Looking to Get Lost by Peter Guralnick

Author:Peter Guralnick [Guralnick, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2020-10-27T00:00:00+00:00

Gambling, like music, offered its own form of fellowship, and its own intangible rewards. The man who introduced Doc to the ways, and the world, of professional card playing was one of his closest friends from the Hotel Forrest. “Johnny Mel was a professional gambler who knew all the tricks but prided himself on being completely legitimate. Johnny was one of the most honorable, honest people I ever met in my life. He was a high school All-American football player and a war hero who dismantled a whole field of land mines with one other guy. He came from a very nice family, and when he got back from the war—as a matter of fact he won $50,000 shooting craps on the boat, he used that as a stake—he opened up a cigar store in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, where he was from. Johnny loved cigars, he used to smoke ten five-dollar cigars a day—but he found he couldn’t get the product. There were other, bigger cigar stores in town with more money and more access. So he went to the Veterans Administration, and he said, ‘Look, I don’t want your money. If you could just help me get a contact so I could be competitive.’ Well, they turned him down. And he swore he’d never do anything legal for the rest of his life. And he never did.

“He was the sweetest human being. He showed me all these great tricks, but he prided himself on being completely legitimate. If he had to stoop to cheat—well, it would just be beyond him. So he taught me, and I had pretty good instincts and got to where I was able to survive at it. Well, he used to go out to Jersey, and one night he asked me, ‘You wanna be my partner?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He’d put up $100; I’d put up $100. And, you know something? I never questioned him. At the end of the night he’d either say we had no money left, or we had $500 to split, something like that. And it went on like that for months and months—I made plenty of money with him, and I was getting an education, too.”

For nearly ten years this was how Doc made his living. After a while he graduated to running a game of his own, in his or other people’s apartments. He got held up. A friend of his was kidnapped right out of a game. A well-known tough guy offered to sponsor him, “supposedly the toughest shylock in New York, and he wanted to be partners with me in a game. I told him, ‘Ruby, I don’t want to be involved.’ He said, ‘What are you worrying about? Nobody fucks with me.’ Two weeks later they found him floating in the river, with his arms and legs cut off.” Although this is one of the few sides of his life about which Doc is the least bit reticent, you get the feeling that he appreciated the people as much as he did the life, and he profited from his own appreciation for it.

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