Lounge Acts: Nightlife and the Vegas Underground

This essay is my contribution to a recent collection of writing about Sin City, called "Neon Riffs and Lounge Acts," published by the Huntington Press, about my trip into the depths of The Las Vegas musical underground, and the characters I met there.

By the time I moved to Las Vegas a decade ago, The Rats were all long dead. You know, the Rat Pack, the original Lounge Lizards, those old-school Strip entertainers and womanizers who once ruled all nightlife across this crazy entertainment realm like crowned kings, replacing scepters with stiff drinks and cigarettes.

Well, that life catches up to you, considering how many mistresses you’ve collected along the way. Your last performance is your funeral which, let me tell ya, ain’t usually no laughing matter, one which few, if any, of the mistresses bother to attend.

Old Blue Eyes dropped dead from a heart attack at 82, a few years after Dino fell to cancer. Sammy Davis Jr., that old trendsetter, was actually the first to go, dying from a throat tumor triggered by his chain-smoking ways. 

The boys were another generation’s definition of Sin City crooners, performers my parents worshipped from the living room of our house in suburban Syracuse, N.Y. But this was 2012, and a new dawn had pervaded The Strip, with new celebrities and new rules. The nightspots now featured deejays, electronic music and $100 cover charges. 

Sure, a few A-List entertainers and the usual retreads blew into town, performed a few sold-out shows and then caught the first flight out of this desert inferno.

But where was the working-man musician this town had once celebrated? The local bass player and lady lounge-singer who never made it to the top of the marquee but whose name was still once up there in lights, as a backup but never a lead.

Where did they fit in to this new Sin City matrix? Was there still a place for them, like there was, if just barely, the gray-haired blackjack dealer or that cocktail waitress with a few too many age lines? 

Well, for the most part, they’ve all moved underground. 

No longer supported by the so-called visionaries running The Strip, they perform gigs in tiny bars and restaurant lounges, some bona fide holes in the wall, eking out an existence before a small legion of local fans who still appreciate them.

For ten years, I have been a fringe denizen of this world, lurking in places like the Tap House, Shifty’s, the Sand Dollar, The Dispensary, the Golden Tiki and the venerable Italian American Club. I’ve met characters who have enriched my life or asked to borrow money, singers and musicians who sometimes feel that the Vegas that once employed them has now coldly turned its back.

Real characters populate this realm. People like Sam the Realtor, Frankie the Tough Guy, Peewee the Hells Angel and Lisa the Showgirl, who was always proud of being called a broad.

So come on a journey into this netherworld of nightlife Las Vegas, 2022-style. Meet the people I either still consider heroes or would eat glass to avoid.

Leading that list is Lisa. Ah, Lisa, you will forever be my Northstar of Absolute Cool. Let me tell you a little tale that took place a few years back. We’d gone out for drinks at some downtown dive. I was driving back toward our houses in Sun City Anthem, the 55+ community that Lisa and I joked wasn’t cool enough to house the likes of us, the bad-boy journalist and the showgirl-turned brothel madam-turned cocaine dealer.

If Anthem was a graveyard, we were the two youngest corpses in the cemetery. 

Laughing in her raspy cackle, she was long past her dancing years, when she was The Strip’s first all-nude showgirl, a vixen Carry Grant once asked to marry him, shield his closeted gay life, have his child.

As we turned off the I-15 past the M casino, on our way to our safe suburban homes, Lisa started complaining about men. Or sex, to be more precise. She wasn’t getting any, or enough. She was 75.

“I’m not getting laid, and I don’t know why,” she lamented, with a tone that suggested we might be at the beauty shop, our heads under hair dryers, or I was doing her nails.

“I mean, my tits haven’t fallen. My ass hasn't fallen. I just don’t get it.”

Lisa posts pictures of exotic birds on social media. That’s her in a nutshell — a gorgeous, glamorous feathered creature still proud of her flight path. “It took talent,” said the old showgirl. “It was the look, the attitude, that said, ‘Don’t you wish you had the money to sleep with me? Well, you can’t have me.’”

Lisa is unvarnished, wild in a way you admire in a woman, as long as you prefer a sassy, say-anything type who’s gonna tell you straight if you’ve got a toilet-paper tail or that you’re not flying right. She also has a taste for suitors decades younger, avoiding men her age because she doesn’t want to burp them, make sure they’re taking their medicine and then, finally, bury them.

“I always get the younger ones so they don’t die or just get boring,” she said.

Lisa was consummate old-school Vegas, the tip of the vodka-on-the-rocks of bookies, barflies and bit players I would soon come to find in this seamy, long-overlooked Las Vegas musical Underworld.

*

Back in the 2012, when I relocated to Sin City, the first item on my personal agenda was buying a house. I’d contacted a realtor and we met on an afternoon in April at a place called Mr. B’s, off The Strip, near the old Hard Rock casino. 

I was wearing a Dexter Gordon T-shit, a white-on-black relief featuring the saxophonist playing in New York in the 1950s, the smoke from his cigarette swirling into the air like strains of music.

That’s where I met Sam The Realtor, a man soon to become my very best friend in this sunny place with shady people. His last name was Wagmeister and he came from Chicago, which he pronounced Chicargo, and I later joked to a friend that, from first impressions, he was most likely the most-Jewish man in America.

Sam was cool. He had the heart of an artist inside that realtor’s suit. The moment he spotted Dexter on my T-shirt, our conversation that day soared, lifting off from housing prices and curb appeal into the realm of music and the years we both spent in Kansas City. We were both there in the mid 1980s, he as a manager at an Egghead software store, me as a newspaper reporter for the Star, without ever knowing one another.

Kansas City was all about jazz and Sam loved jazz. In fact, he loved all kinds of music. And somewhere along the way, he decided that even if he didn’t play an instrument, he could become a lively and reliable patron to the art form in Sin City, the adopted home he had come to love.

Sam seemed to know every singer and bass player in town, and a few years later launched a Facebook page called “Reasons to Love Las Vegas,” which began in 2015 with a few followers and has now risen to a subscription list of more than 5,000.

“So, you like jazz?” He asked early in our conversation. “Why don’t you come out to the open mike tonight at the Tap House?”

Then the realtor kicked into full promoter mode. This was an open mike like you’d never seen in your life, he said, not some amateur karaoke crowd or that tired Holiday Inn lounge act that always plays the beat a few beats too slow. No, these people were real pros, who’d spent years playing every kind of music, from rock and blues to soft jazz and crooning cabaret.

Then Sam slipped in the hook, with the sly sleight-of-hand of the best Vegas Strip magician or LA publicist. “Maybe you can write a story about it.”

It was an elegant piece of work, to be sure, like a singer hitting hit a high note or Dexter reaching down low, scraping the register for sounds you never knew exited.

*

On those nights inside the Tap House, I felt like Dorothy crash-landing in Oz, jarred from my bed inside that old Kansas farm house, without the squealing munchkins or flattened witches. I was looking for my Glenda; the lead character for a piece in the LA Times; she had to be in there someplace.

Instead, the bar was a Saturday morning cartoon, a mix of Foghorn Leghorn and Ren and Stimpy, with a slightly out-of-tune charm that could either make you smile or want to cover your eyes. Everybody was 60 or older, trying to reprise 40. There were coiffed hairdos, too much perfume, and far, far too much Botox. 

There were thick-necked toughs from another era, like the slick Frankenstein in the expensive suit who carried himself like an undertaker from Cleveland, with the cadaver-like look of an embalmed corpse, its blood drained, with a hooked quarter-moon of a chin, who made you want to sidle up and ask, “So, why the long face?”

But you valued your life, so you didn’t, you moved on inside the milling crowd.

The Tap House was located out on western Charleston, as far from the slickness of The Strip you could get while remaining in the Milky Way Galaxy. The place was divided into two parts — one was a dive bar that became a de facto headquarters for Cleveland Browns football fans. The Tap House was on the other side of a narrow hallway, past the kitchen and break area for gum-chewing waitresses who called ya “Hon” when they weren’t complaining about their tips. One night, a server discarded her tray for a slithery dance to a rendition of the 1962 hit “The Stripper.”

It all seemed so surreal, so Saturday Night Live, but here’s the thing; I couldn’t look away. I saw some amazing music, played by performers who still loved the art form, an impromptu collection of seasoned musicians who’d recorded and toured with the likes of Lou Rawls, Joe Cocker and Barry White.

At one point, many of them had touched the big time, if only for a fine fleeting moment.

Still, they were good enough to rule almost any venue in America. When a tribute artist took the Tap House stage to do Elvis, Marilyn or Sinatra, it almost made you ask: “Hell, who needs the real deal?”

And Sam? Well, he was like a Bronx kid with front row seats to a Yankees game. He loved rubbing elbows with these flickering entertainment lights, often not knowing if a performer was a Grammy winner, gold record holder or somebody doing bar mitzvahs.

“Do you know who that guy is?” he’d ask, poking my side, adding “Wow, look at her!”

To a player, these performers all rued the fact that the casinos were shrinking their house bands or hiring soloists with a computerized beat. That left them all to compete for a diminishing number of gigs at lower-paying lounges and restaurants like this one.

More than just a place to slap the backs of a few cronies, however, the Tap House provided a haven and a job network. Entertainers performed without pay before a crowd that often included talent agents. 

That fact alone fueled the scene with a foul whiff of arrogance. People rolled into the place with attitude, like they were walking atop a Grammy Awards red carpet — with cancerous personalities and thin skins.

In some corners of the room came a stink of desperation. Waxen dummies with publicity-shot smiles downloaded their entire resume on you in a matter of minutes: where they played, who they knew, often after you’d only asked them how their day was going. They couldn’t help themselves, those careers were all they had, now they were lions on the hunt for a last kill. As a result, business cards were pressed into hands like street baggies in downtown Baltimore. 

“Come see my show,” one singer said, with a whiff of desperation.

“If I’m not playing myself, I’ll be in the building,” came the reply.

It wasn’t long before I found my Glenda, the story’s lead actor on this stage of bit players: Despite the smooth voice of a Tony Bennett, there was something peculiar about the way singer-emcee Mark Giovi moved about the room: his mouth drooping slightly, left hand hanging limp, left leg somewhat stiff.

Giovi had cerebral palsy, a condition that had no doubt hurt him in the hard-hearted music industry. But not at the Tap House, not among this standing-room-only crowd.

“If anyone said anything unkind, it might become a little dangerous for them,” Giovi told me. “I don’t think they’d get out of here unscathed.”

Sam, of course, loved my published story. Even though he wrote a jazz column for a local senior’s weekly, it was like he’d found a conduit to a larger audience for this music scene he so cherished: Me.

But not everyone was so enthusiastic. There was a particular buzz about my Botox line and other unflattering descriptions, how nobody was simply John, how the room was instead full of Johnnies, Frankies and Bobbies. The regulars also chafed at my descriptions of the Tap House crowd as “longhaired Bob Seger lookalikes with cocktails in hand and the occasional tough guy who did time in prison for Runyonesque crimes people are afraid to ask about.”

And I heard that L.J. Harness, the house band’s drummer, a car-salesman who sidled onstage with the look-at-me easiness of a “Tonight Show” couch regular, was bad-mouthing both me and my piece, insisting that he should have been the star of the story, not the guy with the physical ailment.

After that, I never went back. I guess I was just Tapped Out. Years before Will Smith’s Slap Seen Around the World, I feared a similar fate within the smoke-stained walls of that small-time venue. 

Still, I have a few fond memories, one involving a performer named Rico “Suave” Diamante, “the Las Vegas showman,” who belted out songs by Michael Jackson and Rick James, sweating in his sequined white suit and Panama hat.

During a break, standing in the darkened parking lot on a warm April night, Sam and I watched Rico suddenly break into a dance and a cappella routine of the song “Only You” that would have made The Platters proud. 

Standing beside him was a tall woman named Grace, quiet, ex-military, puffing on a cigarette, who told me, “Everybody in here’s got a secret, including me. But I’m not going to tell you mine.” Then she stuffed out her butt and walked back into the bar.

*

I met Frankie the Tough Guy on my first-ever night inside the Tap House. Within nanoseconds, one of his man paws was clenched in my face. I was sitting with a female friend, when this guy breezed in — a cocky-looking little spark plug dressed in a fedora and pressed suit. 

But it was the cologne that spoke to me. It smelled like menace.

“How ya doin’ beautiful?” he said in my friend’s direction.

Well, I’m sort of a wise guy myself.

“Are you talking to me?” I smiled.

And then there it was, that fist, more animal hoof than human hand. It was so close I could count the individual hairs on his fingers. He’d made his mark in life with those ham hocks, at first boxing professionally and later using those same fists to get people’s attention outside of the ring.

“No, “I’m not talkin’ to you,” he said, his tone signifying that the conversation was over.

Later, I found Sam in the crowd.

“Who is that guy?” I asked.

“Oh, that’s Frankie Citro,” he said. “You don’t wanna mess with him.”

Fair enough, I’d been forewarned. 

A few months later, I was researching a story about Nevada’s Black Book, officially known as the “Excluded Person’s List,” an index of desert undesirables blackballed by the state’s casino regulators. The book was created in 1960 as a public-relations ploy to reassure tourists that Vegas was not indeed overrun by the mob, as most suspected. 

Soon, the list included such names as William “Icepick Willie” Alderman, Murray “the Camel” Humphries and Chicago crime boss Sam “the Cigar” Giancana, as well as bit players caught up in the dragnet, many of them Italian, whose crimes barely registered as a public threat.

Black Book membership means you can’t own, manage or even set foot inside a casino anywhere in Nevada. The only way off the list is to die, and even then state regulators require a death certificate as proof you’ve truly left this world.

I wanted to find one of these guys.

I called Sam.

“Remember Frankie from the Tap House?” he said. “He’s on the list.”

So, as Frankie might say, I gave him a jingle. From the start, Frankie ruled out any telephone conversations. In his line of work, he’d probably been wiretapped up the wazoo. When I brought along a friend, he insisted I vouch for the guy’s character. 

When he felt comfortable, Frankie told his story.

The youngest of three sons in an Italian enclave in northern New Jersey, Frankie shined shoes for street thugs and learned a valuable lesson: most tough guys aren’t as tough as they talk. He vowed he would never fear another man.

A product of a neighborhood that spoke with its fists, he began a modest professional boxing career, fighting as a light-heavyweight — working as a bouncer and making collections to earn some cash on the side. 

While he did jobs for some pretty disreputable characters, he says he never joined the mob because he didn’t want those guys telling him what to do — only his mother had that power.

He got by, doing a little bit of this and a little bit of that. 

Badda-bing, baddah-boom.

In 1985, he and six others were convicted in Southern California of bookmaking and loan-sharking, an operation prosecutors said charged 1000% interest. Two years later, he got his reckoning with federal charges. A newspaper story at his sentencing was headlined “Brass Knuckles Therapy.” In true form, Frankie considered that an insult: he’d never hit a man with anything but his own bare fists.

In the end, Frankie spent a few years behind bars in the federal pen. Worse, upon his release, the sentence landed him in Nevada’s dreaded black book, even though none of his crimes in any way involved Las Vegas casinos.

It was a sentence tantamount to life in prison without parole, leading to both personal and financial ruin. Frankie’s a stand-up guy; a comedian with pace and timing. He’s owned bars, served as emcee at fundraisers and loves to sing his beloved doo-wop music in public.

Not as much anymore. Being banned from venues connected to any type of live casino gaming rules out most places. For years after his release from prison, Frankie endured a succession of lackluster jobs — including strip club manager, plumber and carpenter, even running a janitorial company — but nothing has worked out, especially once bosses found out about the Exclusion List, which many in this town view as a more-serious mark than any racketeering conviction.

Eventually, the black book inclusion even affected his health, but Frankie soldiers on. I’ve watched him recover from open-heart surgery and a painful shoulder operation without once taking pain medication. I’ve seen him struggle to find any kind of work, even swallow his pride to call people he’d once written off as enemies. Yet not once has he lost his sense of humor. I’ve never told Frankie a joke he hasn’t heard before.

Frankie is also stubborn.

To him, leaving Las Vegas would be tantamount to surrender. Now this tough guy is plotting something never achieved in the history of the Nevada Black Book: Frank Citro Jr. wants to get off that list — while he’s still alive.

In the meantime, Frankie figures he might as well put his notoriety to work. He’s considered all kinds of schemes — from hosting a frank-talk podcast where he would recommend products that earned the tough-guy seal of approval to running a wedding chapel that offered mob-style ceremonies, officiated, of course, by Frankie himself.

In 2008, he briefly starred in an Internet reality-show called “Tough Guy with Frankie Citro,” in which he played a version of himself, a wronged man struggling for redemption. In the show’s opening scene, Frankie provides a voice-over to the sound of accordion music and a series of photos of well-known mobsters — both living and after they were whacked.

“My name is Frankie Citro. I live in Vegas. I’ve been here a long time,” he says. “I’m in the black book, the list of undesirables. They say I’m associated with this guy and that guy; the mafia, the boys. Ah, they’re all full of it as far as I’m concerned.”

Frankie eventually left the project after the producers failed to keep their word, which is important to him. Frankie lives in a world that values respect; something he knows he’s not getting in Las Vegas. That’s why he defends his streetwise shtick, even though some might see it as embracing an ethnic stereotype.

“It’s all I’ve got left,” he told me once. “They made it so I can’t find work in this town. It’s like I have leprosy.”

Frankie also has another trait, perhaps one learned in the old neighborhood: He’s a dedicated friend who elicits loyalty in return. 

When one old crony, a six-foot-eight former Hells Angel nicknamed Peewee, was sentenced to prison, Frankie spent hours offering advice on how to stay invisible in the Big House. He threw Peewee a going-away party at the Italian American Club, attended by both leather-clad bikers and older Italian men who kissed each other’s cheeks as a gesture of respect. He and Peewee stood behind a cardboard prop of some jail bars and mugged for the camera.

It was that kind of party. Even for Vegas, a city known for the unscripted, the event stood out: a fundraiser by one tough guy for another tough guy of a different stripe.

I wrote about the event, a piece headlined, “Two friends: Ones been to prison, the others going.” 

My lead, with the pair meeting to plan the party, read: “LAS VEGAS — The two men are best friends, a burly odd couple pounding down meaty sandwiches at a steakhouse here. The mood was heavy. One will soon take a long trip to a place the other has been before, where the beds are hard and so is the time.”

Peewee liked the story; his mother hated it.

As the years pass, I have gotten to know Frankie better, a lot better. I know he’s politically conservative, that he’s never drank or done drugs in his life and recently quit smoking following a health scare. I’ve seen him cry — from the pain of his ailments and the emotional burden of being declared an outcast in your adopted hometown.

Over the years, I’ve also learned not to make anything that resembles a promise to Frankie, because he’ll hold you to it.

“Ya cocksucka,” he’ll say. “I thought you were gonna call me.”

When I once told him about a troublesome editor at the Times, Frankie had my back.

“That cunt,” he said. “You want me to come in and talk to her?”

“No, Frankie,” I winced. “I’ll handle it.”

But the Tough Guy was on a roll. 

“You know what she is, John?”

“No, Frankie, I don’t.”

“She’s an ankle,” he seethed. “Three feet lower than a cunt.”

Yikes.

Still, Frankie’s showmanship always shines through.

Years ago, we sat at a table inside the Italian American Club, just a few days before my 2013 newspaper piece ran on his black book predicament. 

On a whim, I called my editor on his night shift, not the ankle, but an editor I loved and liked to razz. I handed Frankie my phone. 

He didn’t miss a beat.

“Are you John Glionna’s editor? Well, from now on, I don’t want you to touch one word of his copy, ya understand?” I could hear my editor gulp. “And another thing,” Frankie added. “If that story don’t run by Thursday, you’re gonna be runnin’!”

I have come to passably imitate that hit-you-with-a-brick New Jersey accent that makes everything new and funny. 

I even have a Frankie glossary.

“He was trying to put me in short pants,” means disrespect.

“I’m not throwin’ flowers at myself,” means not bragging.

Once, when I told Frankie that Sam had a new girlfriend, he said: “That guy’s gettin’ laid? He ain’t no oil paintin’.”

After my father died, I gave Frankie an essay I’d written — an Italian son’s paean to his Dad. I knew he’d appreciate it.

He called me later. “John, you know I ain’t no readah,” he said, his voice catching. “I haven’t even read many of the indictments against me. But I read this.”

Our friendship has crossed cultures: Frankie’s a tough guy; I’m not. I went to college; he didn’t. We’re both lousy spellers. Frankie respects my so-called intellect, even if he threatens to strangle me acer reading my liberal social media posts. 

I envy his chutzpah, the way he’s graciously dealt with his outlier’s role.

I guess we’re like an old Odd Couple in that way.

*

By rights, Sam and I should no longer be friends. He showed me countless houses, but I finally bought one with another realtor. Still, Sam let it slide; our relationship had never been based on real estate, anyway.

We kept in touch. And his news was the same: His marriage was crumbling. He didn’t want to go home.  I’d ask where he was.

“I’m here at the office with my friend Jack,” he’d say. 

Jack Daniels.

Sam is a sweetheart of a man who sends birthday cards with handwritten notes. He gets emotional over things that aren’t right in the world, and sometimes he cries.

He’s dealt with life’s setbacks. He was a young journalist who once covered the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Once, as a cub reporter for the City News Service, he’d asked Arnold Dornfeld, the grizzled night editor about a story he’d filed. 

“I oughta roll this up in a ball and shove it up your ass, then pull it out with your entrails and throw it in your face,” the old man said, “if you call that a face.”

People haven’t always been kind to Sam. His grown daughter won’t talk to him, blaming him for all that has gone wrong with her life. To Sam, feeling appreciated is important in life and at home, he played second-lead to the family dog.

Now he was selling houses in Vegas, and once confessed that he kept an emergency kit in the car trunk so that once the pressure became unbearable, he could just disappear. It seemed like a desperate measure.

Before leaving on a trip to China, I asked if he wanted to house sit.

Boy, did he. 

When I got back, he was a changed man. He’d had time to think. And he’d decided he couldn’t go home. He was leaving a wife of more than 40 years to move in with me, the inaugural inhabitant of the guest room I now call “The Home for Wayward Men.”

Finally on his own, Sam learned what it was like to, you know, just relax. Even if it meant drinking beer and watching TV in your underwear.

He’d been with his wife since they were kids. Now he was this old lion on the African plains, chasing prey.

He’d quickly met a Judy Garland-like siren. He’d seen her singing at a little jazz place called The Dispensary. She did “The Man Who Got Away” and then “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Sam hated that song. 

When he lived in Kansas City 40 years ago, they played it just before the TV programming went off for the night. Not “the Star-Spangled Banner,” he’d say, “but Over the Fucking Rainbow.”

When she raised her hand like the Statue of Liberty, Sam realized she was channeling Judy Garland, and suddenly, he couldn’t speak. He tumbled like a pile of poker chips.

We talked about it in therapy. That’s what Sam called it, anyway. He’d call me during the day, asking, “Is the doctor in session tonight?”

We’d sit in my living room, drinking beers in our skivvies. As a once-divorced lonely loser, I knew a thing or two about hopping into bed with the wrong women, and I never liked the Judy Garland impersonator. I told him to go slow, warning that this was merely a rebound relationship. 

But Sam had the untested heart of a 16-year-old beating inside the chest of a much-older man. He listened. Then he moved in with the new flame.

Several months later, he was back.

We went back to our chairs, and I worried about my friend.

And then, finally, Sam got lucky: He met a woman from Chicago one night at the Italian American Club. Dianne might as well have been sent from heaven’s central casting office. It’s like they’ve always been together. He still doesn’t talk to his daughter, but that’s her loss, as far as I’m concerned. He recently spoke with his ex-wife, who told him “Thanks for the life you’ve given me,” which, to Sam, meant moving to Las Vegas, the place he loves, that cruel mistress that has only now started to treat him right.

The next time I see my old friend, I want to open the trunk of his car to see if he still keeps that old desperation emergency kit there.

I’ll bet he doesn’t. I’ll bet it’s gone.

*

Frankie telephoned the other day. 

He called me a cocksucker for not keeping in touch, then told me he was emceeing a show off of The Strip. He wanted me to be there.

Frankie still gets around. A year before, he’d gotten an award — from his backgammon club, as one of its most loyal, longest-serving members.

I went to the festivities. The crowd was tough, let me tell you, the kind of old crows who would walk around a body on the sidewalk and comment on the blood spatter. Frankie looked debonair in a deeply-purple suit. On this night, he pulled a one-liner out of his suit breast pocket.

“I wanna thank the Academy,” he said. The boys guffawed.

He’s been keeping his material sharp. Earlier this year, he spoke at a memorial service for an old friend, Sonny Turner, who’d once been the lead singer of the Platters.

The service was inside a library, filled to capacity with 300 people.

Frankie took the microphone. “I gotta confess, public speaking isn’t my forte,” he said. “The last time I addressed a crowd of this size I told ‘em, ‘It’s a fucking holdup.’”

Frankie was back.

“I owned ‘em after that,” he said. “I fractured ‘em. The fucking place was cheering.”

But lately, the laughs have suddenly vanished.

Frankie called me not long ago to tell me the worst thing I have heard in years: 

Lisa was gone. 

Our Lisa.

The last time we’d talked, she told me about going for a medical exam, and how underneath it all, she’d worn a pair of butt floss.

It was sheer Lisa naughtiness.

“I’ve always thought of myself as Errol Flynn with tits,” she said.

Like so many other outliers I’ve met lounge-crawling Las Vegas, Lisa stood out. She grabbed you by the lapel, or the balls, a femme-fatale with a standup comedienne’s wit, who seemed to have skipped the doll-playing routine as a little girl and went right to becoming opinionated, outspoken and even dangerous stage diva.

In 2012, she chronicled her life in a self-published autobiography, “I Can Hear the Applause: Adult Language … Some Nudity,” co-written with a neighbor who became curious about Lisa after she saw her in the front yard trying to fix a light. “She was wearing the shortest shorts, enough to make Daisy Duke blush,” the neighbor said. “I thought, ‘This is an age-restricted community. How did those legs get in here?’”

Lisa kept a life-size cutout of herself as a 19-year-old “Folies Bergere” show dancer. Once, she looked at the image of a girl young enough to be her granddaughter. “She was so naive,” she whispered. “She didn’t know anything.”

Born Loretta Maloof, a girl with Middle Eastern blood, her father manufactured women’s clothing in Los Angeles and had some tough guys as friends. 

Once, mobster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel came to the house to play poker.

He offered to braid Lisa’s hair because her father was busy. At age 7, she called him Uncle Benjamin — nobody called him Bugsy to his face. 

Bugsy botched the job and Lisa cried, saying that he’d ruined her life.

Decades later, she looked back at Bugsy with fondness. “He was handsome; I knew it even then,” she said. “I’ve always had a thing for guys with big blue eyes.”

Lisa got hooked on gangsters, those gentlemen-clowns who made her laugh. One gave her father tickets to shows on the Strip, where she got her first look at the beauties with glitzy costumes, towering headdresses and 6-inch stilettos.

At age 12, the girl who had dreamed of becoming a lawyer, a private eye or a female Clark Kent suddenly set her sites on being a showgirl.

Years later, in 1957, she got her chance. She was working in a Los Angeles talent office when two Vegas characters offered her a dicey-sounding gig: 

Portray a “nude” statue in a Harry Belafonte show at the Riviera.

Lisa jumped on it. 

All her important real estate, she says, was covered with glitter and sparkle. Suddenly, she shifted her arms to reveal her breasts. 

The crowd went wild.

The job led to an 11-year career as a model and showgirl.

Men fawned while Lisa yawned. She never considered herself a beauty: “I was 97 pounds and knock-kneed with a big nose, pimples, kinky hair and a unibrow.”

Still, Cary Grant thought she looked like Sophia Loren. They dated, and the heartthrob made a proposal: Get pregnant with his baby and he’d set her up financially for life. Lisa said no.

“But I spent nights crying, thinking ‘What if I had Cary Grant’s baby?’” she recalled. “Would my parents really disown me? But I didn’t want kids. He was basically gay, and I wasn’t in love with him.”

Later, she married a television director, but it didn’t last. Then she got crazy, took chances. Flitting about Europe, California and Nevada, she worked as a photographer and bank loan officer, drove stock cars, landed some bit television roles.

She sold dope. Gave motherly advice to call girls.

“I have the retention span of a rhesus monkey,” she said. “Maybe it’s because my grandparents were first cousins. I have no morals but high principles.”

That night in the car, all those years ago, driving home after a night out, the old showgirl imparted a bit of runway wisdom: 

At her age, a woman can’t afford to pass up two things.

“One’s a ladies’ room,” she said. “The other’s a stiff dick.”

Oh, Lisa.

I once asked a visiting friend what he thought of Vegas.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Everybody here’s got a schtick.”

Boom. He nailed it. 

Schtick, that thing I call personality, lurking in the lounges off of The Strip, where the spirit of the Rat Pack still lives, and thrives.