“I Saw You in Las Vegas at the El Cortez”

[Teach]

“I was bluffing on the flop with nothing but air.” That’s a phrase I’d have never used within a mile of a school building in which I would teach during my 35-year career.

For many years, dating back to the mid-1960’s, I’m was a non-descript, straight-laced, mild-mannered history teacher who liked to read, to watch movies, and to go to the theater; yet, on numerous occasions, I turned into and masqueraded as the crude, crass and coarse: “Teach, The Gambling Man.”

“Bet. Wager. Parlay. Exacta. Trifecta…” Even at a young age I knew the racing terminology. I love to bet the harness races, and the thoroughbred ones, as well. I also occasionally play poker, not the 7-card stud or draw-poker of my youth, but Texas Hold’em. I used these terms frequently, especially when I was with gambling buddies. Yet, as an adult, there was one place I would never utter any of these words -- in school. I never wanted to give any indication to my colleagues or to my students that I liked to gamble.

Yes, as cited in a previous post, “I Lived Three Lives,” but more distinctly, two. So opposite from one another that their existence would be like “night and day”. If Robert Louis Stevenson would have written my biography, he might have entitled it: “The Strange Adventure of Teach, the Educator and the Gambler.”

Yes, in a sense, I was being “two-faced.” But it was a matter of survival. I didn’t want anyone connected with the school system in which I was teaching to know that I loved to gamble. That, beginning in the early-1990’s, I frequently drove one hundred and seventy miles round-trip to either Foxwoods or Mohegan Sun, or both. That as a teacher on Long Island I had visited Yonkers and Roosevelt Raceways, but also Freehold, Monticello and even Brandywine. That I began wagering on the speed and endurance of both thoroughbred and standardbred horses since I was 15-years old.

As I look back over these many years, I maintained a “dual existence.” As the saying goes, “And never the twain shall meet.” And they didn’t, that is until one day, quite unexpectedly…

In the mid-1990’s, I made one of my frequent “pilgrimages” to the "Gambling Mecca of The Universe,” Las Vegas. I always looked forward to those trips. It was a chance to unwind. To get away from the classroom. To “let my hair down.” (What was left of it).

I recall that it was during one April school vacation that my gambling buddy "Bucko" and I caught a flight out of Boston's Logan Airport for "Sin City." We were staying downtown at "The Fitz."

As I remember, we had a great time. We drank. We gambled. We took in the "eye candy." We drank some more. We gambled some more...and we looked at more "eye candy.”

Each day, we'd visit our favorite haunts: Binion's, Four Queens, The Fremont, The Golden Nugget, The California, Golden Gate and Vegas Club, and on a one occasion, we crossed Las Vegas Blvd to gamble at the El Cortez.

Yet all good things must come to an end. That following Monday morning I resumed my role as a stolid history teacher at a quaint suburban-Boston high school. Yes, it was tough getting back. No more Coronas with a lime. No more BJ, VP, craps, roulette, Pai Gow poker. No “ponies, no sports bets, no Texas Hold’em. It was now: lesson plans, progress reports, term papers and oral presentations.

Yet that Monday morning I was in for a surprise. No, I wasn't terminated, nor was I accused of moral turpitude. Yet the incident that would take place that morning was, at least in my own mind, close to those disastrous circumstances.

That first morning back, a student named Steve comes up to me. He says, "I saw you over the vacation." At first I figured that he might have seen me in one of the local malls with my wife before I left on my Vegas trip. Then I thought maybe he saw my in the waiting room of The Logan Express (the bus into the airport), or possibly in Logan Airport itself. No such luck.

Steve comes right out with it. He says, “I saw you in Vegas." My jaw must have dropped about five inches. Talk about letting all the air out of my balloon. "Damn it," I thought to myself, "I was spotted. My cover's blown." Steve went on to say that he had seen me in the El Cortez (Why couldn't he have spotted me at Bellagio's conservatory admiring the flowers).

At first, I thought of using the tack of saying that I was in Vegas, but hey, it's not illegal. I haven't committed a crime. But I quickly thought the better of it. I said to myself, "Why now? I've spent all these years presenting myself as a squeaky-clean, upright, bookish high school history teacher.” This Vegas revelation is going to fly in the face of everything I've tried to portray myself as over these past many years.

In the end, I quickly changed gears. I said, "That wasn't me you saw in Vegas, Steve. That was my twin-brother. I said, “Bruce just loves to gamble." I do have a younger brother (his name isn’t Bruce) who loves to play VP. Yes, we do resemble each other; yet, we would never -- in a million years -- be taken as identical twins.

I recall breathing a sigh of relief as my student, Steve, apparently “bought” the story. At least I never heard from him about being sighted in Vegas after that Monday morning.

As I think back to that morning in late-April, my gambling cover was nearly blown; yet, somehow, I managed to pull an inside straight, “on the river.”

[thaskalos]

You were being paranoid, Teach...being spotted while gambling in Vegas hardly stigmatizes you as a "hardcore gambler". Vegas is more like an adult playground. It isn't as if you were spotted at Parx racetrack on a snowy Tuesday.