For We Like Sheep

Zem and Magnolia’s only bad moment came at the Galaxy, when its twin Associate Presidents refused to budge.

It was a ridiculous fact that the Galaxy had two men to do the job accomplished everywhere else by one. Magnolia knew that family connections– convenient marriages to daughters of industrialists who wanted shares in casinos but didn’t want any public involvement with gambling– had gotten these two young men where they were. Around town, in the executive suites of other hotels, they were referred to as the boy scouts.

They were 29 and 33, twenty years younger than any of their peers, and Magnolia and all the other bosses knew they understood almost nothing of their job, in spite of their matching Harvard MBAs. Their consistent business strategy was simply to scorn all the other properties up and down the Strip and do the opposite, whatever that meant to them at the time. Luck and the Galaxy’s astoundingly loyal clientele had kept them in the black for their first year, but there was a not-too secret pool among hotel executives in town on their demise. Buy-in cost: an even grand.

Still, the Galaxy was one of the Strip’s oldest hotels, and it boasted the biggest and most profitable sports book in town, so Magnolia couldn’t skip it on the Grand Zem Tour. Besides, it had financial ties to three leading Downtown casinos, a whole different breed from the Strip titans, so it was important as a tool in bringing them in line. Once the Galaxy signed onto Zem’s plan (which it would, Magnolia knew, by whatever means proved necessary) all of Fremont Street would neatly follow.

Magnolia had postponed meeting the boys scouts as long as she could. She’d been reading a little mythology in her free hours, the few she had, and she had been imagining the boy scouts turning into oak trees (a new symbol of stubbornness) or wild boars (crashing through the casino and wrecking it) or something even weirder. The idea was repellent, yet somehow... enticing. Their appointment with the boy scouts drew her like a ten car pileup, and she was just as horrified at her own thirst for violence as she was at the prospect of whatever scout bloodshed Zem might wreak.

“Vegas is in trouble,” he’d begun, just as he always did.

“We know that. You can save your breath. We’re not falling into the same traps, and we’re not suffering.”

“Ah, but you will,” Zem told them smoothly. He’d been interrupted before.

“No, we don’t intend to,” the other associate president– the intellectual one this time, as opposed to the hot-headed one. They were like a pair of a Ken dolls, two clean-cut, thin, slightly-harried suburban boys. But one wore glasses and had dark hair, while the other got his thick locks streaked blond and drove sports cars. They were named Dan and Sam, respectively. “The Galaxy’s profits are up,” Dan continued, “Our customer counts are consistent, and our sports book brings in enough money to run the whole place if we need it to.”

“Yes, I’ve heard about your famous sports book.” Zem looked over at Magnolia, and she guessed– she was beginning to think she could read a few of his moods, although he revealed very little, which drove her crazy– that she saw impatience. She tensed, or would have if she hadn’t already been sitting straight up with every muscle tighter than it had been since her last time swinging on a pole. “That sports book has quite a loyal following, doesn’t it?” Zem asked them.

He looked back and forth from Dan to Sam. One had to. They sat on opposite sides of an antique partner desk that more than filled their office, a one-time hotel room in the Galaxy’s motor-lodge-like building. Behind them a wall of glass revealed the pool two stories down. The aqua shag carpeting had not been changed since sometime in the early seventies, and just about matched the pool through the window.

Zem looked back and forth again. All meetings with the rulers of the Galaxy were like table tennis matches. “Someone told me that you get many of the same customers who came here twenty or thirty years ago. They’ve been coming here longer than you two have been alive, some of them. They’re still making jokes about the hotel’s last remodel.”

“That’s right–” Sam, the daredevil, blurted, “We get all our loyal customers. So what do we need with any new ‘new Vegas’? All the other places can go to hell, we’ll still be here raking in the cash.”

“Those loyal customers must be getting old,” Zem said.

The boys looked at each other. Magnolia waited, knowing this was their Achilles heel, and knowing also that they knew it. The Galaxy, aside from having the most money-making sports book and the most out-of-date carpet, drew by far the oldest demographic of any property in Vegas.

“Gamblers don’t live forever,” Zem continued. “In fact, they have shorter life expectancies than anyone except for coal miners. It’s amazing you still have enough customers to require a full staff to serve them, if you’re relying on the people who first came here in the Sixties and Seventies.”

“And besides,” he continued, “What happens when the rest of the town goes bust all around you? Or goes in a new direction, all at once and all together? Do you have a brilliant plan for that eventuality?”

Magnolia was a little disappointed. Zem’s argument was a good one, and she knew that Dan and Sam had no answer, but they’d also heard it endless times before. They’d been questioned this way by competitors and union bosses and high school journalists, for god’s sake. Magnolia looked at her new lord and master and waited. He’d better have something more convincing up his sleeve.

“We exist in a different arc of the spectrum from most other properties–” Dan was saying.

Magnolia caught Zem’s eye. She looked at him, glanced at her watch, then looked back at the two rebellious mini-executives facing them.

He frowned. She seemed to be waiting for some big performance from him. Lightning bolts or thunderstorms or turning himself into a huge, horrifying monster to eat everybody in sight.

Well, he’d done those things, of course. But it had been awhile.

“The ‘New Vegas’ can do whatever it wants, Mr. Zem, we here at the Galaxy don’t need gimmicks or...” Dan was still talking. Zem had never met someone so young who was so long-winded. With so very little to say.

Zem looked at Magnolia again. She was watching the boy scouts, then glancing at him sidelong. He sighed.

He wished she wouldn’t expect so much. That was one difference in the modern world he’d noticed– godly terrors and miracles were so in demand. A deity never got the chance to strike without warning, these days. Everything had been pre-planned, requested and prepared before he even got involved.

Still... perhaps Magnolia deserved her big show from him. And perhaps it would inspire her as well as these two nincompoops.

He was growing tired, anyway. Dan and Sam clearly weren’t going to surrender before logic. Dan was saying something about demographics and marketing objectives, and Sam was interrupting regularly with barbs and insults about their competitors, which Dan would then backpeddle and try to mitigate. Pure MBA-speak, the whole performance. He tuned in enough to hear:

“...the bottom line, Mr. Zem, is that we’re not sheep here at the Galaxy. We won’t be herded–”

“Ah ha!” Zem exploded in his turn, and stood. “That’ll do it,” he said to Magnolia.

The two associate presidents had stood up, too. Sam raised his fists like a schoolyard tough guy. Zem didn’t notice. He just looked at them, and Magnolia got the big dramatic moment she’d been looking for.

The Boy Scouts shrank. And changed. They fell forward, their hands clumping back down on their desk and their heads flopping. Their bodies grew rounder. And softer. They sprouted wool, it curled all over them. Their semi-good suits– high priced, but bought at middling department stores, hardly first rate– fell apart and fell away, and more wool popped out. Their faces lengthened and horns grew from their temples, then migrated up their heads farther. Their eyes became hard like pebbles. Their ears disappeared, and new, much bigger ones, sprouted.

After perhaps a minute, the transformation was complete, and Zem and Magnolia were across the partner desk from two black and white goats, each standing with its front hooves on the desk, slipping on the polished surface and looking alarmed. As much as goats can look alarmed.

“They’re not sheep,” Zem said.

One of the goats said, “Meeeeh.”

NEXT POST: A DIVINE COMMISSION (Friday 9/25)