It is 8 a.m. Wednesday morning. I’ve had breakfast and stroll down the gravel path to my office, stopping only briefly to say good morning to my bonsai and pluck out a couple of weeds. I know that those little weeds have a right to exist, but I can’t have them sucking up water that the bonsai need. I feel very content because I have an uninterrupted four-hour stretch of writing ahead of me. I look forward to beginning, but, as always, can’t resist checking out my email, promising myself that I will spend no more than thirty minutes on responses. The first message greets me:
Reminder: GAME TONITE at my house. Doors open at 6:15. Delectable and expensive food provided. Eat fast—game starts promptly at 6:45. Bring barrels of moolah! Kevan
My first reaction is to delete it, but I stop myself, and try to experience the wistful feeling passing through me. I started that poker game over forty years ago, but can no longer play, because my poor (and uncorrectable) vision makes the game too expensive: misreading the cards cost me at least one or two big pots every game. For a long time I resisted giving up the game. Getting old is giving up one damn thing after another. Now, even though I haven’t played in about four years, the guys continue to send me the invitation as a courtesy.
I’ve given up tennis and jogging and scuba diving, but giving up poker was different. The others are more solitary, whereas poker was a social endeavor: these sweet guys were my playmates and I miss them greatly. Oh, once in a while we get together for lunch (flipping coins or playing a quick round of poker at the restaurant table to see who pays the bill), but it isn’t the same: I miss the action and sense of engagement in risky stuff. I’ve always loved the thrill of betting, and now all that remains for me is to try egging my wife into bets, bets on entirely silly things: she wants me to wear a necktie to a dinner party and I respond, “I’ll bet you twenty dollars there won’t be a single man wearing a necktie at the party tonight.” In the past she ignored it, but now, since I stopped playing poker, she humors me by occasionally accepting a bet.
This type of play has been part of my life for a very long time. How long? A phone call a few years back supplied some information. It was from Shelly Fisher, whom I hadn’t spoken to since the fifth grade. He has a grandniece studying to be a psychologist, and on a recent visit he saw her reading one of my books, The Gift of Therapy. “Hey, I know that guy,” he said. He found my sister’s name in the Washington, DC, phone book and called her to get my number. Shelly and I had a long talk, reminiscing about walking together to school every day, going bowling, playing cards and step ball, and saving baseball cards. The following day, he called again: “Irv, yesterday you said you wanted feedback. Well I’ve just remembered one other thing about you: you had a gambling problem. You kept pressing me to play gin rummy with baseball cards as stakes. You wanted to bet on everything: I remember one day you wanted to bet on the color of the next car to drive down the street. And I remember what a kick you got out of playing the numbers.”
“Playing the numbers”—I hadn’t thought about that for years. Shelly’s words stirred up an antique memory. When I was about eleven or twelve, my father converted his grocery store to a liquor store, and life became a little easier for my mother and father: no more spoiled goods to throw out, no more 5 a.m. trips to the wholesale produce market, no more sides of beef to be carved up. But things also became more dangerous: robberies were not infrequent, and on Saturday evenings an armed guard hid out of view in the back of our store. During the day the store was frequently filled with larger-than-life characters: among our regular customers were pimps, prostitutes, thieves, both sweet and sour alcoholics, and the bookies and numbers runners.
Once I helped my father carry an order of several cases of scotch and bourbon to Duke’s car. Duke was one of our very best customers and I was fascinated by his style: ivory-headed cane, suave blue cashmere double-breasted overcoat, matching blue fedora, and his mile-long gleaming white Cadillac. When we got to the car parked on a side street, half a block away, I asked if I should put my case of scotch in the trunk and my father and Duke both chuckled. “Duke, why don’t we show him the trunk?” my father said. With a flourish, Duke opened the Cadillac trunk and said, “Not much room here, Sonny.” I looked in and my eyes popped. Seventy years later I still see the scene with striking clarity: the trunk was stuffed to the hilt with cash-stacks of bills of all denominations, tied with thick rubber bands, and several large burlap sacks bulging and overflowing with coins.
Duke was in the numbers racket—an enterprise endemic in my Washington, DC, neighborhood. Here’s how it worked: every day, bettors in my neighborhood placed wagers (often as small as ten cents) with their “runners” on a three-digit number. If they guessed correctly, they “hit the number, glory be,” and were paid sixty dollars for a ten-cent bet—600 to 1 odds. But, of course, the real odds were 1,000 to 1, so the bookies made a huge profit. The daily number could not be manipulated, since it was derived by a publicly known formula based on the total amount wagered on three designated horse races at a local track. Though it was obvious the odds were against them, the bettors had two things in their favor: the wagers were very small, and the ongoing “glory be” hope of receiving a sudden stroke of great good fortune relieved some measure of their lifelong, poverty-induced despair.
I knew firsthand about this daily anticipatory excitement inherent in betting on the numbers because I occasionally, and secretly, placed a small bet myself (despite my parents’ admonitions), often with nickels or dimes I filched from the store cash register. (This recall of my petty theft makes me, even now, cringe with shame.) My father repeatedly pointed out that only fools would bet against such big odds. I knew he was right, but, until I got older, it was the only game in town. I made the bets through William, one of the two black men working in the store. I always promised him 25 percent of my winnings. William was an alcoholic and a lively, charming man, though not a paragon of integrity, and I never knew whether he truly placed my bets or simply pocketed my dimes or booked the bet himself. I never hit the number, and I suspect that, if I had, William, most likely, would have begged off by saying the numbers runner had not come that day or some similar concocted story. I finally abandoned the enterprise when I had the great good fortune of discovering baseball betting pools, craps, pinochle, and, above all, poker.