Benny and I stayed at the bar for a while longer, then he left and I went to play some more blackjack. After a couple more drinks, and a winning streak that got me back to even, I headed upstairs to bed. I felt a little drunk, a little tired and emotionally spent, so I was disappointed to wake up at four in the morning. Although my body was in Las Vegas, I guess my brain thought it was still in New York and decided it was time for me to get up.
Alone in a hotel room in the pitch dark, I was wide awake, with nothing to do but think.
The human brain is a magnificent thing, but the one feature it lacks is an on-off switch. You can stop yourself from doing just about anything, except thinking. You can close your eyes and stop seeing. You can tune people out and not listen to what they’re saying, even without putting your hands over your ears. You can stop moving, walking, talking. You can even hold your breath for a while. But your noggin just keeps going, asleep or awake, whether you like it or not.
I have friends who claim that meditating stops your mind from working, but it didn’t work for me. All you do when you meditate, instead of allowing your mind to run off in its own directions, is to focus on a solitary thought like a one-word mantra, or the picture of waves crashing on a beachy shore, or some other repetitive image that’s supposed to be peaceful and soothing.
God save us from the gurus.
Rather than some deep breathing exercise, I preferred to lay there and worry about things, so naturally I thought about my father. And, being in Las Vegas, I thought about the time he decided he was going to teach me how to play poker.
I was thirteen and I wanted to buy a junior golf permit, which cost twenty-five dollars. I had a couple of friends who started playing golf, I tried it a few times and it was fun. Van Cortland Park and Mosholu were the municipal courses near where we lived in the Bronx, but they cost ten dollars a round without a permit. With a junior permit it was only three.
Blackie didn’t like the idea. He believed I was too young to play golf.
“Golf is for old men,” he said. “Kids should play baseball and football. What kind of pussies are you hanging around with? Next thing I know, you’ll be coming home with a tennis racquet.”
I didn’t think of my friends as pussies, and I liked golf. I was too skinny to play football, and couldn’t hit a baseball very far—I was all glove, no hit, which doesn’t get you chosen for the starting nine at that age. I was good at stickball, since I was fairly coordinated and you don’t need a lot of strength to power a rubber ball with a broom handle. But how much stickball can you play?
I wanted the golf permit.
When Blackie came home one night after a few cocktails, I figured it was a good time to bug him again about the twenty-five dollars. With some drinks in him, I thought he might be feeling generous.
“What’s the matter, don’t you have any money of your own?” he asked me.
I felt like telling him, sure, I have that two million in the trust fund you set up for me, except I don’t feel like going to the bank this week. Instead, I said, “I have about six dollars saved up.”
“Okay, big shot, I tell you what. You bring your bankroll into the kitchen and we’ll have a little poker game. You and me. One on one. I’ll give you a chance to win the money and teach you a little lesson in life.”
I already knew how to play poker, although I don’t recall which of my friends taught me. Poker is just something you seem to know how to do, except maybe you get confused about whether a flush beats a straight, but only in the beginning. It’s not like chess or bridge, where someone has to sit you down and explain all the moves and the rules and the nuances. Poker is just something you learn how to do, almost by osmosis, like checkers.
Since Blackie was a little snookered I figured I had a chance. I hurried inside, pulled out the money coins I had hidden in a tin box, and ran back to the kitchen. When I got to the table my father was waiting with a deck of cards, my mother standing over him, serving up a lecture on what a bad example he was setting and how gambling was evil and that there had to be something seriously wrong with a father who would even suggest that he play cards for money with his own son.
When my father saw me standing in the doorway he started shuffling the cards. Ignoring my mother, he asked, “You know how to play poker?”
“Sort of,” I told him.
“What you don’t know you’re about to learn. Siddown.”
I looked at my mother, giving her one of those imploring looks that said, come on Mom, give me a shot here.
She said something like, “I can’t believe this,” then stormed out of the room, leaving me to work it out with my father.
“Table stakes?” Blackie asked as I sat down.
“Huh?”
“How much are we playing for?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I need twenty five dollars for the permit.”
“I don’t want to hear about the damned permit after tonight, you understand?”
I nodded.
“Put your money on the table.”
I opened my hands and spilled my collection of coins and bills onto the speckled mica table top.
Blackie put down the cards and counted my money. I had six dollars and twenty-five cents. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a roll of bills. “Table stakes means you can bet anything on the table. You understand?”
“You have a lot more than I do.”
“That’s all right, I can’t bet any more than what you have in front of you.”
Seemed fair to me.
“And we ante fifty cents a hand.”
I agreed, feeling proud that I knew what it meant to ante. I slid two quarters to the middle of the table.
“Cut the cards,” he told me, and I did. “Five card draw, all right?”
I only knew two games at the time, five card draw and seven card stud. I was grateful he picked one of them. “Sure,” I said.
He dealt out the cards, then asked me if I wanted to bet.
“Not yet.”
“You don’t say, not yet. You pass.”
I nodded earnestly. “Okay. I pass.”
“I bet two dollars,” he said.
Two dollars! The fifty cents ante already made this the largest poker hand of my life. I looked at my cards. I had a pair of jacks, so I nervously slid two dollars to match his and asked for three cards.
“Dealer takes two,” he announced. He took my discards and dealt me three new ones. Then he replaced his two. After he looked at his hand he explained that he had the right to make the next bet since he was the opener.
“The opener?”
“The player who made the first bet,” he said impatiently, his whiskey breath filling the air between us. “You passed and I opened, so I’m the opener. Unless there were other players and somebody raised, then the last raiser would be the bettor. I thought you knew how to play this game.”
“I forgot that part, I guess.”
“Three dollars and seventy-five cents,” he said, throwing four singles on the table and pulling out a quarter.
“Three seventy-five?” That was exactly what I had left. I stared at the cards I’d drawn, which included a third jack. Then I looked at my father. “If I lose, that’s it?”
“That’s it.”
I wasn’t exactly the Cincinnati Kid, but I had an idea he was bluffing, trying to bull me out of the game on the first hand. I slowly pushed all my money to center of the table.
Blackie looked surprised. “What have you got?”
“I think you have to tell me first, right?”
“Don’t be a smart ass.”
I shook my head, then slowly laid out my cards. “Three jacks,” I said nervously.
“Sonuvabitch,” Blackie said as he threw his cards face down on the table.
“I won?”
He shoved the cards at me. “You deal,” he said.
The next few hands Blackie stayed with his scorched earth policy, trying to scare me out with large bets. I dropped out a couple of times, but after eight or nine hands I’d won more than twenty-five dollars. I was feeling pretty excited. “Well, that’s it for me, Dad. I quit.”
“You what?” he asked in an angry voice. You would have thought I just told him I’d thrown his television out the window.
“I have the money for the permit. That was the idea, right?”
“Did I tell you not to mention the permit again?”
“You said after tonight. You said I shouldn’t mention it again after tonight.”
He started to get out of his chair. “Are you razzing me?”
I felt my insides get a little shaky. “No, I’m not, I’m really not. I just thought what you said—”
“I don’t give a good goddamn what you thought. You can’t quit while you’re winning.”
“I can’t?”
“You gotta give me the chance to get even.”
“I do?”
“That’s right.”
“Then how does the game ever end?”
I don’t know if that concept had never previously occurred to him, but it seemed to take him by surprise. And made him even madder. “The loser says when it’s over.”
“But Dad, if I lose I have no more money. You could keep losing forever.”
I knew the concept was right, but the way it came out…
“You think I’m gonna go on losing to you forever?” he hollered.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I’ll bet it’s not.”
By now my mother was back at the kitchen door, providing her version of a Greek chorus, reminding my father that she had warned him, that these were the wrong lessons for a father to teach his son, but all she did was stoke Blackie’s anger.
I sat there as they got into it, occasionally glancing at the pile of money in front of me. As the volume of their shouting increased, so did my fear that I was not going to be allowed to keep the money I won.
I wasn’t.
In the middle of his argument with my mother, Blackie announced that I was not entitled to my winnings since I had not given him a chance to get even.
I couldn’t believe the utter stupidity of his reasoning. “Why would anyone bother to play poker,” I asked, “if no one is ever allowed to win?”
He turned from my mother, glared in my direction, then got unsteadily to his feet and grabbed all the money off the table. All of it, not just my winnings, but my original six and a quarter as well.
I stood up too. “What about my money? What about the money I started with?”
“That’s the price of learning a valuable lesson,” he sneered at me, and made his way out of the room, into his bedroom, slamming the door behind him.
To this day I have no idea what valuable lesson he was referring to, but I can tell you that I never played another game for money with my father, not for the rest of his life, certainly not when he was drinking.
That said, when I woke up in the morning, I found twenty-five dollars next to my bed, which neither of us ever discussed again. As I may have mentioned, Blackie was a mass of contradictions.
***
WHEN DAWN FINALLY ARRIVED that morning in Nevada, I was already showered and dressed. I headed for the airport, boarded the flight for New York and settled back in a comfortable gray leather seat, grateful for the frequent flyer miles that got me to the fancy upstairs compartment they used to have on the 747. A Bloody Mary seemed a reasonable idea as I prepared for several hours of wondering what the hell to do next about Blackie’s letter. All I had so far was Benny’s refusal to help and the name of a Frenchman who may or may not still be around.
As I sank into a bog of confusion, a young woman’s voice intruded with a polite “Excuse me.”
She was seated just across the aisle to my left and, as I turned in her direction, she apologized for interrupting whatever I was doing, which was obviously nothing. Unless you consider staring into space doing something.
She had a pretty face, if you’re partial to a firm line at the jaw, well drawn but delicate features, deep blue eyes and a healthy tan. I had given her the once over as I got on the plane, but when she barely glanced at me in return, I sort of forgot she was there.
“I’m sorry,” I said to her now, “did you ask me something?”
She pointed to a magazine sticking out of the seat pocket in front of me. “I was wondering if I could have a look at that. If you’re not reading it right now.”
That was a silly thing for her to say, wasn’t it? I mean, how could I have been reading it if it was in the seat pocket? I pulled out the magazine and handed it to her. “I’m too busy doing nothing to read.”
She thanked me as she took the magazine.
“You come here often?” I asked.
She looked around her, then back at me, cold comment on an old line. “You mean this airplane or Las Vegas?”
“I meant Las Vegas.”
“I work here.” She opened the magazine and sat back.
“Ah,” I said.
A few moments later, she said, “I’m sorry, did you lose a lot of money in the casinos or something?”
“Why do you ask?”
“You seem a little, uh, distracted.”
“Oh. No, I really wasn’t thinking about the casinos at all. I was only in town for one day.”
“You came to Las Vegas for one day?”
“Business,” I said, making that sound as important as I could.
“Was it a successful trip?”
I shook my head. “I guess that’s what I’m trying to figure out.”
She didn’t seem in a big hurry to resume looking through the magazine, so I asked what sort of work she did in Nevada.
“Hotel management,” she told me.
“Oh,” I said again, falling back upon some of my cleverest repartee. I often rely on “Oh” or “Ah,” or my favorite, “Huh?” to keep a conversation going.
She asked if I lived in New York.
“I do. Born and bred. What brings you east?”
“Other than this airplane?” She smiled, which was the first time she tried it on me. It was quite a smile.
I said, “Yes, other than this airplane.”
“I grew up in Queens,” she told me. “Visiting, then going on from there.”
I nodded. “You want a drink?” I asked.
“Why not,” she agreed, closing the magazine on her lap. She told me her name was Donna, so I introduced myself.
The stewardess came over and I suggested a Bloody Mary. “It’s a morning kind of cocktail. Chock full of Vitamin C.”
Donna ordered a screwdriver instead, just to stay with the citrus thing I guess, and I asked for another Bloody Mary.
She told me she had a graduate degree from the hotel and management school at Cornell, spent a few years in New York, then a couple of years ago landed a job in the front office of one of the big complexes on the Strip. She was learning the casino trade from top to bottom.
“You visiting family back home?” I asked.
“No, just friends. My family moved to Florida a few years ago.”
“Ah. Florida.”
“I’m looking forward to just walking around the city for a couple of days. I miss it. Las Vegas is awfully provincial, for all its glitz. When you work in the industry, which almost everyone does, it becomes a very small town.”
“Never thought of it, behind all that glitz.”
She showed me her smile again. “What do you do?”
“I write.”
“Newspaper? Magazine?”
“Advertising.”
She nodded.
“You said you were going on from New York. To see your family in Florida?”
“No. Taking some vacation time in Europe.”
“Ah.”
“What sort of business brought you to the land of Sodom and Gomorrah? Your agency doing work for one of the hotels?”
“No, it was personal.”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.”
I told her it was fine, since I’d been prying into her life for the last several minutes. “I needed to look up an old family friend.”
“Things work out?”
“I’m not sure,” I admitted. “But it was good to see him.”
She studied me for what seemed a long time. “Well that’s something, right?”
“Yes,” I said, “I suppose it is.”