NBA Owners' net worth (Dan Gilbert's net worth rose from $7.5 billion to $45.3 billion this year)
...After his company went public. I had to include that in the title. Maybe now he won't be such a cheap bastard with his GMs. I had no idea Gilbert was now the second richest owner in the league. Which made me wonder what other owners are worth (the title of this post was almost "why is Tilman Fertitta such a cheap bastard while Joe Lacob spends money like he thinks the shit's gonna rot?"). Which brings us to this handy Forbes list from March: 1. Steve Ballmer (Los Angeles Clippers): $51.4 billion Ballmer scored a huge win this week for his dream of building a new arena. He bought the Forum for $400 million from the Madison Square Garden Company, which tried to block a new Clippers arena near the Forum in Inglewood, California. 2. Philip Anschutz (Los Angeles Lakers): $11.2 billion Anschutz owns one-third of the Lakers, plus the arena in which they play, the Staples Center, in addition to the NHL’s Kings. \For those wondering, it's hard to find a reliable source on Jeanie's net worth but according to unreliable sources it's in the ballpark of $500 million* 3.Stanley Kroenke (Denver Nuggets): $10 billion The real estate and sports mogul owns teams in the NBA, the NHL, the NFL, MLS and the Premier League. 4.Joseph Tsai (Brooklyn Nets): $9.9 billion The cofounder of Alibaba Group completed his purchase of the Nets last year for $2.3 billion and bought the Barclays Center for an additional $1 billion. 5. Robert Pera (Memphis Grizzlies): $7.1 billion Pera owns nearly three-quarters of wireless equipment maker Ubiquiti Networks. He was the lead investor in the Grizzlies purchase in 2012. 6. Daniel Gilbert (Cleveland Cavaliers): $6.2 billion Gilbert made his first fortune from Quicken Loans, the largest online mortgage lender, which he cofounded in 1985 at 22 years old.*List is from March, before the IPO 7. Tom Gores (Detroit Pistons): $5.7 billion Gores and his brother Alec are both private equity billionaires. The Pistons opened a new $90 million headquarters and training facility in September. 8. Micky Arison (Miami Heat): $5.3 billion Arison’s net worth plummeted 33% over the past six weeks with the collapse in the stock price of Carnival Corp. The world’s largest cruise ship operator was founded by Arison’s father in 1972. 9. Tilman Fertitta (Houston Rockets): $4.4 billion Fertitta furloughed roughly 40,000 employees at his casino and restaurant empire to curb the economic impact caused by coronavirus-induced shutdowns. His fortune is derived from his ownership of the Golden Nugget Casinos and Landry’s, a Texas-based restaurant and entertainment company. 10. Mark Cuban (Dallas Mavericks): $4.3 billion Cuban was one of the first sports team owners to commit to paying hourly arena workers for games missed during the coronavirus crisis. He’s invested more than $20 million as a “shark” on ABC’s popular Shark Tank show. 11. Joshua Harris (Philadelphia 76ers): $3.7 billion Harris cofounded private equity powerhouse Apollo Global Management in 1990 with fellow billionaires Leon Black and Marc Rowan. He remains a managing director there. 12. Gayle Benson (New Orleans Pelicans): $3.2 billion Benson inherited the Pelicans and the NFL’s Saints when her husband, Tom, died in 2018. 13. Glen Taylor (Minnesota Timberwolves): $2.8 billion His printing firm, Taylor Corp., generates more than $2 billion in revenue annually. Taylor also owns stakes in Minnesota’s MLS and WNBA teams. 14. Herb Simon (Indiana Pacers): $2.6 billion The real estate mogul bought the Pacers with his since-deceased brother, Melvin, in 1983, for $10.5 million. Simon Property Group is one of the world’s largest real estate investment trusts, with 206 properties in the U.S. 15.Antony Ressler (Atlanta Hawks): $2.4 billion Ressler cofounded private equity firm Ares Management in 1997. He owns a small piece of the Milwaukee Brewers, in addition to his controlling stake in the Hawks. 16. Michael Jordan (Charlotte Hornets): $2.1 billion The NBA’s GOAT sold a minority stake in the Hornets in September in a deal that valued the team at $1.5 billion. Nike pays Jordan more than $100 million annuallybased on growing sales for the company’s Jordan Brand. 17. Marc Lasry (Milwaukee Bucks): $1.8 billion Lasry, a hedge fund titan, joined Wes Edens to buy the Bucks in 2014 for $550 million. He was born in Morocco and moved to the U.S. at age 7 with his family. 18. Gail Miller (Utah Jazz): $1.7 billion Miller transferred ownership of the Jazz in 2017 to a family legacy trust to deter her heirs from selling or moving the team. Gail and her since-deceased husband, Larry, bought the team for $22 million in 1986. 19. Jerry Reinsdorf (Chicago Bulls): $1.5 billion Reinsdorf led a group of investors who bought a controlling stake in the Bulls for $9.2 million in 1985. Good timing. It was one year after the team drafted Michael Jordan, who led the Bulls to six NBA titles. The team is now worth $3.2 billion. 20. Theodore Leonsis (Washington Wizards): $1.4 billion Leonsis initially built his fortune as a senior executive at AOL, before investing in sports teams like the Wizards and the NHL’s Capitals. *Not included on the list but googled for your edification: DeVos Family (Magic): $5.4 billion James Dolan (Knicks): $2 billion Joe Lacob (Warriors): $1.2 billion Vivek Randive (Kings): $700 million Robert Sarver (Suns): $400 million Jody Allen (Trail Blazers): The sister of Microsoft cofounder, Paul G. Allen, took control of the team after his death. At the time her brother was worth $20 billion though he intended to give most of his fortune away... Boston Basketball Partners LLC (Celtics): An American local private investment group formed to purchase the Boston Celtics Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment (Raptors): The Raptors are a subsidiary of MLSE The Professional Basketball Club, LLC (Thunder): A group of OKC businessmen "who represent a wide variety of local and national business interests" owns the Thunder Spurs Sports & Entertainment LLC (Spurs): An American sports & entertainment organization, based in San Antonio, Texas owns the San Antonio Spurs
Later this month, I'm going to Black Hawk for the first time. I'm looking into different travel options, to get there from Denver. Thoughts on Ace Casino Bus? Have you taken it? Is it okay/decent?
This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 64%. (I'm a bot)
DENVER - The ballot measure to legalize sports gambling in the state and to tax casino proceeds from the sportsbooks at 10% to pay for the Colorado water plan narrowly passed after more votes were counted Wednesday. Colorado now will join at least 11 other states that have legalized sports gambling, and there are a slew of other states considering legislation. Black Hawk, Central City and Cripple Creek voters all on Tuesday passed municipal questions authorizing sports betting at the casinos there, opening the door for casino sportsbooks there now that DD has passed. The bipartisan proponents had hoped that Coloradans will continue to approve taxes on things formerly illegal - as they did with marijuana - in order to help pay for state programs and to pull sports gambling in the state off the black market. The state Division of Gaming will regulate the gambling and has until next May to come up with the rules on how the program will get off the ground, how it will operate, and how it will ensure that those who are gambling are of the legal age. People will be able to gamble through the apps or at any of the 33 casinos in Colorado that decide to operate a sports book.
Summary Source | FAQ | Feedback | Topkeywords: gamble#1state#2vote#3sports#4casino#5 Post found in /news. NOTICE: This thread is for discussing the submission topic. Please do not discuss the concept of the autotldr bot here.
We were faithful practitioners of an antique religion, the malevolent priesthood of a primitive and chemical mystery.
Denver Spring 2011 We were faithful practitioners of an antique religion, the malevolent priesthood of a primitive and chemical mystery. All but vanished for decades, a vein of revival made its way up from Mexico in the early 1990s. Upon conversion, we sold all we had to follow our goddess. In back alleys and hotel rooms all around Denver, we built altars with blackened spoons, the bottom halves of aluminum cans, gnawed and looped leather belts, orange-capped needles, lighters, and empty cigarette boxes, the worn relics of our sacrament and liturgy. We cooked magical potions and conjured blissful sleep with vapors the smell of vinegar and brown sugar, kneeling before her altar and letting blood from our arms. We would have sacrificed our first born if she asked. Heroin was life for us, and without her we were dead. Every heartbeat. Every thought. Every move. Every drop of gasoline in the car. Every cent we made. Every calorie we consumed. Every breath was devoted to the chase for more. In Denver, four Hondurans started selling heroin and cocaine at 5 in the morning. They came like clockwork, because they got off the first bus that brought them to Civic Center Park. Besides Chivo, it was the only other means we knew to get heroin in town, and it was the only place it was available at 5 a.m. Chivo started at 8, but sickness started early. The Hondurans sold dimes, or 10 dollars’ worth, in tightly wrapped balls made from cut squares of trash bag. Black was heroin. White was cocaine. They sold five for $40 as an incentive to buyers and allowed any combination. At Walmart on Wadsworth and Colfax, we woke up before 5, sick as usual. I gathered together the random CDs in the car and went to see if one of the Hondurans in the park would trade a dime of black for them. Roger was the one we knew best, but he laughed at my offer. He seemed annoyed. He would not look at me. We were out of luck, so we parked on Corona Street off Colfax right next to a 7-Eleven. In the car, we stretched and yawned. Our bodies ached, and the anxiety set in. We never knew where we would get it. We just had to have it. Watery snot and tears started, the sure signs of dope sickness. “What are we going to do, Bubby?” Danielle lay back in the passenger seat. “I don’t know, baby. I’m tired. We can call Chivo and ask for another front, or we can do something, but it’s too early to call Chivo. Let me chill for a minute. We’ll get it. Don’t worry. I don’t know how but we will.” She always said she liked me better when I was sick. Heroin made me extremely mean and difficult. When I was sick, I felt exposed and sensitive. Television commercials would bring tears to my eyes, and I was nice to her. “OK, Bubby. I’m sick as sh*t.” She held her stomach. “I know, baby. Me too.” I folded my arms and closed my eyes. My back and head ached. I pushed back into the driver’s seat. Not two minutes passed before we heard a knock on the window. A strange individual tried to talk to us through the closed window. Thick glasses, a shaved head, orange freckles on pale skin, a gaunt face. Maybe a man. Maybe a lesbian. I tried to tell the person to wait till we rolled the window down, but the person continued to talk. As the window lowered, I could hear he was a man. “I need a ride out of here! Right now! I’ve got money! I’ll pay you. I have to get out of Colorado!” He seemed genuinely desperate for our help. Through the window he flashed several bills, mostly ones and a five. It was good enough for me. “Get in!” Danielle had to open the door for him to crawl into the back, and we took off. “Where do you want to go?” I didn’t know where he went. There was nothing in the back seat but a pile of clothes. “I don’t know! Anywhere, out of Colorado!” His voice came from the clothes the pile of unfolded and dirty clothes under which he had buried himself. “Well, maybe you could give us a little more direction. Like, New Mexico? Nebraska? Utah? If you pay, we’ll take you anywhere you want.” I remembered the condition of my release from jail. My travels were not to exceed a 150-mile radius from Adams County, but money was on the line. “Utah. Sure. Let’s go there.” Traffic halted for miles on the interstate. It was from people headed to work in Denver, so we were stuck for a while. He talked about the people chasing him. They wanted to kill him, and the cops would send him to prison. He had spent the previous night jumping fences to escape. A day or two before that, he threw away several ounces in a hotel room of the Black Hawk Casino, because he thought he was being set up. Danielle and I knew what he needed. “Why don’t you let us get you some heroin? That’ll calm you down. We can get a hotel room and get some brown. Hey, what’s your name anyway? If we are going to be helping you escape and partners in crime, we should know each other’s’ names.” “I’m Earl.” “I’m Riley. This is Danielle.” He agreed that getting heroin was a good idea, so we pulled off at the next exit, and called Chivo. We found a Motel 6, and Danielle checked into the room for us. Earl snuck in while we waited for Chivo. We never had much money to score, so Chivo’s driver hurried to meet us at the gas station down the street. Out of the four $50 balloons, Earl gave us three to share, and he did so several more times, always giving us three and keeping one. It was like Christmas morning, and we were little kids. When Danielle and I got high, we bickered and said nasty things to one another, not as a matter of any real hurt or problems we had, but like an allergic reaction to the heroin. There were two or three days in a row of us sitting in a dark, cool hotel room watching HBO high on heroin and Danielle and I squabbling. Earl spent time on his computer and whined about our fussing and fighting. “You guys should love one another. You never know when you won’t have the other one with you again.” He whimpered. His life was hard, one of six boys, the youngest, and regularly raped by one of his brothers. His father hated him. In New York City, he found love with an old man named Tony, who taught him the trade of stealing fine art. They were busted together and sent to different prisons; Tony died of AIDS. I guessed. Danielle and I thought Earl turned tricks off the internet for the money he had, but we had no proof. On our third day together, he had us drop him off in the middle of nowhere between Boulder and Denver, because he did not want to hear us fight. His countenance was depressed, and he wouldn’t make eye contact. Danielle and I came back from trying to score all day at around 6:30, to find Earl outside of the room waiting for us. He got four balloons as usual, but this time he only gave us one and kept three. Then he gave us 20 bucks and sent us to Wendy’s to get some dinner. Earl lay on the floor sweaty and flaccid by the time we got back to the room. A few slaps to the face and yells of his name proved he had overdosed. Danielle shrieked and flapped her hands at her face in fear, while I ran to the bathroom and saturated a hand towel with water. When I wrung it out over his face and the water hit him he came to. “Hey, mother f*cker, we’re calling 911! You need to go to the hospital!” I didn’t take his attempt at suicide personally. It was his prerogative far as I saw it, but overdosing himself in the hotel room where we slept was unacceptable. “No! No! No! Don’t call the ambulance. I’m okay. I’m okay.” He begged us not to call. I listened to him, for some reason. Soon after all of it, I regretted not robbing him of all his money and sending him overdosed to the hospital. We would have been gone with his electronics and money before he got out of the hospital. We feared that he would asphyxiate, so we made him sit up against the corner of the room on his bed while we watched TV. The blankets were around him, and Danielle and I must have given cues that I was nodding out with our conversation. His eyes were closed, but he was awake. “See? Riley is nodding out,” said Earl. Why doesn’t he have to go to the hospital?” “Shut the f*ck up, Earl. Or we will call 911 to come get your overdosing a**.” It was 10:30. “It’s not fair. You are as high as I am.” “Shut the f*ck up, Earl!” He was snoring at 1:30 when I went to sleep. “The Hangover” played mute on the TV. Danielle woke me up at 10. “Riley. Riley. Wake up. I think he’s dead.” “No, he’s not dead.” I opened my eyes and looked at him. I was not so sure. “I’m pretty sure he’s dead, Bubby! He looks dead!” “No. He’s not dead. Let’s find a rinse before we check.” We found the bottom half of a coke can on a shelf below the TV. It had a spot of brown goo on the edge with a gray, shriveled cotton in the middle. It was all that was left of the three balloons he did the day before. I wondered how he managed to get that much tar into a syringe and inject it while we were at Wendy’s. I thought he must have skin-popped it. It would have been several injections of black sludge, and if he had hit a vein the first one would have put him out. We washed the bottom of the coke can with water and sucked it through his old cotton. It was not the clean thing to do, but we didn’t care. She peed on the toilet and kept telling me he was dead while I split the syringes of slightly colored water. I denied it one more time before I hit a vein in her arm and then my own. I walked out first and went over to his bed. I focused on his mouth and the strand of drool hanging from his chin. It was dried out and stuck there, the consistency of hair-sprayed spider web. When I put my hand on his shoulder to shake him awake, I screamed “Earl!” But he rolled over, cold and stiff. His legs never unfolded or changed position. The dried-out stalactite of drool stood upside down in the air, and his head hung off the bed. His eyes belonged on ice at the supermarket. They may as well have been a pair of yellow, lumpy grapes for all the life that they had in them. “He’s dead!” Danielle cried. I pulled him off the bed onto the floor. It only took a second for me to consider what money he might have on him and I reached into the pocket of his shorts to find a black leather wallet. There were $250 dollars, so I took the two big bills and left the $50. Danielle called 911 like we should have the night before. She said the operator said to give him mouth-to-mouth. One look at his dead mouth and the thought of the stale air trapped in his lungs settled in my mind that I was not giving him mouth-to- mouth. “I’m not giving him mouth-to-mouth!” “Come on, Riley! Just try! Is he cold?” “Not cold, but he’s not warm. If you want to give him mouth-to-mouth get over here and do it. Or they can come do it, but I AM NOT doing it!” She talked into the phone. “He’s not completely cold. Is that a good thing? Is there a chance he might live?” She asked in tears and then turned to me. “She says to put your mouth on his mouth and breathe.” “Hang up!” We gathered the syringes and cookers and balloons and threw them in the dumpster at the back of the parking lot. We stepped outside as the fire truck pulled up. They quickly gave up on trying to resuscitate Earl’s dead body. One squad car pulled up, then another, and one more. A cop put up the yellow tape around the room, and they separated Danielle and me, to question us. She spoke so I could hear her, to get our stories to match up. The black cop dressed in blues flirted with her. She flirted back and told him she was a stripper. As I wrote a statement on the hot hood of a running squad car in the sun, I wondered how many years I could get for it. Would these be my last minutes of freedom, scribbling and nervous on the hood of a cop car? An unmarked car pulled up with two detectives. They wore jackets, slacks and ties and had personality. They slicked their black hair back, true to their Hispanic heritage. One of them talked to me about the Hornets and mentioned the Nuggets. Sickly scents of pomade and cologne mixed with fear to turn my stomach. The detective’s partner walked around and talked to the policemen before he walked up to me. “Look. We got an overdose to go to right after this, two blocks away. Another dead body. We don’t have time for all of this. Where are the syringes and cookers? You don’t think he overdosed on air, do you? No. We don’t either. Now, we understand, you and your girlfriend got scared and hid all the stuff. But we need some evidence of his drug use. We need some syringes for evidence, and we’ll get you two on your way. I promise.” They took me to the dumpster where we tossed the stuff, and made me climb in, but I couldn’t find it. There were several empty 20-ounce bottles from another room with syringes in them. We never put our syringes in bottles like that, but the detective seemed satisfied. “OK. Grab a few and give them to me.” They took some pictures and got our written statements. Things wrapped up, and the coroner came. A hearse came to pick up the body. It was obvious that one of the two men working for the company with the hearse enjoyed his job, maybe too much. He wore a black three-piece suit and a felt top hat, with a gold chain to a watch in his breast pocket and a monocle. I didn’t know hearses picked up overdosed bodies out of hotel rooms, but that’s what I saw that day. When they finally took the yellow police tape down and released us from the scene, Danielle jumped into my arms and wrapped her legs around my waist. We shouted in glee and relief and made out in front of the last two cops on the scene. It was over, and we were free. I still had the $200. The first thing we did was call Chivo and met one of his guys at a gas station. When his driver showed up, I told him what happened. It didn’t matter to him. They wanted the money. At some point in the day, I spilled the last of our heroin out of a cooker onto my khaki pants. She was mad, so we went to Home Depot on Quebec. I tried to steal a bunch of copper wire to scrap for money, but on the way out of the door, Loss Prevention drove me to the ground so hard the scab on my knee had fabric from my pants in it and turned green. Denver County smelled better than Adams, and they let me out after three days for petit theft. A week later, the coroner called to ask what I knew about Earl. I told him what Earl told me; maybe it was true, maybe not, but it’s what he said. His tone of voice seemed bewildered over the phone. Sometime after that, on our way to Danielle’s first night at the Hustler Club, a strange figure riding a scooter on Colfax pulled up next to us. Danielle and I looked over at a lesbian in her mid-50s wearying a black leather cap and vest, thick glasses, orange freckles and pale face. Her hair was red and grey and buzzed off. Could it be Earl? It looked exactly like him. We laughed about when the 911 operator had instructed us to give him mouth-to-mouth. I never felt much about robbing the dead man, or the fact that the last words he heard before he died were me telling him to, “shut the f*ck up.” There was no time to feel bad about it, when spilled hits of heroin and three days in jail were so disappointing. The only thing I ever thought about it was that we should have robbed him when he was overdosed and called the paramedics. It would have been less trouble for us.
Natsuki’s POV Gah… My head hurts… Where am I…? I cracked my eyes open. The sun was shining bright. My head was pounding. What happened last…? Oh. Right. She left me. I had stopped Dr. Renier, thank fuck. At least they’d be safe. I sat up. There was dried blood in the spot around me. I grabbed some bandages out of my pocket and wrapped them around my head, tightly. The stream beside me was red. I must’ve bled into there. How long was I out…? I didn’t know. I looked to where the cult’s truck was. Good. They’re gone. They must’ve thought I was dead. I tried standing. It was a huge effort, but I could do it. My legs were trembling. My head was spinning. I hobbled forward, on the road. Maybe… Maybe they’d be there, waiting for me. Now that’s a load of bullshit. Monika hates me. She left me for a reason. Something snapped inside her. Alex wasn’t going to fight it. Sayori and Yuri were nowhere in sight. They hadn’t been seen since they left for wherever they went. So that means I’m alone. Fucking christ. I’m alone. I took a deep breath in. I just… I just need to focus. Where am I going? I was heading down the road. My supplies: The knife, The Nemesis, some bandages and a couple of granola bars. “Heh. Yay.” I croaked with sarcasm stinging in my voice. Hey. At least I’m not dead. The sun beat down on my back as I moved forward. I… need… water…. My throat was dry. My stomach groaned. It felt like I was back there, eating stale bread every two days, or whenever they felt like it. Maybe I can… get back to Alex’s house. I can rest there… Y-Yeah… There it is.... I think. I stumbled. My head spun. I-I’m on the front lawn. I collapsed. C-C’mon… It’s right there... There wasn’t a door. It was blown off. I-I can make it… I got inside. It was so much cooler… The air conditioning was on. I got to my knees and crawled to the sink. I hoisted myself up, turned on the faucet, and plunged my face into the water. After I got enough, I felt good enough to stand. I grabbed myself some eggs out of the fridge, and got to work cooking it. Within a couple of minutes, I heard a dog barking. I looked at the stairs to see Charlie, bolting towards. “Ch-Charlie?” What was he doing here? “I thought you were with Alex…” He barked and nuzzled his head into my leg. I pat him on the head and put the cooked eggs on a plate. I grabbed some dried thyme out of the pantry, and put a pinch on each egg. I sat down at the dining room table and dug in. Charlie sat at my feet under the table. Each bite shot me straight up to the stars. It was like heaven. I finished the meal up in a few quick bites. Okay, Nat… I thought to myself. What to do… I can’t stay here, sadly. I need to find them. We have Alex’s truck… Charlie… The food here… More weapons and medical supplies too. “So… Head into the mountains…” I said out loud to myself. It was true, some miles east I’d be going into the nearby city. Monika or MC had never taken us there… I wonder why. They were probably heading there right now. That was the direction Monika had been mumbling to herself in the past couple of days. Should I…? I had no clue of what was out there. It could be dangerous. But… I could also find someone who could help us. I silently agreed in my head. Within an hour, Charlie and I had everything we could packed up in the truck. I was just hauling the last cooler of food into the truck’s flatbed when Charlie came running up to me. I smiled and pat him on the head. “Ready to get going?” He barked happily. I had finally gotten everything in the truck. I wiped a bit of sweat off my brow and looked inside. “Alright, I think I got everything.” I looked over to Charlie, who was panting from the heat. I opened up the door to the truck and he hopped in. I shut it and ran back inside to grab the keys Alex left on the counter. “Okay, Nat. Weapons? Check. Food and water? Check. Money to pay for gas?” I nodded. I was thankful Alex was rich enough to keep spare cash lying around. He was–or used to be–a doctor, meaning he was paid a good salary. Also luckily, he was an… unstable guy. I mean, he bought tons of alcohol and kept the bottles laying around. I’m sure he went to the BlackHawk casino areas and did some gambling from time to time. Plus, he was known to smoke. So yeah… He kept change lying around. I eyed a pack lying on the counter. Well… One wouldn’t hurt. I grabbed the smokes off the counter, along with around 500 bucks of cash and stuffed them in my pocket. Hopping in, I saw Charlie waiting patiently in the backseat. He was snoring lightly. I grabbed a map from the front and eyed it down. We were in an area close to Battlement Mesa, called Stone Quarry Gulch. Not a ton of people known to live in this area. I moved my finger east, towards the mountains. Best place to stop is around Evergreen, I thought to myself. I heard it was a nicer area in the Rockies, easy place for tourists to stop. Then I should head up into the city. I nodded my head. I put the keys in the ignition and pulled the gear into reverse. “Alrighty Charlie. Next stop: Evergreen, Colorado.” Keep in mind that this is LOOSELY BASED, meaning that the entire location, I don’t know. I live more in the Denver-ish area.
Have a trip to Denver coming up some friends. Never been to Denver. Upon Googling, it looks like there are a few viable casinos nearby in Black Hawk or Central City. Anyone know which one’s the biggest and best? Is Ameristar decent?
A guy named Carl overdosed and died in our hotel room.
Danielle PART 4 Dead Guy Carl
We were faithful practitioners of an antique religion, the malevolent priesthood of a primitive and chemical mystery that emerged from the soils of Asian jungles and worshipped by tribal factions of the middle east and orient through the 19th century. All but vanished for decades, a vein of revival made its way up from Mexico in the early 1990s. There existed sects in America still.
Upon conversion, we sold all we had to follow our goddess. In back alleys and hotel rooms all around Denver, we built altars with blackened spoons, the bottom halves of aluminum cans, looped belts of gnawed leather, orange capped needles, empty cigarette boxes and lighters. These were the worn relics of sacrament and ministration, our liturgical rite. We cooked magic potions and conjured blissful sleep and vapor the smell of vinegar and brown sugar. Daily devoting ourselves, tying off, kneeling before her altar and letting blood from our arms. We would have sacrificed our first born if she asked.
Heroin was life for us, and without her we were dead. Every heartbeat. Every thought. Every move. Every drop of gasoline in the car. Every cent we made. Every calorie we consumed. Every breath was devoted to the chase for more.
In Denver, four Hondurans started selling heroin and cocaine at five in the morning. They came like clockwork, because they got off the first bus that brought them to Civic Center Park. Besides Chivo, it was the only other place we knew to get heroin in town, and it was the only place it was available at five a.m. Chivo started at eight, but sickness started early. They sold dimes, or ten dollars’ worth, in tightly wrapped balls made from cut squares of trash bag. Black was heroine. White was cocaine. They sold five for 40 dollars as an incentive to buyers and allowed any combination. At Walmart on Wadsworth and Colfax, we woke up before five, sick as usual. I gathered together the random CDs in the car and went to see if one of the Hondurans in the park would trade a dime of black for them. Roger was the one we knew best, but he laughed at my offer. He seemed annoyed. He would not look at me. We were out of luck, so we parked on Corona Street off Colfax right next to a Seven Eleven. In the car, we stretched and yawned. Our bodies ached, and the anxiety set in. We never knew where we would get it. We just had to have it. Watery snot and tears started, the sure signs of dope sickness. “What are we going to do, bubby?” Danielle lay back in the passenger seat. “I don’t know, baby. I’m tired. We can call Chivo and ask for another front, or we can do something, but it’s too early to call Chivo. Let me chill for a minute. We’ll get it. Don’t worry. I don’t know how but we will.” She always said she liked me better when I was sick. Heroine made me extremely mean and difficult. When I was sick, I felt exposed and sensitive. Television commercials brought tears to my eyes, and I was nice to her. “OK, bubby. I’m sick as s***.” She held her stomach. “I know, baby. Me too.” I folded my arms and closed my eyes. My back and head ached. I pushed back into the driver’s seat. Not two minutes passed before we heard a knock on the window. A strange individual tried to talk to us through the closed window. Thick glasses, a shaved head, orange freckles on pale skin, a gaunt face. Maybe a man. Maybe a lesbian. I tried to tell the person to wait till we rolled the window down, but they continued to talk. As the window lowered, I could hear he was a man. “I need a ride out of here! Right now! I’ve got money! I’ll pay you. I have to get out of Colorado!” He seemed genuinely desperate for our help. Through the window he flashed several bills, mostly ones and a five. It was good enough for me. “Get in!” Danielle had to open her door to open the door for him to crawl into the back, and we took off. “Where do you want to go?” I didn’t know where he went. There was nothing in the back seat, but a pile of clothes. “I don’t know! Anywhere, out of Colorado!” His voice came from the clothes. He had buried himself in the pile of unfolded and dirty clothes. “Well, maybe you could give us a little more direction. Like, New Mexico? Nebraska? Utah? If you pay, we’ll take you anywhere you want.” I remembered the condition of my release from jail. My travels were not to exceed a 150-mile radius from Adams County, but money was on the line. “Utah. Sure. Let’s go there.” Traffic halted for miles on the interstate. It was from people headed to work in Denver, so we were stuck for a while. He talked about the people chasing him. They wanted to kill him, and the cops would send him to prison. He had spent the previous night jumping fences to escape. A day or two before that, he threw away several ounces in a hotel room of the Black Hawk Casino, because he thought he was being set up. Danielle and I knew what he needed. “Why don’t you let us get you some heroin? That’ll calm you down. We can get a hotel room and get some brown. Hey, what’s your name anyway? If we are going to be helping you escape and partners in crime, we should know each other’s names.” “I’m Carl.” “I’m Riley. This is Danielle.” He agreed that getting heroin was a good idea, so we pulled off at the next exit, and called Chivo. At 84th and Washington, we found a Motel 6, and she checked into the room, for us. He snuck in while we waited for Chivo. We never had much money to score, so Chivo’s driver hurried to meet us at the gas station down the street. Out of the four 50-dollar balloons, Carl gave us three to share, which he did several more times. He always gave us three and kept one. It was Christmas morning, and we were little kids. When Danielle and I got high, we bickered and said nasty things to one another, not as a matter of any real hurt or problems we had, but like an allergic reaction to the heroin. There were two or three days in a row of us sitting in a dark, cool Motel 6 room watching HBO high on heroin and Danielle and I squabbling. Carl spent time on his computer and whined about our fussing and fighting. “You guys should love one another. You never know when you won’t have the other one with you again.” He whimpered. His life was hard, one of six boys, the youngest, and regularly raped by one of his brothers. His father hated him. In New York City, he found love with an old man named Tony, who taught him the trade of stealing fine art, paintings and such. They were busted together and sent to different prisons where Tony died of AIDS, I guessed. Danielle and I thought Carl turned tricks off the Internet for the money he had, but we had no proof. On our third day together, he had us drop him off in the middle of nowhere between Boulder and Denver, because he did not want to hear us fight. His countenance was quiet and depressed, and he wouldn’t make eye contact. Danielle and I came back from trying to score all day at around 630 to find Carl outside of the room waiting for us. He got four balloons as usual, but this time he only gave us one and kept three. Then he gave us 20 bucks and sent us to Wendy’s to get some dinner. Carl lay on the floor sweaty and flaccid by the time we got back to the room. A few slaps to the face and yells of his name proved he had overdosed. Danielle shrieked and flapped her hands at her face in fear, while I ran to the bathroom and saturated a hand towel with water. When I rung it out over his face and the water hit him he came to. “Hey, mother f***er, we’re calling 911! You need to go to the hospital!” I didn’t take his attempt at suicide personally. It was his prerogative far as I saw it, but overdosing himself in the hotel room where we slept was unacceptable. “No! No! No! Don’t call the ambulance. I’m okay. I’m okay.” He begged us not to call. I listened to him, for some reason. Soon after all of it, I regretted not robbing him for all his money and sending him overdosed to the hospital. We would have been gone with his electronics and money before he got out of the hospital. We feared that he would asphyxiate, so we made him sit up against the corner of the room on his bed while we watched TV. The blankets were around him, and she and I must have given cues that I was nodding out with our conversation. His eyes were closed, but he was awake. “See? Riley is nodding out. Why doesn’t he have to go to the hospital?” “Shut the f*** up, Carl. Or we will call 911 to come get your overdosing a**.” It was 1030. “It’s not fair. You are as high as I am.” “Shut the f*** up, Carl!” He was snoring at 130 when I went to sleep. The Hangover played mute on the TV. Danielle woke me up at 10. “Riley. Riley. Wake up. I think he’s dead.” “No, he’s not dead.” I opened my eyes and looked at him. I was not so sure. “I’m pretty sure he’s dead, bubby! He looks dead!” “No. He’s not dead. Let’s find a rinse before we check.” We found the bottom half of a coke can on a shelf below the TV. It had a spot of brown goo on the edge with a gray, shriveled cotton in the middle. It was all that was left of the three balloons he did the day before. I wondered how he managed to get that much tar into a syringe and inject it while we were at Wendy’s. I thought he must have skin-popped it. It would have been several injections of black sludge, and if he had hit a vein the first one would have put him out. We washed the bottom of the coke can with water and sucked it through his old cotton. It was not the clean thing to do, but we didn’t care. She peed on the toilet and kept telling me he was dead while I split the syringes of slightly colored water. I denied it one more time before I hit a vein in her arm and then my own. I walked out first and went over to his bed. I focused on his mouth and the strand of drool hanging from his chin. It was dried out and stuck there, the consistency of hair sprayed spider web. When I put my hand on his shoulder to shake him awake, I said, “Carl!” But he rolled over, cold and stiff. His legs never unfolded or changed position. The dried-out stalactite of drool stood upside down in the air, and his head hung off the bed. His eyes belonged on ice at the super market. They may as well have been a pair of yellow, lumpy grapes for all the life that they had in them. “He’s dead!” Danielle cried. I pulled him off the bed onto the floor. It only took a second for me to consider what money he might have on him and reached into the pocket of his shorts to find a black leather wallet. There were 250 dollars, so I took the two big bills and left the 50. Danielle called 911 like we should have the night before. She said the operator said to give him mouth to mouth. One look at his dead mouth and the thought of the stale air trapped in his lungs settled it in my mind that I was not giving him mouth to mouth. “I’m not giving him mouth to mouth!” “Come on, Riley! Just try! Is he cold?” “Not cold, but he’s not warm. If you want to give him mouth to mouth get over here and do it. Or they can come do it, but I AM NOT doing it!” She talked into the phone. “He’s not completely cold. Is that a good thing? Is there a chance he might live?” She asked in tears and then turned to me. “She says to put your mouth on his mouth and breath.” “Hang up!” We gathered the syringes and cookers and balloons and threw the in the dumpster at the back of the parking lot. We stepped outside as the fire truck pulled up. They quickly gave up on trying to resuscitate Carl’s dead body. One squad car pulled up, then another, and one more. A cop put up the yellow tape around the room, and they separated Danielle and me, to question us. She spoke so I could hear her, to get our stories to match up. The black cop dressed in blues flirted with her. She flirted back and told him she was a stripper. As I wrote a statement on the hot hood of a running squad car in the sun, I wondered how many years I could get for it. Would these be my last minutes of freedom scribbling and nervous on the hood of a cop car? An unmarked car pulled up with two detectives. They wore jackets, slacks and ties and had personality. They slicked their black hair back true to their Hispanic heritage. One of them talked to me about the Hornets and mentioned the Nuggets. Sickly scents of pomade and cologne mixed with fear to turn my stomach. His partner walked around and talked to the policemen before he walked up to me. “Look. We got an overdose to go to right after this, two blocks away. Another dead body. We don’t have time for all of this. Where are the syringes and cookers? You don’t think he overdosed on air, do you? No. We don’t either. Now, we understand, you and your girlfriend got scared and hid all the stuff. But we need some evidence of his drug use. We need some syringes for evidence, and we’ll get you two on your way. I promise.” They took me to the dumpster where we tossed the stuff, and made me climb in, but I couldn’t find it. There were several empty 20 oz. bottles from another room with syringes in them. We never put our syringes in bottles like that, but the detective seemed satisfied. “OK. Grab a few and give them to me.” They took some pictures and got our written statements. Things wrapped up, and the coroner came. A hearse came to pick up the body. It was obvious that one of the two men working for the company with the hearse enjoyed his job, maybe too much. He had a black three-piece suit and a felt top hat on, with a gold chain to a watch in his breast pocket. He wore a monocle. I didn’t know hearses picked up overdosed bodies out of hotel rooms, but that’s what I saw that day. When they finally took the yellow police tape down and released us from the scene, she jumped into my arms and wrapped her legs around my waist. We shouted in glee and relief and made out in front of the last two cops on the scene. It was over, and we were free. I still had the 200 hundred dollars. The first thing we did was call Chivo and met one of his guys at a gas station. When his driver showed up, I told him what happened. It didn’t matter to him. They wanted the money. At some point in the day, I spilled the last of our heroin out of a cooker onto my khaki pants. She was mad, so we went to Home Depot on Quebec. I tried to steal a bunch of copper wire, but on the way out of the door, loss prevention drove me to the ground so hard the scab on my knee had fabric from my pants in it and turned it green. Denver County smelled better than Adams, and they let me out after three days for petit theft. A week later, the coroner called to ask what I knew about Carl. I told him what Carl told me, maybe it was true, maybe not, but it’s what he said. His tone of voice seemed bewildered over the phone. Sometime after that, on our way to Danielle’s first night at the Hustler Club, a strange figure riding a scooter on Colfax pulled up next to us. Danielle and I looked over at a 55-year-old lesbian in a black leather cap and vest, thick glasses, orang freckles and pale face. Her hair was red and grey and buzzed off. Could it be Carl? It looked exactly like him. We laughed about when the 911 operator had instructed us to give him mouth to mouth. I never felt much about robbing the dead man, or the fact that the last words he heard before he died were me telling him to, “shut the f*** up.” There was no time to feel bad about it, when spilled hits of heroin and three days in jail were so disappointing. The only thing I ever thought about it was that I should have robbed him when he was overdosed and called the paramedics. It would have been less trouble for us.
Nader Wahdan claims first place in Heartland Poker Tour
Winning a major tournament is the kind of experience that poker players are dreaming of, even those who choose to stick mostly to cash games. Prevailing at a shorthanded table is not the same as outshining hundreds of opponents in a live event that lasts for a couple of days. Titan Poker presents its members with the chance of enjoying the best of both worlds, by providing the kind of gaming experience that is all-inclusive. More recently the online poker room decided to expand its offer, to include live tournaments Instead of running the competitions themselves, they chose to award generous packages to those players who win qualifiers. The satellites for live events run live throughout the week and those who have a keen eye for such tournaments are going to be happy with what they get. The Heartland Poker Tour recently crowned its winner and even though there were no players winning packages as a result of playing online, there was no shortage of competitors.Golden Gates Resort in Black Hawk, Colorado was the gracious host for the competition and the $1,650 Main Event was the highlight of the series. There were a couple of poker professionals who found it worthwhile to attend the event, but the vast majority of the players were ambitious amateurs. Greg Raymer and Chris Tryba were among those pros who tried their luck at these tables, but the first prize evaded them and eventually landed in the lap of Nader Wahdan. The poker player made the final table with a healthy stack and since most of the pros were already out of the picture, he was among the favorites to win. The guaranteed prize pool was exceeded and the winner was expected to claim in excess of $200k, assuming no deal was made between remaining players. Nader and Chad Leasure were the last players standing and they decided to play it through all the way, with Chad bowing out in the second place for $140k. These are the final table results: 1 Nader Wahdan Aurora, CO $226,8912 Chad Leasure Colorado Springs, CO $140,1703 Phil Mader Grand Island, NE $91,8674 Adam Zimowski Racine, WI $63,8335 Matthew Schierenberg Lakewood, CO $46,3876 Nils Bardsley Denver, CO $36,0017 Colin York Black Hawk, CO $30,2538 John Sacha Denver, CO $25,2119 Edith Mortellaro Lakewood, CO $20,168 from via Casinoreviews
Danielle PART 4 Dead Guy Carl We were faithful practitioners of an antique religion. It originated in 19th century Asia, but a vein of revival made its way up from Mexico in the early nineteen nineties. Upon conversion, we sold all we had to follow our goddess. We lived for her, and in back alleys and hotel rooms all around Denver, we built altars to her with blackened spoons, the bottom halves of aluminum cans, needles, empty cigarette boxes and lighters. We practiced the ritual of cooking magical potions, conjuring up blissful sleep and vapor the smell of vinegar and brown sugar. We vomited and hiccupped as a rite of passage. Daily devotions involved tying ourselves off, kneeling before her altar and letting blood from our arms. We were ready to sacrifice our first born if she asked. Heroin was life for us, and without her we were dead. Every heartbeat. Every thought. Every move. Every drop of gasoline in the car. Every cent we made. Every calorie we consumed. Every breath was devoted to the chase for more. In Denver, four Hondurans started selling heroin and cocaine at five in the morning. They came like clockwork, because they got off the first bus that brought them to Civic Center Park. Besides Chivo, it was the only other place we knew to get heroin in town, and it was the only place it was available at five a.m. Chivo started at eight, but sickness started early. They sold dimes, or ten dollars’ worth, in tightly wrapped balls made from cut squares of trash bag. Black was heroine. White was cocaine. They sold five for 40 dollars as an incentive to buyers and allowed any combination. At Walmart on Wadsworth and Colfax, we woke up before five, sick as usual. I gathered together the random CDs in the car and decided to see if one of the Hondurans in the park would trade a dime of black for them. Roger was the one we knew best, but he laughed at my offer. He seemed annoyed. He would not even look at me. We were out of luck, so we parked on Corona Street just off Colfax right next to a Seven Eleven. In the car, we stretched and yawned. Our bodies ached, and the anxiety set in. We never knew where we would get it. We just had to have it. Watery snot and tears started, the sure signs of dope sickness. “What are we going to do, bubby?” Danielle lay back in the passenger seat. “I don’t know, baby. I’m tired. We can call Chivo and ask for another front, or we can do something, but it’s too early to call Chivo. Let me just chill for a minute. We’ll get it. Don’t worry. I don’t know how but we will.” She always said she liked me better when I was sick. Heroine made me extremely mean and difficult. When I was sick, I felt exposed and sensitive. Television commercials brought tears to my eyes, and I was nice to her. “OK, bubby. I’m sick as s***.” She held her stomach. “I know, baby. Me too.” I folded my arms and closed my eyes. My back and head ached. I pushed back into the driver’s seat. Not two minutes passed before we heard a knock on the window. A strange individual tried to talk to us through the closed window. Thick glasses, a shaved head, orange freckles on pale skin, a gaunt face. Maybe a man. Maybe a lesbian. I tried to tell the person to wait till we rolled the window down, but they continued to talk. As the window lowered, I could hear he was a man. “I need a ride out of here! Right now! I’ve got money! I’ll pay you. I just have to get out of Colorado!” He seemed genuinely desperate for our help. Through the window he flashed several bills, mostly ones and a five. It was good enough for me. “Get in!” Danielle had to open her door to open the door for him to crawl into the back, and we took off. “Where do you want to go?” I didn’t know where he went. There was nothing in the back seat, but a pile of clothes. “I don’t know! Anywhere, out of Colorado!” His voice came from the clothes. He had buried himself in the pile of unfolded and dirty clothes. “Well, maybe you could give us a little more direction. Like, New Mexico? Nebraska? Utah? If you pay, we’ll take you anywhere you want.” I remembered the condition of my release from jail. My travels were not to exceed a 150-mile radius from Adams County, but money was on the line. “Utah. Sure. Let’s go there.” Traffic halted for miles on the interstate. It was from people headed to work in Denver, so we were stuck for a while. He talked about the people chasing him. They wanted to kill him, and the cops would send him to prison. He had spent the previous night jumping fences to escape. A day or two before that, he threw away several ounces in a hotel room of the Black Hawk Casino, because he thought he was being set up. Danielle and I knew what he needed. “Why don’t you let us get you some heroin? That’ll calm you down. We can get a hotel room and get some brown. Hey, what’s your name anyway? If we are going to be helping you escape and partners in crime, we should know each other’s names.” “I’m Carl.” “I’m Riley. This is Danielle.” He agreed that getting heroin was a good idea, so we pulled off at the next exit, and called Chivo. At 84th and Washington, we found a Motel 6, and she checked into the room, for us. He snuck in while we waited for Chivo. We never had much money to score, so Chivo’s driver hurried to meet us at the gas station down the street. Out of the four 50-dollar balloons, Carl gave us three to share, which he did several more times. He always gave us three and kept one. It was Christmas morning, and we were little kids. When Danielle and I got high, we bickered and said nasty things to one another, not as a matter of any real hurt or problems we had, but like an allergic reaction to the heroin. There were two or three days in a row, just us sitting in a dark, cool Motel 6 room watching HBO high on heroin and us squabbling. Carl spent time on his computer and whined about our fussing and fighting. “You guys should love one another. You never know when you won’t have the other one with you again.” He whimpered. His life was hard, one of six boys, the youngest, and regularly raped by one of his brothers. His father hated him. In New York City, he found love with an old man named Tony, who taught him the trade of stealing fine art, paintings and such. They were busted together and sent to different prisons where Tony died of AIDS, I guessed. Danielle and I thought Carl turned tricks off the Internet for the money he had, but we had no proof. On our third day together, he had us drop him off in the middle of nowhere between Boulder and Denver, because he did not want to hear us fight. His countenance was quiet and depressed, and he wouldn’t make eye contact. Danielle and I came back from trying to score all day at around 630 to find Carl outside of the room waiting for us. He got four balloons as usual, but this time he only gave us one and kept three. Then he gave us 20 bucks and sent us to Wendy’s to get some dinner. Carl lay on the floor sweaty and flaccid by the time we got back to the room. A few slaps to the face and yells of his name proved he had overdosed. Danielle shrieked and flapped her hands at her face in fear, while I ran to the bathroom and saturated a hand towel with water. When I rung it out over his face and the water hit him he came to. “Hey, mother f***er, we’re calling 911! You need to go to the hospital!” I didn’t take his attempt at suicide personally. It was his prerogative far as I saw it, but overdosing himself in the hotel room where we slept was unacceptable. “No! No! No! Don’t call the ambulance. I’m okay. I’m okay.” He begged us not to call. I listened to him, for some reason. Soon after all of it, I regretted not robbing him for all his money and sending him overdosed to the hospital. We would have been gone with his electronics and money before he got out of the hospital. We feared that he would asphyxiate, so we made him sit up against the corner of the room on his bed while we watched TV. The blankets were around him, and she and I must have given cues that I was nodding out with our conversation. His eyes were closed, but he was awake. “See? Riley is nodding out. Why doesn’t he have to go to the hospital?” “Shut the f*** up, Carl. Or we will call 911 to come get your overdosing a**.” It was 1030. “It’s not fair. You are just as high as I am.” “Shut the f*** up, Carl!” He was snoring at 130 when I went to sleep. The Hangover played mute on the TV. Danielle woke me up at 10. “Riley. Riley. Wake up. I think he’s dead.” “No, he’s not dead.” I opened my eyes and looked at him. I was not so sure. “I’m pretty sure he’s dead, bubby! He looks dead!” “No. He’s not dead. Let’s find a rinse before we check.” We found the bottom half of a coke can on a shelf below the TV. It had a spot of brown goo on the edge with a gray, shriveled cotton in the middle. It was all that was left of the three balloons he did the day before. I wondered how he even managed to get that much tar into a syringe and inject it while we were at Wendy’s. I thought he must have skin-popped it. It would have been several injections of black sludge, and if he had hit a vein the first one would have put him out. We washed the bottom of the coke can with water and even sucked it through his old cotton. It was not the clean thing to do, but we didn’t care. She peed on the toilet and kept telling me he was dead while I split the syringes of slightly colored water. I denied it one more time before I hit a vein in her arm and then my own. I walked out first and went over to his bed. I focused on his mouth and the strand of drool hanging from his chin. It was dried out and stuck there, the consistency of hair sprayed spider web. When I put my hand on his shoulder to shake him awake, I said, “Carl!” But he just rolled over, cold and stiff. His legs never unfolded or changed position. The dried-out stalactite of drool stood upside down in the air, and his head hung off the bed. His eyes belonged on ice at the super market. They may as well have been a pair of yellow, lumpy grapes for all the life that they had in them. “He’s dead.” Danielle cried. I pulled him off the bed onto the floor. It only took a second for me to consider what money he might have on him and reached into the pocket of his shorts to find a black leather wallet. There were 250 dollars, so I took the two big bills and left the 50. Danielle called 911 like we should have the night before. She said the operator said to give him mouth to mouth. One look at his dead mouth and the thought of the stale air trapped in his lungs settled it in my mind that I was not giving him mouth to mouth. “I’m not giving him mouth to mouth!” “Come on, Riley! Just try! Is he cold?” “Not cold, but he’s not warm. If you want to give him mouth to mouth get over here and do it. Or they can come do it, but I AM NOT doing it!” She talked into the phone. “He’s not completely cold. Is that a good thing? Is there a chance he might live?” She asked in tears and then turned to me. “She says to just put your mouth on his mouth and breath.” “Hang up!” We gathered the syringes and cookers and balloons and threw the in the dumpster at the back of the parking lot. We stepped outside as the fire truck pulled up. They quickly gave up on trying to resuscitate Carl’s dead body. One squad car pulled up, then another, and one more. A cop put up the yellow tape around the room, and they separated Danielle and me, to question us. She spoke so I could hear her, to get our stories to match up. The black cop dressed in blues flirted with her. She flirted back and told him she was a stripper. As I wrote a statement on the hot hood of a running squad car in the sun, I wondered how many years I could get for it. Would these be my last minutes of freedom scribbling and nervous on the hood of a cop car? An unmarked car pulled up with two detectives. They wore jackets, slacks and ties and had personality. They slicked their black hair back true to their Hispanic heritage. One of them talked to me about the Hornets and mentioned the Nuggets. Sickly scents of pomade and cologne mixed with fear to turn my stomach. His partner walked around and talked to the policemen before he walked up to me. “Look. We got an overdose to go to right after this, two blocks away. Another dead body. We don’t have time for all of this. Where are the syringes and cookers? You don’t think he just overdosed on air, do you? No. We don’t either. Now, we understand, you and your girlfriend got scared and hid all the stuff. But we need some evidence of his drug use. We need some syringes for evidence, and we’ll get you two on your way. I promise.” They took me to the dumpster where we tossed the stuff, and made me climb in, but I couldn’t find it. There were several empty 20 oz. bottles from another room with syringes in them. We never put our syringes in bottles like that, but the detective seemed satisfied. “OK. Just grab a few and give them to me.” They took some pictures and got our written statements. Things wrapped up, and the coroner came. A hearse came to pick up the body. It was obvious that one of the two men working for the company with the hearse enjoyed his job, maybe too much. He had a black three-piece suit and a felt top hat on, with a gold chain to a watch in his breast pocket. He wore a monocle. I didn’t know hearses picked up overdosed bodies out of hotel rooms, but that’s what I saw that day. When they finally took the yellow police tape down and released us from the scene, she jumped into my arms and wrapped her legs around my waist. We shouted in glee and relief and made out in front of the last two cops on the scene. It was over, and we were free. I still had the 200 hundred dollars. The first thing we did was call Chivo and met one of his guys at a gas station. When his driver showed up, I told him what happened. It didn’t really matter to him, just the money did. At some point in the day, I spilled the last of our heroin out of a cooker onto my khaki pants. She was mad, so we went to Home Depot on Quebec. I tried to steal a bunch of copper wire, but on the way out of the door, loss prevention drove me to the ground so hard the scab on my knee had fabric from my pants in it and turned it green. Denver County smelled better than Adams, and they let me out after three days for petit theft. A week later, the coroner called to ask what I knew about Carl. I told him what Carl told me, maybe it was true, maybe not, but it’s what he said. His tone of voice seemed bewildered over the phone. Sometime after that, on our way to Danielle’s first night at the Hustler Club, a strange figure riding a scooter on Colfax pulled up next to us. Danielle and I looked over at a 55-year-old lesbian in a black leather cap and vest, thick glasses, orang freckles and pale face. Her hair was red and grey and buzzed off. Could it be Carl? It looked just like him. We laughed about when the 911 operator had instructed us to give him mouth to mouth. I never felt much about robbing the dead man, or the fact that the last words he heard before he died were me telling him to, “shut the f*** up.” There was no time to feel bad about it, when spilled hits of heroin and three days in jail were so disappointing. The only thing I ever thought about it was that I should have robbed him when he was overdosed and called the paramedics. It would have been less trouble for us.
Danielle PART 4 Dead Guy Carl We were faithful practitioners of an antique religion. It originated in 19th century Asia and had all but vanished. Except a vein of revival made its way up from Mexico in the early nineteen nineties. Upon conversion, we sold all we had to follow our goddess. We lived for her, and in back alleys and hotel rooms all around Denver, we built altars to her with blackened spoons, the bottom halves of aluminum cans, needles, empty cigarette boxes and lighters. We practiced the ritual of cooking magical potions, conjuring up blissful sleep and vapor the smell of vinegar and brown sugar. We vomited and hiccupped as a rite of passage. Daily devotions involved tying ourselves off, kneeling before her altar and letting blood from our arms. We were ready to sacrifice our first born if she asked. Heroin was life for us, and without her we were dead. Every heartbeat. Every thought. Every move. Every drop of gasoline in the car. Every cent we made. Every calorie we consumed. Every breath was devoted to the chase for more. In Denver, four Hondurans started selling heroin and cocaine at five in the morning. They came like clockwork, because they got off the first bus that brought them to Civic Center Park. Besides Chivo, it was the only other place we knew to get heroin in town, and it was the only place it was available at five a.m. Chivo started at eight, but sickness started early. They sold dimes, or ten dollars’ worth, in tightly wrapped balls made from cut squares of trash bag. Black was heroine. White was cocaine. They sold five for 40 dollars as an incentive to buyers and allowed any combination. At Walmart on Wadsworth and Colfax, we woke up before five, sick as usual. I gathered together the random CDs in the car and went to see if one of the Hondurans in the park would trade a dime of black for them. Roger was the one we knew best, but he laughed at my offer. He seemed annoyed. He would not look at me. We were out of luck, so we parked on Corona Street off Colfax right next to a Seven Eleven. In the car, we stretched and yawned. Our bodies ached, and the anxiety set in. We never knew where we would get it. We just had to have it. Watery snot and tears started, the sure signs of dope sickness. “What are we going to do, bubby?” Danielle lay back in the passenger seat. “I don’t know, baby. I’m tired. We can call Chivo and ask for another front, or we can do something, but it’s too early to call Chivo. Let me chill for a minute. We’ll get it. Don’t worry. I don’t know how but we will.” She always said she liked me better when I was sick. Heroine made me extremely mean and difficult. When I was sick, I felt exposed and sensitive. Television commercials brought tears to my eyes, and I was nice to her. “OK, bubby. I’m sick as s***.” She held her stomach. “I know, baby. Me too.” I folded my arms and closed my eyes. My back and head ached. I pushed back into the driver’s seat. Not two minutes passed before we heard a knock on the window. A strange individual tried to talk to us through the closed window. Thick glasses, a shaved head, orange freckles on pale skin, a gaunt face. Maybe a man. Maybe a lesbian. I tried to tell the person to wait till we rolled the window down, but they continued to talk. As the window lowered, I could hear he was a man. “I need a ride out of here! Right now! I’ve got money! I’ll pay you. I have to get out of Colorado!” He seemed genuinely desperate for our help. Through the window he flashed several bills, mostly ones and a five. It was good enough for me. “Get in!” Danielle had to open her door to open the door for him to crawl into the back, and we took off. “Where do you want to go?” I didn’t know where he went. There was nothing in the back seat, but a pile of clothes. “I don’t know! Anywhere, out of Colorado!” His voice came from the clothes. He had buried himself in the pile of unfolded and dirty clothes. “Well, maybe you could give us a little more direction. Like, New Mexico? Nebraska? Utah? If you pay, we’ll take you anywhere you want.” I remembered the condition of my release from jail. My travels were not to exceed a 150-mile radius from Adams County, but money was on the line. “Utah. Sure. Let’s go there.” Traffic halted for miles on the interstate. It was from people headed to work in Denver, so we were stuck for a while. He talked about the people chasing him. They wanted to kill him, and the cops would send him to prison. He had spent the previous night jumping fences to escape. A day or two before that, he threw away several ounces in a hotel room of the Black Hawk Casino, because he thought he was being set up. Danielle and I knew what he needed. “Why don’t you let us get you some heroin? That’ll calm you down. We can get a hotel room and get some brown. Hey, what’s your name anyway? If we are going to be helping you escape and partners in crime, we should know each other’s names.” “I’m Carl.” “I’m Riley. This is Danielle.” He agreed that getting heroin was a good idea, so we pulled off at the next exit, and called Chivo. At 84th and Washington, we found a Motel 6, and she checked into the room, for us. He snuck in while we waited for Chivo. We never had much money to score, so Chivo’s driver hurried to meet us at the gas station down the street. Out of the four 50-dollar balloons, Carl gave us three to share, which he did several more times. He always gave us three and kept one. It was Christmas morning, and we were little kids. When Danielle and I got high, we bickered and said nasty things to one another, not as a matter of any real hurt or problems we had, but like an allergic reaction to the heroin. There were two or three days in a row of us sitting in a dark, cool Motel 6 room watching HBO high on heroin and Danielle and I squabbling. Carl spent time on his computer and whined about our fussing and fighting. “You guys should love one another. You never know when you won’t have the other one with you again.” He whimpered. His life was hard, one of six boys, the youngest, and regularly raped by one of his brothers. His father hated him. In New York City, he found love with an old man named Tony, who taught him the trade of stealing fine art, paintings and such. They were busted together and sent to different prisons where Tony died of AIDS, I guessed. Danielle and I thought Carl turned tricks off the Internet for the money he had, but we had no proof. On our third day together, he had us drop him off in the middle of nowhere between Boulder and Denver, because he did not want to hear us fight. His countenance was quiet and depressed, and he wouldn’t make eye contact. Danielle and I came back from trying to score all day at around 630 to find Carl outside of the room waiting for us. He got four balloons as usual, but this time he only gave us one and kept three. Then he gave us 20 bucks and sent us to Wendy’s to get some dinner. Carl lay on the floor sweaty and flaccid by the time we got back to the room. A few slaps to the face and yells of his name proved he had overdosed. Danielle shrieked and flapped her hands at her face in fear, while I ran to the bathroom and saturated a hand towel with water. When I rung it out over his face and the water hit him he came to. “Hey, mother f***er, we’re calling 911! You need to go to the hospital!” I didn’t take his attempt at suicide personally. It was his prerogative far as I saw it, but overdosing himself in the hotel room where we slept was unacceptable. “No! No! No! Don’t call the ambulance. I’m okay. I’m okay.” He begged us not to call. I listened to him, for some reason. Soon after all of it, I regretted not robbing him for all his money and sending him overdosed to the hospital. We would have been gone with his electronics and money before he got out of the hospital. We feared that he would asphyxiate, so we made him sit up against the corner of the room on his bed while we watched TV. The blankets were around him, and she and I must have given cues that I was nodding out with our conversation. His eyes were closed, but he was awake. “See? Riley is nodding out. Why doesn’t he have to go to the hospital?” “Shut the f*** up, Carl. Or we will call 911 to come get your overdosing a**.” It was 1030. “It’s not fair. You are as high as I am.” “Shut the f*** up, Carl!” He was snoring at 130 when I went to sleep. The Hangover played mute on the TV. Danielle woke me up at 10. “Riley. Riley. Wake up. I think he’s dead.” “No, he’s not dead.” I opened my eyes and looked at him. I was not so sure. “I’m pretty sure he’s dead, bubby! He looks dead!” “No. He’s not dead. Let’s find a rinse before we check.” We found the bottom half of a coke can on a shelf below the TV. It had a spot of brown goo on the edge with a gray, shriveled cotton in the middle. It was all that was left of the three balloons he did the day before. I wondered how he managed to get that much tar into a syringe and inject it while we were at Wendy’s. I thought he must have skin-popped it. It would have been several injections of black sludge, and if he had hit a vein the first one would have put him out. We washed the bottom of the coke can with water and sucked it through his old cotton. It was not the clean thing to do, but we didn’t care. She peed on the toilet and kept telling me he was dead while I split the syringes of slightly colored water. I denied it one more time before I hit a vein in her arm and then my own. I walked out first and went over to his bed. I focused on his mouth and the strand of drool hanging from his chin. It was dried out and stuck there, the consistency of hair sprayed spider web. When I put my hand on his shoulder to shake him awake, I said, “Carl!” But he rolled over, cold and stiff. His legs never unfolded or changed position. The dried-out stalactite of drool stood upside down in the air, and his head hung off the bed. His eyes belonged on ice at the super market. They may as well have been a pair of yellow, lumpy grapes for all the life that they had in them. “He’s dead!” Danielle cried. I pulled him off the bed onto the floor. It only took a second for me to consider what money he might have on him and reached into the pocket of his shorts to find a black leather wallet. There were 250 dollars, so I took the two big bills and left the 50. Danielle called 911 like we should have the night before. She said the operator said to give him mouth to mouth. One look at his dead mouth and the thought of the stale air trapped in his lungs settled it in my mind that I was not giving him mouth to mouth. “I’m not giving him mouth to mouth!” “Come on, Riley! Just try! Is he cold?” “Not cold, but he’s not warm. If you want to give him mouth to mouth get over here and do it. Or they can come do it, but I AM NOT doing it!” She talked into the phone. “He’s not completely cold. Is that a good thing? Is there a chance he might live?” She asked in tears and then turned to me. “She says to put your mouth on his mouth and breath.” “Hang up!” We gathered the syringes and cookers and balloons and threw the in the dumpster at the back of the parking lot. We stepped outside as the fire truck pulled up. They quickly gave up on trying to resuscitate Carl’s dead body. One squad car pulled up, then another, and one more. A cop put up the yellow tape around the room, and they separated Danielle and me, to question us. She spoke so I could hear her, to get our stories to match up. The black cop dressed in blues flirted with her. She flirted back and told him she was a stripper. As I wrote a statement on the hot hood of a running squad car in the sun, I wondered how many years I could get for it. Would these be my last minutes of freedom scribbling and nervous on the hood of a cop car? An unmarked car pulled up with two detectives. They wore jackets, slacks and ties and had personality. They slicked their black hair back true to their Hispanic heritage. One of them talked to me about the Hornets and mentioned the Nuggets. Sickly scents of pomade and cologne mixed with fear to turn my stomach. His partner walked around and talked to the policemen before he walked up to me. “Look. We got an overdose to go to right after this, two blocks away. Another dead body. We don’t have time for all of this. Where are the syringes and cookers? You don’t think he overdosed on air, do you? No. We don’t either. Now, we understand, you and your girlfriend got scared and hid all the stuff. But we need some evidence of his drug use. We need some syringes for evidence, and we’ll get you two on your way. I promise.” They took me to the dumpster where we tossed the stuff, and made me climb in, but I couldn’t find it. There were several empty 20 oz. bottles from another room with syringes in them. We never put our syringes in bottles like that, but the detective seemed satisfied. “OK. Grab a few and give them to me.” They took some pictures and got our written statements. Things wrapped up, and the coroner came. A hearse came to pick up the body. It was obvious that one of the two men working for the company with the hearse enjoyed his job, maybe too much. He had a black three-piece suit and a felt top hat on, with a gold chain to a watch in his breast pocket. He wore a monocle. I didn’t know hearses picked up overdosed bodies out of hotel rooms, but that’s what I saw that day. When they finally took the yellow police tape down and released us from the scene, she jumped into my arms and wrapped her legs around my waist. We shouted in glee and relief and made out in front of the last two cops on the scene. It was over, and we were free. I still had the 200 hundred dollars. The first thing we did was call Chivo and met one of his guys at a gas station. When his driver showed up, I told him what happened. It didn’t matter to him. They wanted the money. At some point in the day, I spilled the last of our heroin out of a cooker onto my khaki pants. She was mad, so we went to Home Depot on Quebec. I tried to steal a bunch of copper wire, but on the way out of the door, loss prevention drove me to the ground so hard the scab on my knee had fabric from my pants in it and turned it green. Denver County smelled better than Adams, and they let me out after three days for petit theft. A week later, the coroner called to ask what I knew about Carl. I told him what Carl told me, maybe it was true, maybe not, but it’s what he said. His tone of voice seemed bewildered over the phone. Sometime after that, on our way to Danielle’s first night at the Hustler Club, a strange figure riding a scooter on Colfax pulled up next to us. Danielle and I looked over at a 55-year-old lesbian in a black leather cap and vest, thick glasses, orang freckles and pale face. Her hair was red and grey and buzzed off. Could it be Carl? It looked exactly like him. We laughed about when the 911 operator had instructed us to give him mouth to mouth. I never felt much about robbing the dead man, or the fact that the last words he heard before he died were me telling him to, “shut the f*** up.” There was no time to feel bad about it, when spilled hits of heroin and three days in jail were so disappointing. The only thing I ever thought about it was that I should have robbed him when he was overdosed and called the paramedics. It would have been less trouble for us.
Here is a short video history of Black Hawk and some links to other sites with historic information regarding the City of Black Hawk. Facts and rules for Black Hawk visitors and tourists: Black Hawk is the largest gambling town you will find in Colorado and is home to 18 casinos, some operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week. #10 of 13 Casinos & Gambling in Black Hawk "They are doing some renovations right now but even with that it was still a great place to play and stay while gambling in Blackhawk" "Wife and I spent 5 nights at Ameristar in next door Black Hawk, and spent several hours in the Isle Casino ." OVER A DOZEN CASINOS AND ENDLESS GAMING FUN. Looking for the nearest casinos to Denver and Boulder? Whether you’re visiting for a day or planning a multi-day vacation, Black Hawk Casinos are some of the best destinations in Colorado. Immerse yourself in Black Hawk, Colorado by visiting historic casinos and newer ones alike. Lakewood / W Denver – RTD Federal Center Station; At Ramblin Express, we provide comfortable, reliable and affordable Casino Shuttle trips to Colorado’s Casinos in Historic Black Hawk, Central City and Cripple Creek. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the scenery aboard our Colorado casino tour shuttle buses! Casinos in Mountain Towns. As a result, the closest casinos to Denver are in the nearby mountain gambling communities of Black Hawk and Central City. Black Hawk and Central City are old, historic, charming mining towns situated in the foothills west of Denver. Denver area gambling casinos are located in Black Hawk and Central City CO which are twin towns less than 3/4 hour drive from Metro Denver, Colorado. Black Hawk and Central City were settled in about 1859 with the Colorado Gold Rush. With the rush of gold-seekers, the towns boomed with gaming halls, saloons and brothels. Black Hawk is Colorado's premier casino gaming destination, home of outstanding lodging and dining at some of the finest hotels and restaurants. Black Hawk, CO is a small city that has become a major regional gaming destination and home to AAA's four diamond hotel properties. From the luxurious stay… Ameristar Casino Resort Spa Black Hawk is now rated among the nation's elite resort lodging facilities and earned the prestigious American Automobile Association Four Diamond designation. Ameristar Casino's 536 luxurious guest rooms, including 64 suites, are comfortable and versatile with oversized bathtubs and panoramic views of the Rocky Mountains. The inviting Lady Luck® Casino Black Hawk offers a homegrown destination for nonstop gaming action high in the Rockies. Just focus on the fun you are going to have. From the latest and greatest slots and machines to action-packed table games to live-action poker. Odds are, we’ve got just the game for you! Ameristar Black Hawk Casino luxury hotel and resort features views of the Rockies and outstanding gaming, dining, & entertainment options in the Denver area.
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