Ron Overmyer

When Steve is away, Joyce goes to the neighborhood bingo games near El Cajon Boulevard. When Steve is home on leave, they go together to the Indian bingo games, sometimes three and four nights in a row.

Until last year the small Sycuan band of Mission Indians used to chase tourists and earnest anthropologists from their tiny reservation just south of Harbison Canyon, seven miles east of El Cajon. Not any more. Now the Sycuan Indians hire bus drivers and “hostesses” to bring you to their turf. In fact, if you're on Linda Vista Road and Ulric Street and it’s three forty-five in the afternoon, any afternoon of the week, and you board a red-and-white bus, vintage 1957 with patched seats, you get a free tour of half of San Diego and a free ride all the way out to the newest bonanza-land in the boonies — the Indian reservation.

Within the six months the games have been open, there have been changes in the quality of life of the tribe members. Says the Sycuan tribal chairwoman: “Unemployment has been erased, and everyone who wants to work has a job.”

Today the deer and the antelope play together with the Running Dog of capitalism, and the aroma is crisp twenty-dollar bills while the Indians teach the cowboys how free enterprise really works. Flourishing like cactus flowers in spring, these nouveau capitalists are providing paper and plastic trinkets and all the free coffee your Styrofoam cups can hold. The cowboys and cowgirls, 1200 to 1400 of them at a clip, are shelling out hard currency, lots of it, faster than you can holler Amway and Mary Kay. Faster than you can spell B-I-N-G-O.

The sign in the front window of the old red-and-white bus reads “Bingo Palace Express,” but “express” is misleading because it makes eight to ten local stops and passengers are in for a long ride. The old red-and-white winds through heavily trafficked city thoroughfares spilling into San Diego’s freeways, then out on Willow Glen Road and Dehesa Road where the terrain turns to pasture, where cows graze and rust-colored horses meander in the late-afternoon sun. While the bus clangs and pings uphill, pastoral turns into brush and brush into red clay and clay into pebbly mounds. At dusk, the rocky foothills start turning mauve. Past the Cottonwood Country Club and Cuyamaca College and Singing Hills Golf Course, past farms and corrals, through rural El Cajon, the red-and-white chugs on, and there, smack in the middle of all those amber waves of grain (only two-and-a-half roundabout hours from Linda Vista) is the brand-new, 27,000-square-foot bingo palace, situated in the one-square-mile sovereign nation of the Sycuans.

After it leaves the Linda Vista starting point, the Bingo Palace Express stops near Salazar’s Taco Shop on Genesee, just south of Balboa. Chatty, impromptu picnickers are standing on the sidewalk on Genesee and sitting on the bus-stop bench eating out of paper and plastic bags and Kentucky Fried Chicken boxes, and they pass around fruit and cookies while they wait. Newcomers get drawn into conversations right away by old-timers who offer them snacks.

Evelyn is an experienced player but she’s new to the Sycuan Bingo Palace, which she pronounces “Soo-can” rather than “Sick-wan.” Evelyn’s husband, an aerospace engineer, drops her off at the bus stop (Evelyn doesn’t drive). He sits quietly in a brown Mustang in back of Salazar’s until the bus takes off heading north on Genesee. By then Evelyn has lit her third king-size Carlton and she is striking up conversations with everyone on the bus at once by directing questions to no one in particular but everyone in general about “warm-ups” and “hard cards” and “night owls” and “early birds” and “black-outs” and “regulars” and “doubles.” She delivers a nonstop stream of unsolicited information about the games and the prizes at Saint Catherine Laboure church in Clairemont and what it’s like at the Barona Indian Reservation in Lakeside, where the community hall seats 800 bingo players and there are daily matinees except on Mondays and on Monday nights you can win a new car. In July the Barona tribe will open a 2000-seat bingo palace that cost two and a half million dollars.

Evelyn continues. She tells all the bus people — whether they’re listening or not — about the bingo games held under a provisional tent that holds 400 players at the Rincon Indian Reservation near Valley Center and the food at Saint Mary Magdalene church in Bay Park, where for $2.50 you get mashed potatoes and lotsa gravy and Salisbury steak with lotsa gravy and a roll and butter and something else but she doesn’t remember what. Evelyn’s large canvas bag (in addition to her purse) is. equipped with bingo supplies, Scotch tape, and snacks, but today she’s forgotten what’s most essential — chips (used to cover the numbers on the bingo cards). Faye, one of the hostesses or tour guides on the red-and-white, overhears Evelyn’s plight. In fast fellowship she and her sister Linda, the other hostess, offer to lend Evelyn a box of red plastic chips, provided she returns them at the end of the night. “We used to lend them out to everyone all the time, darlin’, but none of them ever got returned so here’s all that’s left and we keep track of them,” Faye explains in a gravelly voice that suggests a Wild West saloonkeeper, making two facts self-evident: one, she grew up in Texas, and two, her heart’s in the right place. Faye is a widow in her late fifties. She suffers from asthma and chronic lung infections, which explains why she sends the smokers to the back of the bus and why she’s not working any more as pastry cook at T.D. Hays and Halligan’s in Pacific Beach where one of her sons is a partner. Although the two sisters work the bingo bus every night, they consider it part-time employment. “Just for pin money — for bingo money,’’ Faye says, adding that she and Linda are paid a small “per head’’ percentage by the Sycuan tribe rather than a flat fee.

A bright-yellow nylon jacket with dark-blue letters that read “Sycuan Bingo Palace” covers Linda’s hefty frame. Underneath that she wears blue polyester pants and a print top and comfortable-looking “sensible” shoes. Along with the people on the tour and the bus drivers, the two sisters play bingo, too. Fortifying herself with a few bites of cold chicken, Faye admits that bingo can be an expensive habit. “Some of them just hate to be alone and do nothing and they get tired of watching television. Going to bingo is their only social life,” she says. “Everyone here’s real friendly and they don’t know where else to go, so they come here because it beats drink-in’ in a bar all night. Some of them have plenty of money, but some of them work real hard and don’t have much and they can’t afford to lose it, but they do. They don’t think they’re gambling, they think they’re just playin’ bingo with a bunch of friendly people.”

While Evelyn again establishes her bingo credentials (Barona, Rincon, Catherine Laboure, Mary Magdalene) with the regulars and summarizes the last few decades of bingo and what her lucky numbers are now and what they used to be, the red-and-white keeps rolling along, north to Clairemont Mesa Boulevard where more passengers are picked up in front of the Moonglow bar. Some of these passengers display wealth on every finger — rubies, diamonds, sapphires, emeralds — all set in chunky gold and platinum. Bejeweled gold charms hang from their necks and their wrists on heavy gold chains, and thousands of dollars’ worth of precious gems are embedded in their earlobes.^ Platinum-tinted beehives sprayed until stiff and Brillolike (a la Reno, Las Vegas, and Miami Beach, circa 1950), pink sweats and the kind of slip-on shoes they used to call “mules” back in the Fifties, beveled sunglasses on skin covered from neck to forehead in layers of pancake make-up and mouths defined by pale silvery-orange iridescent lipstick, chewing gum, and extra-long filtered cigarettes — these are the prevailing fashions. The bus heads south to Balboa and Clairemont Drive and then lumbers west and down the hill to Pacific Beach where Peggy, the grande dame of the bingo bus, comes on board, followed by her regular crew. When the noisy hellos subside, Peggy settles into her usual seat up front next to Happy Lena from the Philippines, exchanges a few minutes of conversation and compliments, adjusts her glasses; and then begins to read her paperback about the Kennedy family. Peggy’s plastic button earrings match her pale-blue polyester pantsuit and draw attention to her clear, light-blue eyes. Her bingo bag contains not only wooden racks and other bingo aids that mark habitual players, but today she’s got a sack full of foil-wrapped chocolate Easter bunnies to distribute to the staff at the Sycuan reservation. “I hope there’s enough,” Peggy says. “I wouldn’t want anyone to feel left out.” Within the four months that the bus has been making its daily trek to the reservation, Peggy has become a legend, probably since the night the security guards got together to present her with a twenty-five-dollar gift certificate to play bingo that particular night. People say they did it because Peggy’s so nice to be around and they just wanted to encourage her to keep returning.

Peggy says she began playing bingo twenty-three years ago at the Naval Training Center in San Diego with the other Navy wives while their husbands were stationed overseas for long periods at a time. Today the seventy-three-year-old grandmother takes care of three elementary-school-age grandchildren and their livestock (‘‘three dogs, ten birds, and two hamsters”) in the small Pacific Beach house she also shares with her husband, who is now retired from the Navy. Besides running a busy household, Peggy works the morning shift at the 7-Eleven store on Garnet near Mission Bay Drive. She relaxes for an hour a day watching soaps, she says, and then fixes dinner for the family. But nighttime is bingo time. While her husband stays home with the grandchildren and the animals, Peggy plays bingo seven nights a week. Seven nights, that is, except if she’s on a weekend in Las Vegas with the bingo crew. And when her husband goes out to the ball game, she stays home those nights with the kids — but she’s been to bingo seventy or eighty nights in a row. “I’ve worked hard all my life and I still do and I’ll spend my money the way I damn please!’’ she tells critics.

“I don’t win often,” Peggy says, “but when I win, I win big.” Last New Year’s Eve Peggy played bingo and won a 1984 Cadillac, but she sold it and used the cash to help pay off the house mortgage. Soon after that, she won an all-expense-paid trip to Florida to play bingo on the Indian reservation near Tampa — and two tickets to the Super Bowl were thrown in, but Peggy didn’t want to leave San Diego and her husband and grandchildren and her bingo friends, not even for a little while, so she turned the prize back to the reservation in exchange for a thousand dollars in cash. Peggy listens to your troubles and hands out compliments to everyone and she tells you to stick up for yourself. After you ride with her a few times, you wish she were your grandma, too.

As the red-and-white continues making pickups south on Ingraham, over into Point Loma to the Navy housing near Rosecrans, other stories unfold. They talk about Lucky Theresa’s roll. “A few weeks ago, Theresa won $7000 in one night, and a week later her husband Johnny won a thousand, and a few nights later, Theresa won another thousand,” Faye explains. People like to sit next to winners. Theresa’s got lots of people around her now on the bus. She always wins, they’ll tell you.

Some players never win but they keep going to bingo. Louise says she played forty-nine nights in a row without winning a penny and she was beginning to get discouraged. “But on my fiftieth anniversary at Sycuan bingo I won a great big eight dollars, so I keep coming every night but I don’t ever win anything anymore. Just the eight dollars was all I ever won,” Louise says. Within minutes, Louise lets her seat companion know that she’s divorced, that she’s got a bunch of children and a grandchild, and that she once lost sixty pounds but still couldn’t get together with a man so she gained back seventy-five. Louise earns a living selling Depression glass and what she calls “joolery” at Kobey’s Swap Meet.

Pat Beinlich, editor and publisher of the monthly twenty-page county-wide bingo tabloid Bingo Bugle (part of a chain of nineteen others), has a theory about why many of San Diego County’s estimated 200,000 bingo players are habitual. “It’s become a community,’’ she explains. “You see the same faces and they become familiar, and for single people, bingo provides a socially acceptable night out. It’s safe and it’s noncommittal.” She adds that several weddings have taken place as a result of continued bingo encounters.

Unlike Louise, who says she never wins, Nino says he always wins. Now an accountant in a local law firm, Nino is from New York and has only been in San Diego for a couple of years. He plays bingo at the Sycuan Bingo Palace every night of the week. “What else is there to do in San Diego?” Nino shrugs. As a self-professed veteran of “every bingo game up and down El Cajon Boulevard,” Nino says the others on the bus used to go to those games, too, and that’s how he knows their faces.

There are approximately 300 charity or nonprofit bingo games operating in San Diego, mostly in churches, synagogues, community centers, VFW and American Legion Halls, and Boys and Girls Clubs. They are limited by law to cash stakes of $250 per game and to volunteer staffs. The idea of funning bingo games on Indian territory began in Florida in 1978 on the Seminole reservation. The stakes are unlimited and cannot be regulated by any United States government agency because, according to Sycuan Tribal Chairwoman Anna Sandoval, Indian land is considered sovereign and state laws governing bingo don’t apply. Naturally, Indian bingo caught on and spread quickly throughout the nation. Today, about eighty-five Indian tribes across America are hosting bingo games. Here in San Diego, a three-year series of court battles between Sheriff John Duffy and the Barona Indians culminated in the U.S. Supreme Court refusing to hear Duffy’s appeal of a state Supreme Court’s ruling that gave the Indians legal sanction to stage bingo games. Four months later, in April of 1983, the 300-member Barona tribe opened San Diego County’s first official Indian bingo games on their ten-acre reservation. Their victory in court set the precedent for the Rincon and Sycuan tribes, as well as other tribes in California, to get in on the action.

When the Bingo Palace Express reaches its North Park pickup point on Idaho Street, Joyce and Steve and several others enter noisily. Joyce wears clinging beige pants and a flowered blouse that reveal her large, matronly shape. Her unstyled blond hair is short and curly, and she wears no make-up. At thirty-five, Joyce is seven years older than Steve, her husband, and she is nearly twice his girth. Steve keeps calling her “Baby.” Up until a few months ago, when they moved into a one-bedroom apartment in East San Diego, the couple had shared a small studio apartment. When Steve, who is a Navy enlistee, is at sea for months at a time, Joyce earns a little spending money washing clothes for her elderly neighbors and doing errands for them on foot. At night, when Steve is away, Joyce goes to the neighborhood bingo games which she identifies only by street names, near El Cajon Boulevard. When Steve is home on leave, they go together to the Indian bingo games, sometimes three and four nights in a row. Between them they say they spend an average of $ 110 per night by buying extra cards to increase their chances of winning. They are seldom successful. But since they have neither a car nor a phone and their rent is low, they figure they can afford to lose.

“He plays to win,” Joyce says, nodding in Steve’s direction, “but I go strictly for entertainment. Bingo’s in my blood. I learnt it offa my parents when I was a kid. I got seven brothers and sisters and we all grew up playing bingo and we all still play. Bingo is the only thing that doesn’t make me sick. Bingo and pool. I met him offa a pool table in Detroit,” she says, pointing to Steve. Without prompting, Joyce launches into a detailed description of their three years together before they got married. She had a series of short-lived jobs, she says, as a dishwasher, as a masseuse, and on an assembly line, but none of them worked out and she doesn’t work anymore. Because Steve couldn’t get work in Detroit, he joined the Navy and they got married in Vegas (where Joyce got on a plane for the first time in her entire life and she told the pilot how scared she was). They wound up in San Diego, even though Joyce’s children by her first husband are living in Detroit. Joyce relates years of bingo stories punctuated by family history and by Steve’s grinning approval. Joyce tells the well-worn tale of how Steve almost got on a game show but when the producer asked what cereal he ate that morning for breakfast, he drew a blank and was unable to remember whether it was Froot Loops or Cap’n Crunch.

Virginia is another of the North Park riders. She’s a seven-night-a-week player who insists that she never wins. “Only twice since February,’ she claims. Her hair is dyed bright red and she wears lots of rings. She usually comes with her husband Gary, who is from Samoa, and sometimes with her sister. Tonight she is alone and uncharacteristically quiet. “I don’t feel good,’’ Virginia says, but staying home for a night isn’t even considered. “What, miss bingo?’’ shrieks Nino from the seat directly in back. As he flaps his hands in the air until they rest on his dyed-bright-yellow hair, he reveals wildly attenuated fingernails. “You stay home from work before you stay home from bingo!’’ he laughs. It’s clear that for these two, Virginia and Nino, life without bingo would be flat.

The big K mart Store on University and Fifty-fourth is the last pickup point. Mary, a one-legged woman with a cane and a heavy Italian accent, gets on and greets people by announcing, “I’m a-gonna take-a the bigga money tonight!” Following Mary is a young black couple wearing fashionable jeans and sweaters, a Japanese woman called Yoshi, an ice carver from Hawaii named Jake, and Brandy, a blue-eyed Farrah Fawcett blonde wearing a black leather jacket and tight pants. Brandy has been playing bingo for eleven years and averages four nights a week at the Sycuan reservation. When she wins, she says the money goes to make payments on her husband’s tuba.

The bus is carrying a full load of forty-five passengers. Faye and Linda are walking down the aisle collecting game card money from each of them; fifteen dollars buys an evening’s packet of green cards, but if you buy a twenty-five-dollar packet of red cards, your winnings double — if you win. Linda is trying to sell magnetic chips and a matching magnetic wand for four and a quarter, but there are no takers, though several passengers are buying some lower-priced bingo supplies.

Animated conversations are going on all at once. Still plenty of eating, gum chewing, and smoking. Faye is coughing quite a bit and drinking ice water from a thermos. Two humorless white-haired women sit in the back of the bus, chain-smoking from the yellow packages of generic cigarettes, lighting one after another with an exquisite silver cigarette lighter that’s encrusted with turquoise. The inside of the old red-and-white now looks like a busload of refugees heading east, heading for tonight’s progressive bonanza jackpot possibility of $70,000. (If no one wins, the jackpot increases by $500 per night until someone does.) There’s a tension in the bus as it draws nearer to California Gold. As the landscape out the window turns from urban to rustic, Linda takes the bus microphone and further stimulates the crowd. “Is everyone feelin’ lucky tonight?” she yells. “Yes!” they yell back. “How many of you feel lucky?” she calls for a show of hands. “Y’all wear your Easter bonnets on Sunday, okay?” Linda says. She announces that there’ll be prizes on the bus for the best bonnets and bigger prizes for the best-looking bonnets at the bingo palace.

Just beyond a thicket of oak trees and past a small wrecking yard, the bus stops in front of the bingo palace, which, from the outside, resembles a woodsy Price Club. During Santa Anas, the smell from the pigpen on the hill above intrudes for but a brief moment. Plenty of other buses and cars converge. After a representative from the Sycuan tribe boards the red-and-white to make a perfunctory, low-key welcome speech (two sentences), all forty-five passengers pile out and head inside, into the small entry lobby where they exchange the tickets they bought from Faye for their packets of game cards. It’s six o ’clock now but game time isn’t until a quarter to seven, so there’s forty-five minutes to buy more bingo supplies, extra cards, cigarettes at a dollar and a quarter a pack, and Las Vegas-style “pull tabs’’ which are, in essence, miniature slot machines, similar to the cardboard supermarket giveaways. If your series matches, you win.

There’s also forty-five minutes left to feed the hungry, though many have been eating continuously on the bus. The plastic marquees at the two food concessions (owned and operated by the Sycuan tribe) reflect an attempt to please the diversity of players: hamburgers, nachos, egg rolls, chili, and bagel dogs. Aspirin, Rolaids, Alka-Seltzer, and breath mints are given equal-size billing directly under the food listing. At the counter is a prominent sign that reads, “We Gladly Accept Tips.” In case you miss the sign, the message “Tipping Allowed and Appreciated” is printed on the daily program, and if you miss that, too, a similar announcement comes over the public address loudspeakers.

The Sycuan Bingo Palace, largest in the county, was built with prefabricated parts in just six weeks in the fall of last year. The place has as much charm and warmth as a warehouse. The 1450 bright-orange plastic seats attached to the floor, eight TV monitors and nine electronic flash-boards, and big red-and-white signs indicating restrooms and concessions, generate a certain gambling hall excitement further stimulated by cigar and cigarette smoke and twenty Sycuan security guards walking around providing protection. According to the managers, there’s never been any violence. “There’s a lot of stuff here to protect — lots of expensive equipment,’’ explains one of the guards. “And we’re here to let the cleaning people in at four in the morning,” she says. There are accommodations for everyone here — handicapped facilities, wheelchair tables, smoking and nonsmoking sections, and according to the printed program, Braille cards are welcomed.

It’s a few days after “Income Tax Deadline Day” and a couple of days before Easter, yet 1200 people show up. Mainstream America is mingling unselfconsciously with Third World America in accents ranging from Nebraska to Manila to Saigon to Brooklyn to Naples to Spanish Harlem. Lots of tattoos and huge crucifixes and polyesters. Eighteen-year-old kids in jeans and eighty-year-olds in wheelchairs and fashionable blonde anorexics and hillbilly porkers with paunches hanging over their belts. Young pregnant women and lumpen and leisure and blue collars smoking cigarettes, eating nachos, and chewing gum. You see registered Republican types and people who’ve never voted in their lives, and obvious gays and straight-arrows and entire families (three generations) and couples, and those who come alone. Black, brown, red, yellow, and pink, forming an instant coalescence — united under the bingo banner. And in the middle of all this wonderful humanity are two Indians dressed in Easter Bunny outfits roaming around selling bonanza tickets. Selling Americana.

By now the bingo equipment is spread out on the long tables and good luck charms are in view. The players are supplied with enough cigarettes to last the night, they’re hyped on caffeine, and the 1200 are seated and ready to play. After a few announcements are made, the low-ante warm-up games begin. The only sound you hear in this gigantic hall is the sound of the caller’s voice: “N forty-five,” he calls. ”B nine. O seventy-one.” After he calls a few more numbers, someone invariably yells, “Bingo!” The next game is quickly announced, and the next and the next. There are no intermissions. If you have to go to the restroom, you’d better have someone play your cards or you can forget about going. Everyone in the room is concentrating on the single number that appears on the TV monitors seconds before the caller announces it. The great hall is absolutely still, as still as an exam room during finals. There’s no schmaltzy M.C. to warm up the crowd. There’s no need for cheap laughs and one-liners to keep the crowd awake. There aren’t any Indian artifacts for sale or photos of life before bingo on the reservation. There are no feathers or tom-toms or sideline hawkers of good deals on turquoise rings or leather belts, and there’s very little movement in the hall except for the floor clerks who wear name badges and colored aprons denoting what they sell or what function they perform. They move swiftly and quietly around the great hall in their Adidas, dispensing extra cards, taking food orders, emptying ashtrays, and accepting tips. When someone yells, “Bingo!” there’s a mild hum.

When tribal chairwoman Anna Sandoval attended last year’s tribal council meeting in Sacramento, seeking some sort of economic development for the tribe, another member of the Tribal Chairman’s Association suggested bingo. Anna thought it was a good idea, especially since she’d been playing church bingo for years (and never won, she says). The funds for the 1450-seat, million-dollar building were initially provided by the Pan American Management Company, which has handled bingo on Indian reservations in Florida, Arizona, and Minnesota. After Pan American is paid off for the building, the split is 55-45. “Fifty-five percent for the tribe,’’ says Anna. “We hire the management company and we pay them forty-five percent of the profits.’’

She says that within the six months the games have been open, there have been changes in the quality of life of the tribe members. “Unemployment has been erased,” she says, “and everyone who wants to work has a job.” According to Sandoval, by next year the tribe will have repaid the management company for the building and will begin funneling profits into health clinics and improving the education of the youngest tribe members. “We’re a very small tribe, with less than ninety of Us, including children. The next generation will reap the profits of bingo,” she figures. Meanwhile, the Sycuans have been creating good will in neighboring communities by holding special games to benefit the Great Oaks Village home for retarded adults, by contributing to several volunteer fire departments, and by contributing to the Muscular Dystrophy Fund. “Most important,” she stresses, “is that bingo has given us our dignity.”

The night is almost over. Lucky Theresa is off her roll. Between buying red cards and extra chances at bonanza jackpots and six extra bingo cards that pay double and lots and lots of pull tabs, Joyce and Steve drop over a hundred between them. Steve is playing the standard set of twelve red cards that pay double and he’s busy helping everyone, watching their cards and going to the counter for coffee. There’s plenty of good-natured kibitzing going on at the table. One man leaves to go to another table that’s quieter, more serious. Joyce is concentrating on playing eighteen red cards at once. She spends extra money to increase her odds but she still comes up empty. “Missed it by one. Baby,’’ Steve says cheerily. They didn’t win anything last night or the night before, but they look happy. After the last game is over, Joyce announces, “Well, we didn’t win a dime. A hundred-fifteen down the tube.’’ She laughs. They’ll be back tomorrow night and maybe they’ll win and maybe not, but they’d rather lose at bingo than be anywhere else in the world.

Some players want to stay on and spend a few more dollars and get another few rushes of adrenalin and play a few more rounds in the “Night Owl “ games that last for another hour, finishing somewhere close to midnight.

While one of the callers is announcing tomorrow night’s big bonanza lure, Faye and Linda and the bus driver are beginning to round up their passengers and herd them back to the bus. Faye announces that a Navy wife is one of three winners of an $ 11,000 jackpot — her share is $3667. In addition, she’s won another high-stakes game, giving her a total profit for the evening of $4174. Everyone has to wait in the bus because the winner is delayed at the counter collecting her money. She’s an instant celebrity, and when she comes on board they all burst into applause, just like on a game show. Louise, who never wins, mutters to her seat companion that if she’d won, she’d share the money with all the passengers.

To cement solidarity, Linda announces into the microphone in a self-congratulatory tone that the grand total of winnings of those who ride the old red-and-white during the months that they’ve been operating is $133,983. “Pretty good!” she exclaims. Happy Lena, who always sits next to Peggy on the bus, announces that she won $200; and Brandy, who played twenty-four cards (doubles) at a time and bought lots of extras, also won $200. (“This’ll make the last payment on the tuba,” she smiles.) Out of forty-five players, there are three winners, yet all the passengers look unified in spirit.

Before the celebrity winner is dropped off at Navy housing, Peggy asks her why she doesn’t donate (from her winnings) a step stool that will enable short-legged people to step down from the bus to the ground more easily. “Hey, I just might do that! ” the celebrity laughs, “but first thing I’m gonna do is pour me a double Scotch.” After she leaves, the remaining riders continue to talk about the big win. They identify with the winner because she’s one of them so that makes them all winners. Someone wonders aloud why she didn’t take a cab home. The tale will be recounted for weeks, each with her own version of how close she was to getting it, how close she was to coming home with a pocketful of money, and what she’d spend it on.

When the rickety old bus swings around to Pacific Beach, Peggy’s bunch gets off. ‘‘I’m so mad I didn’t win. I’m not coming back. Not until tomorrow night,” Peggy says with a wink as she steps down onto the curb. It’s after midnight now and Peggy has to be at work at the 7-Eleven store by seven in the morning. Faye and Linda and the others wave goodnight to Peggy, knowing they’ll see her again in about sixteen hours. As the red-and-white heads up the hill to Clairemont, those who are still left start rubbing their eyes and yawning and stretching and complaining about being tired, but they’re still talking about the big win and how close they were to making it. Tomorrow night they’ll make it for sure.