Little Casino

Small magic

HE TELLS, YET AGAIN, WITH A LITTLE ADDED here and a little subtracted there, a story centered on Fat Harry, an essentially unremarkable story, tells it as if to understand what he may think of as a “secret” at its banal core. Fat Harry of angry, abused, neglected, and deserted wives and forgotten children, of bad debts and beatings by shylocks and policy muscle, of absurdly long shots with no chance to run in the money, of disastrous losing streaks created and sustained by betting the wrong way, the right way, the hard way, by drawing to inside straights, holding low kickers, bluffing with pairs of deuces and treys, ignoring aces up, betting carefully when winning and recklessly when losing. In short, a chump. A Fat Harry of drunken nights and gonorrhea, lost keys, back rent, wrecked and repossessed cars, broken windows, maudlin tears, filthy bathrooms, dirty underwear, take-out Chinese, useless refrigerators leaking freon, plastic forks and spoons, dull knives, semen-spattered girlie magazines, of this job and that job, moving furniture, painting shotgun flats, spraying roaches and bedbugs, helping out in saloons in Bay Ridge and Park Slope, Red Hook and Borough Park, Greenpoint and Bath Beach. A Fat Harry who cleans out urinals, mops up vomit and blood, washes grease-slick dishes, walks dogs, shovels coal and snow, washes cars, pumps gas, delivers dry cleaning and laundry and groceries and flowers and pizza. A Fat Harry of fruitless, hopeless, futile, irrational, meaningless journeys by bus to Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, to Wilmington, Richmond, Albany, to Altoona and Camden, to the Delaware Water Gap, to the Poconos, to Binghamton and Paterson, for what reason? For no reason, for any reason, to be able to say — nothing. Nothing at all. A Fat Harry who is punched in the mouth and nose, who suffers lacerations and abrasions, cracked teeth, a broken jaw, crushed ribs, sprained fingers, split lips, for talking, for not talking, for saying the wrong thing, for not answering, for making promises and breaking promises, for being a wiseass, for being a dummy, for being a momo, for just being fucking there. A Fat Harry, who, in some crazed final gesture before he disappeared, trailing bad markers and murderous bookmakers, used his temporary night bartender job to close the Lucky Shamrock Bar and Grill, a police hangout by day and early evening, at 3:00 a.m. of a Saturday morning, to pull the blinds so as to enable the dozen patrons still at the bar to drink free of charge, dance to the jukebox fed by the bar’s quarters, laugh and embrace and sing and kiss and grope each other, make drunken assignations, confess hidden attractions, and then stagger out of the joint at dawn, reeling and blinking and joyous in the thin cold of the pre-snow morning, ecstatic with the pleasure of transgression. I’m fucking dead anyway, Harry supposedly said, by way of explanation, as he pocketed the cash in the till. And so he probably was.

Fat Harry was the vector of small magic, the profane and secular equivalent of the sinner chosen by God to be the conduit of grace.

Grace, by the way, was the name of one of Fat Harry’s sad, mistreated wives.

It is an urban rule of thumb that police hangouts are good places to stay away from, at least while officers of the law are on the premises. This, in spite of the fact that the policeman is our friend.

It may be clear that this Fat Harry is not the same Fat Harry who died^* in the oily waters off the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

^* Vide “Presidential Greetings.”