“The dream is over. I’m not going to be able to send Penny to some fancy college by hitting a jackpot. All I’m trying to do is get something back,” she said, yanking down the arm again. “I just want to break even.”
I watched her stare at the spinning 7s, blankly accept another loss, and pull on the lever again. The room hummed. There was nary an empty seat at any of the slots or the tables. It was a world that non-gamblers could never understand. For most people, the thought of risking their hard-earned money on games of chance that were designed to favor the house was incomprehensible. I used to feel sorry for them when I thought of all the action they were missing out on, but after enough time in there, it wasn’t that difficult to see where they were coming from.
“You ever notice we don’t even talk about winning anymore?” I said. “All we talk about is breaking even.”
“What’s wrong with breaking even?” she said, hitting a row of single BARs that paid ten measly credits, then shouting, “Good for you, Camilla!” to an old black woman who had just hit a small jackpot a few rows down.
“Breaking even’s just getting back what was yours in the first place,” I said. “Doesn’t that make it all seem like a big waste of time?”
“Not to me. To me, breaking even means getting back to where you used to be and being happy to be there. Breaking even means appreciating what you had before you started gambling.”
She was right, of course. She had a way of saying things like that, things that were very simple, and true, and completely useless to me. I started coughing and couldn’t stop. It had been going on for two weeks.
“I think you’ve got bronchitis,” she said, turning to look at me for the first time. “I’m sorry for throwing you out of the car. I feel terrible about that.”
This was typical of Dawn, who’d had every right to throw me out of the car. Without getting into details, suffice to say that I’d been behaving precisely like someone who deserved to get thrown out of a car. She had been good enough to take me to the hospital to get a cast put on my wrist after my meltdown at the blackjack table, and then I had said some things that I knew would get me pitched out of the car whether it was pouring rain or not. She hoped for things out of me that it was obvious she’d never get. She knew I adored somebody else. She knew, even, that I hung out with her because I hated being alone. Yet despite the fact that all I ever did was disappoint her, she was still good to me. And instead of being grateful, I punished her for not being L. I know I’m not the first guy to do this kind of thing, but it doesn’t make me feel any better about it.
“I don’t know why you even mess with these stupid things,” I said, kicking the tray again. “I mean, you see that guy over there with the tool belt? He opens these suckers. The casino pays him to work on them. Why would you trust a game that the house literally has the keys to?”
“And the house doesn’t have it over you at the blackjack table?” she said. “I don’t see you getting rich playing Twenty-one.” She reached down into her purse and handed me my phone charger. One of her “I’m clearing your stuff out of my place” gestures that I was used to.
“Nobody calls it Twenty-one anymore,” I said bitterly. “They stopped calling it Twenty-one about the time people stopped naming their first sons Jasper.”
“You used to like that I called it Twenty-one,” she said quietly.
This was true. I used to think it was charming that she said things like that, but those days were long gone. Everything I ever found endearing about L (that she had a blue speck on her lip, that she liked to sit on the floor of the shower and talk until the hot water ran out, that her Southern accent came out when she drank, that she sniffed the dog’s feet, that she drank mini-creamers but not coffee, that she’d named our dog after Springsteen, that she’d run naked to the ice machine in hotels, that she liked the drive-in, that she knew how to change oil, that her freckles bunched up when she got a lot of sun, that she wore an anklet, that she cried when she saw dogs with gray hair on their chin, that she was smarter than me, that she wrote “You ’n me, babe—how ’bout it?” in lipstick on the dash during our first road trip, that she loved the batting cages and fireworks and trains and maps and walkie-talkies and every last thing about life and how you could wait for her to get ready for an eternity and never be disappointed when she walked out), those things never went away. They only got more delicious over time, while Dawn’s habits just grated on me as the repetitions accumulated. And that, you’d have to say, is the undeniable difference between love and everything else.
I didn’t have much time to mull this fact over, however, as I looked up to see two stone-faced security guards and a bemused pit boss heading my way. I was given two choices: They could call the state police, or I could end my relationship with Mohegan Sun and kindly leave the property forever. As with taking a right or a left at the bottom of Archer, this was an easy decision, so I said so long to Dawn and was walked out of the casino by security. Dealers, regulars, staff: Everyone was watching me, thinking God knows what, but I was far past the point where I worried about that kind of thing. Some of them probably considered me something of a folk hero (I mean, what gambler hasn’t wanted to take a swing at a dealer who rolls himself a 3, 10, 2, then lets a hint of a grin form when he slaps down a 6 for 21?), but most of them probably just felt sorry for me, because I used to be a somebody and was on my way to being a nobody, maybe worse off than all of them. Whatever they were thinking, they couldn’t know any more than I did that I just might not be through, and that maybe, just maybe, the kid might be primed for a comeback. Stranger things had happened, after all. And I was the kind of person they happened to.
SCHNAUPH & ASSOCIATES
September 19
. . . it’s a question of knowing who you are. Having some fundamental understanding of the person you are, or at minimum the person you want to be. Prince wrote a song called “Funk Machine” when he was seven years old. He knew who he was. R never did, and so of course I didn’t, either. How could I? How could I have known any of it? I used to think that he had the greatest attitude a person can have. Easygoing. Nonjudgmental. It took a long time to realize that the reason he never judged is because he didn’t want to be judged himself. He never went in search of anything because he didn’t want to be searched for himself. He accepted everything and challenged nothing by design. It’s just that simple. “I had a lover’s quarrel with the world” is written on Robert Frost’s grave. R? He has a nonaggression pact with the world . . .
ONE OF THE WAYS GAMBLING is like life is that things can go from bad to worse in an instant, yet right when it seems like all hope is lost, there’s often a turn of events that might just herald a change of fortune if you can seize the shift in momentum and eliminate all the mistakes that created your current predicament. The morning after I was escorted out of the casino is an excellent example.
I woke to a thunderous banging. Now, there were a lot of candidates in regard to whom I might have pissed off enough to start hammering away at my door at eight-thirty in the morning (which was why I always parked the F-150 in the secret spot behind the motel), but the first place my mind went was the police and the Belmont Park incident. My instinct was to go for the bathroom window and make a run for the truck, but there were two problems with this: 1) I had no idea whether the window was big enough for me to climb out of; and 2) I was on the second floor. The drop couldn’t have been that bad, provided I hung from the ledge. I’m six-three, and if I could extend, I might be able to drop down into the parking lot with minimal damage. Problem was, I couldn’t extend, since my wrist was broken, so fleeing was out of the question. Hiding wasn’t going to work, either. So I crept to the door as stealthily as I could and looked out the peephole, where my bookie, Bing Buli, stood. He banged on the door again and started yelling. “Parisi! Parisi son bitch! You hide Bing Buli! You pay! You pay!”
Bing was an immigrant from the Philippines who’d sold doughnuts and loose cigarettes on the s
treets of Manila as a child, then fought his way off the island as a flyweight boxer. He’d eventually established himself as a bookmaker in Connecticut, of all places, brought his parents over, and lived with them in a tiny South Norwalk apartment. I had met him through people at Mohegan Sun (getting hooked up with a bookie at a casino is roughly as difficult as finding a cigarette butt in an ashtray) and quickly tumbled into the hole betting on sports. Bing had allowed me to work off my original, much smaller debt to him by recruiting new clients. He was entirely enamored with the fact that I was a television personality; considered me his only friend; and agreed to give me a percentage of the business I brought him. Sensing an opportunity to manipulate lines in my favor and gain an insider’s advantage, I proceeded to invent new customers who were really me under assumed names. This went about as well as most of my other schemes, and I eventually racked up the aforementioned $52,000 debt before Bing figured out what I was doing. He was brokenhearted when he discovered my scheme, then had his hurt calcify into seething bitterness when he realized how thoroughly I had taken advantage of him. The fact that a furious Filipino boxer was the best-case scenario for me at the door that morning certainly highlights the dodgy state of affairs I found myself in.
As Bing kept shouting his threats in broken English, I could feel a coughing jag coming on. I covered my mouth and raced to the bed, burying my face deep in a cluster of pillows to avoid being heard. I reached for the NyQuil, but that was spent, so I kept my head buried until the fit passed and Bing gave up outside. As soon as he climbed into his ancient sea-foam Honda Accord and pulled away, rotting muffler roaring, the room phone started ringing. This was safe, as only Maurice ever used it. Lord knows it wasn’t L again.
“What is it, Maurice?”
“Ray? Bing—”
“Buli’s looking for me. I know.”
“OK. But he’s really PO’d, Ray.”
“I know, Maurice.”
“You also have a FedEx.”
“A what?”
“A Federal Express package?”
I threw on a pair of cargo shorts, trotted downstairs in a light drizzle, and mentally prepared myself to face Maurice Boudreaux, about whom I can tell you this: Aside from being four hundred pounds, he had a face that most resembled an old catcher’s mitt, a wispy, halfhearted mustache that curled into his mouth at both ends, and a toupee that sat on his scalp so precariously that it looked like it dropped out of a loose ceiling tile and landed on his head by sheer chance. Maurice was so obese that he had the driver and passenger seats removed from his Capri and drove from the back with the help of foam blocks that extended from the brake and gas pedals like shoe lifts. Watching him struggling to get in and out of that car was always a couple of blocks past heartbreaking, and it could drop me into a deep funk if I was having rough sledding in the head on that particular day, or if L had refused yet another of my overtures to reevaluate the state of our relationship, which, as you can already tell, was pretty much constantly the case.
Maurice had been letting me live relatively rent-free at the Motor Lodge, usually accepting autographed sports memorabilia in lieu of hard cash (I hate to admit that the items were all forged, but there you have it). On days when I didn’t stay at Dawn’s, I’d go out and get Maurice breakfast before I went up to the casino so I wouldn’t have to watch him fighting his way into the Capri, and so the Sarge, the ex-marine who ran the package store next to the motel, wouldn’t stand outside with his phone and videotape him when he did, uploading the results onto YouTube with regularity under a series titled I Spy a Fatty. Whether it’s more depressing that a decorated Vietnam War veteran has a YouTube account or that there’s a sizable audience for videos of an obese man struggling to get into a Capri is anyone’s guess.
The Sarge tortured him on a daily basis, and Maurice never defended himself, opting instead to bunker in behind a stack of papers at his desk in the motel lobby, where he used a love seat as a chair and did nothing all day but scour the New York Post cover to cover, listen to WFAN sports radio, and suck on his inhaler. He was roughly the size of a utility shed, and among his three or four hundred pressing health concerns was that he was asthmatic, a condition mocked relentlessly by the Sarge, who carried a deep and unshakable belief that anyone who had not been subjected to the rigors of Parris Island was doomed to a life of weakness, failure, and shortness of breath.
As far as Maurice knew, I used the Motor Lodge for writing purposes and spent a good deal of time there because my house was being renovated and my wife was in South Carolina taking care of her sick mother (because this once was perfectly true, I found it had no expiration date as a domestic fallacy). Maurice asked very few questions of anyone as a general rule, and even fewer of me because I was a minor celebrity due to both my old ESPN sports adventure series and the fact that I had been a regular on a popular afternoon panel show. I had been canned from the panel for missing a couple of tapings due to getting hung up at the casino and failing to make it to studio headquarters in time, but I didn’t share this detail with Maurice, choosing to tell him that I was on sabbatical from ESPN while I wrote a book. This, like my wife’s absence and failure to have any access to cash whenever rent was due, was never questioned. I further secured my cost-free living situation by allowing him to handle all postings on my Twitter feed, a role he took on with the sobriety and care of a White House press secretary. He was so shy, and so grateful for our spotty friendship, that he allowed himself to be oblivious to the fact that the first thing I ever said to him (“Hey, my name’s Ray, and I need a room”) was probably the last thing I ever said to him that could be described as wholly accurate.
As I headed for the office, I saw the Sarge opening up the packy. I gave him a nod, and he did what he usually did when he saw me, which was shake his head as if I weren’t one person but rather a van full of hippies. I opened the door to the lobby and walked in. Maurice was gnawing on a McMuffin and pawing at the Post while someone who lived in a Staten Island basement bitched about the latest failure by the Mets’ front office on the radio.
He smiled when I walked in, then sifted through four empty Big Gulps, seven or eight spent inhalers, two dozen old copies of the Post, and thirty or forty bled ketchup packets before uncovering a FedEx package. How it had made its way to the bottom of that catastrophe, I’m not sure. It was a pretty good bet it hadn’t arrived that morning.
“We picked up a bunch more followers last week,” he said, taking a pull on a forty-four-ounce Cherry Coke to kick the day off. “People miss seeing you on TV, but they’re excited about your book. I think it’ll be a big success for sure.”
“Great. You’re doing a hell of a job, Maurice.”
I had consistently lied to Maurice about following his social media efforts on my behalf, mostly because I wanted to keep him on my side and also because I knew he took pride in it and didn’t have that many things in his life to take pride in. You have to give people that kind of thing when you can, even if you think all of that stuff is bullshit, which both L and I did. She said she couldn’t think of anything less appealing than knowing what everyone was up to all the time, and I felt the same way (though I would come to discover that Facebook does have its benefits as a purely investigative tool). The Twitter thing had been a mandate from ESPN. Some intern had set it up and kept it current until I got canned and gave the honor to Maurice, and I suppose I was able to rack up a bunch of followers because of the shows I was on, and also because of an impromptu speech I gave on the field at the Little League World Series over a decade before. It was televised and became a very big deal, heralded for its inspirational qualities and message of tolerance (both of which were entirely accidental, as all I was really trying to do was get the kids to stop crying on national television).
“I was thinking maybe we could do an ‘Ask Ray’ thing for like an hour one day, if that’s OK with you,” Maurice said, taking another bite of his McMuffin. “The fans would really like it. Being interactive is a great w
ay to grow our base.”
“Do whatever you want,” I said, grabbing the FedEx envelope and looking at the sender. Schnauph & Associates. It rang a bell.
“Awesome. When?”
“Whenever you want. That social media stuff is all you.”
“OK. But it’s ‘Ask Ray,’ so you’d have to answer the questions.”
“Maurice, you pose as me every day. Answer the questions yourself. I can’t get involved in that stuff. I need to stay focused on the book.”
He nodded. The air for the “Ask Ray” idea went right out of his balloon. He was easier to discourage than a foster child.
“Um, Ray? Listen. You by any chance have a dog in your room yesterday?”
“What’s that?”
“You by any chance have a dog in your room yesterday?”
“A dog?” I said.
“Yeah. Like, yeah. A dog.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You didn’t have a dog in your room?”
“I thought you guys had, you know, a no-pets policy here.”
“We do,” he said.
“There’s your answer, then.”
He looked at me, shrugged, and turned his attention back to the McMuffin. As I said, it didn’t take much to persuade Maurice to give up. It was his first impulse in nearly every situation, and his having seen me hauling a ninety-five-pound golden retriever right past his window not fifteen hours before was not going to change that.
“Ray?”
“What’s that?” I said, itching to get out the door.
“It’s OK if you had a dog in your room. I had a dog once, too.”
He had a forlorn look on his face and a bit of egg hung up in his mustache. I sighed. Any interaction with Maurice was, by its very definition, depressing, and I shuffled out of there with my FedEx before I started to feel too heavy.
Swimming with Bridgeport Girls Page 4