I was living off-campus at that point, which was not particularly unusual except that it was a section of off-campus that was off the beaten off-campus path. I’d moved there specifically because it was off the beaten path. Nevertheless, it wasn’t any further from campus than the usual haunts, but this being Syracuse and winter, it was a bit of trek at one a.m., walking home after my day at work, which a couple of times a week also included the classes I was taking. When I say it was cold out there, and snowy, I do not exaggerate. You do get used to it, but you never really enjoy it. I have seen the movie Nanook of the North; you can’t tell me that our eponymous hero wouldn’t rather be Nanook of Tahiti, no matter how well he and his family seem to have adapted to their icy world.
Berenice had to pass near my place on her way home, and of course, unlike me, she had a car, and she generously gave me a lift home most nights, along with a couple of her friends. Of course, this gave her yet another opportunity to show off her little white boy, but she also put me to work. Berenice was an inveterate numbers player, and my job was to run into the newspaper office to pick up the early edition of tomorrow’s paper, which was usually printed by the time we arrived at 1:30 or so. I would get back into the car and check the number for her; I don’t remember her ever winning, but then again, in the numbers game, the odds are against anyone ever winning.
Ah, the numbers. Nowadays we have state lotteries, which are the same general idea, but they’ve taken away all the mystique. Keep in mind that I was raised among a lot of Italians, who, along with African-Americans, were among the biggest numbers players. I already knew the numbers well before I met Berenice.
The numbers were, of course, a racket, run by racketeers. Or the mob, if you want to call them that. I learned about the numbers first from an uncle who was a big player. The thing is, being a big player of the numbers did not mean spending a lot of money. The numbers were a nickel-and-dime game. You were a big spender if you bet a quarter, or maybe boxed a number for a dollar. Let me explain this more clearly. Every day there was a winning three-digit number. If you picked that number, not just the digits but in the correct order, you won. Boxing a number meant that the digits could come in any way, in any one of the six possibilities. If you boxed a number for a buck, you were betting twelve and a half cents on each possibility. The numbers games I knew about all paid off 500 to 1. Even as a young lad in knee pants I realized that there were a thousand possible numbers within the span of 000 and 999, and that the payoffs meant that the people operating the numbers game were making out like bandits. Then again, they pretty much were bandits, so there you were. Berenice, by the way, not only played the numbers, but ran them for her friends. That is, she played her own bets and also transmitted theirs for them, thus earning a little extra on the side. It was her way of supporting her playing habit.
Playing the numbers, at least as far as my uncle was concerned, was a complicated business. It wasn’t that you had a favorite number that you always played, or at least that’s not how he did it. He went by coincidences. If he saw a fender-bender, for instance, he’d take it as a sign and copy down the last three digits of the cars in the accident. If someone told him a new phone number, those last three digits were ripe. Any event offering three digits was a sign from God. But the biggest sign from God was dreams. It seems that any dream you could have meant that you should play a specific number that that dream represented. You could actually buy dream books that didn’t interpret what your dreams meant, but instead interpreted what numbers your dreams were telling you to play. I don't know if the bigger racketeers were the people operating the numbers or the people writing these books. Morally, it's a tossup.
Because playing the numbers was so cheap, it was very popular among people without a lot of money, and there were enough of them that the mob made a fortune off the game. The question of what exactly the number was would vary, depending on locale. There was the Brooklyn number, say, or the Bronx number, or something like that. These details are fuzzy in my memory, but I do remember clearly that my uncle had to calculate his daily number, which was derived from the overall take at a certain race track, the last dollar digit of the total proceeds of win, place and show. In other words, if the track took in $4444.22 of win money in a day, $3333.76 of place money and $2321.34 of show money, the number was 431. Some numbers were simply the last three numbers of attendance at a specific track: I’m pretty sure that’s how Berenice’s were calculated. I gather there were also other ways to do these calculations, but I'm pretty hazy on all of this. I do remember that they were what they were because they couldn’t be manipulated. In the New York Lottery these, little balls pop out of a machine on television. Where’s the magic in that? Where’s the mystery? Where’s the mob?
(to be continued)
.
No comments:
Post a Comment