Double Down: Reflections on Gambling and Loss

by Barthelme, Frederick

• ISBN13: 9780395954294
• ISBN10: 0395954290
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-11-01
• Publisher: HOUGHTON MIFFLIN

Summary

"So each night begins. One of us picks up the other and we drive into the Mississippi darkness, headed for a place where everything is different." This first nonfiction book by Frederick Barthelme, author of BOB THE GAMBLER, and his brother and colleague Steven is both a story of family feeling and a testimony to the risky allure of casinos. Within a year and a half, the authors had lost both of their parents, less than a decade after their brother Donald died. Their exacting father had been a prominent modernist architect in Houston; their mother, the architect of this family of seven, which she "invented, shaped, guided, and protected." "We were on our own in a remarkable new way," the Barthelmes write, "and we were not ready." What followed was a several-year escapade during which the two brothers lost close to a quarter million dollars in the gambling boats off the Mississippi coast. They played to enter that addictive land of possibility. Then, in a bizarre twist, they were charged with violating state gambling laws, fingerprinted, and thrown into the surreal world of felony prosecution. For two years these widely publicized charges hung over their heads, shadowing their every step, until, in August of 1999, the charges were finally dismissed. DOUBLE DOWN is the sometimes wryly told, often heartbreaking story of how Frederick and Steven Barthelme got into this predicament. It is also a reflection on the pull and power of illusions, the way they work on us when we are not careful.

Author Biography

Frederick Barthelme is the author of eleven books of fiction. He directs the writing program at the University of Southern Mississippi and edits the literary journal Mississippi Review. Steven Barthelme is the author of a collection of stories, And He Tells the Little Horse the Whole Story, and an award-winning essayist.

Table of Contents

Authors' Note	vii
I
Mississippi	3	(8)
Family	11	(13)
Tearing Down the House	24	(15)
II
One Night	39	(20)
Table Games	59	(11)
Gamblers	70	(9)
Dreamers	79	(9)
Slots	88	(10)
Thrall	98	(9)
Money Plays	107	(8)
Courting Loss	115	(10)
III
Eighty-Sixed	125	(5)
Don't Know Quit	130	(9)
Next Year	139	(10)
Booked	149	(16)
Insurance	165	(4)
Law	169	(9)
Spotlight	178	(6)
Father	184	(11)
At Last	195

Excerpts

Chapter 1 Mississippi We arrived in Hattiesburg almost ten years apart. We'd held plenty of other jobs -- cab driver, construction worker, advertising writer, journalist, art installer, architectural draftsman -- and we'd each done stints at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore for graduate degrees, and now we were ready to settle down and teach. Rick arrived first, in the mid-seventies, terrified because Mississippi had that reputation, that myth the prominent aspect of which wasn't the lovely Old South with its high manners and splendid architecture, but ignorance, burning, lynching. Being from Houston, having lived five years in New York City, and just out of graduate school, he figured he was profoundly enlightened and Mississippi wasn't. Indeed, his introduction to Hattiesburg was at an all- night gas station on Highway 49 where a lone teenager- slash-halfwit was capturing "pinching" bugs attracted by the bright lights and corralling them in a five- gallon bucket of sand he kept inside his little glass booth, a diversion he favored because, as he said, he liked to watch the bugs kill each other. This was two in the morning, and Rick and his girlfriend had been driving all day from Baltimore, where the morning before they'd had brunch with the British literary critic Tony Tanner in the polished- mahogany restaurant on the first floor of a hundred- year-old hotel. Now instead of talking about postmodernism they were facing it, and it didn't seem to know their names. So Rick spent the first six weeks of his employment at the University of Southern Mississippi commuting from Houston, a safe four hundred and fifty miles away. In time he discovered that Mississippi was as civilized as anywhere else. The gas jockey notwithstanding, things had apparently changed, and at least in Hattiesburg and around the university, the myth was a phony. In fact, taken as a whole, the people he met in Mississippi began to seem gentler and more humane than many he'd run into in ostensibly finer settings. Probably there were remnants of the "old" Mississippi elsewhere in the New South of the seventies, but those remnants weren't on public view, did not seem dominant. In spite of the benighted reputation, Mississippi seemed more than its share enlightened. Steve arrived nine years later, and if some of his impressions were different, maybe that was because when he arrived in Hattiesburg he had already spent the previous two years teaching at a university in Monroe, a dim, depressed, trash-strewn Louisiana town where even the snakes hung their heads. If the races seemed to him stiffer with each other in Mississippi than they had been in Louisiana, Hattiesburg itself was clean and bright, and the people were friendly. There was more money apparent, and the roads were mostly paved. During his first weeks in town he noticed two, maybe three Volkswagen beetles. You wouldn't have found them in Monroe. So there we were, college professors and fict

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Excerpted from Double Down: Reflections on Gambling and Loss by Frederick Barthelme, Steven Barthelme
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