everyone in the place, including the next couple, one hundred dollars each. Or the legendary invasion of the pasta people, when an entire Hollywood movie crew, every collagen-glutted face and vacuumed gut bound to a different set of dietary restrictions, occupied the chapel for a diverting three days filming the key wedding scene of
In a Family's Way,
the offbeat romantic thriller about a young, handsome DEA agent who falls in love with the young, beautiful daughter of a Colombian drug lord and the wacky comedy of manners that ensues when the daughter, now pregnant, discovers that doting hubby was the murderer of her mother and brother in a previous bust and has recently been assigned to bring in her father, dead or alive. Every member of The Happy Chapel staff was in it, either playing themselves or posing as casual witnesses while Reverend Pop conducted the seasoned leads through their "I do's" over and over and over again. Surprise lesson for the uninitiated: infinite were the readings of a single line. Besides the Reverend, Jessie was the only other "civilian" assigned a speaking role; given the privilege of replying "Yes" to a passing question of Jason Ladue's, the young actor playing the DEA agent, she discovered at firsthand the swoops and echoes that can be contained within the ample space of a simple three-letter one-syllable word. She also discovered that up close the well-tended nap of Mr. Ladue's appearance offered evidence of wear completely absent from his big-screen image. When she finally viewed the finished product, on videocassette at a friend's house, having missed the theatrical release, as did perhaps most of the country, she was horrified to see personal physical defects magnified into inescapable lapses of moral will and presented without comment to a nation's critical regard: her hips were too wide, her hands too narrow, her nose too long, her thighs too thick, her eyebrows too light, and her hair. . . well, of course, her hair. At least her smile was pleasant, the toothy product of a Nikki-encouraged self-improvement plan to boost Jessie's hostess rating, her face in normal repose subject apparently to such hostile interpretation several clients had commented openly about it. Smile, damnit, you're in the hospitality business! So she had practiced, the obedient employee, at wedging blocks of consciousness up under those droopy facial muscles until now, whenever she was deliberately sharpening herself against her mood, as was often the case, the resulting persona could work to stunning effect. "You're the nicest young lady I've met in the entire state of Nevada," declared the nastiest, oldest widow in the country (she was eloping with her Albanian chauffeur) an instant after Jessie had realized how pretty the woman would look with her mouth stuffed full of mothballs and a wire coat hanger twisted around her short wattled neck. Viva, Las Vegas.
On the rare slow night, Jessie's attention might be arrested for unrolled moments by the neon palm burning in her window. It was an amazingly detailed rendering, this animated tree of brittle tubing and electrified gas, renowned emblem of the Ishtar Gate, world's largest casino and hotel, sprouting from the night like a growth out of another, more vivid, more clever land where memories were diamonds and she was their queen: sweet doughy dimples on the back of Bas's jam-stained starfish hand. . . carving her name into Suzyn's basketball shoe with a dull X-acto blade. . . bottle of black Armored Slut nail polish cemented in its own goo to her desk top. . . Tappy the tattered sock kitten, button eyes and felt ears sacrificed in battle to one of his furrier relatives. . . dead purple corpse skin of the iris Hector gave her on the bus to Phoenix. . . Cammie's candy breath "I love you" tickling at her ear. . . winter storm in the Rockies, every separate flake falling at the same forty-five-degree angle, the same mesmeric rate. . . lipstick skulls on the mirror in the girls' locker room. . . the light on the lake the morning she lost her virginity, everything she was and was-to-be instantly apprehensible in the direct eloquence of sunfire on water. . . child's flecks of honest gold in Garrett's haunted eyes, ore for miners more intrepid than she. . . the broken emotions of a windup rabbit lying in cop-car shadow on the stubbled lawn. . . Nikki's naked body curled innocently into the protective cave of sleep. . . these glints shining through the black waste of her past with a cut clarity, a hard elegant persistence, domestic trivia yielding private significances as momentous as any public event, the day-to-day increments of the heart and the motion of the sky and the transit of the mountain and the voice of the sand -- the cards you were dealt, the ones you played without complaint, you knew the gamble and you knew you could turn a winning hand.
Her first lover was a kid named Dow Webb who'd ridden in on Greyhound from St. Cloud, Minnesota, top of the world, age of twenty-one. His Uncle Early knew a guy who knew a guy. City was his for the asking. So was Jessie. She was impressed by his smile, his confidence, his chest. She was seventeen, running the streets at night with a pack of girls in an adults' play town with too little to occupy the restless and the underaged. They met one hot dangerous 3 a.m. out at the neon graveyard on Cameron Street, where Jessie and Luane and Suze (the Three Mousseketeers) and Dow and a pair of wire cutters were all attempting to breach the fence in quest of valuable sign junk. "I'm uh looking for an S," said Dow, wiggling his hands in his pockets, striking a pose no less effective for its obviousness. "Is that your initial?" Jessie asked. "Uh no actually uh I like the uh shape." She liked his, too.