J.W. Yablonsky                                                                          

Bankroll

“I have warned many times about the guaranteed dangers of betting with your heart instead of your head…”
- Hunter S. Thompson

“But suppose I’d lost heart then? What if I hadn’t dared to risk?”
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Gambler

August 15th - $74,362

Later on, when reflecting on how they met and everything that came after, she concluded that the only reason she’d spoken to him at all was that he was the only person in the bar even close to her age. She was on a girls beach weekend with the other women in her family, still the baby in her mid-twenties, stuck shuttling her aunts and cousins back and forth from the beach to the hotel to the same four restaurants. He was alone and unbothered by it, free as a bird. His hair was bushy and sun-kissed. He was shaving maybe every three days, about mid-cycle at that point. He wore a matched shirt and pants set patterned in green glass liquor bottles, Soju, he’d later tell her. He was talking to the laziest bartender on shift about sports, in that way men do. A silent arms race of escalating trivia and insider terminology.

It was a simple matter to get her to leave with him. He wasn’t in the Hampton Inn across the street, where her family was staying. It would be a walk, further down the peninsula to a rather sprawling, rather upscale condominium complex. She knew the one. She’d gone past it in her teetotaler aunt’s rented minivan en route to restaurant number three. She didn’t want to go back to the two queen beds and see that same aunt in her nightgown, cream on her face, snoring in defiance of her assertion that she’d never once snored in her life. She hated how she felt about her own blood but couldn't deny it. The sexless snowbird frumpiness of her family was like a miasma. A preview of what biology and cruel, cruel time held in store for her. She wanted a little adventure and her traveling party found adventure an inconvenience. So she sent a text to the girls trip group message and left with him.

They walked back on the beach at high tide, holding their shoes, feeling the seafoam fizzle on their feet, watching the crabs scuttle away. She figured he must be a local. He had trivia for seemingly every oceanfront property. Used to be a pretty nice house there before the last hurricane. This condo building used to be orange before the sun faded it pink. There’s a good bar here. This is the spot we used to stay in when I was a kid.

“So hey look, uh, I’m grateful for the company if that’s all you’re after but I don’t want any confusion here because-”

Then she kissed him. When she opened her eyes again he had this look of incredulity, a horrible feeling pierced her gut. Was he mocking her?

“Well all right then.” He smiled, gap-toothed “Glad we cleared that up.” He’d later tell her he just couldn’t believe his own luck.

The condo was a lot nicer than she was expecting. High ceilings, leather sofas, granite countertops. Too big for just one occupant. It was his family’s. She left her sundress in a heap on the tile and followed him to bed. It all began beautifully. His was the tautest male body she’d seen since she’d arrived in Florida, starkly contrasting the swollen, hairy, sunburnt retirees musking all up and down the beach. Mummified or reptilian, poured into soggy swim trunks, Miller Lite in hand. She caught a bad feeling, though. Lost interest all at once. She couldn’t say why. It might have been the beer on his breath, the day-old sunscreen collected in his crevices, maybe the absence of a condom and his laxity in seeking one out.

“Wait. Wait. Please, just. I’m sorry. Could we stop?”

“Oh shit, sorry. Condom? Right? I’m clean, but good thinking.”

“No, I just- I’m sorry but I don’t think I want to.”

She hated herself at that. Hated the feeling of her own indecision. It’s the hell of being twenty two, three, four, five, grown and told to take hold of the world before it slips away from you. So god damn sure of what you want but by the time it comes you’ve lost interest. Being told you’re spoiled but really you’re just impulsive. Neither condition is “good” strictly speaking but confusing the two ascribes a moral failing to impulsivity where none exists.

In any case he simply sat up and said “Well all right. Want a glass of water or something?”

She was fine, thanks.

“Alright, fine. You mind sleeping in the guest room? All my stuff is in the bathroom here.”

“You’re not mad?”

“I’m not mad. Children get mad. I’m frustrated. But what am I meant to do? Scream into your vagina until you want me? Make you walk home alone in a town you don’t know? I’d rather just go rub one out and try my luck again in the morning. I don’t chase losses as a rule.”

She didn’t yet know what he meant by that, “chasing losses.” Her drowsiness overtook the shame at her indecision and she drifted off in gritty, sandy sheets in a room furnished for a child that had long since outgrown it. She suspected the child in question was in the master bedroom, sawing logs.

When she rose in the morning, he was already up, drinking cheap coffee and typing away on a laptop. With the evening’s haze dispelled the romance of his all-too-grand living situation could fall away. It was unmistakably a twenty-something single man’s apartment, with the requisite detritus. She couldn’t decide if he was more disciplined in keeping house than the median example of the species or if he just had more space to clutter up than most.

He asked if she’d like to join him for breakfast. She obliged. He chose not to walk, he had a small electric scooter in the garage downstairs.

“You don’t mind riding on the back, do you?”

“No.”

They went to a small cafe nestled into the corner-pocket of a brick strip mall, the sort that seemingly come into being on their own all throughout central Florida with no input on the part of any thinking, feeling human being. He had waffles and bacon and another cup of coffee. She had two eggs over easy with whole wheat toast and a glass of orange juice. The meal cost maybe fifteen dollars altogether. The waiter came, recognized him. More friendly words between men, the sort she’d always feel alienated by. He gave the waiter a fifty dollar bill and they walked out.

“You must have tipped that guy 200%”

“So what? He needs it more than me.”

“Were you trying to impress me?”

“You never gave me the sense that you’re the sort of person that’s impressed by money. So no. He’s a good waiter. It’s a good cafe. He needs the money more than me. What does it matter?”

“What do you do?” She felt that the very question leaving her lips represented failure of some sort of invisible test.

He sighed, as if he’d had this conversation before and it hadn’t gone well. Without a word he took out his phone, tapped away on it for just north of thirty seconds, then he turned to show her the screen. It displayed a username, an email address, and an account balance. Sixty-nine thousand three hundred and sixty two US dollars.

She didn’t understand “What- what is this?”

“It’s my FanBet account. You asked what I do. This is what I do. I’m a professional gambler.”

“There’s almost seventy-thousand dollars on here.”

“Oh I know. I’ve been having a few mediocre months.”

Summer was the off-season and it was almost over. He’d get busy as the leaves started to fall and the weather turned gloomy and damp. The arrival of football season was like an earthquake, with basketball and hockey coming right behind as aftershocks. Golf, soccer, and mixed-martial arts were theoretically year-round affairs but generally served as a side-dish to the meat and potatoes of the Big Four American TV sports, or three of them anyway. He’d hit peak season as football wound down and the championship pictures came more sharply into focus. The results of those title games would set the tenor of the spring; whether the incoming basketball and hockey playoffs would be a slow, stoic advance across no-mans-land to recoup losses no matter the cost or a mad ecstatic orgy of profit and victory. Slamming house money on the table, wild-eyed, real defeat never even a possibility. Then the summer would come and he’d slink off in search of powdery white beaches and beers that cost what they ought to cost. He’d catch up on his reading, sleep late, squat in his parents’ condo, take little trips whenever they rented it out from under him to doughy midwesterners shuttling their spawn off to the theme parks in Orlando. Two weeks before they met he was in New Orleans, a month before that he’d gone up to Minneapolis to escape the heat and visit a fellow traveler, supposedly the greatest Canadian Football handicapper in the country. He’d had long weekends in the Bahamas, Key West, Puerto Rico, and Aruba, where he’d sunburned his feet and vowed never to return.

He subsidized his lifestyle partially via charging for his picks, netting him a respectable passive income in the neighborhood of $1500 monthly from premium subscriptions at $5 a pop. But this, in his own words, was just for beer money. The real money, the twenties and fifties he’d hand out so freely to waiters, bartenders, and hotel housekeepers, was acquired via a yearly ritual of cash withdrawal. A pilgrimage to pay homage at the temple of luck, victory, and gold. His bankroll, the money he played with, sat at just under $90k at the conclusion of last year’s busy season. That annoyed him. He’d resolved to make it into six figures and gotten so damn close. If his hockey positions had played out a bit better, if those frauds in Boston hadn’t choked it all away to an equally fugazi Montreal squad, he’d have gotten over $100k comfortably. He grumbled and groaned but still dropped his account balance down to $70k even before leaving for Florida. The sunshine state had no legal sports gambling, so there was no temptation. This was to avoid betting on baseball, which he seemed to fear like the devil.

He told her a story the night before she flew home. The first year he’d started gambling he’d cleared $15k just betting on the college basketball tournament. He walked around his parents home in Pennsylvania feeling like he had a superpower, he conjured money from thin air just by watching sports and putting some numbers in a spreadsheet. Baseball season rolled around and within a month he’d pissed it all away. He’d acquired an almost mortal fear of America’s pastime, convinced the sportsbooks ran the major leagues through some shadowy conspiracy. She never really had an opinion on that, though later on she’d theorize that this trauma was what gave him his flippant attitude about money. Nobody, at least nobody normal, could ever keep hold of it in his view. So the smart thing to do was spend it, ideally on one’s own pleasure and at one’s own whim. Burning fortunes quickly meant accruing them even more quickly, the expenditures serving as an offering to some unseen deity of wealth.

October 9th - $67,028

She’d flown home to Fairfax County, Virginia. She was settling back into that endless suburban flatness which saw its colors stripped anew every four years with the coming of one government and the departure of the last. A parade of defense contractors, lobbyists, bureaucrats, alphabet mafiosos, and military desk-jockeys would roll in and stamp down anything that grew in the cracks during the previous administration. It was some of the richest real estate in America and it was full of people that thought the Cheesecake Factory was fine dining. She hated it so much she no longer needed to think about it. It was just a reflex.

As it happened he offered her an escape hatch, not into real life but further down the rabbit hole into his little wonderland. He kept an apartment for himself in Maryland, near the DC border. This came as a surprise to her. He’d talked about Pennsylvania as being home. Maryland had never come up.

“If your parents are getting on your nerves,” he proposed, “why not come down to Bethesda and stay with me for a bit? Could use the company.” She found herself packing her bags and begging her mother for a ride to the metro station within minutes.

It wasn’t a big apartment, no one rents in Bethesda for an excess of space. Alone it was a lonely, expensive little box. With two it was cozy. She’d gotten over her lingering anxieties about sleeping with him while they were still in Florida and they weren’t shy about enjoying the reunion after a layoff. For a weekend they lived like children playing pretend, imagining themselves as adults. Eating out for every meal, dressing well, sleeping late, accountable to no one. On Monday she rose to find him at his computer, navigating an abyss of spreadsheets. He didn’t pay her any attention until she forced the issue. Then he suggested she find breakfast without him, as well as lunch. Dinner they could probably have together. “Here.” He said, pulling out his wallet “That’s $250 I think. Drink it, bet it, eat it, go see the changing room girl at Anthropologie and send it up your nose. I don’t care.”

“Look I told you when I got in, I don’t want you buying me-”

“Then don’t spend it and give it back once I’m done. It would just reflect badly on me if my guest were walking around with empty pockets.”

Guest. Not girlfriend. Not any of its cruder synonyms. Just guest. She didn’t know how to feel about that. Maybe he thought he was doing her a favor. He clearly valued his own freedom. Wanted to make it clear he was valuing hers.

Though really, how free was he? She had pictured a more romantic lifestyle than this when he’d held up that phone and shown her his little dragon’s hoard. He’d made it seem that way when he’d spoken of his friends and comrades. A merry band of rebels like himself all over the world. There was Macau Pete, the Korean baseball and Asian kickboxing savant. He had a real respect for Gaz from Cardiff, public enemy number 1 of the UK sportsbooks for his prowess as a darts and lower-league soccer handicapper. Then of course there was Silk Suit Slayer, the resident court jester and head-case. Silk would burn $30k in a weekend, drunkenly declare that all the sports leagues around the world were rigged in favor of the bookies, then come back next week to do it all again. Two out ten weekends though, Silk would get on a heater and make his money back with interest. That was when they all loved him, quietly envied his bravery. That was what it took in the estimation of that fraternity. It took bravery to be out here with no insulation. Not working for the books or for sports media, not relying on a 9 to 5 to get by like some sucker. Not paying Uncle Sam his share so he could drop missiles on Pakistani children (his exact words when she expressed concerns about his not paying taxes). Out here, on your own, surviving by your own wits, luck, and balls.

But really, none of that was true. It wasn’t luck. Not if you were smart. It was statistics. Cold, acidic, above-the-shoulders type stuff. If you were a pro, making real money, you had a statistical model that told you what bets to place, where and how much. A model meant data, endless rows and columns of numbers. The more the better. In essence, they’d draw themselves magic eye pictures in the spreadsheet programs of their choice and then squint at them until they saw dollar signs. That was the reality of it, greasy little men hunched over their double-monitor displays hunting for percentage points. A crumb of value to get the barest edge. It was easy to see, for her at least, how that could drive you crazy, like Silk. He told her they’d had to kick Silk out of their little group chat a handful of times for sending death threats to tennis players. He said it like a joke. She must have missed the punchline.

She had a lonely day. Made some resolutions to herself. Then came back to the apartment and handed him his $250. She wasn’t going to be taking money from him like that anymore. It made her feel dirty. If she needed it she’d take a loan and repay him. Furthermore, if they were going to be serious about this, he couldn’t be sending her away like that. She wanted to help him, wanted to be involved. Would that be okay? Or should she go back to Fairfax?

He was shocked. It didn’t occur to him that he could hurt her that way, without meaning to. He shut off his computer and they spent the rest of the night within the range of each other’s warmth, promising to make it work. In the morning he jumped her into the lifestyle, the requisite beating delivered by terminology and numbers. Spread. Moneyline. Team total. Parlay. Hedge. Boost. Prop. Trap. Hook. Plus. Minus.

One number stuck out. His new FanBet balance was just a hair north of $62k. Was he on a losing streak? “Oh no, not at all. Just placed a few big futures.”

Another insider term. A future. Picking a champion, an award winner, an MVP, before the season had even begun. Like dropping a dart out of an airplane and hitting a bullseye. If you saw someone do that, then you’d be pretty impressed, right? You’d pay someone a pretty decent chunk of change to do it, right? He’d gone a little nuts, he conceded, going all the way down to $55k, but he was already well on his way to making it back. Besides, if any of those darts dropped from orbit did find the board, the resulting payout would hit, in his words “like crack.” Besides, he hadn’t even touched the 5K he kept off-shore for betting on entertainment and political props. He’d cleaned up on the Oscars last year.

November 19th - $67,764

With her he was healthier, but he didn’t seem happier. Just down to a lack of luck, really. The big hits eluded him. The climb back towards six-figures was sisyphean. Up five, down three, up seven, down six, up four, down eight. A slow, grinding sort of progress. Like trench warfare.

If his luck wasn’t better than his process was healthier at least. She had him in the habit of clocking out at regular hours. Eating better and more regularly. Taking walks around Bethesda Row to relieve the nervous energy accumulated by monitoring ten, twelve, fifteen games at a time. He was drinking less. Self-medicating with amphetamines and cannabis less. He was more present. It was like helping a snake shed its skin. The necrotic shell around him peeled back by helping hands. She’d begun to get some sense of the strait-laced, shy, rabbity data analyst he’d once been, before he’d “busted out,” in his own words.

When he won big it was like a holiday. They’d go downtown, eat well, drink and dance in Dupont Circle. Normally he didn’t like downtown DC, he carried money and was paranoid about muggers. When he won he felt invincible. Steak au poivre. Red wine. Shots for the whole bar. But he always stayed true to her. His appetites never ranged in that direction. She was grateful for that, and hoped he was grateful for all her work in turn. He’d say he was, and she believed him.

It all went wrong on a wet, cold morning in November, just when she was considering whether to tell her mother she wasn’t coming home for Thanksgiving. She clocked it well before she heard it from him, but figured he’d tell her when he was good and ready. He got distant and quiet when things went wrong and it was almost always over nothing. Some impactful injury or suspicious line-movement would set his stomach in knots. Was better to just let him work it out on his own. Later in the afternoon, when he came to her in his jacket and boots, announcing that he was going downtown to the FanBet sportsbook, she began to suspect something was really, truly wrong.

He’d done nothing wrong, made no mistake. It was the damn app. The FanBet mobile app had robbed him. He was dialing up a couple soccer plays, normal, by the-numbers stuff. Four units apiece. He played a unit size of one hundred dollars. But the app froze, when it began working again he felt as if he were going to be sick. They’d placed a forty-thousand dollar parlay bet. No early cash out was offered.

FanBet customer support was worse than useless. They could pay celebrities to shill their app but not web designers or customer service staff. They kept him staring at an automated live chat for hours on end. Once, when going to his computer, seeking advice from his comrades, a flesh and blood human did attempt to make contact. When the customer support woman received no reply, she closed the session and shunted him back to the rear of the queue. He’d waited three hours. She waited seven minutes. The second interaction was somehow more insulting. Whatever overworked, underpaid call-center slave he found himself in communication with this time merely directed him to the terms of service and terminated the session again. They were under no obligation to offer him a refund, even if it wasn’t his fault.

When at last he worked up the nerve to check his phone, he broke even more. He’d missed by one leg. One point. One pitiful little roll of the dice. If it had broken differently he’d have made $120,000 that afternoon. As it stood, he’d lost $40,000.

She wasn’t sure what he was planning to do and that was why she followed him out the door. The determination in his eyes scared him. His purpose was clear, but only to him. They got the train in silence, made the switch downtown and ended up at Navy Yard, near the baseball stadium. The FanBet Sportsbook was a two-story high glass cube leaking television light in every direction. She could see the illumination dancing against the parking garages arrayed around the baseball stadium from the moment she stepped off the escalator from the metro and hung a left out of the station. Inside the air was thick with tension and stress chemicals found in human sweat. It was decidedly unromantic, whatever hidden appeal the place held for its patrons wasn’t showing up on her radar.

To the window clerk, he was polite. That was something she’d always liked about him. He was always polite and abiding to service workers. “No reason to make someone’s day worse,” he’d say. He simply explained his situation and wished to speak to the manager. The clerk was confused. The bet was placed through their company, that’s true. But it wasn’t at their facility. He was insistent. He’d just like an explanation from a flesh and blood human being.

The manager was a woman, dressed in an off the rack suit. She wore it well.

“I’m very sorry to hear that.” She said, “But unfortunately there’s very little we can do.”

“You can give me my money back for one thing.”

“Well sir, we can’t do that. Don’t be unreasonable.”

“Your app. Stole my money. Without my consent. And I’m being unreasonable?”

“There’s no need to yell.”

“I’m not yelling!”

She’d been standing behind him and leaned forward to whisper in his ear. “Please baby, let’s just go home.”

He brushed her off and stepped closer to the manager. The manager stuck an acrylic-nailed finger in his face “Now sir if you’re going to lose your temper I’m going to have to ask you to leave. I can offer you a beverage on the house for your trouble and escalate the complaint to our corporate office if you want. But you’re going to have to calm down, alright?”

He laughed under his breath, smiled, looked at his shoes “Forty-thousand dollars and she wants to buy me a beer.” He mumbled. “Okay fine, fine.” he was polite again all-of-a-sudden. “I’ll take the beer and go–”

“You can have a cocktail if you’d prefer.”

“Thank you. I’ll keep that in kind. I’d just like you to answer a question for me.”

“Please.”

“Do you have children?”

The manager looked concerned “I hardly see-”

“I asked you a question. Do you have children? Yes or no?”

She thought about it for a second. Then she said “Yes. I have two daughters.”

“Good. Good. I hope they both get cancer.”

The manager’s mouth fell wide open, and before she could respond he’d grabbed a nearby aluminum barstool and thrown it towards the window to his right. It crashed straight through. The sound was like she’d only ever heard in movies.

“Marsha! Call the cops!” Shouted the manager

“You better have those kids ready to meet God you stupid–”

She didn’t hear the rest. She sprinted out the way they’d come in. She didn’t stop shaking until she was on the subway and didn’t even begin to feel safe until she was back over the state line in Virginia.

November 20th - $27,764

Her parents didn’t ask what she’d been up to. Didn’t berate her for disappearing like she had. Being cruel to be kind wasn’t their way. The holidays passed in a haze. Fall turned to winter. Ice encased the ground, not even allowing the world the romance of a new fallen snow. He didn’t call. He didn’t text. After Christmas she worked up the nerve to ask when she could come by and pick up her things. He said whenever, quicker than she expected. “Whenever” wound up being just after new years.

January 9th - $117,923

He was in a great mood. If the police had ever sought him out after that night at Navy Yard he didn’t show any evidence of it. He didn’t bring it up at all, in fact. Nor did he bring up the state of the apartment. It hadn’t been cleaned in weeks. Cockroaches crawled in and out of empty pizza boxes. The air smelled like weed, urine, and stale air freshener. He’d stopped shaving again. The bags under his eyes were colored like cheap red wine.

He left her in the entryway, went to get her things. Returned with them neatly packed in her gym bag. No malice but no feeling.

She hated herself for even thinking it, but in that moment she simply couldn’t stop herself. “I’m sorry,” she said, “for leaving you like that.”

He waved a hand dismissively “Quite alright. I wasn’t myself. I don’t respond well to being cheated.”

She’d begun to suspect in their time apart that he hadn’t really been cheated at all. He’d just made a mistake and couldn’t bear to admit it. She kept that one to herself. She was scared she’d end up like that barstool. She had to admit as well that she was scared of him.

“Anyway it’s for the best,” he continued, “I frankly don’t think we can be together.”

“Yeah I don’t think so either.”

“Thank you so much for understanding. I really do appreciate your worrying about me. And it’s not your fault.”

“What’s not my fault?”

“That you’re a jinx.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You don’t have to apologize” He tapped at his phone, showed her his balance on a new app. It was over one-hundred-and-ten thousand dollars. His futures had found the mark. He was in his much-sought-after six figures. The way he figured, she’d had him losing his edge. He’d gotten it back these past few months. He’d hit big. The numbers didn’t lie. She was the source of his bad luck.

In the car on the way home she realized she could have never been a partner to him in the way those numbers were. She could never be as compelling as his spreadsheets. As gripping as the game. She realized it was all an act. He was never getting healthier, he just wanted her to believe he was. She expected to be heartbroken, but by the time she pulled into her parents driveway there was a strange kind of relief. She didn’t have to try and help him. He didn’t want the help.

J.W. Yablonsky was born in New Jersey and raised in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He currently lives in Washington DC with his fiance and a large, needy cat. His nonfiction writing can be found on his Letterboxd, where he's compiled a robust catalog of film reviews, as well as his Substack newsletter, where he writes on topics ranging from the decline of fast food dining to the design language of Nike sneakers. His short fiction has previously appeared in Apocalypse Confidential.