Authors: Beth Raymer
Our day-to-day island life was free and easy, brisk and pure. After a sunrise skinny-dip, we’d throw on our shorts and sandals, grab a papaya milkshake, and head to the office for a few hours of work. Late afternoon Amstels at the Golden Seahorse beer stall and we’d make it back to the beach in time for sunset. On the ocean’s edge, at an improvised restaurant with no outdoor lighting, not even candles, we enjoyed our surf and turf in pitch darkness, talking, laughing, and sharing a joint between courses.
No rain, no fights, lots of kissing at traffic lights. Then why, I wondered, did I feel so anxious? At first I assumed it was due to the amount of time I was spending with Jeremy. Six consecutive days was a long time for me. My longest relationship—which lasted nine months—was thirteen years earlier when I was a sophomore in high school. So even though I was twenty-eight, I was an amateur in the art of sharing space. Yet the emotional shift I underwent each morning as Jeremy and I pulled into ASAP had nothing to do with feeling that Jeremy’s mere presence was an assault on my independence (that would come later). It was more as if I were a self-conscious child with yet another long day of show-and-tell in front of her. And no matter how hard I tried to make my line of work look interesting, it was just a matter of time until he saw through the façade and realized just how unchallenging and soulless my job really was and that I was, basically, a highly paid customer-service rep. Compared to Jeremy and the burgeoning career that infused every part of his life, I felt like a loser.
At first, Jeremy was in awe of the office, as I knew he would be.
Its setup was cool and the high-level way we made money was interesting. When Bernard was gone and the TVs were allowed on, Jeremy loved watching the games with the guys. Their knowledge of sports and strategy and the confidence with which they answered all of his questions impressed him. But days later the novelty wore off, as I also knew it would, and Jeremy eagerly threw himself into his article. Hearing his fast, fluent typing—which made him sound busy and passionate—agitated my already plummeting mood. I fought the wild impulse to pick a fight and, instead, opened up about how I was tired of drifting and ready to pursue something else. It surprised me how difficult it was for me to admit this aloud.
Jeremy was happy to hear that I desired a change. He’d heard enough of my gambling stories to know that even the most successful gamblers are incapable of having healthy relationships or interests outside gambling. I was different, he said. Once I decided what it was I wanted to do, he assured me the transition into an on-the-up job wouldn’t be as difficult as I thought.
But gambling wasn’t just a job. It was a lifestyle and a family. Yes, it was small and highly dysfunctional. But it was unlike any other family any other person generally experiences—and that’s what made it so special to me. I was afraid to let go of what I had, no matter how stifling it was. If I turned my back on it, what else did I really have?
“You have me,” he said. “Give me an idea of what you want to achieve. Let’s at least try to live in the same city.”
“Uhm …” I said, feeling embarrassed. Like I was talking to a guidance counselor on whom I had an awfully big crush. “Can I be your reporting assistant? You do the reporting and I’ll transcribe your interviews. I’ll write sentences too. Descriptive ones.”
“Hell yeah!” Jeremy said. “But don’t you have to do two dimes on Atlanta under thirty or whatever?”
I did, but it didn’t matter. I put on the puffy, oversized headphones I wore to listen to ASAP’s tapes, sat at my desk, and transcribed. Jeremy thought I’d find his interviews boring, but he was
wrong. Hedge fund managers were interesting. It was a whole other world to learn about with new stories to listen to. Around me, the office charged into raging insanity with the four o’clock kickoffs. Turning up the recorder’s volume, I drowned out the chaos and imagined how cool it would be to do my own reporting and have my own desk in a newsroom. Maybe I’d try for a part-time internship at the
Vigilante
.
Finally, a plan.
The sound of gunfire came from the wooded area just beyond our shoreline dinner table. At high speed, three cars broke free of the bush: the bad guy, the
Vigilante
reporter, and the sheriff, in that order. Headlights reflected off the iron-black sea, making the choppy waves glimmer like switchblades. The bad guy drove directly into the ocean. In an instant, his station wagon was afloat. The reporter—not the sheriff—rushed from his car, plunged into the sea, and returned to shore with the bad guy in a headlock. Reporters are so brave. The thought made me miss Jeremy.
Citronella torches splashed shadows like war paint across our faces. Drunk and hungry, we returned to our surf-and-turf platters. Except for Bah-Bah, who held his heart in pure, utter terror. Days before, he’d announced his impending departure, blaming his need to leave on “a nasty case of island fever.” I didn’t know what that meant. Was Bah-Bah homesick? Had he done someone wrong? Did he have AIDS? No one dared inquire, for, around the same time that Bah-Bah asked the ASAP cleaning woman to turn out her pockets and accused me of talking in code over the phones, his strange, paranoid fears lost their charm. Now he was just plain mean. Recently, he’d moved out of his spacious, sunny bedroom in Quinta Cindy and into the dark, dank, detached guest quarters. His own private hideout, which he nicknamed the Barnyard. Each morning, he emerged wrapped in a spongy comforter and railed bitterly against our looks of concern.
With Bah-Bah leaving, I was the Figures Department. It was a
big job for one person and Bah-Bah’s sloppiness about entering information into the computer was making the transition increasingly difficult. I found that he hadn’t logged past transfers into the software. He wrote them on pieces of scrap paper and stuffed them into swollen manila folders. Initially he said he’d make himself available for any questions or problems I had. Then he flimflammed. It would be too dangerous, he said, to talk shop or send faxes from Philly. The Feds might be watching.
Leading an entourage of Latina party girls, Bernard arrived with Maritza. Over the past month, her considerable weight gain had spawned pregnancy rumors. But Dr. Chocolaté, the state-certified brothel’s ob-gyn, confirmed that Maritza was not with child. She was just getting fat. Inevitable, considering how much time she spent with Bernard. Her belly pressed between the button and the hole of her jeans, so she fastened them with a large safety pin.
“She’s capable of getting very, very heavy,” Bernard said, watching her eat an entire fried-calamari platter. “I have an eye for these things.”
Moonlit, Bah-Bah looked even more consumptive. “Is island fever contagious?” I asked. He turned his head to me. He managed to find demeaning most everything everyone said to him, and my question was no different. “Fuck you,” he said, and I stared back, sucking drawn butter from my lobster tail.
Days after Bah-Bah left the island, I arrived at the office at five a.m. to balance the books. It was the only time of day the office was calm enough to concentrate. No fights, ringing phones, shouting of orders, or blaring heavy-metal music. Just Pamela and me entering sports scores into software, tracing transfers, making lists of people late on paying, filing wiring receipts, and organizing our dozens of on-line accounts. In the eight months since the opening, our customer base had grown exponentially, with two hundred–plus players betting between twenty dollars and two hundred thousand dollars on games. More often than not, there were discrepancies—transfers
still in progress, botched bets, customer claims—but I wasn’t prepared for what I found this morning.
“How come we have no money?” I said. I checked the amount on the computer and ripped through Bah-Bah’s figure sheets. Useless, considering every third number was unreadable. Sevens could also be ones, or nines. Confused, I glanced at Pamela. Laboring over three different calculators, she did not look her normal, determined self.
We spread the printouts across the floor and studied the calculations as though they were cryptic maps that could lead us to buried treasure. How was it that we were making money on paper but had no money in our accounts? In the long hours of heavy silence to follow, we tried to make sense of the available balance: $461.39.
In walked Bernard, briefcase swinging at his side. He situated himself in front of three monitors and checked the morning odds. “How’d we do yesterday?” he said.
I approached him, reluctantly. My throat tightened. “Bernard?” I said. “I don’t think we have any money.”
He reached for the papers I handed him. With each whip of a page, he slouched deeper into his chair.
“Oh no,” he said.
“What?”
“Low funds.”
I grew agitated. “This is what I’m saying, Bernard: WE DON’T HAVE ANY MONEY!”
Astonishment. Emergency meetings were called. Wild claims were made. Perhaps there was a bank account we were forgetting, and that’s where all the money was. Maybe it was a hack job. Maybe the Feds had frozen our accounts. Maybe Omar, the quiet, polite guy who worked in marketing, had stolen it. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore.
“Come on, you guys.
Island fever?!”
I said. Bah-Bah had five kids he could barely support. Not to mention his coke addiction. Of course he’d been stealing. The numbers had always added up.
Now, suddenly, he was gone, and this number wasn’t real and that number wasn’t real and this guy didn’t get paid and that transfer never took place.
Bernard dismissed my rant. He felt bad accusing anybody without being absolutely sure. “It could be an honest mistake, Beth. There could be a rational explanation.”
“Like what?”
“Could the Internet have stolen it?”
“The Internet doesn’t steal, Bernard. People do.”
After the day’s last game, we listened to taped phone calls. The office was packed with cleaning ladies, clerks, the marketing team, and Bernard’s friends. At first, we went through the calls slowly, rewinding and pausing each time we heard something that sounded fishy. But it soon became clear we were wasting our time. There were hundreds of tapes. Our investigation could’ve continued for weeks. And even if we did finger the culprit, what then? We wouldn’t have him beat up or tortured until he coughed up the money, and since whoever it was would know that, all threats were idle. That’s assuming he still
had
the money. Thieves tend to snort or gamble their booty away in mere hours. And it’s not like we could take legal action. This is what so profoundly sucks about being in Bernard’s position. When roughed up and kicked around, gambling bosses don’t have many options. All they have is each other. When they’re in trouble, gamblers go straight to their friends, not the cops, for help. But those same friends are the ones who often cause the trouble, by lying and embezzling.
During one of Bernard’s longer Xanax stupors, I went behind his back and called Bah-Bah. On his elm-lined suburban street, hiding in the safety and warmth of his family, he acted shocked about the stuff I was certain he screwed us on days before. When I pressed harder, he asked that I never call his house again. Red hot with anger, I wanted to rip him apart. I wanted to tell him that we had listened to the tapes and overheard him conniving. That we had hired someone to shoot him in his fat, bald head and that someone was on the way to his house at that very moment. But before I
could say a word, the line went dead and stayed busy until it was later disconnected.
To this day, we don’t know if Bah-Bah took the money. Afterward, we heard that he lost one million dollars in an all-night coked-up on-line blackjack spree. We heard he went to rehab for drugs and gambling. Then again. And again. One morning back in New York, I passed a newsstand and saw Bah-Bah’s face smiling at me from the front page of the
Daily News
. He’d been arrested on charges of conspiracy to defraud the NBA. Federal authorities alleged he paid an NBA referee to throw games. Soon there’d be a trial. Staring at his picture, I found myself wondering if he had a collaborator or, at least, a confidant—his wife, a friend, a dog. If there was anyone left in his life who liked him, anyone whose faith he hadn’t shattered. As much as I disliked Bah-Bah, I didn’t like the thought of anyone suffering through depositions, court dates, and lingering prison sentences all alone.
Back at ASAP, however, we knew everything that needed to be known. We were spectacularly broke and owed people money. We tried to save as many jobs as we could, but we had no money to pay anyone. Clerks stopped coming to work. The tech team downstairs sold desks and computers and pocketed the money. Cutting our overhead, we got rid of cars and houses. The hangers-on and the Italian crew fled. Stopping by the whorehouses to give their girlfriends a good-bye kiss, they held the women’s faces in their hands and promised to send for them—which was funny, because it was the same thing I said to Otis before I left. I moved in with Bernard. We drove to and from work together, ate together, and worried together. Barely able to stay a step ahead of calamity, we tried to prepare for what came next: the struggle, the hustle. The phone calls.
“Sports, Beth. Name and password?”
“Six two four five mortgage. You fuckers owe me! Sixty fucking grand!”
“Sir,” I said. “I’m sorry. We have a lack of available funds.”
“Sports, Bernard, who’s this?… I’ve been desperately trying to get a hold of you. I’m in desperate need of cash flow and I’m absolutely
buried. Listen to me. I can’t pay people! It’s embarrassing. I need help.”
“Sports, Beth. Name and password?”
“Three nine four oh plane crash. How can a book go broke during the middle of fucking football season? Tell me that, bitch.”
“Oh, like you’re really going to get paid now, talking to me like that.”
Click.
“Sports, Bernard, who’s this?… Listen, I need some cash. I really need cash. I’m absolutely, totally disappointed. I’m being so conservative it’s sickening. Will you please find me some cash? Please?”
“Sports, Beth. Name and password?”
“Two four four four Dinky.”