Authors: Beth Raymer
Not until I was chin down, hands up, in the sweltering heat of Johnny Tocco’s did I feel a sense of relief. Having grasped jabbing and footwork, I graduated to sparring. My sparring partner was a two-hundred-twenty-pound black woman named Regina whose social worker introduced her to the gym in hopes that boxing would help her recover from an abusive marriage. Regina outsized me by five inches and one hundred pounds; the only way to create equality was to give her a handicap. So after our trainers buckled our headgear and smeared Vaseline over our noses, they took a moment to duct-tape Regina’s right glove to her breast.
The electronic bell dinged. Out of nervousness, I clamped down on my mouthpiece and hummed, low and steady, while circling Regina. One side of her face was disfigured. She never mentioned anything about the scars (Regina was an aloof woman), but the skin on her cheek looked melted; it wouldn’t surprise me if her husband, in a fit of rage, had once pushed her face into a hot burner. When she shadowboxed in front of the mirror, I felt sorry for her.
But in the ring, I cast all pity aside. With her overhand lefts coming at me like blades on a windmill, she became my sworn enemy. I attacked relentlessly, throwing short, quick jabs and double jabs. But I had yet to grasp the importance of bobbing and weaving, and after snapping her head back I stood, stiff and satisfied, waiting for a receipt, as Señor Morales would say. A solid smack flashed like heat through my ears and in that instant I finally understood what it meant to fight someone with heavy hands.
Practice ended with Señor Morales’s fighters gathering in the ring and throwing twenty-pound medicine balls into each other’s stomachs. Throughout the drill, I kept one eye on the ball and the other on Rodrigo, jumping rope in the corner. From snippets of conversations I overheard while wrapping and unwrapping my hands, Rodrigo’s background emerged: he and the other illegal Cuban immigrants made money by building cages for the Las Vegas Zoo. His mother worked as a maid at the Stratosphere casino. He lived with her and his five brothers and sisters. His goal was to be a titleholder.
With each whisk of the jump rope, Rodrigo’s forearms bulged. I watched him bounce, double-bounce, skip, jog, knee-up, and fall back gracefully into his boxer’s shuffle. Sweat streamed over his stomach muscles, which were brown and cut like a Hershey bar. In the last thirty seconds of the round, he tossed the jump rope aside and dropped to the ground for push-ups. He had the last-minute endurance of a champion.
After our showers, I asked if I could walk him home. I loved the way the soap smelled on his skin and trying to make him laugh made me deliriously happy. Neon lights at the hourly motels buzzed overhead. On the curb outside the 7-Eleven, next to all the panhandling teenage runaways, Rodrigo smoked cigarettes. At five-foot-nine, 132 pounds, he constantly needed to suppress his appetite to keep weight. Across the street, floodlights illuminated a billboard of two women wearing lace G-strings. The brunette’s breasts pressed into the blonde’s as they made out. The ad had something to do with loose slots. Rodrigo pulled his Spanish-to-English
dictionary from his duffel bag. Sitting close, we talked about our dogs.
The new strategy was to hire people who were not degenerate gamblers, which proved difficult. First, Dink hired Jake, a brash, bigoted Mormon. When I found him cheating on the office basketball pool, I demanded his termination. But it took an offhand remark about hamsters not being allowed through the gates of heaven to force Dink’s hand. An upbeat lounge singer named Stephanie quit her Starbucks day job to work at Dink Inc. Her knowledge and love of music made her fun to have in the office, but her fundamentalist Christian values soon came to light and her pro-Republican rants became unbearable. She was so thankful for the job, coming from Starbucks, that Dink couldn’t bear to fire her. After two weeks of training, she still had no idea what we were doing and Dink demoted her to “lunch girl.”
Joe came to us after being laid off from a respectable electronics firm where, for ten years, he wrote and directed video games. The contrast between the professionalism of his career at the studio and the loud unruliness of Dink Inc. appalled him.
“We should demand hazard pay,” Joe griped as we fled the office, the shouts and groans of Dink’s latest tantrum trailing behind us. We slammed the crash bar across the fire door and rushed into the sunshine like inmates in their first ecstatic moments of escape.
Joe flipped down his shades. “What does that man live for? The drama of winning and losing and throwing the ticker?”
Heat from the asphalt seeped up through my flip-flops. Happy to be out of work early, I walked along with my eyes closed and welcomed the sunshine’s intense red through my eyelids.
Joe continued. “Such stupid amounts of money! He’s a millionaire and he’s the most miserable man I’ve ever met. I hate having to come in to that pigsty every day, surrounded by all that hypochondria …” He seemed to reflect for a moment. “Although, shit, man, I think that fungus eating his tongue might be real.”
At the height of Dink’s tantrum that day, he fired the entire staff, an increasingly frequent form of catharsis that lasted until he hired us all back. Joe, however, never returned.
But guess who did?
Lonely, depressed Bruce. I walked into the office one day and there he was, only two months since he had stolen from Dink. AND DINK REHIRED HIM. I soon found out that forgiving thieves and taking them back was normal procedure for Dink. Tony, it turned out, had stolen money a year earlier. He’d “lost” $40,000, claiming it fell out of his car at the Jack in the Box drive-thru. Still, on the afternoon I heard Bruce nagging Dink to hurry up already and order lunch, I snapped.
“We should have you killed, you fat fuck!” I yelled.
Dink intervened. “We can’t kill Bruce just because he robbed my gambling money.”
“I cannot, I
will
not, stay in this office and sit across from some fat fucking degenerate thief who makes the same amount of money as me,” I vented.
Bruce laughed at me, the tartar on his teeth yellow as pus on gauze. Dink did nothing. I stood there, smoldering, undercut by the very guy I was trying to stand up for. Feeling the disdain flowing through my body, I looked to Dink in anger and disappointment. Forget all the gambling psychology you’ve ever heard. The only thing you need to know is this: every gambler is a neurotic with an unconscious wish to lose. And as for the rare professionals who are talented enough to beat the house, rest assured they will go to whatever lengths necessary to surround themselves with people who will lose their money for them.
In an attempt to make peace and keep me out of the office and away from Bruce, Dink rehired Otis and appointed me casino runner. With a cash-stuffed backpack hanging from my shoulder, I started my route at eight a.m. Rodrigo lived right behind the Stratosphere, my third casino pit stop, and I found myself stopping by to say hi, to smell his musk, to kiss him, and then finally, to set aside the Spanish-to-English dictionary and have sex with him on
the kitchen floor. It had been a long time since I found myself attracted to someone so young, sexy, and strong and I could feel lust’s slow poison work its way through my body and damage my common sense. The Wee Kirk o’ the Heather wedding chapel was just a block from his house. If we got married, he wouldn’t have to fear being deported. We could split our time between Havana and Vegas and have sex with each other every day. These were my thoughts as Rodrigo undressed me and I moved my lips down his smooth, warm chest.
“The Duke game!” Dink shrieked. “What’s the line on Duke?”
Flying down the interstate, I held the cell phone as far from my ear as I could. Puzzled by the loud, screaming voice piercing through the front seat, Otis tilted his head.
“Horrible traffic,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
I could almost hear Dink’s blood pressure rising. Then came the screaming rant about how broke he was and how it was my fault because I didn’t care about his bankroll. Feeling too good to care, I hung up on him, rolled down the windows, and turned up the radio.
Just when it seemed that I would never care for another co-worker, Dink hired Grant Durrett. A twenty-six-year-old budding gambler, Grant snooped around ATMs for receipts with high balances, which he would scatter across the dashboard of his car in hopes of impressing dates and luring one-night stands back for more. Grant charmed me with his skewed vision of the world, undoubtedly shaped by his father, a thief who had served time in Leavenworth for drug trafficking. After not seeing his dad for ten years, Grant finally got a call from him. Freshly out of prison, he wanted Grant to come live with him in North Vegas and for the two of them to be “father and son” again. Grant, having always wanted a relationship with his father, was happy to comply and immediately dropped out of his Arizona junior college. Father and son played cards, drank beer and got to know each other. Within months of their reunion,
Papa stole the ten thousand dollars Grant had stashed in his bedroom and used the money to gamble and pay off his bar tabs. Grant moved out and swore off his dad forever. Unfortunately, his mail was still delivered to the trailer and his dad, Grant Durrett Sr., pounced on the opportunity to steal junior’s identity, leaving his dear son another twenty grand in debt. When Grant realized his credit had been ruined, he returned to the Pair-A-Dice Trailer Park, white-knuckling a nine iron as though it were a battle-axe and expressing hopes that his father’s future included equal parts recidivism, denied parole, and ass-rape.
Grant had been on the periphery of Dink Inc. for some time. Years before he ripped off Dink, Tony had been Grant’s mentor. On their first day of working together, Tony instructed Grant on what teams to bet and handed him thousands of dollars. Grant, who had never seen that much money in his life, stuffed the cash in his front pocket and immediately got an erection. On the afternoon Tony stole Dink’s money, Grant was supposed to meet him for lunch. Tony was Grant’s hero, and he never saw him again.
Grant’s overplayed bravado, though at times hard to stomach, served him well in gambling. To make extra money, Grant began taking bets from players he met at sports books. At casinos along the Strip, he approached out-of-town players and offered them his services as a bookmaker. That way, when their Vegas vacation was over, they could return home to Newport Beach, Brentwood, Santa Barbara—places that had no sports books—and continue to gamble. All they had to do was call Grant. During my time in the business, Grant Durrett, Patron Saint of the Screwed Over, was the only person I met who physically threatened his customers when they failed to pay. He’d wait for them outside the casinos they frequented, follow them to their cars, then bang their heads against the hoods. If they didn’t have the cash, he stole their credit cards and went on shopping sprees at the Fashion Show Mall.
When Grant wasn’t admiring his new threads, threatening to murder someone, or sharing every sordid detail of his latest threesome, he was at the office, trying to buy penicillin over the Internet. His mom had told him his dad was allergic to it and Grant
desperately wanted to get his hands on some so he could mix it into the old man’s food one day. Leaning on one elbow, I’d watch him consider the sites, his thick veins pulsing at his temples. His lips were red and always wet with spit. His mouth hung open naturally, giving the appearance of perpetual bewilderment—a misleading expression, for Grant was unflappable, making him the perfect confidant.
“Do you think it’s weird no one ever gets punished when they steal?” I asked.
“Very,” he said, without taking his eyes off the computer.
“Do you ever feel, like, when you have a hundred grand in your pocket and Dink’s being an asshole and you pass the airport on the way to the Hard Rock, do you ever feel like just taking the money and running away?”
“No.”
“I do.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“Where would you go?”
“Reno, chill with Tony.”
“Would you make up a lie that you got robbed or would you just run away?” I asked.
“Run away.”
“We should make a pact,” I said. “If one of us ever loses willpower and steals a bankroll, let’s promise to support one another. That no matter how much money we took, it’s still not that bad.”
“Whatever you want, Bethy,” Grant said, which I happily took as a yes.
The time had come, but I didn’t think I was ready. I chewed at my thumbnail until I tasted blood, and then moved to my pinky.
“This will be her first fight too,” the translator assured me, referring to my opponent. Señor Morales nodded.
“All I know how to do is jab,” I said. I realized I was whining and stopped talking.
A boxer known as the Psychotic Grasshopper joined the conversation.
Bouncing on the balls of his feet, he threw uppercuts. “Oh, so is ’at it, girl? You wanna train but don’t wanna fight?”
Female boxers love to train and hate to fight. This is their reputation. They are more dedicated, scrupulous, and less ego driven than their male counterparts, making them model students. When talk comes of an actual bout, though, most women demur and once their reluctance—whether rooted in pacifism or fear—is made clear, their trainers, who simply don’t have time for anyone who treats boxing merely as a form of exercise, ignore them.
Saturday afternoon I weighed in at a gym in northern Las Vegas. Mine was the twelfth amateur bout and the only female fight on the card. For the next two hours I waited, resting against the same wall as the gurney. One hundred or so spectators arrived. Until Dink walked in, face scrunched behind his ticker, with Tulip and several Dink Inc. employees of yesteryear in tow, I had been the only white person in the crowd. I waved from across the room. “Get her!” Tulip yelled. Now that her husband no longer enchanted me, the tension between us had eased. It was refreshing to be on her good side.
Squatting beside me, Señor Morales cupped his hand on the back of my neck and swiveled my head away from Tulip. My eyes tracked the crowd. A group of kids slapboxed near the snack stand. Mexican moms dandled their newborns. Old men in cowboy hats kept to themselves. EMT workers shook hands with a policewoman. Twenty minutes later I saw the same policewoman wearing a sports bra and silk shorts embossed with a Puerto Rican flag. Only then did I understand that Señor Morales had pointed out my opponent.