Authors: Beth Raymer
“Either you’re a jinx, or God hates me. Which one do you think it could possibly be?”
Robbie J stayed staring at the televisions. He was accustomed to the dynamic between Dink and Tulip. I wasn’t, and it made me nervous when Dink raised his voice during their fights.
Dink stopped yelling and threw one of his battery-operated singing hamsters at the television set. It landed near my keyboard. I picked it up and pressed its tummy, trying to diffuse the awkwardness, but I regretted it the moment the thing started singing.
Take. Me out to the ball game. Take. Me out with the crowd
.
“Oh my God, shut that fuckin’ thing up. Thing gets on my fuckin’ nerves already,” Robbie J said.
I knew there was no off button; still, I looked for one.
Tulip remained standing with her purse over her shoulder. “God doesn’t hate you, honey,” she said, mildly. “Admit you’re powerless over baseball and that your life has become unmanageable. It’s the first step.”
“You think it’s funny. I’m gonna lose this winter and we’re going to have to sell the house.”
“You say that every winter.”
“But this winter I know. Trust me. We’re going to go broke. It’s going to sneak up on us, quietly. Quietly broke.”
It hadn’t always been like this. The year Dink was in the halfway house, he had such good luck that Tulip never saw any of his temper tantrums. It wasn’t until they moved to Vegas that she witnessed what happened when Dink lost. One afternoon she arrived home from a matinee. The moment she stepped out of the car, she heard yelling. Fearing that her husband had gone into cardiac arrest, she ran into the house. There was Dink, stripped to the waist, writhing around on the floor and pulling his hair with both hands.
“What is going on!” Tulip screamed.
“Cocksucker, motherfucker!” Dink cried. “WHY did he BUNT? Why, why, WHY?”
Tulip ran upstairs and into the bedroom. She turned on her stereo, but even
Rubber Soul
on high volume couldn’t drown out her husband’s yelling. So she packed an overnight bag and drove to the office. She fell asleep on the couch reading about fantasy vacations in
Sunset
magazine.
“Dinky, he takes you to all the funerals and none of the weddings,” his friends often said, shaking their heads. But it wasn’t just the funerals that bothered Tulip. Dink didn’t do anything husbandly. At the gas station, he stayed in the driver’s seat, glued to his sports ticker, while Tulip pumped the gas. He didn’t know how to rent a movie. His idea of grocery shopping was going to the 7-Eleven and buying baloney and American cheese. In all the times they visited his mother in Queens, Dink never once took Tulip into Manhattan for a day trip to Central Park or to visit a museum. It was strictly Shea Stadium, the track, and lunch at the Georgia Diner on Queens Boulevard. If Tulip asked Dink to do a simple task around the house, he’d panic. “I make the money,” he’d argue. “You change the lightbulbs.” Her first husband was so much more competent. David used to take her Jaguar in for tune-ups. He always pumped the gas and opened doors. When David lost
races, he never would’ve imagined blaming it on his wife. He never would’ve called her a jinx.
Dinky, Dinky, Dinky. He was such a child. But Tulip never wanted kids.
Dink continued to scream and punch himself in the head. Without saying good-bye, Tulip closed the door so quietly that it took Dink a moment before he realized she was gone.
“I know something that’ll make you feel better,” I said.
He covered his face with his hands. His voice weakened.
“A bullet?” Dink said.
“Chinese poker!”
I grabbed the deck from my backpack and sat in the empty seat beside him.
“My wife is a jinx. I deal with it as best I can.” He stuck a pen in his mouth and chewed on its end. “Best out of three,” he said. “You shuffle.”
Beneath the banquet table, amid kinked computer cables and tangled telephone cords, our knees touched.
I came home to a message slid under my door by the motel manager. “Your father called,” the note read, “wondering if you’re still alive.”
I had yet to tell either of my parents about my new job. I felt that my mother, who was living in Ohio, recovering from her thirty-two-year marriage to my father and the long, bitter divorce that followed, was better off not knowing what I was doing. It would just cause her worry. But Dad never worried. Working at a dealership in Fort Myers and playing blackjack every weekend on
The Big “M”
(he referred to the casino boat’s high-limit table as his office), Dad is—and always has been—a very lenient man. Other than the casual remark that I’d make a good car salesman, he never pushed me down any career path. As long as I wasn’t “headed to the slammer,” Dad was proud. I put Otis on his leash and we walked to the corner pay phone.
“A collect call from
BETH
. Will you accept the charges?”
“Yello …”
“Dad!”
“Beth Raymer. You alive?”
Then the question that always followed:
“You workin’?”
“I’m working for a professional gambler!”
“Professional
who-what?”
“Sports gambler,” I said. “I help him make his bets.”
I leaned my back into the phone booth and gazed across the street, inside the 7-Eleven. Its glass front doors were wide open and welcoming. Native Americans played the slot machines that lined the walls. Their free hands gripped necks of bottled beers. One of my neighbors, a Filipina hooker, came on to an elderly tourist in an electric wheelchair. Her long black hair sank into his lap as she leaned down and whispered in his ear.
“How much you make to do that?” Dad asked.
“Twenty dollars an hour, under the table!” I said. “Plus vacations and bonuses.”
“See if ya can get your old man a job. I got fired.”
This was not unusual. As a kid, if I walked home from school and saw my dad’s car in the driveway, I knew he had been fired. He sold cars seven days a week, from nine in the morning until nine at night. Under no circumstances, other than being fired (or quitting), would his car be in the driveway during daylight hours.
Through the sliding glass doors, I’d see him, drifting around the pool in the white styrofoam lounge float, Miller Lite tallboys jutting out from each of the built-in cup holders. In my bedroom, I’d quickly change into my bathing suit, run through the house, cannonball into the deep end, and ask him why he got fired. “That’s the car business, Beth Anne. Bunch of assholes.” Looking like her entire world had just collapsed, my mom stood in the shade and asked how we were going to afford groceries. Dad would finish one beer and crack open the other, while I spun him around in circles as though he were the guest of honor in a water parade commemorating
unemployment. In the days that followed, I’d sit Indian style on the driveway and watch him work on the Corvette. A matinee at the dog track, a few games of catch in the street, a couple evenings watching
Benny Hill
reruns, then came the inevitable morning. The smell of Old Spice and drip coffee, and Dad in his dress pants, a button-down, and a tie. The classified ads tucked in his armpit. “Where are you gonna work this time?” I asked on his way out the door. His answer was always the same: “Who knows, Beth Anne. Some asshole fired me. Some asshole’ll hire me.”
I asked if he was serious about working for Dink.
“See what he says. I’ll get a room at the Mirage. I’ll get ’em to forward my unemployment checks there. Me and Brenda Baby’ll move to Vegas.”
Brenda Baby was my father’s most recent girlfriend, a skinny-legged blonde whose augmented breasts were out of kilter with her petite frame. The first time she invited me to her house for dinner, I brought Otis along and when she bent over to pet him, the weight of her chest propelled her forward and she fell. During my parents’ divorce, my father drained his 401(k) and took off with Brenda Baby to the Bahamas. They lived in a suite atop the Crystal Palace Casino for a month. I’m not sure what went on there, how much money Dad won or lost, but eventually they returned, unharmed, and moved in together. I liked the thought of Dad living down the street at the Mirage. Perhaps Dink could take Dad under his wing and teach him how to gamble responsibly. And if Brenda Baby belonged anywhere on this planet it was Vegas, baby.
“When you and Tulip first started dating, was she curious about what you did?” I asked Dink one evening as we shopped for music at Best Buy. He was buying me so many CDs we needed a shopping cart. As a mentor, Dink believed that grooming my musical taste was just as important as teaching me the nuances of sports betting, if not more so.
“Minorly. She knew I had money. Here. The Ramones,
Road to Ruin
. Excellent album.”
I tossed it into the cart. “But what did she think of you being a gambler?”
“You and your questions,” he said. “Here. The Replacements. Great band.”
“I don’t think Tulip likes me.”
“She just doesn’t know you. Why don’t you two do something together?”
“Like what? Shop for overstuffed chairs for the living room?”
I snatched up the Gram Parsons anthology, gasped, and pulled it close to my heart. Dink took it out of my hands and placed it in the top area of the cart, where the important, delicate things go—like eggs and children.
Down Rainbow Boulevard, Dink swerved in and out of traffic. We had stayed at Best Buy for too long. Now we were going to miss Monday night kickoff. I unwrapped the plastic from my CD cases and inserted
Sacred Hearts and Fallen Angels
, disk 1. I slipped off my flip-flops, slouched deep in the leather seat, and dangled my feet from the passenger side window. “Sing with me!” I shouted over the wind. I smudged the side mirror with my toes.
“I don’t know the words,” Dink yelled.
I turned up the volume. Everyone knew “To Love Somebody.” It was a standard.
I watched Dink begin to sing and keep rhythm by tapping his ticker against the steering wheel. What a perfect companion I had in him. For three months we’d been spending nearly every moment together and each day I could feel my heart becoming lighter. I loved Dink’s stories and generosity, his taste in music and how we made each other laugh. Having Dink in my life was the plain difference between spring break and incarceration. He looked over at me, gave a quick smile, and looked back to the road. I could feel in my throat the desire to say something serious. I pulled the ticker from his hand and played with his fingers. At the red light, I brought my palm to his palm and let my fingers fall in between his.
We held hands through the Monday night football game, in which Tampa Bay beat the Rams outright, and afterward, beneath the blackjack table at the Golden Nugget. The next night, in the
dark of the Hilton sports book, we sat close, my head on his shoulder, and rooted for Gonzaga to dribble out the clock. It was a blowout game between two little-known college teams that no one cared about, except for the coaches, the players, perhaps their parents, and, thanks to the invention of the point spread, a Vegas wiseguy and his young apprentice.
“I like him so much,” I told my friend Jamie, from the pay phone across from the 7-Eleven. “Do you think I should confess my love and see if he’ll leave his wife and run away with me?”
“Who’s this again?”
“My boss.”
“The guy you said always has tuna stuck in his teeth?”
I pressed my thumb into a chunk of hardened bubble gum stuck beside the coin slot.
“Yeah,” I said. “Him.”
Most nights after Tulip went to bed, Dink and I met for dinner at the ESPN Zone. Dink presented me with stacks of CDs. Donovan and Joe Jackson were my newest undertakings. As we sat across from each other in the booth, I read song lyrics while Dink watched the late hockey game on the miniature television attached to the end of the table.
“We need the Bruins and under. Our root is for no one to score. But if someone must score, we want it to be the Bruins.” He brought a fork heaped with mashed potatoes to his mouth.
I ordered another glass of wine. A friend of Dink’s once lectured me on why I should never order wine at a sports bar. It was the kind of crap that caused headaches and stained lips, the guy said. It was unsophisticated. Embarrassed, I had switched to rum and Coke. Now, alone with Dink, I was free to drink the ESPN sauvignon. The wineglasses ESPN used were as round as cereal bowls and the bartenders poured to the rim. The waiter returned with my new glass. I used my tongue to pick up the pieces of cork that floated on top.
After dinner we went to the arcade and took turns on the virtual
reality boxing game, which included real boxing gloves to wear. I never liked video games but I loved the feeling of letting my hands go and landing punches. I loved the explosive sound effects that came each time my glove smashed into my opponent’s face, which was now covered in blood. Goateed frat boys gathered in a half moon around me and began cracking jokes. They broke my concentration. In a blink I was on my back and my opponent was dancing around me, arms raised in victory. Game over.
“My turn,” Dink said. He struggled to put on the boxing gloves and his phone rang. Too-lip, he mouthed, before answering. She yelled so loud that Dink had to hold the phone away from his ear.
“There’s no
fucking
reason you should be out so late with her.”
I cocked my head and checked Dink’s wristwatch. Late? It wasn’t even ten.
“Every night you go to bed at nine o’clock,” Dink yelled back. “Now, because I have a new friend, you’re forcing yourself to stay up just so you can tell me what I can’t do.”
She hung up on him.
“No more boxing. I gotta go. She’s losing it.”
“One more game,” I begged. “Come on, one more game.”
“Fine. One more game.”
The next morning, the day of my first pay and collect, the three of us sat beside each other in icy silence. Dink dumped a heap of cash from his duffel bag, I sipped my coffee and doodled, and Tulip sat between us. Tight-jawed and nostrils flaring, she snapped back the pages of a magazine, far too angry to actually be reading. And God knows she wasn’t working. She was nothing more than a chaperone, hanging around to make sure we didn’t flirt.