Double Down by Frederick Barthelme

Author:Frederick Barthelme
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mariner Books

10

Money Plays

WE’D GONE FROM workaday English teachers to gambling junkies in a matter of a couple of years; that brought up questions of how and why and what, if anything, it meant. One of the fundamental things said about compulsive gambling is that it’s not about the money. So what was it about for us?

We were adult children, overage children, who lost our parents and reacted with a clear disregard for the self, not to mention the other. Maybe it was about grief and relief and release, and maybe a newly visible aggression at having been held hostage for a lifetime.

Hostage to Mother and Father and to their picture of the world, notions of people, code of behavior, ethics and morality, their ideas about merit, work, and money, and finally, hostage to their affection. They were people born in 1907 who had used the lessons of their own youth to teach us how to live in a far different time. Father fancied himself as beset and bewildered by the less strong and less wise, a mildly messianic self-portrait, so that quarreling with his teachings made us feel like traitors and heretics. We were hostage, then, not only to their affection but also to his ethos and idealism, formed in the first quarter of the century.

Or perhaps the gambling fever was only a desperate and pathetic gesture of pampered children who had to face the absence of their beloved and devoted parents, their only family, the only group or community tie of substance that either of them had known.

Try still another explanation. Something simpler, something that has to do with gambling, that has to do with money. These two children—we two children—had not been schooled in finance. We were not prepared to make a great deal of money in the stock market or in business or anywhere else. And this being the case, did we perhaps imagine that we could use our (always highly regarded) intelligence to beat the casino at its own game? Is it possible we thought we could win in spite of how we knew the casino operated, about the casino’s edge in every game, about the casino’s percentage take overall, about how much money the casino was pulling in and the small portion it was delivering back to the state, and how much it was pocketing? Is it possible that we imagined we could win?

Now, years later, this is a terrifying thought. That we could have been so stunningly arrogant, so unspeakably naive as to imagine that we might actually come out ahead. This is not pretty; this is “patsy” writ large. This is that of which one is born every minute. This is some kind of lesson in humility. But it’s what every gambler imagines. And we were so close. Sometimes.

This should be clear. We don’t think of ourselves as gamblers. We’re pretend gamblers. This is an authenticity deal. We lack essence. We don’t much believe in authenticity, although everyone else seems to. It’s all the rage, no matter how dull the definition of authentic—fistfights and affairs with daddy.

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