Thread: Hi to all at the forum.

Some really good stuff here great looking forum will look through more a little later, i drive a taxi in Portugal so if anyone from this forum comes on holiday to the Algarve Portugal, come and have a coffee with me..

Originally Posted by taxiguy

Some really good stuff here great looking forum will look through more a little later, i drive a taxi in Portugal so if anyone from this forum comes on holiday to the Algarve Portugal, come and have a coffee with me..

Yeah, thanks for the invite taxiguy. I see you are still driving taxis. I kinda hoped by now you were relaxing in luxury, having cracked the baccarat code and made millions. Are you working on it? Good luck mate. Regards

taxiguy,

Your post brought back a "flood" of memories of my "year" in Vegas many years ago. Four or five of us were renting a house in North Las Vegas... 1112 Bluff Ave, if memory serves me correctly. (Near Lake Mead Ave and Martin Luther King Blvd, off Helen Str.)

Over the time i knew him, which was less than some of the other dozen or so "characters" i met and befriended in "lost wages", i learned Eddy had a flower shop until his wife left him, and his business failed. He was a very-likeable young guy, and a hard worker; but he had a serious gambling problem. But it's great to have people offer a free cab ride here and there; and who can "spot" each other a hundred or two late at night w/o a worry of getting repaid. I think the only thing of value he had left was a brand-new Explorer truck, perhaps under payments (but i think he said he owned it). And of course that damn tooth ache of his. Sometimes he'd be walking around the house with his hand on his cheek. He'd rather play craps at the Palace Station than just pay a little to get it fixed... a grown working man who always wore suit clothes holding his chin?

The first thing (and the last) one realizes the very moment he/she enters the city limits is NOTHING said by strangers there is true. I checked out the (cheaper) Thunderbird first after another long day on the road and finally winding through the Hoover Dam thing. (I don't prefer flying from "one Mac'Donalds to another, and back".) Sign said $20... "Okay, good enough for 8pm in a new town, tomorrow's a new day." Well, the clerk starts writing away, and talking to himself says, "Phone, extra $10; sheets, extra $14; dresser, extra $20; etc. Our cheapest room tonight will be $168." Well i'm not an unreasonable person but soon as i think i'm getting "armed" i'm gone. I'll sleep in the car at the truck-stop out of town first. However i did find a room shortly afterward elsewhere for $25. Next day i happened on a group renting that house in N. Lv.

We were a motley bunch in what was once a beautiful luxury home with one of those peanut-shaped stone pools out back. Real-estate took a nose dive in a lot of the older parts after crime elements set in (from LA, i was later told). The Crypts club-house was right across the road from us. Gun-fights, drive-by's, and other street confrontations were by no means infrequent. And of course the wide-open desert all around with snow-covered peaks behind. I think that was the last of the "old" Vegas, the last of the really-cheap and by-the-seat-of-your-pants living. The valley-trapped humidity, and water-shortage problem(s) were just beginning; and nowadays i've heard a lot of the original LV-Blvd "strip" operations have either closed, or cut back on the extras. It's now a major city of over 3 (?) million. Having to truck everything in, even the odd non-palm tree for neighborhoods far off the strip, has put the cost-of-living there COMFORTABLY well beyond the reach of the latest crop of "fortune hunters". In fact, Lv has some of the biggest soup-kitchens anywhere. And the "bums" there work in teams, with EVREY "line" under the sun. There's one heck of a drug problem too. I learned how they lived & died, how to spot them; even took one to the emergency once when she couldn't afford an ambulance. I could write a book, which no one would likely want to read anyway, about the stuff in my few months there; to escape a Canadian winter, and play a bit of poker... and a few things i wouldn't write at all. (I didn't want my new-found American friends to think i was one of those sub-servient "socialist" Canucks.) Every day there was something in the news, sometimes shocking to even the jaded locals. What they show you in those travel guides is asfar from reality as the moon from the earth.

I met another fellow, Steve, from East Virgina who used to build those "gated communities" springing up everywhere then. Had his own company until one such project in Oregon got swamped by a mud-slide. Wiped him out. In Vegas he worked for a company which repaired the super-high communications towers in the deserts and airports, etc. He laughed about the time while changing a bulb when one of the Mormon-community leaders asked sheepishly if he could use a color other than red. He put in for a transfer for Alaska shortly after i left for home, just to see it. Before i left he said if you're going back by way of Denver you're going to need a snow-suit if the car stops. He gave me his. He was a bit of a survivalist, having experienced prolonged rural-desert jobs there.

One more person, perhaps the nicest guy one could hope to meet on a trip, was David Bey (Beijing Bey). I included his full name here because he's also a public figure there:

David Bey

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David BeyStatisticsReal nameDavid BeyNickname(s)Hand GrenadeRated atHeavyweightHeight6 ft 3 in (1.91 m)NationalityAmericanBirth dateMarch 11, 1957 (1957-03-11) (age 52)Birth placePhiladelphia, PennsylvaniaStanceOrthodoxBoxing recordTotal fights30Wins18Wins by KO14Losses11Draws1No contests0David Bey (born 11 March 1957 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is a retired American boxer who competed as a heavyweight in the 1980s.
Bey made his professional debut in 1981, defeating future heavyweight champion James "Buster Douglas in his first fight. He built up a record of 14-0, which included a decision win over Greg Page, who would capture the WBA heavyweight title in his next fight.
In March 1985 Bey was given a title shot by long-reigning IBF heavyweight champion Larry Holmes. Bey was knocked down twice during the fight and eventually stopped by Holmes in the tenth round. Over the next two years Bey lost to Trevor Berbick, James "Bonecrusher" Smith, Joe Bugner and Tyrell Biggs, and was never a major contender again, although he continued to fight until 1994.

[edit] External links

• Professional boxing record for David Bey from Boxrec

This biographical article related to an American boxer is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

This of course was a few years afte the "multi-million dollar" prize-fights. He was then a used-car salesman. Was scheduled for a hip replacement later. But still a towering man with big hands. The tight little guy who owned the house (and paid street workers with drugs to fix it up again) really used to irritate David (and the rest of us once we got to know him better) was into Kung Fu. He used to practice kicks out front every other afternoon... in front of the gangsters going by, not too smart. Anyways, one night he and Bey got into another argument, this time about who would win: Kung Fu guy or Boxer guy. Bey said in not too many words, "It's already been done. (And) i hit you you explode."

Well i want to say one more thing i learned there in general, about "professional gamblers". Spend a bit of time there, and you'll see right away most of the casinos are empty most of the time, execpt in the evening when it's cooler and the tourists are out drinking. Even the poker scene isn't really the way it's portrayed elsewhere. Now i'm not going to get into which casinos had which hand-dealt games, etc, then. Suffice it to say a common bumper-sticker there reading, "You've seen it, now go home!" isn't too far off the truth.

Yeah, nice rave G. But you never said if you joined the Crypts or not... And another time, you can fill us in on how you came to be interested in baccarat. Was it that LV time when it began for you?