Cha-Ching! (3 page)

Theo had learned about roulette from reading Dostoyevsky's
The Gambler
. Rumor has it that Dostoyevsky wrote that story as a way to get money to pay off a huge gambling debt. Theo believed it—only a true gambler could write the kind of roulette scenes he did, with that perfect mix of blind hope and insanity. The grandmother who can't stop plunking rubles down on zero after just having won on that very number.
Zero. Zero. Zero
. She won't stop saying it. Theo was terrified to turn the page because she knew every winning streak eventually has to come to an end. All of the grandmother's relatives surround her at the table, sickened by her bravado, because if she loses all her money there'll be nothing left to mooch from her.

Theo watched the silver ball jump around the wheel.

“Red seven,” the croupier said, setting the marker down next to Theo's chips and throwing her an apologetic look before sweeping them away.

This time she put five dollars on number seven and five dollars on number eight.

“Good luck,” the croupier said, spinning the wheel again.

If either of her numbers hit, she would win $175. She watched the ball rattle around while the wheel slowed down, popping into the number eight slot and then out again.

“Black thirteen,” the croupier said, dropping his marker and sweeping Theo's chips away again.

She thought about betting thirteen, but decided to push her final five chips to the number eight. If she stopped betting eight now and it hit she'd never forgive herself.

“Good luck,” the croupier repeated.

Theo turned her back to the spinning wheel and lit a cigarette. She could hear way off in a corner of the casino the sound of someone vacuuming, then the clicking of the ball in the slots.

“Black thirteen,” the croupier called out.

Theo couldn't believe it had come up thirteen two spins in a row. She gave the croupier a defeated smile and walked away from the table. Since she'd done well the first time she'd ever played roulette, somewhere in her brain she really believed she had a knack for it or that maybe she was somehow able to will the silver ball to nestle into the slots of her favorite numbers. Winning is the worst thing that can happen to a gambler. After that first big win, Theo took the free casino bus from San Francisco to Reno several times a week, telling herself she was doing it to supplement the income from her job as a cashier at the Party Store. There were coupons in the paper that not only made the ride to the casino free, but gave travelers twenty-five dollars in “free” gambling money. She got paid fifty dollars to work a seven-hour shift at the Party Store, so instead of getting a second job, she would try to win a hundred dollars at the casino. The trick was getting out the door with the winnings.

Theo wandered over to a table where a few guys were clapping and yelling. The craps table is always the liveliest table in a casino. She didn't know how to play craps, so she just stood to the side next to a balding white guy wearing a ripped tuxedo T-shirt.

“Cocktails,” the cocktail waitress said, stopping next to Theo.

“Coke, please,” Theo said.

“Jack and Coke,” Tuxedo-tee said.

“You playing?” he asked Theo.

“I don't know how.”

“I can show you. I'm trying to quit,” he said. “I just got married.”

Theo nodded.

“Marriage is a compromise,” he told Theo.

She was surprised he was so forthcoming.

“Your best odds in the casino are right here,”
Tuxedo-tee
said, pointing to the craps table. “If you've got two hundred dollars to start with you can practically make a living off this.”

“I like easy living,” Theo said.

“What's your name?”

“Theo.”

“Mark,” Tuxedo-tee said. “You got two hundred dollars, Theo?”

Theo nodded.

“You want to learn how to do this?”

“Okay.” She counted two hundred dollars in twenties out of her pocket and held the money out to him.

“Put it down on the table,” he said, refusing to touch it. “You're going to laugh at how easy this is.”

Theo elbowed herself in among the small group of men and exchanged two hundred dollars for three small towers of chips. She could see Mark's eyes getting sweaty as he stood there telling her where to put the bets. He wouldn't touch the chips or the money because then he wasn't technically gambling, just like you're not technically touching the stripper during the lap dance if you keep your hands off her tits. But the gambler in him was alive as he told Theo what numbers to plunk her chips on. One of the rowdy guys threw the dice and everyone groaned. Theo looked at Mark, who signaled for her to put a new stack of chips where she'd just had them.

“Did I win?” Theo asked.

“Not yet,” Mark said.

Another rowdy guy threw the dice and Theo watched as they bounced around inside the table.

“Fuck,” Mark hissed. “This is the time.”

But the result was the same the next five or six times the dice were thrown, until in less than five minutes under Mark's tutelage she'd lost her entire two hundred dollars and still didn't understand how the game worked.

“I've never seen dice so unlucky,” Mark said.

It was such a gambler thing to say. Gamblers believe dice are oracles or monks or soothsayers—anything but just white plastic cubes, painted with black dots. Mark followed Theo away from the table and she could see the hunger in his eyes; he didn't want to leave the casino. She wanted to ditch him so she could focus on winning her money back, but she felt weirdly codependent with this stranger. As they walked up and down the rows of slot machines she understood every single step he took, the whole game of trying to walk casually when every cell just wants to hurry up and sit down and shove some goddamned money into a slot machine to feel those bright-colored packets of endorphins hanging like candy bars fall and dissolve in her brain.

There are so many different kinds of video slot machine themes that it shouldn't be hard for anyone to find one that appears to hold their very own destiny. Slot machines with lisping auctioneer bulls, and romantic cats that speak French, and goats that are surgeons. Theo always gravitated toward slot machines with animal themes because one day she wanted to have a small farm with a tiny country house and a duck pond. But instead of saving money for a house where she could have a long, gravel driveway flanked by attack geese, she sat in front of slot machines trying to line up a bunch of geese in tuxedos.

“Please God, please just give me one more goose.”

Mark steered them to a Playboy Bunny machine and said, “What about this one?”

Theo had figured she knew the target audience for the Playboy slot machines, and now it was confirmed.

She had forty dollars left in her pocket and pushed it into the bill feeder. She hit the
spin
button wishing with every fiber in her being for a miracle. But, despite Mark saying, “This machine's gonna heat up. Just wait!” she lost her forty dollars in an excruciatingly short amount of time.

“Well, I'm broke,” she said, getting up from the slot machine and feeling in her pocket for the room key.

“Oh,” Mark said. He seemed surprised, like she was abruptly ending a date and now he was going to have to figure out what to do with his life.

“Goodnight,” she said, through with being polite. She headed back to her room.

•

Theo had awakened something ugly inside herself, and while she'd managed not to drink she didn't want her new start in New York to be tarnished with her old demons. She felt self-conscious about someone having witnessed her losing money, like an alcoholic who wants to drink at home alone. And she had known, sitting next to Mark, that they were the same, both addicts. The fake nonchalance of just one more spin until all the money's gone. In San Francisco, during some gambling lows she'd sold her clothes, left bills unpaid, written bad checks and gotten money however else she could to be able to stay in the dark casino, pushing a button mindlessly and chain-smoking.

She'd started gambling by playing blackjack. She'd sit at the table and talk to the other players and they rooted each other on to beat the dealer. For as long as she was on a lucky streak and the chips were piling up in her favor everyone was a family of shipwrecked comrades. Her skin became thinner with each hour, until a single drop of alcohol spilt on her wrist could make her feel drunk. She was numb and wired at the same time. She could earnestly think she could fuck and marry everyone sitting at the table around her when she was winning. Even the dealers were on her side. It's not the dealer's money. The dealers wanted her to win so she would throw ridiculous tips at them. The dealers were gambling too, when they weren't working. But when her chips were gone and there wasn't any money left in her pocket to get more, and she'd already done the long walk of shame to the cashier booth or the ATM until there was no money left in those places, either, she would have to wait until midnight, when in the bank's mind it was a new day and her withdrawal limit rolled over. She'd stand behind the other hardcore gamblers, at first shifting her weight from foot to foot, trying to look casual, and then she would stop trying to look casual. She just waited in line with the others with pissed-off or scared expressions.

But there was something about dog track casinos especially that beckoned a certain type of hardcore gambler. No one strolls through the parking lot of a dog track casino; they're rushing to find a place where they can be alone and push a button, or push a pile of chips on a lucky number, or get teary when an ace is turned over in front of them like a healthy baby. Once, when Theo was hurrying to get inside a dog track casino, she passed a flaming car in the parking lot. The fire department hadn't arrived yet. Who knew if anyone had even called the fire department; she didn't. She barely slowed down to double check over her shoulder to make sure her truck was parked far enough away that if the flaming car blew up, hers wouldn't catch fire from the sparks. There were a few people around her, walking past it like zombies too, barely turning their heads to look at the flames. It seemed like all the gamblers were under time constraints or were lying to someone in order to be there. Their kids thought they were out buying groceries or their husbands and wives had been asleep when they had slowly coaxed money from their wallets. And when there was no money left to steal, they set their own cars on fire for the insurance money. They could just light a match, and while it burned, ask the cocktail waitress for a complimentary soda or beer and try to win a little something at the blackjack table.

During the last year in San Francisco, when her drinking really took off, she would take time off from the Party Store and take the bus to the casino every day. She started to recognize other people gambling at the slot machines. At first, she was winning. She was getting free drinks and free money. She felt like she had figured out some great mystery; it was so easy to win a couple hundred dollars. But soon she wasn't able to get home with the money. She thought, if I can win a couple hundred then I can win a couple hundred more, and then she found she would stay until she'd lost all her winnings, or if by some stroke of luck she did make it out the door with the money, then she lost it and more the next day when she returned. Theo wore lucky dice underwear when she went to the casino and a lucky royal flush belt buckle. And in the hours she sat next to other gamblers she'd learn she wasn't the only one wearing special outfits or a piece of jewelry from a dead relative as a charm.

Once Theo sat next to an old woman with short, dyed-black hair who was wearing a leopard leotard and black tights under a giant black parka. Her tiny, wrinkled face was dwarfed behind an extra-large white Styrofoam cup of coffee. She was smoking and she reached over to light Theo's cigarette for her.

“Yesterday, I won,” she said, “and when I win, then I wear the same thing again the next day. Because it's lucky,” she said, waving her hand over her leotard.

When Theo was losing she didn't want to talk to anyone. But she couldn't resist the tale of the lucky leotard. The woman looked a little deeper into Theo's eyes and told her that she wore a diaper to the casino, a friend told her about it, because that way she could drink as much coffee as she wanted and never get up from the slot machine to pee. Theo wanted to ask if she wore the same diaper, too. After that, two things happened. One, Theo felt much better about her gambling problem because she didn't wear a diaper. And two, she became obsessed with staring at the other gamblers' asses, trying to figure out which ones seemed unnecessarily puffy or crinkly.

About a month before she decided to leave San Francisco Theo had found herself chain-smoking and gambling for sometimes fourteen hours straight, her brain cracking from the barnyard sounds of slot machine animals. She went from roulette to blackjack to the slots. She stopped playing roulette because money went too fast, so she moved on to blackjack for better odds. She'd sit at someone's blackjack table drinking free gin and tonics and playing cards. She'd drink and drink and almost never feel drunk, just heavy and depressed. She fell in love with the kind eyes of the dealers.

Once a dealer looked at her and said, “Are you going to be here my whole shift?”

Theo didn't realize she'd already been playing cards for eight hours. She couldn't leave, she was on such a winning streak that day. When the dealer's shift was over Theo stayed, and with the new dealer she managed to lose everything.

•

On the way back to her room Theo scanned the carpet for money, a quarter even. She found she was religious in casinos: If God loved her he'd let her find a quarter on the carpet, and she would use that quarter to try just one more time, drop it into a slot machine and hit the jackpot. But, deep down she knew no one hit the jackpot on a quarter they found on the rug. Ever.