The black man in the cowboy hat said, “I’ll do you one better. I’ll give your machine good luck. Would you like that?”
Missy smiled at him politely but shrank away.
You had to be real careful in a casino. The black man was about her age, maybe a few years older. He was of medium height, well-dressed, clean, and not bad-looking. She had seen him in here before. The other gamblers all seemed to know him and like him. She decided he was safe and took his hand. His head bowed and he kissed her on the back of the hand. When he lifted his head again, he tipped his cowboy hat and said, “You go to that ATM, and when you come back I will make your machine lucky for you.”
When she came back, he was still there guarding the dollar she had left in her machine. She sat down and he said, “Wait a minute.” He put both his hands on top of the machine and brought his lips to the screen and kissed it. “Now it’s ready,” he said. “Whatever money you lost today it’s gonna give back. I guarantee it, or I’ll give it to you myself.”
Missy muttered glumly, “I lost a lot today.”
“How much?”
“With this last $100 I just withdrew?” She figured it in her head. “I’m down $900.”
Her heart thumped with excitement as she watched the black man calmly peel off ten hundred-dollar bills from his billfold and plunk them down on her machine beside the control buttons and her box of Virginia Slims.
He tapped the stack of bills with a finger. “That’s a thousand. You don’t win, you keep it.”
“I can’t do that,” Missy said, desperate though she was. “I can’t take that from you.”
He winked. “You won’t have to. Your machine is lucky now. Play.”
“But I can’t—”
“I’ve gotta go to the bathroom,” the black man cut her off, and then disappeared, leaving the money on her machine.
Missy watched him go and said to the blue-haired woman, another familiar face, who sat down in the empty seat beside her, “What should I do? Is he crazy? He left his money here.”
The woman said, “Him? He’s not crazy. He’s very lucky.”
“I’m not gonna take some black guy’s money.”
“If you don’t want it, I’ll take it.”
The blue-haired woman wasn’t kidding. She reached for the cash on Missy’s machine. Missy stopped her with a faster hand. “He left it for me! ”
The woman clucked her dentures angrily as she turned away from Missy and got back to the business of playing her own machine.
Missy, who still didn’t trust the pissed-off blue-haired woman, kept her hand on the black man’s stack of hundreds as she played her machine, which had suddenly gotten hot.
The black man returned about fifteen minutes later. Missy still had her hand on his stack of hundreds. She did not believe that he had actually gone to the bathroom. She figured it was just his way of getting her to trust him and play the machine, which had gotten hot and was now up to $875. The black man patted her on the shoulder. Then left his hand there.
Sometimes the hand moved from her shoulder to the small of her back.
Sometimes it was on the back of her neck. Sometimes it was on the strap of her bra. She wasn’t exactly sure how she felt about that hand, but she was no fool. It was a lucky hand. Her machine hit an additional $200 while his hand was on her.
When Missy’s total reached $1,100, the black man in the cowboy hat removed his hand from her shoulder and said, “Well, my work here is done,” and collected his stack of money and replaced it in his billfold, which, Missy noted, was thick with hundred-dollar bills.
“Thank you,” Missy said to him.
“It’s gonna lose now,” he told her. “You better cash out and go to another machine. All the luck is gone out of this one.”
“I think it’s hot,” said Missy, who did not believe in moving from a hot machine.
“Suit yourself.” The black man tipped his hat and vanished into the ocean of people milling about but not playing.
There were many people in the casino tonight. It was crowded, smoke-filled, and loud. Ping-ping. Ping-ping. Every now and then Missy would look back to see if he was watching her. She never saw him, but somehow she knew that he was still back there. Her machine went up to $1,200, then down to $800, then up to $1,000, then down to $400, then up to $480, then down to $220. She wanted to get up, cut her losses, but she kept thinking that it would get hot again. It had to. When her machine got down to $43, Missy got up and walked a complete counterclockwise circle around her seat for luck. She sat back down and her total shot up to $93. It worked! Then it stopped working, and the total plummeted to three dollars. Now she was desperate. She smoked the last three cigarettes in the pack, lighting the new one from the old. She turned to the skinny man who had replaced the blue-haired woman at the machine next to her. “Could you watch this for me while I go to the ATM?”
The skinny man nodded and placed his free hand on her seat. She did not go to the ATM. She made a complete circuit of the casino before she spotted the cowboy hat. He was chatting with a white man in a coat and tie and very shiny shoes. She grabbed his hand. “I need more luck.”
“You need help is what you need,” he said. He shot a mischievous glance to his friend in the coat and tie and mumbled, “What are we going to do with them, professor?” His friend smiled back and then disappeared into the crowd. The black man said to Missy, “You blew all that money after I told you to get up. Shame on you. You should have gone to another machine. You gamblers never learn.”
“I am not a gambler.”
He winked. “Neither am I.”
“Then what are you?” Maybe she was lying to herself about not being a gambler, but she had seen him in here many times, this black man in the cowboy hat, and she had never seen him play the machines. Maybe he was a poker player who did his gambling in the back rooms. “What are you?” she repeated.
“I am a lucky gambler,” the black man said, tipping his hat.
Missy wasn’t sure she understood him. Maybe he was crazy, but he was not dangerous and he was lucky and she still had his hand. She had decided that if she could just hit something big today, she would never, ever, ever, ever, ever gamble again. She would get her life together and never come back to this place. She stroked his hand and pouted prettily. “Make my machine lucky again,” she pleaded.
The black man took both her hands in his and pulled her close to his body. He said, “I have something better for you.”
He thumbed through his billfold until he came to a hundred with a torn corner. He put it in her hand and then pressed her hand against her chest. “This is a lucky hundred. Do not put it in the machine. Put it on your seat. Put other money in the machine, but never put this in the machine.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll show you.”
After she made the necessary quick detour to her ATM, he followed her back to her machine. The skinny man was still there with his hand on her seat, but he was standing because he had lost all of his own money. Someone else was sitting at his machine now, but he had stuck around to guard Missy’s three dollars. He told her all this as if she owed him something. She said thanks, and the skinny man said, “Whatever,”
bitterly, and left.
The black man instructed Missy to rest the hundred with the torn corner on her seat and then insert a hundred of her own, which she did.
“What’s this supposed to do?”
“This is lucky protection money. It will make sure that you don’t lose any money.”
“What do you mean?”
“Sit down on this hundred and play,” the black man said. “You won’t lose. I guarantee it. If you lose, I’ll pay you double.”
Missy sat down on the hundred and played. For 20 minutes the machine went up and down. Then it got cold and went down to $10. Just as she was beginning to yield to despair, it went back up to $100. Then it went up to $150.
“See?” the black man said. “You will not los
e as long as your fine butt is sitting on that hundred. You’ll go down, but you will always come back up again.”
“But will I win?”
“Not too much. A few bucks, maybe, if you cash out when you’re up a little bit. Like right now if you cash out.”
“I don’t like this kind of luck. This is crap. This is small-time. I need to get back at least the thousand I lost today. I need to win a jackpot, that’s what I really need. Kiss the machine like you did before. I want that kind of luck.”
The black man said sadly, “Kissing the machine only works once a day. You blew it.”
Missy pouted. “Don’t you have any other kind of luck?”
“Yes,” the man in the cowboy hat said. “Oh yes.”
He had his hand on her back. He brought his mouth close to her ear. A hint of Dentyne. A hint of tobacco. “But I don’t know if you’re ready for that kind of luck yet.”
Missy said, “Is it guaranteed to work?”
“Guaranteed.”
“Let’s do it.”
His mouth was in her ear again. “We can’t do it here.”
“Where can we do it?”
“I have a room upstairs.”
Missy gasped, moving her ear away from his mouth. “What are you saying?” she demanded.
“For this luck to work, it’s not about kissing machines. The luck has to flow from me into you.”
Missy considered this silently. She felt ashamed as she whispered, “Is it guaranteed?”
“My money guarantees it.” He took out his billfold. “What’s the jackpot up to? $6,800? I got that covered easy.”
Missy rose from her seat, sighing. He was not an ugly man, she told herself. She picked up the torn hundred she had sat on and handed it to him. He put it back in his billfold. She reported, “Over the past month, I am down $10,000!”
The black man shrugged, and he, I, said, “I got that covered, too.”
Ping. Ping. Ping. Ping. Ping.
62.
Of course, it was a con.
There was no luck imbued in the machine through his kiss. There was no luck in the torn hundred-dollar bill. And there certainly would be no luck flowing from his body into hers in the room upstairs. The only luck this black man had was in the incredible amount of money he possessed, money that he seemed only too glad to hand over once the lucky act had been completed.
Missy had to admit that the act itself was not so bad. He was patient. He was unselfish. He was skillful. No, it was not bad at all, just a bit embarrassing. She finally (gloomily) admitted, “I’m addicted. There’s no other way to explain it.”
There’s no other way to explain that she had called in sick and come here again. No other way to explain that she had been here 18 hours straight. That last week she had spent 48 hours here, not counting the catnaps on a blanket in the parking lot in her car, the little breaks in the action before returning to play again. No other way to explain that she hadn’t seen her children today and most of yesterday and had turned off her cell phone so that they could not disturb her play. No other way to explain it. But that was the past. Now there was a glimmer of hope because of this black man.
She had been in his suite for a little over two hours. He was at his desk counting the bills that he had removed from his room safe. Lean and tightly muscled, he was naked except for his cowboy hat. She was naked in his bed under the covers. She had been thoroughly loved by this man and now he was going to pay her $10,000. It would get her back on her feet. She would never gamble again, she knew that. She would not even go downstairs and try the machines some more now that he had given her a lucky fuck, as he had called it. She would take this lucky fuck money and rebuild her life.
He counted out the money for her in ten stacks of ten and left it on the bed. He instructed, “Put it in your pocketbook and get out of here as fast as you can. You don’t know who’s watching you in this place. Be careful.”
He was still naked. Missy decided that she liked him. It was a con, but it was a good con. “Who are you really?” she said. “I’m an editor. Maybe I’ll do a book about you. You’re weird, but you’re interesting. Who are you?”
He grinned. “I am a man in a cowboy hat.”
“Who are you really?”
He went over to his desk and picked up a photograph. It was actually a reprint of a cover from Time magazine, under the banner, World Championship of Poker—he was in it in his cowboy hat with several other players who were probably famous in the gambling world though Missy did not know their names. They were posed around a poker table with the brown, blue, and burgundy chips stacked up by the thousands in front of them. The naked black man held the photograph up to his chest. He put his finger on a place high on his chest that was hairless and bore some kind of scar.
Looking at the photo, Missy thought she understood. “Oh, you’re a professional gambler.”
“No,” he said, still fingering the scar on his chest. “You don’t understand. This is a bullet hole, and I got it because of what I am.”
“Tell me about it.”
“It’s time for you to go home now, Missy.”
He turned away from her. She got out of the bed and began to dress. He did not look at her while she dressed, but she looked at him. He had taken off the hat. He was wearing a robe now, seated at his desk looking down intently at the photo, fingering the chest wound again.
Missy left his room and went downstairs. The machines called to her, and since she had $10,000 in her bag, she went to them despite her promise never to do it again. She was there for close to an hour. She banged it hard. Harder than she ever had. At $200 a pop. They took $7,000 from her in less than an hour and seemed willing to take more. As she pulled herself away from the machine, she wept great big tears. But she made it away with $3,000 remaining in her purse. She saw the irony of it all: that sleeping with a strange black man for $10,000 was only the second stupidest thing she had ever done. The stupidest thing was giving $7,000 of it back less than an hour later to a machine that went ping-ping. She held a napkin to her face as she wept. “My God. My God. What’s wrong with me?”
He intercepted her as she passed the casino’s café, as she was just about to turn around and give it one more desperate try. He took her in his arms and he held her and he told her, “Go home now. You can do it. Go home. Your children are waiting for you. Your life is waiting for you. Get your life back, Missy. This is not life, this is death.”
“But I … but I …”
“Go home.”
And he held her like that and would not let her go until she was able to find her feet and leave. It was the greatest thing anybody had ever done for her. She left and she never returned. He had saved her from becoming a total degenerate—as he was.
PART IV
Penitent
63.
(Barbie Them Check)
They are not lucky, the old man and the young girl.
In fact, they are very unlucky.
Especially the girl. A tall, slender brown-skinned thing with juicy lips and alluring eyes. She is wearing the kind of skirt that I like. Tight. Short. Showing lots of leg. Flaunting that ghetto booty. Nice. Real nice. I keep right on looking.
The man she is with is a thickset older brother, well over six-three, with dark skin, rough features, and shocking white hair. He is banging the machines at five dollars a pop while the pretty girl coaches: “Change it to the 9s. Yeah. Now put a 6 in it. No, don’t change your zero card. You need a zero card. Zeros hit a lot.”
The man is banging the machine, and it plays with him a little bit, sending him the FIRST-TWO from time to time, but nothing more than that. In a few minutes, he is down to his last quarter.
The girl says, “Now what?”
He says, “Go get some more money.”
She says, “From what?”
“We ain’t got no more cash?”
She shakes her head.
He says, “Well. That’s—” but he does not finish his thou
ght.
She says, “We can get some from the Visa.”
“We got from the Visa a few minutes ago. What about Barbie them money?”
“No,” she says. “No.”
“But the mortgage.”
“Mortgage can wait. I don’t wanna touch Barbie them money.”
“Mortgage can’t wait.”
“Why you touched the mortgage money? Stupid. Shit. Why you hadda touch that?”
“I said the mortgage. You said try it.”
“That ain’t what I said.”
“Don’t be loud talking me,” he says, pressing her mouth closed with his hand. He’s the boss here. Broke, but he is the boss. His hand on her mouth. Then he gets up, apology in his eyes, and holds her against his shoulder. She wraps her arms around his substantial waist and says something into his ear that I cannot make out. He nods and looks down at the machine that has taken the money for their mortgage. Then he knits his brows in determination. “We took out like $500 after that. Not counting the Visa. ’Bout $1,200 in cash and $500 on the Visa. But we don’t have to worry about that until the 15th. How much we owe Barbie them?”
She says into his neck, “Counting this?”
“Well, we could cash their check. We gotta cash it anyway.”
“Yeah. I feel some kind of luck is coming. Go cash it. You got your ID?”
He tells her, “I got it. You sit here on the seat. I’m going to the cash office.” And he leaves her and heads over to the casino’s cash office, where personal checks can be cashed for a 15 percent fee. Before he gets there, he stops, closes his eyes, and says a silent prayer in the middle of the floor.
It is 3 a.m. on a Saturday morning in September in this South Florida Indian casino, which means I have been watching them for four hours. They have lost about $1,700 in four hours. All things considered, that’s not too bad. I’ve done worse. With a chin nod and a whuzzup, I stop the older man on his way to the cash office. He does the chin nod back.
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