I guess the best place to start is with me getting lucky in a casino.

Which gets your attention, but is probably dishonest, since I am not really a gambler. Back in Wisconsin, at Paradise Lake, I played poker with a little group of locals once a month, young professionals in their thirties, two lawyers, a dentist, a doctor. I was a young professional, too, but of a different variety. We’d got to know each other at a health club in Lake Geneva, and started up our regular game maybe five years ago, but that’s not terribly relevant except to say that my idea of gambling was nickel/dime/quarter.

What had brought me to the big noisy casino in the little thriving town of Boot Heel, Nevada, was business, though you’d take me for another tourist. I was in a yellow polo shirt and chinos and loafers, and had a nice tan going, picked up over the month I’d just spent in Las Vegas, sixty miles north, also not gambling.

I was 32, five ten, one hundred sixty pounds, with shortish brown hair, a fairly anonymous sort, if passably presentable to the fairer sex. I based this on the many smiles I got from waitresses in little buckskin outfits, fringed vests over white blouses and fringed miniskirts; they were circulating, offering free drinks, as I threaded through the slots and poker machines and blackjack and roulette tables, heading back to the bar.

Boot Heel had six casinos, but this one-at the Four Jacks Hotel-was by far the largest, sporting a showroom that hosted the likes of Jerry Vale (this week) and Vikki Carr (next week). The little town’s claim to fame as a sort of second-string Deadwood or Tombstone was based on Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday having lived here for a time. Holliday even killed somebody. Wild Bill Hickok gunned somebody down on Main Street, too, it was said.

The town of ten thousand had one other claim to fame, an annual biker blow-out that attracted a lot of media every year, giving Boot Heel a certain modern-day outlaw reputation. The last such event had been three weeks ago, and currently no bikers were to be seen, at least within the Four Jacks casino.