After the Ball Was Over:

James Murphy, twenty, sits at the roulette table in the cool, tinkly darkness of the Paradise Island Casino, throwing away money, conservatively. Murph is splitting rows tonight, and he’s not doing badly at that. He’s using 50¢ chips; losing more slowly than I. Why we’re gambling escapes me, except that I am by nature a fiend. Murph is good company. He understands the idiocy of it. It’s late—going on 4 a.m.—and the croupier calls, “Last spin on this table, ladies and gentlemen.” Murph and I sigh, put two stacks of chips on black, chips that have taken us maybe five hours to accumulate, and drain off the lukewarm suds at the bottom of our beer glasses. You see, we have a thing about black. In Tom Wolfe’s wonderful piece on Las Vegas, one hears of Baron Bleichroden, an old Monte Carlo regular who amassed a stinking fortune at roulette. His rule: “My dear friends, it is so easy on black.” So the vibes are on black, along with my $75 and Murph’s $20. The ball tumbles into number 3, which is red. The svelte swine of a croupier scoops up our chips. Gambling is as satisfying as feeding $20 bills into an office shredder.

Murph is incensed, of course, just as he was incensed the night before and, come to think of it, the night before that. I feel responsible. Three nights ago I led him off to lose his virginity at the tables and now he’s been raped. We muse over this at the nearest bar, having put a few dollars in our socks for liquid consolation. Murph is upbeat: “No regrets, no regrets at all,” he says. Like hell. Murph is tough, Irish; from Rhode Island. His father is a hard-working lawyer with eight kids, and Murph is sitting here at the bar thinking of ways to tell the old man what happened to the $100 he took down to Nassau by way of “expense money.” This isn’t the first time this month we’ve had regrets, as when earlier in the week we stood in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria watching Jim Buckley concede the election to Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

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Christopher Buckley

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James Murphy, twenty, sits at the roulette table in the cool, tinkly darkness of the Paradise Island Casino, throwing away money, conservatively. Murph is splitting rows tonight, and he’s not doing badly at that. He’s using 50¢ chips; losing more slowly than I. Why we’re gambling escapes me, except that I am by nature a fiend. Murph is good company. He understands the idiocy of it. It’s late—going on 4 a.m.—and the croupier calls, “Last spin on this table, ladies and gentlemen.” Murph and I sigh, put two stacks of chips on black, chips that have taken us maybe five hours to accumulate, and drain off the lukewarm suds at the bottom of our beer glasses. You see, we have a thing about black. In Tom Wolfe’s wonderful piece on Las Vegas, one hears of Baron Bleichroden, an old Monte Carlo regular who amassed a stinking fortune at roulette. His rule: “My dear friends, it is so easy on black.” So the vibes are on black, along with my $75 and Murph’s $20. The ball tumbles into number 3, which is red. The svelte swine of a croupier scoops up our chips. Gambling is as satisfying as feeding $20 bills into an office shredder.

Murph is incensed, of course, just as he was incensed the night before and, come to think of it, the night before that. I feel responsible. Three nights ago I led him off to lose his virginity at the tables and now he’s been raped. We muse over this at the nearest bar, having put a few dollars in our socks for liquid consolation. Murph is upbeat: “No regrets, no regrets at all,” he says. Like hell. Murph is tough, Irish; from Rhode Island. His father is a hard-working lawyer with eight kids, and Murph is sitting here at the bar thinking of ways to tell the old man what happened to the $100 he took down to Nassau by way of “expense money.” This isn’t the first time this month we’ve had regrets, as when earlier in the week we stood in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria watching Jim Buckley concede the election to Daniel Patrick Moynihan.