Cha-Ching!, page 12
The woman looked at Theo’s machine while still playing her own and said, “Why did you do that? Why weren’t you playing the maximum amount of credits?”
“What do you mean?”
“You have to play three credits to win on three sevens. Otherwise you get nothing.”
“It was my last two credits,” Theo defended.
“You don’t win anything when you’re only playing two credits. You can’t do that. You’ll kill yourself doing that,” the woman said. “That’s the kind of stuff that keeps you up at night.”
Theo stared at the three sevens, stunned, and kept pushing the spin button even though there was no money left. When she finally got up to leave, the woman told her one more time, “You can’t do that,” shaking her head.
Theo wandered over to the pay phones and stood in front of one for a long time holding the cigarette with Marisol’s phone number. She’d just call her and say hi even though it was late. She had no idea what time it was, but she knew it had to be at least 2 am. She dialed the number and hung up when she realized she didn’t have any change. She considered breaking another hundred and getting some rolls of quarters from the change girl, but felt impatient. She dialed the operator and asked to place a collect call. While the operator dialed Theo’s heart pounded. She wanted to hear Marisol’s voice. She regretted having come to Atlantic City.
Marisol’s sleepy voice answered.
“Will you accept a collect call from Theo?” the operator said.
Marisol paused a second and gave out a little chuckle, “Uh, okay.”
“You are connected,” the operator said, hanging up.
“Hi,” Theo said.
“Hello.”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m sleeping. What are you doing?”
“I’m in Atlantic City.”
“Really?”
Theo couldn’t tell if there was the slight sound of disgust in her voice.
“I just wanted to call because I wanted to call you all day and, uh, I didn’t.”
“That’s nice.”
“So, maybe we can do something again soon?”
“Yeah,” Marisol said, “why don’t you call me when you’re back from Atlantic City.”
“Okay. And I’ll give you money for this collect call. I just didn’t have any change.”
“Sounds good. I’m going to go back to sleep now because I have to work in the morning.”
“Okay. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight.”
Theo felt injured walking away from the pay phones. She didn’t know what she had expected, but that wasn’t it. She wandered through the casino slightly depressed until she found Big Vic at a blackjack table looking pissed. She stood back watching him bust a few hands, throwing his cards down in disgust and occasionally taking a sip of a Coke. She couldn’t understand how he could refuse free drinks from a casino that was so obviously kicking his ass. Theo had never been too proud to refuse a free four-hundred-dollar gin and tonic. While she stood behind him, his losing streak continued. Bust. Bust. Bust. Even the dealer was disgusted. Nobody tips the dealer when they’re losing. Theo watched the dealer’s face and saw that she was afraid to turn over her own cards because she couldn’t stop winning. After Big Vic was out of chips he opened his wallet to buy more, but the only thing inside was a condom. Then he reached into his pockets and rummaged around, confirming the fact that he was a broke-ass joke.
“Let’s go,” he said to Theo, and they left the casino.
On the walk to the truck Big Vic confessed he’d lost eighteen hundred dollars. She didn’t say anything because she knew there’s nothing to say to a person who’s lost that much.
“That was the money I was going to use to buy my mom a minivan tomorrow,” he said in the very, very, very low voice of someone who has lost a lot of money.
“You have to work tomorrow?” Theo asked.
He shook his head no.
“Let’s get a room, take a shower. Maybe eat something. I’ll loan you two hundred dollars and we’ll win that money back. It’s lucky money,” Theo said, patting her jacket pocket where the envelope of Buttermilk winnings remained.
“No,” Big Vic said, but she could see he was considering it.
•
Theo realized it was 4 am and they would have to check out of a room by noon, so they decided to try plan B, which was get some pizza and use the money they would have spent on a room to recoup their losses at the roulette wheel. Big Vic sat in angry silence next to Theo on the ride to the pizza shop. It was the last bit of night where it meets up with morning, the sun about to push up against black sky. Theo felt crazy from exhaustion and cigarettes and alcohol and the casino. But the biggest disappointment was her conversation with Marisol.
What had she wanted, for Marisol to beg her to come over right then and marry her? She thought about it for a second and, embarrassed, acknowledged yes. Maybe she should have sex with Big Vic and that would make her less attached to Marisol. She’d had sex with a few guys in high school, but mostly during alcoholic blackouts. Now that she was drinking again anything could be normal. She had become a ghost walking beside her ghost self; when you’re a ghost you can be anything. She could be in love with Big Vic and help him care for his mother. She could be a professional gambler or a day trader. Someone could surely teach her how to be a day trader. Plus, maybe Big Vic just needed sex to quell his post-gambling rage. She had no idea how men operated, she just figured they were willing to have sex anytime anywhere, especially after she’d seen the inexplicable desires of men at The Looney Bin.
The farther away from the casino they got, the more real became the fact that Big Vic had lost the eighteen hundred dollars he was going to use to buy his mother a van. Theo knew from her own experience of losing large sums of money that there were no words to console him. It would take him a long time schlepping dead lobsters at the restaurant to recoup those losses. But money stops being money in casinos and becomes this weird other currency of easy come/easy go credits.
The first time Theo lost eighteen hundred dollars she felt like she would kill herself. Tonight, the combination of losing four hundred dollars plus her shitty phone call with Marisol and her botched sobriety made her only consider suicide, eyeing the ditches on the side of the road. She absorbed Big Vic’s despair, and the trees flew past the windows. She wondered if everyone in the long line of cars heading away from the casino at 4 am was considering the same thing. Finally, they reached the 24-hour pizza place.
Theo gave Big Vic a hundred-dollar bill and asked him to go in while she stood against her truck smoking her ten millionth cigarette of the night. He emerged holding two white paper bags, and half tossed/half flung Theo’s on the hood of the truck. Inside was a giant, greasy slice of pizza.
“If he asks me, I’ll have sex with him,” she thought, interpreting the toss of the pizza as some kind of mating call.
They ate their pizza and downed some soda and then Theo turned to Big Vic and said, “Scared money don’t win.”
•
Every casino smells the same: cigarette smoke and carpet glue and doom. Theo knew it was a lie when Big Vic said he was trying to win money to help support his mother or girlfriend. She also knew she was lying when she said the reason she was returning to the casino was to help Big Vic. Gambling is not about getting money; it’s about shoving adrenaline into the brain receptor that eats it up like birthday cake.
“We’re going right to the roulette wheel,” Theo said. “That’s the only way to do this.”
Because it was so early in the morning there was only one roulette wheel in operation. An older Asian man sat on a stool and chain-smoked next to a tray with an untouched steak dinner on it. Theo took a hundred-dollar bill out of her envelope and bought four twenty-five dollar chips, placing them all on black.
“Oh man,” Big Vic said.
“Scared money don’t win,” Theo said, looking him in the eye.
“Okay, okay. Come on baby,” Big Vic said.
If they still had money then they still had hope. The croupier spun the wheel and they all watched the silver ball bounce around inside it.
“Black, black, black,” Theo whispered, trying to will the ball to settle into the black slot.
“Black twenty-eight,” the croupier sang.
“Yes!” Big Vic cried.
The croupier slid two matching towers of chips over to Theo’s pile and then spun the wheel again.
“You gonna let all that ride?” Big Vic asked.
Theo didn’t answer him, just watched the wheel turn and in her mind repeated, black, black, black.
“Black fifteen.”
“Oh shit,” Big Vic said.
The Asian man got a big payout because he had a lot of money on fifteen. Theo and Big Vic watched the croupier measure stacks and push them over to him. Theo’s low back was sweating. She left the chips where they were, and the croupier spun the wheel again, and as it slowed Theo could see the ball settling in the red seven. Black, black, black, she thought, closing her eyes.
“Black eleven,” the croupier called out.
Big Vic slapped Theo’s shoulder.
Theo resisted breaking the streak but she really wanted to put a hundred-dollar chip on eight. The croupier spun the wheel again and she watched the ball bounce around, and then right before it was too late to place anymore bets, she put a hundred-dollar chip on the number eight. She watched the ball bounce around. She was so high, endorphins were racing through her brain like a bunch of elementary school kids during recess.
“Black eight!”
“Fucking shit! That’s thirty-five hundred dollars,” Theo said to Big Vic, “just for the eight!”
Big Vic was so high that he turned around in a small circle of disbelief, flashing the gap in his teeth.
“Cash out,” he told Theo. “Cash out.”
“Are you kidding? Let’s do one more.”
“No. We gotta get out of here before we lose it.”
The Asian man used the delay in action to saw off a piece of his cold, untouched steak and numbly chew it. When a cocktail waitress came by, he signaled for her to take it away.
“Cash out,” Theo told the croupier.
Her body buzzed with adrenaline as she watched the croupier push a tower of black chips toward her. She pulled two hundred-dollar chips off the top, tapped them twice on the felt and rolled them to the side for him.
“Thank you,” the croupier said.
Then she picked up the rest of her chips and stepped back from the table.
“How much is there?” Big Vic asked.
“I don’t know. I just want to watch and see if black comes up again.”
She could see the relief in his face and they waited to see where the ball would fall next. The Asian man glanced at Theo and then put a hundred-dollar chip on her eight that just won.
“That eight better not hit again,” Theo said to Big Vic.
The croupier spun the wheel and they all watched the silver ball bounce around.
“Black twenty-eight,” the croupier sang.
He was like an experimental poet reciting to an audience of one.
“It’s still coming up black. We should’ve let all that ride,” Theo said sadly.
“No, no. We’re straight,” Big Vic said, giving Theo a celebratory jab in the arm.
She counted out eighteen hundred-dollar chips and held onto the rest as they went to cash them out at the window. After paying Big Vic, she had won $3,100. While she waited for the cashier to pay her she was trying to calculate how much she would have won if she’d let the money ride one more time.
On the drive back to Brooklyn, Theo tried to make Big Vic talk to her so she wouldn’t fall asleep, but before long he’d passed out with his head pressed into the window. The rest of the ride she obsessed about Marisol. She would take her out to a fancy dinner with her winnings. It was morning rush hour when they reached the city. Everyone in the cars around them had the sleepy faces of people heading to work. Big Vic asked Theo if she could drop him at a subway station. He was getting dental work done at the Bellevue dental clinic. Then he was going to buy a minivan for his mom.
nine
Theo slept late into the afternoon, waking up confused. She felt hungover, something she hadn’t experienced in a long time. Slowly she began playing back the events of the night before, squashing out the bad feelings about drunk-dialing Marisol by focusing on the fact that she’d won another $3,100. She got into the shower and tried to scrub off the smoke from the casino. She would bring Marisol flowers and return her books to the library. But first she needed a haircut.
Theo had always picked her barbers the same way she picked her therapists: less than fifteen dollars and a vacant chair. Because of this she often met sad barbers who drank coffee out of dirty cups and read magazines that had hit the stands thirty years ago. Barbershops were dangerous watering holes, where predators waited in hiding for the timid sirma’amsir to come and drink. She came from a long line of barbers and hairstylists—in fact, she’d considered becoming a barber herself. She’d gone to man barbers and woman barbers, friend barbers and stranger barbers who asked was she on her lunch break, did she speak Spanish, have any children, go to church, know how to drive, have rent control?
She gave vague instructions, “Number two on the sides and natural in the back.” If asked straight sideburn or angle sideburn, she’d say straight. If asked square back or natural back, she’d say natural. She’d had her hair cut by religious women whose shop walls were so completely covered with Psalms posters, there was barely room for all the crucifixes. She’d had her hair cut in kitchens, in discount haircutting franchises by Russian students, by women who looked at her and told her to bleach her hair, or at the very least try a few highlights, and they said it without malice, as one woman to another. They told her because they’d bleached their own hair, to get a man or keep a man, and Theo knew that when they looked at her she seemed like some kind of terrifying exotic food dish, like pig nipple, or brain, or eyeball or tenderloin of sirma’amsir served with mint jelly, and they combed her thick fur this way and that and hung their heads over her shoulder asking if she was absolutely sure she didn’t want highlights, and they said it with an open heart: They wanted Theo to be able to seize a man, any man, because they were absolutely positive there was no way a person who looked like Theo had a man. Or maybe they wanted Theo to be a woman, and when they looked at her they had no fucking idea how to begin making that happen, so they thought they could chip away at it by starting with highlights. And for the most part Theo couldn’t hate those women, because she could see the goodwill in their eyes.
Sometimes she would go to Mary’s, where the men’s haircuts were ten and the women’s twelve, and when she got to the register to pay there would be a giant debate of diez o doce, diez o doce? And ultimately it was doce, the timid sirma’amsir too timid to object to a two-dollar surcharge.
Today Theo wanted a haircut so she could feel handsome enough when she asked Marisol out. She walked up to 4th Avenue and found a shop where the barber had just finished giving a buzz cut to a redheaded man. Theo looked at a few handmade signs posted on the mirrors that said the prices of haircuts had just gone up from eight to ten dollars. The shop thanked the customers in advance for their loyalty. The man who’d left his tufts of red hair on the ground didn’t have enough money for a tip because he hadn’t known about the price change. He looked sheepish, gave the short, old, sad barber the money he had, saying, “I’ll come back after I eat lunch,” which Theo doubted.
The barber motioned Theo into the chair, and as always when she climbed into these chairs, she slumped forward with a submissive posture, curling her body into its most unobtrusive shape, not knowing if the barber thought of her as a man or a woman.
“What you want?” the barber asked.
She tried to figure out the man’s ethnicity but could not. She guessed Filipino.
“Number two,” she said.
“And nothing off the top,” the barber said, more as a command then a question.
“Right,” Theo said, even though she did need the top trimmed.
The barber started to buzz the sides of her hair with the number two attachment. She watched him slyly in the mirror then glanced through the front window to the street. There was a perfect spiderweb shatter from a bullet that had been halfheartedly covered with a calendar. The barber was using only one of his hands to do everything, and she wondered if he was paralyzed. In San Francisco there had been a paralyzed barber. Her friends went to him but she’d never been because he was a few blocks farther than she’d wanted to walk. He’d had a stroke but kept on working, modifying, holding things with his shoulder to his bent neck and one good hand.
Paralyzed barber or not, Theo was happy with this haircut. She could tell from how the hair was falling off easily that the man had good buzzers. She caught a glimpse of the dark circles under her eyes, a result of her all-nighter in Atlantic City. Barbershop mirrors were especially abusive to the timid sirma’amsir, how they showed every flaw.
There was a haircut called The Butch on the poster on the wall. The Butch was next to The Flat Top and The Brush Cut. Honestly, she couldn’t tell the difference between any of them. Nor did she think the man in the illustration of Haircuts For Large Ears seemed to have large ears at all. Theo looked at her ears and wondered if they would be considered large. It amazed her how many times she’d seen this exact same yellowed poster advertising Haircuts For Large Ears, Haircuts For Small Ears, The Flat Top, The Professional, and The JFK. This neighborhood was Puerto Rican and Dominican; still, the poster on the wall offered choices for white men with blond hair from fifty years ago. If a person didn’t want a haircut from the 1950s, they could choose from some photographs that were taped to the mirror of clients who’d gotten sports team logos shaved into their heads.
