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Lester Friday's 1983 Trip To The Lucky Lady Keno Challenge In Wendover, Nevada, And Subsequent Actions By Tim Boisvert In the summer of 1983, Lester Friday ran out of the Lucky Lady Casino in Wendover, Nevada. He carried with him a big cardboard check in the amount of fifty-thousand dollars, his prize for a night well spent at the annual Lucky Lady Keno Challenge. He stepped into his late-model Lincoln Continental, slowed his way through the parking lot, and returned to his home in suburban Ogden, Utah. Impaired by two high-balls, he drove unusually fast that morning, no doubt concerned with the alibi forming in his mind. He had stayed late at the office, he’d say, he had slept in the employee lounge when sleep had come to him. No thought was given to an explanation for the prize money, which now found itself laid across the bench seat in the back. Regardless, he’d spend it before she ever knew that he’d had it. He pulled into his driveway, turned around and folded the check – impressively done without breaking a sweat, the check being made of a durable cardboard – then covered it with the gym shorts and towel he used for racquetball twice a week. He stepped inside and found silence, except for the humming of the bathroom fan several rooms down the hall. He quietly closed the door and set his briefcase down by the door, then walked to his bedroom and lay on the bed. Moments later, after the fan in the bathroom had wound down, Suzanne opened the door and walked into the bedroom with a towel wrapped around her and fastened above her breasts. He had stayed late, he told her, at the office, working on the benefits file. He should have called, she said, at which point he rolled over, away from her, and fell asleep. Not twenty-five minutes later, Suzanne having left for her job at the Galaxy Diner, Lester was awoken by the sound of three fists wrapping against the front door. He stumbled down the hall and peeked through the hole. Three familiar faces awaited him. He took a deep breath, adjusted his neck, and opened the door. It was the Korean men from the previous night. Considering his situation, Lester fabricated pleasantries to his Korean visitors, pretending to disregard the possibly foul words they aimed at him in their native tongue. At once a document was produced, written in neat but unreadable Korean. Wishing to buy some time, Lester asked for a moment to please go get his glasses. The Korean gentlemen didn’t respond, but Lester left the doorway anyway, heading for the dining room and the location of his reading glasses. Passing the reading glasses, he tip-toed through the laundry room and to the garage door, opened it, stepped through, and quietly closed it. He opened the side door and walked around to the front of the house, out of the view of his Korean visitors. The dinging sound of the Lincoln’s door being opened alerted the Koreans, who quickly left the front door and ran after the Lincoln, which was by now rolling down the driveway and into the street. Lester sped away and into downtown Ogden, easily escaping and outwitting the Koreans from the previous night. It is here where the story finds its home. In the minutes that followed, Lester’s getaway strategy consisted of pulling into the Daytime Donuts location on the 1400 block of Washington Boulevard, walking in, and ordering a black coffee and a crueler. Perhaps he suffered from some sort of short-term memory loss, maybe it was pure capriciousness, or perhaps, just perhaps, this lapse of judgment was forged by the stress of the moment. Either way, he proceeded to sit in one of the hard seats away from the window, at a table where a copy of that day's USA Today rested. Minutes later, his breakfast finished, his coffee consumed, Lester walked out of the store and headed for his car. At that moment a Buick pulled up to the donut store and came to a screeching halt. Out of the car came the three Koreans, now angry over the turn of events that had just occurred. The Koreans walked toward Lester and stood in front of him. They stood in a line perpendicular to him, a formation that seemed to Lester to be some sort of Wild West showdown. He stood his ground, though, wiping the smile off of his face and putting his hands by his hips. He twitched his hands as if preparing to pull a revolver from his belt and dispose of his tired enemies. Not familiar with the tales of the Old West, the Koreans looked at each other, looked at Lester, then looked at each other again. As Lester drew the imaginary revolver, the Koreans charged him, chopping him with their hands and screaming high pitched calls. Lester, suddenly aware of the absence of a revolver in his hand, and becoming increasingly alert to the fact that these men weren’t playing his game, ran. Arriving at the Lincoln, he fidgeted with the door handle, but the Koreans caught him and slashed him to the ground with a 600-year-old martial art maneuver to the back of his neck. Then the moment arrived that the Korean gentlemen had driven half-way across the barren wasteland of western Utah for: at once all three saw the big cardboard check. After finding themselves stranded in Wendover the previous afternoon, left by their tour group and forgotten by their friends, the Korean men had formulated a plan. There was to be a keno tournament that very night, and at the hotel where they had stayed, no less! Years of playing keno at the Yun Eet-nen Yo Casino in downtown Seoul would prove to be their very salvation. Entering the tournament and playing all night, the men found themselves the winners of the tournament at 4:00 A.M., and they were awarded a large cardboard check in the amount of fifty-thousand dollars. Awaiting sunrise and the opening of the local Wells Fargo branch, the three men doused their struggle away at the Lucky Lady Casino bar, ordering Shirley Temples all around. As the morning arrived and the Korean gentlemen walked through the lobby and toward the exit, Lester in his sweaty suit approached them from behind, and, no doubt as a result of his evening intoxication, pushed the big check to the ground. The Koreans were appalled; such action in the early morning hours is not becoming of an American gentleman, they said to him. Unaware of even the slightest principle of the grammar of the Korean language, and still drunk, Lester picked up the check and ran toward the parking lot. Now standing above him as he lay between the donut store and his Lincoln, the three Korean men proceeded to slap and beat Lester with the check. As he had folded it in order to conceal it in the back seat, it was hard like a piece of wood. Lester, now tamed by the power of the Orient, defenselessly lay there and took his beating like the man he had always wanted to become. The Koreans, happy to have the money for their return trip back in their possession, left him in the street and drove away in their Buick, no doubt leaving the rented car at the Salt Lake International Airport and flying home to Korea. Back to Tim's Short Stories |