Gwen Finally Won When She Finally Gave Up Gambling
Two years ago, Gwen was so dead broke that the woman at the pawnshop where she’d hocked all of her belongings had to spot her $50 so she and her son could buy a Christmas tree.
That was a cold, hard holiday. In those days, her car seemed to know its own way to the card club, where she’d bet hundreds of dollars a night. She felt hollow, twisted--had trouble remembering what she was living for.
Today, Gwen’s living room is all red and green and sparkly--fuzzy stockings hang from the bookshelf and her coffee table is adorned with a stuffed Santa Claus, plastic snowmen and a glittery “Merry Christmas” sign.
The 44-year-old waitress sits on her couch and beams, stroking a gold “2” hanging around her neck--a gift from a customer to commemorate the anniversary of the day she decided to live.
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Sunday, Dec. 13, 1998. Gwen sat at the cash register of the Beverly Hills restaurant where she worked, weeping. Before her was a front-page article in that day’s issue of The Times with the headline “Going for Broke,” detailing the severe toll that compulsive gambling takes on society. It described how millions of people in the country--rivaling the number of hard-core drug addicts--risk their homes, their jobs, their families and even their lives for the rush of the bet.
The piece featured a woman coming down hard off gambling’s short highs. She stayed out in the card clubs all night, blowing her paycheck, ignoring her teenage son. Behind on the rent, she pawned everything of worth in her house. Her family was fed up and she felt desperate, tempted to veer her car off the road to stop the decadelong cycle of wins and losses.
“I have hurt so many people with my gambling,” the woman in the story said. “I have lost best friends. After all the pain I’ve caused everybody, the pain I caused myself, I still have the urge to gamble. I never know what I’m going to do. I’m so afraid. I’m really afraid.”
The woman was Gwen.
“How could I be this person?” she thought as she wept. She moved in a fog for the next day, not sure if she wanted to live or die. As she worked the late shift the next night, it suddenly hit her.
“I don’t want to be this person anymore,” she thought. “And I don’t want to die. I just want to straighten up my life.”
She went to her manager.
“I have to leave,” she told him.
“You can’t just leave,” he said. “It’s busy.”
She handed him the article. “I need to leave, because I’m trying to save my life,” she said.
He took the story into his office. He emerged a little while later and nodded to the door: “Go.”
She drove straight to a nearby Gamblers Anonymous meeting. She had tried the 12-step self-help group several times before, and always went back to gambling. She walked in and started crying.
I thought I wanted to stop before, she told the group. But I never wanted to stop. I just wanted to get control.
Gwen went to a GA meeting every night that week and she made a decision. She wanted to put an end to the pain she had tried to deaden with late-night games of “hold ‘em” at the local card clubs. She wanted to stop hiding from her landlord and lying to her boss. She wanted her son to trust her again. “I wanted it so badly I could taste it.”
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For the last two years, Gwen has faithfully attended Gamblers Anonymous meetings, and follows the 12-step program religiously (including a GA requirement that she ask for her last name to be kept out of press accounts).
She started a women’s meeting in a church near her Jefferson Park home in the Central City, hoping to encourage those who felt intimidated in predominantly male groups to seek help.
One day, a newcomer came to the meeting and said she decided to stop gambling after reading a newspaper story.
It made me cry, the woman said. I’m so grateful to that woman Gwen in the article for telling her story. If only I could just meet her and talk to her.
Gwen introduced herself. The woman gasped. After the meeting, they talked for hours over coffee.
Moments like these have helped her heal, Gwen said.
“I don’t want anybody to go through what I’ve been through,” she said. “If I could save a person from getting to the point where I was, that would be the best thing for me.”
Stopping gambling has given Gwen a chance to do things that were always lost in the shuffle of the cards.
She went on her first vacation--to San Diego--where she had a massage at the hotel. She bought a new car and has paid every bill on time in the last two years.
And after years of hiding a learning disability, she finally sought help, taking reading classes at a community college.
Her neighbor says she has an aura of peace about her. Her boss praises her steadfastness. Her mother says she’s proud of her--and relieved.
Her teenage son Phillip, who stoically weathered his mother’s absences, paying the bills and comforting her when she was depressed, bristled when she tried to reassert herself in his life.
One day she nagged him to wash the dishes and he responded: “When you were gambling, you never had to tell me to wash the dishes, and they got washed. So wait till I wash them.”
I deserved that, she thought to herself.
The frustrated teenager started failing his classes and getting into fights at school. He eventually dropped out.
Slowly, mother and son worked on their relationship. “Mom,” he finally told her, “you just came on too strong. One day I didn’t have a mother, and now I have a mother. It was confusing to me.”
Today, they are fast friends. Last June, Gwen cried as she watched Phillip get his high school diploma.
And he was on hand Thursday night, smiling proudly along with other family members and friends, when Gwen celebrated her second gambling-free year at a GA meeting in Beverly Hills.
Gwen savors the small things: Having dinner with her sister once a week. Being able to see Tina Turner in concert--twice. Having enough money to buy Christmas presents for the toy drive at her church. Going out to the movies and dancing. She wants to write an inspirational book about her experience.
“It’s like, yah!, I’m finally somebody in this world and I’m doing what I’m supposed to do,” she said. “Today I’m happy. I’m finally at peace. I feel that actually I’m a miracle.”
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For information about compulsive gambling, call Gamblers Anonymous at (310) 478-2121 or (213) 386-8789.
