Bunko Blood
Tools of the Gambler's Trade
Shady Park retirement home in Boca Raton, Florida is a place of forgotten men and women. Mostly they are people who are dumped there, the detritus of their offspring's high-powered career. But the occasional resident simply moves there, when they have nobody left in this world to whom they have any kinship, and the rest of their friends have passed. Those few usually don't last long. It is not that they give up on life exactly; it is more like a building that has wooden support beams that have been eaten out by termites -- catastrophic structural failure occurs because entropy simply overcomes the force mustered against it. Their whole life presses down on their heads, and they simply can't support the weight of it any more.
When Bobby, my lawyer, said that he could get me out of my DUI if I was willing to do 1,500 hours of community service, it sounded like a dream come true. Sure, I would have to pay a fine, and yes, there would be the actual service itself, but no jail time, and more importantly, I could avoid having the felony charge on my record, which meant my job was safe. A win-win.
I'd burned through about 1,200 hours of my time before Gladdis moved in. I spent that time reading to the residents, playing bridge, and on a few occasions, helping to change out bedpans. The first time I had to do that was for Mr. Johnson, who apparently was a VP at IBM before he went senile. He had a son and daughter. I think the son works at Google, and the daughter I heard was a mover and shaker at Goldman Sachs. Neither was there when their dad lost the ability to control his bowls, due to the cancer eating away at his body. By the time he died I was pretty sure he was shitting out his intestines, and I remember worrying that I would never get the sickly-sweet smell of treated cotton
sheets, disinfectant, and undigested Sprite out of my skin, and by extension my clothing.
But that was only 150 hours in. But 500 hours in, I had seen Mr. Williams, Mrs. Goldstein, Mrs. Locke, Mr. Hunt, and Mr. and Mrs. McIlhenny pass. By 750 hours in, I had quit paying attention to the names, and just remembered, that I could in fact get that smell out of my clothing. But then Gladdis showed up.
She was a wisp of woman, who was just an inch shy of five feet tall, even though she always stood ramrod straight. She had incredibly smooth skin for someone in their 80s, with only the crow’s feet around her jade green eyes belying her age. Gladdis abstained from jewelry, but she always had a solid silver, ornate hair stick to hold the knot of an
elegant bun she would fashion in her long white hair. But the most striking thing about her was her voice, which was smooth and rounded like a stone that had been worn down by a river, and flowed like that same water.
It was that voice that said, “Well hello handsome. What ever did you do to get yourself locked up with old farts? I turned to find Gladdis by a huge bay window that looked out over Lake Wyman. “Excuse me?” But Gladdis was already
staring out the window again, and she didn’t turn when she responded.
“You heard. What’d you do to get landed with the mummy convention?”
“I’m just here to help,” I offered. “What are you looking at?”
“Oh, come now. Don’t try and bullshit me, and don’t try and change the subject. What did you
do to land in here with us?”
It’s odd. She was the first resident who had bothered to ask, and she obviously knew that I was not there by choice. Still, I didn’t want to admit I was only here to avoid jail.
“Oh, come on,” Gladdis said, a touch of impatience coloring her voice. “Did you get caught with your pants down at a cathouse? Beat up the man your wife cuckolded you with? Or did you just get drunk and wind up pissing in public?”
“Nothing quite like that, and if you must know,” I said to the bun on the back of her head, “I’m here because I got a DUI.”
“Swerving a bit were you?”
“Actually no. My driving was perfect. I got pulled over because one of my tail lights burned out. Yeah, I was drinking, but I was perfectly fine to drive. But that damm machine said my blood was over the limit, so here I
am.”
For the first time, Gladdis turned and looked at me, and oddly she was smiling. “Is that all? Well did you get your taillight fixed?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Because, there looks to be a pretty decent bar on the other side of the lake there. Com’mon, I’m buying.”
And that was how it started. We drove to the bar and just talked. Gladdis told me about her dead husband, and how her only daughter, Alice, had died back in 2005, trying to help victims of Hurricane Katrina. Alice had been chest deep in water, going from house to house looking for survivors when she stepped on a water moccasin that she couldn’t see. It bit her, and she died about four hours later when the poison reached her heart.
“But that’s luck for you,” Gladdis said, a strange wistful and sad note in her voice. “Alice was only there to help. The storm had passed, and it was a one in a million chance of stepping on that damm snake.”
After that, Gladdis and I would take drives all over the state. We went to Disney Word, to clubs in Miami, drove out to the everglades just because I’d never seen them, and the whole time, we talked. I told Gladdis about my job working as an contract specialist, and she told me about working in a factory during WWII, making parts for P-38s. I told her about how my girlfriend had left me when I got arrested, and she told me about how her husband had once come home with a hand the size of a grapefruit because he’d been stung by a bee.
Then one day she said, “I need to go to the hospital today. The home offered to drive me, but I told them I’d rather go
with you. You don’t mind do you?” That was the first day I ever saw her without her hair stick.
“No. Let’s go.” And I drove her. The sun was bright, and the sand on the beaches reflected the light back up into the air, making the humidity even worse than normal. I sat in the waiting room, sweltering and staring at the gold flakes swirling through the white marble floor. I sweated through both my undershirt and my button-down. When Gladdis
finally finished, she looked even smaller than normal, like I was looking at her through a telescope turned the wrong way around. We walked to my car in silence, and I opened the passenger door for her, making sure she settled in
comfortably before closing it and walking around to the driver side. By the time I was behind the wheel, a single tear had rolled down Gladdis’s cheek.
“Gladdis. What is it?”
“Start the car. I need some air,” she said. I turned the motor over, and flipped the switch so that the cool air
from the AC unit blasted our skin. For a while there was nothing but the sound of the air, and for the first time, I noticed that when she sat in my car, Gladdis’s jade eyes were just about level with my dash. It struck me then that she probably had not seen half the scenery out the window on our many trips, yet she never said anything.
After a while she spoke, and her voice was again the rounded and rich tone I was used to. But she didn’t answer my
question. “When I was a girl of about six or seven, we went to my grandfather on my dad’s side. His name was Peter Duffy, and he was born to poor Irish people who fled the potato famine. They landed in New York, and he was born in 1854. I later found out that by the time he was eight, he was already being arrested for pickpocketing. By the time he was thirteen, he was working as an enforcer for one of the cathouses in what was to become the Tenderloin area.
Now, my grandfather was a smart guy. He taught himself to read, and he was pretty good with numbers, so after a while he started keeping the books at this place, and over time, he becomes so important that they make him a partner. His life was going well, at least by the standards of the day. But then, that bitch luck shows up again. This time it was in the form of a fire. The normal story is a drunk knocked a lantern off a hook, and caught the building on fire. Another version of it is that the owner got in a fight with Tammany Hall, so they “relocated” that business. Either way, it gave my grandfather the out he needed. So he bought himself a bunko box and a one-way rail ticket as far West as he could go.”
“What’s a bunko box?”
“Well, back in those days it was still mostly territories out in the West, and gambling was not really controlled. Some towns allowed it. Others didn’t. So a bunko box was just a box full of games of chance: maybe a small roulette wheel, a couple of different dice games, and if it was a good box, it would contain custom poker chips and cards. Of course they were also outfitted with a place for a knife or two, and usually either a revolver or derringer holder. Basically, everything you’d need to run games and make sure people pay up."
"So Peter took his bunko box and set out," Gladdis continued. "He always claimed he was heading for San Francisco so he could open up his own business, but I think that after all those years of being cooped up in a dingy building, he just wanted to roam free. And roam he did. By the time he was done, he had warrants out for him in Mississippi, Ohio, Missouri, Texas, Colorado, Wyoming, and Nevada. My grandmother even told me that he changed his name from Peter to Paul, to Doug, to Sean, and then back to Peter just to keep ahead of the law."
"Anyway, one day he wound up in this speck of a town in New Mexico call Tularosa, and he was plying his trade at this place called The Desert Rose. It’s a gambling and vice den, so he was right at home, but what do you
know? He meets my grandmother working there as one of the girls. And somehow he fell in love with her.” She stopped talking and opened her purse, pulling out the silver hair stick. “Apparently, this,” she said, brandishing the
stick, "is what my grandfather wagered to get my mom out of that place."
"He never said where he got it, but he made the bet with a man called Jose Vasquez, playing Texas Hold’em. Can you believe that? Gambling to free a prostitute? And he won."
"But Jose thought he cheated," Gladdis said, forstalling any questions. "So before my grandfather knows
what’s happening, he is jumped by two banditos that work for Mr. Vasquez, and they beat him half to death. To the day he died he was missing his top-right canine, and he had a nasty cut on his forehead from where one of them cut him
with their spurs. Turned into the ugliest scar you’ve ever seen. They smashed up his bunko box, and left him out in the desert. He would have died out there too, if it wasn’t for a group of Benedictine monks on their way out West that
found him and nursed him back to health. And once he was better -- well, he was never one to be cheated."
"The way my grandmother told it to me, is that he waited until about five in the morning. Then just when everyone went
to sleep or passed out, in he came. Vasquez was passed out on the bar, and before he could do anything my grandfather took his revolver and then proceeded to shoot both of those banditos in the knee caps. He forced Vasquez to give him back this stick, robbed him of all his money, and he and my mother rode out and caught the first train back East.”
“But Gladdis, what does any of this have to do with what happened in the hospital?”
“I’m coming to that. You see, Peter and his wife settled in this speck of a town call Miami. It had only been incorporated a few years before, and Peter bought himself a lot of land. Eventually he became a Methodist preacher: though I doubt his congregation knew he always kept a derringer up his sleeve. But when he died, he owned over twenty large lots in and around what became downtown. He prospered, and he raised his kids to be so straight-laced and respectable that by the time I was born, you’d never know I’d had a gambler and whore in my family tree."
"And now, I want you to have this,” Gladdis seemed to whisper as she pressed the silver stick into my hands.”
“But Gladdis, why?”
“Because my blood is not my parent’s blood. It’s my grandfather’s blood, and that means at heart I’m a bunko man, just as sure as he was. But I never found my Desert Rose. Never had the chance. Hell, I even made up Alice and my husband, because I needed you to like me. I needed you so I could have a few more adventures, even if they were small before I die. But, I’m not that person. I’m just an old charlatan. And now, at least according to the doctors, I only have a few more weeks.”
I looked at the silver stick in my hand, and then at the frail lady sitting next to me, who still had a tear in her eye. I wanted to be angry at her. To scream and rage at her, but she was so small. So instead I said “Here. You’re going to need this where we’re headed,” and returned her hair stick.
“And where’re we going?” she asked, her voice laced
with trepidation.“New Mexico is nice this time of year, and a helluva lot less humid.”
“You think we’ll make it?” she whispered.
“I don’t know. After all, it’s an adventure,” I said, then smiled.
She smiled back.
When Bobby, my lawyer, said that he could get me out of my DUI if I was willing to do 1,500 hours of community service, it sounded like a dream come true. Sure, I would have to pay a fine, and yes, there would be the actual service itself, but no jail time, and more importantly, I could avoid having the felony charge on my record, which meant my job was safe. A win-win.
I'd burned through about 1,200 hours of my time before Gladdis moved in. I spent that time reading to the residents, playing bridge, and on a few occasions, helping to change out bedpans. The first time I had to do that was for Mr. Johnson, who apparently was a VP at IBM before he went senile. He had a son and daughter. I think the son works at Google, and the daughter I heard was a mover and shaker at Goldman Sachs. Neither was there when their dad lost the ability to control his bowls, due to the cancer eating away at his body. By the time he died I was pretty sure he was shitting out his intestines, and I remember worrying that I would never get the sickly-sweet smell of treated cotton
sheets, disinfectant, and undigested Sprite out of my skin, and by extension my clothing.
But that was only 150 hours in. But 500 hours in, I had seen Mr. Williams, Mrs. Goldstein, Mrs. Locke, Mr. Hunt, and Mr. and Mrs. McIlhenny pass. By 750 hours in, I had quit paying attention to the names, and just remembered, that I could in fact get that smell out of my clothing. But then Gladdis showed up.
She was a wisp of woman, who was just an inch shy of five feet tall, even though she always stood ramrod straight. She had incredibly smooth skin for someone in their 80s, with only the crow’s feet around her jade green eyes belying her age. Gladdis abstained from jewelry, but she always had a solid silver, ornate hair stick to hold the knot of an
elegant bun she would fashion in her long white hair. But the most striking thing about her was her voice, which was smooth and rounded like a stone that had been worn down by a river, and flowed like that same water.
It was that voice that said, “Well hello handsome. What ever did you do to get yourself locked up with old farts? I turned to find Gladdis by a huge bay window that looked out over Lake Wyman. “Excuse me?” But Gladdis was already
staring out the window again, and she didn’t turn when she responded.
“You heard. What’d you do to get landed with the mummy convention?”
“I’m just here to help,” I offered. “What are you looking at?”
“Oh, come now. Don’t try and bullshit me, and don’t try and change the subject. What did you
do to land in here with us?”
It’s odd. She was the first resident who had bothered to ask, and she obviously knew that I was not there by choice. Still, I didn’t want to admit I was only here to avoid jail.
“Oh, come on,” Gladdis said, a touch of impatience coloring her voice. “Did you get caught with your pants down at a cathouse? Beat up the man your wife cuckolded you with? Or did you just get drunk and wind up pissing in public?”
“Nothing quite like that, and if you must know,” I said to the bun on the back of her head, “I’m here because I got a DUI.”
“Swerving a bit were you?”
“Actually no. My driving was perfect. I got pulled over because one of my tail lights burned out. Yeah, I was drinking, but I was perfectly fine to drive. But that damm machine said my blood was over the limit, so here I
am.”
For the first time, Gladdis turned and looked at me, and oddly she was smiling. “Is that all? Well did you get your taillight fixed?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Because, there looks to be a pretty decent bar on the other side of the lake there. Com’mon, I’m buying.”
And that was how it started. We drove to the bar and just talked. Gladdis told me about her dead husband, and how her only daughter, Alice, had died back in 2005, trying to help victims of Hurricane Katrina. Alice had been chest deep in water, going from house to house looking for survivors when she stepped on a water moccasin that she couldn’t see. It bit her, and she died about four hours later when the poison reached her heart.
“But that’s luck for you,” Gladdis said, a strange wistful and sad note in her voice. “Alice was only there to help. The storm had passed, and it was a one in a million chance of stepping on that damm snake.”
After that, Gladdis and I would take drives all over the state. We went to Disney Word, to clubs in Miami, drove out to the everglades just because I’d never seen them, and the whole time, we talked. I told Gladdis about my job working as an contract specialist, and she told me about working in a factory during WWII, making parts for P-38s. I told her about how my girlfriend had left me when I got arrested, and she told me about how her husband had once come home with a hand the size of a grapefruit because he’d been stung by a bee.
Then one day she said, “I need to go to the hospital today. The home offered to drive me, but I told them I’d rather go
with you. You don’t mind do you?” That was the first day I ever saw her without her hair stick.
“No. Let’s go.” And I drove her. The sun was bright, and the sand on the beaches reflected the light back up into the air, making the humidity even worse than normal. I sat in the waiting room, sweltering and staring at the gold flakes swirling through the white marble floor. I sweated through both my undershirt and my button-down. When Gladdis
finally finished, she looked even smaller than normal, like I was looking at her through a telescope turned the wrong way around. We walked to my car in silence, and I opened the passenger door for her, making sure she settled in
comfortably before closing it and walking around to the driver side. By the time I was behind the wheel, a single tear had rolled down Gladdis’s cheek.
“Gladdis. What is it?”
“Start the car. I need some air,” she said. I turned the motor over, and flipped the switch so that the cool air
from the AC unit blasted our skin. For a while there was nothing but the sound of the air, and for the first time, I noticed that when she sat in my car, Gladdis’s jade eyes were just about level with my dash. It struck me then that she probably had not seen half the scenery out the window on our many trips, yet she never said anything.
After a while she spoke, and her voice was again the rounded and rich tone I was used to. But she didn’t answer my
question. “When I was a girl of about six or seven, we went to my grandfather on my dad’s side. His name was Peter Duffy, and he was born to poor Irish people who fled the potato famine. They landed in New York, and he was born in 1854. I later found out that by the time he was eight, he was already being arrested for pickpocketing. By the time he was thirteen, he was working as an enforcer for one of the cathouses in what was to become the Tenderloin area.
Now, my grandfather was a smart guy. He taught himself to read, and he was pretty good with numbers, so after a while he started keeping the books at this place, and over time, he becomes so important that they make him a partner. His life was going well, at least by the standards of the day. But then, that bitch luck shows up again. This time it was in the form of a fire. The normal story is a drunk knocked a lantern off a hook, and caught the building on fire. Another version of it is that the owner got in a fight with Tammany Hall, so they “relocated” that business. Either way, it gave my grandfather the out he needed. So he bought himself a bunko box and a one-way rail ticket as far West as he could go.”
“What’s a bunko box?”
“Well, back in those days it was still mostly territories out in the West, and gambling was not really controlled. Some towns allowed it. Others didn’t. So a bunko box was just a box full of games of chance: maybe a small roulette wheel, a couple of different dice games, and if it was a good box, it would contain custom poker chips and cards. Of course they were also outfitted with a place for a knife or two, and usually either a revolver or derringer holder. Basically, everything you’d need to run games and make sure people pay up."
"So Peter took his bunko box and set out," Gladdis continued. "He always claimed he was heading for San Francisco so he could open up his own business, but I think that after all those years of being cooped up in a dingy building, he just wanted to roam free. And roam he did. By the time he was done, he had warrants out for him in Mississippi, Ohio, Missouri, Texas, Colorado, Wyoming, and Nevada. My grandmother even told me that he changed his name from Peter to Paul, to Doug, to Sean, and then back to Peter just to keep ahead of the law."
"Anyway, one day he wound up in this speck of a town in New Mexico call Tularosa, and he was plying his trade at this place called The Desert Rose. It’s a gambling and vice den, so he was right at home, but what do you
know? He meets my grandmother working there as one of the girls. And somehow he fell in love with her.” She stopped talking and opened her purse, pulling out the silver hair stick. “Apparently, this,” she said, brandishing the
stick, "is what my grandfather wagered to get my mom out of that place."
"He never said where he got it, but he made the bet with a man called Jose Vasquez, playing Texas Hold’em. Can you believe that? Gambling to free a prostitute? And he won."
"But Jose thought he cheated," Gladdis said, forstalling any questions. "So before my grandfather knows
what’s happening, he is jumped by two banditos that work for Mr. Vasquez, and they beat him half to death. To the day he died he was missing his top-right canine, and he had a nasty cut on his forehead from where one of them cut him
with their spurs. Turned into the ugliest scar you’ve ever seen. They smashed up his bunko box, and left him out in the desert. He would have died out there too, if it wasn’t for a group of Benedictine monks on their way out West that
found him and nursed him back to health. And once he was better -- well, he was never one to be cheated."
"The way my grandmother told it to me, is that he waited until about five in the morning. Then just when everyone went
to sleep or passed out, in he came. Vasquez was passed out on the bar, and before he could do anything my grandfather took his revolver and then proceeded to shoot both of those banditos in the knee caps. He forced Vasquez to give him back this stick, robbed him of all his money, and he and my mother rode out and caught the first train back East.”
“But Gladdis, what does any of this have to do with what happened in the hospital?”
“I’m coming to that. You see, Peter and his wife settled in this speck of a town call Miami. It had only been incorporated a few years before, and Peter bought himself a lot of land. Eventually he became a Methodist preacher: though I doubt his congregation knew he always kept a derringer up his sleeve. But when he died, he owned over twenty large lots in and around what became downtown. He prospered, and he raised his kids to be so straight-laced and respectable that by the time I was born, you’d never know I’d had a gambler and whore in my family tree."
"And now, I want you to have this,” Gladdis seemed to whisper as she pressed the silver stick into my hands.”
“But Gladdis, why?”
“Because my blood is not my parent’s blood. It’s my grandfather’s blood, and that means at heart I’m a bunko man, just as sure as he was. But I never found my Desert Rose. Never had the chance. Hell, I even made up Alice and my husband, because I needed you to like me. I needed you so I could have a few more adventures, even if they were small before I die. But, I’m not that person. I’m just an old charlatan. And now, at least according to the doctors, I only have a few more weeks.”
I looked at the silver stick in my hand, and then at the frail lady sitting next to me, who still had a tear in her eye. I wanted to be angry at her. To scream and rage at her, but she was so small. So instead I said “Here. You’re going to need this where we’re headed,” and returned her hair stick.
“And where’re we going?” she asked, her voice laced
with trepidation.“New Mexico is nice this time of year, and a helluva lot less humid.”
“You think we’ll make it?” she whispered.
“I don’t know. After all, it’s an adventure,” I said, then smiled.
She smiled back.