Gambling Is My Trade
By: Alan Asnen
Tags: Humor, Fiction, Short Story, Gambling, Satire

Satire

Gambling Is My Trade

EXCLUSIVE TO MUDDYUM: A Frank Gould Story

Photo by Keenan Constance on Unsplash

I don’t have the brain for games. Never lucky at cards or any type of gambling. I had streaks. Everybody has streaks. But no genuine luck. I didn’t gamble much until I hit my golden years. You know, eighteen, nineteen.

Those wonderful golden years. Brain like a brick painted gold.

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During that time, out of a rudimentary necessity, I encountered my first loan sharks and one of them turned into a friend. It’s funny when you do business with a loan shark who is also your friend. It’s like having a lawyer who is also your friend. One moment it’s business, the next not, but the business time is…different.

On Saturdays we would have a friendly dinner at this French bistro on Lexington Avenue. Just a couple of blocks away he had introduced me to his tailor at the Saint Laurent store who, in turn, had introduced me to Marlene Dietrich who lived in the swanky apartment building above and didn’t know me from Adam but seemed to think me cute. She looked me up and down and smiled. Yeah, me.

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Anyway, he began to reveal that, for me, losing wasn’t an absence of luck — obviously, right? — but the presence of a kind of stupidity or blindness in the way I played cards. I didn’t pay enough attention, he explained. Other games were more a question of chance, but cards — particularly poker, my game of choice — could be studied because you were playing with a limited deck and, if you looked around, you might notice you were playing against people. People, too, could be read.

Those being my golden years, the information basically reflected off that golden block.

Later in life, during my doldrums of depression before I started sweeping my Berkeley driveway again, playing solitaire on the computer and noticing how I lost all the time, I remembered that it wasn’t bad luck or the computer program. I wasn’t paying attention to the cards. Or the people playing.

Marguerite would come by and comment. “How can you lose that miserably all the time,” watching me sit there at the computer.

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I’d make some stupid remark to get her off my back, like, “I’ve only been doing this for a few days. I thought a dropdown menu had something to do with porn.”

You would be correct in assuming one high function of my brain, gold brick or not, never let me down, even in the worst of times.

When he was a child, the Buddha was a spoiled brat. It’s important that we know and understand this if we are attempting to study Buddhism, especially if one is trying to be a Buddhist. That rotten kid went on to find wisdom and Enlightenment. He turned into a wonderful human being. That’s the whole point.

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99.9999 percent of the Christians in the world have no earthly idea who the heck Jesus was as a child. However, it turns out he was, to turn a phrase, Satan’s spawn. If you looked sideways at him, he’d put a spell on you, and you done. Done. Cooked. He mocked his elders to the point where they contemplated suicide by tossing themselves off a cliff and then he invited them to jump. The hidden stories known only to the church scholars make you think crucifixion was too good for him. He should have been drawn and quartered, splayed, skin ripped off an inch at a time. Trust me. But…he ended up a pretty decent guy.

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So they say.

Everything is apocryphal. As far as I’m concerned, just about all such stories are apocryphal until Marconi. Then most of them merely became lies. For money.

People get twisted by anger. Gambling, losing, makes people angry, most of them. If they’re smart.

Both the Buddha and Jesus talked about this quite a bit, as did many others way back in the day. Not the gambling, specifically, but the anger.

People still do, apparently because those two guys, and the others, did not quite get the message across. But the worst part is that people feel the source of the anger twisting them, and react to it, often never understanding that source. Sometimes they come to regret their reactions, and they turn that regret against themselves, or others, again in some sort of anger or self-inflicted pain. This happens to nearly everyone on occasion.

Most people cannot focus continuously and lose focus because of such anger. Of course, that doesn’t apply to psychotics. Psychotics focus continuously but very narrowly. That’s what identifies them. The twisted nature that drives them, provides their focus, defines their lives. If you have the radar for it, that’s how you spot them.

The misconceptions of others, as in the overwhelming majority who have no radar but suffer under the misconception that they do, the definitions that others give to people that define others often lead us astray into believing people are something they aren’t, though. It gets confusing when you don’t know people well enough, and we usually don’t know people as well as we should. At least not before we judge them.

Any tales about misunderstood old people, like the movie UP for example, will explain that old saw.

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There’s a polite knock first. Always quick, meaningless. Then the door opens.

The white smock cannot hide Morris’ fattening belly. Don’t you really trust fat doctors? “So, Frank, how’s the shoulder? And the leg?” Somehow, he always looks happy when he walks into the room.

I wonder if they teach a class in that?

I shrugged. “Shoulder? Slow and steady. Leg? Just slow.”

He puts my chart down and picks up my wrist like it was his morning coffee. “They told me at the clinic you never went back after the first visit. You were supposed to keep up with those shoulder exercises. Not to mention the leg. Did you?”

“Nope, I didn’t mention the leg to anyone.”

He stared at me dryly while the sleeve puffed up then deflated.

“Sure, Morris. Like I said, slow and steady.” I stood up. “Look, I can almost do that full Shirley Temple again.”

He stared at my modeling over his glasses. “I’m impressed. Sit down.” You notice when people never say please or thank you. “I set you up with that nice-looking young therapist for a reason…”

“Yeah, and it did wonders for the wrong organ. I don’t like those places. If I were rich, thin and had lots of time on my hands, maybe it would be different. Plus, I’m just a scoonch neurotic. Maybe you’ve noticed over the years? No offense, but I don’t even like coming to see the doctor. You’re a doctor, aren’t you? So, these amateurs really scare me…”

“You’re rich and thin enough. They aren’t amateurs, Frank, they are well-trained…”

“They touch you everywhere, even the men.”

“That’s their job.”

“Well, they can do it to someone else.”

He came over with the sleeve. “Let me take your blood pressure before it gets too high.”

“When I had this shoulder problem back in Tennessee, all I had to do was lift fifty-pound sacks of grain every day. Slow and steady. It was gone.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Didn’t need any clinics. Didn’t have to go to a doctor. My neighbor, Dave, told me.”

“A veritable mountain man.”

“It was hill country, Morris.”

“Be quiet for a minute, will you?”

“Morris, are you ever going to remarry?”

“Nope. I like being a bachelor.”

“You didn’t like all those years with Rebecca?”

“Of course I did, I was very much in love with Rebecca.”

“So…”

“So, Rebecca is gone. Things change.”

Things change. “Yeah. I guess they do.”

“Be quiet while I check your lungs. Just breathe in deep. If you don’t shut up, you’ll make me late for my tee time.”

Doctors are invariably psychotic because they are focused on golf. Golf is undeniably a game. I don’t even understand why rich white men play. Unless they are despicable people like politicians and gangsters. Ah, there I go, being redundant again.

We had to walk by a golf course in Douglaston all the time when I was a kid. I was a big walker, walked down Northern Boulevard to the movie theater in Bayside. Was kicked out of seeing Elmer Gantry there. Walked down to Flushing to the RKO Theater to see The Great Escape, The Guns of Navarone and The Magnificent Seven. To the UA Theater in Forest Hills for the newest James Bond movies.

Quite the walker. That should make me a golfer, since nine of ten golfers play for the walking. They say. But, no. They say baseball is boring. Golf is boring. The moment of tension, if it ever comes, trying to get that ball in the cup. It creates more stress for you than all the walking could ever release.

And the mental energy wasted while walking on, thinking about what golf club to use next or how to cajole your caddy into a piece of advice. Better your cerebellum churned over what was going on around you, on the other side of the fence enclosing that golf course, or even inside you, rather than something so inconsequential.

What’s it all for? Gambling. That’s what.

Pfft. Gambling, just another traditional institution.

Speaking of golf and institutions, my wife hated Bob Hope. Something slightly painful between us at moments, like on movie night. It was an intense dislike she inherited from her father, her mother as well, as far as I knew, never having met her mother. She never had to talk about it at length, I could gather the impressions.

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Her eyes, mostly. I understood it as plain as a piece of pound cake. Something completely political. The way she and Willard saw politics in black and white. Like a cookie. In terms of what they saw about this question of hypocrisy on an emotional level, too.

I suppose I had my difficulties with Hope when I was younger, but those didn’t last very long. I can’t claim that I personally had the courage, if that’s the right word, to climb up the ladder, if that’s what it was, that people like Hope scaled. Because maybe he was better than I am. I don’t know. I seriously doubt I’m better than he was.

I look at what he did and what I’ve done. Was he a hypocrite? Of course. But certain hypocrisies are necessary, some lies have to be told. You accomplish nothing without them. In order to keep faith with certain people you have to be able to suck it up, smile that gruesome smile, rather than gambling on showing your true feelings.

Willard and Robin didn’t agree. A lot of people don’t. You know what? They were both liars. Myself, I don’t like people based on the people they associate with. That’s my flaw. One of them. My wife was a social liar. That was her flaw. She actually did not have many. Guess how many social liars there are? You’ll lose count quickly.

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I can’t do it most of the time, myself. I try to laugh things off. My true feelings come out, sometimes they cripple me, and I just can’t deal with situations. Mrs. Manness told me never to play poker. That was the second grade. It’s been obvious at least that long. That’s why people like Hope are heroes in many ways, icons, role models, because of their natural hypocrisy. Their gift for fooling us.

Forget about whatever we might be thinking about politics, they might be fooling us there, too, for our own good. Maybe not. What does it matter? Politics come and go; they change on a whim for most people.

Real politics for most people has to do with their stomachs, the roof over their heads, the future of their kids. Those folks don’t want to gamble with anything if they know what’s good for them. Unlike my folks.

You think of it in terms of anything else, the way I used to, the way Willard and Robin did, you’re an elitist idiot. I could never successfully argue this point with Robin, she stood her ground. I loved her for standing her ground. That was not a flaw, just a disagreement. But you know me, I’m stubborn, too.

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When I was a kid, learning to love Hope because he was the creative ideal for Bugs Bunny, among other things, I was learning to hate Plato because I thought Plato was a capitol F Fascist, down as he was on democracy.

But, over time, as I read Plato more closely, and came to understand that he merely better understood the outcome of things, the very nature of things, and saw that everything was temporary, and that, from his perspective, completely built in to democracy was its own doom, I understood that Plato wasn’t a Fascist but, from his perspective, a Realist.

What’s a Realist? Someone without kids who still doesn’t want to gamble.

Was Hope a part-time philanderer, a liar about his wealth, a shameless marketer? Everything is temporary, and everything is flawed.

I’ve lived a long time now. I look myself in the mirror, most days more than once. I don’t know how you do these balancing acts, no, I still don’t. Everyone has good and bad in them. How does it work?

By François-André Vincent — Musée Fabre (brochure), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32949659

Take a look at Anthony Wiener. There’s an extreme case. He is our country’s, our century’s Alcibiades. Maybe. Couldn’t keep his cock off the phone. Maybe even worse than that.

But he devoted his life to serving the best interests of poor people, every living day.

How do you deal with that balancing act? I don’t know the answer for people like that or myself. I don’t know if there can be an answer, do you?

There’s this old saying: You pays your dues, you takes your chances.

Don’t judge?

Don’t judge.

Alan Asnen copyright 2019