Games Of Chance Are Mischance

During my teenage years, I thought like most adolescent males: I was no longer a boy, but a full-grown man. During those turbulent years, my boyhood best friend and mentor Jaybird taught me many life lessons the hard way: through experience. Once, after he lit up a Camel cigarette while we were fishing, I reached over and took the cigarette case from his shirt pocket. The old black man didn’t say a word when I boasted that I was a man and could smoke if I wanted to. Shrugging, he passed me the lighter. I lit up, inhaled deeply, and picked up my fishing pole. After several puffs, wooziness set in, and I saw three bobbers instead of one. Soon the sardines, onions, crackers, and RC Colas we enjoyed for lunch revolted. I leaned over the boat’s edge, vomited, and flicked the cigarette into the water. Amid Jaybird’s chuckles, I vowed never to smoke again.

Using experience, he also deterred me from another vice: gambling. On Dad’s Mississippi Delta farm, a Saturday dice game always followed payday on Friday. Crouched beside Jaybird, I soon grasped the game’s fundamentals. After loaning me money, he said, “When the game is over, pay me out of your winnings. If you lose, repay me from your allowance for doing chores.” To win, Jaybird taught me gambling jargon used to encourage the dice. “Natural” inspired them to turn up the same amount as the previous roll by landing with identical numbers on each die, e.g., if the first roll was four (three plus one), a natural on the next toss would be two plus two. My favorite encouragement was “apologize, dice,” used when a player regains the bones, having rolled craps — two (snake eyes), three (acey-deucey), or twelve (boxcars) — on his last roll. Emulating Jaybird, I kissed the dice, bounced them off the wall, and shouted, “Seven come eleven!” — always a first-roll winner. The dice apologized, and I raked in the pot. To the other players’ chagrin, I kept on rolling and controlling those bones. The mound of filthy lucre in front of me grew steadily. Amid envious glances from the other players, I kissed the dice and rolled seven-eleven again. Ecstatic, I rolled once more. “Boxcars!” Jaybird shouted. “You crapped out, boy.” When my pile of dough was gone, he loaned me more money. Little did I realize that he was allowing experience to show me the hard way that the vice of gambling must be avoided. Like cigarettes, Jaybird knew that it is addictive, and just as he used experience to deter me from smoking, he let the loss of hard-earned money cure me of gambling. For weeks, I handed Jaybird big chunks of my allowance, a painfully educational obligation. From then on, I was content just to watch the dice games, having been taught by my beloved mentor that a gambler’s hope of regaining losses by continuing to gamble is what ruins him. The lesson was clear: Games of chance are mischance.