Trust: Book One of Gypsies, Gamblers & Thieves

Chapter 1: Poker Face

When I was seven years old, my mother Lilith packed two suitcases. She drove us to Oglethorpe County Airport with $10,000 cash in her purse and bought two airplane tickets. We boarded a puddle jumper to Atlanta, and then a Boeing 747 to Las Vegas. Five hours later, we descended into a blanket of lights, grabbed a taxi, and checked into the Hacienda Hotel and Casino.

From the beginning, I liked turbulence and traveling. 

The next day Lilith called her father, my Granddaddy Willow, to tell him we had moved. One of the biggest bookies in Georgia, Willow counted senators and sheriffs, doctors and degenerates among his clientele. He even had a black real estate agent as a customer. My Granddaddy did not discriminate--at least not openly.

My mom asked Willow to have her Cutlass Supreme driven to Nevada. Willow kept the car for himself and sent my mother $8000 to buy a new one. I tried to talk her into buying a red convertible Cabriolet, because they were cute and perfect for year-round sunshine. Instead, she replaced her shiny green Cutlass for an ugly brown one. We were stuck with a car with a roof.

Lilith went to dealing school, where she learned to sling blackjack, roulette, and several types of poker. She found her first casino job at the Golden Nugget on Fremont Street. It didn't take long until we moved into a single story, ranch house on the east side of town. With a population of two hundred fifty thousand people, Clark County, Nevada wasn't much bigger than Oglethorpe County, Georgia, where I was born.

I was in the middle of second grade, when my dad found out where we lived. He drove two thousand miles west in a gun-and-money-loaded Cadillac with his buddy Cream, the proud father of thirteen shoeless children. Cream and my dad, Clayton "The Madman" Dobson, had come to take me home to Georgia. Although my dad never jumped off Hoover Dam as he threatened to do (my mom's version of the story), he and Cream pulled off near-magical feats of card cheating at the mob-run Dunes and Sands casinos (my father's version of the story). The actual outcome of Madman and Cream's Vegas or Bust Adventure: My parents finalized their divorce, and I stayed in school at Native Glory Elementary, where I finished out the year.

That summer between second and third grades, I began the ritual of visiting Morrisburg. On my first flight as an unaccompanied minor, I racked up three pairs of Delta wings from three different stewardesses. I stuck two on the wrists of my blue jean jacket to create cufflinks; and pinned the other one over the Izod alligator on my polo shirt. When the plane landed at Hartsfield Airport in Atlanta, my dad and a woman named Trixie were waiting for me at the gate.

That airport was huge! While the three of us waited at baggage claim, I scanned the arrivals schedule, transfixed. Once every minute or two, a new flight number from a new city popped up. I had seen Boston, New York, and Los Angeles on TV, because they all had sports teams. As I watched the names continue to change, I felt excited. I wanted to see these cities from the air. To walk their streets and hear the accents of people talking, see what the locals wore, smell the air, eat new foods. 

"Major Tom to Ground Control" my father said and squeezed the back of my neck.

I ripped my gaze from the arrivals screen and looked at my dad. "What's that supposed to mean?" 

He held my suitcase in front of my face, as if it were merely a paperweight. "It means we better ride, if you wanna make it to Six Flags on time."

In that moment, I felt like I was an airplane. "We're going to Six Flags?"

Now the lady named Trixie spoke, "Might as well since we're here. Don't you think?"

I nodded in agreement and bounced on the balls of my feet. "Can we ride The Scream Machine?"