Anthony rolled the dice. “Deal,” he said.
The casino was long past its glory days. The buttons on the slot machines were sticky, the seats were worn, and there was a perpetual odor of citrus freshener and ammonia on the stained carpets.
Three girls clad in cheap sequins and satin twitched their bodies with stiff, lackluster movements on the stage to the right of the gambling floor. They faced their catatonic eyes towards the ceiling and walls.
The slot machines and card tables were half empty (or half full, depending on how you looked at it). Most of the people there were senior folks wearing “Swingers Club” t-shirts, with bald heads and wispy, gray and white hairs. Anthony cringed at the thought of their wrinkly, sagging bodies writhing and their toothless mouths opening and twisting with pleasure. He wondered which casino bus had taken these retirees in from the city to spend their social security checks.
So what brought Anthony to this air-conditioned shithole in the desert?
Gareth, his fourteen-year-old orange tabby, a plump, twenty-pound pumpernickel of a senior cat, had passed away on Monday. He’d fallen ill over the weekend and when Anthony took him to the vet, the vet had said his cat’s organs were failing rapidly.
Anthony held Gareth during the euthanasia. Gareth let out his final breath with a small rattle as Anthony whispered over and over again, “You’ve been a good boy.”
Up until then, it had been Anthony and Gareth, living in their one-bedroom apartment in a shitty desert town not too far from this casino. The town was one that rich and adventurous folks from Southern California drove through on their way to Vegas, the home of much more luxurious and well-kept casinos.
But no, the desert he lived in also had its own casino—the Palm Casino. Anthony couldn’t afford the prices of the Strip, with their add-on fees and upscale dining costs. Besides, he wasn’t looking for a posh experience.
He just wanted to get away from his town, a town he had lived in for most of his adulthood. It was sufficient when he had Gareth. He worked from home as a computer tech support guy for a small company in California. He wasn’t required to, and thus never attended any work holiday events, and he was paid well for someone who lived outside of California.
Anthony’s little apartment was kept at a cool 72 degrees during the summer, where temperatures would soar to the high 90s or 110s. From 2015 to 2025, every day, he would wake up to Gareth’s loud meowing, feed Gareth, brush his teeth, scoop the litterbox, shower, heat a bagel and slather with cream cheese, make a cup of coffee from the Keurig, and log in to his computer for work. He would break for lunch in the middle of the day, microwave some lunch, and watch a daytime show while Gareth cuddled with him on the couch. Depending on his workload, he would clock out at some point in the evening and fix himself and Gareth their respective suppers.
Once the evening was sufficiently cool outside, he would pull on some sweatpants and take a walk along Dune Avenue, a long stretch of street with the desert brush and cactuses in the background, one liquor store at which he would occasionally buy chips and soda (his guilty pleasure was tortilla chips, nacho cheese, and Mountain Dew), and one gas station that overcharged because there weren’t any other gas stations nearby for miles. Anthony seldom saw any other pedestrians on the streets during his walks, and he preferred it that way. His walks would take half an hour, and then he would return to take another shower and sit on the couch with Gareth while watching a movie or playing a video game on his Xbox. After that, he would brush his teeth, retreat to the bedroom as Gareth pounced on the bed, and go to sleep.
This was good. He enjoyed this life. But it was tragic, a great injustice, Anthony felt, that cats’ lifespans were only a fraction of a typical human’s.
And now, with Gareth gone, the silence in his apartment and the empty streets around his building, were too much.
He needed a distraction. And to see people. How long had it been since he intentionally sought the company of humans? As he drove home from the crematorium with Gareth’s ashes in a box on the passenger seat, he saw a billboard on the side of the road.
25 miles until Palm Casino.
Yes. This was it. He drove past his apartment and kept going, towards Palm Casino.
Continued in part two: https://edenonpeng.com/2025/09/02/goodbye-to-gareth-a-story-about-a-man-and-his-orange-cat-part-two-the-end/.
Eden Onpeng 