me.
The proceeds of gambling were a cash cow, bringing over a billion dollars into the province’s coffers and also helping many charities. Albertans assuaged their guilt over using gambling to raise government money by allowing nonprofit groups to “volunteer” to work at casinos for a few days every two years. In return they would get a portion of the proceeds of the take during those days.
It was hard for any group to say no to an average of fifty thousand to eighty thousand dollars every two years in return for a few hours of volunteer work. Still, with Klein and his cronies gone, things were changing. Many school boards, churches, and other nonprofits had passed directives disallowing their members or any group connected with them to accept any money from gambling sources.
Of course, I could have taken a different route home to bypass the casino. There was no need for me to tempt myself every day after work. But the selection of my route home was a test. I was like the alcoholic who pours himself a drink he hopes he won’t drink or the sex addict who flips through the escort ads on the back pages of one of the alternative weeklies. There was that thrill of temptation, the imagining of what we could be doing, of returning to the comfort of our addiction. It is a comfortable place to be, in our addiction, because we know exactly how we’re supposed to act, what we’re supposed to do, and how we’re supposed to feel. And even though we may be destroying ourselves, it’s at least someplace where life is easier. Living in the real world, with real people, is much harder. So much harder.
Because of the image of the dead body in the field, today was a more difficult day than normal, a day I knew I could easily say “fuck it” to it all and step through those doors into the beautiful oxygenated air. But today was also a day of honest victory, where the simple act of arriving at a place before anyone else brought a type of success I hadn’t experienced in a long time. When one lives in and for a casino and gambling, luck is a major force in your life and this time luck was not in the cards or the numbers or the order of finish of a horse; it was in the real world. And in that, I took strength and walked past the casino toward my home.
I followed the path I had taken for these past months in the real world and arrived at my place, my little suite in the basement of a dilapidated house in the Kush. My room was in a postwar bungalow sitting in a nicely sized corner lot, the siding bleached pale, with flakes of paint hanging off the window frames. Twenty or thirty years ago, when some family lived and grew in the house, it might have been one of the nicer houses on the street, but now it stood as one of the few houses left. Three- and four-story walk-ups surrounded it, and directly across the street was an industrial park that had also seen better days. There was a small, unattached garage in the backyard but it leaned to the north like a slouching teenager.
The back door gave direct access to the basement without having to enter the main floor. The original owners of the house were long gone; the upstairs residents were now a bunch of students attending the nearby Grant MacEwan College. I climbed down the stairs, an invisible presence to the preoccupied upstairs residents.
The basement was a dark, damp place, the concrete walls of the foundation crumbling and dripping with condensation. Cardboard boxes of various sizes were stacked throughout the basement along with old toys, bikes, and the other refuse created by an annual revolving door of students. There was an old gas furnace pumping away somewhere behind all the boxes, a washer and dryer set from the sixties, and a single shower stall next to the washer and dryer.
My room was a small rectangle, slightly larger than my bank-machine bedroom from the previous night. Outside light streamed in from a tiny window near the ceiling. The room was neat and clean, the
The proceeds of gambling were a cash cow, bringing over a billion dollars into the province’s coffers and also helping many charities. Albertans assuaged their guilt over using gambling to raise government money by allowing nonprofit groups to “volunteer” to work at casinos for a few days every two years. In return they would get a portion of the proceeds of the take during those days.
It was hard for any group to say no to an average of fifty thousand to eighty thousand dollars every two years in return for a few hours of volunteer work. Still, with Klein and his cronies gone, things were changing. Many school boards, churches, and other nonprofits had passed directives disallowing their members or any group connected with them to accept any money from gambling sources.
Of course, I could have taken a different route home to bypass the casino. There was no need for me to tempt myself every day after work. But the selection of my route home was a test. I was like the alcoholic who pours himself a drink he hopes he won’t drink or the sex addict who flips through the escort ads on the back pages of one of the alternative weeklies. There was that thrill of temptation, the imagining of what we could be doing, of returning to the comfort of our addiction. It is a comfortable place to be, in our addiction, because we know exactly how we’re supposed to act, what we’re supposed to do, and how we’re supposed to feel. And even though we may be destroying ourselves, it’s at least someplace where life is easier. Living in the real world, with real people, is much harder. So much harder.
Because of the image of the dead body in the field, today was a more difficult day than normal, a day I knew I could easily say “fuck it” to it all and step through those doors into the beautiful oxygenated air. But today was also a day of honest victory, where the simple act of arriving at a place before anyone else brought a type of success I hadn’t experienced in a long time. When one lives in and for a casino and gambling, luck is a major force in your life and this time luck was not in the cards or the numbers or the order of finish of a horse; it was in the real world. And in that, I took strength and walked past the casino toward my home.
I followed the path I had taken for these past months in the real world and arrived at my place, my little suite in the basement of a dilapidated house in the Kush. My room was in a postwar bungalow sitting in a nicely sized corner lot, the siding bleached pale, with flakes of paint hanging off the window frames. Twenty or thirty years ago, when some family lived and grew in the house, it might have been one of the nicer houses on the street, but now it stood as one of the few houses left. Three- and four-story walk-ups surrounded it, and directly across the street was an industrial park that had also seen better days. There was a small, unattached garage in the backyard but it leaned to the north like a slouching teenager.
The back door gave direct access to the basement without having to enter the main floor. The original owners of the house were long gone; the upstairs residents were now a bunch of students attending the nearby Grant MacEwan College. I climbed down the stairs, an invisible presence to the preoccupied upstairs residents.
The basement was a dark, damp place, the concrete walls of the foundation crumbling and dripping with condensation. Cardboard boxes of various sizes were stacked throughout the basement along with old toys, bikes, and the other refuse created by an annual revolving door of students. There was an old gas furnace pumping away somewhere behind all the boxes, a washer and dryer set from the sixties, and a single shower stall next to the washer and dryer.
My room was a small rectangle, slightly larger than my bank-machine bedroom from the previous night. Outside light streamed in from a tiny window near the ceiling. The room was neat and clean, the
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