THE FORTY-YEAR CASINO CAREER THAT ALMOST WASN'T

The term; Command Performance, is defined as the presentation of a play, concert, opera or other show, at the request of royalty.  In my youth and into my twenties, my mom used Command Performance whenever she required that my sister and I attend something she thought we might try to weasel-out of.

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On the day following Labor Day 1978, I was scheduled to start a casino dealing class, at the now defunct, New York School of Gambling.  Unfortunately, there had been a death of a loved one and the Tuesday September 5th funeral, conflicted with the first day of my craps dealing course.  That's when my mom cleverly invoked her no questions asked, Command Performance demand.

The New York School of Gambling was located in Manhattan, on West 32nd just off Broadway.  From my hometown community, Canarsie, in Brooklyn, the ninety-minute commute for a 9:AM start included a seven-block walk, a short bus ride to the subway and switching to a second train.

Oh the sad faces of commuters.  On that first hot and humid Wednesday morning, I likened the beaten-down look of my fellow passengers to those at the funeral from the day before.  Many men buried their sweaty faces in the sports page or financial news while women gravitated to steamy romance novels.  But the bulk of these drones either closed their eyes or stared aimless at the floor, out the window or into back of the lost souls in front of them.

To cope with the boredom, I did the math.  My guess was that a lot of these silent zombies wasted ten maybe twenty hours of their lives, weekly, perhaps for decades, in this god awful ritual to be unmotivated, under appreciated at their otherwise unfulfilling position.  

By the time I switched trains at Manhattan's Fourteenth Street, I felt good knowing that my four-month investment in craps training would lead me to a glamorous life working in Las Vegas.

WHILE ATLANTIC CITY HAD JUST OPENED ITS FIRST CASINO, A FRIEND, THE FABULOUS MR. K, INSPIRED ME TO GO WEST.  ODDLY, MR. K HAD ALREADY PULLED UP STAKES FROM VEGAS AND MOVED TO RENO. 

My path to the connecting train would take me down two stairways to the uptown Broadway Line.  I was unfamiliar how to navigate through the labyrinth the tunnel-like corridors but I managed to find my way. When I reached my destination, (one more flight down), I faced an option, at a two-pronged split in the staircase, I ended up heading to the farthest end of the platform.

My eyes hadn't adjusted from the well-lit stairs to the darkening, dismal platform.  So before I realized there were no people around, in the near distance, as I got down to the last five steps, I saw a line of two dozen burnt, metal trashcans.  These cans were old, dented and broken but there was something distracting about the garbage inside.  Curiosity led me astray, towards this dead end.

I was fifteen feet away when my brain figured out what my eyes were seeing...RATS!  Hundreds of filthy, wet, rabies infested, ravenous vermin were undulating inside the cans competing for commuter refuse.  It was so disgusting that I made a u-turn and hustled away with my hand over my mouth in case I lost my breakfast.

WHAT'S MORE REPULSIVE THAT SEWER RATS?  SUBWAY RATS!  NO INTERNET PHOTO CAME CLOSE TO THE NAUSEATING PICTURE THAT FORTY YEARS LATER, STILL STAINS MY BRAIN.

Twenty minutes later, on the seventh floor of an office building, I was seated in front of the school's receptionist (Phyllis). I apologized for missing the first day.  In a harsh Brooklyn accent she twirled her hair and cracked her gum while saying, "It don't mattah.  Everyone's friendly here. You'll do 240 hours...whenevuh."  She didn't seem especially bright and in a disorganized way, presented me with the contracts that the enrollment officer (salesman) had prepared after my visit two weeks earlier.

Phyllis was a hottie despite a deep, straight-line scar across her broken nose and some facial splotches.  She may have dressed appropriately for the weather but professionally too much of her incredible body was left exposed.  Every time she looked away, my eyes wondered off the paperwork to gape at her ample cleavage until the enrollment officer came by.

This superficial prick shook my hand after Phyllis said, "He's payin' half his tuition up front."  His enthusiastic facade vanished after a brief yaddy-yadda welcome to the school.  He then parked himself aside Phyllis, rubbed her bare upper back and neck, leaned in, pushed her hair back and brushed his nose on her ear.  Maybe they were dating because she smiled when he breathlessly whispered, "I bet you taste even better than you smell."

I finished signing the contracts, made my payment and Phyllis led me into the classroom.  Fifty students were scattered in this huge space.  Many of which stopped what they were doing to whistle or make risque remarks to Phyllis.  She smiled, "Told ya, everybody's friendly here."

The owners must have gutted several offices because this enormous classroom looked like a casino.  There were six blackjack tables, two craps, and one each roulette and baccarat. Plus desks for instructors, a walk-in coat room, a big area for breaks that had two large circular tables with chairs and vending machines.

A cluster of students surrounded two blackjack tables.  One craps table had fifteen people working on it and the roulette and baccarat tables seemed full too.  Phyllis introduced me to Mitch, the craps instructor.  He was focused on her chest as I apologized for missing the first day.  She said, "Cutie, when ya ready tuh look up, yuh new guy wants tuh know what he missed yesterday."

Mitch stared at her shapely bottom as she wiggled back towards the office.  When she was gone from sight he scoffed, "Yeah, yeah yesterday.  I got you covered."

It worried me that he didn't introduce me to the class.  Instead I was led to an unoccupied blackjack table and told, "Dealing craps is fun.  But, nothing is more important than developing a good set of hands." He demonstrated how to handle a stack of twenty chips.

Mitch looked like a magician as he neatly made four sub-stacks of five, followed by smoothly setting down, one, two, three, four chips in a row.  Then without hesitation, he reversed the order with the remaining ten chips: four, three, two, one.  Like watching a 3-Card Monte street hustler, in disbelief my eyes were bulging out of my head until he said, "Of course you'll learn how to do it with your left hand too."  If that wasn't intimidating enough Mitch used a second stack of chips and repeated the exercise simultaneously with both hands.

I WAS ALWAYS TAUGHT TO AVOID GETTING HUSTLED SO HAVING THIS IMAGE IN MY HEAD DIDN'T BODE WELL FOR THE $1,200 I WAS PAYING.

Mitch said, "Practice while I get back to the class."
Practice?  What he just did was a blur.  Still, I tried.  Some of my problems were; a full stack did not fit in my hand. Mitch had shown me what to do...NOT how to do it.  Far worse, my class was running an actual craps game.  They seemed like veterans as they fluently spoke in a language between dice rolls that was as foreign to me as Hungarian.  The students laughed and had side conversations as the constant clank of the chips sounded like rapid-fire clams getting shucked.

A lot of their chatter was locker room talk and it centered on someone named "Sif."  Soon I realized they called Phyllis "Sif" as in Sif-Phyllis.  She was romantically chasing someone named "Party" Artie Cisco, (he's another story).  Cisco was apparently an absent student. I gathered that he not only cast her aside but encouraged her to "do" his friends and school officials to keep on his good side.

In the longest half hour of my life, I felt ostracized. Like a condemned, plague-ridden prisoner on an island, I imagined everyone staring at me. I never looked up, stood true my task and fiddled with these plastic circles, and made zero progress.

I felt like a spastic as my fingers went into spasms.  When I flexed my hands, I saw the budding blisters in my palms, I thought Jesus H. Christ, I can't hold a stack of chips, let alone manipulate them. How did the others learn all this shit, in the one friggin' day I missed?

I was disheartened and feeling worse as each minute felt like an eternity.  Finally, I summoned the courage to peer over at the craps group.  Mitch wasn't even there!  I found him bullshitting with the roulette instructor.  "Holy shit," I mumbled these guys were running their own game without supervision.  It got worse when Mitch returned to answer one of their questions.  He then sat at his desk opened the newspaper and started reading the comics.  I wondered what Charlie Brown was doing then it dawned on me, I was Charlie Brown.

CHARLES SCHULZ'S ICONIC COMIC STRIP "PEANUTS" FEATURING LOVABLE LOSER CHARLIE BROWN RAN FROM 1950-2000

I've gotten the short end of the stick plenty of times in my life but I never looked at myself as a loser.  But as my craps predicament worsened, I did look to see if there was a zigzag pattern on my shirt.

A thousand reasons crossed my mind to rationalize why I couldn't do this. I couldn't handle the all-important chips and I was eons behind the class after missing just one day.  But I just made a non-refundable $600 payment that I couldn't afford to piss away.

If I left, what were my alternatives...miserably commuting into the city in a subway overrun by rats for the next few decades.  Going to a different tech school?  Living home and working for my dad?  I pressed unhappily along.

A normal person, stuck in the grim reality of an acutely awful idea would just pull his own head off, but not me.  I fixated out the tall windows that looked across West 32nd Street at Macy's and thought, from seven stories up, straight down was my fastest way out.

I was thinking about my family attending another funeral as Mitch drifted over.  "How's it going?"
I said, "Tough."
He said, "Show me what you can do."
I put on an embarrassing horror show and whined, "I'll never be able to do it."

Mitch demonstrated at a much slower speed and explained how crashing the chips into an existing pile will leave you the same amount.  He also showed me how to twist my wrist to set down a desired amount of chips.

He laughed, "This is a learned skill.  It takes practice here and at home.  It's rare that a natural walks in.  If you look at the class, almost all of them started like you...and many of them haven't improved...and they've been here for weeks."
"Weeks," I said, "I thought yesterday was the first day.  I thought they all learned..."
He cut me off, "No.  Didn't Sif, I mean Phyllis explain that we have a rolling enrollment."
I recalled being pleasantly distracted when she bend over the file cabinet and said, "Maybe?"
"Ha, ha you were too busy looking at her tits. Rolling enrollment means each week new people start as others graduate. See that tall guy?  He's finishing next week and two newbies are starting Monday.  And by the end of tomorrow, you'll be with the rest of the class."

I was too much of a coward to tell him that five minutes ago, I was so frustrated that I wanted quit and even jokingly considered jumping out the window.  I took on a greater urgency as I crashed the chips together.  I still sucked at it.  But I was inspired to go on by the fantasy of sweeping Phyllis off her feet, at my Command Performance graduation.

Oddly, forty years later, I never really excelled at handling the chips.