I arrived yesterday morning on the all night train after a slow churning trek through the White Mountain's range. I’d not slept more than a few fever dream quarter hours in the coach and I’ve spent the balance of the night in the gentleman’s cabin being talked up by a table of the travelling brotherhood. As their numbers were great and I the sole non mechant, my presence was tolerated while they talked shop. I think perhaps the redness of my eyes and the glaze of night sweat over my limbs set them at ease that their trade secrets couldn’t possibly get far. They even stood me several drinks, perhaps thinking me little more than a rummy out on a bender, too out of my mind even to track the converse.
The mountains were of distinctly western aspect in the earliest of morning life. Ghost white with a chalky dust coating anything that stayed still. Leaving the Nevada deserts, I intended to see the lush wonderland of California. Instead, these mountains simply heighten the fierceness and foreboding of the desert landscape. As if the barren sands were given free play to display their direst aspect, these crags and canyons must remain ominous to human flesh. What deserts could be if you would lend them malicious life. We, however, shrouded in steam engine casing need not make consort with these inhuman dangers.
But beautiful as well in the specter light of dawn. And eventually we emerged out of them into the vacant planes. Our pace increased, I spent the sleepless morning with my eyes shuttered and my head bobbing.
I arrived in Santa Ynez {change} with only the possession in my pant and jacket pockets, countable on only a hand’s worth of digits. Among them two coins, one to buy my first night’s stay and the second my only hope on the tables. As elegant as the flip of the remaining coin, but with somewhat longer odds or greater rewards, I’d at least be cleaned up when I was finally ruined for good. I’d envisioned it in full, tho it’s bad luck to plan your demise in such detail that it certainly must come true. Somehow I anticipated that the moment the ball stopped and I was on the instant totally lost that the guards would know—simply know—my state and drag me out, possibly to be shot or at least left bruised in the dust. No need to wait for the creditors, no need to alert other interested parties. Tho flat on my back in the desert, dust in my mouth, my eyes, was where I left the vision. A vague notion of desert birds, carrion and eventually bleached bones floated somewhere in the epilogue.
My rooms, let for my single coin—on the barrelhead, were sparse and worn to the fringes. Clean, however, as hot alkali dust as an antiseptic effect. The pitcher was already full when I entered the room and I cleaned my face at the wash basin. I hadn’t seen my own reflection in several days and it seems to have been for the best. A persistent sweat and grime from worry and lack of rest seemed to have plagued my visage. The cold water snapped me into myself. I cleaned my collar and changed my shirts. Dress code at the Opera House was more lax than one might imagine, but those uninsured and with only a single piece of silver to their names, appropriate dress can get you at least as far as the first table. They may smell on me the ill luck I’ve been carrying with me, but might as easily scent it like the desert’s carrion birds or just as easily dismiss it entirely. I have never been the sort to call attention. In certain fervors, certainly I have called undo attention. But for the most part I am simply another body to be drained dry and returned to his own devices in whatever corner of the world from which I’d come.
There’s a depressive sort within me that is of an intellectual bent. Neither care for the madman they must share a shell and a soul with. A looked into the glass on rough skin and sunken eyes. Even buffed up with clean cold water and cheeks razed, I was nothing more or less than the retch I felt.
As the light cascading through the curtains took on the sorrowful dim of winter twilight in the west, I finished my toilet in the fanciest I could manage. My tie was worn at the knot, from where it’d spent its entire life, the same knot, rubbing up against itself. My waistcoat held a demure shine that always made me feel a little more fit than I was. In fat men a waistcoat can work some magic on their bellies turning them from slovenly to dignified with just as much fabric. Mine had been the reverse and was like to fall of of me if I hadn’t gotten it tailored during my last repose in Garberville.
I swung and locked my door. My room let onto a wooden walk that shared the entrances to the other cottages. There wasn’t but one man making use of the porches; he was smoked the short fat butt of a cigar that smelt like he’d had it up out of the floor, tho he looked nice enough. He tapped his brim as I walked past, his eyes as silent as he was but nonetheless gave me a look of commiseration. For what I don’t know. Sometimes a body just knows when it is around kin or those of a similar malady. Like dogs lazily sniffing the air who even in recognition wouldn’t think of breaking their own repose.
Into the casino that first night I had the high hopes of a ruined man. Fearless in an emboldened and unthinking way. I looked as fine as a man in my condition can want and tho a little more meat on my bones and the perkier look of a full night's rest would have been ideal, I yet felt keen. My mind liked that juxtaposition of finery and failure. The final bare appearance of civilization about to be stripped from me—and the room as well, as my failure was sure to loose the snarling dogs just below the surface of all men. Perhaps I am a pessimist, but in a gambling room this far from civilizations heartier grasps the illusion of community ruins only so thick.
The hall had all the glories of this western life. A full and perpetual din that frothed forth out of the door and onto the street. A din that snarled at the edge of a brawl, cried out—howled!—with primordial lust of winning and losing equally. And entering, it was clear, the more typical kind of lust as well. A good number of ladies adorned the room, tho only—as with those other adornments: chandeliers, glass bottles and paintings—with an expressed function of logic, work and purpose. They were just enough to catch one's eye at ingress, to bespeak the flash the room wanted to muster.
The room, essentially, was an outsized barn built with high visible rafter beam. The type of room men have always felt comfortable with because you can stand at one end of it and survey its entirety majestically. A structure like a Nordic alehouse Hrothgar would have comfortably sat at the head of. No portion of the room could hide from your view. Helpful too for the proprietors looking to catch a cheat or disrupt a fight before it damaged any of the more expensive furnishings. The great sacrifice of the style was its cost to the prostitution racket. Without an upper floor to easily retreat to, there was little hope of plying men too far from the tables. Clearly the decision was made in gambling's favor. And surely the saloon a door over could supply such needs to those celebrating or sulking.
The room breathed a sort of malevolence that comes from too many men all sharing the same goals. The air was what might be considered competitive, tho the amount of civility and decorum required of the gambling hall, say versus the playing field, squelched all appearance of outward aggression. Of course this in turn mired the entire room in a palpable frustration, which all but guaranteed the occasional flare up of violence on an ill timed stare or an ill turned card.
Tho I was sensitive to all of these emotions floating around the room—and not a little unnerved by them—I have always been able to find my own kind of repose in a gambling hall. All the din can, with the right timed hearing, conjure up the great orkestar chaos.
The room and I, however, were quiet yet. A few grumbling men having taken up a side game of whist, it was yet unclear if any gambling at all were taking place in the room. While some men can make a wager of anything, I'm of the sort that enjoys the great wash of engagement, a room filled with eager men, cigar stubs chewing to anxious pulp all awaiting the same axe to drop. Be it a horse to cross the line or a ball to drop in the Roulette wheel doesn't matter. Just the retention of that furious moment, an ecstatic calm in which time stops at the very heights of passion and anything might come in that following moment, heaven, hell or all the more likely their chaotic intersection in the routine passions of earthly life.
How anyone has ever enjoyed penny bets is beyond me. How anyone has lived their lives quietly as well.
I rubbed the one scratchy coin in my pocket to sense its reality, its immanence. My mind was on odds for only half a second before it ran beyond me into the realm of chance. A one to ten odd on the face of it looks reasonable, even good. But my life that has brought me to this little town in the nolands of California, a tiny strip of old Russian rule, so close to the continent's edge and yet a desert? This is the realm of incalculable choice, a near infinite mass. And now it must matter absolutely what game I drop this coin on, or not at all.
And the coin becomes a burden to me. No longer infinite chance, but crucial choice. I plunk it out of anger down on a game I despise. Essentially a coin flip, 50/50 odds. And soon my coin is two. Frustrated by the pointlessness of limited gain, my coin and its fresh minted twin go down again and come back four.
I gather them and head to my real home in the casino, the roulette wheel. By now a few more patrons have trickled in and true games seem to have emerged. The four become sixteen in a single drop of the ball. I am not interested in splitting up this little family, or hedging bets as a generality. And they are sixty four, tho at this point their physical beings disappear and in their place less but larger denomination coins.
You see, chips, in this part of the world at this lonely hour in the middle 1800s are not only a luxury no one can afford, but would be quite a liability. The standards of currency are hard enough to maintain when we are concerned only with the standard currency. Introducing any form of stand in would produce such instability that the thin layer of civility that covers the pent up violence of this world would surely crack.
But less coins meant less option, less safe guarding, less cover from the truth that at any moment I could lose all. Soon I had sixty four of these larger coins and I could feel the heat of the room swell around me. The rising tide of risk was carrying me with it. And just as suddenly, without pronouncement and almost without anticipation, this growing pile of coins was swept away. On a single spin I had lost all.
Or so for a brief instant I thought. All too brief tho. The dealer shoved back at me one lonely scratched coin and an attendant shining twin. It seems I had, in the confusion of exponential growth, neglected and let ride my single scratched coin, which had experienced its own tumults without me. Had swelled and sunk, but never left the table. It returned to me as two.
Defeated. I had no energy for the rest of the night. A pale loss, as ridiculous as every pale win. But enough money to pay for my room and board tomorrow night. And another chance to play the same single coin game tomorrow.
I sit writing this in the half dawn. The time in-between days where I sit sleepless fearing both past and present. Tomorrow or today, whichever it has become or remains, I will stake my whole soul and hope finally to be rid of it one way or anything. No more of this pale life with its miniscule and tortuous ups and downs.
