Lay the Favorite (18 page)

The more frustrated I became, the more I pined for Dink Inc. As discouraging as working for Dink sometimes was, I never had to pretend to be someone I wasn’t. Sitting beneath the quivering high-wattage lights, diluting my life until it was as colorless as dishwater, I felt like a fraud.

I pressed my finger down on the delete key and held it there in defiance, erasing bullet point after bullet point. I didn’t come to New York to do the Long Island commute and work as a secretary at Citigroup. I wanted to work for a gambler. I wanted to box. And other than that, I wanted to be left alone.

A twenty-inch snowfall confined me to the Israeli’s apartment for two of the longest days of my life. In the shadows of his living room, he played Israeli fight songs on his Casio keyboard. On day two, I was jumping rope in the hallway when the phone rang.

“I’m only doing this because I’m concerned for your near future,” Dink said. His cheerful tone signaled that he had, indeed, found a way to maximize his gains. I couldn’t believe I had actually followed his advice and tried to get a legit job. His big Roll-n-Roaster-franchise lecture hadn’t even been sincere. He was just in
a bad mood because the Patriots weren’t covering the spread. When would I learn?

He gave me the phone number of Bernard Rose. A “harmless maniac” Dink had known since he was a teenager, Bernard had a gambling and bookmaking office on Long Island.

Without hesitation I hung up on Dink and dialed the number.

“Right, right, Dinky’s friend,” Bernard remembered out loud. “You like pizza? You been to Ronkonkoma? The. Best. Pizza. Famous for its pizza. Take the railroad to Ronkonkoma and look for the most miserable guy driving a limo. That’s Mikey.”

As the morning sun pushed the temperature up from the negative into the single digits, I hightailed it through the Long Island Rail Road parking lot and jumped into the back of Bernard’s stretch limo. It was warm back there and had a greasy smell, which seemed to fit with Mikey’s surliness. Navigating the slushy streets, he kept a running monologue under his breath.
Like hell I’m gonna let yuh in. Nice blinker, tough guy
.

Through the tinted windows, I watched people wave to me from their cars. Parents pointed me out to their kids. They thought I was famous.

In the back of a pizzeria, at a red-and-white-checkered table, the three-hundred-seventy-pound Bernard Rose sat splay-legged, the lower half of his belly hovering just a foot or so from the floor. Gripping a chocolate éclair the size of a hoagie, he smiled to himself as he read the paper.

“Today is the most beautiful day in the history of the world!” Bernard beamed. His black, unruly eyebrows curled into glittering blue eyes. The gray at his temples glistened with perspiration. “Cher is coming to Madison Square Garden!”

“Ah, Christ,” Mikey said, disgusted. “Well guess what? I ain’t drivin’ yuh there.” He plopped into a corner booth, where he sat, bemoaning his existence for the entire afternoon.

Bernard offered me a seat and poured me a glass of root beer. “I had the weirdest dream last night,” he began, creating instant intimacy. “I was real aggravated yesterday. My wife was mad at me. My
parents came over so I’m trying to hide my gambling. They pick a time to leave and it’s halftime of all the four o’clock games. Torture! I can’t leave the computer to tell them good-bye so I pretend to be stuck in the chair …”

Across the room, a waiter delivered food to an elderly woman lunching alone. Bernard cupped his hands at the corners of his mouth and shouted, “Vera! How come you’re getting served before me?”

“Because, Bernard,” said Vera, “I’m special.”

“That’s my weakness,” Bernard whispered. “Women with a lot of personality.”

Waiters arrived at our table, balancing pizzas, bowls of spaghetti, Caesar salads, baskets of garlic knots, and French fries. Bernard took one last bite of his éclair, set it on top of his cell phone, and tucked a paper napkin beneath his third chin.

“Meatballs make me so happy it’s scary,” he said. “Anyways, yesterday. Lots of aggravation. Very rough sleep.”

He wound pasta around his fork until it resembled a fat spool of yarn. “So, my dream. I was dead. Dead! I was watching my own funeral and I could hear everything everybody was saying. My wife was telling somebody that she wanted me to come back to life. That she loved me and she was upset that she never told me. Are you tasting this marinara?”

With each colossal bite, Bernard’s fat cheeks and bulbous nose grew rosy with delight. His greasy lips had a hard time keeping pace with his racing mind and rapid speech. He was looking to get into the pineapple import business, the ice-cream-cone business, the popcorn-machine business. He dreamed of starting up his own premium-rate telephone service: 1-900-BAD-BEAT, a number gamblers could call when they suffered a heartbreaking loss and needed to vent. “Ninety-nine cents a minute. Think of the advertising! ‘If you need assistance with debt consolidation please press one.’

“I’ll trade you,” he said. “My pepperoncini for your garlic knot.”

For Bernard our meeting was probably just a favor to Dink, a
chance to get out of the office and order a few more items off the menu without the guilt. But for me, it was the first time since leaving Vegas that I was sitting across from someone, enjoying myself. Watching him smile and chew, the afternoon light coming in through the frosty picture window behind, I was seized with the urge to crawl into his lap and rattle off my Christmas list.

“Dinky says you’re an independent thinker,” Bernard said. “I like that. Let’s think of a job for you.”

“Make her get her Class B license,” Mikey said from the booth. “Make her drive the limo.”

“I’m good on the phones,” I said, ignoring Mikey. “And I like going on pay and collects.”

“Ah, Christ. Who doesn’t?” Mikey said.

With the last garlic knot, Bernard soaked up the grease from his plate. “Got it! Hows about you pick up the donuts in the morning. Love Boston creams. Addicted! What we’ll do is, you’ll be my girl Friday. Girl-Friday-dream-therapist. That’s you.”

Leaning in closer, he whispered, “I’ll pay you forty dollars an hour. It’s more than Mikey makes.”

Double what I made at Dink Inc.: “Perfect,” I said.

Surrendering to the empty baskets and pizza trays, Bernard removed the napkin from his chin and set it gently atop his plate. He slapped his hands together, cleaning the crumbs from his palms. “Done,” he said. “Let’s go get a pedicure.”

I moved out of the Israeli’s immediately and into the second floor of a brownstone in Brooklyn, walking distance to the Flatbush Avenue LIRR terminal. Five mornings a week, the stretch limo waited for me outside the Ronkonkoma station. Grudgingly, Mikey set aside the sports section and drove me to Dunkin’ Donuts, where I’d pick up a dozen Boston creams and two large black coffees in styrofoam containers and bring them to Bernard’s office.

Named after Bernard’s favorite sandwich, BLT Inc. was on the fourth floor of a characterless building overlooking the Long Island
Expressway. The “rent-a-space” was a tiny, windowless room with access to a lobby that supplied a copy machine, a stapler, and Sarah, a communal secretary with a matronly bun and obvious crush on Bernard. BLT shared the floor with three other businesses. But they weren’t really businesses. They were just divorced men past forty who didn’t have a lot going for them. One of the guys lived in his rent-a-space, a secret Sarah was kind enough to keep to herself. On Fridays, as an end-of-the-week goodwill gesture, Bernard ordered BLTs for everyone on our floor, which I delivered, courtesy of BLT.

From the moment I met Bernard, I understood why Dink called him harmless. But it wasn’t until the door to BLT closed that I witnessed the other half of Dink’s description,
maniac
. How the man generated money through booking, betting, hedging, arbitraging, middling, and scalping, the way he pinched pennies and shaved points and chopped numbers. It wasn’t gambling. It was cannibalism.

Unlike Dink, who handicapped games and employed a crew to search for weak lines, Bernard had no raw handicapping skills and he worked alone. He was, however, an exceptionally gifted mathematician who was utterly confident in his unique arbitrage system. The strategies he used in his sports betting—scouring the market, placing big bets on small discrepancies between bookmakers’ lines—were no different from the strategies hedge funds use to exploit small deviations in commodities prices or foreign-exchange rates. Sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, he sat in front of his computers booking bets, making bets, calculating sixteen-team-if-reverse-round-robins in his head and taking advantage of the very large, very liquid, no-risk betting opportunities created by the Internet. He referred to his gambling style as “grinding,” and fellow bookmakers around the world knew him as the Industrial Sander.

“Charting, it’s alls about the charting,” he’d say. Though I never once saw him
chart
anything. Nor did I see him use a calculator. The amount of money that moved through BLT on a daily basis made Dink Inc. look downright conservative. Even when Dink
found a very cheap price on a matchup he absolutely loved, I never saw him bet more than seven thousand dollars on a game. When Bernard found the best of it, there was no limit to what he bet. No matter how marginal the mathematical advantage, he would keep betting and betting and betting—
hundreds of thousands of dollars
—until the kickoff, tip-off, or first pitch took the game off the board. Only after the game started did Bernard consider how much he had riding on it.

It was shocking. Sitting at my little desk directly across from his, I watched Bernard frantically scribble on the backs of paper plates the hundreds of bets that he placed and booked. “Should I lay the sixteen minus the oh-two to get a take-back of plus seventeen minus the oh-nine?” he’d ask the office goldfish, while overfeeding it. The day’s climax came at six p.m., when the folks in China were just waking up. Their action came flying over the Internet gambling sites, creating awesome scalp and middle opportunities, or, as Bernard called it, “steam.”

“We’re steaming!” he’d holler, giving off a faint whiff of custard filling. “Complete bedlam! Bet, Beth, bet! Get on the phone! Steaming!”

Bernard was involved in every imaginable facet of gambling and bookmaking and I’d guess that about twenty-five, maybe thirty, percent of what he was up to was illegal. Point being, he should’ve been a little more discreet. As if the limousine and the yelling and the ever-ringing telephones weren’t enough to raise suspicion, each day, around noon, Wombat, Guppy, the Battler, Bernie the Bartender, and other gambling clients or “famous guests” that Bernard booked or went to the track or synagogue with staggered into our sweltering little office. Polite conversation quickly devolved into how much was owed to whom and when it could be paid. One of my girl Friday responsibilities was to make phone calls to see how we could move the money, calling Dookie’s guy who wanted to get paid in Yonkers and Scooter’s guy who needed money in Newark, confirming that Chinese John had a package ready for pickup at his restaurant in Flushing and Lenny Smalls was good for sixty
dimes. Once the pay and collects were arranged, Bernard settled into his chair. With the famous guest at his side, he shared stories of what the guest was famous for.

“Totally famous. Invented the handoff. Put the money he owed you in a fancy Lord and Taylor string shopping bag and instead of saying hello, he walked past you and swung it right into your hand. Very graceful. Very athletic.

“Notoriously. Famous. Three ex-wives. All sued him for mental cruelty.

“Unbelievably famous. Super Bowl Sunday, 1981. Bet sixty thousand on the Eagles. Midway, first quarter, Eagles are down fourteen nothing. They were favored. He had no chance. All of a sudden, comes flying down the stairs with a dozen eggs, cracking them over his head. He was overheating. I said, ‘Drink water!’ but no. He rubbed egg all over his face. Fourteen nothin’. Famous.”

I would not be lying if I said these famous guests were the most socially inept misfits I’d ever met. Dink’s friends in Vegas … sure, some were a bit odd. But these guys still lived with their
mothers
. Watching them watch Bernard as he lifted their inadequacies into the heightened world of legend, I saw the faces of men who had never before heard anyone say something nice about them. Their smiles were so unnatural they looked more like agony. Bernard was an exceptional storyteller, but his real gift was his vulnerability. Sharing his unabashed love for Cher and pedicures was just the beginning. He talked freely of his visits to his “pill doctor,” his struggles with his weight and obsessive-compulsive disorder, and the gloom he felt when he argued with his teenage son. The guests listened to Bernard in wonderment, as though they were waking up to the realization that they weren’t the only ones with such problems. I think Bernard was their only link to humanity.

“They all want to be your best friend,” I said, after a famous guest left.

“When you’re doing good everybody wants to be your best friend,” he said. “When you’re doing bad nobody wants to know you. That’s in any business in any part of life. If you live long enough, you’ll see what I mean.”