You got to Go

by Royal Hopper

A co worker of mine, a casino order keeper someone I liked a little and respected a good deal, a had a saying he was fond of quoting when people in his casino behaved like angry children and it was time for them to leave. It is one I remember all the rest of my life.

“You got to go,” Bill would say in that deep southern Louisiana drawl squinting like a black southern version of Clint Eastwood and when all other avenues had been exhausted, “ I aint trying to hear it. You got to go.”

As the city has become more and more like a giant frat house _ a giant house of ill repute. It is a phrase we Sinners seem to be saying more and more often to the people who come here to drink gamble and pass out and then wake up and stand half naked on a bench singing “I got to be me.”

“You got to go,” sitting on the bench naked man.

To the man determined to sell time shares in the elevator lobby of a Strip hotel _ Time shares in Brazil mind you _ “You got to go,”

Having an argument in the middle of the Youth Good Sportsman League Basketball Tourney while your kids watch from the court.

“You got to go.” I still remember Bill pointing at the door and uttering those words to three people who nearly started a fight at a child’s basketball Tourney taking place in the hotel convention center.

To the person who tried to reclaim a wallet filled with other people’s drivers licenses and credit cards from three other states from lost and found hours after he was kicked out for disorderly behavior. Those same words were uttered. ”You got to go.”

When the 80-year old tourists compliments you on your Kermit the Frog costume and you look them in the eye and say..”What costume???”

“You got to go.”

When you ask for your money back from a casino in Las Vegas because casinos are known for that kind of thing.

“You got to go.”

Wild rowdy and drunk doesn’t always make for a good night out. They do make for lots of angry drunks having it out just feet from elderly gamblers weaving in and out of slot machines with their impressionable grand children tugging at their pant legs in bored frustration or staring wide eyed at the working girls called Sugar Witch working their magic on guys from Montana called Slim.

“You go to go,” both of you.

Vegas now more corporate than gangster peddles its Cowboy party town, gangster/family image harder than it ever did when gangsters and cowboys and “families” actually ran the town _ and surprise surprise guess who is coming to the city of Sin.

Bill is gone now but the city of Sin rolls along in its confused eternally decadent way. So long Bill you will be missed every time someone crosses the line and someone is needed to say those infamous words.. “You go to go.”
That is life in the City of Sin fellow Sinners.
To all my Sin City brothers and sisters

Rock On