The office was in a tenement building next to a bodega on St. Marks. I stepped around a grunge punk who was using the dirty window of the door as a shaving mirror, scraping the scalp on either side of his spiky Mohawk with a dry razor. Three sharp rings to the buzzer, per instructions, and I was in. Five flights up beyond the urine-scented vestibule, a door opened and a pudgy-faced blond kid in a Malcolm X hat led me into a gloomy, cluttered apartment filled with Salvation Army furniture, dusty books, peeling paint, and a sour haze of cigarette and b.o. aroma.
Three men sat at a large oval table lit by a low-hanging fluorescent fixture. The blinds in the apartment were drawn. In one of the darkened windows an air conditioner labored noisily and without much apparent effect.
Only Michael looked up at me. “You’re late,” he said.
A clock on the wall behind him showed ten after five.
I thought he was joking and smiled. He didn’t smile back. “Late on your first day,” he said, shaking his head. I still couldn’t tell if he was serious or not. “Lucky for you it’s going to be slow anyway.” He introduced me to the blond kid who’d opened the door, Spanky; to Pat, a florid-faced Irishman with a shock of white hair; and to Bob, who had the broad shoulders and the thick neck of a linebacker and wore a green Lacoste shirt over a white T-shirt.
Spanky and Pat nodded noncommittally. Bob said, “How ya doin’, Pete?”
“All right. Should I just watch or what?”
“Sit over there,” Michael commanded, gesturing to a seat at the end of the table. One of the six phones rang, and Pat, the Irishman, picked it up. “Yeah,” he said brusquely. “Not open yet. Call back in fifteen minutes.”
I sat where I was, listening to the four of them converse. Somebody’s “bottom figure” was off by three thousand; an agent was asking for a higher commission; someone called Benny Cadillac had “a new sheet” for the office that was “fifty percent, fifty percent—a Dutch treat.” I had no idea what any of it meant. The phones continued to ring until Bob said, “Fuck it. Take ’em off the hooks. Let ’em wait,” and the other three men took the receivers off the hooks.
Pat turned to look at me. He had a mottled pink face—a real Irish busted-capillary complexion—and eyes that were acid-washed blue. “I hear you’re a Harvard man.”
I shrugged.
“You must have fucked up pretty bad to be here, huh?”
“Hey,” I said, nodding at Michael and Bob, “these guys went to Ivy League schools, too.”
“Yeah, I already know about these bums. What’s your story?”
“You mean where did I go wrong?”
“Everybody’s got their story.”
“What’s yours?” I said.
“My story?” He laughed. “You want to know my story?” He looked from Michael to Bob. They were both stifling smirks. “I was on the executive board of two different companies.”
“Look what your college education got you. A fucking Ph.D in collecting the vig.”“You’re kidding. Two companies?”
“In the rag trade. You ever hear of. . .” He ticked off the names of a couple of well-known clothing manufacturers. “Well, I ran those.”
He was serious. Michael and Bob said nothing.
“So what happened?” I asked.
“What happens. One of them went under. The other made an executive change.”
“Just like that?” I said. “Was there a reason?”
He shrugged. “A million reasons. And not one of them my fault. Now look at me. I’m sitting here with you fucks. I’ve got alimony, car payments, and my kid had to take out a loan for college. He’ll be paying $292 a month for the rest of his life.” Pat paused to let that sink in for a moment.
“Not that he’s going to pay it,” he continued. “I will. I just haven’t told him yet.”
“I had to pay off my own loan,” Michael said.
“Yeah, and look what your college education got you. A fucking Ph.D in collecting the vig.”
Before the office opened up, Michael made calls to several bookies around town to get their opening lines. Later I learned that the lines originated out of the Stardust Hotel in Las Vegas, put out by a well-known oddsmaker named Roxy Roxborough who was paid by the casinos to post a number that would anticipate the way the public would bet. Once he had a few sets of numbers, Michael averaged them out, or shaded them to sides he favored—that is, made it more appealing for bettors to take teams he thought would lose by giving them a cheaper price. When he was done, he said, “Ready?” and began reading off the spread: “Phillies two-ten, Astros sixty cents, Mets twelve cents . . .” while the rest of the crew worked their pencils on their sheets.
I asked for an explanation of the numbers, and Michael said, “I thought you knew this shit.”
“I know point spreads on football. Not this.”
“Baseball works with a dime line and a twenty-cent line,” Spanky piped in.
“You want to explain it to him?” Michael said.
“Sure. See, Pete, let’s say you got the Astros, who are sixty-cent favorites over the Padres. That means that if you want to bet the Astros you have to pay a hundred and sixty to win a hundred. You understand that?”
“I think so.”
“And if you bet the dog, the Padres, you’re betting a hundred to win a hundred and fifty. That ten-dollar difference is the juice. You know about juice, right?”
“Sure.” The juice, or the vigorish or the vig or the eleven-to-ten, was the ten percent commission that bookies collected on all losing bets. It was the profit margin, assuming they could get even action on both sides. “Basically, you’re trying to get the same amount of action on both sides, right?” I asked.
“Most of the time.”
“And when you get too much on one side, you lay off?”
“Hey, he knows about laying off,” Pat said.
Laying off was what they called it when a bookie who was getting too much money on a particular team called another bookie and made a bet on that same team, essentially giving away some of the business but at the cost of a five percent commission.
“Yeah, sometimes we’ll go to the outs,” Michael said. “Outs,” I learned, were bookies who took other bookies’ layoff bets. “It depends.”
“On what?”
“On whether we’re on the right side or not. But you don’t need to know this stuff right now.”
“What do I need to know?”
“Just how to give lines to customers and write tickets.”
“So how would it work with the Mets line?” Spanky asked me.
The Mets were twelve-cent favorites over the Cubs. “Let’s see, the Mets would be a hundred and twelve dollars to win a hundred.”
“That’s right! Very good! The kid’s a genius,” Bob said.
“And the Cubs?” Spanky asked.
“Ah, they’d be a hundred and two to win a hundred?”
Spanky looked at me expectantly. I saw Bob and Michael raise their eyebrows. “It’d be the other way around, wouldn’t it?” Spanky said. “A hundred to win a hundred and two. Right?”
“Oh, yeah. Right.”
“Harvard,” Pat grumbled.
“All right, that’s enough,” Michael said. “It’s time to open.”
“Let’s rock and roll,” Bob said.
I spun out a whole pipe dream just like that, me with cash buried under my floorboards, a fancy car, a plush crib. It was a nice fantasy.The minute the phones were back on their hooks they began to ring. Each of the six telephones sat on top of a tape recorder. All conversations were recorded, protection in case a customer decided to dispute a bet. On one wall six jacks were lined up. The lines worked on the hunt system—incoming calls kept searching until they found an open line. The whole setup looked way too elaborate for this dump of an apartment.
“What did the guy who installed the jacks think was going on?” I asked.
“We told him we were starting a travel agency,” Michael said. The others laughed.
Over the next hour I watched as Michael, Pat, Bob, and Spanky fielded a steady stream of calls from around the country. They scribbled orders furiously on triple-sheeted betting slips, then flicked them into an empty cigar box in the middle of the table. Michael was charting—keeping a running account of how much was being bet on both sides of each game, so that he could make adjustments in the line. The lines were everything, I was informed, and it was crucial to keep adjusting them up or down to encourage equal betting on both sides. If too much money was coming in on one side, the price was simply adjusted in favor of the other side until it reached a level at which bettors would find it attractive to take the side we needed.
“Sometimes the balance gets way out of whack,” Michael said, “and we’ll lay off some of it to another office. But we don’t always try to balance our books. Our feeling is that in the long run the vig will take care of us. A guy’s gotta win fifty-two point five percent of his bets just to break even against us. The key, really, is volume. If we get enough, we can’t help but make a profit.”
During one lull in the action I learned that the apartment we were in belonged to a guy named Krause, who was asleep in the next room. I wondered what kind of person would allow such an invasion into his home even if he was getting, as I was told Krause was, his phone and utility bills taken care of and a couple of hundred bucks a week on top of that. Forget the fact that the living room was a pigsty—crooked paintings, a film of dirt on the walls, a flaking ceiling. Forget even that the tired-looking furniture had been shoved into corners to make room for the big fluorescent-lit worktable and that brown shopping bags were scattered around, piled high with garbage and cigarette droppings. How could anyone tolerate the daily violation of his privacy?
At ten to eight Spanky started sorting through the pile of tickets that had accumulated in the cigar box during the session, arranging them in some kind of order. When he finished, he spit into his hands, rubbed them together briskly, and with tremendous speed and dexterity, began separating the white top copies from the yellow bottom copies. The pink bottom copies had been torn off and “ducked” into a hiding place at the time the tickets were written.
Michael said, “You don’t have to stick around while we close up, Pete.”
I took this as a cue to leave rather than an offer, and I got up.
“Tomorrow’s going to be busy, but why don’t you come in Thursday morning? It’ll be slow enough so you can learn some stuff—that is, if you still think you want to.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I think I do.”
I walked to the subway station through the hot, crowded, still-light streets of the East Village, which seemed different to me now than they had a few hours before. I felt as if I had been walking around with blinders on, oblivious to the secret doings that I now suspected were taking place inside every run-down tenement, behind every facade and storefront. I was excited by what I had seen in Krause’s dark apartment.
Waiting for the IRT back to Brooklyn, I couldn’t help wondering what would happen if I started making the kind of money that Michael was making. What would Anna think? Would she be horrified? Amused?
I spun out a whole pipe dream just like that, me with cash buried under my floorboards, a fancy car, a plush crib. It was a nice fantasy. But dangerous because it got me thinking about Anna. It made me want to know what would happen, how she would feel if I could actually offer her something more than love.
Back in Brooklyn, I climbed the five creaky flights to my studio, lugging an armful of magazines I had purchased at the Clark Street station in an effort to bring myself back to earth. It was hot in the apartment, and I grabbed a Coke out of the refrigerator and sat in the red velvet armchair by the open window, happy for the slight breeze off the river. Still breathing hard from the climb, I paged through Men’s Health and Men’s Journal and Fitness and Health, jotting down the names of editors to contact, along with mailing addresses, telling myself what I needed to do was keep up the job hunt, not relax it or get diverted. Working for Michael was a short-term thing until I could find other work. That was all. Fate had thrown it into my lap, and I had followed up because it was expedient, a way to relieve some of the money pressure, the anxiety. And it gave me something to do. . . .
*
On Thursday, when I arrived at the office, Spanky handed me a list of names with some columns of figures beside them. Michael and Bob had hero sandwiches spread out before them, bits of lettuce and tomato spilling onto the white waxy wrapping paper. The two of them chewed noisily, nodding when Spanky said, “He should learn this shit, right?”
With his high-pitched wise-guy voice and the scraggly blond hair spilling out from under his X cap, Spanky was a nineties version of a Dead End Kid. He had been the most junior clerk until my arrival, and he seemed to take pleasure in being able to show me the ropes. “These are the weekly figures,” he said. “Study ’em. Familiarize yourself with the names.”
The names were grouped in bunches, and next to each group Spanky wrote another name, using a felt-tipped pen. “This is the name of the agent—the sheet name. Each cluster of bettors is part of a separate sheet represented by an agent.” He pointed to one group of names: Dodge, Jaguar, Pinto, Camaro, Ford, and so on. “Like, the agent for this group is Tranny. When Dodge calls, he’ll say, ‘This is Dodge for Tranny.’ ”
“What do the agents do?” I asked.
Spanky looked at Michael, who nodded at him. Spanky explained: “Each group of these bettors has an agent. He’s the guy who’s responsible for them. They pay him and then he pays us, or vice versa.”
“What if they don’t pay him?”
“If a guy doesn’t pay, it doesn’t matter. The agent still has to pay us.”
“Yeah, but what if the agent doesn’t pay?”
Spanky ignored the question, forging onward. “Okay, when you take a bet, you write both names down at the top of the slip. So a typical bet might go, ‘Dodge for Tranny, Mets plus fifty-three, for a dollar.’ Which means?”
I shook my head.
Wingnut had apparently lost $8,000 for the week, $5,000 of it in one night. Scarecrow had lost $12,500. And a player named Meat had lost a grand total of $23,220.“That Dodge is putting a hundred dollars on the Mets, who are fifty-three-cent underdogs. So if he wins, he gets how much? ”
“Uh …”
“A hundred and fifty-three for his hundred-dollar bet.”
“Right.”
“And if he bets against the Mets?”
“If he’s playing the favorite, then he’s paying a hundred and, uh…”
“Sixty-three. Remember? The ten-dollar difference is the juice.”
I looked over his shoulder as he began writing something on a betting slip. “For the suckers, though,” he said, sliding the betting slip over, “we give ’em a different line.”
“How do I know who the suckers are?”
“You’ll learn after a while.”
I picked up the slip of paper. He had written: 0-10 = 5-6; 10-20 – 5.5-6.5; 20-30 = 6-7; 30-40 – 6.5-7.5; 40-50 = 7-8; 50-60 = 7.5—8.5; 60-70 – 8-9; 70-80 = 8.5-9.5; 80-90 = 9-10; over 90 it becomes a 30-cent line.
My head was beginning to spin.
“Keep this until you can make the conversions yourself,” Spanky said. “When a sucker calls, let’s say we’re using thirteen cents on the Dodgers. You look at this chart, it becomes five and a half, six and a half. Five and a half is actually a hundred and ten, and six and a half is actually a hundred and thirty. Which means that the sucker is betting a hundred to win a hundred and ten when he takes the dog, and laying a hundred and thirty to win a hundred when he takes the favorite. So he’s paying twenty percent vig instead of ten. It seems more complicated than it really is.”
I wanted to say “I’ll bet,” but I refrained.
Spanky wrote out another key for me on a separate betting slip. This one translated the shorthand terms for different units of money. In the language of gamblers a dollar equaled $100 and fifty cents equaled $50, but just to confuse things a nickel was $500, a dime was $1,000, and the times sign—an X—was five dollars, as in 20 X equals $100.
After the session I went back to my Brooklyn cubbyhole. There was no mail of any interest, and the only message was from my mom. Sad. I pulled out the stapled pages that Spanky had given me and looked them over. There were eight columns of numbers next to each name—one number for each day of the week and a total at the end. Six pages of names. I counted three hundred. In each column, there was a positive or negative amount. There seemed to be more negative amounts than positive. Wingnut had apparently lost $8,000 for the week, $5,000 of it in one night. Scarecrow had lost $12,500. And a player named Meat had lost a grand total of $23,220. Holy shit. These were not kidding-around numbers.
I put the sheet down and studied the scraps of paper on which Spanky had written out the various keys and explanations. Dizzying. I took a break and returned my mother’s call.
My mother’s approach to my various problems, both monetary and otherwise, was definitely of the Western medicine school and entailed dealing with symptoms, not root causes. Guilt, disappointment, and anger were things we rarely talked about directly.
“There were a couple of want ads in this Sunday’s Times” she told me right off. “Did you see them?”
“Yeah, I circled a few.”
“Any other leads?”
“Not really.”
“What about your friend at Time?”
“He says they’re cutting back. Definitely not hiring.”
“Have you given any more thought to freelancing?”
“Uh-huh. But I talked to a couple of editors I know, and they both said they’re not making new assignments right now; they’re working off of inventory. The magazines that aren’t folding are cutting back. It’s grim.”
“What about Esquire? Did you decide against writing a piece about Winnie’s son?”
“No, I queried the guy. I haven’t heard back from him. But you know how that is. It’s why I don’t want to get back into freelancing.”
“You’re going to have to do something, Pete.”
“I understand that,” I said, and in a flash of anger nearly added, “I am doing something, Ma. I’m working for a bookie,” just to see what she would say.
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