The Risk Pool

day more convinced that luck ruled the universe and kept him
un
lucky. Even when things like the odd fortuitous pair of Yankee tickets dropped into his lap, he liked examining the odds of such a thing happening, and when he was all finished studying the ins and outs of this particular good fortune, he’d go back to his original thesis about being unlucky, noting that real luck would have brought him Mets tickets. When the game was over he always insisted on heading back to Mohawk. He knew how to get from the stadium to the Thruway and was convinced that if I ever got him all the way downtown where I lived, he’d never find his way back.
    “You can’t get lost,” I told him. “Just remember. The streets go one way, the avenues the other.”
    “Thanks anyhow,” he said. “My luck, I’d be just as liable to get going wrong and end up in California, where I don’t know anybody but your mother.”
    This was a hint for me to fill him in on how she was doing, whether she and F. William Peterson were still married.
    “I never liked this town, even when I lived here,” he said each time he came to the city. “It’s full of people who don’t know any better.”
    He did come all the way downtown once, about a year after the last of our meetings at Yankee Stadium. It was the week before Christmas, windy and wet and not quite cold enough to snow. I’d gotten home late and still had my overcoat on when the buzzer went off. On my way to see who it was, I ticked off half a dozen people who might be buzzing me at 7:30 on a Friday evening, and Sam Hall didn’t even make the list. There he was though, the top of his head recognizable three stories down.
    He’d been drinking at Mickey’s across the street and waiting for me to turn up. “It’s a wonder anybody ever gets drunk in this town,” he said, even before hello, when I met him on the stairs half way up. “I ordered a bottle of beer and the bartender says two-fifty. I tell him I don’t want the whole six-pack, just the one. That’s good, he says, ’cause for two-fifty you just get the one.”
    We shook hands.
    “What on earth are you doing here?” I said.
    “Visiting my son, if that’s all right.”
    “It’s fine,” I said. “It’s great. You took the bus?”
    “Drove.”
    “Where did you park?”
    “Right out front.”
    We were back in the apartment by then, so I looked down into the street. “Right there,” he pointed to the roof of a Plymouth Valiant.
    “Amazing,” I said. “Whatever you do, don’t move it.”
    “This is all right,” he said, looking around my place. It was, in fact, the first decent apartment I’d had since coming to New York. “What’s it set you back?”
    I told him.
    He raised his eyebrows, but offered no comment. It figured, given the price of beer.
    He’d planned to stay the weekend but by lunchtime the next day he was clearly itchy to get back to Mohawk. It depressed him that Manhattan barmaids didn’t like to be teased. He didn’t think there was much point in
being
a waitress if you couldn’t let yourself have a little fun at least. The bartenders were just as bad. They looked at him strangely when he slid onto a bar stool and staked his claim to it with a twenty-dollar bill. His was always the only bill of any denomination on the entire length of the bar,which had been specially grooved to accommodate the tabs which were rung after each order and then arched before the patrons.
    “Not me,” my father said. “If I’m tending this bar, I gotta see green before I go near the tap. Otherwise, you got guys drinking till closing and coming up light.”
    He was sure of it, too. He’d be damned if there wasn’t at least one deadbeat at the bar even as we spoke.
    “I come in, I drink a couple of beers, I get up to go to the john, I go in, I come back, I drink another beer, I gotta go again, right? Except this time I keep right on going out the door. There’s another spot around the block does things the same dumb way. Tomorrow night I go to a different part of town. By the time I run out of bars it’s 1990 and I can start all over again.”
    He couldn’t wait to tell Roy Heinz about it when he got back home. Could I imagine that son of a bitch down here? He’d drink five hundred dollars worth of free booze in a week. A thousand probably.
    My father took his time about it, but eventually the reason for his visit came out. Eileen had married during the summer, and for six months he’d been flirting