An inauspicious beginning

It’s hot, again. Brutally hot, again. “Like living in the convection-current animation from the as-seen-on-TV food dehydrator commercial” hot. Aaaaaaa-gain. We went to an outdoor concert last night and drank too much beer; now, at high noon, dehydrated and fragile, we don’t care about gambling, or the boardwalk, or whether Caesar’s has a salon where Gen (formerly “The Future Mrs. Stupidhead,” but “Gen” is easier to type) and I can get pedicures. We just want to get the hell out of Brooklyn, which takes some doing, because it’s sweaty and glary outside and everyone is driving all lurching bumbling zero-depth-perception like the road is made of flypaper, and not long after we hit the Parkway, we see a bumper sticker on a truck that says “Equal Rights For Southern Whites” above and below a Confederate flag. The truck has Jersey plates. We just absolutely do not get it, any part of it — we don’t get the sentiment itself, we don’t get the thought process that led the owner of the truck to announce it to the world on his vehicle, and we really don’t get what he’s doing living among us Yankees. Dude: the expression “the South will rise again” does not refer to South Amboy. Move to Mississippi if it’s that important to you. Also: gross.

Several bottles of Vitamin Water later, we’ve perked up a bit, and when we get onto the Atlantic City Expressway and the dueling buffet-and-magic-show billboards appear, my stomach stops feeling hung over and “eeee-yeeehhhh” and starts feeling thrilly and “eeeeeee!”

We get to our room. We pee. We leaf through the room service menu. We “enjoy” the “view.” We pretend to care about the hotel amenities. Then we pile out the door and into the elevator with every intention of attaching ourselves like barnacles to a low-minimum blackjack table and not moving until we either run out of money or get scraped off by a pit boss.

Frankie B says relax

It’s going okay — not great, but okay, picking up a little. Mr. S, finally freed from the unlucky prison of the first-base position, is mounting a comeback; I’ve pulled out a handful of nail-biter splits to get up over break-even. And the table is starting to come together at last, personality-wise, which is important — well, it’s important to me, because my system is somewhat unorthodox, but if I double down on a nine when the dealer’s showing a face card, I need to feel like the table is supportive even if it doesn’t exactly approve. So we’ve got the couple from Phoenix, Pink Shirt and Twelve Killer, and we’ve got Fingernails Olson parked in straightaway center in his motorized wheelchair, smoking stinky El Productos and hitting hard sixteens, and we’ve got the three of us on the third-base side. I rack a hundred over break-even and put it away. Fingernails splits and doubles and wins big and bails out, and a girl sits down with a pack of Misty cigarettes. The shoe ends. We order beers.

And then, as our unflappable dealer Rohit is finishing the shuffle, who to our wondering eyes should appear but Frankie B. The guy is straight out of Jersey Central Casting — jean shorts, high white socks, softball-team Beefy T, Drakkar, not an inch of neck on him — and he wedges himself in between Misty and Mr. S and immediately begins referring to himself in the third person by way of announcing to the table that he’s not wearing underwear, and then he says, “Okay, let’s do this. The fat man needs to eat.” He doesn’t, really, because he is in fact rather fat and he’s crunching Mr. S and Gen and me together so tightly on his left that I have to signal hits and stays, like, over Mr. S’s head, but we forgive him, because the minute he shows up, Mr. S and I can’t stop winning. I’m doubling on soft fourteens, I’m splitting queens, I’m standing on sixes. No matter what I do, it pays. Twelve Killer ducks out, and Frankie B’s Uncle Johnny comes in at first base and kicks off a winning streak, and he’s letting it ride — every time he wins, he just leaves the stack in the circle, and it’s getting tall and wavery. Rohit is busting on every hand, and when he has to change out and Narcisco comes back in, we think maybe the run is at an end, but no — Narcisco gets the same nasty run of hard fifteens, draws to them, busts, and we just keep winning. I keep racking off hundreds and putting them in my bag. Misty keeps drawing tens for her doubles. Pink Shirt keeps squeaking by with fours on sixteens. Frankie B himself is not doing so well, because Frankie B’s vodka-tonic level is point-one percent blood, but when Uncle Johnny suggests going to get some dinner, Mr. S and I exchange an alarmed look. If Frankie B goes to dinner, we all go to dinner, and not in a good way.

Big John the pit boss tacks a post-it to the table minimum sign; it’s going up in half an hour. Frankie B slides off his chair, tells Mr. S to warn the next person that he, Frankie B, spent the entire time “fluffing” in said chair, flaps the leg of his shorts to illustrate the point, and lumbers off to not wear underwear at the buffet. And it’s nice to have extra elbow room at the table — Mr. S’s cargo short pocket is imprinted on the side of my leg — but as much as we kind of want Frankie B to get the salad, we miss him. The hands start to get harder. I get a bunch of dumpy fourteens in a row, stand pat, and watch the dealer stick on twenty-one, and by the time Sekoe comes in to deal for us, we’ve had it. Gen is down a bit, Mr. S wants to quit while he’s ahead, and I’ve got room-service French fries on the brain.

In Soviet Union, chips count you

Back in the room, we order a huge spread from room service, compliments of Mr. S, who is the beeg weener. I dump out my bag, expecting to find myself up about a hundred fifty, two hundred.

…Six hundred, baby.

Wait. Six fifty. Found another couple of chips behind a pack of gum.

It doesn’t seem real; it’s just plastic chips with pictures of Nero on them. It’s not real money. And the fake money is exciting enough — we sit around spending the money out loud while we wait for the food to come up — but even more exciting? The system seems to work. I’ve used it before, but in short bursts, and evidently it isn’t as effective unless I settle in for a few hours, and it isn’t effective at all if I don’t stick to it.

At a happy table, it’s easy to stick to it, to feel confident in it. At a salty table, a lot can go wrong.

Boulevard of broken thirteens

After dinner, it goes wrong.

Mr. S is full of filet mignon and content with his winnings, but Gen and I venture back downstairs, because she wants to win back her budge. We wander around looking for a low-minimum table with two seats together, and when we finally find one, we grab the seats, even though we hate the first-base side…and even though it’s evident from the very first deal that the rest of the table has, at best, no use for us, and mostly cherishes an active hostility towards us that is palpable and immutable. We cheer for their blackjacks, we compliment the tens they pull on double downs, and still the lady in the camp shirt on the other end clearly wants me dead.

The table doesn’t think much of my system, either. There isn’t much to the system, in the end; simply put, I play in a way that forces the dealer to beat himself. But it’s not the conventional style of play, and when I refuse to hit a thirteen and the dealer’s got a queen up, the guy next to me — who has a stack of hundreds in his pocket which is, literally, a cube, it’s so big, but which is also rapidly shrinking — scoffs disgustedly that “you’re supposed to hit on that.” Then the lady in the camp shirt hits on a fifteen, takes the eight I would have gotten if I’d hit my thirteen, busts, and blames me. Out loud. And she’s not kidding, either. She hates my ass.

Now, I understand that this is how a lot of people play — read the books, memorize the “rules,” don’t deviate from them. The classic blackjack strategy makes sense, I guess, but it’s never worked for me. I also understand that a lot of people get angry at players further up the table for “gaming the count,” but…I don’t try to game the count. I don’t count, period. I play a bust-averse game. That’s it.

But this table is not having it. Well, most of the table is not having it. One player, who is sitting next to his mom (…?), doesn’t know enough about blackjack to have it or not have it in the first place; his mom and her giant flashy pear-cut diamond have to play for him, because he’s either too drunk to follow the deal or too dumb to know you don’t stand on an eight. The guy’s my age; he’s got a wedding ring on. If you can manage to get married, you can probably count to twenty-one, son…and once you’ve mastered that, how about telling your mamacita to start doubling down on those sweet elevens she keeps getting while I’m floundering around in the weeds with a dozen soft seventeens in a row, because she’s wasting money and it’s making me sad.

It gets to me after a while, the waves of hate that roll down the table every time I leave a fourteen in the wind, so I start playing middle hands the square way, hitting if the dealer has a face card and standing if he doesn’t. It doesn’t work, of course, because it never works, because the only way to beat the house consistently is to let the house hang itself on sixteens while you keep very still, but I can’t take the glaring from Camp Shirt, and we don’t see any open seats at the other tables, and Gen is actually doing really well. So, we stay put. My pile of chips dwindles.

Fools and children

Finally, we can’t take it anymore. The dumb guy’s mom spilled her red wine all over the table, and everyone sympathized with her. I drew a nine to a twelve and everyone ground their teeth at me. Enough. We can’t play at a mean table anymore, so we head around the side of the pit to a table near the band, which for obvious reasons is fairly empty (although the band is playing everything from Fleetwood Mac to the Donnas. Who ever heard of a casino band playing girl punk? It’s not that bad, either — it’s not good, but given that there’s a Casio involved, it’s okay).

A huge thunderstorm went through earlier and knocked out the air conditioning, so it’s getting a little muggy in the casino, but I feel like I can change my luck by getting away from The Salty Table, so we settle in at Trini’s table, order some bottled water, and hope for the best.

And our new tablemates actually like us, thank God…except for the guy at third base, who is so drunk he probably doesn’t even know we’re there and who is just hurling tips at the dealer like a monkey flings poo. He’s half-lying on the table; he’s shooting nonstop finger guns at the band; he’s asking for change-outs in the middle of hands; he’s horrible, and we all hate him. But he has the best luck in the world, this guy. Every time he slops five hundred onto the chip circle, the whole table hopes this will do it — he’ll bust, run out of money, and go the hell away to sleep it off. But it never happens. He only loses on small bets; when he’s got a huge pile of Neros in the circle, he snags a blackjack and wins enough to keep going. The guy sitting next to me, Eagles Jersey, and I keep saying we should split a bottle of bourbon and drink the whole thing in five minutes so we can start enjoying The Luck O’ The Trashed.

Luis tags in and leads us into the Ninth Shoe of Hell — dealer blackjacks galore, every hand a squishy thirteen, inscrutable face cards, and of course The Poo Flinger singing along with “Hotel California” and slurping Heineken. Eagles Jersey goes all in, trying to make something happen, pulls a twenty, and still gets beat. Gen is on a down slope; I can’t seem to get that last hundred back. We finish out the shoe and flee. As far as I know The Poo Flinger is still sitting there, drooling down the front of his shirt and bouncing five-dollar chips off Luis’s forehead.

Heading back to the elevator, weaving through clots of bridesmaids, we have to pass the poker tables, and let me tell you, I pray to God blackjack never gets as pervasively popular as Texas Hold ‘Em has the last few years, because the poker section is a seething mass of sweaty, hollering Chipsters the likes of which I hope never to see again. Every one of them is wearing the same Chipster uniform: backwards baseball cap, either a Red Sox hat or a white Cocks/Terps-type hat, with a chewed-up brim; bleach-spotted polo shirt over a Co-Ed Naked [Sport] t-shirt; voluminous cargo shorts; old-school Nikes with ankle socks and a snake/giant Irish cross tattoo crawling up the side of the leg; gigantic G-Shock watch; and Miller breath. The craps table is even worse, with an inner ring of Tophers and Matties and Travses surrounding the planet of the table and then an outer ring of girls in tube tops and spike heels that keep getting caught in the carpet, all fake-movie-smoking Parliaments and shrieking.

Did I mention the air conditioning went out?

Putting the AC back in “A.C.”

When we get upstairs, Mr. S is sprawled out in one bed like the Sun King with no covers on. The air coming out of the vent is tepid and smells like feet. Gen and I skulk around trying to get ready for bed quietly, but Mr. S wakes up anyway and wants to know if the air conditioning is messed up or something. We tell him it is, and crank the thermostat down to sixty just in case; no joy, so we call down to the front desk to see if we can get a discount for having to sweat balls all night. Again, no joy. Clearly, the only solution is to nibble the fruit platter, complain, and come up with complicated plans involving stashing our chips in the room fridge for twenty minutes and then putting them in our shorts.

Nobody has the energy to execute, though, and we all fall asleep. In the middle of the night, the air comes on full blast and when we wake up, Mr. S is a giant burrito of covers and the room is a tundra.

Cash and carry

Time to head back to the city, but first, time to visit the cashier. We file out of the room, me bringing up the rear, but the door closes before I can get through it, and I can’t turn the knob because I have my hands full…of chips. It’s a rough life I lead, let me tell you.

The cashier counts out my winnings. It looks slightly more real now, but not much — I don’t spend that much time with fifty-dollar bills in my everyday life — and I wedge the profits into my wallet, which I put in my bag, which I hug like a teddy bear all the way to the car. Finding yourself with a few hundred bucks I didn’t expect is almost paralyzing; I don’t know what to spend it on. I need a new bookcase, the fall catalogs have started arriving, I’d like to get some art matted…where to begin?

So far, I’ve contented myself with visiting my stack of winnings in its envelope on the kitchen table a few times a day. We spent the whole car ride home planning our next trip, spending our ill-gotten gains out loud, dissing Salty Table and their hidebound strategy, and gloating, and I would worry that I have a gambling problem now, but I think I liked getting away and doing something completely different the best of all. I only had to worry about arithmetic for twenty-four hours, and for once I had math on my side.

August 8, 2005

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