“Don’t you have better things to do?” I got asked that question about 55 years ago by then-Las Vegas City Police Chief Matt O’Brien as he stuck his pointer finger into my ear and gave it a slight tug.
“Gee, officer, I wuz just leaving. Honest.” Actually, my friend Wilfred and I, both 11, weren’t just leaving. We were beginning our second hour of watching half-loaded patrons at the El Fidel bar wrestle with the several pinball machines that gave about 10 minutes’ worth of entertainment for a nickel.
In our youth, as we sold Optics on the streets, we enjoyed getting out of the cold and invading the local bistros. There were about a dozen of them in a several-block downtown area. Some of them I can still remember: the Manhattan, the El Fidel Bar, the Casino, the Casanova, the Sportsman’s Bar, the Castañeda and the S&S Club.
Every bar had its own clientele. One could usually tell the time of day by the number of empty beer glasses John had in front of him at the Casino, and our days of newspaper sales weren’t complete without seeing a man named Benny spending his earnings by enjoying the sauce and generously tipping others.
A paperboy who sold a competing newspaper gleefully left the S&S Club once and told me Benny had bought a New Mexican from him and had given him “dos reales” for it. Well, “dos reales” or any number of reales just weren’t part of my vocabulary, so I assumed he’d gotten two of something, maybe dollars. Wow! If I can get the same tip from Benny, that’ll equal my profits for the whole week, I thought. Benny tipped me, all right, but the windfall I expected was just a quarter. “Dos reales” was the equivalent of two bits. But let’s not look a gift “real” in the mouth.
Our frequent runs to pinball-equipped bars we thought of as a public service: if we’re not allowed into bars to sell papers, the populace will be poorly informed, grossly under-educated and potentially mutinous. So, Mr. Bar Owner, it’s to your benefit to let us peddle our papers — and watch a little pinball on the side.
Well, maybe the owner thought it wasn’t safe for pre-teens to be in a place that retails spirits. Who knows? We might inhale some of the fumes from the alcohol and cigarettes and actually enjoy them.
Wilfred and I also thought of the El Fidel Bar as a safe haven, away from two Old Town cousins named Carlos, both of whom were born 15 and who terrified all involved in a paper turf war.
Unlike today’s Optic, which hits the streets at noon, in 1950, press-run time was precisely between 1:15 and 6 daily. In all kinds of weather a pack of us huddled in a drafty back room waiting for Pete Garcia to call us to get in line. Regardless of what time the two Carloses arrived, they got to the head of the line because, well, they were born 15 and had six-pack abs before abs or six-packs were even invented.
What I think made them heroes, or at least icons to be revered and feared, were their ways of getting the best of us. Before we realized Carlos-1 and Carlos-2 were mean, we tried to ingratiate ourselves toward them. On the day we were ejected from the El Fidel, as we waited for our papers, I wore a devil-may-car mien, hopped on my bike backwards and tried to impress those mono-purpose bicyclists. I pedaled the bike while facing to the rear and performed a quick modification to my body that darn near prevented me from ever acquiring a deep voice.
Now what’s worse, the pain or the humiliation? So, with the grace of Wallenda, I performed a resurrection and chose to act as if that was all part of my routine: don’t you guys realize I ride by bike from Mora to Pecos every day before breakfast, backwards?
Carlos-2 said, “Son, what you just did can get you killed. But I can do you one better: I can give you a ride on the bike — backwards.”
So, in front of the non-believers, he mounted the bike backwards, his feet placed carefully on the pedals. I sat on the seat, facing forward and clutching the handlebars. And to the amazement of the Western World, Carlos-2 did as he promised, and rode me about 50 feet. That made him a hero, but it didn’t make him nice.
The trick, Carlos-2 explained much later, was to include me in his exhibition. Amid the oohs and ahhs of the admiring crowd of paperboys, Carlos-2 simply pedaled the bike; he counted on me — without my knowing it — to provide the steering and the balancing. Smooth trick, Carlos-2. What if he’d performed solo?
That evening, trying to tell my family about the Evel Knievel-ish skills of Carlos-2, I got interrupted by Mom, who asked me, “Don’t you have better things to do than almost kill yourself on a bike?”
“Better things . . .” That brought back memories of Chief O’Brien. Had he told my parents of our barhopping? No, he couldn’t have. Yes he had. And so had a bunch of others who liked doing things for my own good. I got paid for getting tossed out of a bar. “Payday” came in two installments, my parents having been equal-opportunity executioners.
Chief Matt O’Brien, the leader of Las Vegas’ finest, had told on us. And all the time Wilfred and I thought police chiefs had better things to do.