Skipping Towards Gomorrah by Dan Savage Page A

stupid risks I took the night before, when I kept on gambling after I doubled my money. I wasn’t going to get greedy.
    My last night in Dubuque was my last chance to be a whale. I wouldn’t be able to bet the maximum—$500 per hand—but I decided to up the ante. I added a zero to the amount of money I was prepared to gamble. Instead of $300 and $5 bets, I gambled $3,000 and made $50 bets. I went to a bank that morning and cashed a money order for three thousand dollars, and I was given a short stack of hundred-dollar bills. I expected three thousand dollars to make an impressive roll, not realizing that three grand is only thirty hundred-dollar bills. It’s thick, but it doesn’t look like something a gangster carries around with him. Still I was nervous on the walk from the hotel to the casino, which was deserted as usual. In the week I spent in Dubuque, I was the only person I ever saw walk from downtown to the riverfront. Everyone else drove.
    It was on the walk to the casino that I made a fatal blunder: I began spending the money in my head. If I played as well as I played the night before—and why wouldn’t I?—I would leave the casino with about seven grand, four of it profit. The three grand I brought to gamble with would go back in the bank, of course, but I would return to the tavern and establish a thousand-dollar tab for my coaching staff before I left Dubuque. Every morning for breakfast, I went to a small café around the corner from my hotel, a place called Dottie’s, and every day the same waitress took my order. If I won big, I would leave her a hundred-dollar tip. Shit, I’d give her a grand, too. The rest of my winnings, the other two grand, well, I would donate it to some charity or other, or to a group trying to legalize nonmedical marijuana. I would put my ill-gotten gains to good use, I swore, as I walked into the Diamond Jo and found an empty table. Two old men wouldn’t have to worry about their bar tabs for a long, long time, and I would use the rest of the money to make the world I live in a slightly better place. I wasn’t greedy; I was good.
    Do I even need to mention that I walked out of the Diamond Jo —four hours later—without a cent in my pocket?
    Leaving the Diamond Jo after losing three thousand dollars was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. You would think a person who just lost three grand playing cards would be anxious to get the hell out of the casino. That wasn’t the case. I had to force myself to keep walking—off the boat, past the cash machine, out the doors, over the bridge, up the street to the Julien Inn, across the deserted lobby, onto the elevator, down the hall, into my room, over to the couch. Every step was a battle. I didn’t want to leave the casino: I wanted to run back to the ATM, withdraw another five or six hundred dollars, sit back down at a table, and try to win back all the money I’d lost. The urge was overwhelming—it was what the bartender at the tavern had warned me about. The cards weren’t falling my way, and I didn’t get up and go. I kept playing, and now that I was in the hole, all I wanted to do was go back to the casino and keep playing until I made it right, until I won the money back.
    I couldn’t quite understand how it had happened. What about all the good things I planned to do with my winnings? Didn’t that count for anything? What about the tab I established for my coaches? Didn’t that count? I played the exact same game, the same game I played the night before, when I turned $300 into $710. Playing that same game twenty-four hours later, I turned $3,000 into zero dollars. How was this possible? It wasn’t as bad as my first attempts at blackjack, when I would sit down, lose fourteen straight hands, then get up and go. Shit, I was up much of the night. But the times I was up I wasn’t up by much, and those times started coming