The Ballad of a Small Player

by Lawrence Osborne

  He was unpretentious about it. Now there was complicity between us: the bank that always wins and the punter who has gotten lucky for a single night, both allied against the terror of Grandma.

  “What’s her name?”

  “We don’t speak her name. She’s just Grandma.”

  He leaned down then.

  “I wouldn’t play with her, sir. She’s an opportunist.”

  “Aren’t we all?”

  “Yes, sir. But she’s bad news.”

  At that moment Grandma looked up from her hand and caught sight of me at the very moment that I was scrutinizing her myself.

  “She doesn’t look so bad,” I said.

  “She’s a terror, sir.”

  She recognized me at once and there was a cruel avidity in her eyes as she cashed in her game, got up, and waddled over to our table. The punters seemed to know her and made way for her. As she came into the table’s harsher light her thickly painted and cratered face looked like an overripe peach, furred and uneven, and the eyes were worlds of private pain. She pushed her way to the far end of the table and a place was found for her. She laid a vulgar sequined bag on the table’s edge and took out a pair of reading glasses, which she placed on the end of her nose. Her lips looked as if they had been dipped in hibiscus juice. There are certain faces that appear to be caving in from the inside in slow motion, like cliffs dynamited by experts. Faces that remind you that life is not what you think it is, and that no one escapes scot-free.

  But in this instance I also recognized the face, as one will recall an image from a long-ago dream that has remained in the mind for a reason. And the recognition was mutual.

  “You,” she said to me. “I remember you. You are a bad gambler, as well as being a gwai lo. I have been hearing stories about you. I heard you won a natural downstairs.”

  The table was all ears.

  “Oh yeah,” she went on. “This guy scored two nines downstairs earlier this evening. I have it from reliable sources.”

  The bankers looked at me sternly; the crowd muttered.

  “Jinxed,” I heard a voice say.

  “It’s true,” I said. “I’m having a run.”

  Grandma huffed.

  “You call it a run.”

  My voice rose.

  “I’m on a run. I have means.”

  She smiled.

  “Do you want to ask the boss if it’s okay to go on?”

  “I don’t have to ask him.”

  “You have to ask him.”

  “I have the money. I have the chips. It’s all in three dimensions.”

  Baccarat is virtually impossible to cheat at. Grandma opened her horror bag and took out a huge roll of cash. The crowd stirred.

  “I’m not afraid of this foreigner,” she spat at me. “If I lose it I don’t care.”

  “Would madam like a glass of champagne?” I asked.

  She lightened up and we exchanged a smile. I am a famous charmer. Grandma didn’t go for niceties, even though she liked a bit of male attention.

  “Make it cold, boys. I’m going to play this genius.”

  I looked over at the clock: 12:04. I was now more conscious of the time, the exact times that games were being played. As if time itself now were more carefully partitioned and hoarded. It was even possible that I was becoming superstitious about it.

  The champagne came. Pol Roger bucketed in mounds of crudely cut ice. Not the best, not the worst.

  “That’s the way I like it,” Grandma cried.

  “Xie xie,” she said after a sip.

  Soon the cards were dealt to seven players surrounded by a large group of onlookers. They began to mutter the words that Macau baccarat players always mutter when they are given their cards, tsui tsui tsui, or blow blow blow. This is to blow away one point on a card, as when a player draws a jack and knows that if the second is a nine he will win and if it is a ten he will lose. Peeping at the second card from the side, he cannot tell a nine from a ten and so will blow on it as it turns. There is in fact a whole slang connected to peeping at the cards before they are turned and counting the number of points visible along their edge. The ten card, for example, has four points along its edge and the Chinese call it say bin, after the word for edge, bin. An eight card has three points on its edge, and is called sam bin.

  I let the others turn their hands first and waited until Grandma had pulled a seven. She looked pleased with herself, as well she might have. It was going to be the winning hand and she knew it. I turned mine: a three and a two. At first, no one said anything. I looked again at the clock. It was 12:25. For a moment the crowd stirred slightly and resettled like a patch of grass stirred by a breeze. Their faces betrayed a premonition that had no real shape, and I thought that some reassurance was called for, some verification from a higher source that all this was not going to end in tears, but what would it be? “That makes five,” Grandma said as she collected the chips. She actually laughed at it, just as the other players abruptly rose and left the table.

  “My husband would love this,” she went on. “He would bet against the Englishman on the next hand. He’d say no one can lose against an Englishman.”

  “Shall we?” I said icily.

  “I’m not afraid of you, and I’ve already said it. You may have money, but not as much as my husband.”

  “I’d like to know who he is.”

  “It’s none of your business who he is. He could buy all these casinos out if he wanted, and they know it.”

  “Why isn’t he here?”

  “Play?” the banker tried.

  “Shut up, we’re talking. It’s not every day I talk to an American.”

  “English,” I corrected.

  “Same thing. You’re not Chinese or French. Or Portuguese. Waiter, bring me a spit bowl.”

  The banker leaned forward.

  “There’s a sixty-dollar spit fine, Grandma.”

  “I need to spit, to hell with the fine.”

  She spat into a silver bowl.

  “Feels good,” she sighed. “I love spitting.”

  She offered the bowl to me.

  “Nothing like a good spit.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Shall we play again?”

  I was calculating wildly to myself.

  “Of course,” I said irritably.

  “Have you still got your balls?”

  “Sewed them back on myself,” I said.

  “Good. That makes you the exception.”

  The bankers looked at me gently. I had made a mistake and they had seen it coming from a mile off.

  “I like a man who can operate on himself,” Grandma said.

  I had eight thousand on me and a hundred thousand in the room, but I had to pay the hotel bill imminently and it was more than those two sums combined. I would have to bargain with the Lisboa management as it was, and who knew what they would say. Grandma was right. I ought to withdraw with a bit of winnings and pay off my tab with the Lisboa. I ought to cut my losses. But I couldn’t. I was a swine in that moment and I loved the swinishness, the feeding anxiety next to the trough. I stood my ground and fingered the last notes in my pocket, which I now extracted, handing them to a staff member. All eight thousand. I wished I hadn’t left the hundred thousand in my room; I would have burned through that in exactly the same moment. The man took them almost apologetically. He knew the smell of desperation and fever. A fever in the Congo, like that of a white man decomposing in his hammock hour by hour.

  When the chips came I laid them all down in four installments. Grandma laid down large bets of her own, and our game was as slow as a very fast game can be. Her crest of bird feathers quivered just below the line of floating smoke, and she occasionally turned around and abused the champagne. My two cards were turned and there were a two and seven, against her baccarat. The onlookers touched their mouths as if they were watching a botched execution and they grew much quieter than they had been. The banker bowed to us both and pushed the chips
over to me. Grandma, seemingly stunned, looked at her watch and then shrugged, as if to herself, her plump shoulders rolling for a moment, then subsiding. She must have once been a woman of considerable beauty. For a moment the gwai lo scum was a winner, and winners are always interesting. This lasted for about three minutes. The very next hand I lost and saw half my eight thousand vanish to the bank. Grandma laughed so loud the boys flinched.

  “Oh, we’re flying now!” she roared.

  She turned to the staff.

  “Get me thirty thousand in chips.”

  “Thirty thousand, Grandma?”

  “You heard what I said, you morons. Do I look like I fumbled a zero?”

  The chips came over. Like Soviet tanks facing a defenseless German village.

  “Come on, your lordship. Open your credit line.”

  I didn’t have one, of course.

  The bankers laughed it off.

  Grandma looked around the room.

  “He doesn’t have a credit line?”

  “I prefer not to,” I said.

  “What kind of gambler doesn’t have a credit line? I thought every gwai lo had a credit line.”

  “Not me.”

  “How rotten. If you lose we can only play two hands.”

  “I’ll win.”

  She smiled lasciviously and tapped my arm with her folded glasses.

  “You have a system,” she said.

  “I’m not using one. If I were—”

  “You’re suckering me in. It’s the oldest trick in the world.”

  She said she didn’t care either way. Money was cheap, common as earth. It always returned to you, like bathwater.

  We played; I won a modest hand.

  “Oh,” she cried. “You suckered me in.”

  After a while, she said, “It’s quite clear that you’re using some system, I don’t know what. I can’t even imagine what system one would use with a game like this. It doesn’t make any sense at all.”

  “Shall we go a little higher?” I said.

  It was madness but I had to take her down a notch. She was becoming insufferable.

  “A little higher, your lordship?”

  “High as you like.”

  The banker tried to dissuade me.

  “Sir, we can keep the bets moderate.”

  Grandma reacted strongly.

  “Shut up, you idiot. You’re shooting yourself in the foot.”

  His eyes were slightly panicked.

  “Sir, it’s as you wish.”

  “I can match Grandma.”

  Fuck Grandma, I wanted to say.

  “See?” Grandma snapped.

  “Put whatever you like up to four thousand,” I said.

  “And they tell me you are a lord as well. A lord. The last time I saw you, as I remember, you were at that shabby place Greek Mythology. Of course I was there, too, I admit. It’s sometimes a good place, isn’t it? We shared a merry look. It sometimes coughs up a bit of profit. But as I recall, you were with a young girl. Or she picked you up. Yes, that’s it. She picked you up right at the table. All they have to do is bat their eyelashes at you.”

  I poured her another glass, and then myself. I didn’t care about anything anymore. I even thought of lying to her about my system. First I was a lord, then I had a system; it was as if they were inventing me as they went along. The absurdity of the process was external to me, and so I let it carry me along for a while. And so I tried to seem calm and nonchalant as I placed the entirety of my chips on the table.

  The bankers tensed.

  Grandma took off her earrings and placed them in her handbag. A superstition thing. I watched the spatula move and there was a faint din in my ears, a white noise that came not from the room or from the people in it but from myself. I was dead certain that I would win right then, because I needed to win and therefore there was no question of not winning. My heart was in my mouth, beating in an unusual way, missing beats, leaping erratically, and the edges of my eyes had become glutinous and sticky. You fucker, a voice rose inside me, you stupid fucker. Hurtling down into the pit with the worms. I held back my spit and kept my eyes in their sockets and the blade turned a six for me and an eight for Grandma, and in the twinkling of a blind eye I had lost it all. The light went out in my mind and I gripped the edge of the table.

  “Grandma takes all,” the banker said.

  I turned to her and offered a grim congratulation.

  “Thank you, young man.”

  She scraped together the chips and had the boys bag them.

  “I suppose,” I said, “I should be getting home.”

  She lit a cigarette as if to refresh herself. “Home? What kind of man goes home?”

  “A defeated one.”

  “Nonsense. There’s no one else for me to play with.”

  “But I have to go home. I have to get drunk.”

  “You can get drunk here. Or else, go home and get some more money and I’ll wait for you. Right here at this table.”

  I got off my stool and the legs were rubber.

  That’s a crazy idea, I thought. A wonderful idea.

  “Will you?” she said gaily.

  Home in this case was only an elevator ride away. I passed the Throne of Tutankhamen, in which a factory boss was half asleep with a beer in his hand, eyes trained upon The Abandoned Mother. The corridors were alive with transactions, with sloe-eyed girls. But I went straight to my safe and pulled out the hundred grand. I didn’t bother with an envelope. I was astir like a guitar string. My face was bloodless in the bathroom mirror. I told myself not to go out again, to pour myself a vodka and stop right there, sit on the bed and leave the dough alone. And I did so for five minutes. I thought of going downstairs to reception and settling up at least seventy percent of my outstanding bill, which would allow me to stay on for a couple more weeks without being ejected. A couple more weeks with a roof over my head. How quickly the whole thing had come crashing down around my ears. I had miscalculated everything in a fit of prolonged pleasure. Now I had only this last hundred thousand, and that wasn’t much, it was certainly not enough, but even so I was going to spend it at the New Wing because I couldn’t not spend it, I couldn’t stop the electric flow of my own irresponsibility. I’ll win, I thought. It’s fifty-fifty. I’ll win and I’ll come home and have a bath and pay my bill in the morning. I’ll cover myself in glory and be absolved.

  It became such a certainty that I didn’t even need the mini-bottle of vodka I downed to steady my nerves. I went back to the New Wing in a cold state of mind, as if a meter were running inside me and clocking up lists of numbers that tabulated and measured my intensity of purpose.

  Grandma was waiting for me. By now she was high on her fizz, and the boys were bringing her oysters with toothpicks. She looked a tad more blowsy.

  “There you are,” she drawled. “What kept you?”

  “I’m a slow walker.”

  I held my dough as a kind of loose paper ball that I had to proffer with two hands, like garbage.

  “All of it, sir?”

  “All of it.”

  “That’s better,” Grandma said. “Settle down.”

  I did settle down. I unruffled my heart.

  “Now we’re all comfy,” Grandma went on, “we can get down to some playing. I’ve been bored stiff waiting for you. And I hate being bored.”

  “Very well.”

  I put on my yellow gloves.

  “I’m ready,” I said. “Ready as steel, as my father used to say.”

  “Play,” Grandma barked at the banker.

  The shoe went into action after I had placed half my pile on the first bet. I couldn’t say why I did it. I was just starting to feel lucky, and one knows when Luck is approaching. I lost. Grandma ordered another bottle, and we waited for it to be opened and dispensed before continuing.

  “I love losing,” she said lightly. “When I was angry with my husband once, I took him to Hong Fak and I lost five hundred fifty thousand in ten minu
tes. You should have seen the look on his face. It made my year.”

  I should have divided the remaining fifty thousand into two piles and bet them separately, but somehow this would have meant losing face in front of Grandma, and there was something about her that made this absolutely impossible. It would have been tantamount to committing moral suicide.

  So I put down the entirety of the fifty thousand. The rashness of doing it released me from months of stagnant indecision. This marked a crossing of the Rubicon. Perhaps these past four years I had been progressing toward this one clear moment, because one always has to be progressing toward some kind of final moment, some revelation, and when it comes it stops you in your tracks. It might be this: total disappearance. I sat there and stared at the pile of chips and many things went through my mind as Grandma assembled her counterbet. The past came back in a thousand simultaneous images. Perhaps your whole life is a preparation for a single moment like this, and in that moment you see everything at once, the cities, the countrysides, the extinct loves. You see the grand moments juxtaposed with the ridiculous ones and you see that they are not that different from each other. You see your petty crimes laid out in a neat line, one leading to the other. You see dusty streets and idle parks where you wasted half your given moments. What did they all matter now? They were being annihilated, and I myself was being erased.

  Fast-forwarding, I wondered then what I would do if I lost. I would be penniless. Wait, there was still time. Skim off one chip and keep it to one side just in case. It would buy me dinner at least. Hamburger deluxe with fries and a glass of Yunnan merlot. I reached down and took off one chip, then two. Grandma noticed at once, and she flashed me a cruel look. She understood. Two chips were enough to buy dinner with a bottle of wine. I pocketed them and the banker gave me an understanding nod.

  It was all over in a moment. When Grandma’s victory was revealed, she simply pursed her lips. She raised her glass and shot down the fizz. Something in her still wanted to lose, to destroy her husband, and yet tonight she was out of this perverse kind of Luck. The winds were with her. She asked me if I’d like a glass, too, and I said, “Why not, I’m foredoomed anyway; I might as well get liquored up.”