Drink, Play, F@#k by Andrew Gottlieb

Author:Andrew Gottlieb
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2009-05-20T16:00:00+00:00

18

Not surprisingly, I couldn’t sleep. First of all, I’d just woken up a few hours earlier. Secondly, I was so jacked up on adrenaline that I kept replaying the various hands that Say murdered me with over and over again. Every time I shut my eyes I saw that damn ball skipping out of twenty-nine and landing on twenty-five. The perverse bad luck that had plagued me at blackjack destroyed me at roulette. Like I said, it’s one thing to just lose. But when you lose in such a cruel way—with winning so tantalizingly close—it eats away at you.

I had to do something or I’d go nuts. But what do you do in Vegas if you’re too nut-punched to gamble? It was too early to catch the Amazing Jonathan—besides, I hate magic acts. So I decided to go to the gym.

There are only two kinds of people who go to the gym in Las Vegas: people who hate gambling and people who have just taken a beating at the tables. Since people who hate gambling rarely go to Las Vegas, the gyms there are pretty much filled with losers. And I’m not making a moral judgment about these people. As I approached an open treadmill, I was most emphatically one of them.

It was a pretty depressing exercise session. Since I was sure that the story of my ruinous run had spread across the town by now, I avoided direct eye contact with everyone. I just jogged along with my headphones on, staring at the plasma screen playing SportsCenter but not really watching or listening.

My mind was reeling. I was supposed to be in Vegas for four months. I was supposed to have all kinds of fun in Vegas for four months. But so far I had been in Vegas for twenty-four hours and I had already experienced a soul-crushing reversal of fortune at the tables. If I blew all of the money I’d brought with me in the first week, what the hell was I supposed to do for the rest of the time?

I forgot to mention something earlier when I was describing Vegas math. The mathematical coefficient that is the key to having fun in Las Vegas, regardless of how much you lose, is always having money when you’re in Las Vegas. You don’t have to have a lot. But you have to have some. When you have no money in Las Vegas, and you can’t get any more out of your ATM, and your credit cards are all maxed out, and your buddies no longer think of you as a reliable credit risk, then there’s only one thing to do: leave Las Vegas.

But I was committed to staying here for the long haul. So what was I going to do if I kept getting wiped out? I was really stressing over this as I was pounding the treadmill. Maybe I should have stayed in Ireland. Maybe I should never have even started this stupid trip. Maybe I should go back to New York and beg for my old job back.

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