Chemistry of Fire Page 3

  “What’s that?” I asked as we walked away from the transaction. Don handed it to me. My heart leapt when I saw the value. “One chip?” I asked. “A thousand dollars?”

  “That’s it,” said Don, a lawyer from Chicago, who had been playing the stock market since the age of fifteen. As we crossed the casino, he flipped the chip like a quarter and mused, “You know, I trade hundreds of thousands of dollars in stocks. I move large sums of money around, and often the money is at just as much risk as it would be in this place. But my little five-dollar bet at the blackjack table gives me more adrenaline than forty-five hundred shares of Ford. Explain that.”

  Jan and Don selected a table and sat down. I stood behind them to watch. He flipped the yellow chip one last time and then pushed it across the green felt to the dealer, and I could feel my heart reach out to the chip: Good-bye, little yellow chip. Be safe. We could have had a pacemaker installed for that price.

  The dealer, an attractive woman in her thirties, made change without looking up. There is no point in trying to impress a dealer in Las Vegas. They’ve seen it all. If you stood on your head and $1,000 bills flew out of your butt, they’d simply convert them to chips and deal another hand. Don pushed $500 over to his wife, Jan, and they ponied up a red chip each. The dealer dealt. I stayed to see her bust and pay Jan and Don and then deal again, setting the cards on the table with a soft and reassuring pop.

  I crossed through whirling lights, insistent bells, and the clatter of coins as the slots paid off into metal buckets. I passed a cordoned-off area where a well-dressed woman fed $500 tokens into a machine and pulled the lever with wan disinterest and lost and pulled again and lost again. I crossed the immense sports book with a wall of televisions and comfortable theater seating. I pressed on to find a craps table that had my name on it.

  I selected a five-dollar table where a number of people were playing with the concentration of cats watching a beetle. Nearly everyone was losing. Craps gurus say to watch before you play, to look for “a good table.” My math wizard at Bell Labs, Lorraine, said that the tide of probability runs out, but it runs back in. Mathematicians call that “standard deviation.” If you flip a coin, it might come up heads ten times in a row. That’s standard deviation. But the longer you keep flipping, the closer your score will come to approximating a fifty-fifty split of heads and tails. It’s those excursions of standard deviation that make it possible to win at games of chance, as long as you’re willing to quit. And as long as you’re betting at correct odds. In the case of flipping a fair coin, correct odds works something like this: If the coin comes up heads, you pay me one dollar. If it comes up tails, I pay you one dollar. You can reverse tails and heads and make the payout any amount. But the point is that we will wind up even if we play for long enough. In a casino, if the coin comes up tails, you pay the house a dollar. If it comes up heads, the house pays you ninety cents (or some other amount that is less than a dollar). That’s why the casino always wins unless you quit while you’re on one of the excursions in your favor. And that’s why the casino wants you to keep playing.

  I walked around the pit looking for someone to ask about my misgivings. I had played craps in casinos for money only three or four times in my life. But I had read about it. Now I sought out one last authority before putting my money down: the pit boss. She was an attractive woman of forty with a good suit and a sense of humor, and she told me to bet five dollars on the pass line (the minimum bet) and ten on the odds. That way the dealer could always pay me nearly the correct odds. It didn’t matter what number came up. This is a critical concept: receiving correct odds on any bet was the only way to reduce the house advantage. Correct odds with a coin is simple, because there are only two sides to the coin and you’re betting on an event in which either outcome is equally likely. A die in the game of craps has six sides. And the game uses two dice. So odds are more complicated, but the casino allows you to bet on those odds and is willing to pay out correctly on those odds, even while cheating you on the original bet of five dollars on the pass line. I know: I was confused, too, at first. But following the advice given to me by the pit boss is the best bargain in the house.

  The pit boss wished me luck and said, “We want you to win.” It’s true. Since the casino does not pay correct odds, it makes money even when we win. Since experts call the house advantage “the most important concept in gambling,” it’s sad that most people aren’t familiar with it. It’s like playing tennis without knowing that the ball has to go over, not under, the net.

  I remember standing with Jan one night, watching a man at the craps table. He had a long stack of pale purple chips in the wooden rack before him. The purple chips are worth $500 each. He was a studious-looking fellow with steel spectacles and a tweedy coat and scuffed tan sued lace-up shoes. He looked like a college professor in his forties. Thinning hair. Didn’t say a word. After each decision, he’d play the pass line with one pale purple chip, and when a point was rolled, he’d back it with double odds—two purple chips, or $1,000, for a total wager of $1,500. We watched him carefully. He won and won, but when the tide of standard deviation turned and he began to lose, he picked up his chips and gave them to the dealer. “Color me,” he said, and the dealer gave him chips in denominations of $5,000, which the man dumped into the big sagging pockets of his jacket as he walked away.

  After my conversation with the pit boss, I returned to the table and dropped a $100 bill on the felt with a deep sense of the picayune nature of that denomination. This effect of relativity, I understood, was part of the strategy of the casino: Where else was a $1,000 going to seem ordinary, $100 seem trifling? And where else would their loss seem less than catastrophic? Everything in the casino was bigger than we were, and as we grew, we participated in that giddy bigness while escaping the sense of loss as we shrank back to our normal size once more. And we always shrink back unless we run screaming into the street to board the first taxi to the airport. The Alice-in-Wonderland effect.

  Steve Wynn founded the Mirage. He’s principally responsible for turning Las Vegas into a family vacation destination. Once he was going over the take for a single day at his Mirage, and the number in his hand was $3.6 million, higher than expected. You’d think that if games of chance are ruled by probability, Steve Wynn could predict the day’s take rather accurately. Not so. Standard deviation rules (gamblers call it luck). The reason for the abnormally large take was a single baccarat player, who had won $1.5 million the night before during a standard deviation event in his favor. He had unwisely stayed at the table, losing a total of $7 million during the course of the evening. He got big. But then he got small again. Very small. Welcome to Wonderland.

  The boxman shoved my trifling bill down a rabbit hole, and it was gone like a gum wrapper. The nearest dealer gave me twenty red chips. I love the way they handle the chips in that ritual transformation. There is a prestidigitation in the way a good dealer manipulates chips and in his coordination with the boxman in making money vanish and gaming chips appear. The fingers have such a sure grip on the smooth clay chips, which click and chatter like castanets as he stacks them up in exact accounts of change and wins and losses. I picked them up. The chips were cool and smooth and heavy. They smelled like new earth. They had a character so real, like phonograph records from the 1920s, it seemed they would break if I dropped them. A delightful attachment to them, a trembling wave of emotion, grew and swelled within me. Paradoxically, they were both money and not money. An experiment was done with apes in which they were asked to choose between two piles of candy, one large, one small. Whichever pile they chose was given to their mates. But the apes could not stop themselves from taking the larger pile of candy, even as they learned that selecting the large pile meant losing it. But when researchers gave the apes numerical symbols (i.e., chips) to represent the two amounts, the apes were able to overcome their survival instinct and make the correct decision, to take the smaller pile in order to receive the larger amount of candy in th
e end. Money is how we obtain food and clothing and shelter, our channel of survival on this earth. We are the apes in this experiment, and these chips are our symbolic candy. For most of us, it would be a stretch to play these games with real money. But the chips are also part of our ritual of magical thinking. They are played in a spiritual test of who we are.

  I laid the chips in the wooden tray before me. Jan came up and slipped her arm in mine. “What’s the word?” she said.

  “You and Don winning?” I asked.

  “A little. I want to learn craps,” she said. “And I want to teach you roulette.” Jan was a tall and fit and blond California goddess who played a lot of tennis and rode horses and drove a little red convertible that Don had bought her for her birthday. Jan had read just about everything that had ever been printed with ink, and I recall that in our youth the men fell before her as if they’d been hit by a stand of grapeshot. She was writing a big book on Los Alamos National Laboratory for Simon & Schuster. And in the late sixties and early seventies, we had been as close as two people can be.

  A young woman in a red blazer was coming out, and the croupier was absently pushing six dice around with his stick, waiting for everyone to place bets. “Coming out” means throwing the dice for the first time in a round of play. The rules for the first throw of the dice are different from those for the subsequent throws. I dropped a red chip on the pass line, explaining to Jan as I went: “I’m going play the same way that that tweedy fellow with the pale purple chips played.”

  “God, I hope not,” she said.

  “I’m going to bet one one-hundredth of what he bet.”

  The croupier pushed the dice toward the woman in red and said, “Coming out.” Fighter pilots and croupiers both have an economy of words that is almost codelike in its frugality. The woman picked up two of the six dice that were offered to her, the croupier returned the rest to the boxman, and the woman threw a seven.

  “Seven a winner, winner seven,” the croupier said and set a red chip beside mine in payment of my bet.

  “That’s easy,” Jan said. “I can do that.”

  “Just do what I do,” I said.

  It happened fast, like the first time I rolled an airplane upside down. I didn’t have time to worry. I felt the adrenaline, then it was over. Weird. It was only $5, so where did this sense of tremendous peril come from? You cannot buy $5 worth of any drug that will do that. Secondly, it was not even my $5. I was a journalist on assignment. I had a gambling budget of $500 of their money. I could lose $500 and still make a profit, because I get paid to write this stuff. So: Where was that hard rush coming from?

  I picked up the $5 chip I’d won as the dealer paid off other bets. I left my original bet in place for the next roll. Jan placed her bet next to mine. I felt the pressure rising in my chest as the woman in red shot again. She raised her fist in the air and shook the dice in a decidedly Freudian gesture and then fired them off across the felt, which under the hot lights was as green as a hayfield at sunrise. Six.

  “Now what?” Jan asked, sounding disappointed that she didn’t get another red chip.

  “She’ll roll until the dice come up six again, in which case we win, or until she gets a seven, in which case we lose.” I showed her how to put two more red chips behind the pass line for the all-important odds bet of ten dollars. This was the only bet in the house that would be paid at correct odds. It is interesting, therefore, that it is the only bet in craps that is not depicted on the layout.

  New gamblers were drawn from the crowd by the woman in the red blazer, who rolled and rolled and did not lose. This is the meaning of craps: to have a beautiful woman in red roll and roll and never lose. The distant clamor of the casino fell away in a curtain of smoke, and the hard spotlight on the green felt seemed to define the only world we knew. I felt my heart race. My face grew cool with apprehension. Jan and I were winning. My heart soared like a hawk. With a sudden clarity, I saw how much sense this game made. I understood it. The dealer paid us twelve dollars against our ten-dollar odds bets, and we removed all except the single red chip for our next pass-line bet. I felt myself growing. I had thrown my test on the waters of fate, and the answer came back about who I was: I was a winner. My fingers worked the stack of chips in the beautifully constructed wooden tray before me.

  The table was a lovely boat of handmade wood and Simonis number-two woolen felt, imprinted with the legends of the ancient game. I felt myself falling into the table. Yes. Jan and I would stay here forever. This would be our new home. I loved this table, this beautiful pea-green boat and plenty of money and the shiny red dice with their sharp and gleaming edges, honed to within one ten-thousandth of an inch, flying through the air and hitting the foam baffle at the far end. I loved the shooter, her blond hair flying, her well-cut blazer, and I imagined her in her other life, in her office back east (or west), commanding executive power. I loved the soothing murmur of the croupier as he commented on the play, cataloging the items being bought and sold in a constant stream of transactions like the barter on the floor of a commodities exchange, and I especially loved the clickety-clack as the dealer paid off bets and the boxman stacked the winnings.

  The boxman sat hoarding his great piles of chips like a demon king, a knotted-up dwarf with horrible afflictions of the skin that had healed years before, leaving him with a waxlike countenance of ferocious unfriendliness and the grim certitude born of naked statistical destiny. His beady eyes peered out from the prison of his colorless flesh, and as he absently sucked on the stump of a cigar, a blue curl of smoke traced the outline of his bent head and filtered through his thinning hair.

  I was struck by the pile of chips before him. There were the stacks of black hundreds, green twenty-fives, and red fives, dozens in each stack. There were tall pillars of purple $500 chips (called whites because they were once white). There were a couple of stacks of yellow $1,000 chips. And on top of all those stacks, scattered about in lonely profusion, were “chocolate” chips worth $5,000 each. I found the concept staggering and asked the dealer, “Do people really bet with those?”

  He looked at me with contempt. “Yes, they do, sir,” said a gravelly voice from a cave. “All the time.”

  The boxman’s fat and nervous fingers, adorned with heavy rings, were guarding more than $500,000 at this low-end craps table. And everywhere hived within the thunderous drone of the casino were tables just like this one and, on each one, a pile as big or bigger. I felt myself growing faint at the concept of the amount of money that was gathered here—a million at least between us and the next table, and there were tables as far as the eye could see. We were in a veritable mint, and not an armed guard in sight. The stuff had a gravity all its own, a power and pull, like some superelement so strong that it warped space and pulled light down into it.

  Lost in my reverie, I heard the croupier say, “Seven out” as he raked our chips away.

  “Can’t win ’em all,” Jan said, and the shooter’s turn passed to her. She was suddenly alarmed. “I’ve never shot before,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said, “but you’ve trekked across a nuclear test site and hiked the Australian outback. You lived in Ecuador, and you can ride a horse backwards. Are you telling me you can’t throw those two little dice across this table?”

  “You’re right,” she said, shaking the dice, as an enormous gentleman stepped up to the opposite end of the table clicking a handful of hundred-dollar chips thoughtfully and scowled down at the green felt. Jan threw the dice as hard as she could, and they bounced off his chest, and one of them vanished into the big pockets of his workout suit. His regal countenance gathered in concentration as he digested the insult that had befallen him. Jan reared back a little. Then the man burst into a big grin, retrieved the lost die from his pocket, and tossed it back onto the table. The dice were given to Jan again.

  “Hit the other end of the table,” I said. And she did.

  She rolled seven, and we took five each and left one down. She rolle
d nine. We added ten for our odds. She won again. We were in harmony with the rolling tide of probability, a mystical union such as surfers must feel entering the long blue luminescence of the tubular wave world.

  Jan rolled and rolled. We won and won. She was blond and tall and graceful, and she smiled at me as she threw. “I like this game,” she said. She was hot. She was red hot. This was the meaning of craps.

  She asked the dealer, “How long have you seen a shooter go without losing?”

  “More than an hour,” he said with no expression.

  Indeed, there are legendary stories about “the unfinished hand,” supposedly the longest run in craps history, which took place between 2:00 and 3:30 a.m. in February 1947, at the 86 Club in Miami. A car dealer from Detroit held the dice for an hour and a half without crapping out, and the players at the table collectively won $300,000 before the casino managers declared the bank broke and shut the place down for the night. Not very standard but a standard deviation nevertheless.

  When we pulled Don away from the table, he was up, too. With the self-satisfied smugness of winners, we went to an Italian restaurant called Spago. We were gracious. The world fell before our footsteps. “Isn’t this a great place to be the week before Christmas?” Jan said.

  Some days I’d drive out in the desert and look back at Las Vegas and wonder what it was, this cracked crystal city swimming in a pool of its own yellow protoplasmic smoke, like the nucleus of some alien amoeba that had fallen from the stars and landed and lodged in the parabolic reach of the Mormon Mountains.

  As I stood out in the vast and consuming beauty of the desert, among the upthrust rock formations, under a huge white setting moon that floated on a barge of clouds with its dipolar opposite, the rising sun, so bright I couldn’t see in that direction, a cold wind issued off the last edges of the night. No cars came past out on this lonely highway, which grew faint as a thread and vanished in the shimmering distance. Like the shifting adumbral dreams of night being cast out, the mountains awakened from those shadows and the steeply rising land as the bowl of the land filled with luminescent mist. An inert snake lay cold on a rock, awaiting the first feeble rays. Moon dissolved in cloud. A mislaid flock of Canada geese crossed the desert sun.