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Lighting up while lit up Page 10
New York Edition
May/June 2012
Going All In: I Can’t Stop Gambling All bets are off for those whose brains turn a game into a gorilla By Jeffrey C. Friedman
British statesman Edmond Burke referred to gambling as “a principle inherent in nature.” Burke’s remark seems on the money since games of chance are a pass-time in every culture throughout the world. Gambling predates recorded history and can be traced to the earliest of human societies. Dice-like objects discovered in 40,000 year-old archeological sites suggest that even pre-historic man liked a little action now and then. In the last thirty years, legal gambling has proliferated throughout the world and now even into cyberspace. Today, legal gambling is a one trillion dollar global enterprise. But no one really knows how much money is actually wagered, since so much of the world’s gambling activity is extra-legal – unregulated and unrecorded. Regardless of whether a gambler bets in a government-licensed casino or with a street corner “bookie,” a vast majority of gamblers know the activity as just a
R
ecovering gambler Leo D. has a suggestion for everyone who suspects he might have a gambling problem. “If you eat one meal a day and it’s a buffet, you might be a compulsive gambler.” Leo should know. He lost thousands of dollars and as many nights of sleep before he finally recognized his gambling problem. “I always lost back everything I’d won, and then some – but, hey, what do you expect,” he says with bemused irony. “I’m a problem gambler.” Whether he was taking the Knicks and the points or calculating a roulette payoff, Leo’s gambling – and all gambling – was, is and will always be based on the same simple premise: someone stakes something of value on a contest of uncertain outcome. Then the race is run, the wheel is spun or the deal is done. And whether you lay the bet or cover it, someone wins and someone loses. In a 1780 House of Commons speech,
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A Moment of Truce A happy ending with bad coffee and powdered creamer
D
By Benjamin Cheever
espite more purple eyeliner than even the most crass mortician would apply, I could see that this beautiful young woman was still very much alive. “Hello, Ben,” she said, and with a familiarity that would have been offensive, were it not so clearly authentic. I had no idea who this person was. She‘s forgotten her contacts, I thought. She’s mistaken me for somebody else. Somebody she knows and likes. How odd. How unusual. But then I hadn’t traveled 10 feet before an older gent in a gabardine suit stopped me to beam and crow. “Good morning,” he said, as if the two of us had shared a foxhole. A third stranger – this one in a tight dress with two gigantic bows – clicked into my field of vision and purred a greeting while I was still wondering privately why women dress themselves as presents when you aren’t supposed to open them up, not even at Christmas. The corporation at whose headquarters this all was happening had grown well beyond the limits of such easy companionability. I’d been at The Reader’s Digest for years, but most of my co-workers were strangers. We’d pass each other in the halls like salaried ships in the night. Good social Darwinists, we kept score. A few would win, many would stalemate, while others lost the game. “Fired,” we’d whisper, and wag our heads, our
faces frozen into masks of sorrow and concern. While inside we might be thinking, Yippee!! That poor sod’s gone, while Yours Truly dodged another bullet. On this golden morning, though, some sort of truce must have been signed. Apparently, I’d missed the memo. Headquarters had been designed with care, and at this time the building was still exquisitely maintained, but none of this could explain how fine the place began to look. The very quality of the light had changed. Strange happening, but also something I have always expected. Strolling the sidewalks of Manhattan, I’ll hear somebody say, “then,” out loud and (mistaking it for “Ben”) I’ll spin and give the royal wave. I once made a perfect fool of myself at a dinner party, where one of my elders-and-betters gave a speech about what a talented writer Ben was. Crimson with false modesty, I interrupted to reject the praise. Turned out it was another Ben he was talking about. “I didn’t know you wrote,” he said.
Tumbling into love
Such experiences rattled, but did not shatter my conviction that John Donne was right: “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”
(Continued on page 19)