With a Little Luck: A Novel (4 page)

I wouldn’t buy into it if nine times out of ten my superstitions weren’t confirmed. But they are. They say that everything happens in threes.… It’s true. One famous person dies and two more will
follow. You get a paper cut and stub your toe? Count on biting your lip the next time you eat a piece of fruit. But fear not, it works in the reverse as well. You meet a great guy and get a promotion at work.… You’re bound to find that pair of jeans that’s been missing since October of two years ago.

To understand why I believe these things and not think I’m entirely off my rocker, I guess you need to know a little something about my dad, Brian Lambert. To this day, my father will insist that every superstition he has ever passed down to me is fact, not hypothetical—that luck is achieved by following a “code,” and luck is, well, kind of like my dad’s religion.

My dad was a professional gambler for my whole childhood. His game of choice was poker, and he was good. He would explain at length that poker is a skill and it has nothing to do with luck. But he could turn on a dime and tell you everything in life has to do with luck, so it would get confusing. Regardless, he had about sixteen thousand superstitions that I had to honor and live by or there would be hell to pay in the form of guilt, blame, and shame.

My dad always told me that the world was “my oyster.” For one thing, I’m allergic to shellfish. That makes the analogy bad enough to begin with. But have you ever looked at an oyster? I mean, really stopped to give it a close examination? There’s that curving, cloudy-gray shelf of shellfish fleshiness, topped by a dirty-brown ruffled disk, all swimming under a layer of glossy slime, the whole thing looking like a pile of washed-up sea vomit, or something you pull out of your sink drain when it’s clogged.

So that’s what my world is?

Bottoms up!

If Dad had only said, “The world is your fudge-mocha latte with caramel shavings,” I’d have been on my way.

So now I’m just as superstitious as my dad—and not in a good
way. Not even in an “isn’t that adorable” way. I believe giving certain gifts can have catastrophic effects. For example, giving someone a watch is basically telling that person that it’s time for them to go. Ditto for shoes. Give someone a pair of shoes and they will walk right out of your life in them. Seeing an ambulance is very unlucky, unless you pinch your nose. I won’t step on cracks, walk under ladders, or say goodbye to someone on a bridge.

Oh, it goes on. I don’t mind Friday the thirteenth, oddly enough, but I refuse to travel on a Tuesday if it’s the twenty-second. I believe that everything happens for a reason, and one misstep can have disastrous consequences. And don’t get me started on snakes, owls, black cats, the number four, or broken mirrors.

If you ask my best friend, Natalie, she’ll tell you I am insane and that none of this stuff is true. But she secretly quasi–buys into it, too. Yet she’ll say that I waste so much time and energy worrying about if I’m doing the wrong thing, stepping on a superstition, or paving the way for disaster that I don’t have enough time to actually enjoy my life. Which a) is not true, and b) is a total contradiction, since anytime I’m out of earshot she’ll say that she’s had bad luck for the past four years because she broke a mirror and now she just has to suffer through the next three.

Now, if I’d known about her broken mirror I could have solved the problem when it happened, but because she doesn’t want to encourage my craziness, she kept it from me. Too bad, because I would have told her she simply had to wait seven hours before picking up the broken pieces (one for each year of potential bad luck) and then bury them outside in the moonlight. But she didn’t tell me. So now she suffers.

Poor thing. It’s sad, really.

When I was little I thought that we were extremely fancy people. We’d drive up to Vegas every weekend and stay in hotels where they’d treat us like royalty. My mom and I practically lived on room service, and all of our meals would be comped.

My older brother, Peter, would usually stay at home or crash with friends. He was already a teenager when I was still carrying around stuffed animals. I loved him, of course, but he was always a bit of a stranger to me growing up. Once I was in high school and he was in his twenties we finally bonded, but by the time I hit my twenties he was in his thirties and living in Chicago.

So Peter missed out on our Vegas trips, and I always wondered if he knew what he was missing. I guess when you’re a teenager you definitely have better things to do—at least you think you do. To me, Vegas was like Disneyland. Minus the rides, of course, but I don’t much care for roller coasters, anyway. Between all the different hotels and themed casinos, it was my own version of an amusement park. I knew the names of all of the dealers at Dad’s favorite tables in town, and they all knew me. It made me feel special. Looking back, I think they felt sorry for me and that’s why they were so nice—what little girl wants to spend all of her time in smoke-filled rooms with no windows or clocks, watching her dad go through the crazy highs and lows that go with serious gambling? If the little girl doesn’t know anything different, then it’s not so bad. Until she grows up and realizes that nobody else lived that way, that smiles from people taking your money don’t always mean friendship, and that although you can specifically seek out a magic show … everything in Vegas is pretty much smoke and mirrors. A guy can lose his mortgage money in an instant, but a buffet and a prostitute can make him still somehow end up feeling like he won something. Until the sun comes up, anyway.

That’s the one thing my dad never did, though—cheat on my
mom. Through all of their drama, and there was plenty of it, he always thought the sun rose and set with her. The problem was that he spent so much time in casinos he never actually knew if the sun was rising or setting.

Nor did he care. He’d get lost in the games, and he’d be lost to us.

One time I took the elevator downstairs into Harrah’s, wearing my footie pajamas, in the middle of the night, hoping I could drag my dad back upstairs because I knew how upset Mom was that he still hadn’t come to bed. But my dad had an excuse that I know he believed with all his heart: Tommy Lee Jones was eating in the Oyster Bar, and when Tommy Lee walked in, he “nodded” at my dad. My dad took that as a sign that he was gonna win big that night. Because how often do you see a real live movie star, and how often does that star make eye contact with you? Dad’s craps table was suddenly, miraculously “hot” within moments.

The problem with this particular night, aside from the obvious problems associated with a five-year-old wandering around in a casino, was twofold: One, I didn’t tell my mom I was leaving our room and managed to sneak out when she was asleep, so when she woke up and found me gone, she thought I’d been kidnapped. She stormed into the casino, looking for me, wearing only her nightgown, sobbing to the point of barely being able to breathe. And two, when after almost an hour Mom finally found me, I tried to explain that I’d gone downstairs to bring Dad back for the night, but he couldn’t come back right then because he got a “sign” from Tommy Lee Jones. But the words “Tommy Lee Jones” never actually emerged from my mouth. The words that emerged from my mouth were “Kathie Lee Gifford.” See, I couldn’t remember what name he said. I knew it was someone famous, and I knew it had “Lee” in the middle, and my mom watched
Regis and Kathie Lee
every morning and my dad would always comment about how cute
she was, “if she’d just maybe stop talking,” so Mom already had a tiny jealous streak when it came to Kathie Lee.

“What do you mean he can’t come home because of Kathie Lee Gifford?” Mom said through a smile that I knew wasn’t a real smile because of how her teeth were clenched. The bad smile turned into a worse smile seconds later when I replied, “He said she made him suddenly ‘hot.’ ”

“Oh,
did she now
?” More teeth. More clenching. This was not good.

“I said he should come back upstairs, but he said something about ‘crap’ and Kathie Lee being hot—”

“That’s it,” my mom cut me off. “I’ve heard enough. And I’ve had enough.”

That was pretty much the point of no return. My mom lost it. She packed up our bags and said we were done with Vegas … and my father. At least she was.

There were a good number of years when I felt guilty about it. Like if I’d only gotten Tommy Lee Jones’s name right, my parents would still be together and we’d have been a happy family. But I know better. It could have been anything. Or nothing. And it wasn’t even the Kathie Lee debacle that was the last proverbial roll of the dice. It was the fact that her child was wandering in a casino, in footie pajamas, at three a.m. That did it.

I’m pretty sure my mom hasn’t been back to Vegas since that night. My parents divorced six months later. Even so, my dad never stopped loving my mom, nor did he stop loving Vegas. I’d spend every third weekend with him in his rented apartment in the Valley—the less cool (and predominantly less expensive) part of Los Angeles—watching him bet on sports games and play online poker, once that became “a thing.”

I actually loved our weekends. And I love my dad, but then
again, I didn’t have to be married to him. I could see how frustrating the gambling thing could be. Aren’t poker players complete liars by virtue of the game? That could complicate things and blur trust in even the most trusting and trustworthy parties. Especially in a marriage. But in his defense, it wasn’t like my dad had a job and quit it to play poker full-time, risking their financial security. They met when they were just out of college and he hadn’t really even figured out what he was going to do with his life. He was playing a lot of poker at the time, and one day he kind of realized that he was making a decent living at it. He was being referred to as a “pro” poker player before he even knew he was one. And suddenly he was ranked and winning tournaments left and right. I asked him what happened, years after he’d stopped playing professionally—what really happened that forced him out of the tournament circuit—and the look he gave me was a combination of frustration, righteousness, and sorrow.

“You know,” he said.

“I don’t, Dad,” I pressed. “I really don’t actually know what happened.”

What I did know was that he had been accused of cheating, but I knew my dad, and he wasn’t a cheater. There was some big controversy that was at once public and private. Public enough to have shamed his name and forced him off the national circuit and into a life of low-level sports gambling with bottom-feeder bookies and guys you don’t want to screw over. And private enough that nobody ever knew the story behind the story.

There was a long pause. I’d never asked my dad point-blank, and he knew that it was time to tell me, if only to finally get it off his chest.

“You remember your uncle Lou, right?” he said, eyebrows raised, lines gathering on his forehead.

He knew I did. Lou was a character. Lou was one of those honorary uncles who’s not related to you by blood but who you know would give you his kidney if you needed it. Of course, fortunately for Lou, since he’s not actually a blood relative, his kidney is unlikely to be a match.…

“Lou got into some trouble,” Dad said, and looked away. It was clear that he didn’t want to tell me what kind of trouble, and I didn’t know if it was crucial to the story, so I sat silently, waiting for whatever was going to come out next. “Lou’s a good man … with a good heart. But he’d buy his friends into tournaments. He had a system going with some of the dealers, marked cards, that sort of thing. He didn’t tell me, wanted to keep me out of it.”

“Okay …”

“That night, I was one of five players in, but I didn’t know what BS he had going on. I only found out after he got busted. He did everything he could to keep my name clear, but you know how it is. His word was no good anymore. I hit a lot of hands that night, thanks to Lou. I just thought I was hot. The reality was very different. In hindsight, hell, I would have been better off being part of the whole racket.”

“No, you wouldn’t have, Dad,” I said. “You’re more honorable than that.”

And he was. This was the guy who once went back into Ralphs supermarket in the pouring rain because he noticed the cashier had given him too much change.

“What’s my life now?” he asked, and looked at me like I might have an answer other than the obvious, and if I did, he hoped we could somehow will it into a reality.

“You’re not a cheater,” I reassured him, but it didn’t seem to matter. And I understood why. If you do the time, you may as well get to do the crime. He’d been so shamed that his life spiraled downward
into a pretty depressing existence. He went from being a pro poker player, nationally known, playing televised games, the real deal … to being an online poker player with a side habit of sports betting. Weekends with high rollers in Vegas turned into weekends with degenerates at the Los Alamitos Race Course. Or worse … the OTB. Have you ever been to the OTB? I’m half surprised he doesn’t shoot himself. What a difference a day makes.

I try to spend as much time as I can with my dad, but it tends to feel more like an obligation than a choice these days. And that’s not because I don’t want to see him. It’s because he considers me his “good-luck charm,” so if I don’t see him and he loses a game or his horse comes in fourth, it’s somehow my fault.