Bob the Gambler by Frederick Barthelme

Author:Frederick Barthelme [Barthelme, Frederick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

10

In the next week or so we spent some time toting up our losses and figuring how to get around them. Most of the money could sit on the credit cards, although when Jewel told me she'd seen a TV piece on credit-card debt and that the average debt was only four thousand dollars, that gave me pause, since we owed more than ten thousand, not all of it from gambling, spread across a half-dozen cards or more. Plus, we had the house, the cars, everything else to pay for.

"Our problem is we're small fry," I said to her one night when we were talking about gambling. "How can we win anything betting twenty-five dollars a hand? Everything is piecemeal for people like us, people our size."

The night before I'd watched a guy walk up to the craps table and get a ten-thousand-dollar marker by nodding at the pit boss. It was easy. The guy lost, got a second marker for the same amount, lost that. He got a third ten thousand and dropped that. The fourth time he got a marker the table turned around, and pretty soon this same guy had a hundred thousand dollars in front of him. He was dumping thousand-dollar chips on the hard ways. He paid his markers and still had sixty grand. He hit the hard eight three times in a row for nine thousand a shot. The dice were coming in. He was a loud guy a big guy with cowboy written all over him. Everybody liked him. When he yelled, everybody yelled. He got all kinds of treatment—they let him hold three dice and throw two. He tossed the third back behind him, and one of the dealers had to scramble to jump on it.

"We have to beg to get any credit," I said. "Get the pit guy, the floor guy, tell a story, ask for something extra. Then the floor guy is solicitous but not sure he can help."

"You talking about that Phil person? He's nice."

"They're all nice," I said. "They go off and look at their slips of paper, then come back and say, 'Maybe I can go eight hundred, how's that?'"

"I don't know why you think this is a problem," Jewel said.

"Because we can't play enough to win anything," I said.

The shift guy we knew best was Phil Post. He was a family guy, he had a wife, kids, one in college at Tulane, doing real well. That's what we usually talked about until we needed something on the credit line. Then it was business. Then it was "Let's go look at the credit records, O.K.?" and we had to follow him over to the cashier and stand there waiting for help. Sooner or later Phil would come up with a marker for seven hundred, or maybe nine, and that was it. So we were forced to split the new money and sit and play quarters, hoping to get some cards, to get a run, win a few hands and boost the ticket.

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