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Candyland Jones was a terrible nickname.  He told me that he had many customers who were parents that would be more inclined to think that his cordiality and good-heartedness would extend to their children as well if he had a name like Candyland Jones.  I told him that it made him sound like a pedophile and no parent would trust some person with their children if they suspected that that person was a pedophile, and then he asked me if the game Candyland was a game for pedophiles, and I said yes, yes it was, if you were still playing it at age 40, in your underwear, with children tied up at the wrists.  He said he would never lower himself to such revolting behavior.  This coming from the man who became a multi-millionaire from the pain of other people at the HC Palace.
He started off smalltime, turning little ideas into gradually bigger ones.  Remember the Ball and Beer?  You know, the place where the mothers would drop off their kids and husbands before shopping, and the children would go off to the playpen under the supervision of group leaders while the men were given all-you-can-drink bar privileges in the adjoining room under the supervision of bartenders.  At $30 per family group for a four-hour session, it was an amazing success.
No man could profit from synergistic relationships like Prince could.  Some people go out on Saturday nights.  Prince Davis stayed home and spent all night writing down random words and names and phrases in two separate columns until he found seemingly contradictory yet desirable combinations.  One day he matched Candy Land with Indiana Jones.  Masculine superhero with childhood board game.  He fell in love with it.  Surely there was some kind of Freudian complex for the motives behind that decision, I just can’t think of one at the moment.  Anyway, on another fateful, solitary Saturday evening, The Ruthless Entrepreneur Formerly Known as Prince Davis combined two words with the most polar opposite implications into one member, subsequently bringing about the construction of the HC Palace—the first and only Hospice Casino on the planet.
I tried to convince him that nobody would ever check their loved ones in to some institution that was so blatantly sick and morally reprehensible, and he just shook his head and told me that I would be surprised at how low one can set the bar on human depravity.  And like the marketing magician he was, Prince surprised me by putting his entire savings into advertising and construction, with quarterly returns more than doubling his initial investment by the end of the first year.  He was so kind to incoming customers and patients.  Prince respected their pangs of impending loss, for both his mother and father had died at early ages in his life, and he gave lollipops to the children and let them play in the backyard of the building, which had a peaceful little manmade pond with a jet-powered waterfall that looked like the real thing no matter which angle you stared at it.  The Eventually Bereaved would watch their children through the window of the Grieving Lobby.  As the kids played with the frisky, well-trained ducks on the neatly kept lawn next to the artificial waterhole, Prince would watch with his customers in silent reverence and reflection, and everyone in the Grieving Lobby would have a good cry and then make the 10,000 dollar non-refundable exchange for services, and then take their children (if they had brought any), and step outside to watch as their loved one was transported through the parking lot on a gurney wreathed with flowers into the Ward of Mercy.  Sometimes, if one of the customers broke down during the procession, Prince would run out to them with a sincerely desperate looking face, and place a hundred dollars worth of chips into the palms of their tear-filled hands and escort them into Recreation Room and sit them down at the nearest black jack game.  All his employees were physically attractive, kind, and comfortingly optimistic in their philosophical worldview, with a good feel for putting things in non-condescending laymen’s terms.  When visitors drained their kid’s college funds at the poker table, it was because they were paying for counseling from a dealer who was more loving and analytical and good-looking than any of the local therapists.
“And hell,” Prince reasoned to me, “With half of these players having just shelled out 10,000 bucks on a sure bet to lose, as their other chips are lying and dying on a clean bed in the adjoining building, what’s another 10,000 to lay out on a Weak Flush?  Or a good Two Pair, even?  And coupled with the grief brought on by their relative or spouse, who’s got the right to tell them not to spend their troubles away?  Nobody, is what I say.  You know why they tint all the windows in casinos?  So that when the losers at the slots look outside, they can’t tell if it’s 3:00 in the evening or 3:00 in the morning.  Don’t see any windows here, and you know why?  For most of my customers, the ones with the dying kin, it’s permanent midnight in their minds.”
Prince displayed the EKG machines for all the patients on a multi-screened board.  The lifelines were cartoon jockeys riding horses trailing a neon red light, and the part of the screen below the lifeline was grass green and the color above it was sky blue.  It was the most successful bookie in town.  People from all over would come to bet on which jockey would flatline first, and despite the huge occupancy at HC Palace, it would take a while for one of the lifelines to actually do that, so many of the players would put in their money and then head to the bar where some of the dejected family members of the terminally ill would be drinking down their agony.  Prince made as much at the bar as he did from the bookies.  But oh, when some poor sap’s heart-rate dropped on the big board, you could hear the agitation of hundreds exploding and echoing throughout the Recreation Room as they crowded around to check the current state of their loved ones in comparison to the other occupants, while the other visitors checked their bets, hoping for what Prince playfully called a Dead Ding-A-Ling.  The patients themselves couldn’t hear the noise though, every entrance into the casino area siphoned off all sound through Prince’s perfect construction planning.  Two soundproof doors at the end of each hallway to get into the casino from outside, and the same to get into the ward.  So the patients didn’t hear a thing, and they could have their windows open and hear nothing but the sound of birds and the ruffling of curtains from a morning wind and smell the dew of the day after a cool sprinkling of rain untainted by errant cigar smoke.
The place, like Vegas, was founded upon beautiful lies.  Prince made a real show of the flatliners.  A bunch of red sirens at the top of the big board would start turning their revolving lights and blaring their sweet song, like the Great Bells at the Gates of Heaven on the Eve of Armageddon, and everyone would drop whatever they were doing and start making a lot of noise, and a team of nurses, really cute ones, would run very seriously through the soundproof hallway, and then come out ten minutes later and declare “He/She’s OK!” and it would be followed by exultant cheering.  I have to hand it to him, in a place of constant death, he sure made it a huge living experience.  When one of those jagged peaks and valleys started leveling out into a straight path of monotone eternity, he somehow managed to turn the situation on its head, creating a crazy existential confirmation out of it, instilling in the whole crowd a sense of anxiety followed by vulnerability and climaxed with a self-gratifying belief in one’s own false-immortality in the Rounded Grinning Face of Doom.  That was the name of his huge roulette table.
Tonight, I decided, was the last time that I would ever visit him.  And it was a pity, because we were such good friends at school, way back when.  I opted to drink myself stupid before leaving.  Despite Prince’s manic intellectualism, I could never seriously understand where he was coming from unless I was completely intoxicated.  So after downing a bottle and a half of wine by myself I grabbed my keys and drove crookedly from my house to Prince’s Palace fifteen minutes away, and parked my car into a Reserved for Eventually Bereaved Customers stall at the front of the HC Lot and then got out and headed to the entrance.  The doors opened as I stepped over the SensorMat, and I stepped in and waited in the hall between the two doors.  Then I heard a suctioning sound as the mechanical slides shut behind me, sealing off any inch of space for external sound to squeeze through, save for the whispers of the air vents above my head.  I looked around at the white walls running parallel to my sides.  And then I unzipped my pants and walked around peeing on the corners where the carpet met the ends of the hallway.  Then I zipped back up and stepped over the second SensorMat and walked into the HC.  It was quiet.  A slow Tuesday.  There were a couple people at the slots with HC cups, and one hospice attendant on break in a standard issue scrub outfit sitting with a dealer at the table.  I staggered past them and walked as straight as I could through the Recreation Room until I walked into a tall man’s mighty chest.  He told me that I was too drunk to go any further into the HC and I asked him if he knew who the hell I was and he said that he did not know who the hell I was and I told him that I was Prince Davis’ best friend, knew him back when he was just a poor boy on the farm, and he asked me if by Prince Davis I meant Candyland Jones, and I told him to get the fuck out of my way.
I twirled around the security guard and then looked up at the second floor loft where a two-way mirror panel took up the entire front wall of the overhanging structure that stood on two massive, silver-hued support columns.  I headed up toward the stairs but the security guard called out from behind me and told me that he wasn’t in there, that he’d been looking for him but couldn’t find him, so I went to go check the Grieving Room.  Sometimes I caught him in there at night, crying to himself, for God knows what reason.  I was furious to find that he wasn’t there.  I stamped around the labyrinth of slot machines, steaming about the wretched concept of the whole goddamned building.  It would all end sometime, I assured myself.  The Beer and Ball joint had just recently shut down due to several incidents, one involving a ten-year old downing six shots of vodka, and another having something to do with a heavily inebriated man and a ball pen full of unsuspecting children.
And then I saw him.  He was pulling slots, wearing an old baseball cap and a heavy gray jacket to look inconspicuous.  He was making his rounds, dropping coins and pulling the lever and moving on, picking up whatever came out and putting it back into a tin bucket that he had wrapped around his left arm.
“Sarah’s dead,” I told him.
“Sarah is dead,” he said, nodding.
“I had a crush on her from 6th to 8th grade,” I said, my voice shaking, growing in volume.
“So did I,” he said, as he pulled slots and stared at the fruits and sevens and diamonds that rolled around randomly and then froze in place, and he barely waited for the results of the pull—he just kept moving on and placing coins and pulling levers and collecting.
“You killed her,” I told him, “You killed Sarah, and you killed her fat boyfriend.”
“I killed neither her nor him.  She applied for residence at the Matchmaker Apartment Complex.  It was my concept, but it was her decision.  She knew what I was like.  Sarah knew about the Candyland Jones Synergistic Monopoly Program.”
“You paired her with a grotesquely obese man with an insane overeating problem!”
“Were they not the perfect match?  I spent a lot of time on those two columns, and when I saw their compatibility—”
“She turned anorexic ever since she got denied from that professional ballet company, and you knew it, you knew it goddamn you, and you paired her with a man who couldn’t stop eating and ate all her food and then they fell in love and then he had a massive heart attack but kept on eating and she suffered from extreme fatigue and then you murdered her, Candyla—fuck, you murdered her, Prince!  She fell in love with that guy and then you let her die.”
“Sarah never would have met that guy if I hadn’t paired them together,” he said, and he slid a coin in and pulled one more slot, in the center of all the machines.  The yellow sirens on all the slots began wailing, and they flashed in sequence, starting down from the ends of each row, and then shutting off just as the other lights in the second to the last row flashed on, and then those shut off and the ones closer to the center flashed on, until the sequence reached the center, at which point the sequence repeated itself from the outside and worked its way in again, with the sirens wailing and with my head reeling from drunkenness and depression.  Prince Davis smiled comically, his eyes welling up with water, and he asked, “Wanna hear something funny?”
“Okay.”
“I’ve got cancer.  I’m gonna die.”
“Good,” I said, “Good for you.”
He laughed loudly and then looked around at all the flashing lights on the tops of all the slots.  I could see that he was remembering the same thing that I was.  That night down by the stream where we whipped switches at fireflies—the night we discovered that if you opened up those insect’s insides, you could smear it on a stick and make it shine like solid energy.  We held lightsaber battles every night after, until of course, he made a business out of it by selling Two-Dollar Lightsaber Sticks.
He looked back at me, and as gold-plated dollar coins began spouting out of the machine before him, I realized the absurdity of the situation.  Prince Davis had just won 50,000 dollars of his own money.  A lighted sign under the siren of his slot machine, labeled “You’re A Winner!” began blinking belatedly as the coins continued to fall.  He dropped his bucket, and came toward me with arms extended, for a comforting embrace from a longtime friend, with the most miserable face in the world, tears streaming down his cheeks and darkening the collar of his gray jacket, but I pushed him away, turned toward the soundproof doors and ran outside as the wind blew through the trees surrounding the buildings and the doors closed behind me and imprisoned all the wailing sirens and beeping slot machines within the building, and I got into my car and drove home as fast as I could, sobbing into my steering wheel the whole way back.