by Les Edgerton
“I’ll take a gin,” she said to me. “My name’s Saundra.”
She was cute, looked like a young Dionne Warwick with less of a Dick Tracy chin.
“Gin and what?” I said, motioning for the bartender.
“Gin and gin,” she laughed and flipped around on the stool back and forth, her short skirt flaring up so I could see her legs. They were fine, fine legs.
We had a few and talked—flirted, actually—and I was just about comfortable enough to hit on her when someone shoved me in the back, would’ve knocked me off my stool if I hadn’t grabbed the one in front of me, the one Saundra was sitting on.
It wasn’t me this guy was shoving. As quick as I snapped around I saw that. He had been pushed into me by a much bigger guy. All in the space of a second or two, the smaller guy was shoved into me, the noise died down, the big man said something like punk or something to the little guy and the little guy hit him in the chops. Only he didn’t just hit him. None of us, including the guy who’d been hit realized what had happened at first. Not until he put his hand up to his face where he’d been popped and his fingers slid inside his mouth. My eyes went from the fingers disappearing inside his face to the other guy’s hand and as soon as I saw the flash I figured out what had happened. He’d hit him with a straight edge razor.
“Let’s book, white boy. This is not the place for you.”
It was Saundra and she was pulling my sleeve. I just nodded and slipped off the stool only not before I scooped up my change from the bar. We were out in a parking lot before the noise even started up again and shooting down some dirt road before I had time to think.
“Thanks,” I said, soon as my head cleared. “Where we going?”
“Here,” she said and pulled off to the side of the road. We were outside of town somewhere, who knows how the hell far from my motel.
“Bye,” she said.
“Bye?”
“Did I stutter?”
“You kicking me out?”
She grinned.
“No. I’m letting you out.”
“I don’t get it.”
“What—you think I was going to take you home, introduce you to my daddy?”
That wasn’t what I thought she was going to do but this wasn’t either.
She dropped the grin. “I did you a favor. You’da stayed around that bar you’d be dead right about now. I just got you out. That’s it. Period.”
“I thought—”
She gave kind of a snort and looked away, out her window. “You thought I was gonna give you some lovin’. Well, I’m not. I’ve got a boyfriend wouldn’t appreciate that very much. Just get out.”
I opened the door and swung my legs out. “You could at least take me home, couldn’t you? Where the hell are we anyway?”
The corners of her mouth turned up in a smirk. “No, I couldn’t, Yankee boy. I get seen lettin’ you off and somebody I know sees me I might as well move to New York. We’re about a mile from town. Just follow your nose.”
“Your friends are prejudiced?”
She laughed then and let her foot off the clutch and the car started to move forward slowly. I jumped out, half falling.
“Say ‘thank-you’,” she said, pulling away.
I said something else but I don’t think she heard me.
CHAPTER 11
A little more than halfway to Indiana the Ford broke down, threw two rods which was my fault as I knew it liked oil and I hadn’t been feeding it enough. I got thirty bucks for it from a junkyard and caught a bus out of Paducah, hit the Fort about three-thirty in the morning which is a good time to arrive at a bus station, no hookers or winos bothering you. I copped a few zees on a bench and bright and early the next day called Mr. Brooks my P.O. and sure enough, it was like Bud said. Mr. Brooks came down and chewed my ass out which I had to sit there in his car and take; that was fine, it was what I deserved, but he was a stand-up guy, held up his part of the bargain and drove me over to the halfway house himself. Going in I seen three, four guys I knew from Pendleton and some times at the city lockup and I knew things were going to be all right.
I wasn’t in the halfway house a month and Mr. Brooks let me leave. There’s lots of stories, mostly bad, about P.O.’s but I drew a decent one. Your P.O.’s God, believe me and you get a good one like I did, well!
Brooks got me a job over at Danny’s Tonsorial Emporium, which wasn’t nothing but a fancy name for a barber shop that did some styling. Same kind of work as everywhere else but we shampooed the hair before we cut it and then we blow-dried it. Triple the price. “You make your money on the shampoo,” Danny said. “Give ‘em a good one.” Danny also had the biggest gambling operation in town. I don’t know if Mr. Brooks knew that or not but I don’t know as how he could have missed it. We had six phones in the back room was used for nothing but taking and laying off bets.
I always liked to gamble but at Danny’s I sort of went wild. It got to the point where I was betting upwards of ten grand a week. Some weeks double that. That was kind of risky being as I was knocking down maybe four hundred in salary on the busy weeks. Except I wasn’t losing or winning that much; that was just what changed hands. Like on Sunday I’d start out with five hundred on five, six football games and maybe I’d come out a few hundred ahead or so and then I’d do the same on Monday, on basketball, plus a couple on the Monday Night Game in football. Tuesday the same thing. Wednesday and so on. End of the week, I might be up three, four hundred or down the same even though the total I’d’ve bet was five figures. More than once, I ended up with a good score, maybe two, three thousand on the week. One week, I hit for almost six thousand. One thing. I never once lost on football overall but basketball was a killer. Too many games, too many teams to follow smart.
Football was different. Especially college football. Danny taught me how to bet smart.
The way he did it, the way he taught me, was to pick out four or five really obscure teams. Slippery Rock University, places like that. Follow those teams, know everything there is to know about them. Danny’d get the town newspaper, the college paper, everything he could get that might have an article or something on the local team. He knew when their left guard was gonna take a shit.
“The way it is,” he explained. “There’s a guy in Vegas what sets the spread for the whole country. Same guy’s been doing it for years and years.”
We had a lot of opportunities to “middle” bets. That’s where the smart money was. Middling was hard to do if you were an average schmuck, but being as we had access to bookies all over the country it was a piece of cake. Danny was in with the local goombas and they let him lay off money just like he was connected.
Most people don’t understand professional gambling. They think bookies want everybody to lose. Bookies thought like that they’d be out of business in a week. What they want is the money on a particular game to come out fifty-fifty. You got Notre Dame vs Southern Cal, for instance, you want a hundred grand on N.D. and a hundred going on U.S.C. The bookie don’t care who wins or loses—he makes all his money on the juice, the ten percent vig the loser pays. It’s a business, pure and simple. A true gambler never gambles—that’s a sucker’s game. That’s for the chumps out in the tool room at Bendix Automotive, guys that drive bread trucks, amateurs like that.
That’s why the point spread goes up and down all the time until time for the kickoff. The rule of thumb is, for every twenty-five hundred bucks bet on one team over the other the bookie jacks up the spread a half point to entice money to go the other way and even it up. If the bookie can’t get it even before game time he calls Vegas and lays off the extra.
It’s like this. Say Notre Dame plays Alabama in the Sugar Bowl. Naturally, most of the money bet in South Bend and Fort Wayne and Gary is going to be on the Irish and the same thing is happening down in Birmingham and Selma, only the money is going to be on the Tide down there. Bookies in both places get overloaded so they call Vegas and swap money until it comes out even. This
is going on all over the country. Ma Bell makes a killing. Ma Bell loves gamblers to death.
What this does is make an opportunity to play the middle. You can’t lose on a middle. A middle is when you take advantage of a shift in the point spread.
Say it’s the Monday before that ND-Alabama game. The Fighting Irish are favored by seven. You bet five hundred on Alabama, get the points. By Friday the spread has shifted to where ND is only favored by three. That means you’ve got a four-point spread to middle. Now you get five hundred down on Notre Dame. The most you can lose is the juice on the loser, fifty bucks. But...if Notre Dame wins by say, four points, you win both ways. You win the five you bet on Alabama when you had seven points and you win the five on ND where you were only giving up three. You win a thousand and all that was at risk was fifty bucks.
There was a time when that’s all the smart money did, bet middles. But they fucked up. They let too many of their friends in on a good thing and the bookies shut it down, quit giving the spread out early. Most of them wouldn’t release the point spread until just before game time so there wasn’t enough time to develop a good middle.
Us guys at Danny’s could still do it though, as Danny had bookies all over the country he was connected with, had different spreads than the ones we had locally. Everybody knew what was going on. The bookies knew and Vegas knew but as long as only a few people were making middle bets they looked the other way. It was kind of a bonus check for bookies and a few of their friends. If they started to abuse it Vegas would figure out a way to stop it, so everybody tried to be cool.
It was about this time that I got a chance to go to the Super Bowl. A local bar owner had formed a sports club that had its own plane and everything. They went to all kinds of things. The Kentucky Derby, the World Series, you name it. Danny and a bunch of guys from the shop had joined up and were going to the Super Bowl which was being played in Houston that year. Miami Dolphins versus the Vikings. I decided to go, too.
It was a sweet deal. The club flew us down to Houston in their private plane, all you could eat and drink (beer) on the way down. Once we were there, they bussed us all over to Rice Stadium, which is where they moved the game to at the last minute. This was before the game got to be so big. The club had seats on the 40-yard line. After the game, they took us to a big seafood place named the San Jacinto Inn, where you ate as much as you wanted. They had big oil barrels full of ice and beer and you just helped yourself. There were platters everywhere, full of shrimp and oysters and all kinds of seafood. We stuffed ourselves so we could hardly walk.
Then, they bussed us back to the airport and our plane and on the way home they furnished us all we could eat and drink then, too.
The whole deal cost a hundred bucks. That’s all. Like I said, this was before the Super Bowl got to be such a big deal.
At the game I sat right behind Jimmy Wynn, the slugger for the Houston Astros they nicknamed “The Toy Cannon,” on account of he was kind of a little guy. He’d hit 45 dingers that year for the Astros. Really a nice guy. I talked to him most of the game and he was just a regular guy.
Sounds like a good deal, doesn’t it? Only it wasn’t. Most of the guys in the club were gamblers and bookies and that was my downfall. That was the year Fran Tarkenton had led the Vikings to one of their best years ever, and he was scrambling and throwing the ball better than anybody in the league. He’d made me a fan. So...before the game, I got down $1,500 on the Vikes. When I got on the plane, I found myself sitting next to Buddy Lake, who was one of the bookies we used at Danny’s. He got to mouthing off so much about how the Dolphins were going to cream the Vikings that I just had to get another bet in with him. Fifteen hundred more on Tarkenton and his pals. Then, at the game, I found myself sitting next to Stan DeAngelo, another bookie and the same thing happened. Mark up another $1,500 on the Vikings.
I felt pretty good just before the kickoff. Minnesota was going to kick those sissies from Miami’s butts, big-time. I knew it in my bones. Nobody was going to stop Tarkenton.
Only they did. It was pitiful. The whole game the Vikings are behind and the whole game Tarkenton had receivers wide open. There were receivers didn’t have anybody within twenty yards of them. Did Fran throw to any of them? You guessed it. He kept throwing little dinky five-yarders even when there was another guy twenty-five yards out who must have had the worst bad breath in history, the way the other team was avoiding him. I’ve never seen receivers so wide open. Tarkenton must’ve had a speck of dirt in his eye, since he didn’t seem to notice any of them. Only guys he ever threw to were guys he could reach out and touch and who were double- and triple-teamed. The whole game went like that, even in the last minutes when they were only a touchdown away from tying. I know he’s considered a straight-arrow and all that, but if ever a game was fixed, I swear that one was. The whole place was screaming and pointing to all the wide-open ends that were begging for the ball, but ol’ Tark just kept tossing it to guys surrounded by Dolphins and when he wasn’t doing that, he was running around, playing tag in the backfield until somebody caught him. Some scrambler. Gained 5,000 yards. Sideways. Never saw anything like it. I picked up the paper the next day, fully expecting to see front-page headlines on how Pete Rozelle had busted the “Georgia Peach” for laying down in the game, but there was never word one about anything like that. I shoulda known something was up, the way all the bookies were snickering and had their tongues out when they took my bets.
It was the longest plane ride home I’d ever been on. Took forever. All I could think about was the forty-five hundred big ones I was going to have to pony up.
I was just lucky I’d had a good week the week before, so it didn’t wipe me out. And right after, I went through a four-week period where all I did was win. I even won on one of those sucker cards, where you have to pick all winners. Went ten for ten on one and won a measly $150.
I was doing pretty good after the Super Bowl fiasco, winning most weeks and then I took a hit. A big hit. Over six grand. There was no way I could make it up, even middling. Not in time. It wasn’t like they were going to break my legs or anything. That’s mostly in the movies and not for a measly six thousand dollars. For six thousand dollars they might threaten you if they thought you were the kind ran scared, but guys like me they did something worse to. They just wouldn’t take any more bets. They’d write the loss off but I couldn’t bet anymore.
I’d rather they break my leg and call it even, let me get back in the action.
Only way I could get back in the game was pay them off and the only way I knew to come up with that kind of money was to steal it. No problem—I figured after a good Saturday night, Smiley’s had at least that much for the deposit. Chances were fifty-fifty Smiley would just hide it in the bar until Monday, especially since I knew he had a broad on the side, kept her in an apartment over by Riley High School and liked to take her up to Chicago once in a while on Sundays to watch the Bears game. The times he planned on going to the Windy, I guess he wanted some serious money to impress her with, take her down on Rush Street, wine and dine her to the max after the game. All I had to do was sit around the bar, see if his little girlfriend was there and if they were lovin’ it up, figure he would just leave the money there overnight, pick it up on their way to Chicago next day. No way he’d deposit it if he needed it and no way he’d take it home so his wife might find it, figure out what he was doing with his bimbo.
That was my plan.
***
I finally run into Donna, day before I robbed Smiley’s. I was down at Alexander’s over on State, came in for the take-out ribs and I turned around and there she was, big as shit, tits hanging half out her blouse and looking like sex with All Caps. It was about three months after I got back. I didn’t know what to expect, it being sudden like that and a surprise, this not being a place where we’d ever gone together so I wasn’t on my guard but you know what? I didn’t feel anything. Not a goddamned thing.
That was something, that.
I can’t say this hadn’t crossed my mind, about running into her. Shit, it was the reason I’d really come back but I’d just kept putting off looking her up. Once or twice I even dialed her number but I always hung up before she answered. Maybe I thought a guy might answer and I didn’t know how I’d handle that.
“Hi, Jake,” she said and I could tell she was trying to figure out how I’d react to this, knowing we’d had our violent times and that felt pretty good, knowing she was up on her toes so to speak, but all I said, and this I couldn’t fucking believe, all the speeches I’d rehearsed, even the way my eyes would be, frosty, was—”You owe me a new razor cord, sugar.”
We stood there a few minutes, toe to toe, just looking at each other, her folding and unfolding her hands down in front of her, her eyes big and wide and...and bright...glittery-bright, and I tried to think of something else to say, come out on top, she must think I’m crazy what I just said, not knowing the circumstances but it wasn’t worth the effort; it just didn’t matter.
“I got your postcards. And your letter.”
I just stared, trying to get my mind untracked.
“Oh. Yeah. Well, I thought of you a couple of times. I’da written more, but...” But what? “But, I was hooked up with this girl,” I said, not knowing I was going to lie like that. I wish I’d had more time to think of something else, something better. “A black girl. Her name was Saundra. You’da liked her, Donna. You probably wouldn’t even try and stab her like you did Patsy.”
Oh, man. This was the lamest thing I could have done but how do you haul something like that back into your stupid mouth? You just have to go on with the program once you start some shit like that.
