Winners and Losers

The next best thing to playing and winning is playing and losing. The main thing is to play.--Nick "The Greek" Dandolos

Aquinas, Augustine, Gregory, Jude--these and other talismanic names rolled like loose ballast through my empty mind. The examination was at an end and, crouched like a cur at my desk. I had made the usual appeals, which they in their infinite wisdom, had ignored. And so it was not until the headmaster, said, "Time, gentlemen, time," that I dared use up the one true trump card left me. "Oh, my God," I whimpered, help me God--trying for the life of me to become something more than the fraud I knew myself to be. Nothing: a shuffling of feet, silence. Had there been time, I might have knelt. But it was, as it usually is, too late.

Across the aisle, young Lockland the acne on his checks scratched raw, rose with a smile of smug assurance and handed in his paper. The headmaster gazed fondly on the boy as he strutted from the (continued on page 194)Winners and Losers(continued from page 118) room and then, turning to one of the senior prefects, said: "That young man's a winner. Mark my words, he'll go far." I waited, hoping to hear further, more pragmatic proof of the boy's potential, but none was forthcoming. Which troubled me, since Lockland was a craven fellow with none of the qualities that I associated with "winning" or "going far." He was an overly attentive student; he neither boxed nor wrestled nor ran; he kept to his bed after lights out and took no delight in poetry or in photographs of Esther Williams; neither did he smoke nor masturbate and he called his mother Mama. A winner. Even now, some 20 years on, I remember thinking that if these were the qualities on which Lockland had been propelled to his tawdry fame, then I would concentrate on becoming the most notorious loser in the school's history.

All of which brings me to the point (or nearer the point) of this particular tale. Taught from the start to believe in absolutes. I found myself still half in love with the lie that losers were unlucky, that winners were merely fortunate and privy to none of those sudden catastrophes that snap at the heels of lesser men. But only in part. Of what befell the wily Lockland (who was likely enough an honorable, if priggish lad), I shall probably never know. But he was a debut of sorts for me--the first in an irksome series of apparent winners. And, if the unanimous decision of my masters is to be believed, I, well, I was my first loser. Misfortune, like charity, begins at home.

Winners and losers, then: The types are so familiar a part of our mythology, we feel their faces could be picked as easily as twins' from the crowd. One, a cocky fellow with a self-appointed air; the other, drawn and self-defeated, with the look of a man who would pawn his soul if he could somehow ascertain its worth. We have come to see them as little more than trite and quintessential types. As a result, whenever someone points them out to me, I feel sure he is also trying to convey some flattering evaluation of himself--as if by naming them, he had in some way defined himself. Nick the Greek, most notorious of American gamblers, claimed that the only difference between winners and losers was one of character, which, he added, was about the only difference one could really find between people anyway. But Nick held a rigid view of the world--heads or tails, win or lose, no two ways about it. He was a gambler and gamblers incline to unconditional views.

During the past few months, I have consorted with two such men--not to define myself or them but to understand that part of myself we had in common. I am not a constant player and gambling does little more than occasionally appease the romantic excesses my gods demand of me. For me, it is more of a cold than a cancer--incurable, perhaps, but hesitantly held in check. They, however, were professionals--or "compulsive gamblers," for those who prefer psychological names for our passions. But they had very little in common. It was only in the pursuit of their passion that they could be said to have been alike. That pursuit was more important to them than God or love or money, even. To call one of them a winner, the other a loser is too easy, too uninteresting a definition, since, at the beginning, they both believed the force of their passion would somehow see them through. Much later, when I first encountered them, there was only this to tell them apart: One of them, a bootlegger's boy from Tennessee, believed that, given time and talent and happy odds, all things were possible. The other, whose youth had been fat with promises of power and prestige, knew by the time he turned 40 that he would never believe in anything again.

• • •

My boy . . . always try to rub up against money, for if you rub up against money long enough, some of it may rub off on you.--Damon Runyon

His name was Walter Clyde Pearson, but few of his friends or acquaintances knew it. For as long as he could remember, he had been called Pug--because of his nose, irrevocably flattened from a boyhood fall. Everyone called him Pug with what amounted to an implied familiarity--the doormen and carhops at the Las Vegas Strip hotels, the shills, the show-girls, the dealers and grifters and all the hapless players who came to sit with him at poker. Only his mother, in keeping with the Southern custom, called him Walter Clyde. He must have liked the nickname or had grown accustomed to it. When telling me comic tales of his early gambling days, he sometimes referred to himself as Pug--as though he were talking about someone else, a pigeon, or some extravagant friend, perhaps, whom he implied it would have amused me to know.

He had a candid sense of humor, brusque and down to earth. He would not have noticed irony nor appreciated it if he had. He wasn't that kind of man, nor did he have that kind of circumambulatory mind. He saw things simply and then brought a kind of inspired logic to bear. He once, for example, explained to me why there were so few good poker players in the country. "Poker," he said, "has a language all its own, but you don't expect most folks to understand it, any more than you expect 'em to understand Egyptian."

Pug was good with people in the way some men are good with dogs. People responded to some quality of self-belief in him, which gave them an illusion of potential warmth and safety. It was the illusion usually described as charm. Pug used it, as charming men do, to exert an influence in order to control. His voice, filled with unchallengeable assurance, simply extended and completed the illusion. I had been told I would have no difficulty recognizing him. "You'll know him," one of his colleagues had said. "Ain't but one nose like it in the world." Pug was a tall, heavily built man in his early 40s who covered his almost-total baldness with a wide-brimmed straw hat. He had the round mischievous face of an elderly troll, a troll with a fondness for Cuban cigars. There was an air of jauntiness about him and of inexhaustible good spirits, the air of a man who had had his share of passing pleasure.

Yet, despite the way he immediately took one into his confidence, his accessibility, he had been a difficult man to meet, implying that it would in some way detract from his anonymity. Nick the Greek observed that in gambling. "Fame is usually followed by a jail sentence." and Pug, at least temporarily, had held some similar belief. "Son, you can't be too careful," he explained. "The Government is like the Gestapo on gamblers. Like they was some kind of outlaws. But, I'll tell you. Gamblers are the most broad-minded people in the world. If more folks were like 'em, there would be fewer laws. That's on the square. You've got to be sharp in this world, no matter what your business is, or the world is gonna gobble you up. That's what it's all about, son. That's what they call life." Pug liked to imply, and with good reason, that he knew more about life than he pretended. Given his obvious airs of opulence, emphasized by the wad of $100 bills he carried, one tended to forget that his life had not always been so prosperous--that once, prosperity had seemed not only improbable but beyond the ken of any experience he or his family had ever had.

Pug was born in Kentucky in early 1929. It was not an auspicious time, he recalled, and he was not referring to the Depression. Reports of imminent depression would not have meant much to his family. There had been no joy in Appalachia for a generation or more. "My folks were what we used to call 'God-fearin' people.' Church of Christ," he said. His father was a sharecropper, tilling other people's land, though he worked at any job that came his way, including a stint at building roads for the WPA. When times were lean, as they often were, he ran bootleg whiskey, till a competitor's gun removed his little finger. There is a portrait of the old man in Pug's mother's parlor. Posed in his rough Sunday best, he looked as many men of that period did in their photographs--stern and upright, with a look of moral condescension in the face. Whatever else the photograph implied, it reminded Pug that his father was often sullen and usually unemployed. In 1934, the family drifted south into Jackson County, Tennessee, following rumors of work from one hollow town to another. Before Pug was ten, he had lived in nearly 20 of those towns. They always moved for the same reason--slipping away in the dead of night because the rent was due at dawn. They moved from Reese Hollow to Farn's Branch by covered wagon and Pug can still recall the blackened pots and pans swinging from the wagon as he walked behind it in the dusty road. There was never any money. They lived in the clapboard-and-log houses of the region, using coal oil for light, wood stoves for heat and cooking. The potatoes and whiskey were buried in the ground, the perishables were stored in the well house, the meat in the small smokehouse, and when there was fruit, it was dried and hung inside from the rafters. Times were hard and the nine children often went for days with nothing to eat but beans. Pug never saw a loaf of bread before he was ten. Even after they had moved to Nashville at the beginning of the war, the family's main diet consisted of corn bread, molasses and biscuits. "We never had meat," Pug remembered. "When I ate lunch at school, I was always conscious of the little our family had to eat. The other kids had good food--peanut butter and crackers and jam--but we ate biscuits and molasses. The other kids used to rib me a lot and, believe me, kids on kids is tougher than anything."

Once they had moved to Nashville, much else could be overlooked. They were in a city and they settled down. Back in the hollows, the Pearsons had never settled--they had never cleared the land, nor plowed, nor built, nor created for themselves a single place of permanence. They had established an identity of a kind; that is, they were remembered--since to this day the up hollows are filled with Pearsons--but they were remembered as transients. But that was all behind Pug now. "I don't know how I ever got out." he said. "A miracle. I guess. Evolution on the move."

Nashville. Pug still had great affection for the city, though it lacks the rush and color of his youth. There was a lot to do in the city then, particularly for a boy accustomed to an absence of temptation. To gain time, at 14 he left school. He had already discovered where his real talents lay: "I started hustlin' real young," he recalled, "at ten or eleven. I just started playin' cards and pool with the other paper boys. In those days, there was a pool hall on every corner and Eddie Taylor and New York Fats were our heroes. They came through Nashville all the time." At 13, Pug hitchhiked to Tampa with three dollars in his pocket. In two weeks, he made over $1000, more money than he thought existed, playing pool. "But I was burglared," he said, "so I had to come home." At 15, he drove 40 miles a day to a small town north of Nashville to pitch half dollars to the line. He traveled a lot in his early teens and he soon began to feel he had exhausted Nashville's possibilities. His appetite for action had become insatiable, though he expressed it in different terms. It was just that Nashville seemed somehow smaller and more confined than Farn's Branch or Reese Hollow had ever been. In 1945, at the age of 16, Pug joined the Navy to get what the Navy assured him would be an education.

"I didn't really start to play poker till I got in the Navy," he said. "I learned the game real good. While everyone else was throwin' their money on drink and women, I was organizing poker games and playin'. When I got out, I'd saved about twenty thousand." He returned to Nashville. He opened a couple of bars, but that soon bored him. He had an itch to play cards and Nashville was no place for poker. "Between 1951 and 1957, I had this poker route, you see. Used to make the trip at least twice a year. I'd get in that old car and drive up to Bardstown and Bowling Green, to Louisville, Atlanta and Chicago, and sometimes down as far as Miami. A poker game every night. Those old boys could always count on me droppin' in on their little games. Knew I was comin'--same as Santa Claus. I played most everything. I played a lot of 'git-you-one' and cooncan, an awful lot. But I loved poker. I got so good at that game I could play with folks that used marked cards and signals and God knows what and beat 'em every time. Them old boys used to call me 'Catfish Jones, swimmin' up a muddy stream,' because they never saw me comin'. I came in right on their blind spots. I played and played. The thing of it is that when you're a kid, you've got no sense of time. And time passes the quickest during a poker game. Why, I got up from a game once, turned round a couple of times, and five or six years had gone by. That was in 1957. For years, on that poker route. I played one game after another. That's all I did."

Pug had an excellent memory. The story of the poker route was the only one he told me twice. I assumed it disturbed him, that somewhere along the way he had nurtured other dreams, which he had not had time to follow. But his dreams had been conventional enough. He had never had what are called illusions, no elusive sense of the ideal. It would have contravened his sense of order. "When I first started gamblin'," he remembered, "I suppose all I wanted was a big Cadillac, my own cue and cue case and a pocketful of money. What would you expect a poor country boy from down yonder to want? Now I sometimes feel I haven't accomplished a damn thing. I gambled out of necessity to start. Now it's too late for anything else."

• • •

The Aladdin is no gaudier than any other hotel on the Strip. Given the ambience, the names of the hotel's main rooms--the Sabre Room, the Sinbad Lounge, the Gold Room and the Bagdad Theater--make as much sense as its mock-Byzantine façade. The cardroom is across from the Sinbad Lounge, in the large main room on the ground floor, where nightly some of the biggest poker games in the world are played. Here Pug Pearson holds court in a way Neil Diamond must have had in mind when he sang of "a high-rolling man in a high-rolling neighborhood." At first, it seems more than a little preposterous to find Pug--"a poor country boy from down yonder"--in such an opulent environment, until one understands that here the American ideal has been carried to its most practical conclusion; a place where, regardless of differences in background, taste or intelligence, money makes everyone equal, or momentarily creates that illusion. It is the panacea of the merchant classes. On the wall above the card tables is a sign that reads: Poker--24 Hours Every Day. Above the sign is a spread royal heart flush. The cardroom is not a room at all, since it occupies a side of the casino and is open to traffic between the slot machines in the lobby and the stage, from which pours the amplified noise of resident talent. Round about the card tables is the crowd of tourists and hopeful high rollers, as ridiculously dressed as jesters, the shills and stickmen, the security men and bad-credit boys acting as a kind of palace guard, and here and there an itinerant sinner. The people come and go like refugees--the places of the departed so quickly taken by new arrivals that there is little impression of real movement: just a kind of tense restlessness and the garbled sounds of the machines and the music and the mob lifted in endless crescendo. It is here that Pug, who has never been as innocent as any of them, makes his daily bread.

Pug has lived in Vegas for ten years. He, his wife and daughter occupy a rambling house on the nice, suburban edge of the city. His wife is also from Nashville and Pug claims they still miss the hills and streams of Tennessee. But Vegas is where the action is and his wife accepts his way of life, because, as he explains, "there ain't no changin' it." Now, action does not mean easy money, though there is that, too. But some of the best poker players in the country live in Vegas. Almost to a man, they are Southerners, from Texas, Oklahoma and Kentucky, and, like Pug, poor boys become well to do because of a talent at cards. Gambling, as Pug certainly believes, was born of necessity and represents the open road to Avalon. It is a curious fact that, like the American military--80 percent of whom above the rank of major are Southerners--the majority of professional cardplayers (and cardsharps) are Southerners. Thus, in one sense, Pug, by playing cards with his peers, maintains a loose hold on his roots. Eliminate the slot machines and the vulgar Western crowds, listen to the players in the Aladdin Hotel and one might easily be in Abilene or Tulsa or Bowling Green.

The night I walked into the Aladdin, I was told I could find Pug at the poker table, where he had been for the past 24 hours. He was dressed as he always was--the striped trousers, the short-sleeved shirt, the colored shoes and the wide straw hat. He looked no more outlandish than anyone else in the room; he looked perfectly at home. There was an air of permanence about him, the slightly bored authority of a teacher who has taught the same course for 20 years. He was in the middle of a hand and looked, as Nick the Greek had once been described, "like a guy sitting with an icicle up his ass." Looking round the crowded noisy room, I remembered that this was the place Pug had called his office, a place of business to which he came each night; his opponents, seated now round the green-felt table in various attitudes of peevish dejection, he had referred to as his clientele. They were all there--Alabama Blackie, Treetop Jack Straus, Nigger Nate Raymond, Texas Dolly Doyle and a group of lesser players, all of whom looked like they had ridden in that night from the ranch.

In Las Vegas, Pug was deferred to--as parents defer to favorite sons. Everyone seemed to know him. Waitresses assured themselves his glass was always filled with water or tea or Seven-Up; passers-by stopped to chat or to whisper urgent messages in his ear; and players, en route to other games, paused to discuss old times or future plans. All of which Pug accepted as his due. "Folks know me real well out here," he explained. "I could sit down in the middle of the freeway and get a game going, because people like to play with me. They like my action. They know I'm gonna give 'em a square gamble. That's what it's all about. I can beat 'em and beat 'em and they'll always come back. But fuck 'em out of a quarter and they'll leave forever. It gives 'em an excuse for losing." Pug thought of himself as a winner; it was something he knew about. As a winner, he also figured he knew more about loss than losers did. "Losing," he told me, "is like smoking. It's habit-forming, believe me. Some of the players at this here table couldn't beat Tom Thumb at nothin'. But loss is inevitable. The question is how much you control it. A winner is first and foremost a controller. That's why in life, I'm just a little better than even--and an odds-on favorite to stay that way.

"You've got to remember that in poker, there are more winners than losers. At least at the higher levels. I'd say there was a ratio of twenty to one. But losers are great suppliers. One loser supplies a lot of winners. And the better the player, the bigger the cut. That's what they call the great pyramid of gamblin'. Sharks at the top, then the rounders, the minnows, and at the bottom the fish--the suckers, the suppliers. Scavengers and suppliers, just like in life.

"It's a funny thing--gamblin'. It's like running a grocery store. You buy and you sell. You pay the going rate for cards and you try and sell 'em for more than you paid. A gambler's ace is his ability to think clearly under stress. That's very important, because, you see, fear is the basis of all mankind. In cards, you psych 'em out, you shark 'em, you put the fear of God in 'em. That's life. Everything's mental in life. The butt was made to lug the mind around. The most important thing in gamblin' is knowing the sixty-forty end of the proposition and knowing the human element. Some folks may know one of 'em, but ain't many know 'em both. I believe in logics. Cut and dried. Two and two ain't nothin' in this world but four. But them suckers always think it's something different. Makes you think, don't it? I play percentages in everything. Now, knowing the percentages perfectly, the kind of numbers you read in them books, is all right, but the hidden percentages are more important. The thing to know is that folks will stand to lose more than they will to win. That's the most important percentage there is. I mean, if they lose, they're willin' to lose everything. If they win, they're usually satisfied to win enough to pay for dinner and a show. The best gamblers know that."

I sat next to Pug or just behind like a stowaway, and between hands or when he folded early, we talked. There were usually five or six players sitting round the table--with piles of $100 bills and various stacks of colored chips in front of them. As a rule, the players remained the same, though occasionally, one went broke or another would leave and someone would take his place. There were no introductions. They all seemed to know one another and Pug referred to them as "environment." They played limit poker--usually five- or seven-card stud--which Pug believed was the best kind of poker, because there was less jeopardy and the best player always won. Once, in the middle of a hand. Pug suddenly turned as though he had forgotten something and said. "Always remember, the first thing a gambler has to do is make friends with himself. A lot of people go through this world thinking they're someone else. There are a lot of players sitting at this table with mistaken identities. You wouldn't believe it."

The hands went on and on throughout the night. At midnight, Pug's wife phoned to say good night. He continued to play while he talked to her. At one point, he was almost $10,000 ahead, but by four in the morning, he had lost most of it. He was tired. He had been up too long and knew he wasn't giving the game the attention it required. But he began winning again and his game was soon interspersed with running comment and criticism. Toward the end of one hand, he turned up his cards and said: "This will beat your two queens, pally."

"Christ, Pug, how'd you know I had queens?" said his opponent. "You see through my cards?"

"Hell, no," said Pug, "I'm a gambler, not a mind reader." Another player, a Texan, decided to leave, taking close to $8000 in winnings with him. As he left, Pug said, "He'll be back. He's a great poker player, but, like most gamblers, he's got a lot of bad habits--craps, roulette and the football." Beating another player for a small pot, Pug said to him, "Son, if I'd had your hand, I'd of won." He laughed. "That's the thing of poker," he said. "Ideally, you want the winning hands to pay and the losing hands to win." At ten in the morning, Pug was about $2500 ahead. He decided to play a final hand. The calls and raises went back and forth until there was some $4000 in the pot. Only Pug and one other player had stayed in. Pug was very quiet. The seventh card was dealt. It was his call. He hesitated for a moment, then looked up and, pushing a pile of bills into the pot, he said: "I'm gonna raise you, son, 'cause you ain't got nothin' in that hand but dreams." He didn't wait for an answer. Turning over his hand, he pulled in the pot.

The other player simply put down his cards and, shaking his head in disbelief, said. "Pug, you're the goddamnedest lucky player."

Pug grinned, lighting up a fresh cigar. As he put his money in his pocket, we left. "They all think I'm the luckiest son of a bitch in the world," he said. "I like that; it brings 'em back. Hell, ain't no one can fill an inside straight quicker 'n me. I'll tell you about luck. I believe in it, sure, even though I know there ain't no such thing. But other folks believe in it and sometimes it's downright polite to go along with their beliefs. Just remember one thing--luck ain't never paid the bills."

That morning, he told me the story of the biggest hand he had ever won. "I was playin' Johnny Moss," he said, "at deuce-to-the-seven lowball. Kansas City lowball, they call it. Straights and flushes count against you. The perfect hand is two-three-four-five-seven. Now, I'm dealt a two-three-four-seven-jack. There were six or seven players in the game, a two-hundred-dollar ante. After the first round, there ain't but three of us left in the pot--Johnny, me and another guy, who was sitting on my right. He opens with a thousand. I raise twenty-eight hundred. Johnny calls and raises five thousand and then this guy only calls. Well. I know this guy, see, and he's a tight player, and when he calls I figure either he's got a perfect hand, what they call a bicycle, or he's gonna draw, and it's a hundred to one he's gonna draw. So I push all my checks into the pot--about twenty-five thousand--hoping to pick it up right there. Well, there's about forty-seven thousand in that pot now. Johnny sits there and stalls and stalls and does a lot of whispering with his confederate. I know he's got a real tough hand, possibly a two-three-four-seven and a ten or a jack. And I'm worried. Well. I know what Johnny's thinkin' and he's a good enough player so that I know what he's thinkin', just like he knows what I'm thinkin'. Hell, we're environment, we know each other like hills and streams. Finally, Johnny calls for what he's got left, which is fifteen thousand. By calling, you understand, he thought he was getting two to one on his money. Which is what I thought: but what happens, the guy on my right throws in his cards. He folds. Now Johnny knows he ain't but getting about six to five on his money and that just ain't the same investment. That's the main secret in cards--getting the right price on your money. Now, had the other guy drawn. I'm gonna get rid of that jack, but he drops, so I stand pat, figuring to make Johnny come off his hand. Hoping he'll dog it. Johnny is in last position. And he's uncertain. He knows I play kinda wild. Now, he stalls and stalls. I can see the BBs goin' round and round in his head, just like he sees mine, though not so clearly--Johnny's gettin' on. No more bets can be made, so he knows I'm not stealin'. He also knows I'm not bluffin'. I'm not. I'm playin' a fine line, son. I was reading my people real good and I knew it. I was like one of those guys with a baton in front of an orchestra. I was playin' it like Liberace. And Johnny, Johnny knows I got a hand. But what kind of hand do I have? He probably figures I've got a slick nine or an eight, so what does he do? He pooches it and draws. Now, once he hits that deck. I'm an eight- or an eight-and-a-half-to-five favorite to win. As he draws, I flop over my hand and say. 'Johnny, you made a mistake, now beat that jack.' He had discarded a ten and drawn a king. 'Oh, my God,' he says, 'I dumped the winning hand.' And I raked in the pot of sixty-two thousand. Now, that's what I mean about knowing your human element."

It was nearly noon. Pug took me round his garden, which he had reclaimed from the desert. "It's a long way from Jackson County, ain't it?" he said with a smile. Even here, in Las Vegas. Appalachia wasn't far away and it reminded me that for all his practicalities. Pug would have to play and keep on playing in order to push it further from his mind. But it was always there; it was responsible for the dream in which he had become marooned. It was why he talked so intimately of loss and why suddenly, as if in answer to a question I had asked some time ago, he began to talk of it again. "Losers have an overwhelming ambition to win," he said, almost in a whisper. "They con themselves that they can win and that's why they keep on coming back. They have to, you understand, 'cause they'd hold a bad opinion of themselves otherwise. But without 'em, there would be no winners. No me." He paused, then added: "And that would be contrary to the laws of nature. Wouldn't be right."

Pug believed in what he liked to think were the laws of nature, one of them being that he would always be a winner. Although he had been broke before, he believed the odds had set things right and that they had also promised something more. And perhaps they had--though it continued to elude him. Like his father before him, chasing rumors of work from one town to another, Pug still pursued that dream of high elusive action. And in his darker moments, he must have wondered why it had not materialized. No matter. He was a patient suitor. Tomorrow, it would come. Tomorrow . . . or the day after. It was in the cards.

• • •

I hope I break even today. I need the money.--Joe E. Lewis

He had always been just another face in the catalog of dark and half-remembered faces across from me--another player across a backgammon board in one of New York's darker East Side bars. No one, it seemed, knew much about him. Bo Strickland was his name, though I was to learn his given name was George, as his father's and his grandfather's had been before him. But they called him Bo, presumably because he was born in Boston. His accent was crisp and pleasantly stilted. He had only to ask the waiter for a drink to indicate that he came from Boston or from one of the clapboard towns in that vicinity.

He was a tall man with a sharp aristocratic face, which in the dim light of the bar seemed to have just two expressions--one taut with a kind of pronounced regret, the other a lazy look of diffident elation, the look of a boy who has been praised for something he hasn't actually done. In his mid-10s, he was always dressed in an elegant pinstripe suit, as though he had just arrived from the office. He had, in fact, that dour commercial air one usually attributes to members of the banking and stockbroking professions. Yet he also had the casual authority of a man with private funds. But it was difficult to know much about Bo. He usually arrived after midnight and rarely stayed more than an hour or two. I didn't know him very well: We exchanged the humdrum pleasantries of strangers who happen to gamble at the same game.

I would not have remembered him at all had not a curious incident occurred. One evening toward midnight, I stopped for a drink in one of those noisy "German" bars that clutter the Yorkville section of New York. Just inside the door, I looked across to the bar and there, in an open-necked shirt with a large dirty apron round his waist, was Bo Strickland serving drinks. Without his pinstripe suit and tie, he looked older, that taut look of regret more deeply pronounced than usual. Even his hair, normally slicked back, fell across his brow like some cheap, equivocal disguise. He looked somehow vulnerable and suddenly, not wishing to be seen, I turned back to the door. But Bo, at that moment, looked up and saw me there. He did not seem embarrassed nor particularly put out, almost angry, rather; and when a customer demanded service from down the bar, he abruptly turned away.

Some days later, I saw him again. He was at the backgammon table in his pinstripe suit. Looking occasionally at his watch, he played with that unruffled poise of his--the impression of a busy man between important errands. He noticed me at the bar, though he showed no sign of recognition. But when he was through playing, he rose and offered to buy me a drink. It was the first in a series of drinks and dinners and though we never became friends, we struck up for a time a loose and even convivial association.

At the best of times it is difficult for anyone to admit his failures, and Bo was no exception. To the end, he insisted he had merely been unlucky. When his bartending job was over, we would go to his apartment or sit and drink at one of the back tables in the bar, often until closing time, and Bo would recite the tale of his decline and fall in the sort of apathetic tones that schoolboys use when reciting passages they have had to memorize the night before. He sometimes sounded like a man with an alibi. But, for all his persuasive charm. Bo was an inadequate liar. Whenever he wished to gloss over certain portions of his life, his words would run together and his fingers would twitch endlessly through his thinning hair. He wasn't convincing: These are the facts, they speak for themselves, he seemed to say. The trouble was that I was forced to see them exclusively through Bo's disarming and often dodgy point of view.

He was the only child of an old Boston family. Born just before the Depression, he had no real sense of that grotesque occasion. He remembered only that it had not disturbed the opulent composure of his father's home; when it was mentioned at all, it was made to seem like some fantastic rumor, like one of those catastrophes that frequent the far side of the world, an earthquake or a tidal wave, which are horrible but ultimately unimportant, since they involve Peruvians or Turks or Pakistanis.

Bo's childhood was that circumscribed. Although he cannot remember feeling one way or another about it then, when older, he developed a fear of partitioned spaces and interrupted views--a hatred, in fact, for any obstacle that set a limit to his actions. But at that time, his little world was as neat and elegant as a cocoon. His family had always had money; it was, his father liked to say, a family custom. Only once in their dull untroubled history had a note of alarm been introduced. His grandfather (by all accounts, a monstrous man) had squandered his inheritance on what used to be called loose women and riotous living. Accounts of his spendthrift ways occasionally filtered down to a spellbound Bo, though it was forbidden to mention his name in the house. A monstrous man. Although the family had continued to maintain houses in Boston and on the Cape, when Bo's parents had married, they'd lived in "comparative penury." But his father soon righted the balance by making a fortune in real estate.

Bo's mother had died in childbirth: unexpected complications, too great a loss of blood, a frail condition--there never was a satisfactory answer. But his father had been unaffected. A gruff and stoic man, he saw in Bo the continuation of the Strickland line and he treated him not as a son but as his eventual successor. He seemed to imply that although certain gestures would be made, although certain standards would be indifferently upheld, Bo's real life was to be somehow suspended until that day arrived. Of the boy's capabilities, the father had no doubts--a chip off the old block, you understand. Making those smug assumptions, which fathers often make of only sons, he would say to Bo: "Remember, Son, you're a Strickland," as though that were more than most could hope for. It was a long time before Bo could repeat those words, even to himself, without breaking into raucous laughter.

Before he was 12, the boy had been sent to a series of fashionable day schools--till he was old enough to attend Choate. As a student, he was never more than satisfactory, but he did enough to get by and to be admitted to Princeton. Again, he made no particular mark, though he became conspicuous in other ways. He was one of those people who always seem to get away with things. Before the end of his freshman year, he was admired for what was thought to be his audacity and his eccentric charm. The latter quality, one of the few things he had not inherited from his father, enabled him to enter worlds from which his conduct should have barred him. Bad habits are often best disguised by what appear to be good manners; and Bo merely contrived the one to camouflage the other. His charm covered a multitude of errors, the earliest of which was gambling. "I gambled even as a kid," he recalled. "It amused me, and besides I was good at it. I learned to play poker before I was ten. I knew those odds and percentages before I knew my multiplication tables." He liked to think that if gambling had been in the curriculum, he would have graduated from Princeton with honors.

As it happened, he was fortunate to have graduated at all. As before, he did just enough to get by--concentrating his brightest efforts on giving or going to elaborate dances, parties and masquerades, spending giddy weekends in New York, Palm Beach or at one or another of the East Coast tracks. Bo looked on Princeton as a smart and rather amusing resort--a place where it was possible to entertain his friends and where, if one had money, all but the most major infractions of college etiquette were generously overlooked. When Princeton gave him his degree. Bo accepted it as a kind of compliment for having executed some extraordinary practical joke.

After graduation, he spent 18 months in Europe undergoing a sort of grand tour from London to Deauville to Biarritz to Cannes and Monte Carlo, to San Remo and to many of the lesser casinos in between. He won, he claimed, some $40,000. When he returned to Boston, he was filled with what he described as an irrepressible joie de vivre and a still unsatisfied yearning to prove himself on native ground.

Back in Boston, Bo's father insisted that he work at one of the more respectable brokerage houses in New York. It was not the money, of course. His father had long before arranged a trust so that he would receive $100,000 on his 25th birthday, followed by similar amounts on his 30th, 35th and 40th birthdays. It was assumed that he would inherit the remainder, "the real cash," on his father's death. Until the trust commenced, Bo was to receive a large allowance. But on the condition that he find work. His father felt that in Wall Street he would acquire a business sense and suitable credentials. Credentials had been one of his father's favorite words, by which he meant insurance against the unforeseen, the keys to the scheme of things. In the early spring of 1950, armed with numerous letters of credit and introduction. Bo set out for Manhattan. Two weeks later, he accepted a job as a customers' man in a reliable firm at a salary of $100 a week. He began the job with reluctance and a certain dissatisfaction, but it would not be for long, he reasoned. So long as he was limited to an allowance, he would conceal his bright hopes in a gray-flannel suit; so long as he was in tether, he would toe the mark and soldier on. Indifference, that was the key. He could wait. It was only a matter of time.

I don't know whether I have managed to convey the intense quality of Bo's optimism. Then, as now, hope was his chief happiness; it was absolute and unassailable. He was an optimist--the sort of man Ambrose Bierce once described as a proponent of the doctrine that black is white. But because hope lives in the future and always seemed just a jump ahead of him, it began to cast a little fog of apprehension on Bo's day-to-day activities. Each day seemed to him a prison, but tomorrow, at dawn, the pardon would come: his hopes were high--as they needed to be, for Bo entered what he later called the bottom of his life. He once explained to me that should he ever come to write his autobiography, that portion of his life would be eliminated for reasons of dullness and a lack of panache. It had been a compromise, he said, and would not do.

For the first few years of his Wall Street period. Bo behaved himself and seemed to have forgotten his dreams of brash knight-errantry. At the age of 25, he came into the first part of his trust and met the girl whom he married shortly thereafter. They lived in a large three-bedroom apartment on Fifth Avenue overlooking the park and maintained a weekend house in a fashionable part of Westchester County. Since joining the firm, he had been rapidly promoted: "They think the world of Bo." his wife liked to say. Each morning, he took the subway to work and the subway back and the weekends were spent in the country. In the second year of their marriage, his wife produced a daughter, and afterward, in the dark of their apartment or sitting during the long summer evenings on the porch of their country home, she would assure him that she was blissfully happy. And so, it seemed, was he. But sometimes, while riding the subway, that little fog of apprehension would creep across his mind: he began to wonder if this were all, if there would be no further nights of revelry, no more extravagant gestures made. It wasn't fun anymore and the daily subway rides began to unnerve him--became the visible symbol of his captivity. He hated his job, hated its pointless aims, its pompous air of self-approval and he began to feel, as Nick the Greek had, that a guaranteed income was a guaranteed bore.

"It began quite inadvertently," he recalled. "A colleague at the office needed a fourth for a poker game. I had no particular feelings about it. I'd made no unbreakable resolutions. I just hadn't gambled for a few years. That night, I wanted to. How can I explain it to you? I got home at three in the morning. I'd won three hundred and fifty dollars, but it wasn't the money. I didn't need the money. No, it was the action, that sense of excitement stretched toward a breaking point that never comes, and I realized just how dull my life had become, how insufferably dull. I went to bed, but I couldn't sleep, and all the next day I felt little, almost orgasmic jolts, not in my cock but in my mind. It was a revelation. I felt as though I'd taken a pill."

His life was never again the same. Even now, looking back after 18 years. Bo saw no telltale clues or inauspicious signs that might indicate some point of no return along the way. Quite the reverse. That night revealed to him what he had always known--it brought him to his senses. He had, as he saw it, denied the best in him, denied those high elated leaps of the soul that rise from the turn of a single card or the sudden burst of a horse in the stretch. He had been living too long at second hand, reined in, and he wanted to come into the open now. "It was," he said, "an appetite over which I had less and less control. But, you see, I didn't want control. I wanted a kind of freedom, I suppose, a sense of space. Gambling was just something to do, like getting laid, and I liked it. I still do. It relieves the pain."

During those first years, Bo could not have been more satisfied, justified, even, that he had made a sensible decision. And he won--consistently. He absented himself from the office more and more. On his way home from the track or the gaming parlor, he usually bought his wife some slight expensive bauble and she would scold him for his extravagance--with unconcealed affection. This was Bo's best period. Curiously, he sensed that his success had little to do with any real gambling talent; more often than not, he saw that chance had intervened on his behalf. Even so, he had also come to believe that some eccentric rationale ruled his wild ascent--as though magic were merely logic mispronounced.

It could not last, of course, and slowly that mysterious flair of his began to disappear. By 1964, his life had become a continuous gamble. What had begun as occasional poker became thrice-weekly sessions. He began to lose. He began to bet on everything--cards, backgammon and craps, the horses and the trotters, the football, baseball and basketball games, even politics. Suddenly, at the age of 36, he found he had gone through most of his available funds. No one knew--not even his wife--credit camoullaged that, but it became apparent that unless he stopped, that unless, as he liked to think, his monstrous luck quit dogging him, he would soon come to the end of the line. One night, in a private high-stakes poker game, he could not cover his losses with ready cash and he put up as collateral the deed to his Fifth Avenue apartment. By four in the morning, when the game ended, he returned to an apartment that was no longer his. The new owner gave him three months' grace in which to move his chattels out. Bo told his wife that he was bored, that he required a change, that they should move to some more appropriate address; and besides, he explained. Fifth Avenue wasn't what it used to be. Surprisingly, Bo recalled, she agreed, but with a kind of abject resignation.

They moved to a more appropriate address--a small brownstone somewhat too far east in the upper 60s. "Given my setbacks," said Bo. "it wasn't bad for a time, it wasn't bad at all." Although minor adjustments were made and occasional concessions given, their lives continued in much the same old way--became better, in fact, since Bo had now embarked on an Indian summer of good fortune. But even irresponsibility develops its own logic and with a kind of evil, irreversible regression. Bo saw his successes slip away. In 1968, he and his wife had a second daughter, whom Bo. during a particularly bad run at the track, called Hope. But nothing came of it. That autumn, he lost $10,000 on the world series and could not pay. Mixing semitruths with apology and outright lies with mild exaggeration, he asked his father for help. But even his charm seemed to have deserted him. His father was cold and polite and he refused. "It was then," said Bo. "that I felt the paranoia breaking out in boils all over my body."

Whatever Bo had lost, whatever his real or imagined fears had taken from him, he always seemed to me a cheerful, uncomplaining man. During those long nights in the Yorkville bar, he would recite the grim account of his demise with a kind of comic malice, as though it had happened to some imprudent friend of his. And yet the night he told me of those last hysteric quests of his to overcome his losses, a kind of gothic monolog ensued--a bitter series of dashed hopes and dark reversals that an inexorable fate had heaped upon him. Rejected by his father and treated more and more with cold suspicion by his wife, he cast about for more amenable solutions. Before the year was out, he was sacked by his employers for embezzling $15,000. For reasons of propriety, they decided not to prosecute, extracting a fragile promise that he would repay the debt one day. "I was at my wit's end," he said. "I'd considered everything--insurance schemes, loan sharks, finance companies, bank loans, everything. In the end. I settled on what seemed the lesser evil." He continued to gamble, but winning had become a lost cause. He sold stocks, obtained advances on his trust, wrote postdated checks, borrowed from the Shylocks, to whom, at one point in his decline, he owed $1000 a week in interest alone. "I'd borrowed sums from five or six loan outfits," he said. "I drove them all crazy." At the end, the schemes, the advances, the loans, the returned checks, all these separate instances of his dementia acquired a general definition: a sense of utter desolation, of having been unjustly singled out for some demonic retribution.

Gambling had become a sort of hypnosis. What had begun as a desire to overcome the odds had now become an obsession to keep them at bay. And everything was sacrificed to that. From time to time in those black years, his wife had threatened separation, but with tears and endless promises, she had been dissuaded. But just before Christmas in 1969. Bo returned to the apartment to find that she and the children had gone. "I think the final straw," he said. "was the day I pawned her engagement ring. I told her I'd only pawned it, that I hadn't actually sold it, but she wasn't listening to much sense at the time. I used to dream of the things I'd buy her with my winnings. And do you know, she thought I was selfish? There was nothing I wouldn't have done for her." Bo paused, as though thinking of further favors he might have performed. "No, she was the selfish one," he said. "She left me at a rather crucial time, you know." Less than two weeks later. Bo received a letter from his father filled with phrases such as "most distressed" . . . "unwarrantable behavior" . . . "that a son of mine" . . . "no alternative" . . . in short, that Bo was stricken from his father's will.

And so, at the pivotal age of 40. Bo stood well outside the periphery of his dreams. He felt cheated, as though the dialectic of the game he'd played had somehow been impure--falsified. But he was not an optimist for nothing: and he began to search for some new Euclidean principle that would direct the straight line of his hope along the shortest distance between loss and gain.

• • •

Bo's present home was in one of those quaint and shabby Upper East Side streets that in New York, at least, are fashionable: here and there, a thin leafless tree kept upright by sticks and wires: on either side, the drab brownstones with steep steps rising to the door. In one of these, an old Frau ran a boardinghouse, though in keeping with the neighborhood, they were called self-contained apartments. On one of the landings, a coin-operated telephone was bolted to the wall: the stair wells were dark and narrow. For nearly two years. Bo had occupied the largest of these apartments at the top of the house--a single room with one high window overlooking the street. Inside: a bed in the corner disguised as a divan, an armchair or two, small wooden tables, a thick wardrobe, a chiffonier--the undistinguished bric-a-brac of furnished rooms. But dotted round the room were remnants of Bo's past--silver-framed photographs of Bo as a dapper young man, Bo at Princeton, Bo and his smiling wife in some such place as Biarritz, his children. In the corner were several walking sticks, a silver trophy was on the mantel and on a table next to the bed lay an old silver brush and tortoise-shell comb. There was an antiquated air about the place and I always felt as though I had entered a rather cheap museum.

Bo was now nearly 44 and he liked to think that life had made a realist of him. Increasing Damon Runyon's odds, he believed that all life was eight to five against, that this was inevitable, the way of the world. Banned from his heaven, Bo began to praise his hell. I once asked him if he regretted the waste of all that had gone before. "A waste?" he said. "How can you call it a waste? I've cornered more excitement into twenty minutes than most men have in twenty years.

"A friend of mine," he continued, "who is now involved in Gamblers Anonymous, tried to talk me into going. I mean, he thought I was some kind of sick loony. Do I look sick? Gambling gives me a sense of camaraderie, that's all. I suppose it reminds me of my days at Princeton. But that's not sick. At one time, I'll admit, I thought of suicide, just after my wife walked out, but I won on the Jets that Sunday and forgot all about it."

Bo talked obsessively about the one game, the one hand, he felt had conquered him, as though it had been a turning point--that single wager that had sliced his life into two quite separate entities. He was very unlucky to have lost that night, he said, with $15,000 in the pot. "Had that not happened," he mused, absent-mindedly caressing the silver trophy, "had the next card been the three of diamonds. . . .

"I remember leaving the room hurriedly. I was broke and had to quit. I rushed outside and got violently sick, vomiting everywhere. Suddenly, there in the vomit. I saw a fifty-dollar bill. I saw it quite clearly and grabbed at it. But it was only an old piece of newspaper and I was sick all over again." It was only after that, he claimed, that he began pressing--drawing two cards to a flush, drawing to inside straights, raising on deuces, bluffing and almost never folding. After that, he dropped from sight, saw none of his former friends and took a series of menial jobs, of which bartending was the best, since the pay was good and it gave him company. And he continued to gamble, convinced that sooner or later, his break would come.

Nick the Greek once said that the majority of people share a common goal and a common failing: "They believe that money is something far more than a handy scorekeeping device." Bo would have agreed with that, though for quite a different reason. "It used to be," he said, "that if I were winning, I'd play to win more, and if I were losing. I'd play to get even. But I don't think about the money anymore. I made that mistake last time. The play's the thing, the play. You know? Hell, I read the license plates ahead of me in traffic jams, figuring just how good a hi-lo hand they'll make. I really love to play." He looked at me and sat down, a faint smile of suspicion on his face. "You think that's unusual, don't you? Come on, everybody gambles. Look around you. Look at the business world. There are a lot of Monopoly games going on."

I saw Bo gambling at cards only once. He didn't like me around, he said, as I disturbed his concentration. But one night he relented, and after his shift, we went to a shabby hotel on the West Side. Bo nodded to the desk clerk; we walked upstairs and down a hall to a small overheated room that reeked of sweat and stale cigarettes. The door was locked behind us. Inside, there were five players at an oval table--seedy, unshaven men of indeterminate age. One of them, a huge Puerto Rican with a gold front tooth, wore little more than his trousers and a pair of suspenders hitched across his naked shoulders. They were all drinking cheap whiskey. The men nodded and Bo sat down--out of place in his pinstripe suit, like a character who had wandered into the wrong play. But he seemed perfectly at home--the silence, broken only by a radio, by coughs and gruff instructions to raise, to pass or fold, the smoke, the sweat, the sense of ugly isolation, were instances of an all-too-hospitable geography now. Theodor Reik observed that gambling was "a kind of question addressed to destiny." And it seemed to me that Bo had bent his head in such a way as to have heard an answer. For he was in his element now and he played with the intensity of a man who sensed that each new dawn, each new turn of the card, represented a place where pain was neutralized and memory dulled, where hope, like some old familiar landmark, would guide him home again.

It was dawn. (It is always dawn on these occasions.) Bo had played throughout the night and, collecting his winnings, about $100, we left. We parted at the corner. He was drunk: he seemed agitated and very tired, as if he had just come down off Methedrine. The streets were empty but for a passing milkman and two or three black hookers loitering in a door at the corner. Bo began to sing in a thick dissonant voice. Adjusting the lapels of his pinstripe suit and running his fingers through his thinning hair, he reeled quaintly toward the corner. I never saw him again. I don't know where he was going, nor I think did he, but sliding out from the door, one of the hookers took Bo by the arm and helped him on his way.