Nit-tastic Tales
I've been passing judgement on ops in this subforum for a while now. So it's only fair that I stick my neck out at least once. Here it is, FWIW, my first (and likely last) BVB op.
Blackjack: Easy Game
Ever think about becoming a card counter? Cliffs: It's easy. TLDR in the spoiler.
Spoiler
You don’t have to be Rainman or one of those supernerds from the MIT team.
(1) Start by spending 20 seconds on Google, download one of the charts and/or practice programs, then put in a few hours at it.
(2) Before long you’ll have memorized a hand chart known as basic strategy. Basic strategy is known for not being called advanced strategy. Good game selection and basic strategy will get you to within 0.5% of breaking even against the house.
(3) Now it’s time to get ahead of the house by counting cards. Can you add, subtract and divide basic whole numbers? Good, you can count cards.
(4) Start the shoe with a running count of 0.
Every 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 = +1
Every 10, J, Q, K and A = -1
Ignore 7, 8 and 9
That's your running count in a nutshell.
(5) Divide the running count by the number of decks remaining in the shoe and you have the true count. At a true count of +2 or higher you will beat the house on average on the next hand. Start discreetly ramping up your bets. If the true count is anything lower than +1 you should be at the min bet or heading towards it. At true counts approaching -4 it’s time to schedule something like a bathroom break until the next shuffle. A few hours of practice at this and you’ll be able to scan a whole full-table layout and come up with the true count in 2-3 seconds.
(6) Grats, your EV vs the house is now positive. Easy game.
I mention this because I was a card counter. Well, I was a nit who counted cards, and I was pretty good at it, because it was easy.
Before I learned to count, I started playing blackjack at Foxwoods, very soon after they opened their tables, just a few months after I turned 21. I’d previously visited their 18+ bingo hall and won heaps ($300+) so I was primed to try my luck in a real casino for the first time in my life.
On my first trip I won heaps ($500+), having no idea how to play or what I was doing.
Easy game, I thought. Why not learn just a little bit about it so the other players at the table will all stop yelling at me.
That's when I ran into Ken Uston's blackjack books, and there I found my inspiration in a man who was a legend in the blackjack community.
;
Cliffs: Ken Uston was a straight up bawss and I wanted to be like him. TLDR in the spoiler.
Spoiler
Ken Uston was a math prodigy, a Phi Beta Kappa at Yale, a Harvard MBA and vice president of the Pacific Stock Exchange, earning today's equivalent of around 300k a year at the latter place, until he tossed it all away to work for one of the earliest card counting teams. He was the Big Player on the team. Other players would signal him when the count was high at a table and Ken would strut over and drop down the big bets. It didn't take him long before he'd adopted his new Big Player image into his IRL lifestyle, changing from a buttoned-down stock broker into flamboyant high roller.
Ken Uston: Classic Nit
Ken Uston: Str8 Balla
At some point I found that he'd actually been an inspiration to me much earlier in my life, but I'd completely forgotten about him. After his blackjack team disbanded in 1979, when card counters lost their brief immunity from being barred in Atlantic City, Uston got into arcade video games. Around 1983 he got into Pac-Man and wrote a strategy book on the game that sold 750,000 copies in the US.
I'd forgotten that I'd bought Uston's Pac-Man book when I was 13. It was, in fact, the first book I'd bought with my own money.
Spoiler
And here's the first album I bought with my own money. Note that the original cover artwork did not actually include a partially-removed sticker depicting a star fronting a rainbow cluster surrounding the name 'Michael' set in a stylized font.
Ken Uston died in Paris in 1987 at age 52. The rumors have it that he drank and partied himself to death. A few conspiracy theories claimed that it was a contract hit, as he was in the process of suing the casinos in Nevada for barring him, and he'd been a general thorn in their side for more than a decade. His family denies all the rumors surrounding his death and claims it was from natural causes. I didn't care how he died. I wanted to live like he lived. And back then, at my age, dying at 52 seemed not much different than dying of old age.
So I quit my job, ran off and started my own blackjack team. No I didn't. I'm a nit, remember? Instead, I worked full time at a ****ty retail job and took a few college classes here and there, trying to put myself through school without taking out any loans. I played blackjack down at Foxwoods and later at the Mohegan Sun whenever my school and work schedule didn't eat up all my time, and when my ****box car felt like it was up for the one hour trip. I played and practiced enough to get very good at counting, but did not put in enough time for it to make me any real money. Any of that counting money went right into classes in any case.
That business lasted for a good chunk of the 90's. A great high school teacher had gotten me very interested in Psychology, and I wanted to become a college professor in that field, eventually. That would be the life, all right. That dream came to an end when a little white rat decided to throw down on me.
Cliffs: I quit school for a trivial reason not long before I was due to graduate. TLDR in the spoiler.
Spoiler
It hadn't taken me many courses to realize that most of psychological therapy is based solely on unscientific guesswork, and that good therapists are good because they're naturally talented and empathetic and in no way due to any courses they may have taken along the way.
There may be some science in the field, mainly in the double blind experiments made in the behavioral and cognitive/behavioral schools, and that's what I eventually gravitated towards. But even the vaunted behavioral schedules of reinforcement can be routinely defeated by human willpower and orneriness, otherwise everyone who spent more than half an hour on a slot machine or at the craps table would degen until they completely ran out of money or died.
So I clung to the idea of exploring the unique notion of human willpower by contrasting it with its absence in animals: like when monkeys choose to do lines of coke over eating food, until they starve to death.
So one day late in the game I was running a rat through a complex lever-pressing exercise in a Skinner box. Press the levers in the right order, get a pleasant chime all the time and a food pellet at random intervals. The rats in these experiments are kept to around 85% of their regular daily food intake, so they're hungry, and they're motivated to do everything right and get some food. Well, halfway through, things got complicated for my little rat and he literally squeaked out of frustration, then he just stopped and looked up at me through the open top of the Skinner box, and not taking his eyes off me, he slowly and triumphantly sat down, and he didn't move for 30 minutes. He was On Strike.
There is virtually nothing in the experimental setup to account for an animal being a dick. The experiment dictates that the rats are either going to press the levers faster or slower, but they're going to press the levers. I could have called it an 'artifact' and put it as an interesting footnote after the conclusion. But really the Little Guy had screwed the pooch on the entire data set by sitting down for that half hour.
I'll skip some of the boring details and just note that if I included this incident in the data I would have failed the experiment. The logical thing to do would have been to ignore that the incident had ever taken place, come back the next day and start over. Instead I drove home, grabbed my backpack and a shoebox, returned to the lab, stole Little Guy out of the lab, and took him home, turning my back on the experiment, the class and the school. I was done with Psychology forever.
A few days after I quit school I was at Mohegan, putting the finishing touches on a new insurance sidecount I'd added after finding it in one of Stanford Wong's early editions of Professional Blackjack
"I'm in my late 20's now, with no degree, a **** job and no real skills," I thought, as I correctly took insurance for the third time that night and idly watched the dealer turn over a blackjack.
"What am I going to do with my life?"
I gave my notice at work a few days later, then booked a one-way ticket to Las Vegas and two weeks at the Gold Spike hotel. Rates there were $25 a night. I hoped that would give me enough time to find a cheaper weekly or monthly getup somewhere. I was on the last month of my lease in my crappy apartment, so I wasn't going to lose out there. I wasn't expecting any security deposit back, though, as I'd put a few holes in the drywall a few years back due to Crazy Girlfriend Problems.
I didn't have many possessions; all of them fit easily in my parent's shed. And luckily a nice young couple I knew had met and fallen in love with the Little Guy (my pet rat from the last TLDR), and they agreed to take him in. The car was on its last legs and I didn't expect to get anything for it, so I asked my parents to junk it after I left and keep anything the junkyard would give them for it for themselves.
So I had about $1200 in cash, which was about half of what I wanted for a bare minimum roll, but it was something. I planned a few trips to Mohegan the week before I left to try to increase that substantially.
I showed up at Mohegan that last week with a plan and I stuck to it. I didn't tilt, not even once. I played well and got my money in good in good spots. I kept my session stop loss at $200 for the sole reason of keeping tilt to a minimum, and when I lost that $200 I packed it up and came back the next day...and the next day...and the next day. Two days after all that I boarded the plane to McCarran with less than $400 to my name.
I had a room paid for two weeks, and feeding myself there was not much of an immediate issue. The Gold Spike had a $.99 breakfast. The Boardwalk casino had a $3.99 midnight buffet, and the Sahara charged the same for their breakfast buffet. Westward Ho had a 3/4 lb hotdog for $1.99, and a 32-ounce (later reduced to 27 oz) $.99 margarita if you wanted to get your drink on. And there were a number of other food deals along those lines that I can't remember now.
As far as playing went, late 90's Las Vegas had quite a few good $2, $3 and $5 blackjack games, but I wasn't rolled for them any more. With less than $400 I was rolled for the $1 double deck at the Western Hotel & Bingo Parlor on Fremont and 9th Street.
;
The Western in a nutshell.
Almost everyone who visited the Fremont Street Experience for the first time back then found themselves wandering out past the canopy, drawn past the old lit-up neon 7-11 store (now gone, I believe?), and then found themselves stopping and saying, "holy **** I'm in a really bad neighborhood all of the sudden." The Western was right in the middle of that neighborhood.
I couldn't afford to be picky; their $1 game was the very best fit for my pathetic roll. AIWEC.
The second shift dealer crew were nearly all recent immigrants from Eritrea. I have no idea if they were recruited en masse or if one or two of them tried the place out, then sent word home to come and work in the paradise that is the Las Vegas downtown barrio.
Hmm...stay here or work at the Western? Seriously, here or the Western?
First off, all the Eritreans dealt way, way deep into the double deck. This detail is extremely important for counters, as the count becomes an exponentially better predictor of EV the further you penetrate through the shoe, especially in the last third of it. Most double deck games aren't dealt much past the first deck. The Eritreans universally dealt way past that, down to a sliver so small you could slice cheese with it. More than once, one of them ran out of cards mid hand, an insta-fireable offense in any other casino, but one that earned them only a gentle rebuke from the pitboss at the Western.
That pitboss was an All-American white kid, probably 22 or 23 years old. I can't remember his name for the life of me. Eric maybe? He looked like an Eric. He was backed up by a security system comprising a dozen or so sporadically-manned, decades-old black and white monitors, all set on a open dais near the storefront. That was the entirety of their 'eye in the sky'. The kid was a card counter himself, and not shy about telling everyone about it. Many, many months later, when he finally dropped the banhammer on me, he tried to play it off like he'd known all along that I was a counter, but had kept me around out of the goodness of his heart, but I seriously doubt that.
My cover was good for quite a long time. I pretended that I was one of those WorkForce type day laborers, showing up every afternoon to drink and degen away my day's paycheck. There were plenty of those guys playing there and I fit right in with them. I'd already tested my counting under the influence back home and found it to be accurate up to the point where I was seriously drunk.
So as soon as I showed up for the day I ordered a shot of Jack and a beer chaser, and followed up on that around once an hour, making sure to make the pit see me drinking whenever they looked over. I could also carry on a loud and friendly conversation with anyone and everyone at the table without losing the count. It was all very easy with practice.
Finally, the most important thing to counting, besides deck penetration, is the spread
Spoiler
You want to be betting the minimum when the count is bad and the maximum you can get away with when the count is good.That's the bet spread. The minimum bet was $1, or nothing if I could get out on a bathroom break, which I did as frequently as I could. Eventually I found I could get around $40 out for a max bet when the count was good. That would be $20 each on two spots, the Western being so chintzy that they made their dealers call out to the pit bosses whenever someone put a green $25 dollar chip in play, so that was to be avoided.
A 1-40 spread in blackjack is very, very good indeed. After 2 weeks I had around $800 on me and was ready to find a new place. My room at the Gold Spike was fine, but would've cost me $750 a month: too much for my still-nitty bankroll. I knew that I was running good at the tables, and that wouldn't last forever. Also, the Gold Spike and the Western were both owned by Jackie Gaughan, an old school Las Vegas dinosaur with purported old school mob ties, so I didn't want to be living in one place if I got in trouble at the other.
So I found a room in a tiny boarding house on 17th street, also in the downtown barrio--an area of Las Vegas which is quite large, actually. Price was $300 a month. The landlord was one of those Christian types who actually practiced Christianity, helping the disadvantaged and down-and-out whenever he could and not casting judgement on anyone.
The man didn't charge me a security deposit, or last month's rent. It was just $300 cash up front, and I would also pay my share of the electric bill starting the next month. Naturally the rest of the house was filled with crackheads, tweakers and last-chance losers, but I couldn't put on airs when I fit solidly into the third category myself. The other guys were actually very nice, like most people are, and I had little trouble with them.
In this fashion, I lasted for 3 more months.I couldn't bring myself to play for more than 30 hours a week. Blackjack is assembly line work. You assemble the correct hands and bets at your station according to a prescribed formula, and you do it over and over again for hours at a time. I hadn't thrown everything to the wind to labor 40+ hours a week on an assembly line.
As with poker, you never truly get into the long run in blackjack, that mythical place where you're 100% guaranteed to be ahead. But in my spot I could expect to get into the long-ish run--where I would have a somewhat reasonable expectation to be close to my EV--within around 25000 hands (quite a bit less than poker, which is nice). I hit that around the 3 month mark and crunched the numbers..
I was making almost exactly $7.00 an hour cash, which was a livable wage in Las Vegas at the turn of the century, especially with my nitty lifestyle. Unfortunately I was paying out $2.25 an hour in tips to the dealer and waitress, and $4.75 an hour was not a livable wage if you weren't willing to work more than 30 hours a week, and I wasn't. If I cut down on the tips I would hurt my image and risk bringing down the banhammer soon afterwards.
Well, maybe 25k hands wasn't enough. Maybe I was running bad. Well, maybe I was deluding myself. When I paid my rent and electric for the 4th month, I had $180 left to my name.
I walked up to the Western and punted it over a marathon session.
The next day, I slept in and spent most of the afternoon reading a Robert Jordan book, trying to lose myself in Rand al'Thor's mythical world, since my real deal hadn't turned out to be so hot.
That worked for me until the hunger kicked in. I had $1.03 and one coupon, left over from my Gold Spike stay, for one free meal at Jackie Gaughan's Plaza. I grabbed the dollar to tip the waitress. I think the tip might have been included in the coupon, but I didn't trust the Plaza to tip their waitresses.
The Plaza was less than a mile from 17th street. I made it on foot as far as the old bus stop on Stewart before I hit some kind of wall.
Suddenly walking became incredibly difficult, like in a nightmare when you try to run but can hardly move at more than a snails pace. To this day, I don't know exactly what it was that made me so weak...To be honest I'd been eating poorly and cheaply for the past week: just the Gold Spike breakfast on some days, alternating with the hot dogs at the Westward Ho. But I'd had plenty of Jack Daniels shots and beer chasers, and that's a lot Calories. I was young and in shape and chronically healthy, but I was on the verge of collapse right there on the sidewalk. Every step was an incredible ordeal, and I had blocks to go before I could secure the nourishment that might help. Really it takes weeks to die of malnutrition. Maybe my blood sugar was low or something.
I stopped there on the sidewalk and took a minute to survey my overall situation. And I found it to be absolutely hilarious. Something about it tickled my funny bone and I was wracked with uncontrollable bouts of laughter. I sat down on the sidewalk, put my head in my hands and I laughed for a very long time.
Now the next time you're in Las Vegas and you spot a young hobo shambling down the street at one-quarter-speed, his long hair getting in his eyes and his beard flowing off to the side in the breeze, and he seems to be uncontrollably laughing to himself, and you wonder what could possibly be going through his head, this post might at least provide you with one point of reference.
All right that's it. This post is WAAAAY TLDR. I'm going to wrap it up here. If you want moar, ask for it. If not, then I will be happy to fade once again into the background.
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Prequel - Part I: Beauty
"Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot."
-Mark Twain, Introductory Note to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
This is my 10,000th post on 2+2. The original post in this thread was my 1,000th. So I thought I'd write something to celebrate this new milestone.
So why a prequel, when most of them are pretty meh?
Spoiler
Well, I've already covered my adventures from 1998 to 2018 here in this thread, and my subsequent House of Blogs thread covers everything from 2018 until today.
I've run out of tales; so like Jack in Lost, I have to go back, back to when things were still screwed up as hell, but in a different way.
So we travel back to the early 1990s, when yearly in-state tuition at the University of Connecticut was just north of $3,000. I was signing up for classes every second or third semester, and then spending the intervening semester or two working and playing blackjack to build up funds for the next go-round. Sometimes I swallowed my pride and hit up my parents when I was short on tuition money. To be honest, I did that more often than I liked.
I made $9/hour as the assistant manager of the Store 24 convenience store on UCONN's idyllic Storrs campus. I supplemented that income to the tune of around $12/hour whenever I made the 45 minute trip to the Mohegan Sun or Foxwoods to count cards, back when they still offered $5 minimums for blackjack at a few tables.
I didn't switch to blackjack full time because back then I neither understood nor could stand the variance. Long downswings wiped out my savings and my confidence in the game. Also, I knew that the casinos could ban me from the blackjack tables at any time. The steady income of the convenience store was a security blanket, plus the store offered good heath insurance for only $40/month.
Spoiler
Store 24 was a small southern New England chain owned by Bob Gordon, father of Phish bassist Mike Gordon. We had a plaque in the office signed by all the guys from Phish, with the epigram of "What's in store for the Store 24 in Storrs?"
Mr. Gordon opened his first Store 24 as a head shop in Boston in the late 1960s, then over the next 25 years the chain devolved into being just standard convenience stores that happened to carry an excellent selection of rolling papers.
Bob visited my store once while I was on shift. He opened our store suggestion box, which contained only one unsigned note. I happened to know that the note was from Tara, a witty whipsmart left-wing bisexual Wiccan woman whom I was dating at the time.
With me, my manager, my district manager, and much of the crew present, Mr. Gordon read Tara's anonymous demand out loud.
Spoiler
"This goddamn store needs to sell more lesbian porn rags."
Tara was a lot of fun, and great to be with. I punted that relationship to hell by being an immature and emotionally unavailable dick. But that's a different tale.
This tale instead involves a future love interest, whom I met soon after the Suggestion Box Incident, when Trish—19 years old at the time and very pregnant—came into my store to buy a pack of cigarettes with two Eisenhower dollar coins and some small change.
That was Trish. I carded her, but I didn't give her any trouble for being pregnant and smoking. These were different times, and I was a pack-a-day guy myself who usually had a cigarette burning next to the register, right underneath the No Smoking sign. I got away with this because my manager was a four pack-a-day lady who took the sign as a suggestion, at best. Besides, I was struck by Trish's beauty.
People talk about pregnant women glowing; I was experiencing some sort of aura of angel light surfacing from and reflecting around Trish, some revelatory lighting magic cooked up by an otherworldly cinematographer. I could almost hear the hackneyed choir of angels chirping away in the background.
Trish was physically one of the most beautiful persons I've met in my life. She had some effortless Margot Robbie in her look, with a bit of a young Julia Roberts mixed in. Trish was not, however, a beautiful person on the inside. But neither was I, so who was I to judge?
I wouldn't see Trish again for another two years, during which time I would put the kibosh on my relationship with Tara, would attend only one disastrous semester at UCONN that would land me on academic probation, and would fall into a cycle of heavy drinking and drug use with my degenerate townie friends.
I also moved into a house 30 miles away, in South Windsor, Ct. Why so far away? I shared the space with two housemates and paid only $120/month plus like $30 in utilities. Even for back then, that was cheap as hell.
Spoiler
Like not even a third of a slot cup in Eisenhower dollars.
I hate to say it, but the rent was probably low because our house was in a Black neighborhood...a middle class, well-kept, safe, quiet and respectable Black neighborhood filled with tidy ranch houses, but a cheap option nevertheless.
The only time the cops were called into that neighborhood was on us, when one of our parties went a little too loud a little too late, with my housemate Ray blasting out the Kinks' Village Green Preservation Society album, of all things, at blistering volume on his top-of-the-line stereo system.
Could this song be any Whiter?
My housemate Ray was an insurance actuarial, one of the folks who use advanced probability and statistics to figure out when you and I are going to die. I'd met Ray in the dorms during my freshman year and we'd bonded.
Our dorm, Trumbull House, had a reputation for harboring a cult dedicated to Charles Manson, thanks in part to the boys on my floor taking out an advertisement in the UCONN Daily Campus for the "Manson Christmas Party! Our goal: one thousand! Bring your own farm implements!" and then throwing said party, and then getting damn close to a thousand visitors, before seeing the party broken up by the State Police.
The boys in our dorm were a close-knit group. I met my friend Will there as well, and we still hang out to this day, 35 years later.
There was a kernel of truth to the Manson cult rumors. I'll just say that I've read Charles Manson's reply to the Christmas card the Trumbull House boys sent him one holiday season.
Each sentence that Charlie wrote in his reply made some sense to me on its own, but when I tried to parse several of them together into a paragraph, I wasn't able to follow the narrative. I don't remember anything else about Charlie Manson's letter to the boys in my dorm. I think that even if I read it today, I still wouldn't remember it soon afterwards.
But those were my dorm days, and another tale. As I mentioned, I went on to live in a house with Ray and my other housemate Chad, who was Ray's co-worker at the insurance company. I don't remember what Chad did for work, but he wore a suit and tie and drove a nice Audi, so I suspect that his job was lucrative. Chad often talked about investing heavily in Microsoft, back in the early 90s. Hopefully he pulled the trigger on that and held on to it through its ups and downs.
Spoiler
Both of my housemates were high-achieving money and career oriented conservative types, and I was essentially the opposite: a heavy drinking, ample drugging college dropout, convenience store clerk and writer wannabe, but the three of us got along quite well in spite of our differences.
I was at a heavy drinking, ample drugging party thrown by my degenerate townie friends when I saw Trish—my beautiful, formerly pregnant Marlboro girl—for the second time. Her daughter was two years old by then, and away with either Trish's parents or with the girl's father's side of the family; she often parked her kid with one set of babysitters or the other.
Trish and her daughter's dad were not an item. Trish and her daughter were themselves an on-and-off item. Trish loved her daughter, but she also loved partying very, very hard.
Now here she was again, singing with the band at the Storrs townie party. She wasn't a member of the band per se, but she'd asked to sit in, and she'd gotten her way. Trish had an excellent voice, and I've always been a sucker for a female singer.
She and I didn't talk for long. I complimented her singing, and we established that we had a few friends and acquaintances in common, Storrs being a small town when the UCONN students were away on summer break. Part of me—likely the coked-up part—believed that Trish and I had found a spark, but the rest of me figured that she was just being polite.
I had no doubts that Trish had guys hitting on her all the time, and that she'd had a lot of practice being gracious about it. Still, I was smitten, and I left the party on a high note, in more ways than one.
A few days later, I found myself down on a low note, one that I'd played upon myself in the form of a terrible acid and beer hangover. My LSD hangovers could be quite manageable on their own. Good trips would give my mind a sort of power wash from the inside, leaving me feeling light and emotionally tidied-up the next day, assuming that I hadn't drank too much during the trip. But if I had, the acid hangovers didn't mix well with the booze hangovers; the lightness and clarity of the former only sharpened the alcohol withdrawal's dizziness and nausea and pain.
I could not call in sick for work that day, as I was filling in for the manager while she was on vacation. So I slunk into the office, barely bipedal, to find and then post the employee work schedule for the next week. Unfortunately, I could not do that, because on the day before, I had accidentally thrown away that paperwork, and the schedule in turn had been taken out to the dumpster.
Our Store 24 location had 8 or 9 employees, most of them part-timers, and we ran for 24 hours every day. There was no way I could reassemble that schedule from memory, even if I hadn't been so badly hungover.
After calling two employees and asking them when they thought they might be working that week, I deduced that not many convenience store workers commit their weekly schedules to memory. Many of them only know for sure when they are working next.
We had a computer in the office, but it was entirely for show. My manager was old-school and did everything on paper. There was nothing for it but for me to go out and search the dumpster for the schedule.
Thankfully, the trash had been picked up recently, but not too recently. Only 6 full trash bags sat in the hopper, albeit bags full of coffee grounds and food waste and several species of unspeakable things that members of the public had thrown into our bin on the outside of the store.
Spoiler
I took an empty bag out with me and proceeded to search through and transfer the waste out of each full trash bag. More than a half an hour later, at the bottom of the 6th and final bag, I found the schedule, soaking in a nightmare concoction of rancid garbage juice, but still barely legible.
And that's how Trish found me, sitting on the sandy parking lot asphalt with bags of trash strewn all around me, holding our work schedule at full length and flicking garbage juice off of it.
She drove up to me in a borrowed car and hailed me, and she didn't say a word about the trash or me sitting amongst the open bags. She asked me when it was that I got off work, and if I wanted to hang out with her later.
I think I remember being cool enough to say yes without sputtering or acting like a dumbass. And just like that, I had a date with a beautiful young woman, though I assumed that I would be joining her at a party or a get-together at her place.
When I showed up at Trish's apartment with a twelve pack of beer in tow, I found that I had assumed wrong. Trish was alone, and she already had a beer in hand. This was a good sign: a very attractive girl, possibly interested in me, who appeared to be a kindred alcohol enthusiast.
Three beers each and one hour later, a young man named Rob showed up to our tête-à-tête. Rob was Trish's on-again, off-again boyfriend. The couple were currently into their off-again stage, but no one had informed Rob of this state of affairs.
At least that's what I ascertained from the situation. It turned out to be a lot more complicated than that, but let's go with "off-again" for the time being. Trish and Rob had a big fight right in front of me that quickly devolved into a yelling match, and it was starting to look like Rob was going to hit her.
I had been a committed pacifist since high school. Before that—to my great and lasting shame—I had been a schoolyard bully, so bully posturing was still a part of my muscle memory, and I engaged in that, and it scared off Rob.
After Rob left, Trish and I put on a good buzz, and we ended up sleeping together that night, capping off an extremely high variance day for me.
In the morning, Trish asked me if I wanted to go in with her on some heroin.
Spoiler
I tanked for around 30 seconds, then I told her that I didn't do needles.
"No, no, no, no. We don't do needles. We only snort it. We can go in on a bag; it's like 30 bucks." she said.
"I don't know." I said. "That's pretty hardcore. I mean, it's heroin. It's not like..."
"It's not like you weren't doing lines with Pete in the bathroom last week." she countered. "You think I didn't know about that? And how come you didn't offer me any?"
"Wasn't my coke; and I didn't know you, hardly. Sorry."
"...Well?"
"Well...I guess hard drugs is hard drugs. And I'd hate to be a hypocrite. So let's go get us a bag of dope."
Spoiler
If you're familiar with this thread, you'll recognize that once again I've rambled on way to long with my tale, and I'll have to stop here and write a Part II at some point. When that's done, I'll post it here and drop a link to it in the [U]blog thread[/U].
Good cliffhanger Mr. Suited, and great writing as usual, hopefully we won't have to wait too long for the sequeliums...
in b4 Naloxone shot in the sternum! 
Or was that Adrenaline?
Good cliffhanger Mr. Suited, and great writing as usual, hopefully we won't have to wait too long for the sequeliums...
Thanks guys! ♥♥♥
Spoiler
The movie's from pre-Naloxone days, I believe, so Adrenaline cut with a dash of movie magic.
I found a better comparative resemblance to Trish from back in the day.
In case you're wondering why I sailed over a sea's worth of red flags.
The movie's from pre-Naloxone days, I believe, so Adrenaline cut with a dash of movie magic.
My ambulance days predate the movie, and we used it already back then (and Fentanyl btw; was used in ORs as part of the narcosis). Still I figure it was Adrenaline; with Naloxone there should be no advantage from injecting it directly into the heart.
I found a better comparative resemblance to Trish from back in the day.
I bet mmmKay would do H with her!
My eyes tracked a small white grain as it leaked out of my nose and bounced off of my great flowing beard, and from there it separated and dropped into the blue carpet like an iceberg calving from a glacier into the cold, cold sea.
This is the next great american novel
...back to reading ...
Meh, I mean, maybe it's just me being an idiot as usual but I think the concept of red flag has to develop in life first of all. I mean me and prolly you and many others at the age we're talking about here were pretty much the definition of a red flag so naturally we were hanging out and meeting and intimate or whatnot with other red flags. Sure there are enough peeps who are not like that at that age, but you prolly don't find too many of them in this forsaken part of the internet. Maybe in the Health and Fitness forum 😃
My ambulance days predate the movie, and we used it already back then (and Fentanyl btw; was used in ORs as part of the narcosis). Still I figure it was Adrenaline; with Naloxone there should be no advantage from injecting it directly into the heart.
Good on you, Morph! You were a much more useful young person than I ever was. I didn't know that Naloxone went back that far. It would've been nice if they'd made home kits available sooner.
The Adventures of TinTin in the Golden Triangle
Thanks for the kind words, No_Limit_Joker! I appreciate you.
Meh, I mean, maybe it's just me being an idiot as usual but I think the concept of red flag has to develop in life first of all. I mean me and prolly you and many others at the age we're talking about here were pretty much the definition of a red flag so naturally we were hanging out and meeting and intimate or whatnot with other red flags. Sure there are enough peeps who are not like that at that age, but you prolly don't find too many of them in this forsaken part of the internet. Maybe in the
I was definitely no prize as a young man, as we will see in Part II. I was also aware of the fact, and I eventually made some efforts to become a better person. I've made some progress on that front in the last 30 years, at a three steps forward and two steps back kind of pace.
What a great post. You’re really an excellent writer, I was hooked to this story.
That is [U]correct[/U].
Thanks, Da_Nit! Your encouragement has helped me to keep writing for these past few years, and writing in general has been good for my mental health.
All right. Here's one that's not so terribly tl:dr
Part V: Shipping the Nickels:
As the weeks and months passed and my meth addiction strengthened, my social life gradually deteriorated. Tom, my old boss and best friend in town, moved away to LA, and I couldn't be bothered to keep in touch any longer with our mutual friends, all of whom were great people who had taken me into their circle, and all of whom I let slip away after Tom left.
Instead, to fill up the time, I picked up a video poker ad
Some of the best written words ever put down on the interwebs.
All right. Settle down now. I still have one more part to write and I don't want to go into it with a big head and get all pretentious and ****.
All right. Settle down now. I still have one more part to write and I don't want to go into it with a big head and get all pretentious and ****.
Well there is an incredible amount of crap written on the interwebz.
It’s like these stories were written for me. Combine with the perfect flow and just good writing and it’s addicting.
Has kind of a Bukowski vibe but with a little more gambling then Bukowski at the race track and a Vegas back drop.
I’ve read some stories from P Moss the guy that owns the Double Down Saloon and Frank’s Tiki bar in Vegas. It’s entertaining but I think you’re a better writer and the stories feel more genuine.
this needs to be a short story/book
it's inspiring me to write my own tbh
Well there is an incredible amount of crap written on the interwebz.
It’s like these stories were written for me. Combine with the perfect flow and just good writing and it’s addicting.
Has kind of a Bukowski vibe but with a little more gambling then Bukowski at the race track and a Vegas back drop.
I’ve read some stories from P Moss the guy that owns the Double Down Saloon and Frank’s Tiki bar in Vegas. It’s entertaining but I think you’re a better writer and the stories feel more genuin
The intertwined memes are legendary as well
