Genre: Fiction
Setting: Gym
Object: A deck of cards
52 weeks, 52 stories inspired by NYC Midnight
Warning: story does contain a plethora of curse words. Gird your loins.
The absolute travesty in life is that there are too many bad ways to lose money. And nowadays, with these devils we shepherd around in our pockets. Fuggedaboutit. Why, time is, a man can lose a proper 100k while he takes his morning shit, and that’s on the legal stuff. The stock market, short selling, crypto, DraftKings. The list goes on forever. Faceless punks who can’t look you in the eyes and say it’s a fair game. Fuck off.
And in each scam, someone’s always got the next great fix. Reads like a list of YouTube videos: The ONE strategy you need to bust the house, TEN SURE FIRE STATS TO DOMINATE ANY FANTASY LEAUGE, Top ten stocks to buy today to earn mad dollarz. The only people laughing to the bank are monetizing the clicks, driving up them subscriber numbers, the goddamn influencer scum of the earth.
Nah, that ain’t for me, and it ain’t for my clientele. See, underneath all the glitz and glam of the professional and amateur stuff, past any type of gambling which requires declaring earnings to the government, acting all prim and proper like gambling isn’t just some two-bit hustle, lies the fairest games. Sure, you got your Dog & Pony boys, card sharks, pool hustlers, and hell, even grannies always prowling for that underground Bingo hookup. Dollar, Dollar bills y’all.
And that’s where I come in. Run the only legitimate bare-knuckle boxing match in the city. Don’t think that every shady mafioso, mobster, and thug isn’t out to get a piece of the action. See, most people won’t place big bets on fights. Someone goes down in the wrong round, under the point spread, outside the realm of the big bets. Always. Everyone, or at least everyone who plays enough to call it a profession, knows not to waste time on fights. They play the tracks, the dice, and the cards, not the fights. Not anywhere but my gym.
Pike’s Gymnasium, down on third across from the check cashing store and the sandwich place that’ll give you runs. You’ve driven past it plenty of times, wouldn’t give it a second look. You’d expect it to have three mortgages, a deadbeat owner, or act as a money laundering front. It ain’t any of those things, but you sit there drinking your ten-dollar latte and think that. Helps keep the riffraff like you away. Sure, we host proper classes. I got regulars. Old farts who come in to dance around the ring and say they still got it. Young guns who want to impress girls at weekend bars. Keep the lights on and stops people asking questions.
On weekdays, it’s a run-down piece of shit gym. But on the weekends, in the backroom where only members are allowed, past the false wall Johnny Two Toes erected in the half-space we liberated from the shop next door, legends are born and die in the span of a single night. Fortunes are lost and won and lost again. So much money exchanges hands a blacklight would make a hundred dollar bill look like a crime scene.
Now how, you wonder, does a customer know the fights are legit? That some boxer ain’t been tampered with, messed around in the head, going to take a dive? I call it: the randomizer.
Come Friday night at nine, texts go out to the list of the night’s pugilists (yeah, I got all them fancy words), and members decide if they want that action. Doesn’t matter to me; we always got a packed crowd. Turn people away kinda crowds. Now comes the random part. We pair fighters with the deck. That’s right. Good ol’ fashion deck of cards. Each fighter gets assigned cards at random, and then they’re dealt out round by round, so we don’t even know who’s fighting next. And I don’t let anyone touch the deck. No fast fingers or card tricks. We use a standard casino dealer. And if anyone knows about not being fucked with, it’s casino boys.
Now, how can you get odds out of that? That’s where the real genius comes in. See you sitting there gawking at my my velour tracksuit, thinking I’m some sort of shmuck. Some classless lowlife. Well, you go ahead and assume that. See, I got algorithms. More than just a fancy word for tech geeks that’d shit themselves if they stepped in my gym. Put the fighters through my system and get odds immediately. And it never fails. Keeps the fights fair, keeps betting on the line, and everyone has a fair chance at hitting the jackpot if they use the info and their own god given intuition.
Now I see you squirming, sweat building on your brow worried about siting next to a criminal. Your social status draining with each sip of that coffee. But don’t worry my friend, I ain’t worried about the Feds. For one good reason: the vigorish.
The what, you’re asking? The vigorish, my friend. Upscale white-collar thugs call it a transaction fee, usually a percentage of the bet, and that’s where you get in trouble. That’s where the Feds and Government get squarely and throw around ugly words like illegal and tax avoidance. So no, I let all these fine people come to my gym, watch the deal, place a bet, and win or lose for free. Tell me the app or casino doing that when you’re not playing the house. I’m listening. That is exactly my point, always someone got their hand out looking to cash in. But not me. My mom always said that if you can look a man in the eye at the end of the day, you didn’t screw him over.
I get it. You see my gold chain and my Gucci sunglasses and say this guy is full of shit. He’s taking a cut. He’s rigging the fights. Well, you can shut your fat face. You don’t get to judge me. Only God and my mother can do that. No, my clientele tips me. Like that box at the bottom of a restaurant recipe. Gratuity not included, mothafucker. They win big, or they lose, and almost everyone throws in for the pleasure of being in a seat. But more than that, it’s the sense of calm they get knowing that for these three hours, they have a shot. Someone’s giving them something close to that scam they call the American Dream.
Why? Because the absolute travesty in life is that there are too many bad ways to lose money