Risky Business, the Folly of Chasing Gambling Riches
Travel Essay. Street Gambling in Georgetown, Exumas
Five Bahamian men are around the table under a patio repainted pink. The gambling game is on. They mutter, click their tongues, and snap their thumbs against the middle fingers with each throw of the two dice. The dice roll and jump on the bumpy table, and before they stop, right before they stop, the tosser clicks his superstitious clicks, curls his leg behind him to balance as if he threw a heavy bowling ball and not a pair of light dice. The others shout numbers, and when the dice stop, they drop more bills into a stash of cash on the table or take some bills from it. The pace is dizzying, few seconds for each roll. My mind cannot keep up.
We did not come to gamble. This is too risky. We came to do laundry across the street. I wish we waited there, among the broken machines, for our clothes to finish. But a cold beer beckoned in the heat.
Alex and I are in Georgetown, Bahamas. It is the capital of the Exumas island chain that runs one hundred thirty miles from north to south. The town is small, a few blocks that you can walk in under half an hour. It has immigration and customs offices, a well-stocked (for Bahamas) grocery store with eggs and produce available most days.
It has a yacht club — not a playground of wealthy oligarchs in polos and boat shoes, but a half-step above a dive pub you find in a small US town. In the winter, it is busy with American and Canadian “Conchy Joes,” as we heard Bahamians refer to white tourists. But in the summer off-season months, the yacht club is surrendered to the locals. Conchy Joes are back to their summer homes in the States, except for us. We travel off-season to walk the empty beaches and anchor in the empty coves.
We came to Georgetown to do the laundry. I carry a large hockey bag filled with clothes from the dock to the laundromat a few blocks away. The walk is short, but the bag is heavy. The sun hangs from the Tropic of Cancer above and beats on us without mercy. Each inch becomes a yard in the hundred-degree heat and the few blocks seem to stretch for two miles.
At the laundromat’s door, a young boy of five or eight picks up his toy car and yells inside, “Mom, people are here.” He is proud of his job.
He follows us inside and watches his mom issue us instructions. “No, not this one,” she closes the machine we picked and opens the lid of another. We load our clothes; then she grasps exposed wires poking from the coin mechanism and taps them against each other. Tap tap, tap tap, each with a little spark. The machine hums, fooled into thinking each tap is a coin. “Come back in thirty minutes,” the woman says.
We walk across the potholed street to a bar to wait and have a beer. “Joe’s Bar” the sign reads in Comic Sans.
“Are you here to rent a car?” a teenager asks.
“No, just to grab a beer.”
He shrugs and points to the back.
As we walk on the patio, we see men gambling. They stop the game, appraise us, and say hello. Five men are around the table, and two others sit by the entrance, checking on the street. Are they looking for cops? I don’t think street gambling is legal here.
One more man is observing the table from a distance. He is sitting atop the backrest of a bench a table away, like a tennis referee on a perch above the net. He is a young man in tight jeans and a tank top—serious and determined. He does not smile at us.
The ninth man is tall and skinny with a toothy grin made wider by the booze and gaps between his teeth. He makes me nervous.
“Are you open?” I ask. I hope the answer is no so we can find another place without the heavy tension oozing from these men.
“Yeah, yeah!” two men at once. A man in the Puma shirt gets up and leads us to a caged door. He unlocks it and leads us inside. The bar is clean, and light music is playing in a small, empty room.
He tells us the bar is his aunts’, and hands us two Kaliks. We sip the beer in awkward silence. We try some questions, but his terse answers do not open further doors. We go outside. He follows and locks the cage behind him.
The gambling game is on. We sit down at a picnic table eight feet away from the game and closer to the street.
The men toss dice, fingers snapping, tongues clicking. The curl of the leg, the blow on the dice, and the dancing motion of pliant wrists. The superstitious tics remind me of the baseball pitchers and batters in the counter-dance of invented charms to outluck the opponent. But, the inning’s worth of superstitions is compressed into the few seconds between the rolls.
The dice roll and men shout the numbers. Then, they add bills to the pile on the table or take some bills away. How do they know everything is right? Roll after roll?
The young man in the blue shirt takes the entire pot. He wears slacks and an aquamarine polo shirt, the color of Bahamian waters, with a resort logo on the chest.
I try to estimate the pot: tens, twenties, fifty, and another, in a mixture of colorful Bahamian dollars and greenbacks. It has to be hundreds! It is only one pot of many that have already exchanged hands. Who can afford such games? In Georgetown, a man of even modest means would be a wealthy man. Are they not risking most of their income?
What drives them? An empty hope of an easy win? Or an addiction? A simple search for fun? A need to recover what is lost? The human folly of throwing good money after bad? The gambler’s fallacy that luck must turn? But the game is zero-sum; they cannot all win.
Insanity. For all but the blue shirt. He keeps on winning. His face shows calm concentration. It shows no joy. He does his dance, his rolls, the finger snaps, and violent tongue clicking. He picks the money off the table and glances at the faces of the men losing to him. Quick glances. Worried glances. His attention is on the white shirt whose stash is growing thinner the quickest.
The white shirt grumbles and his words carry an edge that sharpens against the thinning stash and soon cuts as a lethal razor.
“Losing. No more losing,” he sneers. The blue shirt rolls the dice, but the white shirt snatches them off the table, shakes them in his right hand, weighs them in his left, and groans. The same dice he threw a turn ago, but is he suspecting a substitution? “No more losing,” he blows on the dice and sets them by the blue shirt.
The blue shirt weighs the dice in turn, bounces them in his hand, then blows a kiss at his closed fist and launches the dice across the table. One stops, and the other bounces to the edge and onto the floor. The white shirt snarls, picks it up, and thrusts it at the blue shirt. His mouth moves, exhaling words, but I cannot make them out through the muttering, through the suddenly thicker accent of the local dialect.
I gulp my beer, looking at the scene. I should avert my gaze, but I cannot. Alex is looking straight ahead and taps her bottle. We cannot leave with the beer unfinished, my silly pride refuses to admit we don’t belong.
A few more rolls. “Five! Two!” men shout, but the numbers are wrong, and the blue shirt collects the bills. The muttering is louder now — aggrieved, hurt, accusatory.
The blue shirt glances at the white. His gaze of concern meets a gaze of fury. The blue shirt folds, picks up his cash, and steps to the “referee” — the young man on the seat’s backrest. He hands him two bills and they both walk out on the street.
The white shirt mutters, swears, curses. His anger is not at the man who took his money but the man who walked away and took his chance to win it back, as if he would. “A thousand,” he moans. “A thousand…”
The tension is too much. Alex points at the last sip of my beer. We must go, she means.
The laundry is done. We pack it and head back to the dock, but before leaving, we sit at another bar to catch our breath in the heat and cool off in the shade with another beer. We don’t say much. Alex is on her phone, and I’m consumed by the folly of the poor men chasing phantom riches.
“Look,” I say to Alex. We watch the blue shirt walk along the street. With him is the younger man in jeans — the referee, walking shoulder to shoulder like a brother. The blue shirt is carrying a gift basket with flowers and treats.
“Mother’s Day,” Alex reminds me, and the blue shirt becomes a son. I am glad I cheered for that man. I hope his luck continues and is not cut short by sharp words or angry actions.
His mother will love the basket, I am sure. But she would prefer a gift of knowing that her son is safe and stays away from angry men. That’s a gift young people have trouble giving. I know. I was young once and gambled, not with money, but with my safety in adventures my mother rather not remember, she said.
I imagine chasing down the blue shirt and telling him what his mother wants. I wallow in the pleasant thought, but I stay put. I have nothing to teach. He has a lot to learn.
Liked this a lot! All mothers are the same.
Great story, Egor, so dramatically told.