Lay the Favorite

by Beth Raymer

  Dink rushed through the sinister side of the business as though it were the part of a graveyard where the sun doesn’t shine. There was a casino runner who once claimed to have accidentally flushed three hundred thousand dollars’ worth of poker chips (the ones he was supposed to bet sports with) down a toilet inside Caesars Palace. Dink looked at me: could I even fathom how all that felt? And then to have all those fingers shaking in your face, saying they told you so. Your wife calling you stupid for trusting the scumbags with that much money. And then she goes shopping. She has nothing to do so she spends. A fight about money ensues. Why doesn’t she do something to help with the monthly nut? Why doesn’t she go to real-estate school? Because she’s a woman of leisure. Those are her exact words. She’s gonna end up like her women of leisure friends, you say to yourself. Fifty-three, divorced, and working behind a makeup counter for nine dollars an hour. The door slams and you’re alone. Finally you can shake the computer monitor and throw it against the wall. You can pace the floor and punch the air and get lost in your daydream of revenge. Calming down, you watch TV. The pageant’s on. You have five hundred dollars on Miss Israel and she doesn’t even make the top ten. And how can it be that Miss Sweden is black? What’s the world coming to? The three hours you sleep that night are marked by hysterical nightmares of losing money. The day’s first thought is of revenge. Everyone cheats. Everyone else is a liar. You’re only as good as you were yesterday. You’ll overcome this. It’s a high-risk, high-reward business. You’ll be rewarded. One day. One day. One day. It becomes your mantra.

  Dink looked at me through a long pause. Clear-winged butterflies fluttered around our heads. “I’m telling you this because you’re gonna get old, you’re gonna get sick, and you’re gonna die. So you gotta have fun while you can.

  “Actually,” he said, reconsidering, “you have more fun than anybody I know. I guess I was telling that to myself.”

  The trip to Costa Rica wasn’t a fact-finding mission. It was a spiritual mission for Dink to come to terms with how he felt about the business. Why would he invest offshore and run the risk of having even more employees rip him off? It was a shitty business no matter what the geography was, and now that he realized that, we could go home.

  Not three weeks later, I was in the office when Tony, our casino runner, called.

  “No, you didn’t,” Dink said, pressing his palm to his forehead, feeling for a fever. “You didn’t get robbed. Come back to the office.”

  “I’m not coming to the office,” Tony said. “I’m gonna kill myself. Tell my wife I love her.”

  “Don’t do that,” Dink said. “Don’t do that. Let’s just try to work it out. Come back to the office. We can work out a payment plan.”

  Tony hung up.

  “He threatened to kill himself?” I asked. I couldn’t believe what had transpired. Just two minutes before, we were playing gin rummy, waiting for Tony to call and tell us what basketball bets he had made. Robbie J avoided eye contact. He gave in to every itch and fidget.

  “I can’t have that,” Dink said. “I can’t have that over my head. He’s my …”

  And here his breathing became hard and he couldn’t say the word “friend” that would have completed his sentence.

  “Get out, NOW!” he yelled. “Everyone OUT!”

  Standing outside the office door, I heard a computer hit the wall. “I can’t FUCKING do this,” Dink yelled. I could tell he was crying. The real-estate agents and accountants passing by as they left work for the day rolled their eyes, wondering what the guy in Suite A was raving about now.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Damage Prevention

  Tony didn’t kill himself. He bought a Mercedes-Benz and took off to Reno. Robbie J quit to become a full-time gambler. Otis was fired for barking. Lonely, depressed Bruce was recommended by the Den of Equity host. Dink offered him a job and bought him a brand-new moped for transportation. Bruce lost Dink’s bankroll shooting craps, then called from a pay phone and threatened to kill himself.

  Exasperated, Dink closed his eyes and stuck out his tongue. “Is it green?” he asked.

  Tulip leaned over the table and for a long moment examined its bumps and ridges. Aside from the few bleach spots dotting her jaw line, her face had fully recovered from its lift. Her skin was smooth and golden. Clear gloss accentuated her plumped-up pout. She looked like a thirty-five-year-old babe, vivacious and nubile. Thrilled with her looks, she admired her reflection in every window and stainless-steel appliance she came upon. Even the gloom of the office and her husband’s wretchedness could not sink her high spirits.

  Dink retracted his tongue and swallowed hard, wiping the spit from his chin.

  “My body’s rejecting me,” he said. “The parasites have disrupted things and now I’m turning green.”

  “Baseball makes you crazy,” Tulip said. “Why don’t you quit for a little bit?”

  “No one believes me!” Dink snapped. “You think I want to be this miserable?” His voice changed, as though he was going to cry. “I want to have fun like everyone else! All I do is foot the bill! But no more!”

  Dink whipped a remote at the TV. “We are officially operating on damage-prevention mode. Tulip, YOU NEED TO GET A JOB!”

  Tulip tossed on a floppy, wide-brimmed hat and round sunglasses with pink pearl lenses. Exuding newfound self-confidence and sex appeal, she coyly tilted her head to the side. “Honey,” she purred, “if you don’t respect money, why should I?”

  Tulip had a point. For thirty years Dink had made his living gambling and yet he couldn’t even begin to estimate how much he’d won or lost in any given year. For someone so savvy in assessing the value of odds, of home-court advantages and changes to pitching rotations, Dink failed to respect the value of hard cash. I can’t tell you how many times Dink arrived at the office, wondering aloud what he’d done with the forty grand he’d picked up the day before or complaining that he had “misplaced” sixty thousand. He said this in front of his employees, who were busting their asses to help him make that money—for a salary of six hundred dollars a week. I often wondered if his blasé attitude toward huge amounts of money had anything to do with how often people ripped him off. If he blew off the money, he could pretend that he hadn’t been openly defied and utterly disrespected. His self-esteem, it seemed, was worth more to him than his weekly take-home. Or maybe it was just the gambler’s mentality. Just as my father used to say on family casino vacations: money is no object.

  Whatever it was, somewhere along the way, I adopted it too. Instead of a bank account, I kept my money rolled in an empty coffee canister inside the fridge. I loaned money to friends, grossly overtipped waiters and valets, and bought fancy gifts for my family. And come those excruciatingly hot midsummer days, when air-conditioning added extra appeal to high-end department stores, I’d treat myself to money-blowing extravaganzas. I’d buy four-hundred-dollar bikinis and thirty CDs in one pop. Then I’d grab my road atlas and Otis and I would go on trips to Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and California. We’d stay at luxurious spas with hot springs and private mineral pools, and then return to Vegas, funds depleted, but enthusiasm for the job restored.

  But whether cause or symptom, the tongue fungus killed fun in the office. Everything changed. The ugliness and wildness of the business had gotten ahold of Dink and wasn’t letting go. Fun was now the ultimate sin. If you made the mistake of smiling or expressing joy in Dink’s company, he asked you to leave or he fired you. Dink demanded loyalty, and there was no better sign of solidarity with the guy than sitting in front of your computer and looking as miserable as he did.

  Not until I was chin down, hands up, in the sweltering heat of Johnny Tocco’s did I feel a sense of relief. Having grasped jabbing and footwork, I graduated to sparring. My sparring partner was a two-hundred-twenty-pound black woman named Regina whose social worker introduced her to the gym in hopes that boxing would help her recover from an abusive marriage. Regina outsized me by five inches and one hun
dred pounds; the only way to create equality was to give her a handicap. So after our trainers buckled our headgear and smeared Vaseline over our noses, they took a moment to duct-tape Regina’s right glove to her breast.

  The electronic bell dinged. Out of nervousness, I clamped down on my mouthpiece and hummed, low and steady, while circling Regina. One side of her face was disfigured. She never mentioned anything about the scars (Regina was an aloof woman), but the skin on her cheek looked melted; it wouldn’t surprise me if her husband, in a fit of rage, had once pushed her face into a hot burner. When she shadowboxed in front of the mirror, I felt sorry for her. But in the ring, I cast all pity aside. With her overhand lefts coming at me like blades on a windmill, she became my sworn enemy. I attacked relentlessly, throwing short, quick jabs and double jabs. But I had yet to grasp the importance of bobbing and weaving, and after snapping her head back I stood, stiff and satisfied, waiting for a receipt, as Señor Morales would say. A solid smack flashed like heat through my ears and in that instant I finally understood what it meant to fight someone with heavy hands.

  Practice ended with Señor Morales’s fighters gathering in the ring and throwing twenty-pound medicine balls into each other’s stomachs. Throughout the drill, I kept one eye on the ball and the other on Rodrigo, jumping rope in the corner. From snippets of conversations I overheard while wrapping and unwrapping my hands, Rodrigo’s background emerged: he and the other illegal Cuban immigrants made money by building cages for the Las Vegas Zoo. His mother worked as a maid at the Stratosphere casino. He lived with her and his five brothers and sisters. His goal was to be a titleholder.

  With each whisk of the jump rope, Rodrigo’s forearms bulged. I watched him bounce, double-bounce, skip, jog, knee-up, and fall back gracefully into his boxer’s shuffle. Sweat streamed over his stomach muscles, which were brown and cut like a Hershey bar. In the last thirty seconds of the round, he tossed the jump rope aside and dropped to the ground for push-ups. He had the last-minute endurance of a champion.

  After our showers, I asked if I could walk him home. I loved the way the soap smelled on his skin and trying to make him laugh made me deliriously happy. Neon lights at the hourly motels buzzed overhead. On the curb outside the 7-Eleven, next to all the panhandling teenage runaways, Rodrigo smoked cigarettes. At five-foot-nine, 132 pounds, he constantly needed to suppress his appetite to keep weight. Across the street, floodlights illuminated a billboard of two women wearing lace G-strings. The brunette’s breasts pressed into the blonde’s as they made out. The ad had something to do with loose slots. Rodrigo pulled his Spanish-to-English dictionary from his duffel bag. Sitting close, we talked about our dogs.

  The new strategy was to hire people who were not degenerate gamblers, which proved difficult. First, Dink hired Jake, a brash, bigoted Mormon. When I found him cheating on the office basketball pool, I demanded his termination. But it took an offhand remark about hamsters not being allowed through the gates of heaven to force Dink’s hand. An upbeat lounge singer named Stephanie quit her Starbucks day job to work at Dink Inc. Her knowledge and love of music made her fun to have in the office, but her fundamentalist Christian values soon came to light and her pro-Republican rants became unbearable. She was so thankful for the job, coming from Starbucks, that Dink couldn’t bear to fire her. After two weeks of training, she still had no idea what we were doing and Dink demoted her to “lunch girl.”

  Joe came to us after being laid off from a respectable electronics firm where, for ten years, he wrote and directed video games. The contrast between the professionalism of his career at the studio and the loud unruliness of Dink Inc. appalled him.

  “We should demand hazard pay,” Joe griped as we fled the office, the shouts and groans of Dink’s latest tantrum trailing behind us. We slammed the crash bar across the fire door and rushed into the sunshine like inmates in their first ecstatic moments of escape.

  Joe flipped down his shades. “What does that man live for? The drama of winning and losing and throwing the ticker?”

  Heat from the asphalt seeped up through my flip-flops. Happy to be out of work early, I walked along with my eyes closed and welcomed the sunshine’s intense red through my eyelids.

  Joe continued. “Such stupid amounts of money! He’s a millionaire and he’s the most miserable man I’ve ever met. I hate having to come in to that pigsty every day, surrounded by all that hypochondria …” He seemed to reflect for a moment. “Although, shit, man, I think that fungus eating his tongue might be real.”

  At the height of Dink’s tantrum that day, he fired the entire staff, an increasingly frequent form of catharsis that lasted until he hired us all back. Joe, however, never returned.

  But guess who did?

  Lonely, depressed Bruce. I walked into the office one day and there he was, only two months since he had stolen from Dink. AND DINK REHIRED HIM. I soon found out that forgiving thieves and taking them back was normal procedure for Dink. Tony, it turned out, had stolen money a year earlier. He’d “lost” $40,000, claiming it fell out of his car at the Jack in the Box drive-thru. Still, on the afternoon I heard Bruce nagging Dink to hurry up already and order lunch, I snapped.

  “We should have you killed, you fat fuck!” I yelled.

  Dink intervened. “We can’t kill Bruce just because he robbed my gambling money.”

  “I cannot, I will not, stay in this office and sit across from some fat fucking degenerate thief who makes the same amount of money as me,” I vented.

  Bruce laughed at me, the tartar on his teeth yellow as pus on gauze. Dink did nothing. I stood there, smoldering, undercut by the very guy I was trying to stand up for. Feeling the disdain flowing through my body, I looked to Dink in anger and disappointment. Forget all the gambling psychology you’ve ever heard. The only thing you need to know is this: every gambler is a neurotic with an unconscious wish to lose. And as for the rare professionals who are talented enough to beat the house, rest assured they will go to whatever lengths necessary to surround themselves with people who will lose their money for them.

  In an attempt to make peace and keep me out of the office and away from Bruce, Dink rehired Otis and appointed me casino runner. With a cash-stuffed backpack hanging from my shoulder, I started my route at eight a.m. Rodrigo lived right behind the Stratosphere, my third casino pit stop, and I found myself stopping by to say hi, to smell his musk, to kiss him, and then finally, to set aside the Spanish-to-English dictionary and have sex with him on the kitchen floor. It had been a long time since I found myself attracted to someone so young, sexy, and strong and I could feel lust’s slow poison work its way through my body and damage my common sense. The Wee Kirk o’ the Heather wedding chapel was just a block from his house. If we got married, he wouldn’t have to fear being deported. We could split our time between Havana and Vegas and have sex with each other every day. These were my thoughts as Rodrigo undressed me and I moved my lips down his smooth, warm chest.

  “The Duke game!” Dink shrieked. “What’s the line on Duke?”

  Flying down the interstate, I held the cell phone as far from my ear as I could. Puzzled by the loud, screaming voice piercing through the front seat, Otis tilted his head.

  “Horrible traffic,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  I could almost hear Dink’s blood pressure rising. Then came the screaming rant about how broke he was and how it was my fault because I didn’t care about his bankroll. Feeling too good to care, I hung up on him, rolled down the windows, and turned up the radio.

  Just when it seemed that I would never care for another co-worker, Dink hired Grant Durrett. A twenty-six-year-old budding gambler, Grant snooped around ATMs for receipts with high balances, which he would scatter across the dashboard of his car in hopes of impressing dates and luring one-night stands back for more. Grant charmed me with his skewed vision of the world, undoubtedly shaped by his father, a thief who had served time in Leavenworth for drug trafficking. After not seeing his dad for ten years, Grant fi
nally got a call from him. Freshly out of prison, he wanted Grant to come live with him in North Vegas and for the two of them to be “father and son” again. Grant, having always wanted a relationship with his father, was happy to comply and immediately dropped out of his Arizona junior college. Father and son played cards, drank beer and got to know each other. Within months of their reunion, Papa stole the ten thousand dollars Grant had stashed in his bedroom and used the money to gamble and pay off his bar tabs. Grant moved out and swore off his dad forever. Unfortunately, his mail was still delivered to the trailer and his dad, Grant Durrett Sr., pounced on the opportunity to steal junior’s identity, leaving his dear son another twenty grand in debt. When Grant realized his credit had been ruined, he returned to the Pair-A-Dice Trailer Park, white-knuckling a nine iron as though it were a battle-axe and expressing hopes that his father’s future included equal parts recidivism, denied parole, and ass-rape.

  Grant had been on the periphery of Dink Inc. for some time. Years before he ripped off Dink, Tony had been Grant’s mentor. On their first day of working together, Tony instructed Grant on what teams to bet and handed him thousands of dollars. Grant, who had never seen that much money in his life, stuffed the cash in his front pocket and immediately got an erection. On the afternoon Tony stole Dink’s money, Grant was supposed to meet him for lunch. Tony was Grant’s hero, and he never saw him again.

  Grant’s overplayed bravado, though at times hard to stomach, served him well in gambling. To make extra money, Grant began taking bets from players he met at sports books. At casinos along the Strip, he approached out-of-town players and offered them his services as a bookmaker. That way, when their Vegas vacation was over, they could return home to Newport Beach, Brentwood, Santa Barbara—places that had no sports books—and continue to gamble. All they had to do was call Grant. During my time in the business, Grant Durrett, Patron Saint of the Screwed Over, was the only person I met who physically threatened his customers when they failed to pay. He’d wait for them outside the casinos they frequented, follow them to their cars, then bang their heads against the hoods. If they didn’t have the cash, he stole their credit cards and went on shopping sprees at the Fashion Show Mall.