BINGO : Card Cult : The game requires unexpected skills such as a dexterity with daubers, breathing cigarette smoke and tolerating boredom.

Your friend Kate recently visited a bingo hall for the first time. Now you plan to have a go at it. Kate recommends the City of Hope game on Arundell Circle in Ventura.

“Get there early and ask for help,” she advises, “because you’ll never figure it out on your own.”

Figure it out? Bingo? What’s to figure? This is a game that makes checkers look like quantum physics. Any primate can grasp it instantly, even a member of Congress.

Saturday evening, shortly before 6, you drive to a nondescript building in Ventura’s industrial section. No identifying signs are visible (later you discover an unlit neon “Bingo” sign in a window) and no one is stirring out front. But the street is lined with parked cars, so apparently this is the place.

Bingo players know where the games are. The rest of us have to know a bingo player so we can ask.

Bingo halls advertise in the Bingo Bugle, a free monthly tabloid. Unfortunately, the Bingo Bugle is distributed primarily in bingo halls. This hall, shared by City of Hope and United Cerebral Palsy charities, which run games on different nights, features a snack bar anteroom that leads to a rectangular room the size of a gym.

You have arrived early--the first “early bird” game is 20 minutes off--but the devotees have arrived even earlier. With payouts of $150 and $250 per game in the offing, this is indeed a city of hope: 160 die-hard bingo enthusiasts seated expectantly at Formica tables that run the length of the floor. It looks as though they have been sequestered here for months just waiting for bingo to break out.

Gray hair and cigarettes are part of the uniform. The tables are littered with dirty ashtrays, open cans of soda, half-eaten sandwiches and crumpled chips bags. One woman knits, another plays solitaire. Loyal readers are engrossed in the Bingo Bugle.

The hall hums with anticipation. Bingo is in the air. Bingo and cigarette smoke. You were forewarned about the smoke. The surgeon general’s warnings haven’t penetrated bingo halls. This place could serve as a laboratory for City of Hope lung cancer research.

Feeling very much the interloper, you approach one of the several cashier windows in the back of the room. At this one, players can purchase a “pack” of 15 sheets, each featuring six “squares.”

Each square is a standard bingo grid: B-I-N-G-O across the top and a column of numbers below each letter. As a child you played one square--or card--at a time. Here, even novices and morons play at least six at a time. Many people play 18 at a time, and 24 is not unheard-of. The woman working the window wants to know how many packs you want.

“Ten dollars for the first, $5 for each additional,” she informs you.

“How long does one pack last?” you ask. The woman frowns.

“All night,” she replies in a tone that suggests this is the dumbest thing she’s heard since Bill Clinton said he didn’t inhale.

You buy one.

“You’re going to wish you had more,” the woman says as you walk away. “More chances to win.”

At the next window you pay $4 for “specials”: five $250 games interspersed through the evening. At the third window you shell out another $3.50 for five “early bird” games. You wander toward the tables not entirely sure what you’ve purchased but satisfied that some of the proceeds are going to charity. You find a vacant chair amid four women of maturity who have the look of wily bingo veterans.

Actually, everyone in the hall except you has that look. You confess your inexperience to your new companions, but the admission is unnecessary.

“What are you gonna mark with?” inquires Jeanie, seated directly across the table in a cloud of smoke. You produce a ballpoint pen. “You can’t mark with that. Gotta have a dauber.” Dauber?

Back to the windows, where you cough up another buck and a half for an oversize highlighter that resembles a sex aid. Not that you would know what a sex aid looks like.

Some players, the serious ones, have a dozen or more daubers in various colors arrayed vertically before them like miniature Scud missiles. An advertisement in the Bingo Bugle offers monster daubers, designer daubers, bingo ball daubers, hammer daubers and glitter daubers, all from Bingo Novelty World Inc., which also hawks bingo cushions and bingo tote bags.

Presently, the bingo begins. The caller gently intones numbers over the public address system. He calls at a leisurely pace, a concession to those who are working 18 squares.

Some players are content to wait for the calls. Others watch television monitors mounted high on each wall, where the next number appears well before the caller calls it. For your part, you find yourself alternating between the two methods, a confusing system that frequently gives you the feeling you’ve missed a number. Your mind is off on journeys of its own choosing. It occurs to you you’d make a lousy air traffic controller, though perhaps it would be easier to concentrate if lives were at stake.

The games go quickly, none lasting more than five or 10 minutes. A good thing, because the schedule calls for 31 games. These sessions usually last until 11 p.m. or beyond. This isn’t bingo, it’s bingo mutated. The five “early bird” contests, for instance, are “quad” games. To win, you must get bingo on four of the game sheet’s six squares.

And just for fun, the definition of bingo changes with each game. Game 1 forbids the use of the corner numbers. Game 2 requires players to fill the “inside and outside corners.” Game 3 disallows use of the center space. Game 4 requires that you fill adjoining spaces in a six-pack configuration.

As the evening progresses, the games get more bizarre. Three Card Stack. Six Card Stamp Collection. Block of Nine. Three Hardways Anywhere.

You rely on your table mates for translations. They embrace you like mother hens. Jeanie, playing 18 squares of her own, manages to watch your sheet as well, to make sure you don’t mess up. With the rules varying so wildly from game to game, you could easily have a winner without even knowing it.

By Game 9, you realize you are daubing robotically. The numbers keep coming, you keep daubing. You daub vertically, daub horizontally, daub with your left hand, daub with your right. It’s a dazzling display of dauber dexterity.

Unfortunately, you are bored out of your smoke-infested mind. This is a game that requires no skill, no intelligence, no strategy, just piece-work perseverance. The dauber varieties and game variations are attempts to defeat the game’s very essence: abject monotony.

There is, of course, the money. Everyone else is fixated on winning. Not you. If you won a $250 game it would be the hardest money you ever earned.

The Bingo Bugle features photos of joyous winners, including one smiling face, under which a caption says: “Sandy Crites is a $150 winner, and claims that this is her first win in six years of playing bingo.”

In any given week, there are nearly 50 bingo games in Ventura County. Some addicts play a matinee session, then a night session. The truly obsessed play seven nights a week.

“This is a cult kind of thing,” says Bob Cooke, manager of the City of Hope game. “If you’re a bingo player, you’re a bingo player. It’s pretty much what you do.”

You skip Games 10 through 13 so you can take in the scene. Jeanie wins Game 11 and is paid $150 cash on the spot. You play a few more games before and after the intermission, but by 9 p.m. you are daubed out.

You make excuses to your tablemates. They can’t believe you are walking out with a good two hours of bingo left. You can’t believe they are staying. Or that anyone who plays this game once ever decides to play it again.

* THE PREMISE

There are plenty of things you have never tried. Fun things, dangerous things, character building things. The Reluctant Novice tries them for you and reports the results. After all, the Novice gets paid to do them--and has no choice in the matter. If you want to tell the Novice where to go, please call us at 658-5547. If we use your idea, we’ll send you a present. This week’s Reluctant Novice is free-lance writer Brennan Chase.