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Beginner's Luck?

It may not be a chemical addiction, but nothing hooks compulsive gamblers like that first big win.

Illustration by Richard Tuschman

(page 1 of 4)

It has been four years, two months and five days since Tamara Freeman* gambled. Last night, she learned that her daughter’s ovarian cancer has returned. As she rides the dawn bus to her job as a nursing director in Providence, Freeman remembers her daughter’s last bout with chemo and wonders if it will be worse this time. Then she spies him: Her boyfriend has just stepped off a bus across the street and his arm is braced around another woman. There’s no denying it’s the morning after.

The 54 bus brushes past en route to the courthouse half a block away; in fifteen minutes, she could be at Twin River. A $20 bill ripens in her pocket. Freeman thickens her scarf against winter’s breath and sprints to catch the 54. As the driver pulls onto Route 146, her throat is knotted with the knowledge of betrayal but slot dreams flood her with endorphins. When she steps inside the casino, Freeman knows she will leave addicted—she can already hear her lies. But the moment she feeds that $20 bill into the devil’s mouth, she can breathe again.

She often thinks about the synchronicity of that morning now that she’s four months behind on the mortgage. With a roll of the dice or the twitch of a button, you can become prince or pauper. It’s those winks of fate. If she’d been a minute later for work, if she’d walked instead of taking the bus and had never seen her boyfriend with another woman, would she have stayed clean?

Nine people are gathered downstairs at St. Matthew Trinity Lutheran Church in Pawtucket for a Gamblers Anonymous meeting. The basement backdrop suits their tales of descending deeper into the circles of hell. Like Dante Alighieri in the Divine Comedy, they’ve mapped the underworld’s geography. Some reached the ninth level and awoke from the ashes while others haven’t quit; they just watch their lives feed the flames.

You lie so much you start to believe the lies.

‘You’re a gambler,’ my wife said. ‘I didn’t know you were a gambler when I married you.
I don’t want to have a child with you!’

I get paid Friday. By Monday I’m broke.

Gambling was like a second job. Every day after work I’d think, ‘I gotta go to work again.’

After I’ve blown all my money, I get into my car and think, ‘I’m gonna smash this car into a pole.’

If I weren’t at these meetings, I’d be dead.

The third floor of perdition might be losing the funds set aside for your daughter’s college tuition or the money borrowed for your son’s appendicitis operation. In the fifth chamber, you cup heart shards after your wife leaves. The inferno is when you try to end your life. You might stop taking the insulin that keeps you alive. Or, like Freeman, you could jump in front of a bus. And when the bus lurches, brakes smoking, you could stare into the driver’s eyes and curse him for sparing you. He thinks it was an accident, but you no longer believe in chance.

 Most of us can’t imagine the gambler’s heart. We don’t know what it’s like to debate pumping $20 of regular into our car because that money could be spent on slot credits. We’ve never walked to the 7-Eleven with $10 for bread and milk for our kids and left empty-armed because we spent it all on scratch tickets. We haven’t felt the despair of winning $11,000 in one night only to drive home without two dollars for a cup of coffee. We haven’t been the woman with the million-dollar house in South County, the one who drives past it just to watch someone else live her dream.

And we don’t understand why they just can’t stop.