A Forsley Feuilleton: Franz Kafka should have spent his time rolling dice with confidence on the corner instead of writing letters in confidence on the paper – Act Three

I went to Vegas because I believed that leopard pattern spandex and rusted tinfoil sailor hat wearing street schizophrenic when he grabbed my little tattooed arms and said, “Franz Kafka should have spent his time rolling dice with confidence on the corner instead of writing letters in confidence on the paper.”  And I left Vegas because I realized what Kafka must have realized: if life’s a game, it’s better to play with words than money.

When playing with words, the worst you can do is misplace a comma, misinform a reader, or misspell one of the words. . . I guess you can also trigger a slander lawsuit from your Filipino neighbor, but, in my experience, that’s more a result of destroying him in Pacman trivia than destroying him in a literary column that doesn’t have a single dedicated Facebook ‘fan.’  On the flipside, playing the game of life with money instead of words gets you in the worst kind of trouble.  The worst kind of trouble is the kind that gets you nowhere – nowhere except in a Vegas gutter with a broken face, ego, and bank account. 

And it was in that Vegas gutter, while lying on my back looking at the stars spinning above, that Oscar Wilde whispered something into my ear about the Scott Fitzgerald quote, “action is character,” and how I interpreted it wrong.  Obviously I had suffered a concussion and Wilde wasn’t really whispering into my ear. . . but he was right.  And I blame my misinterpretation on Cameron Forsley – who acts as my illustrator, my brother, and my tattooist – because he not only used a hard-to-read elaborate cursive style to tattoo that Fitzgerald quote on me, but he also placed it on the back of my thigh, which forced me to both read and interpret it upside-down.

Excuses aside, I mistakenly and upside-downenly thought that Fitzgerald quote, “action is character,” meant that the more action one gets, the more character one gains.  Gambling, I thought, would get me a lot of action and a lot of character.  With character I could then become a character, and – using the rapper, Lil B, as proof – I convinced myself that the only way I could get more Forsley Feuilleton Facebook ‘fans’ was by becoming a character.  So off I went to Vegas, baby, Vegas to quit writing and start gambling.

As soon as I turned off the strip and entered my hotel – the Luxor – strangers started throwing insults, demands, and threats at me: “Yo fire crotch, give me a hundred bucks before I burn you alive in your own pubic hair.”  Because of all the carrot-colored hair atop my head, they thought I was Carrot Top, Luxor’s house entertainer, and because the previous night’s show didn’t entertain them, they wanted a refund and a reckoning.  And I wanted a drink, so I sat down at a Game King machine and waited for a cocktail waitress to prance over with a few free cocktails.

My resemblance to Carrot Top may have been the cause, but a cocktail waitress never came.  I sat there at the Game King machine under the hot florescent lights that pushed my silk Vegas themed Hawaiian shirt deeper and deeper into my skin while I breathed in so much second-hand cigarette smoke that I started coughing up blood and my money dwindled away with each passing hand of electronic poker.  I’m sure many a cocktail waitress has come many a times. . . just not for me, Carrot Top, or Vince Vaughn.

Unlike Vince Vaughn, I didn’t blame Jon Favreau for the cocktail waitress not coming.  I blamed Carrot Top, and then I got my own fucking drink.  Then I got another, and another, and another.  I kept getting them until I realized that booze – though it aids the writer – hinders the gambler.  If it wasn’t for all those damn drinks, I wouldn’t have lost all my damn money.  I wouldn’t have bet against the Yankees.  I wouldn’t have played heads-up poker against a Stu Unger look-a-like.  I wouldn’t have argued with the Roulette dealer over which numbers he considered Odd.  And, if it wasn’t for the booze, I probably wouldn’t have found Steven Wright’s standup so fucking funny.

I laughed so hard at Steven Wright that my jaw and throat muscles gave out for the remainder of my stay.  The only good thing about not being able to use your jaw and throat is that when you get food poisoning you can save it for someone else.  That – just like the Odd number bit that encouraged the Roulette dealer to throw me in the Vegas gutter – is a Steven Wright joke.  It’s not a Christopher Forsley joke.  Christopher Forsley doesn’t have any jokes, but, like Papa Forsley says, he is a joke.

He’s such a joke that without the use of his jaw and throat muscles he couldn’t plead, “come on, baby, come on,” at neither the horses getting whipped around in a circle nor at The Girlfriend getting wasted in the hotel room, and he lost the last of his money on last place horses and last place hookers. . . I just liked the sound of that line – “last place horses and last place hookers” – I’m not into hookers.

It’s not the kind of action I like.  I like action from The Girlfriend.  And she’s only with me because I write, not because I gamble.  But, lucky for me, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, and here I am, back in San Francisco, writing away in my slum of an apartment for my Forsley Feuilleton Facebook ‘fans’ – those family and friends that feel bad for me, partially naked ‘girl next door’ personas who want me to watch them get totally naked on their web-cams, priests and pigs with fetishes for longhaired redheads, and porn fanatics that think a ‘Feuilleton’ is a French adult film sub-genre.  None of these ‘fans’ have any intention of reading my column, not this one or the next one. . . but, like Kafka, I’m going to continue writing letters in confidence on the paper because life’s a game and it’s better to play with words than money.