Bandit

by Molly Brodak

Good gamblers let gambling train them to manage their emotions. To be specific, they learn to suppress. Meaning, lying to oneself that things are OK, the bad emotion caused by loss is not there, the guilt, regret, and anger is not there, until the lie sticks, and the gambling can continue with a level head. It can’t be faked.

  I don’t know for sure if he had this self-control. But I do know he couldn’t have been very good at gambling, after all. Being good at gambling requires this self-control, as well as skill and good money management.

  Gamblers seek control at the same time they hope to escape it. It feels good to surrender to the trustworthy outcomes of gambling, to give over completely to the simple rhythm and singular focus of its movements. But the strong desire to control the game, to win it with skill, is in the forward mind, and keeps the addict chasing wins against all reason. And Dad played blackjack, a game the house wins, in the end. He bet on sports with big bookies, odds solidly against him. He lost and lost, persisted at losing.

  To attempt to cope with absolute losses by playing at loss, repeating it, in safer scenarios that are of one’s own choosing, is an old story. I considered this motive there, in the casino, surrounded by losers persisting at losing. Maybe gambling is a kind of wound-replay, wound-fascination, because it’s so obviously unwise that it seems like self-harm.

  I started thinking about Dad’s wounds while we finished our meal in the casino. We sat in a booth overlooking the pit as if at the center of some Technicolor panopticon, the bells and squawks of the slots meshed into one grinding blare. Dad didn’t know his dad; he was only told about him. This loss hung on him like a millstone. He saw his family structure dissolve as Detroit dissolved and St. Albertus dissolved. He came from war and went to war. He knew many losses. It has to be a kind of self-abuse, for certain, to replay losses, what Freud called “repetition compulsion,” but it feels empowering, because for once the loss is now one’s choice. He would’ve said he was going to the casino to make money. Really he was throwing it away. Throwing away his money, meaning his time, meaning his self.

  It’s a way of being a little dead. It’s a nice feeling, refreshing. Living is hard to do.

  While I was wasting away in bed after my surgery I knew that feeling of being a little dead. I understand why sometimes people want to get sick. There are no particulars of self. But here, a choice to self-liquefy actively, persistently, is something more than what I experienced. Most addictions are cowardly, slow, burdensome suicide attempts.

  Maybe the death-drive concept was all a bit much, though, I thought as I looked out onto the casino floor. Most people who gamble don’t become addicted, don’t resort to robbing banks to catch up with their debts. Lots of people didn’t know their dads, lots of people return from war without ending up in jail. It’s just a game, after all, something to draw the things in him out, to play with. Did there have to be something in him, under all of this, essentially primary, to blame?

  70

  Caught as he was, both times, what was it, exactly, that he had to say for himself? I wanted to read the transcript from the trials. The more recent trial materials were online, but the older ones were too old, I discovered. Frustrated, I finally went to the law library at the university where I teach; I couldn’t get any further on the Internet. I waited patiently for the reference librarian to come back to her desk, upon which she had left an open bottle of apple juice and a printed-out email with the subject line “Re: Food at the Beach.” She came back, a rich-looking, bird-y blond girl, and explained to me that the database I was using was the only one, really, and we looked at it together to see if we could get more out of it.

  I watched her type my dad’s name into a search field. I could tell she didn’t type much, pecking with one thin finger, misspelling “Joseph” three times. Eventually she made a call and the person on the other line explained that any trial documents from that year, 1994, were just too old to be in the database, and that all I could do was go to the actual courthouse where he was tried and get photocopies from their files, which would be in storage, meaning their retrieval would be time-consuming and costly. The librarian kept asking me about the man I was researching. “What did he do?”

  “He robbed banks.”

  “Why?” She had a coastal southern accent and unblinking eyes. I shrugged. “Are you sure you have his name right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Exactly right? You sure there’s not a ‘c’ in ‘Brodak’? Sounds like maybe there could be a ‘c’ there …”

  “Quite certain … it is my last name too.”

  “Oh oh my, are you related? A distant relative?” she said, utterly joking, and exaggerated a smile, eyes blinking weirdly.

  “It’s my dad,” I said through a pained smile.

  Her mouth opened wide and she became a bit louder, which bothered me as the nearby circulation clerks could hear her increasingly astonished questions about my research. She wanted to know who I was and what I do and why I wanted to write this and what does everyone think of it. I answered her questions politely, but always with attempts to end the conversation. She was so loud now. “Well, that is amazing, I mean you might hear about a bank robber and think of what kind of person he is, but look at you, and you had one for a dad!” She laughed, and I am certain I laughed, but not for the reason she must’ve thought.

  71

  I took a break from my research to sit on a bench outside of the library, just watching a squirrel do its squirrel work and trying to stay open to the sunshine and leaf sound. The squirrel stopped in a patch of lawn to bury something, arching its back with all of its small power to dig a pretty pathetically shallow spot. It dropped the morsel in, then patted the grass down in that adorable but neurotic squirrel way. I thought about Dad shooting this squirrel.

  No one would care. Squirrels are solitary mammals, meaning they live alone their entire adult lives, except for brief periods of mating or rearing babies. No other squirrel would miss this squirrel. Its little dark life—eating food, sleeping, and burying bits, all alone—seems to light up the network I’m sunk in. It looked at me with its inscrutable eye: Why do you need so much more?

  Our species is social—intrinsically, irritatingly, helplessly social. It’s enough to prove this with any emotional test: it’s not even so much the people we insist on yoking ourselves to, but the connections themselves. We are attachers. We die without attachments. We spend most of our free time refining or maintaining our attachments. Insisting on them, even at great cost. Kids without families hurtle themselves at cobbled-together pseudo families—some loving friends, some insane gangs, some virtual worlds, some sad self-destroyers, cults and churches, too. Sometimes not people at all but things, feelings for things or actions, colors, movements, bells, and dings. It almost doesn’t matter what, as long as there is a binding. As long as the soul is caught in some kind of net.

  It seems logical to think that the natural order of life is to attach oneself to one’s family, who in optimal conditions is automatically there and good, until the time comes to leave this supplied family and construct a new one on which to cleave. And so it’d be logical to consider any disordered attachment—to objects, to drugs, to gambling—as an awful interference, an addiction: a disease! And to cure it would be to release the addict from his prison of unnatural attachment, and sail him back to his more wholesome network of friends and family.

  Was Dad really an addict, exactly? If he was, did that mean he could be cured and sail back to us whole?

  72

  “Come in, come in!” a voice shouts when I knock. My boyfriend and sister and I walk out of the dark February cold into a warm home, lit all around with candles. It’s Valentine’s Day, and my sister has come to Atlanta to visit, and so we brought her along to our friends’ dinner party.

  Christiana in the kitchen with a dainty apron tied over her long party dress, hovering over the most enormous steaming pot of mashed potatoes I have ever seen. She’s adding more cream and cream cheese and
tasting it while Rusty, her husband, hesitates over the incredible tenderloin, knife in hand, not sure if it’s ready to slice. Brian’s wearing a nice suit and his girlfriend Tina hands me a beautiful coupe glass filled with a red drink. “Artillery Punch,” she says, “it’ll knock the chill off.” I introduce my sister around and we sink into the couch by the bowls of pale roses and trailing ferns where Caroline, Christiana’s sister, is regaling the group with a hilarious story of a coworker’s breakdown. She might have had a tiara on. Even if she wasn’t exactly wearing a tiara, she always seems as if she is wearing one, either of gems or flowers.

  She’s made party favors for everyone: framed photographs of each couple in attendance she printed off of our Facebook pages. “A photo of you and your person,” she said when we saw them on the coffee table, “and you have two people!” One photo of me and my boyfriend, another of me and my sister when we were little—Christmastime, us in our dresses, eyes glittery upon the presents. My sister hugs Caroline, beaming.

  We find our seats at a long table where Christiana has painted tiny name place cards for each one of us, even my sister, who is new. Each one decorated with a different flower, each name inked perfectly in Caroline’s lovely cursive. We squeeze close to the table, which is stuffed with mismatched plates and set with dishes of fresh radishes, blackberries and mint, caviar and cheese crisps, the roast, the mountainous bowl of potatoes, the little cups of perfect crab bisque. Various stray fern fronds trailing out from the rose bouquets occasionally alight from some dripping candle, but someone always pinches it out in time. A toast to love is raised.

  I hold my boyfriend’s hand under the table and look around at all of it. Everyone is beautiful. And happy, happy in this closeness. Christiana, ever attentive to changing moods, sees some misty look in my face and plucks two vintage millinery flowers from who knows where and places one behind my ear, and the other behind my sister’s. We hug and smile; someone takes a picture for Instagram.

  My boyfriend and Rusty, friends since the second grade, start bickering as they always do about some dumb football thing, Christiana shouts to me across the table that she is in despair that we weren’t seated next to each other, Brian and Tina are kissing, Tom is controlling the music with his phone, Christy is commenting on it, James and Carolina are dancing in their chairs, oblivious, and all of us are eating and smiling. I look at my sister. She looks at me and tilts her head and we are thinking the same thing. I am embarrassed by my happiness.

  Dinner ends with the raspberry pavlova, lemon heart tarts, cherry vanilla fudge, and of course the cream puffs I made. People are stuffed, leaning in their chairs, dying of food joy. In the living room, someone cues up Fetty Wap and we have to leave just as everyone is drunk enough to start dancing. Out in the cold, on the way to the car, we huddle close, the glow of the party trailing from us like a comet.

  The next day I take my sister to all the Atlanta attractions: the Coke museum, the zoo, the big Ferris wheel. At the end of the ride, photos of us are presented, at which of course I balk but my sister considers. They Photoshopped in the giant Ferris wheel behind us and added a sunny blue sky. My sister insists on buying the photos, even though it costs twenty-five dollars. She buys the accompanying plastic frame, too, when the cashier suggests it.

  At home, the photo of us is added to the dinner party photos on the table. Outside, we sit on the porch swing, and I tell her about the book I’m writing.

  “He’s never going to talk to you again when he finds out.”

  “Oh yeah, I know. I give zero fucks.”

  “I mean. You just better mean that.”

  I know what she means. I don’t give zero fucks and she knows it. But I made my choice.

  “Us growing up … what did … I mean, how did you show me?” she asks, tenderly. It makes me crumple a little, pausing.

  “I just told the truth. You were a stressed-out child, under a lot of pressure, and it showed. It wasn’t easy for you and so I just described it. I know we didn’t really get along when we were little, but it wasn’t our fault really. Don’t worry.” I’m softening it up a bit, I know.

  “I just want to make sure, even though I was bad at times, that it seems like I loved you.”

  I’m quiet for a minute and I look at her like of course. “I was so jealous of you,” she added softly.

  “Jealous of me? I was jealous of you!”

  “You got to go with Mom. Mom loved you. She’s a nutcase but at least she really loved you. Living with Dad sucked.”

  “I know.”

  We swung quietly on the swing for a bit. I thought about how much she used to hate me.

  “I’m sorry, Boo. I wish you had never gone with him.”

  “Well, whatever. I guess I’m glad it was me and not you.”

  I was surprised at this. “Why?”

  “I dunno. I was tough. I am tough. I handled it, then I got over it. And, I’m great now that he’s gone. I have everything I want and he can’t touch me.” I smile at her.

  “You are tough. I’m tough too. We’re stupid tough.”

  “He’s just a weak person. Somehow I’m glad. He showed me exactly how I wanted to not be.”

  73

  It’s the day after Thanksgiving and I forgot to write to him. I log into CorrLinks and check my inbox. No new messages from him in the past month. I try to find the last email exchange we had but it’s all empty: the messages are only archived for thirty days, then they disappear.

  I write to him as I’d write to a penpal—distanced, a little uncertain, with a plain dullness I know is shaped by the self-conscious awareness that someone screens these messages before he reads them, even though their content is never more than polite and bloodlessly broad life updates.

  “How’s the new job? Is it interesting?” I ask. I remember he told me he upgraded from a job rolling silverware in the kitchen to a “computer job” for two dollars a day—previewing patent applications and rejecting them if incomplete. “I got a new cat. She’s kind of shy but funny, with one white spot right on her chest. Her name’s Jupiter.” I feel like I’m talking to a child. “Hope you are staying warm there!”

  I eat lunch, grade papers, go for a walk, check back for a response, spurred by nagging and totally pointless guilt. No response. Over seventy now, with failing kidneys; I sometimes wonder if he’ll make it to his release date. Or even to another email.

  The day passes. I try to forget about him. Then, I do forget about him. Days slip by, weeks, and I just forget all about him, as I always do.

  Almost a month later I receive a Christmas card from his girlfriend.

  “Merry Christmas Molly—you’re a doll!” it says. Below her signature is his, pressed on by a stamp she had made. Enclosed is a check for three hundred dollars, also with his “signature” stamped on it.

  74

  Addictions separate people from each other. The ones forsaken by their loved ones’ addictions are abandoned, without access. If it is a disease, then it is treatable. If it is merely a choice, then it is a moral problem, and the behavior ought to be met with punishment, imprisonment, or worse—traditional corrective actions. I know the enlightened, scientific view of addiction as a disease has softened the stigma of addiction from moral depravity into almost a mental disability. And perhaps it is for some. This doesn’t match up right with Dad.

  The logic of addiction as a disease looks like this: faced with choices, people choose options or behaviors that are in their best interests. Since addictions are self-destructive, choosing that behavior, especially over and over, must be involuntary. If it is involuntary and destructive, it is a disease. The addict can’t learn to get better, or be punished into recovery; he is a victim.

  But people voluntarily choosing self-destructive behavior is ordinary. It is so ordinary to me, so regular, that it seems extraordinary to observe any consistently self-advancing actions in anyone for very long, let alone a lifetime. Perhaps that says something about my life. It shouldn’t be
rare to find a person taking absolutely good care of him or herself every single day. I think of myself as a good steward of my own self: my brain, my heart, and my body. But not always. Not every day. Not even every year. I choose awful things and actions. Repeatedly, even.

  And small actions touch off other particular actions and events. The little blunders, dumb moves, accidents, the delays and distractions: a turn, a click. Lives build like so.

  A poor choice is easier to make when the timescale is small and immediate. If I think of eating a small candy bar today against the range of other things I have eaten today, it doesn’t seem so bad, fine even, against the salads and good snacks. But if I think of all the candy I have eaten all week, I think again. Gambling is the same. It is easy to not zoom out and see all the money at once, all the loss together. There’s only this hand. There’s only tonight. The little loss is OK. It’s manageable. Recoverable maybe. The global loss is forgotten, and when considered, a hard perspective to maintain against the losses to be recovered and the pressing mood of the day and the ache of the now-you, which feels like the only you when you want something. A whole life of gambling would never be chosen as optimal, or even fun or good. But a night of gambling is often just that.

  Did he not learn? He mostly lost at gambling. He mostly chose wrong. Over and over. Why can’t I see him, then, as a helpless addict? I honestly ask myself. I think sometimes I just didn’t know him enough, not like my sister or my mom did. But I think that’s just fear. I did know him, as well as anyone did. My version of him is as true as every version he gave anyone. There are only versions.

  I see this meaning that he had a stable internal locus of control. Those with an external locus of control blame circumstances for their troubles, pray to God for change, await good luck, sink into victimhood at bad breaks, passively react to their lives instead of acting them out. The internal locus types believe in their own control, sometimes to the point of delusion, but generally don’t blame others for their faults or successes, tend to not believe in fate, and force the world they want into existence, for better or worse. Most probably fall somewhere between the two extremes.