Lite-A-Line

I eat mostly mushy stuff at the Colonial, since my cuts are stiff and brittle and if I chew too much, they split open fresh. I load up on mashed potatoes and macaroni and cheese and watch Sergei mechanically shovel food into his mouth while the rest of his face remains astoundingly still.

The Colonial is where this local religious cult named The Way always eats. There’s hundreds of them, they’ve got a real Stepford vibe. With his face all stilled, Sergei kind of looks like one of them. The women wear long shapeless dresses with floral prints and the men all look like chubby FBI agents. And they all wear a tag pinned above their hearts that reads DO YOU KNOW THE WAY? You have to be careful. They harass you when you’re up getting your soup and gravy. One of them stops by our table and asks if we know The Way.

“My foot knows the way to your ass,” Maggot Arm Joe says. “How’s that?”

“The Lord Jesus could help you with all that hate—all that anger,” The Way guy says.

“You find Him, you send Him over—otherwise leave me alone, okay?”

The guy looks stunned. He will head back to the flock without having saved the three strange men at the table. But for now, he’s still standing there dumbfounded with his tray full of food.

“Will you please find the way back to your creepy little tribe?” Maggot Arm Joe says.

The religious guy waddles away and sits at a table with a bunch of other Way people who treat him like he’s a pinch hitter who struck out. It’s back pats and reassurances. Next time, you’ll get them next time.

After dinner, we walk out in the cool night air, our breath showing a little. Maggot Arm Joe lights a cigarette. He sees me looking at him and he tells me he’ll give me one for a Per-codan.

I tell him I’m worried about him doing the Peres, that they might not be the best thing for a recovering junkie.

“I don’t stop you from drinking, Nick,” he says.

“Fair enough,” I say. “But no way is this an even deal.”

“Give me the Percodan, and you can have unlimited cigarettes.”

“Unlimited?”

Maggot Arm Joe pauses and thinks. “For the rest of the year.

This still gives me free smokes for the next two days. I shake a pill out into my hand and tell him he’s got a deal. He gives me a cigarette and lights it as I lean toward him.

“What now?” I say. I look at my watch. We’ve got three hours to kill before we meet with Harry Fudge, which means we’ve got two hours to kill before we get on the road.

“Lite-A-Line?” Sergei says.

Lite-A-Line is this gambling game down at what used to be Long Beach Pike. It’s like a combination of bingo and pinball without flippers. You send your ball up and you hope that it bounces into the right slots to light a line—all the same number, or all the same color. You drop 75 cents a game in hopes of getting back 12 dollars for a winner. At the top and bottom of the hour, they have bigger-stakes games where you put down $1.50 to win $25 or 3 bucks to take $50. Sergei loves the fat games, he’d play two tables if they let him.

Lite-A-Line’s in a building that was originally a carousel back in 1911, then in 1941 it became the gambling building. We walk down Elm to Ocean Boulevard and go down the steep hill to the building.

Out front I see Tony Vic with Willie What’s His Name and Tony Vic’s talking to Billy Mangos, who’s known as Billy Mangos because he’s addicted to the mango-on-a-stick that the Mexican-American bicycle vendors sell. Billy Mangos is a thief who steals merchandise from the Sea and Land trucks down by the water yard. Actually, he hires high school kids to do his picking, and he stays relatively clean as a low-level crime guy.

We’re coming up close to the three of them and I see Willie What’s His Name’s hand is wrapped up in a gauze and an Ace bandage so that only the last knuckles of his index and middle fingers are poking out of the wrap. The rest of his hand looks like a beige club. I wonder if he’s pissed that Tony Vic walked on him when Willie blew up his hand, but I suppose there’s an understanding between them that if the authorities arrive, it’s time to scatter. It’s the only time I’ve seen them split up, otherwise, they’re always together. One moves, then the other—they’re hooked, fused, and hot-wired, as wrapped into each other as the feet and head of a pigeon.

Willie What’s His Name looks at me, and it’s clear that he doesn’t remember splitting my face up. I thought maybe I’d say something, but what good would it do?

“I need some toasters,” Tony Vic says to Billy Mangos.

“No can do.”

“You can’t get me toasters? What kind of a thief can’t get toasters? I’m not asking for a particularly exotic item.”

“Tell you what,” Billy Mangos says. “I’ll give you some toast and you can backwards-engineer it.”

“What the fuck are you talking?” Tony Vic says.

The three of us start to pass the three of them and we do our cool-guy nods and start to walk into Lite-A-Line. Tony Vic grabs me, he holds his index finger up to Billy Mangos, who’s staring at my mashed-up face. Tony Vic says, “Nick, my man. How are you?”

“Fine,” I say.

Tony Vic looks over to Willie What’s His Name, who lowers his eyes like a good kid learning a valuable lesson. He’s bringing that hammer he stole back to Mr. Landry’s hardware store while his daddy Tony Vic tells him to say he’s sorry.

Tony Vic says, “Nick, my man, I’d like to—well, we’d like to compensate you for your unfortunate injuries from the other evening.”

I hold out my hand. “Give me fifty bucks.”

Tony Vic shakes his head. “I was thinking we could barter.”

Sergei and Maggot Arm Joe go inside and tell me they’ll save me a table.

“I was thinking fifty bucks,” I say to Tony Vic.

“Nick, my man. We can barter—like country gentlemen.”

“Is that what we are?”

“It’s an ideal, Nick. What men like us aspire to.”

I could argue that being a country gentleman isn’t my ideal, is one of the few things that seems more of a dead end than my actual life, but I’m getting tired of Tony Vic and I want to get inside. “Give me fifty bucks’ worth of fetal pigs.”

He makes a face. “I was hoping to turn some money on those pigs,” he says.

“Bullshit,” I say. “How many pigs do I get for fifty bucks?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “I could give you two.”

“Ten.”

“That’s stealing them, Nick. Ten is a crime,” Tony Vic says. “How about five?”

“Done,” I say. “Leave them at the Lincoln.”

Tony Vic gestures back to Willie What’s His Name. “So, we’re cool. Everyone here—no one’s mad.”

“No one’s mad,” I say. We all shake hands, even me and Billy Mangos, who has slick, hard hands like a farmer, and then I head inside to get my game card and join Maggot Arm Joe and Sergei at the tables.

Lite-A-Line is an experience. It’s where the poor of Long Beach gamble at the tables the poor of Long Beach have gambled at for the last sixty years. There’s something both ennobling and terribly sad about the optimism of the poor when we gamble. You can’t smoke at Lite-A-Line anymore, but you can tell that you could once. Over half the people here have unlit cigarettes, pens, or lollipops dangling from their lips. A buzzer stxarts the game, then you hear the roll of sixty-four of the little balls as they bounce their way through the tables and light the lights.

The way it usually works is you get pretty close, and then someone else wins. Every hour or so, someone who’s been losing badly gets angry and starts pounding on the table glass. Tonight, it’s one of the Vietnamese gang kids at table forty, which is my favorite table, the one I’ve won four or five times on, he’s pounding the glass and a big guy in a red “Loof’s Lite-A-Line” shirt comes over and asks him to leave. I don’t know this guy’s name, but he’s sort of the pit boss here and he keeps the order and he says something to the kid and the kid nods and calms down and stays at the table.

For a half an hour, we lose pretty badly—I’m down twenty dollars. The guy who takes the money doesn’t seem to notice my face. For better or worse, I fit in here. The woman in the big booth announces that this is a Top of the Hour Game. She says this is the first game on the eighth sheet, which is gibberish that’s meant for the people who take the money off the tables, not for the people who put the money on the tables. The Top of the Hour Game is three dollars down for a fat fifty-dollar payout. I sit it out, so does Maggot Arm Joe. Sergei takes a dollar off my table and one off Maggot Arm Joe’s and plops the three singles on his table.

“You know, this kind of defeats the purpose of me sitting this one out,” I say.

Sergei says, “Have figured table out. It wants to have balls in white.”

The buzzer rings and the balls drop and Sergei’s playing the whites, he’s got the touch down and gets everything but the white 3. He gets the same one, the white 4, three times in a row and the repeats are useless. But several tries in, he gets the white 3 and takes the big-money game. They drop five stacks of ten silver tokens in front of him and he turns to us, his palms up, gesturing to the tokens.

“This,” he says, “must bode well for evening.”

A few losing games later, we gather what’s left of the tokens, cash them in, and go out to my car for our nervous trip down to Orange County.