Pete Bondurant

FRIDAY NIGHT....After work to Hammond, Indiana......Horseshoe Casino...myself....with... Harrison Corning...Jim Hutchinson... and Jim Graham plus four interns.

We are driving in two vehicles........I'm with Hutch in his BMW X5 SUV. Intern #2 is riding shot-gun. I'm in the driver's side rear seat. Walter(intern) is also sitting in the back. The satellite radio is on a sports station, so I'm listening to my MP3 player...a recording of Buddhist Monks chanting. The other guys are riding in Harrison's Yukon. I chose to ride with Hutch because I knew that INTERN #3 would be telling jokes endlessly....I hate jokes. Also, the BMW has a smoother ride, and Hutch didn't have anything to drink after work.

At the casino I partner up with Hutch at a craps table...pass-line betting, hold the dice...thirty good throws. I hit eight ten times. Hutch was betting good and made several hundred dollars. Walter was hanging around the whole time because the twenty dollars he brought to gamble with had been sucked into a slot machine and disappeared in about fifteen minutes. I give Walter a fifty dollar bill, but he does not want to gamble. I tell him not to worry about it, as there are plenty of starving children in.....Zimbabwe, who would give anything to be able to play the slots in Indiana, if they weren't thinking about filling their bloated, empty bellies. WHAT WOULD JESUS DO? Walter walks away. Intern# 2 runs off to the poker room, and we don't see him again for several hours. He winds up winning over three-thousand dollars and we are all very impressed. Dinner is on INTERN #2. Harrison and Graham play black-jack the whole time. They lose all of their money.

We have dinner at a place called Benny's I have a cheese-burger and fries....mustard...a lot of mustard...onions...pickles. Corning asks the table what two women each of us would want to have a three-some with....Hutch chooses Emma Watson(?) and Miley Cyrus(?)...Graham chooses Tina Fey and Sarah Palin...Corning chooses Bristol Palin(pre-pregnancy) and Sarah Palin...I choose Erin Burnett and Michelle Bartiromo.. Harrison and The Jims nod approvingly...the interns look confused....Intern #3 mentions something about what I assume is a female country music singer coupled with a sheep or something, I don't really hear him....Corning tells him to shut it. The conversation veers into a discussion of sex with pregnant women...teen-age girls...mothers and daughters....Walter, my intern, looks a bit queasy. He's a Chinese-American kid from Houston. A good Christian, he's attending UC and is certainly a virgin. I start explaining to him why I added a call strategy to my short futures today...feed efficiency indicators...maximizing income over feed costs vs. feed costs over cwt. He is nursing a Heineken. We drive back home and I sleep the whole way. The satellite radio is on a Frank Sinatra station.

We drive downtown for some drinks. Walter takes a cab home. Hutch, INTERN #2 and myself start downing shots...INTERN #2 is buying girls shots. Intern #2 is flashing a large wad of cash. Intern #2 is a fucking rube. Hutch takes his money and puts it in his sock. We're outside of a bar on Clark Street with some bums on bicycles....we buy the bums some booze then pay them $10 to guzzle it down after which they race on their bicycles... the winner gets $50.00...the loser gets $25.00, but only if he lets the winner urinate on him....

My bum is an old black man,...missing two front teeth....we name him Cowboy, because he has a straw cowboy hat....grizzled...he looks eighty, but he's probably fifty or so....he has an Obama campaign button on his filthy greenish brown(?) courdoroy coat. Hutch's bum is named Floyd. Floyd is also black. We've seen Floyd around before. Hutch once paid him to shave his moustache to look like Hitler's. Floyd is wearing a Milwaukee Brewers baseball hat. When the race begins, Cowboy gets off to a shaky start....veers into a parking meter...falls on the pavement...I guess Cowboy is going to get pissed on. Floyd carries the day. Hutch wants to up the ante...raise the stakes...pay the bums to make out...$50.00 each.....

A new idea? BUM PORN! Are we ready for that?
......Hutch gets it on his cell phone....keeps showing it to girls in the bars....(Hutch is NOT going to get laid tonight.) I am fucking tired.


Saturday: I am having dinner with a girl named Anne. I am wearing a navy pin-stripe suit by Hart Schaffner Marx, with a grey/black tie by David Donahue. She tells me that I probably shouldn't go out looking like a bank executive...I tell her that I rather enjoy being the object of scorn...she rolls her eyes.
We're having dinner at a restaurant called Riva. I didn't want to go there because I hate the Navy Pier, which is usually filled with tourists and obese people, the kind of people who shop at Wal-Mart, but everyone is always raving about the "amazing Lakefront view" at this particular establishment, so I figure she will find it impressive, and it is only a short distance from the theatre. We have a lakefront table... and...THERE IS AN AMAZING LAKEFRONT VIEW!...I don't see anyone familiar...the diners at the table next to ours are discussing the Chicago Bear's new quarter-back....I have some scotch. Anne is talking about a book she's reading....teen-age girl is murdered and narrates the story from the after-life....I nod in all of the appropriate places...Hmmmm...THAT IS VERY INTERESTING...How long will it be until I bury my face between your thighs? She is wearing a black, wool jacket with matching skirt and a white blouse. I have black mussels in a white wine sauce and a 28 oz. rib-eye. I drink a bottle of Australian Shiraz. Anne has crab-cakes and ahi tuna with a few glasses of Riesling.

We are attending a performance of Twelfth Night at the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre...this is not my ideal way to spend an evening.

She wanted to attend the Cast Call and introduce me to one of her friends who has a minor role, some fat homo-sexual no doubt...thankfully our dinner plans do not allow for this.

I am not very fond of Shakespearean comedy, and it didn't help that the three female leads were played by negresses....I would have preferred to see King Lear or Richard III, something with sword-play and murder...rather than sexual ambiguity and cross dressing...the steak and the wine make me drowsy and I...catch myself dozing off more than once....I have two glasses of scotch during the intermission...this keeps me fortified...but I laugh and clap in all the right places, so she is satisfied. After...I am forced to meet her friend...who turns out to be SHOCKINGLY a homo-sexual(!), although he is thin and mulatto. I force myself to grip his hand and look him in the eye....IT IS A PLEASURE....but my stomach churns and I feel nauseous. She tells me he was on an episode of some television series I never heard of...THAT IS VERY....IMPRESSIVE. What a loser. I hope I'm not dragooned into fraternising with these people all evening. We wind up at the Redhead Piano Bar with some of her friends from work or college....I have several glasses of Cragganmore, which is my father's favourite scotch....I feel only slightly soused and am able to converse politely even though I do express my displeasure with the current administration. I am the only Republican in the group. I am also the only person at the table who has ever discharged a firearm. I steer the conversation towards my travels in Africa and since one of the other couples recently visited Kenya, there is an amiable atmosphere. The piano player is doing ROCKET MAN by Elton John and I would like very much to leave, but where would I go? Butch McGuire's? I get a text message from Jocko Rawlings. He says we have to move the tyres because they're tearing down the barn. I have no idea what he's talking about.