Bismillah* your old selfto find your real name. - Rumi
I felt like a dying clownBut with a streak of Rin Tin Tin - The Who
My name is Ozymandias, king of kings!Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! - Percy Bysshe Shelley
It's not completely unheard of to lose your ass at a casino. I mean, it happens all the time. In any movie or television show set in Vegas, if there's a scene in a casino, you've seen someone acting like they've lost their ass. For every story you hear of someone winning at a casino -- it does happen because too much losing is bad for business -- there are countless people who lost their ass ... or more... because the house always wins.
What is, perhaps, a bit more unusual is to completely lose your identity.
Lost. Stolen. Some cosmic message in the form of a pickpocket. Whatever.
The day began on a simple premise. My friend Jamie is, apparently, something of a card sharpie at the blackjack tables and can turn a little bit of money into a slightly larger amount of money in a matter of hours. She wanted to go, partially to have something to do, but also so she could win some money to add to my travel fund. A dear heart, really. She even offered to stake me some money so I could play myself.
Now, all lines being arbitrary... because, let's be honest, they mostly are... I told her I didn't like the idea of gambling with someone else's money. This, she thought, was completely ridiculous. It was no big deal, she maintained. If I lost my stake, she would be able to make it back. And if I happened to win, I count it as a contribution to the travel fund. And since all lines are, really, for the most part, arbitrary...
I thought, what the hell.
Now, I should also mention that while I am no expert at the game of Blackjack. I have some experience at it. Actually, other than the horses, the game of 21 is my preferred method of itching the gambling urge. And while the money is nice, it's the adrenaline rush that tends to drive me in these situations. I like blackjack because not only is it an easy game to learn, but it also satisfies a certain egalitarian impulse: you always play against the house, not against your fellow players.
In theory. Apparently there's all sorts of things you can do to put the squeeze on your fellow players and press your own advantage. I will admit a certain ignorance regarding this sort of table etiquette. There are a a few often thought of "hard and fast" rules in how you play the came, like Hit on 16 and Stay on 17. But what they don't tell you is that those rules are as much to the houses's advantage as the odds on a Roulette Wheel. Yes, there are times when it's goo to hit on 16. There are also times when it's good to stay on 14. Because in spite of the seeming simplicity of the rules, the cars are still fickle, they're still shuffled, and they still behave in a random way.
I was doing okay for a while, and managed to a but more than double the stake Jamie had given me. Jamie was doing pretty well herself, for the most part, but she kept giving me advice... which was distracting her from her game. The table was pretty calm, a nice flow was going and the winning was spreading itself around... which is what, in the best of all situations, you can hope for. Then a high rolling Ethiopian, who played loud and nervous and talked smack to distract the order of the game, came and sat in the chair to my right, putting him on the dealer's left and in the first position for cards. I managed to win a few more deals, even getting a Blackjack (a face card and an ace) or two. The more I won, the more smack he talked. He was betting heavy, and had clearly had a number in mind he needed to hit in order to confirm his manhood.
I was up, and the Ethiopian started winning as well. Then he finally hit his number and left. A few more hands were dealt, Jamie was up, so was the other player at the table, and things were going pretty well.
And came The Cooler.
We cycled through two different dealers, both of whom did a good job of spreading the wealth around whenever possible. The third dealer, however -- a cold skinny bitch with fake eyelashes and a pre-teen's love of blue eye shadow -- killed the table almost immediately. And between here and other pre-teen who felt like he'd gained some experience at the $1 buy in tables (There's a 25 cent table fee with each hand. This means that in order to win $1, you have to pay $1.25. To win at all, you have to bet in $5 increments... which means you might as well find a $5 table. But it's good for the kiddies that don't want to feel like they're losing a lot and who never paid attention in math class.)
I lost my buffer and my stake pretty quickly. It was clear that Jamie wasn't finished, though so I told her I'd get some air and wait.
I went outside and smoked. I could've smoked inside the casino, but it was nice day outside, and I wanted to sit outside and get away from the sound of the slot machines. One of the reasons casinos can afford to let people win at cards is because their money is in slot machines. And spare me the amazing stories of people who have won masses of cash sitting for hours sipping a mojito, smoking a carton of Virginia Slims, and squinting aggressively at the machine in front of them. The odds are always in the house's favor. Yes, they have to let people win so people will walk through the doors to lose and still feel like they had a reasonable chance. But if playing Blackjack is an egalitarian activity, owning a casino is akin to being a successful drug dealer. They ALWAYS come back.
So I smoked, I engaged in some constructive people watching, and felt pretty good.
Then I noticed my journal was not in my back pocket where I had thought it was.
My first thought was: "I can't find my journal!"
Then I remembered: both my driver's license -- my only form of picture ID -- and my bus pass were in my journal as well.
Did I drop it? I thought about the last time I'd seen it. That was lunch.Sometimes I take it out and set it the table, along with my cell phone, when I eat. I went back to all the placed I'd been. I went to the casino restaurant were we ate lunch. They told me anything left at the table would have been turned into lost and found. I asked where that was located, and was told that I could talk to any white-shirted security officer and they would help me.
So I found the nearest rent-a-cop and described my journal, it's important contents, and asked if he could check. He did. There was nothing in lost and found matching the description. I back tracked every step I could remember. Nothing anywhere. Then I went to the parts of the casino I didn't even go to, around the slots where the wrinkled old ladies say smoking near tobacco-less cigarettes and sipping Diet Coke. Nothing. I found a second security guard. He checked over the radio. Nada. I went to find Jamie and found her at another table, doing very well. Between hands I asked if she had it... maybe, I thought, it slid out of my pocket when I left the table. She didn't have it, and gave the key to the car just in case it slipped out of my pocket there, which I was sure it hadn't. It wasn't in the car.
At this point I asked another security guard and after the third check, I was sent to a house phone. Maybe some luck?
No. Zack, who was very apologetic, took down my contact information and said they'd call me if it turned up.
I ended up having to get Jamie to take me back to hers and Dave's place to see if maybe, just maybe I had forgotten it there. I knew I didn't because I don't forget my journal. Any one who knows me knows this about me.
Jamie said she had a good feeling, but I didn't share the sentiment. She felt bad because the casino had been her idea, but she didn't need to. Either I lost it because I wasn't paying attention, or it was stolen by someone who mistook it for a wallet or pocket book.
All they'd find is my nearly indistinguishable scrawls and scribbles, my bus pass, my Illinois Driver's License, and my IWW Red Card... which is behind on stamps because I haven't paid dues since hitting the road. Then it occurred to me that if it HAD been stolen, the most they could hope for was to steal my identity.
Let them try, I thought. My credit rating is so bad at this point they'll lose money trying to make it work. If some undocumented worker tried to steal my name for employment, even that record is spotty. Shit. Let 'em have the collectors and parasites that have my name on some list somewhere. Let 'em have my student loan debt.
I drank a beer, ate two cookies, and began to breathe. Yes, breathe. When people panic, usually the first thing they stop paying attention to is the one thing that, without it, they will not be alive. Air. There's a reason that every form of meditation there is begins with a breathing exercise of some kind. Breathing is fundamental. You can have water and food, but without air, it's meaningless. It's something I've fallen back on when I've been on the road and have to change my travel plans at the last minute. Like leaving St. Louis and going to Nashville. Like going to Colorado instead of Salt Lake City. Breathe. Adapt.
Losing my license and bus pass -- which only had a week left on it -- is not fundamentally different from any other change in plans. People place more importance on having photo ID because society is constantly insisting that we prove who we are, that we defend our right to belong, that we identify as one of the group and take our place among them, happy in our very specific anonymity.
I was annoyed at the loss of the journal, my notes since San Francisco, the various bits of poems I hadn't gotten a chance to type out. But I've been writing long enough to know there will always be more words, and the poems... well, they sometimes return of their own volition. As if they will themselves into being.
The universe has a funny way of sometimes giving you what you need when you don't know you need it. People sometimes enter and leave your life at just the right time. Relationships end so that new ones can begin. Although I love my family dearly, I have, over the years wondered what it might be like to have a different name. I have had different names over the years: Mickey, Mic, Michael, Mick, Quill, Papa. I have sought a way to bring the self within myself closer to the surface... to be who I am rather than what the culture dictates I ought to be.
And now, I am divested of my official identification... and in a way, my identity. I can call on a dozen people or more who could attest to my existence, and know me and who I am. There are people who love me, people who see me... truly see me. So, other than the inconvenience of occasionally being carded in a bar... usually by someone who looks 12 ... do I really need more proof of my own existence other than myself?
A name is a marker, nothing more. It separates us from others. Some believe our naming impacts who we become. But really, all a name does is tell others who are.... and who we are not. We attribute more to some names than others. Historical names. Rich names. Famous names. Infamous names. In the end, though, a name is nothing more than an utterance we have been trained since birth to respond to. Sons (many times) carry the last name of their father. Daughters (many times) carry that name unless they decide to get married and exchange it for another person's name. A name has been connected to notions of dependence and independence, to slave ownership, to heritage, to tradition, to the passing on of wealth and affluence, or -- at times -- the passing on of guilt, spite, hatred, and judgement.
What's the line by Shakespeare? A rose by any other name would smell just as sweet?
Granted, in context, Mercutio is trying to convince Romeo to girl he's infatuated with and move on to some other more willing conquest. And then, of course, Romeo meets Juliet and turns into a dumbass.
Sorry. It's not a romantic play. It's farce. It's about how stupid young people can be, and how pointless family feuds are. It's not romantic to kill yourself because you didn't check to see if your girl is still breathing.
My point, though? I am no less who I am just because I can't prove it. In fact, it's possible that I am more me now than at any time in my life. Ever.
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Bismillah: "In the name of god," spoken prior to a sacrificial slaughtering of an animal in the Sufi / Middle Eastern tradition.
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