In Las vegas, NV, we interviewed Merle, a man with unique perspective on Las Vegas' underground; he is a former cabbie, columnist, entrepreneur and antiques trader.


July 3, 2005

[Merle sipping coffee, wearing SHERRIF hat & maroon t-shirt.]

Gene: The answers may shock you…but that’s all right

Merle: Should I be myself, or should I watch it?

Someone: What’s yourself?

Merle: Obscene, ignorant, rednecky…

Gene: No holding punches!

Someone: Who’s your idol?

Merle: Manson. That’s the guy. Chuck Manson. Those of us who knew him call him Chuck…. [Someone’s making coffee.] Are you familiar with the French press? You put the coffee in the bottom. You boil the water, you pour the water in, and you press down on it. The grounds stay in the bottom and the coffee comes out. Absolutely superb.

Chris: So Merle, can you tell us how you first came to Las Vegas?

Merle: Yeah. I first came to Las Vegas in 1974. I put my wife and two children in a van and said, “adios New York.” My debts were overwhelming and it’s the only way to beat the system. It goes actually before that but I’d rather not get into it because it’s a rather sordid tale. So we wound up in Las Vegas and I said to myself, “what the hell am I doing here?” The place at that time had approximately 125,000 people—you think? [Looks to Susan for confirmation; she says 250,000] At that time? 250? Anyway, everybody seemed friendly and they were bitching and moaning about the early days when there were not so many people here and everybody knew each other and people like me were destroying the thing because I was coming in and just polluting the place. Well, that’s what they say in every town. Anyway, I set around here, all I did here was kinda pleasant then, the rents were dirt cheap, we could eat for nothing and the hotels which at that time were really cheapo buffet—and the kids seemed to like it over here. Very good, a job—I got a job selling pre-, pre-, pre-…. “pre-need” funeral plants. And, uh, that was like selling people all kinds of these…you know, their whole funeral things were done in advance; they died and everything was taken care of. It was a wonderful thing. That lasted about 6 months, and I got a job, a friend of mine was driving a cab in Las Vegas, and said the money was absolutely fantastic and I could make a fortune and really be cool and be free, and uh, freedom which was more important than anything, you just wander around, do your thing. So I became a cab driver. It was a wonderful thing. At that time the drop on the meter was 75 cents, we had all kinds of deals with restaurants, we had all kinds of deals with hookers, we had all kinds of deals everywhere, people paid us to bring customers, we loved every minute of it. I did this for a while, till I got involved with the employees’ union and things like that, and uh, really involved, and my employer, my cab company promised us if we voted a certain way, for the union representatives…we would not pay for gas. As soon as we voted that way, he changed his mind, I took him to court. I took him to court, and that was the end of my relationship with him. And we wound up in the supreme court of the state of Nevada, and they saw it our way. Well, I could go into details about that [cracks up]—you wouldn’t wanna hear how that one worked—do ya?

Brian: If you wanna tell us. It’s up to you.

Merle: ...Anyway I left that, and I decided to…well I had some literary skills, I had met a friend of mine who lived across the street from me, he said, “why don’t you write a column about being a cab driver in Las Vegas?” And I said okay, and I did the adventures of a Las Vegas cabbie. And that started the ball rolling, because it was very, very popular, and I was making up stories, or asking other cab drivers about their stories, interjecting all this stuff, the column became very, very popular. And after a while I decided, hell, I got fired from cab driving because of that business with the lawsuit, so I decided to run my own magazine, and we called it Crib Sheet. And that took off and I had every cabbie with any kind of brains writing articles there, and it was a lot of really good stuff in Crib Sheet, and we were an advocate for the cab drivers. Plus, I was making money by putting all kinds of ads in, and the ads suggested that if the cabbies brought people there, there’d be side-money over there. So that was going well until it got a little overwhelming. [Reconsiders, scrunches up face, nods in the “you know what I mean” kind of way] It got really overwhelming, and people crying to me every day, ‘help me help me help—’ I don’t need this! I’m not a helper! And stuff like that kept going and I said the hell with it, I sold it. But I’ll tell you one little interesting thing, which is another thing, it’s a growing up thing—uh, someone from a very large hotel approached me, he was the president, and he said to me, “I have a problem.” I said, “what’s your problem?” “I’m having a problem getting in—people coming in and out of this hotel, the entrance and the exit are real screwed up, I’ve gone before the planning commission and they don’t wanna know from me because the guy across the street is on the planning commission da da da da so he’s fighting me all the way. Could ya help me out with this?” “Hey, of course I can help ya out, what’s it worth to ya?” I won’t tell ya the amount of money but that’s another story. Uh, I said, “I’ll do it.” I set up a poll, a poll by all cabbies, and the incentives of entering the poll is that you won a free dinner show to one of these hotels…It had to be his hotel, but that…I did a show and everything else, and pictures with the various dancers, it was really an incentive to do it, just answer the poll and we draw your number at random. And every question was “what’s this, what’s this, what’s that,” but there was one question which was basically, “what’s the worst hotel in Las Vegas?” And they all put down this hotel, because of the exit and the entrance thing there. That was done, dun da da dun da da daaa, and we announced the polling, I went straight to the newspapers, a regular RJ [??] and I said, “hey, you guys interested in the poll?” “Yeah, yeah, we’re interested”— they took the poll hook line and sinker, wrote everything down there, I went to the president of the company, I said, “look, there you go, the worst hotel in Las Vegas.” Went to the planning commission, boom-o, he got it. So you see, when you get polls—that’ll teach you another lesson, there’s a reason behind polls, it’s very simple stuff—this is all part of growing up. They didn’t teach you this in school! They did not. Why are you looking so shocked for? Well, we finally sell the newspaper to Dick over there, he died a couple months later…in any case, I become involved in the pawnbroker business, which was a lot of fun—we carried a gun every day, met all kinds of wonderful people who were pawning their stuff and kept doing this, until I got fed up with all this crap, and now I’m doing ebay and very, very happy.

Gene: Tell ‘em about the folks that showed up with goodies so they could have money for the weekend and all that.

Merle: Oh there’s people, again I remember one guy, he was one of our big customers, come in, he had this big watch, uh, a very nice, Patty Phillippe [??], which is a very expensive watch…uh, we’d always loan him about $6000. I remember one day, he came—“hey, here’s your 6 grand.” He’s gone, an hour and a half later comes back, he won 50 grand, pays back the 6. [Mimes doling out the 6 grand.] Two hours later, he pawns the watch again. We didn’t think much of it—it’s amazing. If you won 50 grand wouldn’t you get the hell outta here? Basically? That is the truth.

Gene: What about the hookers at the window?

Merle: Oh, the hookers at the window…we used to have a 24 hour window and on certain nights it was my turn to be up there. And I remember the buzzer rang and actually this gorgeous chick is there. And…really gorgeous. And I say, “hi.” She says, “I need 20 dollars” and she put a ring in this little tray, which we’d pull in. I look at the ring, you know, in the glass [mimes inspecting it through an eyepiece]: “you got ten bucks honey.” “Oh, come on, I need twenty.” I says no. She goes whoosh [mimes pulling up shirt]—“whaddya think of these?” I said, “they’re very nice.” She says, “now will you give me the twenty?” I says no. She says why? And she…she just drops her pants [stands up to mime dropping pants], drops her panties and goes like that [thrusts out his hips to show off the goods]. I go down, I said, “oh, who’s Chucky?” “That’s my first husband.” Tattooed on the side there. So I said to her, no. She said, “what are you some kind of faggot or something?” “No! My thing is big toes.” And she’s wearing these goddamn boots up to her thighs and she can’t take ‘em off. She says “fuck you” and leaves. Ten minutes later she comes back, buzzer rings, I see a toe waving back and forth. Now I had to give her the twenty cuz I’m a decent human being for God’s sake. Am I correct, I mean, would you have done this? [shrugs, smiling] There was a million stories like that. I pulled my gun out at least once a week…. If you hock a gun, you can only get it out by going through that…what’s that bill, the, uh… the Brady Bill. Are you familiar with the Brady Bill? If you pawn a gun, you have to fill out forms to get it out again. It’s the same forms that you have when you purchase a gun. It’s called the Brady Bill Amendment. And they just do it, and we call up, and they charge ‘em 15 bucks, and uh it’s a pretty dissuasive thing for people buying guns. Anyway this guy, a Mexican, comes in, hocks his little gun, and he wants to pick it up, and I says, “you have to fill out the forms.” “No comprende.” I says, “’no comprende’ till you’re blue in the face—you don’t fill out the forms, no gun.” So he goes out on the street and he brings somebody in and the guy says to me, “In the future, we’re not gonna do this shit because we’re gonna own this country.” So I threw ‘em both out. I don’t need this crap. Besides, I had the gun and he didn’t. But my basic feeling is I’m very…very…very angry what I feel is about this insane immigration policy we got in this country, I’m really alarmed at it, I find a bunch of people who have absolutely no intention of adjusting to the way of life here, just using our system for what it’s worth, having kids, and, uh, those in power are happy with them because they’re exploiting the crap outta them, and the people getting screwed are the people in the middle. I.e. you go to a hospital, every emergency room is jam-packed…Abby, my daughter’s friend, five hours she’s sitting in the hospital and throwing up, and nobody wants to see her. The jam-up is unbelievable. It’s gonna be happening in Connecticut too. I don’t know if it’s happening in Texas already—is it Texas?

Dan: Southern Texas.

Merle: Southern Texas. [Nods.] Uh, and again as I say, every orifice is probed when I get on a goddamned airplane and four thousand are running across the border every day and you say what the hell is wrong with it, and I have to say to my beloved President, “George,” I says, “Georgie, what are ya doing?” Well hell, these people…whatever he says…. I’m not a Republican; I’m not a Democrat. I tend to see myself as an independent, and I hate ‘em both…cuz they’re a bunch of bastards, each one of ‘em—they don’t give a rat’s ass.

Gene: What about Astrud? Remember her?

Merle: Oh, Astrud! Oh, good old Astrud. There was a lady in town, Astrud, I got to know her, she was south of the Tropicana hotel, she had this little spread if you want to call it that way, it was a bunch of old ranch houses, it belonged to a man called Dobie Dock [TK]. Dobie Dock is famous in Las Vegas history. And Dobie Dock was one of the founders of the town….

[phone rings; 30 seconds pause in interview]

Merle: Anyway, she [Astrud] says “Mel, you come over, I got something to show you,” so I says okay, I come over there, she says, “you go in the back yard.” There’s this, like, animal wagon in the back, bars on it, a long trailer type of thing, and all of a sudden this Doberman comes up [grits teeth & growls; then shrinks back]—yeah, I got a little nervous. Guy comes out of the thing, yells, “ah! Get away, get away!” “Look,” I said, “Astrud said I should come back here, whaddya got?” He says, “oh yeah, well”—he opens up the door and a lion comes out, a real giant…runs against Astrud’s window on her building there, takes a gigantic piss. Meanwhile, I’m getting scared, the Doberman all of a sudden who growled at me is underneath my feet, he [mimics—howls in terror], he [e.g. the lion-tamer] says, Hey, get in there,” whit whit, with the whip, the lion goes back in the thing, he [lion-tamer] lets out two tigers. I have pictures of this, by the way, in the house—he lets out two tigers, and the tigers didn’t bother me; the lion bothered me. The Doberman is now my absolute best friend [mimics newfound fearful friendliness of the dog]—unbelievable! And then he comes out with two black leopards—black panthers, basically…they were kinda peaceful-looking. And I came back, I says “Astrud—” [she says:] “yeah yeah, gimme a few dollars to stay.” Which…was interesting. Then one day I came in, and she says, “you go to the back room, see what’s there”: the most pissed-off kangaroo ya ever saw in your life. Pissed off! I mean this thing’s like six-foot-six, [demonstrates by raising his hand, then shakes his head] and he is pissed. And I [puts hands in front of face…]…and she says “Oh he’s so cute, Mel, so cute….” These are some of the shit that happened. I remember I’m with Astrud one day, and I’m talking to her, and all of a sudden two guys come in, flash their badges, they’re from the FBI, I says “oh, shit.” Well then he says, “Listen, Astrud, we were told that you might have seen this. Someone just robbed a beautiful six gun from a museum in Utah.” And, uh, [mimics Astrud, shaking head:] “Oh, I don’t know, I don’t buy guns.” “Okay, thank you Astrud, if you see anything” – “Oh, yes, I take your card….” They leave… [Astrud says:] “I sold ‘em two weeks ago.” [slaps table] It fuckin’ kills me. Oh, she was unbelievable. Try to cut the name out on that one.

Gene: [prompts something]

Merle: Oh yeah, I’d come in there, you wouldn’t believe it, you could eat off the floor in there. Literally. There was this there, there was that there, there was cat food, dog food, whatever kinda food, and she always complained, she said “My maid didn’t come today.” [Slaps table, laughs]

Chris: So what do you do for fun around here?

Merle: What do I do? Basically I’m kinda busy, I play golf twice a week. Uh, golf, the flea markets, the ebay, we go out to dinner…at least twice a week….

[Starts to complain about prices in the supermarket, asks Susan whether she feels the same way…rotisserie chickens have gone from 3.99 to 6.99 in the past year, etc…. ‘Beyond inflation,’ he says. Gets more expensive ‘before your very eyes.’ He’s not really speaking in complete sentences; it picks up about 30 seconds later:]

Well, we have a lot of problems in this country, I feel. Maybe not so much here in Vegas but in other parts they must be hurtin’ somethin’ fierce.

Susan: You also gamble.

Merle: Oh, I don’t gamble that much. Well, five bucks here…nah. [Turns to camera] Contrary to what Susan says I really don’t gamble that much. If I have a couple bucks in my pocket I’ll piss it off in a machine. [To Susan:] Sometimes you win, you know. [pause] Around the area, Susan introduced us to a marvelous spot in California called Laguna, Laguna Beach…[Linda tells him we’re headed there] You’re goin’ there next?! Oh, it’s absolutely lovely over there, if there’s anything left of this light. We stayed at this place she mentioned, La Riviera, oh, to walk on the beach over there…oh, it’s the most…it’s just absolutely lovely. Lovely, lovely area. You guys go there, you’ll probably like it very very much. Laguna itself has a lot of galleries, art galleries. Very nice. Very upscale. What else? We go, we travel, this year we’ve been to the uh…last year we were in Alaska…. Well, this has nothing to do with Vegas.

Brian: That’s fine.

Merle: Oh, we met our friends in Mexico City, we were gonna do a car ride from Mexico City to Cancùn, down the whole Gulf Coast there, and we didn’t know what the hell we were doing at the time. [Laughs] Let me tell you, we won’t do that tour again. Going into the interior of Mexico is not my cup of tea. Ya ever been to the interior of Mexico? Beyond Juarez and all that? You don’t wanna go. The people, the federales are not very pleasant. And they used this great line on me about sixteen fuckin’ times: “señor, por favor, your papers are not in order,” which…after a while was getting not funny. From the movie: [Humphrey Bogart voice] YER PAPERS ARE NOT IN ORDER. From the 1930s? You guys don’t know what we’re talking about! Film noir, what is that, remember? Your papers are not in order? Don’t you remember that? Casablanca, for God’s sake? They needed the exit things…? [To Gene:] We’re getting old. Yeah, we wound up some place south of Veracruz, wherever the hell that was, it was in the AAA book which Sonia, one of our friends—in the Michelin book, which she lives by. This place looked like something from out of Jurassic Park. Hovels there, everybody had their own little hovel, and there was this massive lake with steam coming off it. I was by the lake on this pier and this guy comes out …

[This is a story about a monkey stealing some corn from a canoe…sort of disjointed and probably not tremendously useful. He ended it with: Oh, that’s silly shit.]

Chris: How’d you get the eye for antiques and jewelry?

Merle: Oh, it comes after a while…the jewelry from the pawnshop, but that was before then…. The antiques, just lucky I guess…. I been to a lot of museums, after a while you get to understand that to the best of your ability. It’s hands-on. The only problem we have in Vegas is there are really no art museums here where it would be a hands-on thing, or to really look at a painting and study it, as opposed to you know like New York City, the Museum of Modern Art, or the Metropolitan, just stare at it and after a while you get the feeling—where here it’s two-dimensional, a flat piece of paper. So hands-on is what’s happening. The Bellagio has a gallery, but that’s bullshit, or the Venetian…. That’s what I miss—when I go to New York it’s straight to a museum, just staring at some of this stuff is very important.

Dan: Do you ever go as a business trip to museums?

Merle: Well no, not to a museum, the last business trip I went to Massachusetts, my cousin wanted appraisals on a whole bunch of silver stuff. She paid for the trip, and it turned out to be quite lucrative, cuz she had a whole shitload of nice sterling, George…I forget his name, but anyway, it was really nice stuff and I sold it for her, she was very happy about it. I took a cut of that too, so…. But nothing business trip, just a side trip….

Dan: Do you ever work with auction houses or other venues…?

Merle: I did a couple things with Sotheby’s, years back, I personally don’t trust Sotheby’s. My basic feeling with Sotheby’s is a. they deal with their own antique dealers who they have a relationship and anybody on the outside they’re not too friendly with. It’s my own feeling, I’ve heard it from other people also. Uh, Christie’s, much more genuine, a sweeter place from what I’ve heard. I’ve dealt with them a little bit on a couple of paintings. But Sotheby’s, I don’t feel…I wouldn’t…they were in some sort of real nasty thing a couple years ago where there was a lot of fraud situations. That was prior to this. Cuz…I bought a beautiful mask, an African mask, from a tribe called the Dan tribe. And the Dan tribe is uh matriarchal, run by women, which is kind of unusual. And I got this off an ex-missionary who was in Africa with his wife, so there was no fraud involved, this was a genuine thing [pronounces it ‘genu-WINE’] and I paid next to nothing for this…and I wound up on York Avenue, which is where Sotheby’s is, and the guy said “it was made yesterday.” And I looked at the guy, and I said, “what did you say?” He says, “it was made yesterday.” Well I took it to L.A. and it wasn’t made yesterday, it was made when the guy said it was made, it was turn of the century. And he [Sotheby’s dude] didn’t want to deal with me. He didn’t want to deal with me, nothing personal, he didn’t want to cuz he doesn’t deal with people like me, he deals with these other people. That’s my feeling on Sotheby’s—they may have changed at this moment, but at that time [shakes head]… and it consequently proved that they were involved in all kinds of fraud…dealing with specialty dealers.

Susan: Wanna tell ‘em about those coins?

Merle: Nah.

Gene: What about that black guy who came in with his girlfriend’s ring?

Merle: Oh, “mah bitch”? Oh that won’t do you any good, just show you that certain…people of color have peculiar ideas about women.

Dan: [asks r.e. family]

Merle: I have a boy and a girl. My daughter is in Las Vegas, she is the mother of my two grandkids. Her husband works for Bass Pro Shop, he sells very fine quality guns in their fine quality gunshop, high-grade shotguns and things of that nature. My son works for Viacom, which is MTV. He does the station breaks for three different little networks out there. He’s very pleased. He just got married, he got his wife a job doing costume designing for various operations at MTV. She’s very happy there too. But…very power couple, they’re both making a lot of money these days, which is good to hear. [Laugh] The beautiful thing about my son is that he was going to ASU, and my wife was watching television, and for some reason she wound up on MTV and they said are you interested in an occupation with us, and she sent in the resumé and with his knowledge, they called us back and said, “yeah, we wanna see him.” So we had to pay for the trip to New York and he got the job. Apparently he fit some sort of mold. But he’s come a long way since those early days. Are you familiar with some graphics programs which are out there? Heard of Mya? Well…I dunno if you’ve seen some of the Pixar pictures—they use Mya. Really complicated stuff. It’s like a nervous breakdown trying to master them. Their ultimate goal is [chuckles] to replace human beings with these figures—so if I was a snotty movie star, I’d get a little nervous. A little of the humility.

Dan: You still need voices….

Merle: Yeah, Brad Pitt’s voice is a lot cheaper than Brad Pitt. That will come, by the way. [A pause; he yells, I think at Chris:] SAY SOMETHING!

Chris: [Asks something vague about Vegas.]

Merle: Vegas?! What else would I know? People come here and spend money, they love coming here. They absolutely love coming here.

Chris: What keeps you in Vegas?

Merle: Opportunity. It’s still pretty cheap to live here. As opposed to any other place. It’s exciting too. I’m settled in, I know a lot of people. I have a niche here. It feels good…. You can find anybody which you’re interested in here…this place is not all, “well, we’re a bunch of right wingers….” Nah. There’s all kinds of people. Liberals, right-wingers, communists…gays, straights…hey, but they’re here. It’s a very diverse town, and when we first got here, there were a lot of problems with Chinese restaurants, cuz we are from New York and got hooked on Chinese food, and we wound up in, uh, San Diego basically to eat. Which is a real bitchy trip, going 600 miles for Chinese food…that’s a lot. But things have changed radically here, there are excellent restaurants all around the place. We have our own Chinatown here, if you wanna call it that….

Merle: The same time as these folks. The changes are absolutely overwhelming. It’s like, you go to England, and let’s say you try Oxford, where Oxford University is, and you go and you see various buildings and there’s a little cornerstone says, “Erected 600 A.D.” “Wow,” you think, “that’s old.” Here: “Erected 1985, and we’re tearing it down next week because it just doesn’t fit our needs.” And they do that—joom—down, goodbye…. [Mimes the ‘what the fuck happened?’ look.] I go on a trip, I come back 3 weeks later: “when the hell did they put that sucker up?” And I mean that…am I right, Gene? Wha…whoa! And I’m amazed at the hotels, how magnificent some of them are, and there’s a lot of people who’ll say [mimics condescending character:] “aww, heyy, bah….” There was an architects’ convention here a couple weeks ago, just puttin’ down Vegas—“hah! Bah! Wha!”—and each one of ‘em would give their left nut to build a building over here. Basically, the building says, “hey, come on in.” That’s what it says. It’s not, “oh, is that aesthetic…” no, it’s, “come on, whoa, let’s go, Mary Lou, let’s go in there.” And that’s what it does. That’s the purpose of the building. Cuz when you’re in there, you’re gonna spend some money. I dunno how you feel about the Wynn’s over there, kinda sleek-lookin. I haven’t been in there. You guys been in there…. I was very impressed believe it or not with the Mandalay Bay. They have some really, really sexy-lookin restaurants in there. You might wanna go down there, they have a, what’s it called, a shark reef down there, it’s very nice.

Dan: Why do you think this town has grown so much in the last 20 years?

Merle: It has this appeal of ever-changing, uh, it doesn’t stay static, it moves, it’s changing…. To begin with, when we came here, there were lots of reasons but it was cheap to live here, very cheap. I dunno what you paid for this place, but if you paid the same thing I paid for my original house it was $40,000. And that was cool. Now, heh-heh, goodbye. [Thinks for a moment.] It was cheap living, it was small enough that you could get around. Now it’s getting more and more difficult because of traffic. It’s a very cosmopolitan city, for its size.

Susan: People get hooked here.

Merle: You get hooked here!

Susan: Everything’s 24-hours.

Merle: Yeah, you can go to the supermarket at 4 in the morning—if you have the desire.

Dan: How many people live here?

Merle: Right now?

Susan: 1.5 million

Merle: Is it 1.5? [Nods]

Dan: How many people are employed by the casinos and the hotels?

Merle: [after some garbled observations] I’d say the casinos are probably responsible for…I’d say at least 65 percent of all jobs. And when I say that I mean allied with taxis and all that type of stuff. If it weren’t the casinos, cabbies wouldn’t have a job. That’s my thinking. Without the casinos we’re doomed. Consequently the casinos do control what’s going on here. Make no mistake about it.

[garbled conversation behind the camera for 20 seconds; Susan observes that the casino owners have outlawed lottery tickets and that you’ve got to go to California to buy lottery tix.]

My first story in writing “The Adventures of a Las Vegas Cab-Driver” was I had a hooker in the cab one day and she was tellin’ me about how she was sent up to the Hilton, which denies they ever sent up hookers in the first place—yeah, right—anyway, she winds up with this old fart that had a room there, who has an unusual request, and he calls up room service, they put up bags and bags of popcorn. [Demonstrates] Now he gets jaybird naked into the bathtub, she pours the popcorn all over him, and she’s on all fours and he’s tossing the kernels to her. There’s no way in hell I could make that story up. So I wrote about it, and all of a sudden the Hilton went crazy, they said “we don’t have hookers,” yeah, yeah right, sure. They were selling dope through…those early guys down there. They died because of that. The police when we first got here were a lot rougher than they are now. You didn’t do anything wrong, otherwise, God help ya. Now they’ve become…politically correct in a sense. The police were pretty nasty when we first got here—right Gene? “Yes sir, no sir,” oh boy….

Dan: Do you have an opinion on the mob?

Merle: On the who?

Dan: The mob.

Merle: [laughs] A lovely group of people! Well from what I understand, they’re not officially here any more. But they would probably be…

[This is 36:00.00 on the tape, and I can’t understand what he says…the point is something about how the mob locks certain people out of business competition, which the casinos do on their own anyway…but it’s a short piece, and probably not important, from what I can glean. Merle doesn’t seem too interested in Mafia hype.]

Brian: What’s your most embarrassing moment?

Merle: I haven’t had an embarrassing moment in my life. Get outta here. I was on the stage in New York and I forgot my lines—that doesn’t count.

Brian: Where was that?

Merle: It was an amateur play in a school…. Do me a favor: some of those things I’d like you to edit. Names and shit like that. [Editor's note: Names and shit have been edited]

Dan: [asks about the jewelry at Astrud’s]

Merle: Oh, Astrud had all kinds of people coming in the middle of the night, “I pay you tomorrow,” and she’d pay ‘em or she didn’t pay ‘em…. She was into paintings very, very heavy. And I remember one day, she says “come over,” and she showed me that she claimed to be a Raphael, and I’m not just laughing, it was very good, I didn’t know where to go with it, but ya gotta remember that artists like Raphael and other medieval-type people had a lot of people in their tutelage who they were teaching how to paint, and often these students could have been better than the actual master himself. What I’d look for, and what this Arthur guy who’s in restoring would tell me, “always look at hands in paintings.” Most artists can’t do hands. [shakes head] And you see the hands are done well, that’s a good mark. Check it out next time. I mean, Picasso—you don’t worry about the hands. [Laughs]

[Uninteresting discussion of fake Rolexes and diamonds; his cousin Gladys is a jeweler and has trouble with the fakes—boisenite? TK; it transpires that he doesn’t collect antiques, just trades in ‘em—“I have a coupla nice paintings on the wall, that’s it…”]

Since the advent of ebay, things have changed drastically in the world of collections and stuff like that…. Fishing reels, I got four fishing reels right now, they’re gonna probably break at $200 a piece, but they’re very unique fly reels, and that’s a special area of fishing. Real nice. Are you familiar with Orbis? [Dan says yes.] I got three Orbis reels.

Gene: Which areas and countries like certain things?

Merle: Oh, the Japs, the Japs—forgive me if you’re Japanese—the Japs, they’re very peculiar. We were selling Zippo lighters at the pawnshop. Every Jap and his brother’d come [Jap impression] “Hiyo, oh, Zippo lighter,” then one day, it like stopped. Someone in Japan declared Zippo lighters no good. Nobody bought another Zippo lighter. It was insane. Ya ever watch the Japs on the strip? They go in groups. There’s one guy who’s in charge of them, and he’s always every ten seconds checking them out. [Mimics this unsympathetically.] And I’m watching this little woman who’s strayed [more mimicry] and he’s screaming at her, berating her…. This is a riot, you gotta watch this. But they don’t come that often any more. There used to be a lot of them. What they love to do is to go shoot the machine guns. There was a place over here that had machine guns. The Japs’d come in and shoot the shit outta machine guns. Hard to believe. There’s a place out in Prump [??] which was actually established here, they can race cars. And you race ‘em around the track. That’ll cost ya a couple bucks too. The Japs go for that, but they love machine guns. [Dan asks about Japanese gun laws] I think they got shotguns there—you’re allowed to have shotguns. Though I don’t know what you’d want with a shotgun in downtown Tokyo other than to take a bank out or something like that. Uh, the Japanese are also very enamored of golf. When they come here they just…because golf courses are pretty difficult to come by in Japan. When they get here they go nuts. Steve Wynn’s place, I dunno, does he still own that place on Crayton Road? Shadow Ridge?

Susan: I think he does.

Merle: Shadow Ridge is a golf course he built north of town, where the green fees were a thousand bucks a pop. Which didn’t cause too many people to go play golf. But it was the most beautiful of all places.

Dan: So I don’t know if anyone’s told you that the purpose of our project is to find out what makes people happy….

Merle: Money. Sorry.

Dan: So what are the most important factors in any person’s life for the creation of a contented….

Merle: I think it’s an individual thing, you just…. My own thing is, I like to learn. The sense of discovery is very important to me. I will go to a strange city, i.e. London, and take a subway to the furthest point, get out, walk around, I got enough money to take a cab home, if I need it, just wander around into strange neighborhoods for the first time, first impressions, I find that a real kick. Uh, to discover things, I just marvel. That’s why these antiques are…. I find I research a piece, all right, I says, “whoa….” A couple weeks ago I find a little painting like that [narrows hands to indicate a miniature] and I looked at it and I says “oh wow, look at that,” it was good, it was good, and on the outside of the backing paper it said “Polish Scene” [writes with his hand to mimic the inscription], I said “this is no Polish scene,” I took the thing out of it and it said “Brittany,” and it was by a famous artist. Called a plein air type of painting. And I popped it to Santa Barbara, made a phone call and boom it was gone. And so I had a reward for my discovery. The money in itself is not important, it’s the vindication: you’re being rewarded for what you’ve done. [Bangs fist on table] Again, the money is nice. We like to eat out in nice places. Am I right? Money beats the shit out of not having money. But it’s not everything in itself, it’s—to me, it’s a sense of discovery. Discovery is everything. To find, to go where no man has gone before, do you understand what I’m saying on that? This is marvelous to me. Wow! I found it. Again, we’re getting older, myself, Gene, there’s a concern about dementia [this he pronounces a couple time, each time differently: ‘dimensay,’ etc., just for the hell of it. To see what it’s like.] Dementia. Again, Alzheimer’s is a factor, and I know one thing: if I keep busy, and keep thinking and probing, I’m not gonna be involved with all that. Yet you got so many people who sit there [mimics old-timer who’s lost his marbles:] “uhhh, uhhhhhhh,” and it comes on. Uh, I like to play golf, but I see people who play golf five times a day [mimics shitty golfer putting uselessly] I…it’s nothing. I do it just for the exercise, and every now and then: nice shot. But we must always constantly be thinking and discovering. [emphasizes each words with a palm tap on the table] And I think that’s an answer, for me. [Pause; mockingly hoarse] So what have you found out about the answer to happiness?

Chris: Lots of different things.

Merle: [Still hoarse] A good hooker. I’m sorry Susan. [Hides head in hands]

Susan: I won’t tell anyone.

[Merle proceeds to mock Gene for liking dominatrixes]