One night last fall, I went to a 12-step meeting at the local prison. I hope my presence is of some use at a place like that. I've spent no real time in jail, not even a whole night, just some metaphorical spanking for civil rights or anti-war protests. Whatever group of demonstrators I'd joined must have struck the authorities as not worth their trouble. But whenever I visit a correctional facility, I shiver at the clang of a steel door behind me.
I rode home from the meeting with my friend Stanley. Stan, a mason, is my age but physically twice as strong, likewise his emotional strength. I'd put his height at about 5'9" and his weight at 250-plus, not a pound of it hanging. He's foursquare, solid as a Vermont granite block, the sort he hefted around for decades.
Stan escaped some lethal habits a half a century ago, a great thing for him but for others, too. His reckoning came after he broke a fellow drunk's jaw. It all started with a minor insult: noticing my friend's tendency to cross his eyes when plastered, the guy on the next barstool asked if the tears ran down his shoulders when he cried. Stan told him no, he never cried, period, but he was about to give this guy something to cry about himself. Stan ended up in jail—but for the last time. "So far," he always adds.
When you shake Stan's hand, you know, even in his 80s, he could still do a lot of damage with those mitts. But the idea of his getting into a drunken brawl is almost unimaginable. Nowadays, he's the soul of gentleness and restraint.
An inmate at the jailhouse gathering had spoken of his struggles with a gambling addiction, which prompted the rest of the conversation on our way back in Stan's truck. The man with the betting habit said he wanted out of his ruinous life—what there was of it. He'd lost wife, children, job, car, home.
I'd heard identical tales before, but not from any gambler, and it puzzled me that something other than a narcotic or a drink could have consequences like ones faced by people with alcohol or drug habits. Gambling couldn't apply a bodily grip, could it? I asked Stan whether he could identify with the man's gambling compulsion, and he answered that he didn't think he'd get hooked on betting, but he didn't plan on finding out, because he'd encountered quite a few people in his longtime sobriety who'd gone through gambler's hell and landed in a place like the one we'd just left. Or else they died, usually on the streets somewhere. At least this poor addict was still alive.
Like substance abusers, Stan told me, the catastrophic gambler begins in a seemingly harmless way: maybe a few bucks bet with a friend on a local high school game, the prize a slice of pizza, a beer, whatever.
Then, euphoric at winning some small wager, he begins to seek higher stakes, maybe a college game or some regional horse race. He doesn't foresee any trouble, let alone disaster, but the stakes keep getting higher. The provincial horse race becomes the Kentucky Derby or the Preakness, the college ballgame becomes the Super Bowl, and so on, each venture requiring a bigger outlay.
"The worst thing that can happen," Stan said, "is a little success, maybe a hundred back on a ten-buck wager."
Sure enough, the guy at the prison described to the group how he once won a bundle by putting money on some long-odds driver at a big NASCAR event. He couldn't remember which race, let alone the name of the hero. "My big luck never shows up now, though," he admitted. "Don't matter what I'm betting on." He told us he's always convinced himself a change in his fortunes lay right around the corner. That conviction among actively addicted people is common to the point of banal: like the guy with the betting compulsion, the drunk and the junkie get a glimpse of what they're doing to their lives, but they figure something will come along to reverse their predicaments.
For the gambler, as for them, things will go south, maybe slowly, maybe abruptly. There's perhaps a stretch of tardy bill-paying, and when someone, usually a spouse, asks for explanation, he comes up with a plausible justification: an unexpected, costly furnace repair, a child's orthodontic expenses, a set of new snow tires. He may even believe—or at least half-believe—these ruses himself.
Or perhaps his partner notices some unusual withdrawals from their joint bank account and from various ATMs, or unfamiliar debts appearing on a shared credit card. Again, the incipient addict dreams up some explanation, but, just so his partner won't worry, of course, he secretly opens a personal account at a different bank, its monthly statements to be mailed to his work address. And he gets another card that shows his name only.
Such tactics don't hold up. Sooner or later, someone—out of friendship or, in the case of family, fear of financial chaos—confronts the gambler with his problem. Early on, and in many sad cases for good, the addict's response tends to be the same: full of self-righteous resentment, he barks, "I don't have a problem!" and, inevitably, "I can quit whenever I want!"
So he does. He quits. Like a drunk going white-knuckle dry for a time, he swears off betting for a week, a month, even a year or more. And then, having "proved" he's able to resist gambling's hold on his soul, he begins again. This time he'll behave differently; he'll simply go back to his original just-for-fun, penny-ante stuff.
He proposes some rules for himself: one bet a week, say, and not to exceed ten dollars, and he may stand firm for a spell. But his compulsion is patient. It knows he'll soon enough bend those rules. Just this once, the gambler will pledge, pushing his limit from ten dollars to fifteen, maybe, or placing a second bet within a single week. Just this once... The downward spiral starts all over again.
"It's just like you and me said, I'll only drink after five o'clock," Stan observed, "or I'll have one can of beer and that's that. We both know how that story ends."
Having surrendered, however gradually, to his old ways, the gambler discovers his addiction's even more powerful than before. Things get worse, though he doesn't fully recognize as much even now. He'll have a thought like, "Okay, I do gamble too much, but..." That but can take all sorts of shapes. Eventually, the gambler concludes, "Okay, I overdo it. But the only person I'm hurting is me." Often, though, he has a wife and children, so this delusion may be his last before he either addresses his fatal dependency or else loses his life, either literally or figuratively, a life now well beyond his own control. The bet is in charge now, in the same way booze or smack is in charge of its slaves. If funds get short, he may resort to thievery, which is what had stuck this fellow in stir at last.
After Stan dropped me off, I stood a while in the dooryard, pondering our conversation. I'd known people who strained Sterno through a sock and drunk it, a lot more who got wasted on Listerine or some other alcohol-containing mouthwash, even on aftershave. I'd heard one ex-con in recovery from drugs say, "I loved the junk, but I loved the spike, too." He explained in a meeting how he once boiled mayonnaise until a skim of oil came to the top, filled a needle with the goo, and shot it into a vein. "Started floppin" around like a chicken with its head chopped off," he admitted. Then he added, "I lived to tell you about it. A lot of 'em wouldn't. God done that. I don't know what else you'd call it."
In short, I'd seen or gotten word of some truly mind-boggling instances of addictive behavior, but for whatever reason the prisoner we'd heard from that night was the first life-destructive gambler I'd ever seen up close.
And I never saw him again, I'm sorry to say, though I went back to the same jail some six months later. Not one among the handful of prisoners Stan and I had met who were still doing time had any idea where the poor gambler went. Perhaps he moved to another part of the state or the country, but it wouldn't surprise me at all to learn he'd tried some equivalent to the mayonnaise injection, even if I can't quite picture what that would look like for a betting slave. He may not have come through with similar luck to the ex-con's, the one who'd lived through that insane injection.
People who are themselves unsusceptible to addiction often sermonize, ascribing any self-devastating behavior to a lack of willpower or morals or both. The less judgmental simply tend to be baffled. One of my dearest friends, for instance, said of his alcoholic brother, "Why won't he just screw the top back on his fucking vodka? If I were doing something I knew was killing me, I'd stop doing it. I mean, do you know any diabetics who hit the grocery store so they can suck up a pound of sugar?" I couldn't explain the mysterious, deadly paradox to him; I've never found the right words, likely because in the end no such words exist. People drink because they drink, use because they use, and, evidently, gamble because they gamble. No ethical or psychological explanation I've ever heard has proposed more precise motives.
The plain fact is heartbreakingly few addicts ever recover, because too few are blessed—and I use the word advisedly—to find total despair and then, more crucially, to decide for themselves they want a way up and out. No blandishment from others, no legal morass, no humiliation, no physical harm will turn the tide unless the sufferer decides on his or her own to change. The addict must also recognize his willpower has met with daily failure and that he needs help. This is the crux of 12-step programs, after all: you're just whipped, so you need to hear from people who've been where you are, and with a lot of assistance from their predecessors, found an escape.
That evening, after Stan's taillights flickered out in the distance, I suddenly noticed the crystalline, star-freckled sky, and I thanked God, or whatever It was, that I could be there to marvel at its splendor. I likewise thanked people like Stan for helping me break my own chains many years back.
The gambler at the jail had been a real mess, chalk-complexioned, gaunt, howling like a newborn. For whatever reason—it made me squirm—he kept pulling on his right earlobe until I thought he'd do himself bodily harm. Now and again, he'd bolt up where he sat to pace around behind our circle of chairs, all the while incoherently muttering vituperation at the fellowship's terse slogans, which were temporarily taped to a wall.
"Easy does it?" he spat at one point. "Gimme a break!" And later, "One day at a time? How the hell else does anybody live?"
Stan quietly advised him to keep an open mind: "Remember," he advised, "your own best thinking got you here."
Picturing the gambler later, I added to my general gratitude the fact that in my recovery, I tended not to react like that fellow to things I didn't understand. I was thankful, too, that at least I hadn't piled his addictive urges onto my own. I didn't seem to have it in my character to place a bet, couldn't even imagine how it felt like to be possessed by betting.
Then something occurred to me in a flash, something that had always amused me before—and truthfully still does—no matter my inner laughter's more qualified since that jail meeting and the conversation riding home. Just under a quarter-century ago, I taught for a semester at a college in the Ticino, Switzerland's Italian-speaking canton. Our family lived in a little town near Lugano, and for a good portion of our time there, my wife—on leave from her court mediator's job—home-schooled our youngest. The Swiss tend to be xenophobic, so we were having a real struggle to get her into a communal grade school. Ultimately, we had to enroll her in a Steiner school, which turned out to be a gift: she thrived there, learning basic Italian, which she still commands, making friends, developing unpredicted skills.
As for me, I quickly found my own gift at the college. One of my English department colleagues was an Irishman, also a writer, a good one, and it felt we'd known each other for years. I can't recall how the subject should even have arisen, but one day at lunch I learned from him that in Ireland and in the UK, where he attended the University of Birmingham, the card game we call Blackjack goes by the name of Pontoon. One evening at home, I mentioned this, whereupon that same youngest daughter asked what the game's rules were. Though I'd rarely played Blackjack, having no interest whatever in cards, I was able to teach her.
At ten years old, that beloved girl would for inscrutable reasons sometimes affect a 1940s gun moll's manner of speech and gesture. Almost every night, about an hour before bed, she'd arch an eyebrow, look at me sideways, and growl, "Pontoon?" Out came the deck.
A bit of back-story. The refrigerator in our rented house was small for my wife and me, a son and daughter enrolled in the local post-elementary American school, and our little card sharp. On Friday mornings, after home lessons were over and I was off teaching, the youngest would accompany her mom across the Italian border to shop for groceries. Afterwards, they'd stop for a pastry and a cioccolata densa, a hot chocolate drink so thick it looked like a melted candy bar. But in the interim, my wife would give our daughter a couple of francs and let her wander around the toy shop just across from the market.
On the first few visits, the girl sometimes bought Kinder Joys with trifling toys inside, but at least as often, she'd merely look around and then come find her mother. As time went by, though, my wife noticed she'd begun to fetch home some more elaborate purchases—sets of Legos, dolls, stuffed animals, so on. When asked how she could afford such luxuries, that canny daughter rightly pointed out that things were a good deal cheaper in Italy than in Switzerland, and that, having saved up her unspent francs and the small allowance we gave her each week, these things now lay within her reach.
Our daughter deployed this deception simply because my wife had forbidden us both to play Pontoon for money. We could play for swapped chores, for time when she could rollerblade at the little park uphill from our house, for a gelato, but never for cash. Frankly, however, part of the kick my daughter and I got out of our games resided in our mischievous defiance of her mother's injunction.
I'll cut to the chase. To this day, I can't explain it. I was almost 50 years older than that little girl. She was in grade school, and I'd earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature. Yet for every hand of Pontoon I won, I'd lose six. Often, I lost every last one. We'd limit ourselves to 12 hands, the winner getting a Swiss franc, and because we played almost nightly and because I kept getting trounced, our daughter usually owned a fair chunk of change by week's end.
After a month or so, our subterfuge somehow came to light, I think because our 16-year-old son may have ratted us out to his mom. Properly reprimanded, we continued to play a while for the sake of competition only, but in short order we lost interest.
That girl, now a grown woman in her early 30s, seems not to have any addictive tendencies at all; she drinks in moderation, doesn't even use cannabis. As I write she is completing her own advanced degree, this one in clinical mental health. She is a star of her program. And although I still tell the Pontoon story to friends, always evoking chuckles, last autumn's prison meeting changed my outlook even on so petty an episode.
As I say, I stood in our dooryard for quite a spell before going inside last November, hypnotized by a big Beaver Moon. It was by an inner light, however, that I grasped something for the first time. My loss of interest in those Pontoon games after my wife put the hammer down may well have had something to do, at least in part, with the fact that we weren't betting anymore. I shivered a bit, and not from the night's chill alone.
In short, I came to see my own behavior in Switzerland from an unanticipated perspective. Why, I now wondered, did I persist in a contest I lost again and again? The answer came to me unbidden: I'd been dead certain each game would mark the start of a winning streak as long as our child's. In short, no matter how amusing and negligible my incompetent gambling proved, I recognized something lay inside of me I never wanted to nurture.
Here in our part of northern New England, there exist no casinos or OTB parlors, but whenever I watch the Celtics or the Redsox, I see advertisements for online betting sites. There they lurk, one keyboard's click away. Though he roots for the same regional teams, from what he's told me—and I haven't the smallest reason to doubt him—Stonemason Stan has never looked into any of these facilities. And I don't mean to, either.
