The Casino

I 've written a series of stories for another message board call Stories From The Road. I'm new here and it was cool to see that you guys have designated a forum just for me I've got about 20 of these little stories that I've written over the last couple of years. I'm hoping that one day I'll have enough of them together to make a little book. I'll post one of these here and there as the muse strikes me. I hope you like them and I would appreciate any feedback.

I discovered blackjack in a Reno, Nevada truck stop. I had just delivered a load at a construction site on a Friday and I was going to be down for the weekend because there wasn’t a freight broker near me who had a decent paying load. This was back when I owned my own truck. I had also just settled up for the week and I had $1500 on my Comdata debit card. That’s a lot of dough to a trucker. It represented about 3000 miles of trucking.

I parked my truck in the truck stop lot and went in to get a shower and a bite to eat. On my way in I had to walk past the blackjack tables to get to the shower. I stopped at one of the tables and watched the truckers play for a minute. I didn’t know much about blackjack. I’d never played it before in a casino. I noticed that the tables had a $2 minimum bet. I thought I might try it out later on.

After the shower and the meal I took a seat at one of the blackjack tables and bought $20 worth of chips. I told the other guys at the table that I had never played before and asked for their help. So I learned blackjack. I played just like the experienced players told me to, but my $20 bill was gone pretty quick. I plunked another 20 on the table and I was off to the races. My heartbeat went up a little. The palms of my hands got damp. That was Friday night.

By Sunday I had gone through my $1500 and was starting to take cash advances off of my credit card. That, my friends, is known as a bad streak to gamblers. Others call it addiction. I’d lost it all $2 at a time, too. I might have bet a $5 chip here and there, but mostly it was just $2 hands.

When Monday rolled around I was $2000 down from when I parked the truck on Friday. My whole week’s pay was gone, plus a good chunk of next week’s. I got on the phone and started checking for loads. I ended up taking a partial load over to Salt Lake City, Utah that barely covered my operating expenses. I needed to get the hell out of Nevada.

Outside of Reno I was pushing the truck as fast as it would go: 79 mph. The speed limit was 70 and I went right by a cop with the hammer down. He pulled me over and checked my log book. I had one violation in my log book as well as the speeding violation. The cop let me go with a warning. That was the only luck that I had my first time gambling.