For most of my life I could not earn a living. I was really only suited to being a writer, but a writing career seemed as unrealistic to me as a princess career. My parents were both from working-class families, and they raised me to believe you only got paid for work you didn’t want to do.
I tried to get a job I didn’t want, but my psychology made this near-impossible: I had a deep antipathy to doing anything I thought was detrimental to the world, a boundless appetite for finding ways my current job was detrimental to the world, a crippling shyness that came across as brooding hostility, a belief that the concept of ‘appropriate office attire’ was Orwellian, a taste for playing pranks on my employers that broke out at unpredictable moments and an overwhelming compulsion to quit once my rent was paid so I could get back to writing. I was generally good at the work itself. Remarkably, I was never fired. But when I quit a job, my employer always looked profoundly relieved. I spent my twenties destitute, often sleeping on friends’ couches and living on beans on toast.
Of course, I was constantly reading job ads, trying to find my holy grail – a job I could stand to do, and someone foolish enough to hire me. At last, one day, I spotted this gem: Professional gambler’s assistant wanted. International travel, all expenses paid, £120/week + 5% of winnings.
That very night I went to meet the professional gambler in a hotel bar. He turned out to be a man in his sixties, a former civil engineer from Canada, dressed in a cheap-looking turtleneck sweater, with very obviously dyed black hair that he appeared to have cut himself with nail clippers. However, he really had been playing casino blackjack professionally for fifteen years, and he really meant to take his employees around the world and train them to win at cards. He admitted that he was only hiring women, as he found them to be ‘more docile’ than men. I knew this was a big red flag; however, I didn’t get the sense that he intended to leave my dismembered body in the trunk of a car.
He ultimately hired a team of four women and tried unsuccessfully to sleep with us in London, Mississippi, Rotterdam, Kuala Lumpur and Kathmandu. Over dinner, he regaled us with tales of Barcelona brothels and Chiang Mai bar girls, trying to weave a libidinous spell, but all he got was girls rolling their eyes, then, all too often, quitting in disgust. He hired new girls, then hired more, hope springing eternal in the human breast, even when that breast is an unwanted, saggy thing in a polyester turtleneck. The boss grew paranoid, maudlin, embittered, and would return from the men’s room groaning, ‘I’m an old man. That face in the mirror!’ At breakfast, he said darkly, ‘Oh, you look at me with your cold, judging eyes,’ to which we did look at him with our cold, judging eyes. It was difficult not to feel sorry for him, but impossible not to judge him.
Like all sexually harassing bosses, he also expected us to do our jobs, and he coached us seriously in how to win at blackjack. Every move in professional blackjack is determined by statistical probability and, in my time, the professional players were mostly former computer programmers. Sometimes cards are counted, weighing high against low; sometimes sequences are memorized. Both tactics require intense concentration on sequences of cards for hours at a stretch, while surrounded by the constant jabber of slot machines, promotional announcements and other gamblers. I learned that the other players weren’t international spies or pop stars, but gambling addicts in sweat-stained shirts, who hadn’t seen the sun in years, and whose pitiful cries of ‘Picture!’ and ‘Lucky seven!’ made you loathe them and yourself – them for playing so badly it amounted to tearing up money, and yourself for profiting from something that for them was just a bad, slow way to die.
If I told a guy what I did for a living, the same thing always happened. First, he heard ‘gambler’ and decided I worked for a casino dealing cards. I often had to set him straight three times before he grasped that ‘gambler’ could apply to a woman. Next, he would explain to me how to win at cards. This happened every time. To be clear, these men knew nothing. They were telling me I should raise my bet when I had a run of luck; it was like a little boy explaining to a pilot that an airplane flies by flapping its wings. If I tried to explain why this was mistaken, I was dismissed as an emotional woman, too irrational to know I was out of my depth. This invariably ended with him warning me that what I was doing was highly dangerous, and if I didn’t stop, I would get hurt. Nothing could have been more obvious than that he wanted me to get hurt for having a cool job he deserved.
All my frustrations came to a head one night in a drunken fight with the boss in Singapore International Airport, where I called him all the names you have ever wanted to call a sexual harasser, while the one other remaining team member – a Goth girl who outlasted us all – pretended to doze in a nearby chair. Then we flew to Kathmandu, where I formally quit in a Nepalese tea house over plastic cups of Tetley tea. Like every other employer I’d had, he greeted my resignation with undisguised relief. For the two weeks until our flight back, I continued playing with the team, and, on my last night as a gambler, we broke the bank at the Yak and Yeti Hotel, while the electricity repeatedly failed and plunged the windowless room into blackness and a silence only broken by the croupier still dealing cards to the beat of the snuffed-out music. The next morning, we left town amid a general strike, walking two miles to the airport because no taxis were picking up fares. Interviewed by a TV crew on the road, we voiced our support for the strikes – as you might not have guessed, one thing we three had in common was that we were all good socialists. Thus we arrived at Tribhuvan International in rare accord, and were friends on the plane, drinking gin and tonics while staring out the window at the Himalayas. In Singapore we got on different flights, and I jetted back around the world to my old part-time typing job. In four months, my savings from gambling were gone, and it was back to the couches and the beans on toast. I never did make a living until I gave up trying and just wrote books.
Image © Europeana
