Swimming with Bridgeport Girls

by Anthony Tambakis

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  I knew what she meant. My initial reaction to the pregnancy news, which I’d received less than a week earlier, was apparently unsatisfactory. L had always been adamant about not even considering kids until she was thirty-five, and I guess I was under the impression that the Pill was one of the many things I didn’t know much about from a technical standpoint but which was nonetheless fail-safe, like Treasury bonds or the weather in Southern California (or what happens when a man with a family name to protect pushes a pregnant girl down an antebellum staircase).

  After wrapping my head around the fact that you could take the Pill and still get pregnant, I started to worry about the things I’m sure most people obsess about when they find out they’re going to have a kid (deformities, swimming pool tragedies, things of that nature), but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t excited, or wouldn’t have gotten excited, once the deformity and swimming pool images subsided. I’d barely had time to digest the news before that morning in New Orleans. To be honest, the whole thing was pretty much over before it ever got started.

  I hopped on the first flight back to New York, but by the time I got back to Connecticut, L was gone. Not an hour after we had spoken, she had gotten a call from her mother, who was living down in Myrtle Beach. Breast cancer. I arrived home to a note on the table. L had gone to South Carolina. I was to get Bruce from the Prince and Pawper and await further instruction.

  And that’s life, isn’t it? You’re just going along, going along, going along, and then boom, words like miscarriage and cancer bully their way into your everyday vocabulary, and suddenly you find yourself in an empty house in the middle of winter. You get the dog and await instruction, but no instruction comes. So maybe you end up with a lot of time to kill. Too much time, since the person you’re used to spending it all with isn’t around anymore. This could prove disconcerting, and to combat the loneliness, you might hop in your truck and go to Barnes & Noble to buy some books you should have already read. It could be that you recently got skunked in a video trivia match in a Sheraton lounge by some roofing supply salesmen and vowed to fill in some of the considerable gaps in your arts-and-letters knowledge. For example: While you may know that the clock in Tony’s car reads 10:22 in the opening-credit sequence of The Sopranos and Penny Lane’s real name in Almost Famous is Lady Goodman, you’ve never read The Great Gatsby (this would later prove to be even more problematic than you thought). Maybe the roofing supply salesmen thought it was absolutely hilarious that you didn’t know your own country was named after Amerigo Vespucci, which they claimed was something any child would know. If you didn’t have that information, they wondered, what the hell else were you in the dark about? Maybe they made you realize that the handful of credits you got at Rutgers wasn’t enough.

  So it could be that you decide to rectify this situation, head to Barnes & Noble with the best of intentions, but come to find that the place is a fucking maze. Maybe it’s like the hedges outside the Overlook Hotel in there. You could wind up in Games instead of Fiction as a result of the poor layout. A mistake made at the blueprint stage and not corrected, or maybe just the misguided floor plan of a confused low-level manager. Who can say? But this being the case, you might end up in Games, and perhaps the New Orleans outing has piqued your interest in a world you never considered. Maybe you wind up buying yourself some books on blackjack and craps instead of investigating the work of the dead Russians and Brits you CliffsNoted your way through in prep school. The piece of paper in your pocket might read:

  War and Peace

  Anna Karinia (sp?)

  Tale of 2 Cities

  Oliver Twist

  Weathering Heights (sp?)

  The Great Gatsby

  While the books in your bag end up being:

  Breaking the House in 5 Easy Steps

  How to Play Winning Blackjack

  The Gambler’s Guide to Happiness

  Lil’ Joe from Kokomo: A Guide to Craps

  The Gambler

  The Great Gatsby

  Now, you might get home and empty the bag and feel a little ashamed of yourself when you look at the contents relative to what’s on the piece of paper. It might even seem like the dog is disgusted with you. You’re probably glad someone accidentally put Dostoevsky’s The Gambler in Games and not Fiction, where it belonged, and you crack that open first to try and realize your initial impulse toward self-improvement (Gatsby was right by the cash register, fortunately, but you figure you can deal with him later, and put that one on the nightstand, where it will stay until it becomes one of the items L packs up and sends to you down at the Motor Lodge in the duffel bag you kept your softball gear in, tucking it amid a variety of small items you purposefully left behind after your banishment).

  So the reading of Dostoevsky commences, but all that book makes you want to do is gamble. Yeah, there’s a lot of people running around a suite at a German hotel who are either royalty or claiming to be royalty, and they all have agendas and grudges and the stuff of stories, but in the end it seems that the book is basically about playing roulette, and how a guy named Alexei gets completely consumed by it, as does a rich old woman who has come to the town for its healing waters but instead gets sucked into the action at the casino and blows pretty much her entire fortune. This is sickening but also kind of satisfying, since everyone back in the suite is waiting for her to kick so they can claim their inheritance, which you really don’t want them to get their hands on, since they’re a pack of vultures.

  Now, no matter what the roofing supply salesmen think about you and Amerigo Vespucci, you’re not a complete idiot. You’re sure there are themes of class as well as male-female dynamics in The Gambler that some professor could gasbag about for a good while, but all you really get out of the book is an intense desire to go to a casino despite the fact that everyone who gambles in the story ends up in the shits and pretty much an addict. No normal person could read that book and think gambling was anything but a dead end, but you’re not a normal person. This is another case of bad luck. If Dostoevsky hadn’t made gambling so enticing right after New Orleans did, you might have been able to treat it as something you tried once and moved on from (like lox or Swedish movies), but that’s not the way it went, because that Russian can fucking write, and was a degenerate gambler himself, which was another push toward the tables, since anything that was appealing to a genius like Dostoevsky couldn’t be bad for a regular Joe like you. Gambling was obviously an intellectual pursuit of some kind, which is what led you to the bookstore in the first place, wasn’t it? A lot of factors seemed to be pointing toward giving this thing a try.

  One more factor: It could turn out to be unseasonably warm that winter, and as a result there might be dead squirrels all over your yard and driveway. And it could very well be that sitting alone with the dog, the both of you eating French-bread pizzas every meal of the day, is a little depressing. Maybe looking at those dead squirrels piling up is a downer, too. You could easily start thinking the folks in New Orleans were right. Maybe it is kind of a waste to be a little over an hour away from Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun and not play. After all, why not support the Indians? Don’t they deserve it after all they’ve been through? Maybe the roofing supply salesmen were right. What kind of American are you, anyway?

  So, let’s say that you read all the books, play thousands of mock blackjack hands, and keep track of your progress on your wife’s legal pads. Let’s say that those pads show winning session after winning session after winning session. Maybe you never lose, and are seemingly born to play the game, even winning every time you practice online. Perhaps your wife wants to be alone with her mother and doesn’t want you to come to South Carolina. Maybe she surprises you by being pretty adamant about this being a time they need to spend together without you. As she’s telling you this on the phone, you can hear the thunk of a dead squirrel falling off the roof onto the patio. Maybe the poor, confused thing dies in a puddle of warm rain on th
e other side of the sliding glass door. It’s very possible that the dog won’t shut up about it. He might start scraping his nails on the glass and generally going insane for no good reason. At that point, your wife might say goodbye without an I love you for the first time (though you won’t think about this until much later and don’t even notice it at the time). You could say fuck it, grab your keys, take a hundred, hundred and a half, from the petty cash jar under the kitchen sink, and head toward the front door. Maybe you tuck a laminated “Ten Keys to Being a Winner” card that came with The Gambler’s Guide to Happiness in your wallet (where you’ll always keep it and never refer to it), yell “Knock yourself out in there, I’m going to check out the casino” to the howling dog, hop in your truck, and roll down Archer. When you come to the fork in the road, you might go right for the first of many, many times, and find yourself taking your initial steps into a great and disastrous unknown. A gambling addiction is under eighty miles away, after all. And it’s a straight shot there.

  LOVE AND EVERYTHING ELSE

  March 11

  . . . it became something of a constant refrain afterward. What did you know? When did you know? Why didn’t you know? All the girls bring it up constantly. Hope. Beth. Fiona. It’s one of those things that’s very easy for people to say after the fact, but they didn’t see it any more than I did, I don’t think. They all held us up as the perfect couple until everything came to light. But even if they hadn’t, I wouldn’t have done anything differently. I wouldn’t have seen or known more. I was so in love then. My God. I was so in love, I was sick with it.

  I PULLED THE F-150 BENEATH the enormous wooden teepee out in front of Mohegan Sun and tossed the keys to Chip, one of the valets who would leave a loose joint in your ashtray from time to time if you’d had a bad night and looked like you might need it. He smiled and shadowboxed when I got out of the car. “Sugar Ray. How’s the paw?”

  “Be back in the ring in no time,” I said, holding up my cast.

  He smiled and hesitated before getting in the truck. He knew I was banned from the casino but didn’t want to be the one to enforce it. It was just a summer job, after all, and he was still young enough to think that any edict issued by higher-ups was, by definition, complete bullshit.

  “Whatcha doing here, dude?”

  “Research,” I said. “I’m thinking of buying out the Indians.”

  He grinned and shook his head. What was it to him whether I got hauled out by security or not?

  “Dawn’s over by the Triple Sevens in case you’re looking for her,” he said, hopping in the truck. “Or in case you’re not.”

  Chip peeled out. He was twenty years old and going to UConn. His girlfriend was cocktailing inside. They had just spent three weeks in Amsterdam. He had the world by the fucking collar.

  I walked into the casino. It was after eight o’clock and there was a lot of action, a lot of other things the pit bosses needed to be paying attention to besides me. The stakes at the low-limit blackjack tables were being raised, the better-looking cocktail waitresses were starting their shifts, and the drivers of the senior buses had already herded up the old-timers and hit the highway, leaving a younger crowd in their wake. I took a look around. Mohegan Sun, despite being a house of horrors for me, was a fine-looking casino and, unlike nearby Foxwoods, made at least a passing attempt at a Native American motif, which seemed only right, since they were ostensibly sitting on Massapequa Indian reservations (though the closest thing to a real Indian I ever laid eyes on up there was a croupier named Lawrence Littlejohn, who claimed to be one-eighth Massapequa but was practically albino). Mohegan Sun had the teepee out front, and the interior featured a lot of blond wood, with carpeting that vaguely suggested the American Southwest. In the wintertime, the valets wore hooded fur parkas that had a somewhat authentic hunter-gatherer look to them, and some of the $25 chips featured a howling timber wolf on one side. Add the nightly Trail of Tears from the tables to the parking lot, and you could make a case that the natives were finally exacting a sliver of revenge on the ancestors of those who had done the unthinkable to them and gotten away with it. The casinos weren’t much, but down 50–0 to the Cowboys, the Redskins had managed a field goal to get on the board.

  Still cognizant of keeping a low profile, I walked past some craps tables, ignored an “Hola, Ray!” from a couple of drunk Mexican landscapers who were regulars, and strolled into the slot salon to see Dawn Dondero, whom I had met when I first decided to try casino life and who was at least partially responsible for my banishment to the Parkway Motor Lodge.

  Dawn was a petite, pretty dishwater blonde who, at the time we met, had a crappy job at a strip mall hair salon, lousy luck with the slots, and a deadbeat ex-husband who was habitually showing up at her apartment when she was at work and helping himself to whatever loose cash he could ferret out of her dresser drawers. All these things remained permanent fixtures in her life, with the exception of the ex-husband’s unannounced visits, as he had recently become a guest of the state of Rhode Island after making some surprise appearances at the homes of people he hadn’t been previously married to. All Dawn had in the black was a sincere “Today’s the first day of the rest of your life” attitude and a charming five-year-old daughter named Penny. Like a lot of people, Dawn could never quite figure out why it was that she couldn’t get what she wanted out of life despite lowering her asking price year by year. But she never dwelled on that fact for long and was, quite honestly, about as upbeat a person as you could ever hope to know.

  We met through her sister, KC, who was a cocktail waitress up at Foxwoods before they canned her for salting away a dozen White Russians every shift. To protest what was an undeniably just dismissal, we moved our play over to Mohegan Sun and started hanging out pretty much every day. I’d ask her how Penny was coming along in school, and she’d ask me how L’s mom was doing, and oftentimes she’d sit with me when I’d play blackjack, or I’d kill time with her at the slots. We became friends. One night there was a pretty treacherous ice storm, and she invited me to crash on her couch, since she lived close to the casino, and not that far from Bristol, where the ESPN campus is. Once I started gambling every day, I wound up staying over there more often as a matter of convenience, and for a while I found I could play cards in the morning, make it to the taping of my panel show, and then get back to the tables before dark. I didn’t share any of this with L, naturally. I figured I was just killing time until her mom got better and she came home from Myrtle Beach. Only that didn’t happen as quickly as I expected it to.

  I found Dawn perched in her usual spot, working the lever of an American Glory Triple 7s slot machine whose legendary refusal to pay off was matched only by her mulish insistence on feeding the sucker until it did.

  “You ever consider the fact that this one may be a dud?” I said.

  “They’re going to give you the bum’s rush if they see you,” she said, continuing to pull the lever without looking at me.

  “You’re not going to rat me out, are you?”

  She ignored me. She was trying to send a message. But Dawn was a talker, and silence was anathema to her. She held out for almost ten seconds. It must have felt like a week and a half to the poor girl.

  “I thought we weren’t going to see each other anymore,” she said without conviction.

  I looked at her. When she had been playing for a while, she’d get a thousand-yard stare going like Walken at the end of The Deer Hunter, and a quick look at her ashtray suggested she’d been at it for about four or five hours. This meant Penny was with the convict’s parents in Mystic on a sleepover.

  “And if you’re looking for money, forget it,” she added. “I’m not sharing with you anymore.”

  Dawn had long harbored hopes that our friendship might turn into something more substantial, particularly after I got divorced, and she was always telling me she didn’t want to see me until I got over L. She would invariably change her mind a day or two later, so I ignored her comment
and assessed her outfit. She was wearing a suede caramel-fringe vest, dark jeans tucked into red cowboy boots, and a Harley-Davidson tank top, none of which I’d seen her wear before.

  “You on your way to a Bon Jovi concert?” I asked.

  “Very funny. This is the only thing in my closet I’ve never worn here. Everything else is unlucky.”

  “If clothes are to blame for what’s happened to us in this place, then we might as well start coming here in our goddamn underwear,” I said.

  Dawn continued to hammer away at the Triple 7s as I kicked the tray of a Wheel of Fortune slot to her left. An elderly woman who must have missed the last senior bus limped by, pulling an oxygen tank on a metal roller. I sighed. When I first started frequenting the casino, my eyes were always drawn to hopeful sights, like people nailing big jackpots and high-fiving each other at craps tables, but after a while the grind set in and all I ever seemed to notice were Civil War widows pulling oxygen tanks, their final hours ticking away under artificial light. Life will do that to you, but casino life will do it quicker.

  “I thought you were going to start going to the track instead,” Dawn said.

  I thought about telling her that I had been going to the track. That I’d come one horse away from winning the Pick Six at Belmont that very day, but a certain jockey named de la Maria had eased up at the wire and cost me what could have been close to $90,000 and an end to my financial problems. If I told her that, then I would also have to mention that I went a little berserk, jumped the rail, and pulled de la Maria off his horse after the race, and if not for the security staff being completely inept, I might not have been able to make it out of there before the real police arrived (not that the situation was even close to being over, since the jockey had been knocked unconscious, and everything gets recorded by somebody nowadays, so if you fuck up in public, you will most definitely not get away with it).

  “I never said I was going to the track,” I said. “Plus, didn’t you say you were quitting this place, too? I thought the dream was over.”