Swimming with Bridgeport Girls

by Anthony Tambakis

  Half an hour later, I found myself strolling across the cool, gleaming marble lobby of the MGM Grand with a casino host named Bob Mota. He was roughly five-nothing and half that wide, and walking across the white tiles with a cleanly shaved head and black suit, he most closely resembled an eight ball that had just rolled off a pool table and onto the floor. He led me to his office, told me to take a seat, studied the Schnauph check that I had handed him, and looked up at me. I was hopeful that my dyed hair and hat would keep him from recognizing me, but then it dawned on me that I hadn’t done anything, nothing that he’d know about yet, anyway, and that calmed me down until it quickly occurred to me that my name was right there on the check, so of course he’d know who I was, unless he was one of those guys who didn’t follow sports. Except he worked at a casino and looked exactly like a guy who spent the majority of his nonworking hours sitting on a black leather couch and binge-watching games on multiple flat-screens.

  This was the problem with always having something to hide. You could never really relax. I’m sure honest people have their problems, too, but I have to imagine that they have less of them.

  “So what do we have here, Ray?”

  “It’s my inheritance,” I said, surprising myself by telling the truth when confronted with a direct query for the first time since my gambling life started.

  “I see.”

  He looked at me. At the check. Back at me. If he knew who I was, he didn’t let on.

  “He had a heart attack,” I offered. “In a kayak.”

  “What’s that?”

  “My father. He had a heart attack. In a kayak. In Michigan.”

  Mota looked at me again.

  “Not a good place for that kind of thing,” I said.

  “Michigan?”

  “A kayak.”

  “Oh. No. It isn’t.”

  Let me be honest here: I’ve been embellishing, or just flat-out lying, since I was a kid. I have no idea why. I suppose it entertained me to make things up at first, and then it got to the point where I just wanted things to be different than they were and found that they could be if you just said it was so. Most of the time there would be a germ of truth to whatever it was I was lying about. My father did used to kayak, for example, but the chance that he had died in one was slim. I probably said it because I liked the image.

  “He used to kayak around the Meadowlands,” I said, which was true.

  “The swamps?”

  I nodded. “You’re from back east, right, Bob? Accent gives you away a little.”

  “Queens.”

  “I was going to guess Queens,” I said, though this wasn’t true.

  “Maybe he was looking for gold.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Your father,” he said, continuing to eyeball the check. “Maybe that’s why he was kayaking in the Meadowlands.”

  “I don’t know what he was doing,” I said, which was also not true, since my mother was an ecologist when they first met and they used to spend quite a bit of time kayaking through the Meadowlands doing research. I suppose he kept going after she died as a way of remembering her.

  “Probably looking for gold,” Mota said. “Pirates used to—whattya call it? Maraud. Pirates used to maraud in New York Harbor. They’d bury their gold in hollowed-out tree stumps in the Meadowlands. I read it in a book, believe it or not.”

  I wasn’t sure whether Mota was referring to the buried treasure or having read a book as unbelievable, but it didn’t seem to matter. I simply needed to show some interest and curry his favor. The dream was close all of a sudden. I needed to turn $612,500 into $2 million. Technically, I was two winning hands of blackjack away from having my life back. One winning play, you’re looking at 1.2 million. Another, 2.4. That’s the Kinder House with $400,000 left over. I’m not saying I was going to put it all out there like that (you’d have to have balls of molten steel and brains like grits to be that aggressive), but it goes to show how close to my fingertips all of it was. I just needed this bald motherfucker to give me a room and a credit line.

  “For real?” I said.

  “Yep.”

  “Pirates?” I said. It sounded like one of my stories.

  “Pirates.”

  “In the Meadowlands?”

  “In the Meadowlands.”

  “That’s something,” I said, before I started coughing for a good twenty seconds. The bronchitis, or pneumonia, or whatever it was I had come down with after walking four miles in the rain, was still hanging around. I’d get on coughing jags that I couldn’t stop. It hurt the ribs more than anything else.

  “You OK, Ray?”

  “Summer cold,” I finally spat out.

  “What’s up with that cast?”

  “I attacked a blackjack dealer and broke my wrist on his head” didn’t seem like the right call, so I went with “Damn dog went after a squirrel. Practically ripped my hand off.”

  “Fucking animals,” he said in an unsettling tone. There was a whole story there that I didn’t want to hear, likely involving Mota and missing-cat flyers stapled on utility poles throughout his neighborhood, so I changed the subject by nodding at the Lou Gehrig Cooperstown Collection bobblehead he had sitting on his desk.

  “Now, that’s outstanding.”

  “The Iron Horse,” he said proudly.

  “Great player.”

  “Great player. Reminds me to come to work every day. Make the best of things.”

  I cupped my hands over my mouth and approximated the public address echo of his famous speech at Yankee Stadium.

  “ ‘Today I consider myself, myself . . . ’ ”

  “ ‘The luckiest man . . . ’ ” Mota jumped in.

  “ ‘Man, man, man . . . ’ ”

  “ ‘On the face of the earth . . . ’ ”

  “ ‘Earth, earth, earth.’ ”

  Mota smiled broadly. You could tell it was a rare occasion.

  “Great speech,” he said.

  “Courageous.”

  “Fucking A, it’s courageous. You seen The Pride of the Yankees, Ray? Gary Cooper played Gehrig. He was forty and looked ridiculous in the fraternity scenes, but you can’t worry about shit like that. That’s the small stuff. You have to look at the big picture. Cooper was right in the big picture.”

  “I agree. I’m all about the big picture.”

  “Good.”

  He stood up, said he had to take my check down to finance, and told me to fill out a credit application while I waited for him to come back. He handed me a clipboard. “Where you from originally, Ray?”

  “Jersey.”

  “Jersey girls are all right by me,” he said.

  “Down the shore, everything’s all right,” I said, smiling.

  He nodded and left the room. It was the third time I had told the truth in that office. I was practically a new man. And the lyrical reference I had hit him with got me thinking about the old days with L, which always felt good.

  I’d met her at the Parker House in Sea Girt, New Jersey. She had escaped the Georgia heat and was visiting friends who had a place in Point Pleasant before heading back south to start school at Emory in the fall. We met while getting drinks at the bar, then partnered up at bumper pool against a pair of Waspy fraternity brothers who treated the finesse game like they were hazing pledges. It was awful.

  “These guys are a fucking disgrace,” L whispered to me. She altered her voice when she said it. Changed the cadence. I recognized it immediately from one of my favorite comedies.

  “Did you just hit me with a line from Slap Shot?” I said.

  “Did you just recognize that as a line from Slap Shot?”

  “I certainly did.”

  “Paul Newman is the perfect man,” she said. “Do you have Paul Newman qualities? Tell me you do. Say it with conviction.”

  “I have Paul Newman qualities.”

  “We shall see about that.”

  We held the table for nine straight matches, an
d then she said she wanted to go back to Point Pleasant and see a band at Martell’s Tiki Bar. What could I say? She had smooth, fair skin, delicate freckles, silky blond hair, a tiny blue speck on her bow-tie lips, and the widest, clearest eyes I’d ever seen—if she had said that she wanted to hitchhike to Morgantown and put in a night shift at the coal mine, I would have grabbed a canary and a pickax in two seconds.

  We ended up hopping in a Briggs van and heading over to Martell’s, where the house band played Tom Waits’s “Jersey Girl,” which Bruce had made famous on the Born in the U.S.A. tour and was forever a big hit down the shore. L and I were thick as thieves by that point, and she grabbed my hand to dance when it came on. I can tell you that there are few things in life that compare with being nineteen years old, holding the tiny waist of the most beautiful girl you’ve ever seen, and slow-dancing on an outdoor deck while a summer breeze eases in off the Atlantic and pinwheel lights from a distant Ferris wheel bleed across the water. Can you even imagine that? Can you imagine everyone in the place singing “ ’Cause down the shore everything’s all right, you and your baby on a Saturday night, nothing matters in this whole wide world, when you’re in love with a Jersey girl” and, during the “Sha-la-la-la-la-la-la-las,” closing your eyes and burying your face in her hair and hoping the band would never, ever stop playing? And then, right when you think there’s no way the moment can be topped, she looks up at you with those eyes that are neither gray nor green nor blue but something unto themselves, some color you’ve never seen, and you stare at that mesmerizing blue speck and whisper, “I think you have something on your lip,” and she stares straight into your eyes with those little moons of hers and says, “Maybe you could get it for me.” And then your life begins.

  And the thing is: That moment held, people. Trust me. It held for well over a decade of our lives, right up until her mom got sick. We had never been apart, and then suddenly we were, and I guess it turns out that I’m not the kind of person who excels when left to his own devices. On some level L intuited that, because once it became clear that she was going to take a sabbatical from work and stay in Myrtle Beach with Lucille, she continued to handle all of the household duties back on Archer, no doubt figuring that things like bills and whatever else went into running a home were likely to fall by the wayside on my watch. I was given one job: to collect all “pertinent” mail, put it in a bubble envelope, and send it to Myrtle Beach. To be honest, I don’t think I had ever looked at the mail before. I ignored it like I would ignore, say, the plants (or birth control, for that matter). They were things that seemed to get taken care of without my worrying about them. But when L left and I started gathering the mail for the first time, I began to notice something interesting. There were a good deal of letters addressed to me from credit card companies. A very good deal of them. Apparently, thanks to the reliability of my partner, a lot of people were under the impression that Mr. Raymond J. Parisi himself was an excellent credit risk.

  I avoided mailing in an application at first because I didn’t really believe those offer letters could be true. Why the heck would someone give me free money? I could see L getting that kind of treatment since she was a lawyer and earned legitimate bank, but despite what people think, you don’t make that much being on TV, or at least not on ESPN a handful of hours a week.

  I ignored the credit card offers for a while, but then I started going to the casino every day before the show, and once I’d blown through the petty cash in the kitchen, I found that it wasn’t easy for me to get my hands on more money, since my ATM card was tied to our joint account and it wouldn’t take L long to notice that I was making cash withdrawals every day. I thought about asking ESPN to stop putting my checks into direct deposit, but she would have noticed that, too, so my options were limited. I certainly couldn’t call her and say, “Hey, honey, I know your mom has cancer and all, but can you wire me a few grand for the casino, because it’s winter, and I’m bored as hell, and there’re dead squirrels everywhere, and they’re depressing the crap out of me, and did I mention I play blackjack pretty much constantly now?”

  So I sent in for a Chase credit card. And some good folks at Mohegan Sun were happy to show me how to get a cash advance off it. Then I got another one. It was mind-boggling. Do you know how easy it is to get free money if you have good credit? And do you know how long it takes word to get out that everyone was wrong about your perceived reliability? In time I got a third card (why not?) and a fourth (sure). When the mail came, I separated my credit card statements from the “pertinent” mail pile bound for South Carolina and hid them in my desk, and when I got paranoid, I moved them to the toolshed, where I stuffed the envelopes into a wading boot that the previous owner of the house had left behind.

  Before you could say trouble, I was $25,000 in the hole. Thirty. Thirty-five. Forty. Every day, instead of hoping today would be the day L came home, I prayed for today not to be the day L came home. I was consumed with how I was going to gamble my way out of the ditch I had gambled myself into. It was all I thought about. I stayed at Dawn’s, which was twelve miles from the casino, and kept Bruce at the kennel before finally springing him in a fit of guilt one day, wherein he, too, became a fixture at Dawn’s apartment, a fact that L got her hands on somehow and bludgeoned me with along with everything else, constantly accusing me of “setting up house with a hairdresser” when all Bruce and I were doing was sleeping on the sofa and helping out with Penny. I went from buying in for $100 and playing red nickel chips at the small tables at Foxwoods in January to playing in the VIP salons at Mohegan Sun with nothing but black $100s by April. When it became obvious that I wasn’t going to win it all back playing blackjack, and after a misguided “can’t miss” craps strategy that cost me $3,000 on a Thursday afternoon and $5,000 more on a new card Friday morning, I met Bing Buli through people at the casino. Bookies require no cash up front, just your good name or someone’s say-so on your good name, which I guess is really no different from the whole credit card thing, with the notable exception of a definite philosophical difference in the area of collection methodology. Bing was more than happy to sign me up as a customer. To him, I was famous, and having a client like me was a feather in his cap. He liked to joke that he was playing with fire by having someone who talked sports for a living wager on games with him, but anyone could look at my betting patterns and see that they resembled those of a garden-variety schizophrenic more than a professional prognosticator (my mother was a schizophrenic, so that probably wasn’t the best word choice, but let’s just carry on and get to that later).

  I proceeded to handle sports gambling about as well as I handled casino gambling. Something Bing and all the credit card companies would agree on, and I certainly wouldn’t argue with, is that there are certain kinds of people who cannot be trusted with a credit line, and I would be the prototype. Given the opportunity, I bet on everything. I played mostly blackjack. Some craps. A little roulette (thanks for nothing, Dostoevsky). I also tried my hand at baccarat, mini-baccarat, three-card poker, Pai Gow poker, and Caribbean stud. Outside the casino, I played the Lotto. Bought scratch-offs. Wagered on horses, dogs, boxing, baseball, college football, the NFL, NCAA hoops, the NBA, the NHL, and even golf. I bet on everything from the World Series to the opening round of the NIT. I wagered on both the Super Bowl coin flip and the outcome of the Academy Awards. Straight bets, parlays, teasers, halftimes, props, wheels, sides, totals. I tried them all.

  When I met Bing Buli, I was convinced that I could dig myself out of the hole in no time, since I could be betting on games while I was playing at the tables, thus doubling my opportunities to get on a roll, pay off all the cards, and quit immediately (never mind the fact that this indeed happened on at least two occasions, and I pressed my luck each time, figuring I might as well get a little ahead for all my trouble). I would go up to Mohegan Sun in the morning, sit in the coffee shop, and study the day’s matchups, or sit next to Dawn in the slot salon and try to study the day’s matchup
s while she talked about the cast of one reality show or another. Then I would hit the tables until one-thirty, cash in, dash outside, grab my truck from Chip, and race over to Bristol to give my opinion on the sports topics of the moment, which I wasn’t even following anymore, a fact that I covered up by choosing a different member of the panel to agree with every day and parroting whatever his position was.

  After taping in the walk-in cooler that doubled as our set at ESPN, I’d pass up any offers to go over to the cafeteria on campus to grab a snack and catch up with whoever was doing the asking, claiming I had to get home to the dog due to my wife’s absence (you use the word cancer in any context, and the excuse is immediately accepted). I’d race back to Mohegan Sun for some more cards, breaking around six-thirty to hit the coffee shop and study the evening lines. No matter the season, the nighttime action always cranked up around seven and continued through the ten-thirty West Coast games. I’d grab a quick slice from the food court, play more blackjack, and get up from the table between the shoes to check my phone for game updates, as if compulsively looking every ten minutes would somehow alter the course of, say, a Duke-Clemson game being played a thousand miles away by a bunch of teenagers in baggy shorts. By one in the morning, I’d be completely burned out and would run numbers in my head on the ride back to Dawn’s, tabulating the day’s gains or losses, figuring the overall debt, and frantically trying to concoct a plan that would get me square before L found out what I had been up to.

  I benefited from the fact that she had too much on her mind to keep tabs on me. Addicts are first-rate liars, generally speaking, and I managed to hide things pretty well with the help of the liar’s greatest aide: the cell phone. It wasn’t beyond me to text L from the casino bathroom, for example, and say Bruce and I had just crawled into bed and were watching Boardwalk Empire, or step out onto Dawn’s stoop and leave a message about how cold it was in Kansas City, where I had allegedly been sent on an assignment. After I got fired, I told her the network was considering a new show for me, since I knew her mother loved to watch me in the afternoons, and I needed to come up with a reason I was no longer on the panel. But I had no illusions about really getting away with anything. I knew I was leaving a paper trail. And I knew time was running out. I was worried sick. I never ate. I never slept. I owed everybody. How did I let it happen? I really don’t know. You always hear a lot of talk about people self-destructing, but I don’t think that’s true. People don’t self-destruct. They unravel.