DOUBLE DOWN: Reflections on Gambling and Loss
By Frederick and Steven Barthelme
Houghton Mifflin, 198 pages, $24
IN NEVADA: The Land, the People, God, and Chance
By David Thomson Knopf, 330 pages, $27.50
In the 1850s, a few worthy Americans decided to take on the dangerous vice of gambling. They warned employers that the young clerks they trusted with money were easy marks for professional card players. Reformers told stories about dishonest gamblers who set themselves up wherever men had money, especially money they had not earned. In gambling houses just off Wall Street, bleary-eyed clerks lost at night the day’s receipts they had been instructed to carry to the bank. Clerks sent south to pay bills lost their bosses’ money to card players on Mississippi steamboats. And young men who inherited more money than they needed squandered it at card tables and race tracks.
These stories came back to me when I read Frederick and Steven Barthelme’s “Double Down: Reflections on Gambling and Loss.” In the year after their parents died, the Barthelmes, brothers who teach in the writing program at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, managed to lose $250,000 in one of Mississippi’s floating casinos. They gambled away the money they inherited from their father. For all its 20th Century trappings, this is a story that 19th Century reformers would have loved. “Double Down” is a good gambling story, maybe worth every penny the Barthelmes lost.
Life in the university was looking pretty dull for the Barthelmes. They had lost touch with the “ordinary world,” they write. Their colleagues were men and women of “considerable charm (who) seemed curiously reduced when it came to vision and possibility.” A better world was waiting for them at the casinos; a real world full of hope, promise, action, good jokes, and happily free of the crippling irony of a college English department. Even the casino workers were happy — men and women who had escaped the dreariness of 9-to-5 jobs. I’m not sure the academy is as divorced from “real life” as the Barthelmes would have us believe, or that casino work is so very free of dreariness, but their dogged search for a “real life” made the Barthelme brothers into good victims for gamblers.
Or should we say customers for the gaming industry? Although $250,000 might be small stakes for high rollers in Las Vegas or Atlantic City, it was a nice piece of change for the Gulf Coast casinos. The Barthelmes were even happy losers. They came to understand a basic fact about gambling. “Next to the pleasure of winning,” as one 19th Century commentator put it, “is the pleasure of losing. . . . Only stagnation is unendurable.”
Loss is the real subject of their book, especially if we read the story as an elegy for their parents. Losing money at the casinos was a family act, a tribute to their dead parents, the culmination of everything they had learned from them about risk and perfection. Loss eased their guilt over their parents’ deaths and taught them that there was no monetary compensation for their grief.
But the Barthelmes also learned a lesson about the business behind the glitter of gaming. In fall 1996, they were booted out of the casino and eventually charged with cheating at cards, a felony under Mississippi law. Casino security believed they caught a blackjack dealer signaling the Barthelmes about the cards in her own hand. With her help, the Barthelmes would have known whether or not to make “insurance” bets against their own losing cards.
Last August, a judge dismissed the charges against the brothers, although charges against the dealer are pending. The Barthelmes’ lawyer convinced the judge that the dealer’s hand signals were just the accidental gestures she made when she was bored or tired of her repetitive job.
Although the Barthelmes gambled to escape the sterile ironies of academic life, their story really has an ironic twist. They found a way to make money after all. For all their misadventures at the casino, the brothers are writers, not card players. Gambling has given them good material; publishing it has given them a way to profit from their losses. In fact, Frederick rehearsed his casino experiences in his 1997 novel “Bob the Gambler.” In the end, they have even done their architect father proud, turning his hard-earned money into art instead of a couple of dull tract houses.
Still, there are inconsistencies in the story. The brothers project escapist fantasies onto a casino reality that must be uglier for its workers than they let on. When I finished the book, I worried more about the dealer’s fate than I did about the Barthelmes’. The surveillance that caught them on their occasional visits to the casino is everyday fact for casino workers; a shuffle so dramatic for players is dull repetition for dealers; and the hearty bonhomie that made the Barthelmes feel so good is a job requirement for casino personnel. Why the Barthelmes’ keen powers of observation falter when it comes to casino workers, I’m not sure. It is unlikely a similar opportunity for profit will come to the dealer.
David Thomson’s “In Nevada: The Land, the People, God, and Chance” takes up gambling on a different scale. Like the Barthelmes, he has something more in mind than games of chance when he discusses gambling. According to Thomson, our whole atomic age is nothing less than a grand gamble, a strange adventure unfolding with particular clarity in the Nevada desert. “In far more ways than gaming could ever express,” Thomson writes, “Nevada is the providential testing place for our recklessness. So we should study the volatile mix of its danger and beauty, then wonder which we deserve.”
At some point, Thomson, a London-born writer who has published several books on the movies, fell in love with Nevada. He was seduced first by the mountains, lakes and empty spaces of northern Nevada, but he stayed on as much for the state’s cultural excesses as for its scenery.
In his book, Thomson visits full cities, abandoned towns and the magnificent Hoover Dam, and he describes the state’s strange characters and fine storytellers. Thomson is a great storyteller himself, and his book is a delight to read. If you have ever wondered how we got from the Nevada of Mark Twain and the Comstock Lode to the Nevada of Las Vegas and “The X-Files,” Thomson will tell you. He charts the decline of mining and the rise of gaming and tells stories about politicians, musicians, casino owners and all those who have come to Nevada with dreams of easy money, easy divorce, extraterrestrials, or a fine time. Movies cut through Thomson’s stories like so many reference points on a map. To understand Nevada it helps to know “High Noon,” “Red River,” “Casino” and “Independence Day.”
Although “In Nevada” begins in the north, in the area around Reno and Lake Tahoe, Thomson is pulled toward the south. In the second half of the book he weaves together observations on Las Vegas with a guided tour of the Nevada Test Site, where nuclear testing began in the 1950s. Our fate, Thomson insists, is in southern Nevada. We are all gambling there — with the bomb, with the effects of fallout, with buried nuclear waste. Thomson is not a preacher, and he understands that pleasure is often allied with danger. Rather like the Barthelmes, he insists that gambling is essential to humanity. It “is a pretext for taking action; it believes in activity more than reflection; and sooner or later, brutally or practically, with pride or humility, it takes the consequences.”
What will be the consequences of the great gamble of nuclear arms, Thomson cannot say. But he suggests that the consequences of much of our 20th Century gambling will be felt first in Nevada. If so, “In Nevada” may well prove a useful guide to life in the 21st Century.
