Repeat Until Rich by Josh Axelrad

Author:Josh Axelrad
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2010-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Thirty

Elke would become a real girlfriend, but I had no way of knowing this at first. She was seven years younger than I was, and I was pretty young. The whole thing might have been sick. I wasn’t sure. How could I know? Unless you’re going to break the law and really be a villain and an assailant, it’s not actually feasible to date someone substantially younger than yourself until you’re at least twenty-six. It was the first shot I had, so I took it.

There were a lot of first shots around then. There were first shots at casinos. There were first shots playing in new states. It would dawn on me in January that if I continued with regular play and my bankroll continued to grow and my investments in the banks could grow with it (this wasn’t assured—investment space was allocated through an esoteric combination of formulas and politics), I would have my first shot at a six-figure income: 2001 would be a good year, in fact.

Elke would be there the whole time. I would bring the money and the stories from the road; it was her job to bring the humanity. A human body to hold in the form of a cunning young woman would contribute to my grip on reality at a time when the latter was slipping. My life grew episodic through the year—more episodic, I mean. I would wake up in an Oregon forest, in a comped double room indistinguishable from the room I’d had the week prior—except that room had been in New Mexico. In each place I would have a new story, new lies for the boys in the pit, explaining my presence in this or that faraway dump with an out-of-state license and buckets of cash. I was a film producer scouting locations. I operated a chain of coffee houses and was thinking of expanding to Albuquerque. I was simply a compulsive lunatic. The lies would work, and eventually they would stop working, at which point it was rough talk and the guards and their guns and the intimidation racket, the cashing of chips, the worried rush out to the car and the mad dash off the reservation. The next day there would be a flight to New York. Elke and I would have dinner. I wouldn’t have had time to drop cash at my box—I would tote forty Gs on the subway. Elke, who was only a sophomore, had a way of looking at all this bustle as if it were natural, decent, even heroic in a minor sort of way.

“Come on, heroic?” I said to her once. “I lie to get money. Then I spend the money on myself and on you. A preponderance of the money I lie in order to get in order to spend on myself and on you probably was lost to casinos in the first place by people who were mentally ill, addicted, or out of control. That’s whose money I’m getting.”

“Don’t overdramatize, mister.” She was holding tea in both hands.

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