Double Down: Reflections on Gambling and Loss - Hardcover

Frederick Barthelme is the author of eleven books, most recently The Brothers and Painted Desert. He directs the writing program at the University of Southern Mississippi and edits the literary journal Mississippi Review. Mr. Barthelme currently lives in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

Chapter 1
Mississippi
We arrived in Hattiesburg almost ten years apart.
We'd held plenty of other jobs -- cab driver,
construction worker, advertising writer, journalist,
art installer, architectural draftsman -- and we'd
each done stints at The Johns Hopkins University in
Baltimore for graduate degrees, and now we were ready
to settle down and teach.
Rick arrived first, in the mid-seventies,
terrified because Mississippi had that reputation,
that myth the prominent aspect of which wasn't the
lovely Old South with its high manners and splendid
architecture, but ignorance, burning, lynching. Being
from Houston, having lived five years in New York
City, and just out of graduate school, he figured he
was profoundly enlightened and Mississippi wasn't.
Indeed, his introduction to Hattiesburg was at an all-
night gas station on Highway 49 where a lone teenager-
slash-halfwit was capturing "pinching" bugs attracted
by the bright lights and corralling them in a five-
gallon bucket of sand he kept inside his little glass
booth, a diversion he favored because, as he said, he
liked to watch the bugs kill each other.
This was two in the morning, and Rick and his
girlfriend had been driving all day from Baltimore,
where the morning before they'd had brunch with the
British literary critic Tony Tanner in the polished-
mahogany restaurant on the first floor of a hundred-
year-old hotel. Now instead of talking about
postmodernism they were facing it, and it didn't seem
to know their names.
So Rick spent the first six weeks of his
employment at the University of Southern Mississippi
commuting from Houston, a safe four hundred and fifty
miles away. In time he discovered that Mississippi
was as civilized as anywhere else. The gas jockey
notwithstanding, things had apparently changed, and
at least in Hattiesburg and around the university,
the myth was a phony. In fact, taken as a whole, the
people he met in Mississippi began to seem gentler
and more humane than many he'd run into in ostensibly
finer settings. Probably there were remnants of
the "old" Mississippi elsewhere in the New South of
the seventies, but those remnants weren't on public
view, did not seem dominant. In spite of the
benighted reputation, Mississippi seemed more than
its share enlightened.
Steve arrived nine years later, and if some
of his impressions were different, maybe that was
because when he arrived in Hattiesburg he had already
spent the previous two years teaching at a university
in Monroe, a dim, depressed, trash-strewn Louisiana
town where even the snakes hung their heads. If the
races seemed to him stiffer with each other in
Mississippi than they had been in Louisiana,
Hattiesburg itself was clean and bright, and the
people were friendly. There was more money apparent,
and the roads were mostly paved. During his first
weeks in town he noticed two, maybe three Volkswagen
beetles. You wouldn't have found them in Monroe.
So there we were, college professors and
fiction writers. We were middle-aged, born in Texas,
raised in a family of mostly fallen Catholics, with a
father who was a successful and innovative architect
and teacher, and a mother who was an English teacher
and a reader, an actress in college who had wanted to
pursue the stage but didn't quite escape the
conventionality of her time. One older brother, Don,
was a leading literary figure. Two other older
siblings made their livings writing: Joan as a public
relations vice president for Pennzoil Corporation,
Pete as a Houston advertising executive and an author
of mystery novels.
Growing up, we were trained in restlessness
and doubt. Conformity wasn't prized. The house our
father designed in 1939 -- a large, low, flat-roofed
box with a single small square room standing up on
top -- was an anomaly in a neighborhood of ranch-
style and Tudoresque homes. Our house looked like a
large, rectilinear Merrimac. On the empty grasslands
west of Houston, it startled passersby.
The house had been made of wood alone, but later the
exterior was covered in copper. Our father had this
idea about copper. He had read that when sprayed with
a certain acid compound, copper would discolor in a
particularly attractive way, so he hired a contractor
and several workmen and had the vertical siding
covered in sheet copper. Then he bought a sprayer, a
two-foot tank with a manual pump, and he mixed up a
batch of the acid that was going to make the copper
come alive in an exquisite turquoise. Well, it didn't
happen. The copper asserted itself, and from that
time forward the house was -- exquisitely -- brown.
Inside, it was a hotbed of modern furniture:
elegant Saarinen chairs, the bent birch of Aalto
dining tables and chairs, almost every piece of
furniture or fabric that Charles and Ray Eames ever
designed, from the little wire-frame footstools all
the way up to, much later, the big rosewood and black
leather chair, now ubiquitous. The rest of the
furniture Father built himself, or had us build under
his supervision. Things were always being redone,
reconstructed, redesigned in accordance with some new
idea he had.
We went to Catholic schools, and there, along
with the conventional subjects, we were schooled in
guilt. This was before traditional Catholicism lost
its purchase, before "mea culpa" became "my bad," or
however it's now translated.
The Catholics were good at their jobs. You're
eight, maybe, and you go into your older sister's
room and take a new yellow pencil away from her desk
and erase some drawing you have been working on, and
suddenly you think: This is a sin. I'm stealing. What
you're stealing is eraser. But that's not the best
part. The best part comes next, when the eight-year-
old thinks: No, this is prideful worry. Worrying too
much about sins is a sin. It's "scrupulousness."
For our purposes, the complaint that this
indoctrination is barbarous is secondary to the idea
that a Catholic education can accustom a soul to a
high level of stimulation, and if you get too
comfortable later in life, you miss it.
After high school, we each left our parents'
house and the Catholic schools, Rick to Tulane, back
to Houston, then New York; Steve to Boston, Austin,
and California. We ran through three or four colleges
apiece, worked different jobs, were rarely in the
same city for more than a couple of months at a time,
but over that period, in different ways we were doing
the same thing: in fits and starts, we learned to
write. Significantly, we learned the skill of
editing -- what our father was always doing with the
house -- which is in itself a school of
dissatisfaction.
Years passed. We got older, more tired, less
strident. We tried, not too successfully, to learn to
lighten up. We went to Mississippi, where our lives
were all aesthetics, literature, art, music, film,
narrative, character, culture -- teaching school.
Books and movies in a pleasant town, handsome beyond
what we had imagined, lush and green year-round,
sixty thousand beings at the intersection of two
highways. Originally a lumber and rail town,
crossroads in a pine forest, Hattiesburg was a suburb
attached to no city, distantly resembling some suburb
of Houston twenty years before. Perfectly congenial,
if a little short on excitement.
After teaching a few years, we had lost some
connection with the world outside the academy, the
ordinary world pictured in USA Today. We didn't drink
very much, didn't smoke, took only sanctioned meds.
Sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll was a joke. We became,
through no fault of our own, adults. Kids came to the
writing program from all over the country, often from
much better schools, and we helped them find things
to write about, find their talents. We knew it was
awfully sweet work, in our awfully sweet lives.
As college professors we were automatically
in an out-of-harm's-way subculture, but we watched TV
and read newspapers, so we had some idea of what the
rest of the world was like. We just weren't in it
exactly. In fact, maybe nobody of the middle class
was much in it -- that was the point of being middle
class, yes? Buy your way out of the threatening and
the immediate. The downside being that you lose some
edge. In the worlds of kids or poor people or
maniacs, there's always a lot of stuff happening,
people doing crazy things, acting up, risking life,
being desperately in love or terribly angry -- a lot
of stimulation.
So we nodded, and folded our hands, and
thought. There inside our comfortable, well-
maintained apartments. We lived in pleasant
circumstances with work that was agreeable, but after
all was said and done there was still this old
furniture piled up in the garage -- curiosity,
recklessness, guilt. By training we were
dissatisfied, by temperament restless.
Enter the boats. Sometime in 1992 casinos
moved in on the coast and, observing a legal nicety
requiring that casinos be waterborne -- which was
part of the bargain struck between the gaming lobby
and the legislature to legalize gambling in
Mississippi -- they appeared as paddle wheelers that
were docked against the beaches. They were cramped,
crowded, intimidating. Long lines of customers waited
just to get in, and inside the players were dead
serious and going at full speed. The pit people were
gruff and the atmosphere was sweaty and sleazy. If
you sat down in front of a dealer, you'd better know
what you were doing. But the boats were right there,
and eventually we went to see what they were about.
The beaches had never been much good. The
sand had been sucked out of Mississippi Sound and
spread alongside Highway 90 like something in the
bottom of an aquarium. It looked wrong, like a bad
hairpiece. The water was the color
of pot roast; locals said people loved Florida's
emerald water, but fish, shrimp, and crabs preferred
Mississippi's brown, where they were an industry. The
towns strung along the coast had some of the dumpy
charm of Galveston, where our father was born, where
we'd visited our grandparents as children, and where
we'd played on the winningly disheveled Stewart's
Beach.
From Biloxi to Pass Christian to Bay St.
Louis and Waveland, the coast towns were similarly
distressed places, down at the heels, beat-up, and
ugly, but now, with the advent of gaming (they love
to call it gaming), the towns were tarting up in a
new, too wholesome way. The cheesy glitz of miniature
golf and bright pink seashell emporia gave way to
paddleboat quaint: cheap tux shirts, black bow ties,
red cartoon suspenders. Gaming interests wanted
casino gambling to seem harmless, fun for the whole
family, so the newer developments worked along those
lines. The architecture quickly turned Disneyesque:
pirate ships and mock cowboy saloons slathered in
happy neon (splashy pots of gold) instead of the
tiny, furtive neon ("Nudes! Nudes! Nudes!") of the
old beachfront strip. Mimicking Las Vegas,
corporations were building twenty- and thirty-story
hotels, huge parking lots, restaurants, and stores to
attach to the casinos. They had day care if you
needed it.
Biloxi had a great old restaurant called
Fisherman's Wharf, a shoddy wood-frame thing built on
telephone-pole pilings right on the sound. It had
been serving seafood for more than forty years.
Family-owned, dilapidated, but the food was marvelous
in the way that only coastal dives can manage --
fresh fish, fried chicken, big glasses of sweet tea.
Gerald Ford had eaten there, and the restaurant had
pictures of him arriving in a big limousine. Ford's
plate was preserved behind glass, along with the
silverware he'd used, his napkin, the menu he'd
looked at.
After 1992, an Oriental-motif casino called
Lady Luck appeared next door -- a barge decked out
like a Chinese restaurant, complete with dragons and
lanterns and fans. One Saturday when Rick and his
girlfriend, Rie, were eating at Fisherman's Wharf,
they spent the meal eyeing this new casino.
Afterward, they decided to give it a try.
Lady Luck was larger than the paddleboats --
higher ceilings, more room. It was garish and silly
inside, but it had charm. The Oriental decor was
oddly coupled with loud pop music, waves of colored
lights, and women in startlingly short skirts and
tight tops. It was chilly in the casino, even in
August.
Rick and Rie walked around, looked over the
shoulders of the table-games players, tried their
hands at video poker and the slot machines. They
started with quarters and won a little, then moved up
to half dollars and dollars. At a bank of dollar
machines, one of them hit a small jackpot, and then
the other hit one. Two sevens and a wild cherry. A
minute later, Rick hit a five-hundred-dollar jackpot.
Pretty soon they were carrying around buckets of
dollar tokens, and gambling didn't seem so bad. They
walked out with eleven hundred dollars of the
casino's money, feeling as though they'd won the
lottery. Eleven hundred dollars that wasn't theirs.
Later, a similar thing would happen to Steve
and Melanie, his wife.
We learned that this was typical, that it
happened just this way for a lot of people who went
to casinos. You win something sizable, and thereafter
gambling takes up residence in your imagination. You
remember the visit. It's a key to the business -- the
first time you walk away with the casino's money.
When we compared notes about these first trips, we
indulged a light euphoria. Casinos were garish and
grotesque and the people might be seedy, but the
money was swell. We talked about buying books on slot
machines, finding out which ones to play, what the
odds were, how to maximize advantage and minimize
risk. We were serious and excited; something new had
come into our otherwise quiet lives. Neither of us
had any idea how much those first jackpots would
eventually cost.
Copyright (c) 2000 by Frederick and Steven Barthelme.
Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.