Are you a gambling man?” Vera asks me. She hands an envelope to a bartender in the Meatpacking District as she sips on a whiskey and ginger ale. The envelope contains cash for one of her clients. Vera’s a bookie and also a runner, and to be apparent, Vera’s not her name.
She’s a small-time bookie, or even a bookmaker, one who takes stakes and leaves commission off them. She publications soccer tickets and collects them from bars, theater stagehands, employees at job websites, and at times building supers. Printed on the tickets that are the size of a grocery receipt are spreads for college football and NFL games. At precisely the same time, she is a”runner,” another slang term to describe someone who delivers spread or cash amounts to some boss. Typically bookies are men, not women, and it is as though she’s on the pursuit for new blood, searching for young gamblers to enlist. The newspaper world of football betting has sunk in the surface of the exceptionally popular, embattled daily fantasy sites like FanDuel or even DraftKings.
“Business is down due to FanDuel, DraftKings,” Vera says. “Guy wager $32 and won two million. That’s a load of shit. I wish to meet him” There’s a nostalgic sense to circling the numbers of a football spread. The tickets have what seem like traces of rust on the edges. The faculty season has ended, and she didn’t do so bad this year, Vera states. What’s left, however, are pool bets for the Super Bowl.
Vera began running back numbers when she was fourteen years old in a snack bar where she worked as a waitress. The chef called in on a telephone in the hallway and she’d deliver his stakes to bookies for horse races. It leant a charm of youthful defiance. The same was true when she first bartended in the’80s. “Jimmy said at the beginning,’I will use you. Just so you understand,”’ she says, remembering a deceased boss. “`You go into the pub, bullshit together with the boys. You can talk soccer with a man, you can pull them , and then they’re yours. ”’ Jimmy died of a brain hemorrhage. Her next boss died of brain cancer. Vera says she beat breast cancer herself, although she smokes. She underwent radioactive treatment and denied chemo.
Dead bosses left behind customers to conduct and she would oversee them. Other runners loathed her in the beginning. They couldn’t understand why she’d have more clientele . “And they’d say,’who the fuck is this donkey, coming here taking my job? ”’ she says like the men are throwing their dead weight around. Sometimes the other runners tricked her, for instance a runner we’ll call”Tommy” maintained winnings he was likely to hand off to her . “Tommy liked to place coke up his nose, and play cards, and he liked the girls in Atlantic City. He’d go and give Sam $7,000 and fuck off with the other $3,000. He informs the supervisor,’Go tell the broad.’ And I says, ‘Fuck you. It’s like I’m just a fucking broad to you. I don’t count. ”’ It’s obviously forbidden for a runner to devote winnings or cash intended for clients on private vices. But fellow runners and gaming policemen trust . She never speaks bad about them, their figures, winnings, or titles. She whines if she does not make commission. She says she could”keep her mouth closed” which is the reason why she is a runner for nearly 25 years.
When she pays clients, she exchanges in person, never secretly leaving envelopes of cash behind toilets or under sinks in tavern bathrooms. Over time, though, she has dropped around $25,000 from men not paying their losses. “There is a great deal of losers out there,” she said,”just brazen.” For the football tickets, she capital her own”bank” that’s self-generated, almost informally, by establishing her worth on the success of this school season’s first few weeks of stakes in the fall.
“I ain’t giving you no figures,” Vera says and drinks from her black stripes. Ice cubes turn the whiskey into a lighter tan. She reaches her cigarettes and zips her coat. She questions the current alterations in the spread with this weekend’s Super Bowl between the Carolina Panthers and the Denver Broncos and squints at her beverage and overlooks the bartender. Her moves lumber, as her ideas do. The favorability of the Panthers has changed from three to four four-and-a-half to five quickly in the last week. She wants the Panthers to win by six or seven in order for her bet for a success, and predicts Cam Newton will direct them to a double-digit win over Peyton Manning.
External, she lights a cigarette before moving to some other pub. Someone she didn’t need to see had sat down in the initial one. She says there’s a man there who will harass her. She continues further north.
At the next bar, a poster tacked to the wall beyond the counter shows a 100-square Super Bowl grid “boxes.” “Are you running any Super Bowls?” Vera asks.
To win a Super Bowl box, at the end of each quarter, the final digit of the groups’ scores need to match the amount of your chosen box in the grid. The bartender hands Vera the grid. The bar lights brighten. Vera traces her finger across its own outline, explaining that when the score is Broncos, 24, and Panthers, 27, from the next quarter, that’s row 4 and column . Prize money changes each quarter, and the pool only works properly if bar patrons buy out all of the squares.
Vera recalls a pool in 1990, the Giants-Buffalo Super Bowl XXV. Buffalo dropped 19 to 20 after missing a field goal from 47 yards. Each of the Bills knelt and prayed for that field goal. “Cops in the 20th Precinct won. It was 0 9,” she says, describing the box amounts that matched 0 and 9. But her deceased boss squandered the $50,000 pool within the course of this entire year, spending it on rent, gas and smokes. Bettors had paid payments throughout the entire year for $500 boxes. Nobody got paid. There was a”contract on his life.”
The bartender stows a white envelope of money before attaching an apricot-honey mixture for Jell-O shots. Vera rolls up a napkin and twists it in a beer that looks flat to give it foam.
“For the first bookie I worked , my name was’Ice,’ long until Ice-T,” she says, holding out her hands, rubbing at which the ring with her codename would fit. “He got me a ring, which I lost. Twenty-one diamonds, created’ICE. ”’ The bookie told her he had it inscribed ICE since she had been”a cold-hearted bitch.”
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