me on the stairs.
“You should go for a swim. That’ll make you sleepy.”
“No thanks, I think I’ll just hang out here with my Pepto. What a product. This is definitely some bubble-gum flavored awesomeness.”
As for my dad: he was spending a lot more time at home—hanging out with me, which I enjoyed, though his mood swings wore me out. It was football season; he had a bounce in his step. After checking his BlackBerry he high-fived me and danced around the living room: “Am I a genius or what? What?” He consulted spread breakdowns, matchup reports, and—occasionally—a paperbacked book called Scorpio: Your Sports Year in Forecast. “Always looking for an edge,” he said, when I found him running down the tables and punching out numbers on the calculator like he was figuring out his income tax. “You only have to hit fifty-three, fifty-four percent to grind out a good living on this stuff—see, baccarat is strictly for entertainment, there’s no skill to it, I set myself limits and never go over, but you can really make money at the sports book if you’re disciplined about it. You have to approach it like an investor. Not like a fan, not even like a gambler because the secret is, the better team usually wins the game and the linemaker is good at setting the number. Your linemaker has got limitations, though, as to public opinion. What he’s predicting is not who’s going to win but who the general public thinks is going to win. So that margin, between sentimental favorite and actual fact—fuck, see that receiver in the end zone, another big one for Pittsburgh right there, we need them to score now like we need a hole in the head—anyway, like I was saying, if I really sit down and do my homework as opposed to Joe Beefburger who picks his team by looking five minutes at the sports page? Who’s got the advantage? See, I’m not one of these saps that gets all starry-eyed about the Giants rain or shine—shit, your mother could have told you that. Scorpio is about control—that’s me. I’m competitive. Want to win at any price. That’s where my acting came from, back when I acted. Sun in Scorpio, Leo rising. All in my chart. Now you’re a Cancer, hermit crab, all secretive and up in your shell, completely different MO. It’s not bad, it’s not good, it’s just how it is. Anyway, whatever, I always take my lead from my defensive-offensive lines, but all the same it never hurts to pay attention to these transits and solar-arc progressions on game day—”
“Did Xandra get you interested in all this?”
“Xandra? Half the sports book in Vegas has an astrologer on speed dial. Anyway, like I was saying, all other things equal, do the planets make a difference? Yes. I would definitely have to say yes. It’s like, is a player having a good day, is he having a bad day, is he out of sorts, whatever. Honestly it helps to have that edge when you’re getting a little, how do I put it, ha ha, stretched, although—” he showed me the fat wad of what looked like hundreds, wrapped with a rubber band—“this has been a really amazing year for me. Fifty-three percent, a thousand plays a year. That’s the magic spot.”
Sundays were what he called major-ticket days. When I got up, I found him downstairs in a crackle of strewn newspapers, zinging around bright and restless like it was Christmas morning, opening and shutting cabinets, talking to the sports ticker on his BlackBerry and crunching on corn chips straight from the bag. If I came down and watched with him for even a little while when the big games were on sometimes he’d give me what he called “a piece—” twenty bucks, fifty, if he won. “To get you interested,” he explained, leaning forward on the sofa, rubbing his hands anxiously. “See—what we need is for the Colts to get wiped off the map during this first half of the game. Devastated. And with the Cowboys and the Niners we need the score to go over thirty in the second half—yes!” he shouted, jumping up exhilarated with raised fist. “Fumble! Redskins got the ball. We’re in business!”
But it was confusing, because it was the Cowboys who had fumbled. I’d thought the Cowboys were supposed to win by at least fifteen. His mid-game switches in loyalty were too abrupt for me to follow and I often embarrassed