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Games people play

"Double Down" authors Frederick and Steven Barthelme talk about family, gambling and their run-in with the legal system.

By Jim Hanas
www.salon.com

December 2, 1999
Web posted at: 4:34 p.m. EST (2134 GMT)

(SALON) -- On Nov. 11, 1996, Frederick and Steven Barthelme -- brothers, authors, college professors -- were told to pick up their chips at the Grand Casino in Gulfport, Mississippi, and "Come with us." Despite substantial losses -- they'd lost $10,000 at the Grand's blackjack tables that night -- casino security suspected the pair were cheating. A year later, they found themselves under indictment for allegedly conspiring with a dealer, who, the theory went, had sent signals to the brothers about what cards she was holding.

Over three years, the brothers Barthelme dropped more than a quarter of a million dollars in the slot machines and on the blackjack tables along Mississippi's Gulf Coast. Most of that money came from an inheritance the two received after their mother and father passed away in quick succession less than a decade after the death of their eldest brother, experimental author Donald Barthelme. But if it was grief that led the brothers to high-stakes gambling, it was gambling that eventually brought them to grief with the legal system as widely publicized criminal charges loomed over them for nearly two years.

Frederick -- who heads the writing program at the University of Southern Mississippi, where Steven also teaches -- has written about the gambling life before, in his 1997 novel "Bob the Gambler," which tells the story of an average couple who fall under the casinos' spell. In their new memoir, "Double Down," the brothers tell their own story.

In person, Frederick, known as Rick to his friends, is every bit the jovial Texan, not at all like the stern figure who stares out from the dust jackets of his novels, while Steve carries himself with an air of quiet sarcasm. Together, as in the book's first-person-plural narration, the two complete each other's thoughts, each offering his own perspective on their common obsessions.

I met them at Burke's Book Store in Memphis, where they talked about the loss of their parents, the loss of $250,000 and their Kafkaesque run-in with the Mississippi Gaming Commission, which ended in August when prosecutors announced they had found no evidence of impropriety on the brothers' part.

Tell me about your first big win.

FB: That would be hard to remember. When you first start playing, often what happens is you win something relatively large or what seems relatively large. So I suppose when I first went down there, I may have put a dollar in a dollar slot and won $200 or $300, or $500 or something like that.

What happens is when you go home after that, you think, "Oh, this is easy. I'll come next week and do some more." And it turns out to be not quite so easy.

So the first big win isn't necessarily all that big?

FB: That's right. Or at least it wasn't for me.

SB: The scale gets larger and larger over time, and what seems like a big win originally, in retrospect, doesn't look big at all. It's a very standard sort of experience. I was reading this Dostoevski book the other night. He got off the train in Wiesbaden and he went into the casino and he won 10,000 francs and from that proceeded years of misery, to the point where he was hocking his wife's wedding dress to go gamble. The big win is only big in your imagination when it first happens.

Was there a particular time when the hook was set, so to speak?

FB: I don't know. In our case, there are about three threads that run through the book: One of them is the death of our parents; one of them is the gambling and the sort of compulsiveness; and the other is the legal problems, which developed later.

I think that the real serious gambling started after our mother died. Before that we'd sort of been gambling in a desultory way and it got more serious after that. Racheted up. So it wasn't so much exactly a hook being set as it was other events in our lives that made the gambling look more and more attractive to us as some sort of getaway.

And it continued to intensify after your father died, which also gave you more means?

FB: That's true. The absence of the family is integral to the process. The family vanishing.

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