Freerolling

The first thing I did after getting out of the hospital was head to the casino. You hear about all kinds of things happening when people are struck by lightning: suddenly hearing after a lifetime of deafness or walking again after an accident years ago. For me, I could read minds.

I like the term “read.” It’s a lot like that: glancing, skimming, or taking it slow to draw in deep mental impressions. No two books are the same. Some people have a running inner monologue like a ticker at the bottom of a newscast. Other people have flashes of images loosely strung together. I couldn’t understand people thinking in Spanish any better than I could if they’d spoken aloud or written it on a piece of paper.

Those few days lying in a hospital bed let me tinker with reading minds. There the nurses had songs running through their minds or kept a mental checklist they followed each visit testing my vitals. Crowds were a problem, something like being in Times Square with all those different flashing, streaming billboards. I’d have to focus hard on just one of the interns of the bunch the doctors brought in. Usually they were thinking about dinner or upcoming exams. I never mentioned anything about it to any of them; if I had, they probably would want to make me stay or take me somewhere else to study me. Maybe it would’ve made me famous, but I don’t want that. At the time, all I wanted was money. I just counted down to my release and made sure there was enough in my account for a rideshare to the casino.

My mother had offered to pick me up. I refused. The last thing I needed was to tap into every comment that came through her mind. The ones that got past the filter were enough. “I wish you’d be more careful.” It was my own fault I was struck by lightning, apparently, even though it came through the window.

The nearest casino was a dingy box of a building just off the highway and outside of town enough to evade anti-smoking laws. It stank with cheap tobacco, sweat, and industrial cleaner that somehow each flared up, one after the other. There weren’t any windows. My sister always said that was because they didn’t want their customers to know how much time was passing while they gambled away their paychecks. I never needed telepathy to hear her thoughts; they came straight out of her mouth.

Nearly the whole place was taken up with video slot machines. I had to find the few poker tables in the back. There were a couple of frat guys with popped collars and a line worker with crags on his face. The frat guys were easy to read. Their thoughts lined up like bold pop-up ads dominating their minds. I had to be fast, though, since the image of their cards slipped out of mind as soon as they looked away, replaced by dreams of what they’d do with the money they planned to win. The line worker held the cards in his head much better, but there were footnotes and endnotes that came with the cards to haunt him. Sometime before, a work-buddy’s glove slipped, and bare flesh touched a 20,000-volt line. There was a flash and a guttural gurgling as his body twitched.

I bought him a drink with some of the frat guys’ money I won.

When I went home, my mom asked why my clothes smelled so bad. I said I went to the casino since I was feeling lucky; surely, good luck had to balance out the bad of getting struck by lightning. The wad of cash in my pocket proved it. She still told me I should’ve bought a lottery ticket instead.

“Not that lucky,” I told her.

A buddy of mine from high school—real math nerd—spent his summer breaks during college counting cards at blackjack tables until they kicked him out. He did the Northeast after his freshman year, then hit the Lower Mississippi the next summer, and then out West the next. In only a few months of counting, he could make enough money to live comfortably the next year. He kept a big list in a binder of places he was no longer welcome. He works in a bank now.

I followed his lead, but my game was poker instead of going blindly up against the house. I also had a leg up, since I could check with a glance if management was thinking about me. As soon as their thoughts started to center on me, I’d lose a few hands. When their minds turned elsewhere, I’d make back what I lost and head out before they started looking again.

They called me a Professional Gambler, Related Expenses on Schedule C of my 1040 IRS form. There was some risk that I’d slip up and lose a big pot, or somebody might try to follow me out to the parking lot. Mostly it was freerolling, no real gamble at all. I’d hit the casinos late at that sweet spot in the night, when the big rollers were drunk and the crowds had started thinning out. Good money came in, but it was actual work at the tables, sorting through mental reading. Some players were so good at memorizing what had been played in decks that I couldn’t keep up, even knowing what was in their hands at the time. A few were so private, even their minds had poker faces: just a blank sheet with nothing to tell what they had.

The worst were the real losers: people who had been dealt a bad hand in life. The cards couldn’t drown out the bosses or the spouses or the debt collectors taking up so much of their minds. I had to leave the table as soon as they sat down, like a kid slipping out his window instead of listening to his parents fight on the other side of the bedroom wall. They were doing their best to sneak out, too, with a few hands and maybe a drink. I couldn’t blame them. A lot of the time, I bought a round for the table just to see their faces light up for a moment.

Other times, it was the bad ideas they gave themselves. In Rhode Island, there was a guy who thought he could win enough to get Christmas presents for his kids. He blew through most of what he saved up, earned back a little, and then blew it again. He started crying at the table, doing his best to hide his tears by pretending to cough into his sleeve when he wiped his face. I thought to myself, “Just give him a couple of hands for the kids,” but that only made me fear for their next Christmas. I ended up giving him a stack of chips when he finally left the table.

“Thought your family could use it for the holiday.”

He blubbered again and called it a miracle. Then there was a flash in his mind of coming back to the table and doubling it.

I shouted at him, “Get out of here! You, I mean, hurry up, in case the stores run out of the good stuff!” It was louder than I’d intended, but I did stare him down until he took off.

It all came down to Shreveport, where I met an older African American lady. She had a huge denim purse, rhinestones in her black plastic glasses, and layers of summer shawls that she would put on and take off as soon as the air conditioner flicked on. Her mind had a loud, catchy song from Diana Ross playing on repeat, and she wore a huge grin that showed a gold molar.

The first hand, I checked my cards and did my routine glancing around the table to check everyone else’s. The traveling salesman had two pair, sevens over fours, and the honeymooning new husband who was worried about his wife’s shopping spree only had an ace high. Diana Ross was so dominating, I could barely make out the suits of the lady’s cards, let alone the numbers. I had to focus to see the tiny fragments beneath the big print of music.

That’s when the lady’s smile vanished.

Diana Ross went silent.

The lady glared at me, and I heard her think, “You in my head, child?”

My body went stiff except for sudden terror sweat trickling down my brow. I sat like a statue until the dealer prodded me for the second or third time, “Do you want to raise?”

The lady kept squinting at me behind her rhinestone glasses. I couldn’t help but read her mind. It was filled a vivid image of me naked, upside-down, and a dozen tiny devils shoving whole carrots down a funnel into my anus, clear up to the green stems.

That made me jump and shriek like I was the little kid watching the Nazis melt at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time again.

“I fold,” I said, slamming my cards down.

The lady grinned at me. When it came to her turn, she winked. “I fold too.”

I left the table.

She grabbed her huge purse and followed me.

My heart raced. At least the air was clear from smoke so I could breathe, even if the place did have the dull smell from years before. I gulped in as much free air as I could get.

I always imagined I’d be caught someday. Usually I pictured it as two big goons in suits flanking some mob telepath with a giant forehead, like in the comics. They’d force me into service. I didn’t know what this lady was going to do to me.

“I’m not gonna do a thing!” the lady called from behind. “Just come talk to me.”

I wheeled around. She was standing with an arm pointing toward the bar.

Could she do more than read? Could she implant things in my mind too?

“I’m not implanting nothing.” She laughed. “Just come talk to me.”

I sat down at the bar. She sidled up next to me. The bartender stood by silently, his thoughts hoping that the tip would be worth whatever this mess was.

I ordered whatever they had on tap. The lady said she’d have the same. After we’d had our first sips, she asked, “So what’s your plan here?”

I shrugged. “I’m just trying to make some money.”

“Me too. I’m going to fly up to see my sister in Charleston. You?”

I shrugged again. “Just making a living.”

“Really?” She shook her head and then waved around at the casino. “You call this a living?”

“It’s good money.”

“Oh, I know it is, hon, but you have yourself a gift. You have to use it for something.”

I squirmed like a kid being scolded. “I mean, I try to help people when I can.”

“Good on you,” she said. She clapped me on the back. “So this is what you want to do?”

“Huh?”

“With your life? Keep up this gambling and such, ’til you’re old like me?”

I squinted. I hadn’t thought more than watching the numbers in my bank account growing toward some imaginary high score.

The lady let out a laugh that made her glasses shake. “Boo, you haven’t even learned to put a wall ’round your mind. Ha! It’s spilling all over the place.”

I tried to think of nothing, just gray static.

“That’s better,” she said. “Me, I prefer the classics.”

I glanced at her. Diana Ross was singing again.

“I’ve never met another person who can read,” I admitted. “You?”

“Oh, sure, tons. Heck, I’ve seen them all around.”

“Around casinos?”

“Some, like us. Most eventually go do something else. Business, law, politics. I’ve seen quite a few getting into preaching, for what it’s worth. There’s plenty of us out there, probably more than I’d even like to think about.”

I didn’t want to think about it, either. It didn’t seem very fair to read minds and use that for leverage in negotiating deals, whatever they were.

“Of course, that’s what you’re doing here, isn’t it?” the lady asked. “In a way? Or is it so different, since you’re just doing cash rather than negotiating any deals?”

I buried a hand in my hair.

She leaned over to whisper, “What is it you really want to do with yourself?”

I thought. All those people, the line worker to the guy wanting Christmas presents, kept flashing through my mind. Our lives had touched just briefly, yet I left them better for it.

“If we can read people’s minds,” I thought aloud, “and really tell what’s bothering them… that should let us help them sort things out, right?”

The lady nodded. “Now that sounds sensible.”

She patted me on the shoulder again and left me to pay.

School had never been my thing, but I needed it for a psychiatry license. It was rough, and I never would’ve gotten through the exams without peeking in on better students’ answers, but my practice was strong from the beginning. I could really help people sort out the wadded up, torn up, sticky pages in their minds.

Sometimes, to this very day, I had a thought creep into my own mind about the day that ended my gambling career: What if she just wanted me away from the tables so she could have them for herself?

That, I’d never know for certain.