Frozen in Time

by Joseph Epstein

  “You stuck by mom through her terrible last years with Parkinson’s.”

  “Of course I did. I’d have been a real son of a bitch if I had deserted her. I’ll say this much for marriage: nothing transient about it. And in it you don’t die alone, or at least one of the partners in a marriage doesn’t. Alone is the way I expect to die.”

  “Did you ever attempt to see a psychotherapist about all this?”

  “At different times in my life I saw four of them, but without much luck. Therapy isn’t always easy for troubled people who also happen to be intelligent. You have to find a therapist who is brighter than you are—and that’s not always so simple either. I think it was one of the Algonquin Round Table characters who said that he dropped psychotherapy because his therapist asked too many goddamn personal questions. The therapists I went to also asked lots of personal questions, which I didn’t mind, except they all seemed to me the wrong questions.”

  “So where does that leave you, Dad?”

  “It leaves me most days staring out at the lake and contemplating my own insignificance. I sit in a chair and contemplate my life, and think that, if there is a God, he surely must love a joke.”

  He paused, and removed his wallet from his jacket pocket.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said, and dropped a twenty and a ten on the table and pushed back his chair.

  We drove the six or seven blocks back to my father’s apartment in silence. When I pulled into the driveway before his building, he turned to me, his hand on the door handle.

  “I’m not sure I had much to do with it,” he said, “but you’ve become an impressive man, Steven.”

  And with this, he leaned over and kissed me on the cheek, something I have no recollection of his ever having done when I was a boy. He left the car before I had a chance to reply, though I’m still not sure what I would have said. I watched him walk into his large anonymous-looking building to return to his new life.

  I backed out of the driveway. Turning left onto Sheridan Road, heading south to downtown Chicago, I had to remove my handkerchief from my jacket pocket to blot my eyes, which had filled.

  Out of Action

  Eddie Rothman felt it a pretty good night at Gamblers Anonymous. Rothman had been coming to these meetings, held in the basement of the Methodist Church on Lawrence Avenue every Tuesday night, except for holidays, for more than three years now. Most of the meetings were balls-achingly boring, but Rothman kept coming to them for the simple reason that his doing so seemed to work. He had been out of action, as the gamblers say, for the full time, and so he had to conclude that GA worked—at least for him, at least thus far.

  Rothman had told his own story over the first month or so that he had begun attending GA meetings. His problem was sports betting, especially college football, but all other sports, too. After his father’s death, Rothman had taken over the family business, the manufacture and importing of novelties: We’re-Number-One gloves, miniature cameras, dream catchers, fuzzy dice, cellphone cases, junk jewelry. He was thirty-seven and had two kids. He’d been a gambler what seemed like all his life, beginning with betting parley cards in high school at the age of fifteen: pick three teams on the point spread and win six dollars on a dollar bet. He and his pals played lots of poker after school and on weekends; also blackjack and games called in-between and potluck and gin rummy, Hollywood Oklahoma, spades double, for half-a-cent a point.

  Rothman, who had good card sense, more than held his own in these games. Once, though, at the age of sixteen he remembered losing $130 in an after-school potluck game, which took the edge off his appetite for dinner that evening. His friend Bobby Leckachman’s older brother Ted had a bookie, and he could place a $25 bet on a ball game through him. He won more of these bets than he lost. After dropping out of Roosevelt College in his second year and going to work for his father, Rothman acquired a bookie of his own, a guy named Lou Rappaport, and began to up his bets on ball games to $100 a shot. He came out ahead, though not by much.

  He liked to have a bet going at all times. Life in action was better. The action made him feel, somehow, more alive. He probably gave more thought to the sports pages than to the novelty business. There were lots of what his father used to call “green deals” in Rothman’s business, deals made for cash and off the books. When his father died and Rothman took over the business, he used a fair amount of this extra “green” to step up his bets, to $200 and sometimes $500 a game. He started betting basketball and baseball games; in baseball, he bet pitchers, of course, but also the streak system, betting on the teams that won the day before, against those who lost the day before. His craving for action grew stronger, and he was beginning to lose a lot more than winning. This was probably because he needed the action, couldn’t lay off, no longer betting only on those games about which he felt confident.

  Winston Churchill, Rothman somewhere read, claimed that he got a lot more out of alcohol than it got out of him. Rothman used to think the same of his own gambling, but it didn’t take long for him to recognize that this wasn’t so. He knew he was in trouble the weekend he bet two grand on a Friday night PAC Ten game in Arizona, lost, doubled down on Saturday taking Ohio State over Indiana giving 14 points and lost again, and doubled down yet again on Sunday on the Bears-Lions game, where the point spread beat him, making for a twelve-grand trouncing for the weekend. He did the same thing the following weekend, only at twice the stakes. He lost $4,000 on Arizona versus Oregon State, lost $8,000 on Notre Dame over Pittsburgh on Saturday, and then $16,000 on the 49ers over the Rams, putting him down $28,000, which called for just about all the money from green deals that he had stowed away in his vault at Midcity Bank.

  Rothman knew he was in trouble. He knew he had to slow things down. He went two weeks in the middle of football season without placing a bet. Naturally, every bet he would have made but didn’t during this drying-out period turned out to have been a winner. The third week he went back into action and won on Michigan State over Purdue, but lost twice the sum he’d won on the Packers-Colts game, putting him five grand down.

  Fortunately, Debbie, Rothman’s wife, was not a woman at all interested in business, or in where Rothman’s money came from. So at least he didn’t have to worry about hiding his losses from her—not yet anyway. He tried not going cold turkey on gambling, but on tamping things down; betting hundreds instead of thousands. But the same thrill wasn’t there for hundreds, and he felt especially foolish when a slew of hundred dollar bets came in for him and he thought how much money it would have been if they had been bets in the thousands.

  The weekend of the college bowl games Rothman lost $45,000, and he didn’t have it to pay his bookie, a cheerful man in his late sixties named Ike Goldstein. When he told Ike he would need some time to get the money, Ike, over the phone, in a voice in which Rothman heard menace, said, “If I were you, I wouldn’t take too long to get it.”

  Rothman had to tell Debbie as well as his older brother Mel, an orthodonist with a successful practice, about the trouble he was in. A family meeting was called. Everyone agreed it was best to keep it from Rothman’s mother, who was suffering from early signs of dementia. Mel’s wife Laurie was also present. Rothman felt as if he had been called down to the principal’s office for writing obscenities on the walls. His brother lent him the $45,000, and a schedule for repayment was set up. The loan was given on condition of Rothman’s pledge to attend Gambler’s Anonymous meetings, which Rothman promised to do.

  He put himself on a strict mental diet. He stopped watching ball games on television, ceased reading the sports pages. Immediately he realized how large a part of his life these things had taken up. He often found himself with nothing to say when customers and other men brought up the Bears or the Cubs, or asked him how he enjoyed the Series or the Super Bowl. He had to find other interests, subjects for conversation, damn well nearly had to revise his personality. Out
of action, with no bets going, his life at first seemed flat, stale. The withdrawal, he assumed, wasn’t near so rough as that from drugs or alcohol, because the addiction didn’t have a physiological basis. But it was rough enough. Was gambling, he wondered, the alcoholism of Jews?

  So every Tuesday night Rothman dragged himself off to Lawrence Avenue for the 7:00 p.m. meeting of Gamblers Anonymous. He worked until six on Tuesdays, stopped along the way at Wendy’s for a spicy chicken sandwich and small order of fries and a large Coke, which he ate in his Audi. He took the Coke into the meetings with him.

  Tonight’s meeting had four new members. One, a guy in his late twenties, his hair in a ponytail, tattoos on his forearms, got up to announce that we were looking at the man who personally stopped the Miami Heat’s twenty-seven-game winning streak. “I did it of course,” he said, “by betting on them against the Bulls. That’s all I want to say right now, but you’ll hear more about my past adventures in the future.”

  Another of the new members, a man in his middle fifties, dressed in a velour Fila running suit, said that he woke up a week ago after his wife had gone to work, and, while having his coffee in the living room, thought how shabby the furniture in their apartment had become. So he called in a used-furniture dealer, sold the living-room furniture and the dining room set, and took the money—$1,200—to the track at Arlington. His thought was that when he returned home he would surprise his wife by telling her that the next day they would go off with his winnings and buy all new furniture. “Surprise, surprise,” he said. “Didn’t happen. I lost the twelve hundred. We’ve been eating in the kitchen ever since.” After a pause, he added, “I’m here among other reasons to save my marriage.”

  The third new member announced that his name was Les Erhlich. He had a layered haircut, hair combed over his ears, an expensive suit. He told how he had blown his family’s roofing business and two marriages through gambling. He was now selling household improvements, and on his third marriage. Unless he was in action, he said, he failed to see the point of life. He had had a number of bad weeks in a row, and instead of explaining to his wife how he had really lost his money, he began putting bits of lipstick on his shirt collars, so that she would think he was having a love affair and spending the money on a woman rather than gambling it away. “Sick stuff, I realized,” he said, “and that’s why I’m here tonight.”

  The fourth new guy stood up to say that his name was Lenny Adler and that if it was all right he’d prefer not to speak this evening, or until he had the lay of the land on how things worked. He added that his gambling had put him on the edge of suicide and that he was grateful for the existence of a place like GA where he could meet and talk with people who knew something about what he had been through.

  This Lenny Adler was short, on the pudgy side, with thin sandy-colored hair, much receded, with a touch of mousse added, giving it a wet look. He wore a gray suit, a light-blue shirt, no necktie. He had an almost too-clean look about him, as if he just stepped out of the shower. He appeared to be in his early forties, around Rothman’s age. He had a manicure, a blue-sapphire ring on the little finger of his right hand. He looked prosperous, or at least as if he might once have had some serious money.

  At coffee after the meeting, Adler approached Rothman. “Did you by any chance go to Von Steuben High School?” he asked.

  “I did,” Rothman replied.

  “I thought so. You looked familiar.”

  They discovered that they had been there at the same time, though Adler was two years older than Rothman. Would he, Adler wanted to know, be interested in ducking out for a drink to talk about old times. Maybe Rothman could fill him in on how things worked at GA.

  Driving in Adler’s white Porsche, a Boxter, they found an Irish pub on Ashland Avenue called Burke’s. The place wasn’t crowded, though seven or eight thin-screen television sets were silently playing, all on ball games, around the room. They took a booth.

  Adler told Rothman that the car wasn’t his. He was a salesman at Loeber Porsche in Lincolnwood. He was currently separated from his second wife, who lived with his fifteen-year-old daughter Jennifer in Morton Grove. He was living in a furnished apartment in the Somerset Hotel, on Sheridan at Argyle.

  “A beautiful girl, my daughter, but a handful,” Adler said. “Someday she’ll made some unlucky man completely miserable, I’m sure.”

  “What’s your weakness, your gambling jones?” Rothman asked. “Mine was sports betting.”

  “Casinos,” said Adler. “Craps and blackjack. Fifteen or so years ago, I had to travel out to Vegas or Atlantic City to get into action. Now the goddamn things are everywhere. What’s that line about the lottery—it’s the tax the state charges people who don’t understand basic arithmetic. There oughta be something similar said about casinos—the tax the state charges guys dumb enough to think they can beat the house.”

  “What makes you think Gamblers Anonymous is going to do you any good?”

  “I’m counting—I guess I better not say betting—on it, though who knows? At least the stories are better than I imagine those at Alcoholics Anonymous must be.”

  “Some are pretty wild,” Rothman said.

  “The guy who got up tonight and talked about putting lipstick on his shirt collars to put his wife off scent about his gambling problem. I think I can top that one, though I’m only going to tell it to you. Toward the end of my second marriage, I used to put a dab of lipstick on the fly of my boxer shorts to try to establish the same thing. Who knows, I figured it might even encourage my wife to outdo her rival.”

  “Did it work?”

  “No. But I figured it was worth a try. No matter, though. One of the nice things about gambling is that it takes your mind off sex, as you may have noticed.”

  “Sex and everything else,” Rothman said.

  “It can be a problem, that everything else, no doubt about it,” Adler said. “But when it’s going well gambling gives a high like no other I’ve known.”

  “No argument.”

  “How long you been out of action?” Adler asked.

  “It’ll be three years four months in May,” said Rothman, “but who’s counting.”

  “Impressive. You ever feel the ache, the need to get back in action?”

  “Less and less,” Rothman said. “But it can still creep up on me.”

  “Is that why you keep going to these GA meetings?”

  “I go,” said Rothman, “because I’m nervous about not going. Besides, I used to be a streak system bettor, and I don’t want to break my own streak. Might change my luck.”

  “Luck,” Adler said. “I remember using that word a lot before it had the adjective ‘shitty’ before it.”

  They stayed at Burke’s until nearly midnight. Rothman called Debbie at ten to let her know he would be home late, lest she thought he had fallen off the wagon and was in a poker game. They talked about their boyhoods in Albany Park, which Adler referred to as the Old Country. They talked about their similar boredom with school, about there being nothing in the classroom—any classroom—for either of them. They talked about marriage and how gambling didn’t go with marriage. Rothman said he once heard someone say that a married philosopher was a joke, but a married gambler was even more ridiculous.

  But mostly they talked about their adventures in the life: the big scores each had made gambling, and the even bigger losses they had taken. They discovered that they were a lot alike. The major difference between them, at least for now, is that Rothman had money, was “holding,” in the term they used at the track, and Adler was tapped out, and with his alimony and child-support payments figured to be for the foreseeable future.

  The following Tuesday night—it had been raining all day—attendance at Gamblers Anonymous was skimpy. Rothman counted nine people at the meeting, where usually there were twenty or so. Two of the four new guys of the previous week faile
d to show up, and never would again. Soon after the meeting opened, Lenny Adler, who sat across the large conference table from Rothman, stood up to speak.

  “I’m pleased to be here among people who know all the pleasures and horrors of the gambling life,” Adler began. “Yet for all we have in common, each of us has his own story, I’m sure. Mine is fear of being a loser, which is of course what, thanks to gambling, I’ve become, a big-time loser.

  “But to start at the beginning, I was, or at least felt myself, a loser right out of the gate. My father came out of World War II and drove a cab. Veteran’s Cab was the name of the company. He planned for it to be a temporary thing, but he did it for the rest of his life. He played the ponies, my old man, nothing serious, a two-buck bettor. Gambling didn’t bring him down. The ambition gene, I guess, was missing from his make-up. My mother, who was a kind and good-hearted lady, was early afflicted with macular degeneration, which made her practically blind by the time she was thirty. I had two sisters, both older than me, each full of temperament and unhappiness. We lived above a drugstore on Wilson near St. Louis Avenue. I grew up in a home that, from the time I was maybe seven or eight years old, I knew I wanted to get the hell away from, pronto.

  “And I did, even as a little kid. I found my refuge on the streets. I hung out in the schoolyard at Peterson Grammar School at Kedzie and Kimball. My first gambling took place there—marbles, mibs, we called them. I practiced very hard at mibs, because for me they were more than a game. I needed to win. I needed to think about myself as a winner because I knew that, in my family, I had drawn a loser’s hand.

  “My next gambling was lagging pennies, then nickels, and quarters, the kid’s game of trying to pitch coins as close as possible to a line in the sidewalk. I worked hard to be good at this, too. As I grew older, I used to sucker guys into games of Horse on the half-court basket set up in the schoolyard. I wasn’t a great basketball player—I was too small to go out for the team at Von Steuben—but I trained myself to shoot left-handed, which was usually all I needed to win at Horse. Other kids may have found fun at the playground, but for me a lot more than fun was involved. It was where I went to work.