Tattoo

That day, like every other, the brokers poured snake oil into telephones, and traders howled orders. Money, as it always does, chased more. In the office towers, ticker tape raced. But down below in Manhattan’s side streets, dimes limped after dollars on betting slips. That day, like every other, brokers poured snake oil into telephones, and traders howled orders. Money, as it always does, chased more. In the office towers, ticker tape raced. But down below in Manhattan’s side streets, dimes limped after dollars on betting slips. The numbers racket. Any working stiff understands that a dime’s worth of maybe could buy a dollar’s worth of almost. Almost enough when the month's end shows up with its hand out. Eight million souls each day tried to find the right combination to transform themselves. Tried to conjure up some mathematical formula for rest or the square root of happiness. Some equation that would, for a moment stop the world from reaching into your wallet. And all that transformation required was a few numbers on a paper slip. The slips were collected at newsstands and street carts, in barrooms and police holding cells. They gathered in alleys behind sweatshops and cathouses . . . anywhere where worry grows. The slips were a kind of helium that let hope rise above all the trouble that litters each day. At least for a time. When your life is forty and three sixty-five of never, almost becomes enough. You slip that little bit of almost into your wallet where it waits for the one day when it will finally step across to more After all the hope and all that almost were collected, the numbers runners took the Madison Avenue bus uptown to East Harlem where the Italians would smile at the stained bills. The ones earned with 40 hours of back ache. They would count the take, siphon off a winner and give back the payout. They would slip it into a fat white envelope and lick it shut. It was important that the payout was straight. Any grifter or priest will tell you, Faith is easier kept than recovered. And the city needed to know that somewhere among them was a winner, trying, just like them, to have Chance sit up and call their name. The white envelopes were passed hand over hand from the Italians to the runners each morning after. Thick with bills they would pass through the nicotine stained fingers of bartenders and bookies, blind newsstand operators and crippled liquor store cashiers. Each caressed them for just a moment, pretending that they themselves might be fate’s choice, instead of merely its messenger. Cab drivers and plumbers, ditch diggers and priests would buy the newspapers in the morning, all tearing open the business page to see the winner, the number of shares traded on the New York Stock exchange. Then that little slip of almost would fall away, worthless. Losing slips were studied and crumpled and dropped in ashtrays and gutters. Like every other Almost, they had a shelf life of only a day before they went as bad as week-old fish. Nothing smells quite as bad as a losing bet. But the almost kept them coming back. The linemen and secretaries, the drunks and the bank tellers kept filling out the slips and dropping their dimes into its meter to park their dreams for another night. Good for a few hours before being towed away by trouble and worry again. Abraham Hendler took the stained bills from the beggar and for just a moment thought of a longshot he knew was running in the last race at Aqueduct. This beggar will never know, he thought. But then he watched as Dabo once again slowly rolled up his sleeve exposing the numbers etched on his forearm. Like he had almost forgotten that part of himself and had to look at the backside of his own heart to see what it had endured. Dabo copied the numbers on the slip and reached up. A sudden wind caught the paper and it flapped hard, like a trapped bird trying to escape. Hendler, suddenly ashamed, took the slip. He turned away and closed his eyes. For just a moment he remembered his uncle holding a gemstone. “Feel the hard in it...feel the sharp," the old man whispered. "There is no worth without hard and sharp.” Hendler saw his uncle close his eyes. He saw him tighten his hand around a gem, then raise it, searching for the glint. “You have to feel the heat of it before you can ever see the light.” Hendler looked at the beggar before him. He could feel the hard and the sharp in him. And, staring at the numbers burnt into Dabo’s arm, he felt the heat. Then finally looking up into his eyes, past the rags, he saw only light. Hendler opened his eyes then took the slip. It flapped once more in the breeze, like a bird with a broken wing. And Hendler remembered that sometimes luck, forever blind, finds its way past the million Almosts. Luck stumbles past the birthdays and addresses and old telephone numbers scrawled on paper that together amount to a mountain of Never. Luck moves like a seer toward all you wish you’d never felt, searching for the sum of all you have endured. Past the phone numbers of old girlfriends, the dates of a parent’s death, the birthday of the little girl lost to typhus at three. Luck races on then stops. At numbers cut into a beggar’s arm. Then it smiles. WLM