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Chapter 5

MY THIRD TIME IN THE SYSTEM OR
I PROMISE I WON'T GO TO LAS VEGAS AGAIN
--The Consumer Electronics Show (CES), January 1983

The largest convention in the history of the world, the Consumer
Electronics Show (CES), was coming to Las Vegas. As CES approached, I sent
an unusual telegram to my ex-boss at Mattel Electronics, Don Daglow. There
was a message in it.

"If you want a message, go to Western Union"
--Louis B. Mayer

But what the telegram was mostly was the word "dot", such as "Dot dot dot dot
dot dot. Dot dot dot dot dot dot." It sounds like singing to me. I pictured
sending it to the Las Vegas Hilton. Then I imagined calling the hotel and they
answered singing, "Dot dot dot dot dot dot. Dot dot dot dot dot dot. Las Vegas
Hilton dot dot dot dot dot. May I dot dot dot dot help you dot dot?" I don't know
what it all means either but it sounds funny to me.

I wanted to go to the Consumers Electronics Show in Las Vegas. I
promised Bruce, my New Age therapist, that I wouldn't go to Las Vegas again
and that I didn't need to go to CES anyway. He felt that the bright lights and
gambling and shows would set off a manic episode in me. I secretly disagreed.
I didn't gamble any more (I hardly ever did) and didn't usually go to the shows so
I felt safe in going there again. I did not feel that it was Las Vegas itself that had
set off a manic episode in me in November.

Besides, two projects that I had worked on at Mattel were due to be
shown at CES, the Aquarius personal computer and my videogame, "Campaign
Trail". The showing of these two projects made me want to believe that CES
stood for the "Chuck Elliot Show". What really made me want to go was a job
interview with Sega, a large videogames company in San Diego, that I had set
up to be held on the convention floor at CES. So my promise to Bruce not to go
was a lie. I did not feel bad about it.

I prepared to go. I gathered up my interview materials. I made a
compilation videotape for Mike, the Security Lieutenant at the Hilton, in
appreciation of his taking care of my belongings while I was in the hospital in
December. At his request when I talked to him on the phone, I made him a copy
of his favorite film, Woody Allen's "Bananas". (I just wondered if there was a
connection between this title and my bizarre interest in bananas in the previous
chapter.)

Paula was to fly to Vegas with me. We parked at the Burbank airport,
not too close to the terminal. While she sat inside the terminal, I fetched the
luggage for a long time as I kept track of how much time I had left until the
interview. As it turned out, my luggage got there on time for the Sega interview,
but I missed the flight myself because I kept going back to get Paula's luggage
which she didn't want to help on. I was very angry with her and we got separated
on the plane.

I found her in the Las Vegas airport but we were busy arguing when the
tram came. I got on the tram but she missed it. For years, she has told me and
other people that I "ditched" her at the airport". I got off the tram at its first stop,
the Ambassador Suites, and got a room. I then went to the Convention Hall
three hours late for my interview. I left a message for the person from Sega who
was to interview me and was taken by cab by their Vice President to the MGM
Grand so that I could call the interviewing person. In the elevator at the Grand I
muttered, "Is it safe?" which is Laurence Olivier's repeated line in "Marathon
Man", the movie whose videogame I wanted to work on for Sega. I explained
that the line was from their Paramount property, "Marathon Man".

Paula gave up looking for me and went back home but not before calling
each and every hotel in Las Vegas to see if I were registered there. I had moved
from the Ambassador Suites and had paid for a room at Caesar's Palace but
never stayed there. I wound up at the Dunes. I was walking from the
Convention Center and was in front of the Landmark Hotel. A security guard
from the hotel walked up to me and asked, "Are you Chuck?" I said, "No, my
name is Steve." (Steve is my birth name; Chuck is my adopted name.) I was
shocked to hear him call my name but I figured it must be because of Paula. I
did not like the idea of being talked to by someone with a gun. This was
because of my agitated state of mind.

Keeping Tight with the Prostitutes
When I awoke at the Dunes, I turned on the television. The cable
station provided a scrolling "crawl" of the local Teletype. I read about Sheriff
John Duffy, who later, by coincidence, became the Sheriff of San Diego County
where I now live. The TV screen said that Sheriff John Duffy was being strict
with the prostitutes. There was a record number of convention attendees at the
Consumer Electronics Show, 73,000, with only 65,000 having been expected.
Similarly, there was a record number of prostitutes. They were each given 2
hours in jail, I presumed for fixing their hair and makeup, and then they were let
back out on the streets to ply their trade. The screen said that there was a
shortage in girls. Quel domage (what a pity). That fact, coupled with the excess
of guys, made it make sense to have short detentions for the girls. Makes
everybody happy.

Later that day, I met Susan, the nice lady who books all of the girls who
stand and look pretty in the convention booths. She walked me through the
convention floor. At one electronics company booth, I saw a pretty girl whose
name badge had her name and the company's home city, Woodland Hills. I said
to her, "Oh, I live near Woodland Hills." She just looked blank. Pretty but blank.
I then realized that it is just a situation of "rent a pretty face and we'll have her
pretend that she works for you". Because of this situation and the conjunction of
the 70,000 convention-goers and Susan's pretty faces being on the same
convention floor, I suddenly got the idea that Susan's girls were the prostitutes. I
figured that the prostitute shortage was attributable to the fact that hundreds of
the girls were off the streets because they were manning the booths. I did not
tell my suspicions to Susan or anyone else.

Anyway, I was walking with Susan, the nice lady who booked the pretty
faces for the whole CES. We were starting to exit the convention center. As we
entered the lobby area, several pretty girls called her by name and she
responded back by name. This went on for a while. Then one of the girls who
was very pretty and had long blonde hair, looked at me and said to Susan, "I
want him." This made me feel great all over, even when Susan told me that the
girl had a jealous boyfriend.

Earlier in the Convention Center, I wrote a press release about myself.
They charged me $30 to type it up--about 1/2 a page-and make 100 copies. I
was reluctant to pay this outrageous fee, but figured that it was worth it "to get
the word out". The press release said that I was announcing $250,000 in
contracts to program video games. This press release was total imagination on
my part. I had been unemployed for a month since my firing from Mattel
Electronics, had been hospitalized twice and was not really looking for work . I
did have the two agreements that I signed with Broderbund Software in San
Rafael; the president had indicated that one could be worth $48,000, but the
agreement did not stipulate specifics about financial areas. The list of contracts
in the press release included Sega which I had come to Las Vegas to interview
for a job. Someone told me that they saw the release and were totally turned off
to me. They were no longer interested in me for the job.

Xanadunes
The Dunes had a special section for an extensive videogame arcade
called Xanadunes.

"In Xanadu did Kublai Khan a stately pleasure dome decree."
--Samuel Taylor Coleridge

There was a Haagen-Dazs ice cream stand there that sold T-shirts as well as ice
cream. One of the ice cream vendors was a very cute blonde named Marni. I
liked her instantly. I asked if she knew that there was a movie named after her.
She said that Hitchcock was one of her favorite directors and that Tippi Hedren
was one of her favorite actresses. I said, "In other words, yes." I told her that I
have had one of their shirts, the brown and white one that says "Chocolate
Chip", for a couple years. I told her that I had some T-shirt ideas myself and that
I would tell her next time.

Later I went to my room to unwind. I opened the blinds to look out on
the city and saw the giant letters spelling out "Melissa Manchester" straight
across the street on the marquis of the MGM Grand. Her song "Midnight Blue"
was one of my favorite four songs that kept me going in 1975 when I wrote my
doctoral dissertation for USC when I was living in Baltimore.

"You know we're gonna make it if we try....midnight blue"

 I kept going to the Xanadunes video arcade. There and everywhere I
was, I continually thought about a nonelectronic game that I was designing
called "Secrets of the Universe". I was going to have T-shirts made. Each shirt
would ask about a secret of the universe. I was ecstatic about the game. It
would be fun and intellectual for the player and an intellectual source of money
for me.

You're Soaking in It
Back in my room, I tried to call Paula but could not get an answer in
more than 50 rings. I let the phone keep ringing. I turned the TV up and placed
the telephone receiver right on the TV speakers so that she would hear the loud
noise in case she ever answered. Then she would guess that it was me calling.
I was very tired but I had too much work to do. I planned to work on the
"Secrets" game and to write out a lot of the fast thoughts that I was having. I did
not want to go to sleep because it would be for hours and hours and I would not
be able to get my work done. I decided to soak in the bathtub. I soaked in the
tub for 2 hours and felt really refreshed. I did not remember my Mark Hopkins
Hotel long baths then, although it was only 3 weeks later. After my soak, I kept a
lengthy log of my thoughts of the night. I developed several thoughts about the
game in addition to many scattered thoughts that I could not understand when I
reread them after some time had passed.

In the morning a bizarre thought came to me. The thought was to tell
Paula:

"Your son is dead!"

I do not know why I thought this. I thought that I was in a mellow mood from my
tub soak a few hours before. Maybe my thought was just for tormenting her. I
knew that it was not true. I loved her son, Joshua. I finally reached her on the
phone and told her, "Your son is dead." She said, "No, he's not. He's sitting
right here with me."

Absolute Last Minute at CES--the Mattel Booth
On the last day of CES, I suddenly noticed that it was 4:30 p.m. CES
was set to close for good at 5 p.m. I had to get there to see the Mattel Booth
and had waited until the absolute-last minute. It was too far from the Dunes to
get to by foot with only half an hour left, so I called a cab. I told them on the
phone that I needed to get to the Convention Center by 5 p.m. They were not
confident that they could do it, but they said that they would do their best. That
turned out to be an understatement. When the driver arrived, I said, "Just get
me there, dead or alive, but get me there." I was completely serious. As he
drove, he told me that he had a special shortcut. It was special, alright. It
reminded me of the famous chase scene in "The French Connection". He went
between the pillars in a large apartment building parking lot, he made high-
speed turns, he sped past the other traffic when there was any. We got there on
time, just barely, and alive, just barely. I gave him $20 for a $5 fare, expressed
my gratitude, and said goodbye.

He said, "Do you want me to go in there with you?" I was not expecting
this. I said, "Yes", and he grabbed my briefcase and went in with me. It was
about 1 minute to 5 p.m., closing time. I realized that I still did not have a
convention badge, but I had my Mattel badge with me and I put that on. We got
in the front door.

We walked and walked until we found the Mattel booth. It was double-
height, about 16-feet high, and was made out of shiny black plastic. There were
30 flush-mounted 21-inch color TV screens set into the black plastic. On each
screen, a different videogame was displayed. Then you could walk into the
booth and play other games. My videogame, "Campaign Trail", was not there.
This made sense to me because I was no longer at Mattel to finish the game.
The old saying at work was that if you leave, "the game dies with you". My boss,
Don, had explained that my game was so unique that no one else could ever be
found to complete it if I left with it unfinished. Inside the booth was a display of
the personal computer that I had worked on, Aquarius. If I had designed the
display for Aquarius, I would show the "Digital Clock" program that I wrote for the
Aquarius User's Guide that I also edited as well as the "Running Man" sequence
that I programmed for the Instructional Cards. I looked closely and saw that the
user's guide and cards that they had on display were not a finished product but
just dummy mockups without the programs in them. I was disgusted that
although I had put so much work into them, they decided not to use my efforts.

There were several Mattel staff members in the booth. I looked up and
recognized the young guard who had always greeted me at the entrance to our
building ("The TRW Building") at work. This time he seemed mean and
demanded my security badge. I really did not want to give it to him but I knew
that I was not entitled to it any more. This became a confrontation with other
security officers staring me down, so I gave him the badge, which I eventually
would have done anyway. This relinquishment of my badge was my final
acknowledgment that I did not work for Mattel any more. I felt sad.

The cab driver and I were walking the convention floor trying to find an
exit. I told him that he could go on his own, so he left me alone. Soon, a Black
Convention Center security guard drove up to me in his yellow cart. He asked
me the expected questions about what I was doing there, why I did not have a
convention badge, was I an exhibitor. It was 5:30 by then and I was drained by
the Mattel experience. I just wanted to leave. I turned away from the guard and
started walking. He told me to wait. I turned around and asked, 

"Do you shoot unarmed people in the back?" 
"Are you going to start now?"

He did not answer and I kept walking and eventually found my way out of the Las Vegas Convention Center. I was free now from a building that had changed in my mind from highly desirable a few days before to a place of confrontation.

Death and Fire at the Dunes
I had left a message with the Dunes Hotel manager about Paula's son
being dead. In the morning, two hotel security guards came to the door and I
explained it to them. I gave each of them her business card and they said that
they would tell the hotel manager. Outside the door, I found the two business
cards torn in half. Her son was not really dead but no one cared anyway.

I was upset at the hotel management and my bizarre thought was that
the Dunes was on fire. I was aware that the MGM Grand across the street had
caught fire, killing about 100 people, during the same convention a few years
before. I started to wonder why the elevators were still running up to the 16th
floor since there was a fire going on and elevators were supposed to stop in a
fire. I felt compelled to warn the people on my floor about the fire. I did not
want to have to knock on every door so I got the idea of using my room ashtray
to knock on the doors. As you can well imagine, but I never suspected, because
I was tripping off on a higher plane, the ash tray exploded into a thousand
pieces. Well, I knew this would happen. [I know I just contradicted myself - I
never suspected it but I knew it would happen.] I was not worried because I
figured that the ash tray cost about a dollar and either they could afford it or they
could bill it to my room. An ash tray is a dollar and neither is any big deal.

But then I changed my mind about this and started to get scared about
what I had done. I thought that the Dunes Hotel management would get upset
and give out some sort of retribution. So I took the elevator and stairs down into
the basement. A waiter walked past me carrying a large catering tray with
several hundred cherry pastries. I usually would not like cherry pastries but I
had a feeling that I would not be eating for quite a while. I felt some kind of
doom approaching so I grabbed at a source of quick energy, a cherry pastry.
The waiter got upset at me and I kept saying, "I'm sorry", but I took a pastry and
gobbled it down.

Something told me inside not to take the elevator, but I wanted to get
away from the waiter quickly. The elevator door opened on the ground floor and
there were a lot of officials and police standing around. I knew that I had no
chance to get away. The two Las Vegas police walked up to me, wrapped my
legs in wide bands of plastic, and handcuffed me. I felt that handcuffing was a
little extreme for breaking a $1 ash tray. The front passenger's door of the cop
car was open and I leaned in, putting my head and chest across the seat towards
the steering wheel. I said, "I'll drive." The cops laughed and said, "That's alright.
We'll handle the driving." For me it was a tense event but I turned to comedy to
relieve my tension.

A Funny Way of Skiing
One of the cops told me the name of the place where they were taking
me and said, "The Snow Country". I pictured skiing there with Marni, the cute
Haagen-Dazs blonde from Xanadunes. I soon saw the freeway exit for the place
that they had described and then I echoed the cop, "The Snow Country".
However, they kept driving past the offramp. They had lied to me. Then they
took me to-- I should have guessed it--Southern Nevada Memorial Hospital,
Psychiatric Unit, the same place as my first stay after COMDEX. I saw a plaque
on the outside of the building that proclaimed that the hospital was a gift from
"the people of Las Vegas". You do not have to know much about Las Vegas to
know that it was founded by the Mafia. So the hospital is a gift from the people
of Las Vegas, the Mafia.

The routine in the Psych Unit was the same as the month before. First, I
was strapped down in the Quiet Room. Then, I was taken to the Locked Unit.
While I was still in the Quiet Room, I complained about one crab lice. Three
staff members came in dressed like World War III, complete with gas masks.
They sprayed the room with industrial sprayers. Then, they confiscated my $100
pants to take them away and burn them. I asked if they could just dry clean
them and they said that they had to burn them. I was angry at this. There was
one highlight of my stay and that was when they let us outside once and some of
the staff played Simon & Garfunkel songs and folk music on the guitar.

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