Rick is the same age as Johnny Depp and he looks like an aging Gilbert Grape. He wears blue jeans from the 90s and white Dad sneakers. He has no children. He has never been married. His voice has a husk to it from years of cigar smoking.
“I’m not really a smoker,” he says sheepishly when girls at the counter tell him he reeks of heavy smoke. He likes several of those girls and wants to believe he is not a smoker.
Rick is a gambler and a guy who’s seen the city change in big sad ways over the last two decades. His restaurant was in the heart of the art district and many of his acquaintances are from that time. He comes up to the booth a lot, usually after he’s lost, and waxes philosophical until he’s done.
“It’s a loner’s game, you know. That’s why you don’t see me in here with Gerald and those guys that much anymore.” He says this and looks down at his Dad shoes when the girls ask him where his old friends have been.
He’s in a funk, he tells me; he’s only coming here and working on his house. He’s going to paint it before the snow comes, but he’s only painting the first level this year: yellow with red trim around the doors and windows. The upstairs will remain periwinkle, flaking off in spots, like the inside of a seashell. Rick is proud of his home. He tells me he could have bought a whole apartment complex.
“Right on Park and Berkeley—an old Jewish guy died and left it to his kid, but he was doing dope and died the same fucking year as his old man.”
Rick wipes his nose with his thumb and forefinger. He doesn’t stand directly facing the counter; he wiggles back and forth with a forty-five degree difference between his belt buckle and the front of the granite counter.
“You know when I was in Vegas, there was a guy off the strip—you know, old town, and he was paying people, actually paying people, twenty bucks to kick him in the…” He stops to look around and behind him. “In the balls…” He pushes away from the counter with a smirk like can you believe that? I immediately picture a sixty-year old woman wearing jean shorts winding up and kicking a man in the groin.
“Nothing’s changed, even when I was over there throwing shoes…same old people bitching about how tight everyone’s getting on the strip and no one wins on the weekend and rent’s getting bad. You name it. That’s why I don’t go for more than three days. That’s three, TOPS. It gets into your head if you’re there longer, believe me.”
I ask him if he ever leaves Vegas with money.
He nods and looks away. “Oh yeah,” he says. Neither of us is convinced.
“I come out ahead here, too. I mean not tonight. Tonight I got my ass handed to me. It’s cuz I’m chasing when I’m down. I’m chasing more and more and the farther down I get, I chase harder.”
He steps back then falls forward and pushes against the counter with aggression.
“That’s the thing. You know it going in that you’re gonna have to chase for a bit—I don’t know, maybe an hour. Maybe a week; who knows; if the machine’s hitting or warming up, then I can tell you if I’ve got a shot. And you know I’ve got a good handle as well as anybody on those machines. Take, for an example, the 5’s. You can get the movement of the reels and you can get the timing of it. It’s like being in the water and reading the current. On those bends—you know, where you can see the turn in the current?—that’s how the second 5 feels to me. When it drops, that means I’ll get a spade or a wild or one of those Chinese symbol things.”
He pauses to wipe his mouth—the spittle framing the corners, crusting over his dried bluish lips.
“There are moments, I’m telling you, where you get that read on the game you start to catch how this all works…and you know what I’m saying. These games, predetermined or not, are number generators and are random to us and to you and everyone. So you, I mean I, can really get a sense of when a game’s gone cold and it’s not paying or nothing.” Rick looks down. “I still chase anyway.”
He smiles as quickly as he frowns and digs deeply into his tight jean pocket. His hand is vascular and the color of Madura ash. He pulls out two pieces of 8 1/2 X 11 computer paper, folded unevenly with the corners bent. There are little numbers written in Bic pen blue. I can’t make them out and he, too, has trouble reading the small print as he drops reading glasses on the lower end of his nose.
“Right here, through August” he traces with a rough and cracked finger, “I was good and only down a hundred and fifty bucks on the year.” He tiredly looks up and over the rim of his glasses and smirks. “See, I’ve got the whole thing written down right here. This is my wins and losses, my record of what I spend and everything…this is a real record. This is my log.”
He smacks the paper on the counter and tries to peer around the corner of my computer.
“Now what you’ve got in there should…” He pauses, “Well, it might be a little off, but it should be what I’ve got on here. It should line up.”
I pull the year record and, not wanting to disappoint him, round the number down: $12,000. He asks what the number is. He looks triumphant until I tell him and then his face turns down confused, befuddled.
“That can’t be right. No, no, I mean sure, there are times when I didn’t bother adding little shit to the log just because there wasn’t a point. I’m talking fifty bucks here and there. Nothing crazy.”
Rick separates the two pages that are stuck together by the heavy wrinkle running down the middle. He lays them on the counter and they sit with a life of their own, like two little paper boats—hoisted at the ends as if they were Chinese junks on a placid sea. Rick is lost in thought, staring at his busted flip phone as if that will make the numbers balance. I scan the pages. There is a phone number. It includes the area code, which I find odd since it is our area code. All of the numbers on the pages are squished together, lumped discursively around the white space. The amounts are written in large print next to the dates, which are written in parentheses in smaller numbers. He doesn’t have all the days’ plays or even half of them, I think.
But I want to change the subject. I am too curious for my own good and I ask Rick whose number on the paper it is.
He looks over his shoulder and turns to me, saying with a low, drug-deal-kind of voice “Well, I don’t want everyone knowing, which is why I gotta keep my voice down. It’s Nancy. You know, the blonde in the buffet?” I nodded. I didn’t know her. “Yeah, she flirts with me and I flirt back and we like each other, I guess. Anyway, she gave me her number and said to call her. But that was ten days ago.”
I ask him why he hasn’t called. He bends the corners of his log. He bends them the other way and smoothens them on the countertop.
“I can’t—I mean it’s not really for me to say. I’ve been in a funk the last couple months. Maybe a little longer than that. For a good while I was up on the casino, and sure, your computer isn’t right with my log, but I know what I spent and it’s all here. But I mean it’s not just that. Between painting the house and coming here, I haven’t been doing much else. Al and Skee were gone all summer and they’re still doing their own thing now. Loner’s game, remember?” He winks.
In a roundabout way I question where they are and why he doesn’t go to see them outside of the casino. Rick, deep in thought, talks at length about Skee’s financial troubles, how he gave his landlord $10,000 cash with a handshake over a rent-to-own deal. But the landlord short-sold the house and ran to Georgia with Skee’s life savings—all in cash. Rick doesn’t know where he is now. He’s got no cell phone and lives somewhere off the East side of Main. Skee’s been really down, Rick says, and I ask why he hasn’t reached out to him.
“I want to, but what do you say, you know?”
I have no idea either. I return to Nancy. Why don’t you call her?
“Eh, I don’t know, man. Part of me thinks I don’t need her. Well, it’s not really her, it’s that…tie down, the responsibility, the checking in, the ‘Yes dear, I won’t go and fucking spend the rent.’ Now…” He looks off, almost tearfully, “I’ve got all the freedom in the fucking world. Wanna head to Seneca at three in the morning? Hop in the truck, you know?”
I keep pushing on Nancy. He is tender there and I am genuinely curious.
He leans in. “She took me out in her truck on her lunch break. We drove around in the parking lot late at night last…what was it? Tuesday? Maybe I have it in here.” He checks the log. “Yeah, Tuesday. I lost three hundred bucks.” He shakes his head. “It didn’t feel right then, driving with her, sitting in her car. Alone. You know what I mean? It wasn’t good and fun like when she’s at work and I’m a regular guy who’s hungry like everybody else. It wasn’t the same. Sometimes it’s like that.”
I take care of some customers who walk up and I send an employee on a lunch break. It’s late and Rick and I are alone. He’s talked to me for 27 minutes. Loner’s game, huh? Rick has returned to his cellphone, but bobs his head up suddenly.
“I want to get my tenants to take my photo with me in my canoe—right out on the yellow line on Park Avenue. Just me sitting out there right in traffic. Then I’m gonna send it to Nancy and say something like ‘Hey, the water’s fine, wanna join me?’”
I laugh and smile because I know I should. I know how to react.
“I don’t have an oar, though; it’s in storage,” he says dolefully. “But that’s how I’ll get back into it; that’s how I’ll text her. I mean, can’t you see that? Me in traffic, in between all the cars, saying ‘Come on in and join me!’ I’m sure my tenants would do that for me.”
Rick stops abruptly and says he has to go home. He’s tired. He walks out with his head high as he says goodbye to the guards at the front, awkwardly flashing two peace signs as if he were Nixon.
I didn’t see Rick for two weeks after that, but when I did, it was around the usual time. He was wearing the same clothes and his hair was getting long. He waved to me as he walked by and I called out to him. “Rick!” I said as I waved him over. “Did you ever see her again? Did you text her the photo?”
Rick looked lost—like he was getting directions to a restaurant in a foreign language. But then his face changed.
“Oh yeah, yeah…” he said, turning away, “Nah, I decided I want to stay free. Threw the log away, too. Don’t need it. I’ll see you later, kid.”
And he walked off into the cacophonic din of machines and broken hearts.