A bettor’s tale of when gambling ruled

A bettor’s tale of when gambling ruled
By Harry Mark Petrakis

My addiction to gambling began when I was 16 and lasted until I was 24, two years into my marriage. I cannot be sure when I stumbled from pastime into addiction. Friends and I played hearts, pinochle and nickel-ante poker. One day in about 1940, Red, a year older than I was, my closest friend, took me for the first time to the local handbook, a shabby, cavernous room in an abandoned warehouse.

In the years that followed I spent endless hours in that dismal room among a flock of dreamers, pigeons of the scratch-sheet tip and sparrows of the 50-cents-across-the board parlay. There were times I felt it embracing me like a womb and, at other times searing me as if I were an anteroom of Hell.

As a race was called, men and women, clutching their tickets tightly, moved in a wave to stand beneath the loudspeaker announcing the race as if it were some mesmerizing diety. The finish of a race was met by a few cries of jubilation. More often there were curses or a forlorn shaking of heads. People stared at the winners like ghosts at a feast.

Red, who had been wagering on horses for years, led me through the dark labyrinth of gambling. He taught me to study blood lines and the rudiments of betting. With my parents thinking I was attending school, Red and I were intently reviewing the days’ entries in the Racing Form we had diligently studied for hours the night before.

I hadn’t realized how deeply Red was addicted until the day I left him my tickets for a half dozen parlays I had bet, linking horses so if one won there would be a larger sum riding on the others.

After making my bets, my habit was to go to the neighborhood library to read for a few hours and then, late in the day, return to the handbook to check my wagers.

That afternoon when I returned to the handbook, four of the five horses I had parlayed had won. With my eyesight blurring and my heartbeat racing, I confirmed the winners several times. When I left the handbook that day, my winnings totaled almost $500!

Red and I worked part time in a neighborhood liquor store and as I hurried to work I considered giving Red 10 percent for shepherding my bets and cashing my tickets. Deciding that was overly generous, I decided 5 percent would be a more judicious figure.

Red was serving a customer, and when he finished, I hurried him into the store’s back room crammed with boxes of wine and beer.

“Can you believe it!” I cried. “Four winners out of five! Unbelievable!”

His despairing face rejecting my jubilation, Red slowly removed his glasses.

“Hit me,” he said. “Hit me.”

The first awareness of impending calamity seeped into my mind.

“Hit me,” Red pleaded. “Hit me.”

Finally, tears in his eyes, his voice trembling, he told me he had cashed in my tickets and then made a single bet followed by another. When he had lost $100, he became frantic at having to explain the loss to me and he kept betting, whirling from one track to another in a desperate effort to regain the money. In the end he lost it all.

I was heartbroken and barely listened to his tearful promising to share his weekly salary until the debt was repaid. I cannot recall whether he ever made any payment or how much of the debt he repaid.

The highlights of the year were in the summers when the Chicago tracks were running. Half a dozen other young sports would join Red and me riding the Illinois Central train to Washington Park. Our journey among equally cheerful passengers was raucous and buoyant, our motley group exuding the elation of drunks without having touched liquor. When we emerged from the train, the beaming sun and the excited crowds streaming alongside us added to our euphoria.

Seated high in our grandstand seats, we began a chorus of cheers and groans as the races ran. Between races, we intently studied the racing form and offered our counsel.

“Gila Water is a cinch in the 5th!”

“He’s even money!

“A winner is a winner!

“Favorites are for chumps!”

What each of us yearned for was to have a winning ticket on a horse no one else had bet.

At the end of the day we walked back to the train strangely content despite the money we had lost. The sheer thrill of wagering and watching trumped all other emotions.

Days such as that were the high point in those years, the camaraderie, the excitement, the enduring of numerous defeats in return for that triumphant moment when one of our horses crossed the finish line in first place.

But there were low points, as well. Pawning my brother’s suits, selling my sister’s books, stealing from the register of the store where I worked, all to nourish the gambling that had become the obsessive focus of my life.

I think the first step toward my deliverance began on one of the most terrible days in my life. My wife, who was then pregnant with our first son, and I owned and operated a small lunchroom. The first of the month had arrived and I lacked money to pay rent on the lunchroom as well as on our studio apartment in Kenwood.

Not for the first time, I went to my father, who however limited his own resources, never refused me help. I left his church office that day with $200, the monthly salary he received from his parish. With a few dollars of my own, returning to the lunchroom I stopped in the handbook to make a bet. When the horse lost in a photo finish, frustrated at how close I had come to victory, I dipped into the $200 to bet another horse. When I lost that $10, I was faced with the ordeal of having to explain to my wife the reduced amount. I bet desperately, again and again until, late in the afternoon, when the last races had been run, I had lost the full $200.

In despair, I returned to the lunchroom which by then was closed. When I entered and found my wife alone and crying, I realized the immensity of my transgression.

That day marked the beginning of my healing, the awareness that if I did not salvage my life I would become one of the lost souls I had seen in the handbook, men and women without any other allegiance except to those surges of excitement as they listened to the races being run.

At this point in time, reviewing the landscape of my life which along with life’s sorrows has also provided me peaks of ulfillment, I cannot dim the memory of those festive days when our ragtail group rode the train to Washington Park. The hours before us would be filled with a whirling suspense and excitement, and a promise of rdemption and glory each time another caravan of horses paraded slowly and majestically toward the gate.


Harry Mark Petrakis’ new book, Cavafy’s Stone and Other Village Tales, was published by Wicker Park Press in November.