Today would have been my father’s birthday had he not passed away a few years ago. Here is the very brief retelling of a conversation he and I had once about 10 years ago.
My dad was a talkative guy unless there was something he didn’t want you to know about, which was often. Several years ago I went home for a visit and found something new at the house that I just had to ask him about even though I knew that I wasn’t going to get much in the way of a straight answer.
“Hey dad, where did you get this bird?”
“I found it on the road.”
“What road?”
“The expressway, it was just sitting there.”
“In the cage? That’s convenient. Does it talk?”
“Yeah, it say’s stop asking questions.”
I thought for a moment and then foolishly continued:
“Dad, are you smuggling rare birds?”
“That bird isn’t rare, look there’s one right there. How rare can it be if I have one?”
“I guess you have a point.”
“You done asking questions?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. You hungry? I’ll make you something.”
I never found out where that bird came from.
The day before we were supposed to get married, Nina and I packed up everything we would need for the next few days and started driving from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. What we needed consisted of five cases of wine, some clean clothes, my $89 suit, her $119 dress and wedding rings we had bought online. After we filled the gas tank we had $60 to our names. We had a lot of things to be happy about that day but having money was not one of them.
We were broke but I wasn’t overly concerned about that. We had enough gas to get where we were going, our families were on the way to Las Vegas, our room was paid for and I had a paycheck coming my way at the end of the week. All I had to do was not do anything dumb and show up to the wedding chapel on time; if I did that everything would be fine.
The idea of being fine and getting married seemed impossible six months earlier; for starters I had yet to meet Nina. I was still in the process of rebuilding my life after a long period of unhappiness, depression, physical illness, poor decision-making and financial difficulties. For a long time it felt like my life was in an irreversible downward spiral but over time I made some changes and things began to turn around.
While making my way back to the life I wanted to live Nina and I met and I knew that she was the one for me almost immediately. After spending so many years making the wrong choices I knew the right choice when I saw it. My only problem was that I couldn’t keep the fact that I knew we had stumbled into something good to myself.
On our second date I told her that I thought we should get married. Sure this was exactly the kind of ridiculously impulsive decision-making that had nearly ruined my life but this was the smart kind of impulsive. I wasn’t making a desperate decision in an attempt to cover up some void in my life. I was telling someone that my life was never better than when she was in it and I didn’t want her to get away.
Nina was smart enough to turn down my second date wedding proposal but a month later she asked me if that proposal was still on the table; it was. Five months later we were actually going through with it.
In the time between announcing our engagement and driving to Vegas to get married we took care of a few important things: We started living together and I met her parents. Meeting my parents was going to have to wait. I wasn’t hiding my family from her, it was just too difficult to get my parents to Los Angeles as a result my future wife would be meeting my parents the night before our wedding. If she was at all nervous about this, she didn’t let on.
The plan once we got to Vegas was as follows: We’d get in around 2:00 PM, check in and then head downtown to get our marriage license. At 7 PM the families would meet for dinner, then after dinner was wide open. We arrived on time and checked in. While waiting for a car to take us downtown our plans changed. As we stood on the curb a cab pulled up and my family stepped out. Despite being divorced for 25 years my parents had traveled together along with two of my sisters and one of my brothers. Nina was ready to meet my family, she just hadn’t planned on doing it at a taxi stand and my family probably felt the same way but it worked out fine. Everyone was too surprised to be nervous and we exchanged hugs and introductions as their bags were being unloaded onto the curb.
Just before Nina and I got into the car that would drive us downtown my father puled us aside and handed me an envelope saying:
“It’s not much but I wanted to give this to you guys before the wedding.”
I thanked him, put the envelope in my pocket and got in the car to get my marriage license. In the car I opened the envelope. Inside was $1,200. My family is not a rich or even financially comfortable. The cost of airfare and hotels was not insignificant so I was happy that they had made it. The gift was an unexpected surprise. My father, knowing that we spent all that we had to get to our wedding day, wanted to make sure we had fun. While we weren’t married yet I handed half of the money to Nina and put the rest away. I now had some spending money and less than 24 hours until I was to get married. I felt pretty great.
The process of getting a marriage license in Nevada is quick and easy. Within an hour from the moment we ran into my family, Nina and I were back in the hotel getting ready for dinner and talking about what the rest of the day would hold. Nina was curious as to what I had in mind for my last night as a single guy. I hadn’t made any plans for that night. I didn’t see getting married as the end of anything. I wasn’t being sentenced to marriage; I was pretty excited about it. I just wanted to get through the night without any problems. I was too anxious about the fact that my family was about to meet Nina’s family to think about what would come next but I wasn’t worried about it because I was in Las Vegas and everything in my life was going great; something would come up.
As we made our way down to dinner with our families we were nervous but things went very well. Everyone got along just fine especially our dads who hit it off pretty quickly and remained inseparable for the rest of the trip. After dinner we broke off into smaller groups to have drinks, gamble or just hang out. Nina and I hung out with our brothers and sisters for a while but since everyone had just spent most of the day traveling it was mutually agreed that we should call it an early night before the big day tomorrow. We’ll everyone agreed but me, I decided that I was going to stay up for a while. After walking Nina back to our hotel room I promised Nina I wouldn’t get in trouble and headed out to see what Las Vegas could do for me on the night before my wedding.
It was probably around 11:00 PM when I started making my way back down to the casino floor. While there were endless possibilities for a guy looking to do dumb things in the city I wasn’t going to go far. I’ve never been a strip club kind of guy and I was alone so the stereotypical bachelor party activity was out. I considered tracking down Nina’s brother but decided that I’d rather play poker. Since I had gotten some unexpected cash earlier I figured I could gamble a little.
As far as activities go poker was literally the safest bet for me; back then I was playing regularly and was good enough to hold my own in a poker room. I sat down to play but the cards weren’t coming and the room was kind of lifeless. It was the lack of activity in the room that was bothering me. I was about to take the biggest step of my life and I wanted some excitement so I decided to go look for it. Shortly after 12:30 AM I cashed out from the poker room and found I was actually up a few dollars.
Outside of the poker room I looked at my options: With a little over $600 in my pocket I could do a lot of things but I didn’t want to spend all of my money. I found a $10 blackjack table, ordered a drink started to play. I felt great. The last six months of my life felt like the greatest winning streak I had ever been on. I had gone from leading and aimless and unhappy life to feeling focused and as happy as I had ever been in my life. Sure I was still broke but Nina and I would find a way to make it work. For tonight I had cash in my pocket and a bright future ahead of me. I traded $100 for chips and placed a bet. It was almost 1:00 AM on my wedding day and everything was great.
Twenty minutes later I had gotten a free drink but I was out $100; another way of looking at this situation was that I paid $100 for a Jack and Coke. Blackjack moves fast and it moves even faster when, like me, you don’t really know how to play. Sure I understood some of the game but not enough to maximize my chances of winning. My lack of knowledge may have had no impact on the hands I just lost but it certainly didn’t help me any. I assumed however that this was just an unlucky bump in the road. I still had over $500 and a good feeling so I bought in for another hundred and ordered another free drink.
The second hundred dollars didn’t go as fast but I had no better luck with it. At one point I even went on a little winning streak but it didn’t last. At this point the time was approaching 2:00 AM, even in Vegas very little good ever happens after this time of night. If I were smart that night I would have packed it up and gone to bed but I didn’t because I foolishly held out hope that the universe cared that my 7 year losing streak had finally been turned around. How could the casino not understand that I was finally a winner? I put down another $100 and lost it.
Things had taken a bad turn but I still had half of my money left and I was getting married the following afternoon. It was then that I decided to stop gambling…at that blackjack table. I found a new table that felt lucky to me, sat down, and put all of the money I had left down on the table. Something in my mind had snapped and I was making a bad situation worse.
Here’s the thing about $600. It’s not a lot of money, unless it’s all of the money you have in the world. When it’s all the money you have in the world the smart thing to do is to stick it in your pocket and consider yourself lucky to have it. When you’re getting married to someone you met less than six months earlier and you only have $600 to your name you would be smart to try and prove to your future spouse that you posses common sense or at the very least you stick to the things you are good at when you’re gambling. These are things I wish I had considered before I traded all of the money I had left for chips and compounded my losses by increasing my bets. I was a lousy player at $10 per hand so at $50 a hand I was 5 times as bad.
I hung in there at the table for a little bit but despite several opportunities to put the money I had left in my pocket I chased my losses until I was broke. It was now approaching 3:00 AM and I was holding a losing combination of broke and stupid. I took my free drink and sulked away unsure of what I was going to do.
While I was losing Nina texted me to ask how it was going and I of course said that it was going fine. At the time it was true, as I hadn’t really gone off the rails at that point but in the hour since things went very badly and it was my fault. I found a quiet spot to try to compose myself and finish my drink before heading up to my room.
When I got back to the room and sat down at the desk. Nina sat up in the bed and immediately knew something was wrong when I continued to sit there quietly.
“How did it go?” She asked.
“I lost.”
“That’s okay, you didn’t lose all of it.”
“Umm”
“You didn’t.”
“I did.”
“You are the dumbest person in the world. That was all the money we had.”
She was right, at that moment I felt like the dumbest person alive. She knew my past history of bad decisions but believed that those days were behind me. Now, hours before we were supposed to be married I had done something to make her wonder if she was making a mistake. I quietly asked:
“Do you still want to marry me?”
“Yes, but I can’t believe you did this. Go to sleep.”
The next day Nina had a full day of pre-wedding activities planed and I was just trying to stay out of trouble. Luckily I was broke so my options were limited. I wandered the hotel, hung around and had lunch with a friend who had come in for the wedding and mostly worried if Nina was going to reconsider this whole thing. Six months earlier we hadn’t met yet and now we were about to get married. I wondered if she thought this was all crazy, if like a gambler, I was just doubling down because I didn’t know when to quit. I could understand why someone would feel this way but I was certain that we could make this work.
With two hours to go until I was supposed to get married I put on my suit and waited in front of the chapel, where I hoped that her answer would still be yes.
I wrote this on the eve of Election Day 2008:
On a winter night in 1981 my mother was ironing my bed like she did whenever it was cold. Basement apartments on Long Island can get cold but not always cold enough to justify the luxury of turning on the heat. When it was time for bed my mother would bundle us up in our PJ’s and run the iron over the bedsheets and blankets until it was warm enough for us to fall asleep. When I asked when we could turn on the heat, my mother said we could when turn it on things were better but that didn’t happen for a while. Until things got better the iron was the best we could do; it was small way to make things easier to bear.
For the last 8 years I feel like many of us here in America have been taking small steps to make things more bearable but we’re been waiting waiting for a chance to make a lasting change. I hope that when I wake up on Wednesday we’re one giant step closer to where we want to be. For now I feel like ironing my bed to make it through the last cold nights.
In the last four years we have made steps, large and small, towards making the world better more compassionate place. It hasn’t been a smooth ride and our President has made some choices I don’t like, but he’s also done a lot of positive things; more than enough to make me proud to support him.
Four years later I still believe that President Obama is the best choice to keep it from getting very cold in America.
When I talk about my relationship with my late father I often say that the only common ground we had when I was a kid was the New York Mets and The New York Jets but this isn’t entirely true. We had some other things in common. For instance, we shared a passion for the late night classic TV lineup on New York’s WPIX that aired throughout the 80’s featuring The Odd Couple and The Honeymooners. Through the years we saw each episode of both shows many times and on the occasions when we watched them together we would fill in our favorite bits of dialog. Like this bit from The Honeymooners episode “The Deciding Vote.”
Ralph Kramden: (Reading from a credit application referral form) “In your opinion, is the applicant of good character?”
(Ralph pauses and says aloud as he writes his answer)
“The applicant is a bum.”
My father and I also liked to vote. One of the first things I did after turning 18 was register to vote. I graduated high school the same week as my 18th birthday but I was more excited about filling out my voter registration form than I was about getting my diploma.
Through the summer and fall of 1992 my father and I followed the campaign, watched the debates and on Election Day we went to the polls together. He let me get in line first and after showing my ID I found my name, right below his on the list of registered voters. I signed my name and cast my ballot.
My father and I also voted together in local elections over the next few years but by the time the 1996 election came around I had moved out of my father’s house. Since I hadn’t updated my voter registration I had to drive back to my old neighborhood to vote.
For the first time since I was a registered voter I went up to the polling place alone. I looked around for my father but I didn’t see him. After waiting in line I showed my ID and found my name on the voter roll, right below where my father had signed his name when he voted earlier in the day. When I went to sign my name I saw that there was already something written on the line where my signature belonged. Written in my father’s neat handwriting beneath my name were the words: “Is a Bum”
You're an excellent writer.
Thank you kind anonymous stranger. This is not only a nice thing to say, it’s a gentle nudge that I need to get this thing restarted soon. I am working on doing this. Thank you for reading the story up to this point.
