The Ongoing Ellix Powers saga part 15

Ellix called me at 1040 in the morning to see if I could help him out with a ride. Stewart was at the Palms with the jewelry and Ellix was downtown. “I’m so broke, I don’t even got bus fare”. I told him that I had a vicious sunburn and couldn’t move my legs, and he told me to “just go on now, lay up in the bed. I know what a sunburn is like. Well, I don’t know, but I know my white friends told me it can get bad, sometimes its so bad you cant even walk.” I told him I still needed to go out and take care of some other shit as well, so I wouldn’t mind meeting up with him later on, and we agreed to do so around 2 this afternoon.

I finally made it to the Little Hotel after considerable pain on my part, at about 4 PM. My buddy Rick was in the car with me because he had to pick up a job application from a place downtown. This meant that after getting Rick’s papers we couldn’t go our usual route to the Rio, which meant I had to attune myself to Ellix’s quick paced directions. As he put it, “This is Nevada, Downtown Nevada, you got to know the tricks.” Unfortunately, I made a poorly timed right onto Charleston that Ellix could not have disagreed with more, and he had me cut through a corner store. He directed me between two pickup trucks to the corner of the busy intersection at Charleston and Main. There was no exit, only a handicapped ramp for pedestrians, but Ellix assured me that I could enter the flow of traffic that was racing through the intersection from my handicap onramp. I was flying high on medicinal marijuana for my sunburn, so I had to look to Rick for reassurance that this was a terrible idea. He was just shaking his head no, so I backed out to Ellix’s dismay. “Come on man, you got to use the tricks. We can’t be going on no freeway, its fucking rush hour man.”

We eased into the proper route and started talking about how we got delayed because we had to hit the drive through sports book before the early games went off. (Side note: I had a winning 4 teamer that would have paid 120 if the fucking diamondbacks beat the Cardinals last night. Fucking David Eckstien hits a suicide squeeze to win it 2-1 in the ninth. Eckstien looks like the type of kid who enjoyed shop class way too much and would probably suffer burns worse than those on my legs if he tried to operate a Bunsen Burner. Fucking trailer park mop boy, that’s what fucking Eckstien should be doing. Not being involved in a god damn suicide squeeze in a 1-1 major league baseball game. Fuck, fuck fucking Eckstien.) I asked Ellix if he had a favorite team, figured maybe he liked the Sacramento Kings since he was up there for a while. “I aint a fan of anyfuckingbody. I’m a fan of money. I bet the teams I think are going to win, I aint a fan of no one.”

I asked him what he liked to bet best, and he said football. “I always bet teasers and parlay cards the first couple of weeks, try to feel the league out. You can’t get a good feel for it until a couple of weeks in. Then I still put in my parlays and teasers, but I start putting in the big bets.” I asked him what his biggest bet ever was, and he got a faraway look in his eyes. “Fifteen five, The Leonard Hearns fight.” I asked who he was fighting, to which Ellix replied angrily, “No, Sugar Ray Leonard was fighting Hearns. You probably weren’t even born yet. I put fifteen thousand five hundred on Hearns, he was a big dog. I was getting 8 to one. I would have been set for life.” He went on to describe the fight in glorious detail, and I wish I could recount the entire story, but I was too busy laughing the entire way through. The gist of it was that Ellix was watching the fight at the MGM Grand and Hearns was winning the whole way. “He had these long arms, and couldn’t get hit.” It got to the 12th or 13th round, and Ellix was already counting his money, thinking the decision was in the bag. “Then, Leonard figured out Hearns had a glass jaw. Before that, no one knew he had a glass jaw, but Leonard caught him and then his corner knew. Leonard just kept laying it on, but Hearns wouldn’t go down. Leonard was hitting him and looking at the ref trying to get him to stop the fight. Motherfucker stops the fight, and Hearns didn’t even go down. Back then they didn’t have this fucking intelligently defending himself shit, fight shouldn’t have been stopped. I would have been set for life.”

Ellix went inside the Palms where I dropped Rick to watch his ballgames. When he came out, Ellix was holding two sandwich bags with jewelry, and we headed back downtown to see if he could get a good price from his guy. He showed me the jewelry and asked me what I thought. Then he started doing complicated math based on grams of diamonds and silver at different predetermined ratios that he pulled out of the sky, and had me check his math to make sure we came out to the same total that he should get for his wares. I had to make an appearance at work, to let them know that I wasn’t faking sick, so I told him I would try to meet up with him later that night. We didn’t end up crossing paths, but I told him I would give him a call tomorrow, and he said over the phone that "I think I can get three thousand for it. Probably 3 thousand.

The Ongoing Ellix Powers saga part 15

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