Blind Luck (14 page)

Jack flipped the chips in like it was a burden. Dave turned over a ten of spades with the last card. Jack took another look at his cards before karate chopping the air.

“No bet, huh? You sure you’re paying attention?” Dave loved these situations, because he could provoke glimpses of the man he remembered.

He loved those flashes of the man who enjoyed the little things, had a knack for making the most of every moment and a passion for interaction. Jack’s eyes flared. The barbs pricked him, but he had done this long enough to control his game and to bide his time.

No doubt a part of him wanted to toss his cards in Dave’s face, and swear at him until he had no breath left, but the gambler in him knew better. Dave upped the bet another red chip. Jack pushed his bet along the table to the pot.

“It’s all you,” Dave said as he tapped the table.

Jack laid down the ace and king of spades to display a flush.

Dave revealed his pair of nines. “You won’t be able to keep that up all day. I knew you wouldn’t stray from your best ten hands, and your eyes told me you didn’t have the real deal, I just didn't know you were suited.”

Jack pulled the pot towards him as if it were a thousand dollars. “It’s the first of the month. Where’s my treat?”

Dave pointed to the vase with the flowers. “I brought you flowers”

The table shook as Jack threw the cards. “It’s the first of the month. We had a deal.”

“All right.”

Dave got up to close the door. With privacy ensured, he removed a mickey from the breast pocket of his jacket and poured a stiff drink of whiskey into his dad’s coffee mug.

“A little more.” Jack gestured with an index finger.

“That’s good for now.”

“You would think you were turning a profit, you’re so stingy with your pours.”

“Would you rather I didn’t bring it at all?”

Jack ran his tongue over the roof of his mouth after the first sip. “Aren’t you going to have some?”

“Naw.”

“Why not?”

“I’m not in the mood.”

“Come on.”

“Not today.”

Jack began muttering under his breath, but audible enough to hear. “Not today? Turning a drink down to a man’s face.”

“How do you feel about easy money?”

“Easy money?”

“Yeah.”

“There’s no such thing.”

“Not even when things are just happening for you, like you couldn’t get it wrong if you wanted to?”

Jack took another mouthful, and his eyes got a little brighter with every drink. Suddenly he stood up and raised his mug. “Luck is believing you’re lucky.”

“Point taken. To whom do we owe that gem?”

“Tennessee Williams,” Jack said as he pushed his mug across the table. “Now did I earn another drink?”

“You certainly did.” Dave poured him another two ounces while he sat back in the chair.

“Have a drink with me.”

A part of Dave wanted to drink the whole bottle. One drink after another, reliving all the best stories he could get his dad to tell, but circumstance ate at him. Chance, fate and luck swirled through his mind. Somehow he was still alive, and somehow he had more money than ever. His dad knew odds as well as anyone. He’d studied probability, analyzed point spreads and card scenarios every day, and he swore by information over instinct. Precedent told him who to pick in sports, and with poker he only played the best ten hands. The best nine playing hands and what he called the random keeper—a seven and a jack. Math ruled his betting, and while he’d never walked away with the pot of gold, he’d stayed afloat for decades.

“Dad, in all your years of gambling, what’s the most you ever won?”

Jack stared at the wall again. This time a drop of drool from the liquor worked its way down to his chin.

“Dad?” Dave tapped the mickey on the table to get him back to the moment.

“Huh?”

“Gambling. What’s the most money you won at one time?”

“In one play or at one time?”

“Either or.”

Jack’s mind drifted to memories of twelve years earlier. Memories of a black tie event in a mansion and the Yankees battling back from two games down. He knew Atlanta fans were on a wave of hysteria with just two games between them and their second championship in a row, and he knew that would blind them from the start of the game’s most storied franchise regaining its glory.

“Twenty-two thousand,” he said. “Fifteen on a baseball series, seven playing poker, all in the same night.”

“Twenty-two grand in one night, and you don’t think something was working in your favour?”

“Intelligence was working in my favour. The Yankees had the best mix of young players and veterans a team had ever assembled. And with the Olympics in Atlanta that year and having won the year before, the pressure was too much.”

Dave looked at this dad. He hadn’t been that articulate in weeks. He missed those stories. He spoke with ease, honesty and the type of detail Dave never seemed to find in his own life. “What about the seven grand?”

Jack smiled before finishing his drink. “I caught a pro losing his composure. A lot of them are like that when they start losing, you just have to be there enough that you’re at the table when it happens. He started making irrational moves, bad bluffs, over-aggressive bets. I was just one of the ones who took him—the room carved him up for thirty thousand before he left.”

“He must have wanted to die.”

“No, no, he wanted to play. A friend of his had to drag him out of the place.”

“So the money just came to you that night?”

“I jumped on the opportunities.”

Dave looked at his dad and decided to take Thorrin’s money as long as could.

Forget worrying about his misconceptions, seize the opportunity, and take the money while you can. He didn’t need to hear his dad say the words; he knew that would be his answer.

“The other day you said I don’t take enough risks. If you’re on a hot streak, at what point do you stop risking profits?”

Something out the window captured Jack’s attention. “They’re stealing from me,” he muttered.

“I’m asking you a question, Pop. At what point do you stop risking profits on a hot streak?”

“You don’t,” Jack said without turning from the window.

Seventeen

Despite Thorrin’s assurance that the driver would buzz him when he arrived, Dave waited outside. Adhering to time made him feel in control, so when Thorrin said the car would arrive at two, he made sure to be outside at one forty-five.

A short man with slicked-back grey hair and a disarming smile that exposed crooked teeth opened the back door for him. “How are you, Mr. Bolden?”

“Fine, thanks.”

It felt wrong for a man some thirty years his senior to call him “Mr”. Plexiglas divided the front seats from the back, except for the centre, where a communication slot was open, so he sat in the middle of the horseshoe seating.

The driver looked at him through the rear view mirror. “Mr. Thorrin was worried about heavy traffic, so he left you a few beers in the fridge there. If you feel like a snack, there’s most everything you can think of in the two doors beneath the bar, and the T.V. converter’s on the table.”

“Thank you.”

“Buzz me here if you need anything,” the man said, pointing to an intercom.

Dave nodded with an awkward smile. It was weird to think that the man’s job was to make him comfortable and drive him across the city. He opened a beer before turning on the T.V. It took effort to remember being in a living room as nice as this limo.

With a cold drink in hand and five movie channels at his disposal, he imagined Thorrin in the limo as he talked on speakerphone watching stock prices every morning, held meetings on the way to more meetings every afternoon, and had sex that most people only fantasize about every evening. Or maybe the limo was just a vessel. Maybe he used the Mercedes as a sign of success as he moved from one transaction to another, and it was more of a mobile office than the clichéd dream of conquering the corporate jungle.

Either way, he wished the limo were less impressive. He wished the seats weren’t so comfortable, that the ride wasn’t so smooth, that the flat-screen didn’t make whatever channel he turned to so captivating, and that the whole experience didn’t make him happier simply by being there. But it did. The longer they drove, the more he wished he were lucky enough to randomly pick stocks. Fuck the stress of keeping his dad in a home, fuck borrowing money every month and instead, spend away every memory of that freak occurrence until the details that haunted him were buried beneath opulence. If only he knew what the brokers were saying.

A doorman with a receding brush cut greeted Dave as he entered Thorrin’s building. With marble tiles, wall-length mirrors, and high-back wooden chairs in each corner of the room, everything about the aesthetics demonstrated wealth.

The building was a hundred-and-two years old, and despite numerous renovations and additions over the years, the original brick and wood remained preserved.

“Afternoon,” the man said with a heavy Quebecois accent.

“Good afternoon, I’m here to see Mr. Thorrin.”

“Of course.” The doorman pointed to a corridor with an elevator on either side. “You want the top floor. I’ll let him know you’re coming up.”

Dave pressed the day-glow orange P and braced his stomach as the elevator rose thirty-two floors. He had never been to a penthouse. A bell prefaced the doors opening before he stepped into a foyer with two giant ferns in black pots the size of toilets. The foyer was the size of his apartment.

“Good to see you,” Thorrin said, stepping out from a front door that stretched from floor to ceiling. “Come on in.”

In was an open-space concept with windows on every wall. Dave took a seat on one of two couches separated by a glass coffee table. Thorrin stepped behind a wooden bar, complete with two draft taps and three glass shelves of liquor with lights illuminating the bottom of each bottle.

“Do you want a drink?”

Dave looked at the three taps. “I’ll take a pint.”

“Light or dark?”

“Dark, please.”

It was hard to take his eyes off the wall-sized aquarium across from the couch. More than twenty jellyfish bobbed around the tank, and all of them glowed a vibrant orange.

“That’s not their natural colour; it’s a filter in the lighting. I can make it orange, yellow, purple or red.” Thorrin passed Dave his pint, set a stack of silver coasters on the coffee table and sat on the couch beneath the aquarium.

Dave took a quick sip of his beer then another mouthful. “Why am I here?”

“You’re here because you ask questions like that.” Thorrin smiled. “Most people who get inside my place are just happy to be here. You are highly intelligent, Dave. I’ve met maybe five people in my life like you, and I’ve done business with all of them.”

“You’re assuming a lot about me.”

“Observing, never assuming. I picked it up hanging around my father’s restaurant as a kid. I was adopted, and my adoptive mother, God bless her, died when I was seven, so I spent a lot of time at my father’s work.” He twisted his beer on the coaster, and his thumb wiped a streak up the glass’s side. “I used to watch people all day. People on first dates, people having affairs, business lunches, job interviews, lawyers talking to their clients, addicts talking to their dealers. You learn a lot watching body language.”

“What kind of restaurant did he have?”

“Neighbourhood. Basic, dependable. He did well for a few decades, but that last ten years drained the life out of him. He could see it happening, but he refused to evolve. Wouldn’t change the menu, wouldn’t renovate, wanted to keep up all the old photos of people that none of the customers knew any more. Ultimately, he was a terrible businessman.”

Dave watched two jellyfish bump into each other. Orange looking jellyfish in a living room were just too cool to ignore. It occurred to Dave after Thorrin stopped speaking that the home was so large that it was silent. The lights didn’t buzz, the air vents didn’t blow, and there was no racket from the street below. The place was completely self-contained.

“Do you live alone?”

“I do now. My wife, Katherine, died nine years ago. She battled cancer for four years before that, so it was an awful stretch. She was raised Catholic, and I always supported her belief and escorted her to church, but I believed more in her than her faith. Naturally, when she got sick, I thought about life and death in ways I never had before. There’s no way around it when a loved one gets sick. But about a week into her treatment, I realized I was more scared than her. I was consumed by fear, by all the what-ifs, but she accepted her situation and embraced every moment. And I mean every moment, not just the easy ones. She still enjoyed putting me in my place, and it’s not like she started suffering fools. When she died, I adopted her philosophy. Life is about moments, and I decided I’d spend my life searching for the most intense ones.”

“She sounds like an amazing person.”

Thorrin nodded, and a glow in his eyes confirmed that he appreciated Dave’s sentiment. “Do you plan on having kids?”

Dave filled his mouth with beer before shifting his weight in the seat. “One day.”

“Well, if you’re thinking about kids, make sure you have the financial backing to support them. You don’t want to be like my father.”

Dave thought of his own dad. Part of him hated the man for making his mother stress about money and for making her scared that they might have to sell the house or car every month. He agreed with Thorrin; he didn’t want his kids to worry about money.

Thorrin ran an index finger over an eyebrow, “I owe everything I have to my college roommate. We met our first year at university playing football. You ever play football?”

Dave shook his head. “Baseball.”

“Right. Anyway, my roommate and I met that year. We never left the practice squad, and we never played football again, but we lived together for the rest of university. The guy was a millionaire by twenty-five, and I’m going back more than a few decades, so you can appreciate how rare that kind of money was then. His whole business philosophy was to focus on scarce resources. Staying ahead of the demand, the anticipation of evolution. He got me my first break in oil, and I never looked back. Software in the seventies, video in the eighties, bottled water, cosmetic surgery, the internet. He taught me to find things people don’t even look for.”