“Alo alone for me,” said the young man, “but in the seven months I’ve been doing very well in the program.
I played exclusively in Gardena, to the low hand poker.
I played at night, after lying to the children, and of course, I never got home before five in the morning, and my problem was that I could not sleep then.
I was mentally reviewed each play, so the next day I was, you know, tired.
Irritable.
With the kids.
His tone to speak in public was that of someone who has been inspired by analgesic ads, but it was not exactly selling a product. He was doing a “confession” at a meeting of anonymous players to which he attended recently: nine of a winter night at the Social Club of a Gardena Bungalows neighborhood, California. GARDENA is the capital of Poker covered in Los Angeles County (no discovered poker, no alcohol, closed clubs between five and nine o’clock in the morning and all day of Christmas; this is not snowfall but california, where there is only Poker covered and only as a decision of local legislators), and the seductive proximity of poker clubs floated on that meeting as a paraphysical substance, almost as palpable as the portraits of Washington and Lincoln, the American flag, the hydrangeas of plastic and The table that had deployed the refreshments committee. The action was there waiting, just around the corner, and in our room overheated by heating, moving nervously in the folding chairs and blinking when they got the cigarette smoke in the eyes, there were forty people who crave it.
“This city of Gardena,” he whispered, he whispered, “he has destroyed me.
The young man in question, who said that he had been quite a good student of mechanical drawing at Instituto Van Nuys, was twenty-two years old and wore his hair repeated with a 1951 style tupé, which maybe he suggested to what boy, just like the rest
Of the people of the room, I lived on a different planet.
“I did not lose any fortune,” he continued, “but I did lose all the money he could get;
I started when I was in the Marines, I met many pardils in Vietnam, I was gaining easy money, and you can say that it was that time of my life that … Hum … took me to perdition.
The cloud of smoke became denser and the testimonies more intense.
I had not heard so many revelations of that guy since I used to engage in talks on Buses Greyhound moved by the wrong conviction that it was a good way to learn about life.
“It just had just embedded a great sum of money from my boss,” they were among them, and “I was going to a meeting at Canoga Park when I turned down the highway, that was last Wednesday.
I ended up in Gardena and now I am again at the edge of divorce. ”
Mea guilt, they seemed to be lamenting, and many of them had also lamented the night before, and the previous one: Every night there is a meeting of anonymous players in the vicinity of Los Angeles, in places like Long Beach, Canoga Park, Downey or
Culver City, and the ideal is to attend five or six per week.
“I had never come to this Gardena meeting,” someone explained, “for a single reason very simple: every time I happened next to Gardena on the highway, cold sweats enter me;
But tonight I am here because every night I can go to a meeting is a night when I do not bet, and with the help of God and you already have 1,223 nights.
There were certain curious elements in the way they had to talk to each other.
As if they dedicated themselves to write horoscopes (and perhaps it was the case of some), they registered with fanaticism not only their important “dates”, but also those of others (“on December 3, was a bad date for me because
It was the night in which I extended the first false check, for the amount of $ 343, but it was an important day for Frank L, because a year later on that same date turned eight months in the same work, although later I lost it, what
which shows that some continued to fight with the same dates while others are falling on, and that is the miracle of anonymous players “);
In general, they spoke as if they emerged from a subvertal swamp and they will try to hunt phrases on the fly.
“Now that I am in this program I have the solidarity of my family,” said someone, and “the most important thing I have taken from the program right now is my … hum … mental thinking.”
“As you all know, I played that night on November 28 at the Normandie Club,” said another.
After that night I achieved serenity. ”
“That’s my ideal,” someone added.
Achieve serenity ».
What I want to say, by Joan Didion (Literature Random House) arrives today to the bookstores with Foreword by Elvira Navarro and Translation of Javier Calvo.