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Lay the Favorite: A Story About Gamblers Paperback – November 20, 2012
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Beth Raymer waited tables at a dive in Las Vegas until a customer sent her to see Dink, of Dink Inc., one of the town’s biggest professional sports gamblers. Dink needed a right-hand man—someone who would show up on time, who had a head for numbers, and who didn’t steal. Beth got the job.
Lay the Favorite is the story of Beth’s years in the high-stakes, high-anxiety world of sports betting—a period that saw the fall of the local bookie and the birth of the freewheeling, unregulated offshore sports book, and with it the elevation of sports betting in popular culture. As the business explodes, Beth rises from assistant to expert, running an offshore booking office in the Caribbean. As the men around her succumb to their vices—money, sex, drugs, gambling—Beth improbably emerges with her integrity intact, wiser, sharper, nobody’s fool. A keen and compassionate observer of the adrenaline-addicted roguish types who become her mentors, her enemies, her family, Beth Raymer depicts an insanely colorful world teeming with pathos and ecstasy.
NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE
“Candid, smart, funny, wild and crazy.”—Elle
“Raymer gleefully shatters the myth of the modern gambler. . . . Seduced by her stories, we long for this strange, sleazy and alluring landscape.”—Los Angeles Times
“[Raymer depicts] a sordid, florid microworld lurching along the edge of society, not to mention legality. . . . She never condescends or indulges in reality-show caricature; she finds charm in the charmless, a point of light in the most lost of souls.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Lay the Favorite reads more like a novel than a memoir. The rich characters are drawn in depth, yet simply and honestly.”—The Wall Street Journal
“Entertaining (and often quite funny) . . . a delight to read.”—The New Yorker
- Print length240 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRandom House
- Publication dateNovember 20, 2012
- Dimensions5.19 x 0.52 x 7.99 inches
- ISBN-100385526466
- ISBN-13978-0385526463
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“Strange as hell, wildly affectionate and very, very funny. It is a world filled with scoundrels, thieves, and gamblers. It is a world we all recognize, where everyone is looking to somehow come out on top while doing what they love. The book is wise and has a relish for life that is a treat.” –Stephen Frears
“Beth Raymer possesses one of the most original voices I've encountered in years of teaching, reading, and reviewing young writers. And she puts that voice to ideal use in depicting the demimonde of sports gambling, the place where she finds an unlikely but uncanny surrogate family. Lay the Favorite is a coming-of-age saga like no other you’re ever likely to read.” –Samuel G. Freedman, author of Letters to a Young Journalist
Lay the Favorite reads more like a novel than a memoir. The rich characters are drawn in depth, yet simply and honestly.”—Wall Street Journal
“[A] very funny and smart book.”—Robert Siegel, NPR/All Things Considered
“Seduced by her stories, we long for this strange, sleazy and alluring landscape, even as the stakes get higher and Raymer's search for ‘the best of it’ turns into a worst-case scenario. With a film adaptation in the works, it's a safe bet that Raymer's memoir will find a wide audience. In fact, her engaging voice makes her a shoe-in for a sequel. I'm setting the odds at 3 to 1.”—Los Angeles Times
“Raymer’s crackling, hilarious memoir ricochets through the gambling underwold in Las Vegas, and is peopled with all manner of lovable wack-jobs, none of whom is quite as wacky—or lovable—as Raymer herself.”—Marie Claire
“Candid, smart, funny, wild and crazy.”—Elle, Top 10 Summer Books for 2010
“It’s hard not to like the breezy, ingenuous voice of this plucky protagonist who proves she’s game for any kind of new experience.”—Publishers Weekly
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Crew
The thing I liked best about working at Komol was Jowtee, the invisible spirit who controlled the restaurant’s destiny. I had never actually seen Jowtee but the kitchen staff swore he existed. They said he was a seven-foot-tall Native American Chief, a ghost from the Indian burial ground beneath the strip mall. If I didn’t feed him, pray to him, and bring him presents, something disastrous would befall the restaurant. As the only non-Thai, I had to believe them. So in between seating, waiting, and busing tables I found time to keep Jowtee happy. At the booth that was reserved for him, I’d serve Jowtee imported bottled beer in a frosty mug, whole fish fried in hot sauce, and coconut ice cream for dessert. I’d bring him daily horoscopes and decks of cards from neighboring casinos. After lighting his candle, I’d close my eyes and telepathically beg him to help turn my life around and get me that cocktail waitress job at the Bellagio.
Jowtee heard my plea. At least part of it.
During a particularly slow dinner shift, one of the regulars offered to help get me a better job. Her name was Amy and she was a massage therapist. Every Saturday evening she came in by herself and ordered vegetable green curry, extra spicy, and took her time eating it, her oversized black sunglasses never leaving her face. One night, on her way out, she slid into the front booth next to me and watched as I filled out my Stardust and Four Queens cocktail waitress applications.
“These jobs are shit,” she said, flipping through the papers. “I have this one client I give massages to. A professional gambler. Want me to see if he’ll hire you?”
I was twenty-four and had moved to Las Vegas to be with a guy I had been dating for a few months. We broke up soon after I arrived. I didn’t know a single person in town. But no one else seemed to, either. It was 2001 and Vegas was the fastest-growing metropolitan area in America. Fifteen hundred people were moving into the city each week. Everyone I met was very much like me and had just ended up there.
After the breakup, I rented a room in a motel just north of the Strip in a neighborhood known as Naked City. In the fifties, it had been home to strippers who sunbathed in the nude to avoid tan lines. Now, bail bondsmen, hookers, Vietnam vets, and irritable motel clerks added color to the place. My motel was three blocks from the Little White Wedding Chapel and Johnny Tocco’s Boxing Gym and four blocks from the downtown casinos: Binion’s Horseshoe, the El Cortez, and the Aztec—home of the fifty-nine-cent strawberry shortcake. The cigarette burns in the motel’s bedspreads were big enough to fit a leg through and the staccato of stilettos across the floor upstairs made it hard to get a good night’s sleep. But at seventeen dollars a night, it was affordable, and it allowed dogs. So Otis, my sixty-pound Chow Chow, and I moved in. The wooden nightstand showcased the room’s only décor: a Rand McNally road atlas and a Magic 8 Ball.
Before moving to Vegas, I was living in Tallahassee, Florida, and working at a residential home for troubled teenage girls. During one Sunday morning shift, the girls kept asking me if I would let them run away. I could get their shoes out of the locked closet, open the back door, wait fifteen minutes to give them a head start, and then call the cops. I could tell the psychologists that they threatened me. That one of them held a knife to my back—no; my face—then stole the keys from my pocket. Come on, they begged, we just want to see our boyfriends and smoke. Please?
All three of them were seventeen-year-old white girls who got into a lot of fistfights, dealt pot, and dated gangbangers. Usually when they asked me to let them run away I’d change the subject. But on that morning, as the girls over-plucked their eyebrows and pleaded with me to set them free, I felt sad for them. The only thing they looked forward to was filling paper cups with mouthwash, shooting it back as though it were bourbon, then pretending they were drunk. They were never allowed outside, and their lunches and dinners consisted of microwavable pasta dishes high in fat. As a result, they had acne and their clothes were too tight. I didn’t get their shoes from the closet, which seemed too calculated. But I did let them run away. Standing by the door, I watched them laugh and scream in disbelief, grasping for one another’s hands, their bare feet skipping across the parking lot’s blacktop. Fifteen minutes later I called the cops. Two days later I was fired.
A cocktail waitress job seemed like a better fit. But with no connections or casino experience my application went straight to the bottom of the heap. After applying to the fancy casinos on the Strip, I moved to the downtown casinos near my motel. Sure, I was welcome to apply for a position at the El Cortez, but I’d have to wait for sixty-five-year-old Rosie from Cheyenne, in her surgical stockings and culinary workers local 226 pin, to die before I could even get an interview. The only reason I had a job at the Thai restaurant was because my ex-boyfriend’s parents, who were nice enough to offer me a job upon arrival, owned it. They weren’t expecting me to break up with their son, however, and working there had become tense.
I gave Amy twenty percent off her curry and the following day she left a message. Interview at noon with Dink, 1459 North Rainbow.
The office park sat in a patch of desert eight miles off the Strip. Every few steps, Otis stopped to sniff and pee on the benches. Dragging him past the professionally dressed men and women enjoying their smoke break, I pulled the address out of my pocket. I hadn’t imagined gamblers doing business alongside divorce lawyers and accountants. In my denim miniskirt and Converse sneakers, and with Otis scruffy and panting at my side, I felt more like a teenage runaway than an interviewee. I pulled my hair out of its ponytail so that it fell over my shoulders and hid my bra straps.
In a row of offices with signs like Nevada Insurance and Coldwell Banker, stood a suite with no sign and white plastic blinds covering its windows. Next to the door was a square address plaque and scrawled in its center, in Wite-Out correction pen, was “Dink Inc.” From inside, a television blared. The sound of a bugle summoned horses to the starting gate at a racetrack. I knocked.
The door opened, revealing a guy about six-foot-four, two hundred and eighty pounds. His hair was a heap of shiny, springy brown curls, the kind you see in ads for home perms. Tucked into his armpit was a Daily Racing Form, and in his hand was a puffy white bagel overstuffed with lox. He introduced himself as Dink, then took a bite of his sandwich. With mouth full, he asked if my dog had an opinion on the Yankees game.
Dink was in his late forties, but his bashful smile and distracting habit of twisting his curls around his pointer finger made him appear much younger. He dressed like the mentally retarded adults I had met while volunteering at a group home. His Chicago Cubs T-shirt was two sizes too small for his expansive frame. Royal blue elasticized cotton shorts were pulled high above his belly button. White tube socks were stretched to the middle of his pale, hairless shins.
Inside the suite, a long banquet table was cluttered: hockey digests; baseball encyclopedias; a baseball prospectus; sports pages from USA Today, the New York Post, the Las Vegas Review-Journal; dozens of calculators; telephones; mechanical pencils; computer monitors; and several copies of Fuzzy Creatures Quarterly, a magazine that offered tips on how to better love and care for one’s hamster. At the front of the office, a tower of six forty-inch televisions balanced on a flimsy metal stand, each tuned to a different sport. Dink took his seat at the head of the table. In front of him, stacks of cash were piled as high as his bottle of Yoo-Hoo. I stared at the money, mesmerized.
He nodded to one of the TVs and in a heavy Queens accent he said, “We need Minnesoter and undah, for a decent amount.”
Having no idea what he was talking about, I said, “Okay,” and took a seat.
In the long silence that followed, Dink twirled and twirled his curls, engrossed in the basketball games and horse races. The action on TV reflected off his eyeglasses, which were as thick as hockey pucks and cloudy with thumbprints. Rising from the floor were stacks of books, all of which appeared to be on the subjects of hockey and New York punk bands except for one on the very bottom: Hide Your A$$et$ and Disappear: A Step-by-Step Guide to Vanishing Without a Trace.
On the TV, a player for Minnesota made two free throws. Unsure of whether or not this was a good thing for Dink, I stayed quiet and massaged Otis’s back with the bottom of my sneaker. Dink clicked the eraser of his mechanical pencil, then scribbled something down in his raggedy five-subject notebook. He asked me how well I knew Amy.
“Very well,” I lied. I smiled.
He took a swig of his Yoo-Hoo and asked me what I knew about gambling.
The day the Fort Lauderdale airport started offering casino junkets that flew nonstop to the Bahamas was the day my family started taking vacations. My dad, a car salesman, found out about the offer from the guys at the dealership. Basically, he guaranteed that he would spend a certain amount of time at the Paradise Island Casino blackjack tables, and in return, we got free airfare. The next thing I knew there were four airline tickets on the kitchen counter and Dad was coming home from work carrying books. Dad never came home from work carrying anything but Miller Lite tallboys. The only book in our entire house was the Lee Iacocca autobiography Dad won for selling the most cars at the Fourth of July tent sale.
The books were small and glossy and bore titles like A Winner’s Guide to Blackjack and Beat the Casino. They had lots of pictures and were only about sixty pages long. Perfect for an eleven-year-old like me. The week before the trip, after my mom and fourteen-year-old sister went to bed, I sat at the kitchen table and practiced dealing hands of 21 to my dad and my three Cabbage Patch Kids.
On the afternoon my family arrived at Paradise Island, Dad handed my mom, my sister, and me each a crisp one-hundred-?dollar bill. He recited our family vacation motto—Money is no ?object!—then bolted for the casino the moment the airport shuttle’s door slid open. Mom caught the trolley to the outdoor market, my sister went off to buy pot, and I went in search of my dad, eager to sit beside him at the tables and watch him play.
It was my first time in a casino but certainly not my father’s. In the early years of my parents’ marriage, he and Mom flew out to Vegas a couple of times a year and stayed at the Tropicana. In 1976, a nun from the orphanage called my parents and told them there was a two-week-old baby girl available. My parents had married young and had been trying to have kids for twelve years. They had adopted my sister three years earlier. Now there was a new baby, from a different family. Were they interested? Mom cried “Yes!” but as soon as she hung up, Dad reminded her of the tickets they had, to see Elvis in Vegas that weekend. The next morning they picked me up from Catholic Social Services, named me after the Kiss song “Beth,” which was playing on the radio, left me with Aunt Bonnie, and took off to Vegas. On the evening of the show, Dad found himself at the blackjack table, in the middle of a “hot streak.” Despite my mother’s pleading, Dad refused to quit playing, and they missed Elvis. Twenty-two years later, during their divorce, Mom repeated this story in front of the judge as proof that my father was a problem gambler.
Product details
- Publisher : Random House; Media tie-in edition (November 20, 2012)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 240 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0385526466
- ISBN-13 : 978-0385526463
- Item Weight : 6.4 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.19 x 0.52 x 7.99 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,820,934 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,239 in Gambling (Books)
- #52,565 in Memoirs (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Beth Raymer is the author of Fireworks Every Night, Head of Household: A Journal for Single Moms, and Lay the Favorite: A Memoir of Gambling. Her journalism has appeared in The New York Times and The Atlantic. She grew up in West Palm Beach, Florida, and now lives in New York City.
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The plot of the book is straightforward and I won't go into it here since so many other reviewers have outlined the basics: her finding a job with a professional sports gambler in Las Vegas, her move to New York to box in the Golden Gloves and work for a bookie in Long Island and her eventual escapades to the offshore, internet sportsbook in the Caribbean.
There's a spirt of giving in this book that is rare. The author does not sugar coat the bad nor does she judge it, which is so refreshing. There is a clarity here that one rarely sees, especially in memoirs which tend to be so self-referential and self-indulgent. Raymer is generous with her characters. She explains why she does what she does but she's never defensive, just honest--refreshingly honest.
The spirit of her memoir is immediately conveyed. First, she begins her book in the Thai restaurant where she propitiates Jowtee "the invisible spirit who controlled the restaurant's destiny." Right away, you know that one of the themes in this book will be--no surprise here--luck. Do you make luck? Or does luck smile upon you if you tend to the spirit--the spirit of Jowtee--which is in all of us: the belief that anything is possible as long as we cultivate an openness to the unexpected. That's what luck is, right? Something good that's unexpected. You might say that's what gambling is.
I can't imagine a better way to set the tone for the book than of an image of the author keeping this spirit of luck happy. Raymer describes how she brings to the booth reserved for Jowtee "imported bottled beer in a frusty mug, whole fish fried in hot sauce, and coconut ice cream for dessert. I'd bring him daily horoscopes and decks of cards from neighboring casinos. After lighting his candle, I'd close my eyes and telepathically beg him to help turn my life around and get me that cocktail waitress job at the Bellagio. Jowtee heard my plea. At least part of it."
This scene sets up the entire book: that life is mysterious but that goodness can come in all sorts of packages. That insight makes Raymer's character wise and sincere even when she does stupid and immature things. It sounds like a contradiction but it speaks to the openness with which Raymer approaches life not just as an adventure but a love for its details. That's what makes this book worth reading and it gives the readers a charmed feeling.
The answer to Raymer's prayer is a job with Dink, her first gambling boss who she describes in the most endearing way as a nebbish Jewish guy with a love of math and an addiction to sports. He was a regular guy, not some mobster. As Raymer writes, "He dressed like the mentally retarded adults I had met while volunteering at a group home."
Eventually, Raymer becomes a part of this oddball gambling world and the gamblers who for her become a surrogate family. "It was like a Norman Rockwell portrait of a family," she writes in one scene, "but instead of bowed heads and palms in prayer, we rooted for the Bucks to hit a three."
In New York, she meets Bernard Rose, aka the industrial grinder--a math genius with a softspot for garlic knots, chocolate eclairs "the size of hoagies" and Cher. He has a real vulnerability that Raymer turns into a character so vivid and tender you think--as you do throughout so much of this book--that you're reading a novel. "Meatballs make me so happy it's scary," Bernard says, sitting "splay-legged, the lower half of his belly hovering just a foot or so from the floor."
Raymer instantly feels close to Bernard Rose--a bookie who takes his business to Curacao in the Caribbean. She writes, "Watching him smile and chew, the afternoon light coming in through the frosty picture window behind, I was seized with the urge to crawl into his lap and rattle off my Christmas list."
Lay the Favorite never loses its energy. The story hums along and the reader can't help but go along with it. This is the kind of book that even people who don't read books will love.
To say the least, Raymer did not have a stable childhood, and she has commitment issues; but she writes with kindness about her family members. In fact, she is kind about almost everybody, even the lowlifes with whom she comes into contact in Las Vegas and the Caribbean venues where her gambling bosses do their business.
While some of the gambling lingo is not understandable to an outsider, the book still gives an education about gambling, including definitions of terms and unwritten rules of the game, and a recognizable code of ethics. Not all big bookmakers are mob, she explains: many are smart, compulsive Jewish boys who are good at math. She develops a love and loyalty to the men who hire her, trust her, pay her well, and give her sincere fatherly advice. But these men are definitely dysfunctional:
"The only thing you need to know is this: every gambler is a neurotic with an unconscious wish to lose. And as for the rare professionals who are talented enough to beat the house, rest assured they will go to whatever lengths necessary to surround themselves with people who will lose their money for them."
All throughout the story, enormous sums of money are won, lost, thrown around in packages, stuffed into backpacks. This money doesn't go into bank accounts and investments, but into safe deposit boxes all over the city when it's not stolen or floating around between winners and losers. You can feel the intoxication and the lure of excitement, but Raymer doesn't sugar coat the downside of this lifestyle: the drug addiction, the danger, the ruined families. She's a realist, a humorous observer of the action including her own role in it. Well, almost a realist: we never learn for certain if she's really left the life behind her. We do learn that she's turned her sights to become a writer, and I can only hope she keeps on writing.