Swimming with Bridgeport Girls

by Anthony Tambakis

  An interesting thing happened after a while: Playing the chocolate $5,000 chips provided no substantial sense of excitement whatsoever. In gambling, as in all things, the longer you do something, the more you get accustomed to it, and the quicker it becomes a grind. Your first $5 bet is as nerve-racking as any you’ll ever make, and over time you have to keep raising the stakes to try and replicate the feeling you once got with a single red chip sitting in front of you. And this is ironic, because the reason a lot of people wind up in casinos is because their lives are short on the spark, the jolt of adrenaline that gambling gives you, yet in the end the betting life loses its juice in the same way that all the other things that led you to the casino lost their juice. I could see this phenomenon occur with just about everyone I ever played blackjack with. There’s no getting around it.

  I know what the logical question is: Why do it in the first place? And if you start doing it, why not stop once you’ve figured out that it fades like everything else? Well, the first part I’ve talked about. You start because there’s something lacking in your life, and it’s pretty easy to get into it after that, because gambling is the type of thing that makes you forget all about whatever it was that got you into it in the first place. Any boredom, any loneliness, is forgotten pretty quickly once you start playing, because the world of gambling is designed to allow you to think about exactly nothing outside of it. There are always new books to read. New slang to learn. New strategies to try out. There is nothing that happens in the outer world that you don’t begin to think about in gambling terms. Even the weather becomes not a series of meteorological patterns but specific events you can bend into opportunities if you can solve the riddle not of the causes behind them but of the results they will yield. When you watch the rain falling outside your motel window on a Saturday night, you don’t think about the things normal people think about (how this will affect my garden, will Uncle Doyle’s party have to be moved inside?), but rather what impact it will have on the total number of points scored in the Giants game up the road at the Meadowlands the next day. You lie in bed and listen to the rain fall and think it will make for a low-scoring game, since it will be too slippery to pass the ball and both teams will rely on the running game. Running plays keep the clock moving, you think, and that will shorten the game and keep the score down. You make a mental note to call Bing Buli in the morning and drop a bomb on the Under. A minute later, you roll over and consider the fact that the receivers know where they’re going and the defensive backs don’t, so the slippery turf will lead to a lot of broken coverages and big plays, thus actually making it easier to score, not harder. You pat yourself on the back for your cleverness and make a note to call Bing Buli in the morning and drop a bomb on the Over instead.

  “Fine,” you may say. “I can see how you could possibly get sucked into it. But why not get out when you can see the trouble it’s causing? Or at least stop when it gets as dull as everything else?”

  This is an understandable position. After all, a logical person with a modicum of perspective would begin to tabulate the financial losses, or at least the personal ones, and make some changes. But gamblers are not logical people. They have as much use for practicality and logic as a baboon does for silverware. And most of them don’t think they have a problem, or at least not a problem that one good run couldn’t fix. While it would be easy to write this off as typical addict denial at work, I have to point something out: Gambling is unlike any other thing you can get hooked on. Why is it unique? It’s unique because gambling has a possible payoff built into the rush. With other addictions, the equation is simpler. Take cocaine, for example. With a habit like coke, the deal is pretty basic: You put your money down, you get the rush you paid for. You do it again, same thing. Buy, get high. Buy, get high. You can like how it feels, you can look forward to the sensation, but there is no larger history of anything positive coming out of the experience. The shortest book ever written is probably titled Cocaine Success Stories. Once you start down the road, the map is pretty clear. There is no upside outside of the moment itself.

  And this is where gambling differs, because it’s the only addiction that offers these twin attractions: heroes and takebacks. Amarillo Slim. Nick the Greek. Johnny Chan and everyone who’s ever won the World Series of Poker. Arnold Rothstein fixing the 1919 World Series. Hell, even Newman and Redford, all smiles at the end of The Sting. All those guys were action junkies, sure, but they won. And that’s why betting offers a complexity that drugs or booze or sex or food or whatever else it is a person gets hooked on doesn’t. Gambling gives you the takeback. The opportunity to experience the rush and win money after you do. And for extra encouragement, it gives you a glamorous group of people who succeeded before you.

  See, with gambling, you place a bet, and inherent in that act is buying yourself some juice. Some action. So you get your adrenaline rush, and then after you get the boost, there stands close to a 50/50 chance that you’ll come out ahead of the game. Even when the dream of winning is gone, it’s easily replaced by the dream of getting even, which can be almost stronger than the dream of winning. After all, winning involves imagining what you don’t have, while getting even merely requires you to remember what you did.

  In the end, of course, getting even is just as much of a mirage as winning was, because it’s not only money the gambler loses but time itself. This is a beneath-the-surface fact, though, and can be easily ignored when you’re deep in the betting life. It’s relatively simple to lie in bed at night and plan your grand comeback in a way that other addicts can’t. For this reason, there’s not a drug user in the world who hops out of bed at seven A.M. and thinks about what an amazing day it’s going to be, but I can promise you that seven A.M. will find scores of gamblers eagerly and optimistically scouring the morning lines, or cranking up the cars they’ve let the maintenance slip on and tooling up the highway to the casino. And all of these people, no matter how far in the shits they may be, are thinking the very same thing: Today is the day. Today I turn it all around. If you were to advertise for it, “Gambling: The Hopeful Addiction” would probably be as good a slogan as any.

  I treaded water for about ninety minutes before Renée came marching through the casino, followed by one of the bellhops, a thin, acne-riddled kid who was about six-six and straining badly under the weight of about fourteen shopping bags he was carting for her.

  She came up to the table and laid in to me. “I appreciate you letting me get all this stuff, but what gives, leaving me in the middle of the GD mall?”

  She had her hands on her hips, and the way she was standing reminded me of the way Dawn looked whenever I’d go MIA for a few days and pop up next to whatever slot she was working at Mohegan Sun. It was a look of bitterness and exasperation, and behind it were confusion and hurt feelings more than true anger (if you pissed people off as often as I did, you learned the subtle differences pretty quickly).

  “I mean, cheese and rice, Raoul, even Leslie never left me alone like that. Well, he did, but that’s how he is. I don’t know how you are, but you’re not supposed to be like that. You’re supposed to be a whatchamacallit. A gentleman.”

  “I’m really sorry,” I said. “I was feeling sick as hell and couldn’t find you in the crowd after that whole Atlantis thing. I needed to get back here and rest.”

  “You don’t look like you’re resting to me.”

  “I was just, you know, playing a quick hand.”

  “Well, you didn’t have to take the thingy,” she said. “The limo. It was, like, a real pain to get all these bags in a cab. And then I had to tip him extra for his help. He was a perv, too.”

  The bellhop looked at me and shook his head as if to make sure I knew she was talking about the cabdriver and not him.

  “I mean, you could have taken a cab if it was so GD important to run off on me. Unless you were, like, ditching me. Do you want me to go away?”

  “Who said anything about that?”

  “I’l
l go away if you want me to.”

  “Nobody said anything about anybody going anywhere,” I said.

  “I was afraid I was getting on your nerves.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Leslie used to say I talk too much. Do I talk too much?”

  “I don’t think you talk too much,” I said. “Plus, Leslie shoots deer. You can’t listen to what anybody who shoots deer says. They’re the last people to listen to.”

  “OK. But if I start talking too much, just tell me and I’ll zip it.”

  I started to get up from the table and then was overcome with the urge to let it all ride. There was about $250,000 in front of me, and if I lost, I’d still have a million (including my cash), and if I won, I’d be at 1.5 and only $500,000 from the Kinder House. I could scoop that up in a night.

  I looked at Renée and asked if she’d ever seen anyone bet a quarter of a million dollars on a hand of cards.

  “As if,” she said, while I waved my hand toward Mota and the pit bosses to indicate that I wanted to play it all.

  Mota said, “Whatever you like, Raoul.”

  “Let’s do it,” I said to Mota. “Let’s play the two-fifty.”

  Renée covered her face with her hands. “I’m, like, not even looking. Tell me when it’s over.”

  In the movies, a hand like that takes forever. It’s agonizing. Every turn of the card takes thirty seconds. The dealer breathes deeply before each turn. Time stands still. But in real life, time doesn’t stand still at all. This is how fast a hand of blackjack happens in real life: about seven seconds.

  .01: 7 my way.

  .02: Dealer card down.

  .03: Jack my way: 17.

  .04: Dealer card 6.

  .05: “Stay” hand wave.

  .06: Dealer hole card king.

  .07: Dealer draws an 8. Busts.

  Done.

  “You can open your eyes now,” I said to Renée.

  Mota plastered a pained smile on his face and croaked out a “Nice one, Raoul” as Renée jumped into my arms.

  The bellhop who was saddled with the bags took a long look at me, then at the half million in chips being stacked up on the table, then at Renée. He sighed and lowered his head for a moment. There was no doubt that he was either: 1) contemplating the gross, immeasurable injustice of life; or 2) very seriously considering choking the life out of me with Renée’s belly chain. Suffice to say he thought I had it all.

  I added the chips to my account, and Renée and I went back up to the suite. She threw her bags down and glanced at the new watch she was sporting. “Augh. I’m outy. I gotta cover for Cecily tonight.”

  “At the club?”

  “Duh.”

  “Call in sick.”

  “She’s sick. That’s why I’m covering.”

  “Quit, then.”

  “Are you Froot Loops?” she said, fixing her hair in front of the mirror. “I need that job. I mean, it’s not like I have some sugar daddy taking care of me. This girl’s on her own.”

  She took a quick glance at me in the mirror to gauge my reaction. I looked away. I could feel her face fall. But then she bounced right back. She was a rubber ball at heart.

  “Oh, ’member the girl I was telling you about last night? The one I moved here with who thought she was hot shit ’cause she used to be in a Nielsen family a million years ago?”

  “Yeah,” I lied.

  “She couldn’t wait to get out of Blowhio ’cause it sucked so bad, but then she forgot how shitty it was and started saying things like ‘Don’t you miss back home?’ And I’d be like, ‘Are you crazy, Denise? What’s to miss about a bunch of losers and some shitty factory? I mean, even the snow’s dirty.’ But she forgot what it was really like and ended up going back, and now she’s knocked up. All she does is text all day and complain how much she hates being preggers and how Donnie the loser won’t even admit the kid’s his. She’s one miserable bitch right now. Her and her swollen feet. I just got a text from her. That’s why I’m whattyacalling. Talking about her.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “It is for her,” she said, popping a piece of gum in her mouth, kissing me, and heading for the door.

  “When are you coming back?” I said.

  “I gotta work, and then I gotta do a girl thing, and then I gotta play bingo with Lou Ann, and then—wait, do you want me to?”

  “What?”

  “Come back?”

  “Of course.”

  She looked at me skeptically. The ball had bounced back the other way. “I thought that maybe you were gonna Laika me.”

  “I do like you.”

  “Not like. Laika. Laika the Space Dog. I thought maybe you were gonna do me like the Russians did her.”

  “I’m gonna go ahead and say I have no idea what that means.”

  “I did this report at school once. It was about Laika the Space Dog. See, the Russians, they wanted to get to space faster than us. I don’t know why. There’s nothing out there. Anyway, they figured they’d put an animal in orbit. See how that went. So they got this stray dog named Laika. It was the cutest thing ever. They brought her to the astronaut place and trained her, and then the night before they were gonna do the launch, one of the scientists took her home. She got to go to a real house for the first time ever, and there were kids there. She was super happy and finally had a family, only it was BS, ’cause he took her back the next day and put her in a rocket and blasted her into outer space. The Russkies tried to tell everyone she was fine. They made a big hero out of her, and lots of people thought she was still out there alive, a dog in space, but that wasn’t true. She didn’t last but a few hours before burning up. It was all a lie. Every part of it was a lie, even though they put her on a stamp, I think. Anyway, I didn’t want to get Laika’ed, you know?”

  “I’d never Laika you,” I said.

  Renée smiled broadly. Ran over and kissed me again. She was such a sweet kid. “Well, I’ll see you tomorrow, then! Like, maybe around dinnertime or something like that? I literally know this place that sets your dessert on fire, if you want to go there.”

  “That sounds awesome.”

  “Right?”

  And out the door she went. Why I had invited her back when I had no intention of even being there the next night, I have no idea. Her instincts were right. I was treating her exactly like Laika the Space Dog. I mean, the way things were heading, Marty would have the Kinder House paperwork in motion before Renée finished her shift. I made a mental note to text her before I left so she wouldn’t arrive back at the MGM and find me gone. A girl like that would be devastated to learn I had vamoosed after I had just promised not to. Once she had a few years in Vegas behind her, she’d come to expect it. Her trust would be shot. I thought about how it would be for her after a few years in that neon Dumpster. Eventually someone would talk her into doing something for money because they knew how desperate she was to avoid going back home in defeat. It wouldn’t be anything too bad. A local automotive calendar, maybe. One of those garage, bikini, wrench shoots. Then they’d suggest a thing similar to it, just a little worse, and then something a pinch more compromising after that, and well, that’s probably how it’d go until she wasn’t a rubber ball anymore. I had met a lot of girls like Renée during the summer L and I lived in Los Angeles. Girls who worked on porn shoots in the Valley. Cyrus, the screenwriter’s brother, knew a lot of them, and all of their stories seemed to start with a garage, a bikini, and a wrench. It was too grim to think about. I decided to text her right away and tell her there was an emergency with my plastics company and I had to split on the first flight out I could get.

  I took out my phone. Again, there were just numbers everywhere. Six billion missed calls, twelve billion texts, a couple billion voice mails. Before I could start writing to Renée, I saw L’s new number near the top of the scroll. This time, her text read, “We REALLY need to talk.”

  If the four words we need to talk are about as bad as it gets, add
ing an all-caps REALLY takes it to a level you just don’t want to go to. On one hand, I was dying to hear her voice, and any contact was better than no contact, but on the other, there didn’t seem to be much of a chance that she had anything positive to say to me. If she knew how well I was really doing, that’d be one thing, but she didn’t. All she knew was that the police were after me and I was all over the television. I decided to hold off on calling her and turned on the tube to see exactly what information was out there now. I figured I’d find out what she knew, and then at least I’d be prepared to explain myself and assure her that it would be sorted out soon. I popped a couple of painkillers, poured myself a vodka pineapple in a silver tumbler, and turned to ESPN. It was my old show, and a roundtable of reporters was discussing my situation. They were all guys I used to be friends with. People whose destination weddings I attended. Men I’d shared a lot of laughs with. And they were killing me.

  “I don’t know what the man is thinking. Ray, my brother, you lost the plot, kid. You gotta stop runnin’ and own this.”

  “From what we’re hearing, he’s obviously got a gambling problem.”

  “ ’Course he’s got a gambling problem. Why do you think he’s not here anymore? Let’s get real.”

  “Neighbors are saying he kidnapped a dog.”

  “That’s crazy right there.”

  “You got time to take your Twitter down, you got time to turn yourself in.”

  “From that new video going around, Ray’s in Vegas. That’s not a good place for him to be. Man’s gotta get some help.”

  They cut to footage someone had taken on a cell at the Forum Shops: Miles and his pals chasing me through the mall. It was like watching someone else entirely. I turned it off. It wasn’t what I needed to see before calling L back. I killed the tumbler of vodka in a big gulp. That got me going. Then I did a little shadowboxing in front of the window to pump myself up. Maybe I was looking at this the wrong way. She had reached out to me. Twice. I had no proof that it was going to be negative. Those four words (and then the all-caps fifth) were usually harbingers of doom, but not always. Life was unpredictable, after all. You never knew what was coming. A life of following sports had certainly shown me that underdogs like the ’04 Sox pulled off upsets all the time. And who was a bigger underdog than me?