Suddenly it occurs to him he is not just on a small road in the middle of nowhere on the edge of Dehesa.

Joel Nakamura

When Dostoyevsky wrote The Gambler at the end of the 19th Century, the gambler was already a type. Highly strung, wild-eyed, given to unaccountable superstitions, he was the most engaging anti-hero of them all. But gambling today is no longer the pastime of lurid literary types; it has become a gay and democratic activity, somewhat akin to mini-golf and cookery classes. In short, gambling has given way to the game of bingo. And bingo, that calm and sly pursuit of the terminally idle, has become the only activity short of gladiator shows which can entice people from their couches and into a nocturnal adventure reminiscent of blind dating.

In the gray London suburb of my childhood, a proclivity for bingo was tantamount to confessing one had a colourful tropical disease or the onset of senile dementia. There, frenzied old ladies with blue hair sat in dis-used cinemas scanning their prize counters for felt greyhounds and rabbit-shaped teapots. The problem with bingo was, and remains, its image. Who could imagine a Dostoyevsky bingo novel, a tale of obsession and despair woven around the Texas Blackout or the Crazy Bow Tie?

But the European traveller in Southern California is taken utterly by surprise by the bingo he finds being played in the suburban townlets and the Indian reservations. For this bingo is unlike anything he has encountered. In fact, it is possible to imagine the bearded Russian prophet sitting happily with his daubers and popcorn under the great electronic screen that spells ecstasy or disaster. For here in Southern California, bingo itself has become something altogether more magical. The proof of this lies in the California literature of bingo.

At some point, our naive traveller will notice a small local broadsheet, the San Diego Bingo Bugle, lying in racks in grocery stores and even in the occasional prestigious hotel lobby. Out of curiosity, it is inevitable that he will pick it up and, in the privacy of his room, find the paper packed with exciting stories and eye-opening investigations. Upon the cover he will immediately notice the blurred monochrome faces of some bulky housewives from Mira Mesa and Chula Vista holding up, like trophy sharks, enormous cheques inscribed with preposterous sums of money.

Holding the paper close to his nose, he will verify the sum which has just been handed over by a smiling bingo-palace manager to that lucky Mrs. Prang. Eighty thousand dollars? He can barely suppress a chortle. Can they seriously make anyone believe that Mrs. Prang from the Prang Computer store of Miramar has actually won $80,000 on the MegaBingo satellite game at the Barona reservation in Lakeside, a game which, they claim, is played from Tulsa and which pays out million-dollar dividends at least once a week?

All the faces displayed on the cover of the Bingo Bugle are the same. The same glassy eyes. The same frozen, transfixed, half-terrified smiles. Success at bingo has made them look like baked reptiles.

Our astounded alien, marvelling at the dedication and resourcefulness which has allocated to bingo a literature of its own, will then initiate himself in the distinctly religious language with which bingo is now surrounded. A language of miracles: "Blessed Sacrament’s Two-Car Giveaway,” “Saint Gabriel’s Poway Sunday Bingo Free Single Set of Speedies and Turkey Drawings," “Saint Peter Chaldean [above a praying Middle Eastern couple] and Our Lady of Grace: Variety of Breakopens.” And there are the Temple Judea and the Church of Saint Mark advertising their 75/75 Split on All Silver Taken. It is almost as if the Blessed Sacrament could make Geo Metros out of bread and wine and then distribute them to the downtrodden players of bingo.

But it is only when he reaches the “Bingo Astrology” column on page 13 that the full weight of bingo mysticism finally bears down upon him. For there, ranged under the signs of the zodiac, are all the prognostications for your coming week of bingo based on your celestial sign written in a coded language reminiscent of Black Magic.

Taurus, for example:

• Lucky no. 45 - Magic no. 9
• 1st-6th. Lovely rewards awaits 1st/5th$$
• 7th-12th. Not crazy 'bout it
• 13th-18th. Sure worth a try the 14th!
• 19th-24th. It’s your day the 24th.
• 15th-31st. Blue will bag it 28th

There is no doubt in his mind at this point that he is at the threshold of a strange world with its own rules and customs. Doubtless the devotees of this cult consult the stars every week in the Bugle to guide the hand of fate. For it is obvious to every gambler that the dividing line between success and failure is often a matter of the tiniest details.

Now if our childish traveller is to come clean, he will admit at once that he cannot resist any hint of the supernatural. How then could he ever have hoped to avoid the occult charms of bingo? At the back of his mind, he has already formed the hope that, one fine moonlit night in the desert, he will outdo Mrs. Prang from Miramar and prove the truth of the adage that there is more in heaven and earth than in any of his philosophies.

Route 8 heading inland is, at dusk, one of those suburban commuter freeways so common to cities throughout the Western world that the would-be first-time bingo ace feels increasingly at ease. A studious reader of maps, he has no intention of getting lost, and he cleaves tightly to his directions as he searches for the correct exit in the dark and finally lunges into the unknown in the vicinity of Jamacha Road. But he finds himself suddenly hurtling through dark lanes surrounded on all sides by scrubland.

In a panic, he mistakenly concludes that he is about to be catapulted into the desert, where he will probably spend the rest of the week blindly trying to find his way out.

Just as real fear begins to creep in, he finds himself pulling up to an all-night supermarket, with a squat, dilapidated bar tacked onto one side, huddled under a brilliant desert sky. And there, in the illuminated window glowing with scrabbled little beer neons, a mysterious object is standing on a tray—an object which unexpectedly gives him hope.

Inside the tiny mart, three women in red uniforms are waiting to tell him that the red cylinder standing in the window is indeed a mass-produced instrument for the playing of bingo. It is a felt-tipped dauber with a flat nib to block out the squares on the marker cards. Rather ashamed of his accent, he now tries to bend it into a nasal, Louisiana-style drawl, such as he thinks desert people in Westerns speak, and tries to pass for an inexplicably disoriented local.

They look at him in amazement. Is he from the Soviet Union? He laughs uncomfortably and points to the dauber. They must be selling it for a reason.

Would there by any chance be a bingo hall in the neighborhood, or at least one within 100 miles?

By now the empty shop has come to seem a little spooky. The juke box in the nasty bar next door is rattling the shelves.

But as soon as he has uttered this question, the three red ladies are transformed. A radiant glow comes to their faces. He has said the word. Has he come all the way from the Soviet Union with that horrible accent to play bingo here in El Cajon? An intense maternal generosity now animates them, and they spontaneously confess that they play it at Dehesa just about every minute they have free. The flap their hands. Is he a novice? He doesn’t even realize how much fun he’s going to have out there in Dehesa (they wave at the utter darkness out of the window).

“This week," one of them winks as if they are all conspirators now, “they’re giving away free turkeys!”

In the parking lot, the solitary Indian in a black Stetson who has been standing by the bead door of the bar has fallen onto his heels and is looking forlornly at a patch of ochre dust between his boots. Large men are whooping inside. And suddenly it occurs to him he is not just on a small road in the middle of nowhere on the edge of Dehesa. He is somewhere even more disconcerting than that. He is in the great, dusty interior of Bingoland.

The addicts behind the cash tills have drawn new directions for him on the back of his dauber receipt — thin, straggling spaghetti lines which are meant to be roads heading ever farther into Bingoland. And as he plunges into total darkness, he thinks of this land as something like a stage direction in an avant-garde play. Night falls. Bingoland. Which is to say, nowhere..

It is about half an hour before the solitude of this nocturnal wilderness is broken by the taillights of other cars. Gradually he comes to see that he has slowly been joined by a whole cavalcade of open-back trucks, gleaming BMWs with Arizona plates, and heaving chariots filled with grits-eating bingo monomaniacs, all moving toward the same destination. Between the cars are the bingo buses from downtown San Diego, packed with acolytes on their weekly gambling spree, the whole snake of machines moving in a long curve across the scrub toward what he can now see is a tiny ice-blue neon scrawl on the horizon, a word which can gradually be read as SYCUAN.

As soon as he has dumped himself in the immense carpark, which now, at 6:30, must contain over 500 vehicles, he knows that he is no longer in California. It is the sweet smell of the desert wafting over the sand hillocks and a rust-coloured gibbous moon hanging over the steel girders of the huge barn of a gaming hall, and it is the knowledge that the state’s laws have been left behind somewhere on the road. Not knowing in the least what to expect from this giant prefab building which sits in the wilderness like a marooned spaceship, he makes his way across the carpark and climbs a gentle ramp to the glass doors.

If Bingoland had a haunted city, this would be it. And if Bingoland had prophets, they would call it the gambling Gomorrah.

And yet what a squeaky-clean, healthy, unctuous feel there is to this utilitarian den. Entering it for the first time, the innocent is dazzled by the television screens — screens in such abundance that he thinks they are mirrors reproducing themselves to infinity. A thousand Aztecs’ helmets flash around him from the football game shown on them that night, and he feels dizzy at once. But in odd glass cubicles here and there, exhausted bingo worshippers sit motionless in front of eight screens all showing the same thing. There is very little noise. Only a vague, homogenous hum rising from the cerulean pow-gai tables.

Sitting at the empty alcohol-free bar with its dozens of simulation beers reflected in a long mirror, he sifts through the enigmatic wad of multicoloured papers which the receptionists have just sold him for $10. The bingo program lists the evening’s order of games and illustrates each with a small diagram. At seven, the ball gets rolling with the Mystery Money 6-0n, beginning with Three-Card Bingo and a game entitled Horizontal and Vertical. Thereafter. the names of these games become progressively more exotic. What is the Crazy Giant Kite or the Sycuan 7? Having never in his life played the game, he is utterly at a loss as to what he will be expected to do. And so sitting there at the bar, nonplussed and anxious, he attracts the scornful attention of the hard-bitten regulars who see him turning his head upside down in his attempts to figure out the program cards, and they wink to each other like vultures.

Next to him, an immense pile of blue satin holds a hardened female gambler with bulbous veins on the backs of her hands and a face so terrifying in its bingoed cynicism that he wonders what the game must do to people over a long period of time. To judge by the bitter peony mouth with its radial cracks on either side and the haunted, mascaraed eyes — which have in them the kind of worldliness one sometimes discovers in the eyes of certain dominant pigeons — bingo can certainly harden the soul. It is also apparent that coming here is a rather intoxicating social event. For there is a wilted feather in her hair, and from each ear dangles a magnificent 24-carat ethnic ornament in the shape of an anaconda.

It may be that people come to these happy oases of leisure in search of lonely hearts or future husbands. And who could deny the inherent romanticism of a fortuitous encounter over the electronic bingo boards or a chance collision at the Kentucky Fried Chicken counter? Bingo could bring lonely souls together as well as any dating agency, and a perusal of the bar certainly confirms an impression of irresponsible friskiness.

The fellows in the check pants and ulay-scented pomade have certainly lost no time familiarizing themselves with the bingo women in their tartan slacks and bingo-chic butterfly brooches. And as the newcomer makes his wary way out into the main corridor, he sees more happy couples sauntering up and down the corridor with childish expressions of contentment on their faces. And from the vast, coldly illuminated bingo hall itself, a curious crepitation of comradeship filters through the glass gates.

The hall is divided into dozens of long tables at which hundreds of punters sit absorbed in their scorecards. On three sides, huge computerized screens register the numbers called by the master of ceremonies, who sits suspended above the mass of gamblers in a magisterial box. Hunched over a microphone, he calls out the random numbers with the kind of voice which announcers use at boxing bouts.

And along the endless aisles between these tables, between the hairsprayed help girls and the donut vendors with trolleys, he sees, for the first time, the people he has been waiting to see all along and whose reluctance to appear has been a great disappointment to him: the Sycuan themselves.

As it happens, they are the first native Americans he has ever seen. The only others have been those in Dances with Wolves. But now he sees the nomads in the flesh, not clad in buckskin or hugging trees but walking down these bingo aisles in gold chains and Gucci shoes. To tell the truth, he is a little scandalized.

In Europe, whole bookstores are being turned over to the nomad wisdom of the Amerindian. The Noble Savage has made one of his periodic comebacks, and frankly it is more than a mite shocking to see the bearers of this immemorial sanity strutting up and down the bingo playing room looking for all the world like groomed bouncers at a well-heeled, middle-aged disco. Couldn’t they at least have had the decency to retain a stern, nomadic expression or refused, at a bare minimum, to wear those Tom Jones gold chains?

Nor would it be realistic to assume that all of this is a fagade behind which the pure way of life still lurks, raking in the dollars but preserving its ancestral dignity. Not at all. At the back of his mind, the knowledge that the 96 Indian reservations of California turn over hundreds of millions of dollars per annum, that the Indian Gambling Regulatory Act of 1988 is about to crumble before a wave of demands for slot machine licenses, and that only the reservations — delightfully exempt from state gambling laws—can assemble these vast complexes devoted only to easy money, all of this demolishes any hope that the Sycuan will one day go back to breeding horses and meditating on the winds. Bingo has opened the golden door. As the poor charity bingos of San Diego gradually go out of business, as players head more and more to the reservations in the hope of a quick kill, the vertiginous prospect of Indian-run mini Las Vegases in the San Diego suburbs looms large.

Our newcomer might even know that there is now a National Indian Gaming Commission. That it recently campaigned successfully in Wisconsin for the opening of full-blooded casinos on the reservations. Under one roof, a dizzying variety of gambling games might soon be put together, from Pull-Tabs, electromechanical facsimiles and what are mysteriously known as pari-mutuel terminals (gambling machines), the 75-number-card KinoBingo, poker, and, at Sycuan, both their own card game known as Sycuan Aces and live betting via satellite from the racetracks at Santa Anita, Hollywood Park, and Del Mar.

Indeed, he has glimpsed in this enormous hall the 20-foot racetrack screen, which seems to fill an entire wall with sudden explosive images of nags’ heads and straining jockeys. In the Valley Turf Club, “30 brilliant monitors,” as the brochure says, relay the same races. For a sickening moment as he is making his way to the bathrooms, he is suddenly surrounded by 30 flared equine eyeballs. The effect is highly unpleasant. And it is with a certain amount of relief that he gets back into the bingo hall and immerses himself once more in a comforting sea of humans.

The first game has just started, and the crowd is furiously stamping away at their enigmatic cards with their brightly coloured daubers. What on earth are they doing? And with what lightning speed are they doing it!

He is at the end of a long table next to an Indian crafts shop filled with gewgaws and bingo paraphernalia. Opposite him is an elderly Vietnamese couple with five game cards between them. Since the normal complement is one per person, it is obvious that these are serious gamblers. The flabbergasting hand-eye agility with which these four freckled hands flash over the numbered squares, actually crossing over into each other’s territory, is awesome.

Looking over and seeing that he is utterly lost, the woman exchanges glances with her husband and leans over to say "Horizontal and Vertical” in a hushed voice.

He looks back blankly.

“Horizontal and Vertical,” she repeats, and makes a deft figure in the air with her forefinger.

Still, the innocent stares back without the slightest flicker of understanding.

She murmurs in a stream of Vietnamese to her partner, and in the distant whirlpool of that incomprehensible language, he detects that phrase again: Horizontal and Vertical.

She is referring with the patience of a mother explaining the principle of milkshakes to a naughty child that they are about to begin the second game of the evening, Horizontal and Vertical, and that he must get his dauber ready to blot out the numbers. Finally, seeing that he is blotting out the wrong numbers altogether, she picks up his card and starts doing it herself.

At the end of Horizontal and Vertical, in which a fat sulky Chicano teenager at the next table wins $250 and is patted on the back by the Sycuan minders, she hands his score sheets back to him and. lo and behold, he sees traced upon it in pencil a shape which could best be described as, well, horizontal and vertical. She puts up her thumb and nods hopefully. Has the dullard understood?

After Horizontal and Vertical comes the Small Picture Frame and then, at 7:00 on the dot, the Early Bird Special, when the real gambling begins. And as they verify the time on the watches, the Vietnamese duo tense their shoulders, sit down in their molded plastic chairs, and lick their lips.

The average bingo game lasts about ten minutes. As more and more numbers are called out, the tension in the hall palpably increases. Those who are within one or two squares of ending their life’s financial woes begin to squirm in their chairs. You can see them quite clearly, set apart from the rest. Their eyes have gone glassy. The approach of the blissfully impossible is making them pale and almost hysterical. One more number and the loan on the car will have evaporated, the backlog of rent been dispatched, and 30 years of manicures assured. There are always three or four of these at the tables by the time the dread word “Bingo!” rings out from a distant part of the hall. And one can see the agonized hopeful, who right up to that moment had probably sworn to him or herself that God had finally honoured his obligations, crumple, sag, and visibly diminish. A low moan sweeps around the hall. And after this collapse, there is always the same resigned, mystical shrug of the shoulders. The miracle did not materialize. But as when the Virgin Mary fails to appear to the faithful when it has been predicted that she will, Faith lingers on undented. And the faith of bingo is that one day the miracle will drop from Heaven.

The newcomer, who has now suddenly understood what is going on and who is faithfully imitating the Vietnamese wife opposite him, skimming as quickly as he can the columns headed by the five letters B-l-N-G-O, understands nothing of this complex faith. For him it is an entirely secular affair. He hasn’t thought for a minute that he could ever actually win. Furthermore, it seems to be a pretty skillful game, this bingo, or at least one that requires a high degree of savoir-faire.

But halfway through the fifth game of the evening, the Crazy Giant Kite, he slowly becomes aware that a beautiful shape is beginning to form on his scorecard. As if in a dream, he extinguishes the numbers called out over the speakers until he sees what he is sure is the ribboned tail of a Chinese kite. Slowly but surely, the main body of this graceful object begins to fill out. He is not putting a foot wrong.

The Vietnamese husband looks over ironically, then makes a double-take. His eyebrows rise. He nudges his wife. Her eyebrows rise. The four eyebrows remain there for almost a minute as the couple scan the kite crystallizing on the backward one’s card. They can hardly believe their eyes. For although bingo is obviously a game of pure luck, it seems to be understood among true aficionados that their own experience must count for something. And here is the upstart who, five minutes earlier, couldn't even count his own squares drawing a magnificent and very lucrative Chinese kite under their very eyes.

As for the alien himself, he begins very vaguely to understand what the fuss is all about. His head feels light. The kite is almost formed. Only two squares in the top right-hand corner are missing. When one of them is called out, there is an audible gasp on all sides. Help girls have come running to peer over his shoulder. Sycuan braves are dancing all around him. His heart begins to race.

How can the initiated explain to the outsider the intoxication of either the faithful or the gambler? Perhaps the two are similar. When the last number in his kite is called and he is declared the winner outright of the Crazy Giant Kite, he does indeed feel like a martyr pierced with stigmata. Fora moment he thinks he is levitating. The Vietnamese couple is looking at him with intense suspicion. Is he really what he seems after all? The help girls scream “Bingo!" and the announcer booms it over the speakers. "We have a bingo in the corner. One thousand dollars!”

As if he had just delivered a clever speech, the entire hall begins to applaud. A thousand different gazes are launched in his direction. Gazes of soft admiration. Gazes of sour resentment. Some even of outright reverence (for to be blessed by luck is not so very different from being blessed by divine anointment). And others of gimlet-eyed, glittering hatred.

To be at the centre of so many gazes, all of them so helplessly envious! A Sycuan giant in an oiled ponytail shakes his hand, nearly breaking his fingers. The help girls lavish him with seductive smiles. And out of the corner of his eye, he sees an official sauntering over to his seat carrying a fat envelope in one hand. Holy of holies! The envelope is filled with crisp new 50-dollar bills.

Like the Thief of Baghdad, he immediately runs out of the hall with this fantastic and ill-gotten stash, through the Valley Turf Club and its disgusting scent of congealing fries, past the groaning nags on the screens, past the Canyon Card Room and its silky pall of smoke, past the gleaming hostesses fixed in a single, transfixing rictus, past the foyer palms, the slit-eyed poker predators and the cool Minoan pillars and so out into the immense parking lot.

It is a perfect night. What an artist he is! He cannot stop himself giggling. He looks over his shoulder to make sure that the Sycuan bouncers have not discreetly followed him out here like well-trained tracker dogs to recoup their money and then indulges in a bout of self-congratulation. How like the dead the losers are! What a chasm now separates him from them! They live in the dells, in the pits, in the drains, while he...he is Zarathustra prancing about on the Matterhorn, playing a zither!

Never, for the rest of his life, will he ever be able to remember what goods he purchased with his thousand dollars. He will go again and again to all the state’s bingo casinos, to Barona, to Robinson Rancheria, to Trinidad in Humboldt County, to Twentynine Palms, Fort Independence, and Rumsey. But never again will he ever win anything. But it is of absolutely no importance whatsoever. He has tasted the fruit. He belongs to a select band of the happy few: the Panzer division of winners.

A few months later, still glowing within, he is sitting in the bingo hall at Barona, on his usual losing streak, when he feels an indescribable telepathic warmth touching the back of his head. Turning to see who could be directing such a beautiful gaze at him in a place where he is sure no one knows him, he sees a vulgarly dressed woman smiling at him from over an electronic scoreboard, her nails painted silver and two ghastly silver butterflies pinned to the side of her head. Looking down at her lapels, he sees these same two lepidoptera pinned to her lime-green serge jacket — so evil looking, insolent, and unchic that he is immediately smitten with respect.

She is smiling radiantly at him and him alone. A golden halo surrounds her head. Is she a car thief’s wife looking for an adventure? And then, with a mild shock of recognition, he remembers her face. It is Mrs. Prang, and in one hand she is holding up to him a battered scorecard upon which she has drawn a mystic circle around the third diagram from the top, the Crazy Kite, while with the other she waves to him — gently but surely — she rises like a balloon toward Heaven.