The Fiddler in the Subway Read online

  “You’re a gambler,” I said.

  “I need a cigarette,” he said.

  We stopped for cigarettes. He took a long drag and smiled. It was as though he’d been waiting for this release for weeks.

  “Look, I’m not Mister Rogers, okay?”

  Eric definitely has cash-flow problems. They stem from the fact that, for the last several years, the Great Zucchini has been in debt to bookies.

  “I remember the first bet I ever made,” he said. “I went to buy a voice-mail system for my phone, and was talking sports with the guy at the desk, and he asked if I bet with anybody. I made my first bet that day.”

  What followed, he said, was years of gambling, sometimes thousands of dollars a week, invariably more money than he could afford. He once went to Las Vegas on a Super Bowl Sunday and lost $100 before the game even began. He’d bet on the coin toss. Then he lost some more. Once, he went to Atlantic City, won more than $2,400, and then proceeded to lose it all, down to his last penny. He didn’t have money for tolls on the way home and had to beg the tollbooth attendants for mercy.

  When the phone rings, it’s generally a mom or dad. But he always checks the number warily before answering, because sometimes it’s a creditor. Court records show he has a $1,500 income-tax lien against him in Anne Arundel County, a debt he said he didn’t even know about until I told him.

  Anyway, he said, the worst is behind him. He decided some time ago that it’s a no-win deal with sports bookies. “You get in a hole, and you can never get out,” he said. He has stopped using bookies.

  Good, I said.

  Recently, he said, he’s been doing most of his betting in offshore sports casinos, over the phone.

  Eric believes that his gambling helped end the best romantic relationship he ever had—one that might have led to marriage. This was a beautiful, funny, intelligent woman who, he said, chose him over a far more illustrious suitor, pro football quarterback Gus Frerotte. But in the end, by ignoring her needs, Eric chose gambling over her. “Gambling almost becomes your mistress,” he said. “It grabs hold of your soul.”

  He knows he has a problem, he said, and he is planning on getting professional help. Lately, though, he said he’s been making some progress on his own. “I’ve slowed down a lot,” he said. “Let me tell you what I did on Sunday. I used to lay down two or three hundred on four or five different games. Well, I only bet a hundred dollars the whole day, which is a huge step up.”

  A few minutes passed. We talked about women, and how both of us love them. We talked about addictions, and how both of us have had them. And then, to cement our newfound openness, Eric proposed that, in a week or so, he and I take a road trip. To Atlantic City.

  ERIC’S PERSONAL FRIENDSHIPS are strong and enduring. His closest friends are his oldest friends. Nights out are filled with drinking, bragging, and testosterone-laced one-upmanship. With a reporter present on two different Friday nights, it all turned into good-natured savagery, a pile-on, with Eric at the bottom of the pile.

  Mike Conte, a seventh-grade math teacher, asked me if I’d seen Eric’s apartment yet. Funny you mention it, I said, giving Eric a glance, but no.

  “Listen to this,” Mike said. “The guy gets an apartment, a big apartment, and all he has to put in it is a couch and a coffee table, right? That’s all he’s got in the whole place, right? So, then he gets some more money, and what do you think he buys next?”

  Mike paused for dramatic effect.

  “A bed, you think? No. An air hockey table.”

  Eric raised a hand and called out to the bartender. “Could I have a little dignity and self-esteem in a glass, please?”

  On these nights, Eric tends to stick to Miller Lite. He has parties the next morning, and though he has missed, forgotten, and mislaid many other things in his life, he says he’s never reneged on a date with a roomful of expectant four-year-olds.

  K. B. Bae, a financial adviser for Legg Mason who has been Eric’s friend since childhood, told of the time the two of them were at a strip club, and Eric was taken with a certain dancer, who was both pretty and personable: “She seems to be taking a liking to him, talking to him between dances, and he’s tipping like an idiot, not understanding what’s going on. The next day, he says to me, ‘Let’s go back to that place.’ Same thing happens. The third day, Eric reaches into his pocket, and he’s got this glam photo of himself, and on the back he’s written this really deep stuff, ‘Is this chance, fate or love?’ that sort of thing. And she’s dancing naked onstage, right? And he goes up and tips her with the picture. She reads the back of it, and after that, she’s nowhere to be found, dude!”

  Everyone laughed.

  “WHEN HE GOES into a house, his attitude is ‘You’re lucky to have me.’ When I go into a house, my attitude is ‘I’m happy to have the job.’”

  This is Broccoli the Clown, né Jake Stern, who at fifty-seven has been a children’s entertainer in the Washington area for twenty-seven years. He is one of the best. It was only recently that Jake saw a show by the Great Zucchini, when he met Eric to sell him some of his old magic props. Broccoli the Clown has seen a great many characters in his career, but nothing prepared him for the disheveled package of strut and gumption that is the Great Zucchini.

  “At first, I was pissed. I was sitting there kicking myself. I have full clown gear and expensive equipment, and he’s got this change bag with a broken handle and a bedsheet with jelly stains on it, and he’s making more money than I am.”

  After a while, Broccoli the Clown realized he was focusing on the wrong thing. It wasn’t about the props or the costumes.

  “He’s got an incredible rapport with the children. I’ve known guys in this business who are stiff as a board. To them, it’s a job, and they’re bitter. They hate what they do, and they can’t relate to the children. This guy relates amazingly to kids. He understands and enjoys them.”

  The Great Zucchini doesn’t know how to juggle. But he does a bit where he claims to be a great juggler, and then fails dreadfully, the balls bouncing every which way. The kids crack up. Jake Stern, on the other hand, teaches juggling. But after seeing Eric, he began to modify his act. Now he sometimes lets the balls bonk him in the head.

  “If you want to call me the poor man’s Great Zucchini,” says Jake, “I don’t mind. I really don’t. Listen, I look into his eyes, and he’s a good guy. I look into his eyes, and there’s almost…”

  Broccoli the Clown hesitates.

  “. . . there’s something almost innocent there.”

  ON THE TURNPIKE en route to Atlantic City, I was doing 80 mph when I whipped past a state trooper. He followed me into the next rest stop, lights flashing.

  As we waited for the trooper to check my license, Eric said quietly, “You know, if I had been driving, I would have been in real trouble.”

  I smiled, relieved. “I know,” I said. “Your court date is November twenty-first.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I ran your police records,” I said.

  For a moment, there was dead silence. Then: “So you didn’t buy that I just really like to talk to cabdrivers, huh?”

  The cop may have been 20 feet behind us, but I suspect he wondered why two guys he’d just pulled over for speeding were busting a gut laughing.

  THE GREAT ZUCCHINI hadn’t been driving because his license was suspended for nonpayment of parking tickets—well over $2,000 in tickets that he’d simply tossed in the glove box. After the license suspension, he still drove for a while, furtively. (“Do you have any idea how careful a driver you become when you’re on a suspended license?”) Twice he was stopped by the police. The second cop checked his record, found a bench warrant for his arrest, and hauled him in, despite Eric’s desperate last-ditch plea to perform a free party for the guy’s kid. It was in the police station, with his car impounded, that the Great Zucchini decided maybe he really ought to start taking cabs.

  Eric’s misadventures with traffic tickets ar
e symptomatic of larger problems involving his inability to conduct life as a reasonably mature, moderately organized, marginally integrated member of polite society.

  Take his apartment… please.

  I did get to see it, finally. On the morning of the day I was to arrive, Eric awoke to discover he had no electricity. So he quickly had to get cash and run to the utility company. He knew exactly what to do because it had happened many times before. That’s his tickler system: When the lights go out, it’s time to pay the bill.

  As I entered the apartment, to the left was a spare bedroom. It was empty, except for a single broken chair. Down the hall was the living room, with that couch and that air hockey table, which was covered with junk, clothes, cigarette butts, and coins. (“You want to play? I can clean it off.”) Coins and junk also littered the floor, along with two or three industrial-size Hefty bags filled with Eric’s soiled clothing he’d brought back from a summer camp that he’d helped staff, three months earlier. The closets were completely empty. There were no clean clothes.

  The kitchen was almost tidy, due to lack of use. There was a fancy knife set and a top-of-the-line microwave, neither of which, Eric said, has ever been deployed. There was also a gleaming, never-used chrome blender and a high-end Cuisinart coffeemaker that was put into play exactly once, when a woman who slept over wanted a cuppa in the morning. Most of these appliances were purchased in a frenzy of optimism when Eric moved in almost a year ago. (“You know how when you get a new place, it’s all exciting, and you say, Mmm, I’m gonna get me a blender and make smoothies!”)

  The cupboards were bare. The only edible thing I saw was a 76-ounce box of raisin bran, the size of a small suitcase.

  The bedroom was similar to the living room, down to the Hefty bags, except there was actually something in the closet. Not clothing, though. A shoebox.

  It doesn’t belong on the closet floor, Eric knows that. He was going to bring it to the French Quarter of New Orleans, but that’s out now. He’s thinking maybe the bluffs of Big Sur. He just hasn’t gotten around to it. It’s been three years now, so another few weeks or months or years won’t really matter one way or another. It holds his father’s ashes.

  ERIC DOESN’T KNOW why he is the way he is. He knows he’s perfectly ridiculous, and that his disability—or whatever it is—is out of control. We were about an hour outside Atlantic City, discussing his life.

  “I make more than a hundred thousand dollars a year,” he said, “and I literally have no idea where any of it goes.” He is simply lacking, he said, whatever mechanism most people have for dealing with the mundanities of life. His personal finances resemble his apartment: total chaos. He keeps no records. He knows he’s not entirely square with the Internal Revenue Service but hasn’t a clue how much he owes. He’s taking steps to negotiate a payment plan.

  But it’s not just about money, I said.

  No, no, he agreed. It’s not just about money. It’s about a fundamental inability to cope.

  “Some people promise themselves that maybe one day they’ll sky-dive, to prove to themselves they can do it,” he said. “I’ll promise myself that maybe one day I’ll clean my house.”

  The devolution of the Great Zucchini’s act over the last few years is not because his life has been spiraling any further out of control than it’s ever been. It’s just that he started his business with some discipline, but when it became clear his career wouldn’t suffer because of inattention to detail, inattention to detail seamlessly followed.

  I’ve known other men who approach Eric’s level of dysfunction, including myself. I’m saved by the fact that I’ve been able to hang on to a competent wife. That doesn’t seem to be an immediate option for Eric. He’s frightened of commitment, he says, because he is terrified of making the wrong choice. The divorce of his parents, and divorces he’s seen among his friends and his clients, make him particularly scared. It’s odd, because he’s not really afraid of much else. He’s not even particularly scared of death.

  Why not?

  “Life is a crapshoot,” he said. When you understand and accept that, he said, it eliminates fear. Plus, there’s something else.

  “When I was seven years old,” he said, “I was walking in the street with my grandmother, and I got kissed on the cheek by an angel.”

  I laughed. He did not. He meant it. He said he felt the kiss, knew instantly what it was, and believes that this angel has been watching over his life ever since. He has survived serious car accidents, he said, and as a child recovered from two broken arms that doctors said, by all rights, should have turned into rag doll appendages. He believes he is protected. It’s a healthy attitude for living, perhaps, but maybe not for gambling.

  Our plan for this trip was to stay a few hours in Atlantic City and go home. Eric had told me he’d bring $200 in cash and see what happened. But he wound up bringing $500. If things were going good, he said, he just might gamble into the night.

  An overnight? But you didn’t even bring a toothbrush or a change of clothes, I said.

  “Won’t need ’em,” he said, if things go good.

  Half an hour away, he phoned a friend and left a message: “Gettin’ near Atlantic City. Gonna roll some bones.”

  He saw me looking at him.

  “Okay, I’m seriously geeking out,” he said, laughing.

  Five minutes later, he made another call, and left another message.

  “Gonna be rollin’ some bones, baby.”

  WE ARE ROLLING bones.

  Because he likes the company of people, Eric’s favorite game is craps. Craps is not a solitary pursuit, like blackjack or slots. You are throwing dice, and other people around the table are betting on your throws. If you are hot, you can gain a lot of close friends.

  At the moment, Eric is white-hot, and the table is going rip-roaring crazy.

  Laying down bets of $10 and $20, Eric is up a couple of hundred. Others at the table are hitchhiking on his luck, including a large woman with a large tumbler of wine. Right before every roll of the dice, for luck, she hollers the same thing at the top of her lungs, a corruption of a Kanye West lyric. “I ain’t messin’ with no gold digger,” she bellows, “but I ain’t messin’ with no broke nigga!” Appalled, the pit boss implores her to stop. When she refuses, he backs off. At a casino, you don’t monkey with mojo.

  With each cast of the dice, the large woman’s sister, who is even larger, is standing behind Eric, pounding his shoulders, yelling, “Lady Luck! Lady Luck!”

  Eric is up to $350 and climbing.

  The women keep yelling their inane mantras, Eric keeps rolling, everyone keeps winning. The noise becomes deafening. People from other tables migrate over to get part of the action.

  We are in Bally’s, which is pretty indistinguishable from any other Atlantic City casino—which is to say, it is an illusion. The rooms are brocaded and chandeliered, the croupiers tuxedoed, the waitresses sequined, all to establish an atmosphere of genteel, aristocratic gaming, but it’s all in service of banal desperation. The patrons tend toward the taut and the hollow-eyed, the pale and the pit-stained, dressed less for Monte Carlo than for Monty’s Steak ’n’ Ribs. Eric is in a Maryland Terps polo shirt, and the large ladies are in drugstore pink, and most everyone, as always, will go home a loser.

  But while you’re winning, anything seems possible. Eric is at the moment a heroic character, a romantic lead, a suave Bogart or Bond, rolling sixes and nines and never a losing seven, and the cheering continues. The classy illusion holds right up until the moment that the bellowing woman falls silent, sways, hiccups, and vomits all over the table.

  IT’S NOW JUST after midnight. We’d arrived at seven, and Eric shows no sign of tiring. He’s lost some money at blackjack but is making it back on a craps table, again. Beside him is a sweet, funny, attractive woman named Mollie, in a low-cut black blouse and white pants with a big belt. Mollie’s maybe thirty, a businesswoman from Texas. She’d arrived with friends whom she seems to have jetti
soned.

  Eric is hot.

  “You want to see a five?” He teases the table, which has bet heavily on five. “Is five what you want, a five?” He rolls a five. The table erupts in cheers.

  “I’m a magician,” he says to Mollie. “I don’t know if you knew that.”

  “It’s showing,” she says. She is leaning against the table, hipshot, dangling a sandal, watching his every move.

  Eric is generous with his winnings, every once in a while tossing a few chips to the croupier, tipping waitresses magnanimously. He has switched from rum-and-Cokes to coffee, to keep alert, but he still tips $5 or more. That’s a signature of his: At coffee shops, Eric will sometimes leave $20 on a $5 tab. He says he does it to make the day of someone who is not accustomed to generosity.

  By 1:30 A.M., he’s up more than $600, and still rolling strong. “I’m going to call it a night,” Mollie says. She shakes Eric’s hand and leaves for her room, his business card in her pocket. Then she comes back, looks at the table and Eric. She thought she might have forgotten something, but she guessed not. She leaves again, for good.

  “This is the hottest roll I’ve been on all night,” Eric tells me. “When it’s over, they are definitely going to give me an ovation.”

  A few minutes later he finally craps out. There is some polite applause, and someone else grabs the dice.

  I tell him: “You could have hooked up with Mollie.”

  “What? No way,” he says.

  “Eric, at one point there, she was giving you a back rub.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “You had her.”

  “You think, really?”

  “Yeah.”

  He smiles sheepishly, goes back to the table.

  I went to bed. I found Eric again at 7 a.m. at another casino. He hadn’t slept. He was up $1,100 but wasn’t ready to leave.

  The next three hours were ugly. The craps tables had cooled off (“The felt was too old, the table was hard”), and he had a couple of bad outings with steely-eyed dealers at the blackjack tables. (“Those women were cruel.”) Eric finally quit at 10:30 a.m. His all-nighter had left him with a profit of $200, roughly his fee for twenty minutes of children’s party entertainment. He wasn’t disappointed. Life is a crapshoot, after all.