PRIVATE LIVES, PUBLIC PLACES : Making Easy Money Is Hard Work

By mid-morning there is barely space to park outside the Bicycle card club. It is a curious lot: row upon row of American-made cars, gray, sensible, medium-sized. The casino is open 24 hours a day and boasts of being the world’s largest: 170 tables and an unlikely showplace for this colorless corner of Bell Gardens.

By the cashiers, a display case features letters from local civic groups grateful for donations. The atmosphere is one of worthy respectability. Beneath the cold fluorescent lights, the gambling floor is uninspiring; the impression is one of overweight people, white-haired women, bald men with bad teeth. There is a monotone to it, unusual in a climate so full of color.

Against a low background of clicking chips and chatter, the scene seems frozen. Slowly, tiny signs emerge; it is as if the eye changes focus and a miniature world stirs. Huge forces of emotion and activity are at work here; all it needs to see them is intense concentration.

At one table, a man sits statue-like; watch his fingers, though, and the compulsive way he stacks his chips, edge upon edge. The woman opposite has caught the gesture: He is not a man to be reckless. The woman herself is given to talking freely to the table. Ignore the unkempt hair, the plain and pudgy face; beneath that camouflage is a fearless soul, a risk-taker.

Winning at poker, it has been said, is 22% mathematics and 52% psychology. Players watch each other intently, examining and analyzing each gesture, each word, trying to give nothing away and betraying all. Betting, bluffing, raising, calling, checking--here are the power plays of body language and the quadrille of exchange. Staring at a hand, guarding the cards, pretending disinterest, glancing at chips, glancing away--each pose tells a tale.

Outside in the appalling loneliness of the city, no one would dare watch another this closely. Here, no one touches but no one threatens, either. Spirit meets spirit and the thrills are invisible, the excitement passes mind to mind. One woman, 50ish, plump and easily overlooked, flips a $5 chip to the young man behind her; where else would she carry off a gesture of such panache? The timid player given to swallowing too often calls for chips a tad too loudly; how often can he indulge in this suggestion of important money?

No kibitzers are allowed on the floor, no “sweaters,” but some creep in to the far corner where the small-stakes tables are clustered. Behind them, guarded by savage wooden lions painted in gold, is the Dragon Room, an inner sanctum beneath an ornate ceiling with black-tasselled lanterns and raging dragons climbing scarlet columns.

There is a whiff of the gambling dens of the Orient. Pai gow, Pan nine. The card games of the East bring with them the images of mystery and temperament. The dice ring in brass holders slapped down as if defying the very gods. Men call raucously for picture cards, groups of betters shout in anguish and excitement. Cambodian, Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese, the room is aswirl in languages and faces. Families game in groups; men in open-necked shirts with thin mouths and unfathomable eyes, sit alone and still. Shrimp-like old ladies with pinched, disdainful faces stare through cigarette smoke curling down long holders.

One woman has lost $200,000, she says, in the last two years, every dollar she made from years of building a restaurant, 18 hours day.

And then suddenly, the reality, the price for this intensity intrudes: Those harmless black and white chips are $100 apiece. Six, 10, 15 of them, staked on a card.

Thin young men in cheap trousers unfold wads of $100-dollar bills--how many thousands are curled before the dealer now? How many of the players on this one bleak morning have worked long hours, years, to earn this money, only to throw it away in a frenzy of emotion?

At one table, we watch a man lose thousands, an ordinary man with a tired face and hollowed eyes.

Outside, in the streets, men kill for a wristwatch.