Risk

I learned as a child that lying to adults was lucrative. A little talent and a lot of energy put me on stage and performing there soon became a habit. Lying, I learned, could take me out of rural Texas, so I did it as well and as often as I could. Most call this “acting,” but acting is just lying with other people’s words. But the first summer I went to Los Angeles to try to lie on television, I learned another way to cheat adults out of their money while ostensibly entertaining them.

On my first night in the Oakwood Apartment complex, I found the fish. It was March of 2003. Two months later Chris Moneymaker would win the World Series of Poker and popularize the game for millions, but I was already a freak at thirteen—at least in theory. (By ten I’d read Doyle Brunson’s Super System, all six hundred pages. I could also relay the most definitive moments in the history of the city of Las Vegas. Blame movies.) I walked into the complex’s otherwise empty community room: beige wallpaper, round wooden tables, and a glossy parquet floor were dimly reflected in a long clean mirror, the space sometimes doubling as a dance studio. When I saw five older guys drinking and playing cards my stomach fluttered. I sidled up to them and acted curious. They asked if I had cash. I said yes. They asked if I wanted to play. I said yes. They asked if I knew Texas hold ‘em. I lied. Two hours later I had three hundred and sixty four dollars in my pocket and only twenty were mine.

During my next few sojourns in Los Angeles, I spent my free time playing poker at house games across the Valley. My main table was a lucrative home in Sherman Oaks frequented by actors flush with cash. We’d usually start around seven and play until dawn. My opponents were more often than not dramatic, impulsive, and dumb; I tolerated shouting matches and drywall boxing for a weekly bilk. (The couple who owned the house eventually put a heavy bag and spare gloves in their back yard.) After twenty of those games, I had turned three hundred and sixty four dollars into twelve thousand dollars. I was inordinately proud of this feat, mainly for the discipline with which I gambled. Teen boys freaking out at the poker table seemed stupid; why not expend that passion trying to get laid? When I turned eighteen I played a tournament at a nearby casino, scrubbed out, then realized on the long, foggy drive back home that easy access to green felt could ruin me. I vowed to never play for substantial stakes again and I’ve since kept that up. A few years after that long drive, I also quit acting. I no longer felt the thrill of dissimulation in my blood.

Dostoevsky’s novel The Gambler has a subtitle: From a Young Man’s Notes. Youth carries with it a belief in the boundlessness and plasticity of the world. The first time Alexei Ivanovich steps up to a roulette table, he seems to know the future: “something radical and definitive was bound to happen in my fate.” Seeing the gamblers hustling to bet, his heart pounds. Though he has read “thousands of descriptions of roulette,” Alexei is unable to escape his “plebeian desire to win.” He needs money and has none of his own, sure, but no matter: he intends to play for a bigger stake: to win is to change, to break from the world, to escape slavery to whom—or what—one loves. “It only takes being steadfast at least once, and in an hour I can change my whole destiny!” While this is true for all of us (one can ruin a relationship with a few words, leave home and never return, commit a crime, join a cult, etc.), the young person feels compelled to find their hour rather than it finding them.

The Gambler, written by Dostoevsky in a hurry to pay off his own gambling debt, shows Alexei falling into a peculiar intellectual trap. He believes there is “the semblance of some order” in the spin of the roulette wheel (and often makes statistically inane and gloriously superstitious statements), but as former gamblers know, this belief is a pretext for the actual physical drive: the “terrible thirst for risk.” Alexei, thoughtless at the table, seeks “luck, victory, power” and wants to satisfy those cravings as quickly as possible, saying early on in his tale that he sees “decidedly nothing filthy in the desire to win sooner and more.” He is too young to know that in the pursuit of deep satisfaction there are few shortcuts worth taking; he is too young to know that quick pleasures rarely satisfy. No matter their age, the gambler feels the false promise of rapid psychological change. This is a reasonable feeling, though, insofar as money so obviously determines material possibilities. But as Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov shows, a smart young man is capable of justifying all forms of self-destruction.

The initial reason one steps up to the table soon vanishes. For the gambler, risk soon becomes its own end. This is because the feelings produced by winning big and losing big are equally disorienting, destabilizing, and yes, compelling. The structure of an effective drug—be it the stock market or cocaine—is such that any emotion can swiftly be metabolized by using it again. Gambling provides an obvious polarity, pleasing enough in a world without solid standards, but bettors come to love instead gambling’s wild consistency of intensity. Gambling thus attracts those who want method and madness. Sometimes Alexei seems enamored with fast money, and sometimes he seems serious about changing his life, and sometimes he seems constitutionally at odds with giving a shit. He wonders aloud how ridiculous it is to accumulate money “through honest work”; he doesn’t consider himself “something necessary to and accessory to capital”; he regards money as a crude instrument but states the axiom that “pleasure is always useful”; he has to pretend to look with a “serious point of view”; he lives in an incomprehensible world, one “fantastic, strange, insubstantial”; he almost surrenders entirely to “the comic interest of the coming denouement” (a finale postulated in the middle of the book); and, finally, he summarizes his situation like so: “At times it seems I’m going mad. And at times it seems I’m still not far from childhood, from the schoolbench, and it’s simply crude prankishness.” We could read in Alexei’s lack of cupidity an aristocratic disinterest or childlike incoherence over whom the physical fervor of taking risks sometimes prevails, but we would be wrong. Gambling produces polarized emotions and clear outcomes, but more importantly, it creates the pleasurable interplay between the folly and lightness of fucking around and the thrill and weight of finding out. To gamble is to invest care in arbitrary outcomes and withdraw concern for one’s wellbeing. The river must bring you the full house, the pass must be caught, the spin must end on red—not because those events will bring you success or failure, but because they sanctify and ground the risk whose pursuit has become in that moment the whole story of your life.

Of course Alexei loses it all. Everyone who gambles in The Gambler loses it all. In a sly nod to the reader, Alexei says “that is the ideal thing, when the victim himself rejoices that he is being led to the slaughter.” Later he tells Polina, the woman he mistakenly believes he loves, that “there is pleasure in the ultimate degree of humiliation and insignificance.” While another person can humiliate you, a perfectly efficient way to feel you are a chit in the cosmos’s carelessness is to lose your livelihood—your means to existence, your proof of belonging to the human community—to the plunk of a metal ball, the arc of a penalty kick, or the turn of a faceless card. Some like it cold.

We don’t often read memoirs of the bankrupt. Fiction, though, is the realm in which the wisdom of failure is regularly conserved. Yet works like The Gambler are not strictly, or even primarily, moral; Dostoevsky obviously had the most fun while writing scenes of delirium, self-destruction, and headfirst hedonia regardless of its consequences (see also Dmitri’s last party in The Brothers Karamazov). As Alexei says near the end, “Nothing could be more absurd than moral lessons at such a moment!” Much like the gambler can savor the felt under their fingers while losing their rent, we can read literature while a safe and sane world collapses. And don’t worry: the characters recriminate themselves, as Alexei makes plain: “If they only knew to what degree I myself understand all the loathsomeness of my present condition, they wouldn’t have the heart to teach me.” Funny that he understands the loathsomeness but not the essence or cause of his condition. Why? Total self-awareness denies the possibility of both tragedy and comedy.

By way of a “self-intoxication by your own fantasy”—the fantasy of knowing versus pretending to know, the fantasy of determining your fate versus being thrown around by life’s storm—gambling makes love “move into the background.” To gamble with money in a game is a safe substitute to risking love in your life. The servant Potapych is The Gambler’s Candide, saying, “We’ve got everything at home in Moscow. A garden, flowers such as don’t exist here, fragrance, apples ripening, vastness[…]” But none of the earth’s simple pleasures seem to the gambler to compare with the notion of the clean break, the radical transformation, the flight from all concern. At the end of his tale, Alexei has been implicitly invited to visit Polina, the former object of his servile and violent love. But the young man soon lapses into the delusions which drive him again and again to the table. The book ends with this line: “Tomorrow, tomorrow it will all be over!” The it is a question. What exactly will end? Struggle, care, addiction, loneliness, life? In all but the last case, wherever you go, there you are. The wise gambler is the one who knows himself just well enough to walk away; one needn’t master the soul to get while the getting’s good. But with respect to the ruined gambler, the way out—the fix, the come-up, the solution—is simple. For Alexei and all the young men to come, the next life, the best life, is always in the next bet.