Bandit (17 page)

T
he next day we were in Detroit, in a casino, walking the labyrinthine floors of slot machines with my sister and my best friend Lindsey. My boyfriend went upstairs to play poker while we wasted money on slots and drinks. I examined the people as I wove around through the crowds and insect noises of the machines. The air of the enormous room felt thick—steeped in smoke, alcohol, and fried food smells—and I had to remind myself these were games. They were exciting games adults chose to spend money on for fun. Almost everyone seemed miserable, locked in the narrow focus of his or her game.

I had not spent much time in casinos and had stayed away from gambling, purposefully, not wanting to know how to play poker or whatever card games my friends or family played. Here, in the casino, I registered my disgust with the
seductiveness of the environment. Low warm lights, soft curving mazes of machines and table games, the drinks and the buffets, a feeling of envelopment in a non-world, neither night nor day, a floating zone outside regular concerns. Women seemed to populate the massive plots of machines spread around cramped curved tables where mostly men gambled on cards or roulette. Men stood tensely at craps tables, focused. Men and women sat at blackjack tables stolidly, more slumped there.

I wanted to see if I could feel gambling for the fun it was supposed to be. I wanted to know if I could enjoy risk like my dad did. I found a mostly empty five-dollar table with all women and sat down, put my money in front of the momish dealer, and told her I had never played blackjack before.

Of all the casino games, blackjack had to be Dad’s. My sister had told me as much when I asked her what exactly he was losing money on at the casino. He wasn’t patient enough for poker, not foolish enough for roulette or craps, not brain-dead enough for slots. Blackjack is fast, repetitive, and offers players an illusion of control, which would have appealed to Dad.

I knew the basic premise, but no strategy on exactly when it’s best to hit or stand. Least of all, I didn’t know what counting cards meant, not that I would be good or fast enough with math to focus on it anyway. The dealer seemed tired and distracted, but perfectly practiced at being friendly, a good comfort. Her hand motions were perfunctory, a little lazy, exaggerating the clarity of the actions, I assumed for the benefit
of the cameras overhead. Three older women sat at the table with me. Once I told them this was my first time playing they wanted to help me too, gesturing the tap (hit) or wave-wipe (stand) hand motions to me, sometimes to suggest what to do with each hand, and made sympathetic “aww” noises when I lost. The women were sweet, in fresh perms and holiday sweatshirts, playing slowly, like me, and chatting, knitting us together, not against the dealer or each other but the cards themselves. One talked about a blackjack tournament she’d just left, how it was too different and too aggressive. “I prefer this. Just sitting here, no pressure,” she said and laughed, and the other women laughed too.

Another woman sat down at the table, remarking that she was glad to find a table “with just us gals.” She caught on that I was new and brought out a wallet-sized, color-coded chart of instructions on how to play every hand. “You can buy these, you know, and bring this to the table even to check it. It tells you just what to do.” The oldest one elbowed me and said, “See, we all in it together. Nobody plays against nobody, that’s why I like it.” It was true. At the table, as shy and cold as I thought I would be there, and as resistant and ignorant as I was to what I was doing, I began to see it right.

It was clearer, lighter, and more social than I imagined it to be. Against a glut of noise and choices beyond the table, the restraint on my choices, my movements, the outcomes of them, and the fixed loop of play settled me out of myself, into a simpler consciousness. A trustworthy routine, one thing to do at a time: one card to watch, flip, and react to, nothing else.

In a few minutes I doubled my money. Then lost some, then tripled it. “Beginner’s luck!” the women said. I began to feel the split between my sensible urge to walk away and the loopy push to keep going. Because however much you have won, there is always a new hand; there is always more money than what you have. And the ritual of the new deal looks just like the last deal: timelessness. I stayed, and lost a bit, back to having just doubled my money. I got up, felt good about leaving, and liked having the chips in my coat pocket. The money you win gambling is better than money. It is converted into meaning. It affirms you. You made the right choices, you are smart, you took risks and it made your life better. No work, just money. Out of nothing, and so fast.

The goal, I suppose you must call it that, is not particularly to win, but to keep playing. Gamblers and psychologists will both tell you this. Of course, a gambler always has a finite budget, so to keep playing one must win, but the distinction is important. A stretch of gambling is living a whole little life in one sitting, plugging into a faster unfolding of contingencies: wins and losses come logically, clearly, fairly dealt. The proportion of control and providence
seems
balanceable, with just a little more cleverness. A whole life. No wonder we want to keep playing.

A
fter a drink at the bar, I went back to the blackjack table. The dealer now was a sour, quiet man who seemed less patient with my lack of experience and slowness with simple math. The night had brought a younger crowd, more excitable and loose. The smoke was thicker and whoops and group cheers pushed through the crowds. Shifty, quiet players came and went, unlike the old ladies. There were men in leather jackets and baseball caps, alone, drunk couples, often arguing, and middle-aged women more interested in flirting than the game. Right away I won again, and then kept playing. The dealer scoffed at me when I didn’t know to split my aces. The other players were barely watching each other. I lost all my money. The money that transforms into play credits, meaning-chips, is the vehicle into this identity-less loop, and when it is gone, so is the loop. Down to my
last five dollars, I thought seriously about going a few steps over to the ATM so I could take out more. But when I got up from the table and walked in the direction of the lobby, where I could feel the outdoor air buffeting in from the endlessly moving revolving door, and remembered the real world, I didn’t want to go back.

I didn’t like it. I didn’t think it was evil, just shallow and wasteful. I don’t enjoy risk, the “thrill” is just anxiety to me, and I couldn’t exactly afford to gamble anyway. While my chips were being pulled away from me I tried to remember the feeling of the lost bills in my hand and calculate what food or gas they could buy, to punish myself with the thought. Nothing here was sexy, except the forgetting maybe, especially the forgetting of the odds. The neatness of complete escape: a hospital bed, a farm—a gambling table, I see now. The elaborate regularity of the ritual, the feeling of possibility paired with the insane secret confidence all players seemed to have:
they
will be the ones to outwit this unfair game, and it could be
this
next spin/card/roll that will make up for all the others that kept them there. Absorption. It reminded me of what Dad liked about church. It reminded me of where he was now.

Thousands of people in thousands of tiny, locked game-dreams, suspended in timeless cycles, pointed in the kind of focus that hope or pain induces. Fun. But sick. I never felt comfortable enough with escapist self-indulgence, or even regular comfort most of the time; absorption sickened
me—couldn’t
let
myself go too far. I sometimes think it is because I was afraid of letting myself be happy, because I hated that self somewhat, didn’t think I deserved it.

Also I tend to think it’s healthier to enter the pain of the world and see its insides than to block it. I suppose this is me writing this now. I don’t actually know if it is healthier.

Foucault describes the environment of prisons as “an architecture that would operate to transform individuals: to act on those it shelters, to provide a hold on their conduct.” The prison we’d just visited imprinted upon us with authority the seriousness of its message: this is a place of punishment. We listened—we were quiet, kept our heads down, moved obediently, with respect. The next day in the casino acted upon us as its counterpoint: it encouraged a similar loss of self and time, but voluntary. Both replaced the mess of the world with a tidier one.

In these pseudo worlds my dad gave himself over. They controlled him away from us, away from the ordinariness of work and boring family life and debts. I don’t think he would admit he ever wanted to surrender himself to the casino. Or to prison. He might say he felt helpless against them. In the lobby of the casino I sat on a bench and watched gamblers shuffling into the dark gaming cavern. I searched their faces. Were they helpless? Were they fine, happy even? In sweatpants, in leather jackets, in cowboy hats, in puffy coats, in a daze or laughing or with fierce energy, they came in for a bit of fun. I imagined my dad being compelled into the dark
room, steely eyed and drained, aiming only to make enough back for the mortgage or to stop a bookie’s threats, a victim of too much fun. I reimagined him as no victim at all but a perpetrator, a callous cheat, his chest lifted, shoulders straight, smiling calmly. On a winning day I imagine he walked out as the latter. On a losing day, well, there was always tomorrow.

M
oney is already a metaphor for something else. It is not so much a thing but an agreement among people, a relation, and has no real immediacy in its solid form—the coins and paper and plastic cards don’t
do
anything, don’t function as objects, but as concepts, promises. In a regular exchange, it stands in for a person’s time, or some materials, food, honest work. In gambling the metaphor is doubled and in its doubling its relation is smeared: those things converted into money, then money converted into credits, distances you from time, materials, honesty. But the conversion of cash into gambling chips is not a conversion, not really; it’s a purchase, a done deal. You buy a little chance to prove yourself. You buy a little time to do something simple. The credits or chips hold a ghost of a ghost. The money is already gone.

Maybe gambling abstracted money too much for him, prepared him, psychologically, to commit crimes for it. “Money forces humans to reduce qualitative differences to quantitative ones. It forces a numbering of things,” writes Jack Weatherford in
The History of Money.
The hope for numbering impossible intangibles must bore even harder into a gambler’s relations with money. If Dad was in serious trouble with bookies, or dangerously overdue on bills, he had family he could’ve turned to. How his list of sensible options was turned upside down so that robbing banks was on top and asking family for help was on the bottom has everything to do with feelings. Unquantifiable, uncountable, uncontrollable feelings—fear, mostly.

I can’t say for sure how he felt about money. But I myself know what it’s like to steal. It felt just like gaining credits to continue, symbols I neither deserved nor honored beyond their immediate exchange for some of the things that ran my life. To continue is what mattered most.

Now money operates for me as a dull and unpleasant necessity, as it does for other creative people who don’t directly pursue it in itself. If I have enough, I don’t care beyond that, and I have certainly not been particularly good at keeping it, although I am getting much better.

No, I hate money. I resent its power. Meaningless, bodiless, total power. And I resented the people who bought those stolen goods from me online years ago, knowing their money was likely honest, and their honesty was touching my dishonesty in the exchange, exposing it more brightly to me and just to me. I used their honesty, and I envied it.

Dad did the same thing with our trust. He
cheated.
In Caillois’s
The Definition of Play,
he describes cheating in games as simply another way to
use
the rules, paradoxically, to keep playing, like any other player wants: “If a cheat violates the rules, he at least pretends to respect them. He takes advantage of the other players’ loyalty to the rules.”

My sister walks into a bank and uses her key to open the
EMPLOYEES ONLY
door, puts her nametag on, sits behind her window, and flips the
CLOSED
sign to
OPEN
. Her first job out of high school was at a bank, and she’s never left. She accesses the bank in the exact opposite way of her father: honestly.

Years of working as an auto loan officer has left her conflicted. She likes being tasked with making the right decision—who should get what loan when, who has what credit and can handle what repayment schedule. But she sees it as unfair, heartbreaking. The amount of people with bad credit scores and enormous debt in a city like Detroit, under long-term economic depression, is staggering. Most people just want an auto loan so they can get a car to drive to work, since public transit is sorely lacking in the area. Every day she turns people down. The dealerships and the banks make their profits off an undereducated public when it comes to loans, and to her, it is a moral issue. I asked her once what kind of financial job she’d love and she said internal auditor, because “you just go in and tell people what they’re doing wrong.” I had to laugh a little. It was sweet, her unabashed directness. And she’d be good at that. She wants to set things right. It’s
rare, although it shouldn’t be, that a person can thoroughly apply nothing but integrity to money.

I think it is a point of security for her, to work in a bank. It’s a connection to him she probably would not consciously entertain. Also, I think she genuinely likes money. She is brilliant with it, saves and spends without error, has an inhumanly perfect credit score after years of rebuilding it from the damage Dad did to it, owns an enormous house on a golf course full of possessions she earned. She knows about money. I don’t think it is a matter of respect. I think it is a matter of control.