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Jimmy Diamond--or rather, Jimmy
Diamond!--stared at the Cherries, Cherries, Lemon displayed
on the slot machine he was pumping, his stomach clanging from the row
of Bells on the $2-Play line: if only he had played two silver
dollars instead of one, he would have hit an $800 jackpot!
He tried to talk himself into believing that the machine
was now primed for the next pull, the very next one. But its grill work
grinned back with the same smart-assed muteness of the Dog and he knew
that nothing he could say would change its unrelenting "thingness," deaf
as a statue and for that reason a heckler of words.
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"Play me! Play me!" screamed his last dead presidents,
their metal faces hot in his fist.
If he lost them all, he wouldn't be able to feed
the Dog. The god-damned Dog! Already he'd blown auditions at half
the casinos on The Strip, trying to get the Dog to talk--as it did
back in East St. Louis. As it did everywhere except on stage. If
only he had auditioned his own comedy routine as he'd originally
planned, he'd be booked into a swanky room by now. How could he
have been so dumb to trust fame to a dog!
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