All or Nothing Read online

  That evening, as we were watching the Patriots beat the tar out of the Panthers, the nightly numbers ticked across the bottom of the screen.

  7 … . . 7… . . 9 … . . 9

  Damn.

  7.

  My wife screamed because she had heard me singing about 7s and 9s all day. She knew I had bought the tickets. She knew I had bought a bunch of them. The problem was that I had played it straight 7-9-7-9, rather than box 7-9-7-9, which would have covered any combination, including 7-7-9-9. I had played eight dollars straight hoping to get 40 grand. I had been so certain that I did not box it, not even once. If I had boxed just one ticket for a dollar, it would have paid $800 because the numbers were doubled twice. Instead of forty grand, or even $800, I had a pocket full of very close (very, very close) losers.

  With my wife bragging to everybody about the bunch of tickets I had hit and surmising about the big bundle she assumed I had won, I had no choice but to go into my dwindling funds and lend little cuz the couple thousand she was asking to borrow (with no hope of her ever repaying). And my wife went on another shopping spree because I couldn’t admit to her that I had not boxed it even once.

  So now I have two stories to tell. When I see my gambling friends, I show them the very close losers from Super Bowl Sunday and they are amazed and commiserate with me as only fellow gamblers can.

  When my wife is around, I tell it different:

  “Don’t go letting everyone know about it. I didn’t hit it straight, you know. It’s not all that much. Yeah, I hit it boxed. Six or seven times. Eight hundred dollars a ticket. But that’s not really a lot of money.”

  That’s how it is with gamblers, especially the lucky ones. They expect us to win all the time, so we’ve got to have two stories. We’ve got two stories for everything.

  MOM

  8.

  My mother believes that God talks to her in numbers, but I’m not sure.

  She is not a gambler, but she is the only person I know who hit the Cash-3 and Play-4 in the same day and got five numbers in the lottery that weekend.

  She called my house that night whispering, “What does it mean if you have 5-4-8?”

  “It depends, Mom. Is it a dollar-play or 50-cent-play? Is it box or straight?”

  “Straight,” she said, “for a dollar.”

  “Congratulations, Mom. You just won $500.”

  She whistled a thanks and hung up.

  She called back minutes later. “What does it mean if you have 1-1-3-8?”

  I said, “Mom, what’s going on?”

  “I just want to know.”

  “You’re telling me that you have 1-1-3-8 straight?”

  She said, “I think so. Oh, I don’t know. I’m not sure how you play these things.”

  “Well … if you played it for a dollar and it says straight on it, then you win $5,000.”

  “They pay you so much?”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  “For each ticket?”

  “Each?”

  “For all the ones that I bought.”

  “What does it say on them?”

  “Well, on one it says fifty cents and one says dollar. And another one says b-x. What does b-x mean?”

  “That’s box.”

  “How much does that pay?”

  “Usually $200, but since 1-1-3-8 has a double number in it, you get $400.”

  “For each ticket?”

  “Mom, listen to me,” I said, concerned. “How many tickets do you have?”

  “I don’t know. I have to see how many the lady at the grocery gave me.”

  “With the same number?”

  “They let you play more than one number?”

  “Mom, wait there. Don’t call anyone, don’t talk to anyone, don’t do a thing until I get over there, you hear me?”

  “You’re coming over?”

  “I’m coming over. Don’t show those tickets to anyone until I get there.”

  I shot over to her house. She had two dollars and fifty cents straight on the Play-4, which was worth $12,500. She had three dollars on the Cash-3, which was another $1,500. I forgot how many boxes she had, but that was another bundle. I had never seen such a thing.

  “This is amazing. This is incredible. Mom … how did this happen?”

  “The old lady I work for made me go buy her ticket and her groceries today. So I bought her groceries and her tickets, then I got some for myself. I used to see your father doing it all the time. Now I’m all the time watching the old lady do it. I used her numbers. And the grocery lady said, Is that all? And I said, What else can I play? She said, You can make up your own numbers. So I said, Well, just play the numbers on this check the old lady gave me. And she said, How do you want me to play them? and I said, Play them how everybody else plays them, I don’t know. And she said, Okay. She really was a sweet little girl. Okay, she said to me, but for how much? And I said, Well, I have nine dollars left over from cab fare. Put all of this on it and play it the way everybody else plays it, I don’t know. And the girl gave me all of these tickets.”

  She opened her hand.

  “You put nine dollars on the same two numbers?”

  “Did I do wrong? I won, right?”

  I squeezed her hand. Squeezed the tickets in her hand. “Mom, you’re rich!”

  “Well, that’s good. Now that your father’s gone I could sure use the money. His pension’s not much.”

  “Mom, you’re amazing.” And she was.

  She forgot to tell me that she had purchased one more ticket at the suggestion of that nice girl in the grocery store.

  The lotto ticket that hit five out of six numbers on Saturday night.

  Another $3,200 for the lady who doesn’t gamble. Another phone call to her dutiful son.

  “So, you mean they’re going to pay me $3,200 for one ticket by itself?”

  “Yes, Mom. $3,214.64.”

  “I should have bought more than one ticket like I did with the others, huh?”

  “You did fine, Mom.”

  “I did fine. You’re going to come over and help me cash it in again?”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  Beginner’s luck. $3,214.64. Nice. But it wasn’t fair. What about guys like us who do it all the time? Yes, I admit it, I was jealous of my own mother.

  It just wasn’t fair.

  9.

  A couple months earlier, about a year after my father had died following years of battling diabetes, my mother sank into a deep depression about loss, grief, and lack of money.

  They had been together well over 40 years. He had been a longshoreman for most of their marriage and then a security supervisor at the Turkey Point Nuclear Power Plant before becoming bedridden. She had been a nurse’s aide for a while, but then went back to doing day work in the homes of the wealthy Miami Beach ladies. Throughout most of their marriage and the raising of three kids, my father had taken care of the bulk of the bills. He had been the provider. My mother had worked only if she wanted to. Now she couldn’t sleep at night, all the time worrying about what would happen if she couldn’t pay her bills. She feared she would lose her house. She feared becoming homeless. We—my two big sisters and myself—told her that she had nothing to worry about. We would always be there for her. As a flight attendant, an elementary school music teacher, and me a bus driver, none of us were rich, but we would pitch in, we assured her, to make sure our mother was taken care of.

  “It’s not the same,” she told me one morning, like 3 o’clock in the morning. I had just snuck back in the house from gambling late at the casino. I had told my wife that I had been hanging out with a friend and she had been grilling me about the smell of cigarettes on my clothes and accusing me of selfishness and meanness because I lacked the common decency to at least call when I planned on staying out late, and what the hell about work, didn’t I have to get up for work in just a few hours?—when my mother had called. Saving me.

  “It’s not the same,” she said. “Your father I could dep
end on. Oh, he was a son of a bitch sometimes, but he was my son of a bitch. You kids have your own families. I don’t want to be bothering my children. I promised myself that I would never become one of those parents who pester their children.”

  “You don’t pester us, Mom. We love you. We’d do anything for you.” I turned to my wife, who was propped up on a pillow with her arms folded across her chest, breathing in a huff, eager to resume the fight. I tried to drag her into it with my mother to distract her. “Right, hon?” I said to my wife. “Mom is not a pest, right, hon?”

  My wife turned her back to me and breathed a loud, indignant, “Harrumph.”

  I told my mother, “She said you’re not a pest, Mom. See? We all love you.” I smelled it then. My wife was right. I did smell like smoke. I reeked of smoke. And my pockets were stuffed with ATM receipts. I had dropped close to two grand that night, plus some cash that I already had in my pocket from checking the seats on the bus that day. The kids were always losing money in the seats. You dig around in there, you can always find a couple bucks. Some days you can find almost 10 bucks rooting around in those seats. You need every penny you can get when you gamble because when you are losing you have to spend it all. If someone says, Buy some medicine for me with this $20, my life depends on it, and you go to the casino, you will blow all of your money, blow all of the money in your ATM up to the daily maximum, then dig around in your pockets for whatever spare change you have remaining, and blow the $20 your friend gave you, whether his life depends on it or not. You will leave with nothing. Every penny you have must go into the machines because you never know when lady luck is going to dance with you. Tonight, I blew all of my loose cash, blew my daily max on the ATM, then went out to the car and found three quarters and 26 pennies in the toll tray. That made a dollar. That was all I needed. I ran back into the casino, found a floor person to turn the loose change into a paper dollar for me, and I dropped that bad boy into the machine and played it one quarter at a time, which gave me four pushes. The next thing I knew I had turned that lone dollar into $20, then $25, then $40, before my luck ran out. Now my total was counting down like a rocket ship ready for takeoff. I was down to $20. I said to myself, I am going to leave here with $10 in my pocket. And that wicked machine kept losing and losing. It was so frustrating. How could a machine that had turned one single dollar into $40 not hit something in 20 straight pushes—25, 26, 30 straight pushes? When it got down to nine dollars, I said, I am going to leave here with five dollars. At three dollars, I said, I am going to leave here with two dollars. At least I will have doubled my money. At two dollars, I started playing it one quarter at a time again. Eight pushes later, I left the casino with no money and absolutely no way to get any. I had hit my daily ATM maximum and the day was only about two hours old.

  If you’re going to be a gambler, here is what you’ve got to learn: The worst time to go to a casino is an hour or two before midnight, which is what I had done. See, if you hit your daily ATM maximum, which for me is $1,000, all you have to do is wait for midnight and the system resets itself. Now you are able to withdraw another $1,000, which is what I had done. Two grand in less than four hours. Smelling like smoke. Driving the car on E because I have no money for gas, through local roads because I have no change even for the turnpike tolls. Late getting home to the wife. Fighting with the wife. Lying to the wife. So sleepy it feels like sand is in my eyes, but I have to get up in about an hour and a half to get to the depot early so I can sneak on the other drivers’ buses and dig around in the seats for cash the school children lost so that I’ll have a few bucks to put gas in my car until my ATM limit resets at midnight. I did this to myself. I did this to myself. I am a gambler. A gambler is more asshole than head. A gambler is more asshole than heart. I’m an asshole. I have no head and no heart. “I love you, Mom. We all love you,” I said to my mother.

  “But I’ve been having these dreams,” she said, “about numbers. I want you to write them down and play them. When you hit that million in the lotto Saturday, you can have it. I’m too old for it. I want you to have it because I know you’ll take care of me.”

  “Numbers?” I said.

  “Yes. I saw them as bright as day. You know, I used to have dreams as a child and then things would come true that I dreamt about. You need to write these numbers down and then you’ll be rich and you can take care of me when you hit the lotto.”

  I said, “Okay,” and turned to my wife. “Hon, you got a pen and paper?” Her back was still turned to me. She did not answer. I told my mother to hold the phone and I dug around on the bureau until I found a pen. I used the back of one of my ATM receipts as the paper. “Okay, Mom, I’m ready.”

  And my mother began to tell me these numbers.

  “3.”

  “Okay.”

  “5.”

  “Okay.”

  “76.”

  “Mom, 76 is too high. The lotto doesn’t go up that high.”

  “Well, you do what you can with it. I’m just giving it to you as I saw it in the dream.”

  “Okay.”

  “43.”

  “Okay.”

  “46.”

  “Okay.”

  “2.”

  “Uh-huh. Okay.”

  “46.”

  “Mom, you said that one already.”

  “34, 24, 54, 12, 13.”

  “Mom, that’s too many numbers. You can only play six of them.”

  “11, 26, 36, 17.”

  “Mom …”

  “31, 42, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42.”

  I stopped writing. And sighed. Then started thinking of someplace new that I could stash my ATM receipts from my wife. I couldn’t throw them away. I had to keep them in case I hit something big so I could show the IRS how much money I had lost as a deduction. The ATM receipts themselves are a deduction. The fee is around two bucks a pop. You take your money out in increments of 40 and 60 because you’re lying to yourself about how much you’re going to spend. You do that 15 or 20 times a day, you’re talking 40 bucks a day just in ATM fees. You’re talking four to five hundred bucks a month in ATM fees alone if you visit the casino, let’s say, ten times a month. Then the bank charges you an additional monthly fee for using a non-network ATM machine. The ATM fees are a great deduction in and of themselves if you file your taxes, which you don’t because you’re too ashamed to admit that this is what you are. Sometimes you get clairvoyant and you see where all this is leading. Sometimes you think it’s God talking to you. Sometimes you cling to your desperate hope as your mother keeps on reciting the bright-as-day numbers from her dream.

  “46, 63, 64, 25, 36, 76, 77, 9, 10, 19, 46 …”

  Ah, Mom.

  10.

  There are only two kinds of gamblers: the lucky and the broke.

  For years I was the broke kind.

  No matter how little money I had, I found enough to gamble, though other things, like bills and whatnot, went unpaid.

  So much for a credit rating.

  I took the kids to Disney because there was a casino up around there that I wanted to try out. So here I was, leaving boy number one in charge of boys numbers two, three, and four so that I could sneak off to some casino. Keep in mind that funds were limited at the time. Keep in mind that the kids were all minors. Boy number one was only 15, but he looked 18. They made out okay, had fun, didn’t get lost. They stuck together. They stuck to the budget I set for them. They stuck to the conspiracy: Don’t tell Mom.

  Me? I lost my shirt at the casino. I had to borrow from what the boys had left over for gas money home.

  A couple months later God blessed me and I became the other kind of gambler. The lucky kind.

  I had always been a fan of the Rams. I’m not so into sports betting, but I had a friend in Vegas, F, I used to send a hundred bucks to every year to put on the Rams to win it all. The Rams were good back in the ’80s when they had Dickerson. Then they fell into a pit of mediocrity and ineptitude for more than a decade
. I still dutifully sent my hundred bucks every year to F in Vegas. In 1999, the Rams got religion and started beating everybody. By the end of the season they had the best record in football thanks mostly to the right arm of Kurt Warner and both legs of Marshall Faulk. The coaching genius of Dick Vermeil had a little something to do with it also. To make a long story short, the Rams were 150-to-1 underdogs to win it all when I bought my annual ticket back in June, and here they were in the Super Bowl, which they won. I cashed in a ticket for $15,000. My bank account had never been so happy.

  That started it for me. That was also the year I hit my first royal flush at the casino poker tables. The minimum you get for that, besides the pot, is $1,000. If you hit a royal with a jackpot attached to it, you can make 20 or 30 times that much.

  So I went from being a broke gambler to being a lucky gambler. The other kind. Everybody wanted to tap my stack for luck. Everybody wanted to borrow “lucky” money from me so they could catch some luck of their own. All the dealers and pit bosses knew my name. I was getting free drinks and free hotel rooms. Things like that. The dealers all wanted to deal to me so that I could hit something and tip them big. The pretty female dealers were flirting with me, though I had no interest in that kind of action at the time. That would come later, after I had really hit it big. But right then, all I wanted was to keep on gambling and keep on winning, which I did.

  The wife was happy. She had money to shop and pay bills. I was happy. I had money to gamble.

  If I wasn’t addicted before that incredible year, that was when it happened. It was a real good year. I never thought it would end.

  I never thought it could.

  My mother says what I did wrong was I should’ve listened to God. “I think God was trying to tell you,” my mother says, “Take the money and run, you damned fool.”