by Alan Alda
“Really? How could you tell?” his friend asked.
“Well,” he said, “he puts this gun to my head and he says, ‘Got change of twenty?’ ”
I became inert. I sat with my mouth open and barely heard the dispatcher call out to me: “Alda! Your car’s ready. Let’s go.”
Each night, I would stiffen when I heard suspicious sounds behind me, but they never turned out to be more dangerous than someone opening a package. I would come home at four in the morning and empty my pockets onto the kitchen counter of the twenty dollars or so in bills and change that I’d earned. When I woke up, Arlene would have divided it up and put it in envelopes: some for rent, some for food, and some for gas, electricity, and telephone.
Arlene’s mother was discreet and warm, but you could tell she was worried about her daughter’s survival. She would come over and visit for a while, and after she left we would find a piece of meat in the refrigerator. I didn’t know what Arlene’s father thought, but it was possible he took my unemployment in stride. He was usually out of work himself and didn’t seem to mind. He visited the Lithographers Union every few weeks, but work had dried up in his field of dot etching. He seemed happy to occupy himself in other ways. He was visiting us one day and said he was going to the racetrack with his friend Singer and asked if I’d like to come along. Sure, I said. It was a welcome break from scratching for work, and I wanted to get to know Arlene’s father better.
Simon was a quiet man. “Quiet” wouldn’t really describe him; he was quiet when he spoke, which he seldom did. Once, when we asked him if he wanted a piece of cake for dessert, he didn’t answer us. We thought he hadn’t heard us, so we asked him again. He still stared straight ahead. So we got closer and asked him again. He looked up and said, “If I don’t say no, that means yes.”
Singer was even quieter, thin with sharp features. He looked like a razor blade standing sideways. He spent the day at the track without saying a word, even when he won. Simon liked to play the daily double, and occasionally he hit it, sometimes for as much as six hundred dollars. I would bet no more than two dollars a race, partly because I didn’t like gambling. All around us we could see the results of gambling mania. Losing pari-mutuel tickets covered the concrete floor like dead leaves. Men whose shoes were literally down at the heels would scavenge among them, looking for uncashed winners. I went to the track with Simon and Singer a few more times, but then I had to get back to my regular way of being out of work. After a while, I heard from Simon that Singer was beginning to spend most of his days handicapping horses. He was showing signs that he thought he could beat the system. And in my way, I began to show some of the same signs. I didn’t like gambling, but I liked systems. I liked looking for patterns. A system that had predictable results would not, I felt, be the same as gambling. You could lose at gambling.
I began going to the library, looking up old betting systems and trying them out against past performances of racehorses. Of the dozens of systems I studied, very rarely did one system remain successful for more than a string of twenty or so races before it began to grind its way down to chance. When you factored in the costs of going to the track in the first place, your chance of coming out ahead was zero. It reminded me of the gambler in the old joke, leaving his house in the morning and thinking, God, I hope I break even today. I could sure use the money.
I knew the odds were against me, but I couldn’t resist the puzzle. As my eyes scanned the numbers, I saw patches of meaningful patterns and I was drawn on by each patch, looking for a longer string. I followed the numbers down an endless, winding labyrinth whose turns were marked by stretches of meaning that seductively promised order at the end of the maze. In one of the dozens of books I checked out at the Forty-second Street library, I came across a system that dated back several centuries, called the Martingale. It was one of the oldest betting systems known, and fortunes had been made with this scheme. Unfortunately, fortunes had also been lost with it. But that, I decided, was because it had always been used on even money bets, such as red or black at the roulette table. Actually, the odds are not truly even with red or black; the house makes sure of that because of the presence of the zero and double zero. And that’s before they start fooling with the wheel.
But the system was simple. You make a bet, say, on red, and if you lose, you double the amount on the next bet. The idea is that since your odds are fifty-fifty, red will come up before too long; you’ll win your money back and then some. I didn’t realize it at the time, but later I learned, that at Monte Carlo a few people had gone thirty or forty times before seeing their color come up again. This may not sound like a long run, but the problem with doubling is that the bet gets huge very fast. If you start with only a $2 bet and keep losing, by the time you’re up to the ninth bet, you have already lost $512 and have to put down another $512 to stay in the game. And your chances are still fifty-fifty that you’ll lose. By the time you get to the twentieth bet, you have to fork over a million dollars, which is really an inconvenient amount of cash to carry around.
But I wouldn’t have this problem because I wasn’t betting on black or red. I had decided to play the favorites. If they came in often enough and paid, on average, better than black and red, the Martingale would work. The fact that it would be the first time in history that it worked didn’t seem to bother me.
Since I didn’t like gambling, though, I wasn’t going to test the system at the track until I had it working perfectly on paper. I would take a bundle of racing results with me in a briefcase on the subway when I went to work. Once, I saw a young woman nudge her husband when she realized the papers I was studying were pages from the Daily Racing Form. Let her nudge, I thought. She doesn’t know I’ve solved the Martingale.
I would study the columns of figures late into the night, sometimes waking up at five in the morning, having fallen asleep with my forehead on the papers, when the numbers began to dance and morph into liquid shapes.
Meanwhile, I heard from Simon that Singer had apparently become addicted to the racetrack. When he wasn’t at the track, he sat at home at a little desk, facing the wall, going over issues of the Racing Form. He never spoke to his wife. He was immersed totally in the fantasy that he could beat the system. I shook my head in sympathy. The poor guy, I thought. What a shame. His whole life disappearing into addiction. Then I turned back to my charts.
One day I was on my way to a mutual fund appointment and heard at the last minute that the prospect had canceled. I called Arlene and told her I was near the public library and would stop in for a couple of hours for more research. She said, “Listen, why don’t you get it over with? You’ve done enough research. Go to the track. If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, forget about it.” I hadn’t realized how much of a strain my being submerged in numbers had been for her. She was right. I should put an end to it. I left the library, stopped at the bank, and got on the train for Aqueduct.
There had been a drizzle. The handicappers had probably spent the morning refiguring the races for the altered track conditions. But I wasn’t a handicapper. I was relying purely on the probabilities of the numbers. There was no weighing of one immeasurable quality, like breeding, against another. I felt far more scientific than the handicappers.
The favorite in the first race went off at $2.10. I put $2 on him to win, which meant that if he came in first, I would get my $2 back and a profit of ten cents. But I couldn’t start with more than a $2 bet because—with doubling—if I went all nine races without a winner, I’d be totally wiped out. In one of my pockets I was carrying all the money we had for that month’s rent. That was okay, though, because in another pocket I had my hack license.
The first horse I bet on came in fourth. I watched the tote board between races to see which horse would go off as the favorite and went to the window and bet on the next race. And lost again.
By the seventh race, I had lost $128. My bet for the eighth race would have to be an equal amount, and if I lost that, I would have enough money
to take a subway home and walk over to the taxicab company. The favorite in the eighth race went off at three to one. If he won, I’d actually make a profit.
There’s something about a horse race that makes your heart beat, even if you have only a two-dollar bet on it. The entire universe is focused down to a horse’s hooves, a jockey’s goggles, the color of his cap. And I had a lot more than two dollars on this race. Everything we had was on it. The horses broke from the gate with the favorite trailing a couple of other horses. Good, I thought. Let the others fight the wind. Then he started pulling ahead. This didn’t look good. He still had a long way to go. I had seen horses lead the pack only to fall back at the last pole. They rounded the first turn with my horse in the lead, and as they pulled toward the finish line another horse started gaining on him. He was testing the favorite. The muscles in their necks were bulging as they ran side by side. I heard myself screaming at my horse. And then he pulled away. He was out in front by a length, and it looked as though he was going to stay out. And he did. He sailed across the finish line, winning, as they say, handily.
At three to one, I won back my losses and went home with a profit of $128.
For the next month, I went to Aqueduct every day and came home with a day’s winnings: twenty dollars, thirty dollars, sometimes forty. I’d come into the kitchen and lay the money on the counter, and Arlene would put it into the envelopes.
When I wasn’t at the track, I’d be auditioning. Finally, one of those auditions led to an offer of a job out of town playing the leading part in a stock-company farce. I hated to abandon the system because we were raking in the dough. So I arranged with Simon to take our bankroll of $250 to the track while I was gone. I instructed him carefully in how to work the system, which by now, having lived off it for a month, I felt I could rely on if I followed the formula exactly. I went off to do the play, and Simon went off to the track.
The next day, Simon waited until the last minute to place the bet, as I had instructed him, to make sure he didn’t bet on the wrong horse. It was important to be on the favorite, and sometimes at the last minute the odds can change and the favorite can become a different horse, which would throw the whole system off.
Unfortunately, I hadn’t counted on a lot of other people trying to bet on the favorite at the same time, and Simon found himself in line behind ten people as last-minute bets were going down. Just as he got to the window, the bell rang and the window slammed shut. He never got to make the bet. The horse came in, but we weren’t on it and we were out most of the bankroll. Simon won the daily double that day and won the bankroll back, so we were even, but I felt the chill of reality and decided to stick with a life in art.
I decided to throw out the pile of Racing Forms. But I couldn’t make myself put them in the trash. I put them on the top shelf of a closet, where I planned never to look at them, but where I could find them again, just in case.
I wasn’t addicted to gambling. I didn’t like gambling. What I was obsessed with was patterns, systems. I wanted to cut out the gambling part of it, just as I had when I thought I had a sure way to get to heaven; just as William James thought faith was a bet he couldn’t lose, I wanted to see a pattern in the data that would keep it from being gambling. It was a fascinating intellectual challenge. It surely was possible. The key was in there; order hidden among random events. I just had to find it.
I went back to working at jobs that kept us going, and from time to time I would get a real job, an acting job. And that made me know that eventually we’d be all right. We’d make a living doing this thing that gave me so much pleasure and that I knew I could be good at. Around this time, a story in an interview with Kirk Douglas caught my eye. His mother had told him, If you have to gamble, gamble on yourself. You can’t lose if you work hard and gamble on yourself. That’s what I’ll do, I thought, and each job convinced me that that’s the way we’d come out ahead.
But each time a job was over, I was restless. I needed something to do. I walked endlessly through New York, dropping in on agents’ offices and casting directors. I would stand in line for hours to read for a nonpaying part in a hopelessly bad play. I worked on my writing. I thought up businesses I could start. But at night, when Arlene was asleep, I could hear the pile of papers in the closet calling to me. I would resist. But when I went too long without work, I reached up to the shelf and took them down for a look. I opened the yellowing pages and scanned the numbers. Past performances, times, mudders, horses pulling away by the first pole, or dropping down in class: There must be pattern in here. It can’t all be random. I was looking for order. In a way, I was still looking for God, or His understudy—but in strange places. And before long, I was looking in even stranger places.
chapter 11
CONVERSATIONS WITH THE DEAD
By the time I was twenty, I had had a lot of practice talking to dead people, if you count Jesus, Mary, and the saints, so I suppose it wasn’t surprising when I began conversing with the more recently dead while experimenting with spiritualism. The difference was that I started to believe they could talk back.
It began when I went to work at the Cleveland Playhouse. In an effort to stimulate regional theater, the Ford Foundation had chosen dozens of young actors to spread around the country, and I was one of them. I had hopes that this was where I would learn Shakespeare, but they kept casting me in funny, but dopey, farces. One was a British comedy called To Dorothy, a Son, in which my stage wife gave birth to a baby while I dithered for two acts. The only thing that made the play memorable was that, as we approached opening night, Arlene was about to give birth to a real baby, our first. At the opening-night party, the director told her, “Now you can have the baby.”
And about five hours later, Arlene nudged me in bed. “I’m having pains,” she said. In the play, I would be running around and fainting at this news. In life, I was a little less excitable.
“You’re just having cramps,” I told her. “Go back to sleep.” I rolled over and put my head under the pillow.
A couple of minutes later, she nudged me again. “These are pains,” she said. “Take me to the hospital.”
I did, and a couple of hours later our first daughter, Eve, was born.
No matter how I tried, I couldn’t get a part in a Shakespeare play. When they did Macbeth, I begged to be in it. They offered me the Third Murderer, whose whole part consists of six lines, the most memorable of which is “Hark! I hear horses,” but this didn’t seem like a part that would give me a thorough background in handling classical language. So, as I had in college, I took things into my own hands. I had always been fascinated with the Book of Job in the Bible. I was taken by the theme of a man challenging God and the wry recognition that the guilty are not always punished in this life but often live out their lives in comfort, surrounded by their families, while the widows of their victims go hungry. On a bet with the Devil, God looks on Job, who has done no wrong, and afflicts him with boils and other disasters. He wants to show Satan how steadfast Job will be. But Job doesn’t just accept his calamities. He calls out to God and challenges Him: How can God allow injustices like this? And God, a little pissed that someone would complain about the inconvenience of a few things like head-to-toe boils and the destruction of his earthly goods, answers Job out of a whirlwind, “Who are you to question me? I will question you and you will answer me. Where were you when I created heaven and earth? Where were you when I counted out the days of the behemoth?” These questions, both Job’s to God and God’s to Job, seemed to me to be central to our lives—or mine, anyway. How, for instance, could there be earthquakes and floods—tornadoes and plagues? How could a loving mother be so tormented by a diseased brain that she becomes afraid of her own child?
I loved it that Job, like the Congressional Record, was written in dialogue. After I made a few cuts, it actually felt like a theater piece, and when I showed it to the playhouse staff, they agreed to let me play Job. Unfortunately, opening night turned out to be the firs
t time I nearly died while acting.
I was twenty-four years old, too young for the part, so I had decided that for the audience to believe I was Job, I would have to wear about a half pound of suppurating sores made of putty as well as a bald pate with wisps of crepe hair. I didn’t really know how to keep the hair glued down, and on opening night, while I was complaining to God, a little piece of crepe hair floated off my face and wafted through the air, and when I took a deep breath to launch into another complaint, it flew into my mouth and down my windpipe. I started choking miserably. For the first minute of distress, I was sure the audience thought I was incredibly realistic. They were probably thinking, This kid is going to die right in front of us. I coughed and choked so long and so pathetically, they had to bring down the curtain. And this was opening night. The manager of the theater stepped over my body, parted the curtain, and went onstage. He said we would resume the play in a minute or two, but the actor has choked on a piece of crepe hair, and “as we all know, crepe hair is the work of the Devil.” I was behind the curtain, dying, and he was getting laughs. I finished the play—not to especially rousing applause—and after the curtain came down, I could hear an elderly theatergoer in the front row say to his wife, “What did they put that on for?”
But something did get to me in that play that changed my course for a while, and it was the Devil. He was played by Mike McGuire, an actor I admired and who walked away with the evening. The Devil always has the best lines in any play, but with only two scenes, he played the part with relish and a demonic intensity that was captivating.
I watched him closely every night because I studied anyone who acted with passion and spontaneity. In fact, I studied them whether they were acting or not. After we had our first child in Cleveland, our daughter Eve became my acting teacher. For years I would sit and stare at her, hoping to understand the source of her innocent spontaneity, her sudden bursts of energy.