11-18-12
I don't believe that I woke up one day and aspired to be a bad guy. No one wants to be that guy. That said, when asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, "Police Officer" never fell out of my mouth/ When the neighborhood boys played Cops & Robbers, I was always the one knocking off the bank.
The first sports wager I booked was in the 6th grade. I remember it like yesterday. My hooligan friends and I sat in the school library serving our detention sentence. An administrator came up with the brilliant idea of using the school library as the detention cell house; if those meat head kids are around books, maybe osmosis of information will fix them.
I used my time to read the paper. My grandfather ironed into me that only a dummy doesn't know what's going on in the world around them, My second in command Louie (Louie's lunch sacks came stuffed with Twinkies), Rocco (Rocco's eyes were cue balls that looked like they would fall out of his skinny head and roll down the street at any moment), and Broke (his real name was Rich, but since that didn't describe him or anyone we knew, we changed his name and he didn't mind) were serving our sentence together.
My first stop was the sports section. We were in the midst of basketball season and I paid close scrutiny to how my team, The Denver Nuggets, were doing at all times. Any moves that were made around the league, I knew about. Rocco read the sections next and we'd discuss later. Louie sat at the table and focussed on eating his smuggled Hostess contraband.
"I wish I knew how this point spread stuff worked", Rocco said, pointing to the back of the paper. Louie looked up, chocolate on his fingers and face.
"You really don't know?" I asked.
In all this conversations we had before, amazingly this was the first time we spoke about gambling.
I can't find the intersection in my life before when I learned the mechanics of sports wagering, but I knew my uncle operated as a back alley bookie forever. It was as familiar to me as spaghetti, Hot Wheels cars, and marbles (which due to my knobby knuckles I was awful at).
A natural progression took hold and by Valentine's Day my pockets were jingling with lunch money.
It opened my eyes to a lot of what was going on around me. I thought my uncle brought me to all of those football, basketball, and hockey games because he was a big sports fan. No matter where we were, people knew him, came up to him, and were always slipping him envelopes.
When you are Italian, the envelope is how everything is done. Birthday gifts were envelopes with a twenty dollar bill or two inside were handed to you with a "put this away" remark. The priest got an envelope every Sunday at mass. The guy who dropped off the peppers got an envelope, and even the paperboy got an envelope to settle up from time to time.
It only took a couple of birthdays to learn what "put that away" meant. It was to keep you from getting taxed. In my house my mom was the tax man. n birthdays, she'd come up to me at the end of the night and ask "what did you get, let me see". She would follow up with "I better hold onto this for you". A couple of times when I made inquiries about the money, I was told things like:
"You want to go to college don't you?"
"You think the tooth fairy puts food on the table?"
and my least favorite, "You need me to find something for you to do?" This was akin to being sent to the Nike factory in China for the weekend.
My uncle didn't have a normal job like most people either. He ran a concrete and statuary business out of "the shop". He was there at weird times and he didn't do much when he was there other than answer the phone and meet people who would just "stop by" for a minute.
I spent a lot of time at the shop growing up. Much of that time served as on-the-job training for the malevolent career path I would choose.