Chapter 3 - When I Was 18

We're jarringly bumped back 10 years in time now- I told you I wasn't much of a wordsmith, but we shall return to the Friday night of April 2011 soon enough, sooner than I'd like certainly.
So here we are 10 years, 7 girlfriends and $400,000 earlier.
Fresh out of high school, brimming with ill-gotten confidence and with a new girlfriend of suitably impressive cleavage hanging from my arm we enter the bedazzling world of Star City casino, Sydney - Australia.

It was her idea to go but as soon as I walked in the casino staff must have marked me straight away, "Look at that awestruck country rube!" they'd say as I gawked at the indoor fountain and the millions of flashing lights adorning every surface - "Probably has all of $50 from shovelling horse-shit, and he'll part with it in no time, and then he shall be OURS!" then the entire staff cackles, a jet of flame erupts from the fountain and we're in hell.

That of course is somewhere between a gross exaggeration and a complete fabrication, although it is likely I had the smug, cocky look only someone fresh out of high school can attain, the staff would not have noticed me more so than any other in the sad thousands moving through that shiny place.

And it was shiny, for some reason I imagine heaven would be something like this; hundreds of thousands of flashing LED's, load-bearing pillars that are fish tanks with giant eels in them, money embedded into the god-loving floor!

Like a moth drawn to the flame, or the bug-zapper if you will, I sat entranced at the blackjack table as the understanding slowly sunk in that this was different than any video game or sport I'd ever played, this was better, this was for REAL.

Money is, whether we like it or not, the linchpin which our lives revolve around, we spend the majority of the time trying to earn it, just so we can spend the rest of the time wasting it.
And earning it by demeaning myself; someone of as great an intelligence as I, in some crappy subordinate corporate setting for years on end was not the way... not when I could be coming here each night and winning $350.
For $350 was the amount I won that first night.
Now that's not an astonishing amount by any measure (unless of course you have $0, which for the following ten years I basically did aside from the few short hours after pay checks) but apparently one common factor of the problem gambler is this initial big win, looking back I feel my Big Win was disproportionately puny... Perhaps if I'd won $100,000 this would have explained my later behaviour somewhat, but we all know you can't win $100,000 on blackjack.

And so I quickly migrated to the lowest tier of the gambling world: (aside perhaps from internet horse racing) Slots.
The idea with blackjack is you have a decent chance of winning a little amount, but no chance of winning a large amount. Conversely with Slots you have little chance of winning anything, and a tiny chance of winning something big. So instead of a 1:2 chance at winning $1 you have a 1:100,000 chance of winning $10,000.
Now that was my type of odds!
[elaborate, couldn't be bothered atm]

By this point, inside about 3 months, my first relationship had come crashing down- in particularly spectacular Hollywood style: there was shouting on the sidewalk amid the pouring rain, precious gifts hurled back in the face of the gift-giver [need a better word], there were suicide threats, there were suicide attempts, there were tears and it was genuinely a miserable thing to behold.

But I didn't care.

None of that seemed real anymore, certainly it was an annoyance- I would have preferred it not to have happened like that but people in relationships rarely can abide being the second most important thing in their partners lives. And at that point, second was really being generous, my top five or so spots in the Greg's Important Things To Do now involved gambling or doing something to allow more gambling.

Looking back now I feel terribly guilty, and even guiltier for my lack of guilt at the time, after all it was my money, my life and there are certainly worse habits going; Heroin for example I hear is quite nasty, kite boarding can also be quite risky, and these two at least are some foolish things I didn't partake of.
My flippant discussion of it now in retrospect is of course just a way to deny owning the guilt a little longer, for it's a terrible thing to realize you've willingly been a complete prick to everyone for a very significant portion of your life. That kind of thing could seriously bum a person out.

But back then I wasn't concerned, the guilt and the self-delusion came later.
Stepping into the mind of a compulsive gambler is a difficult process, describing what is going on is hard since there are so many barriers and little tricks I've played on myself to keep it going as long as it did. For example, the first few times you step out into the dark, cold night, out that back door of the Gaming Room (and it's always night, and it's always dark, and it's always cold) and with great dread and trepidation gaze into the awful chasm of emptiness that is your wallet, where most people have, something, you swear you will never be so foolish again, if nothing else you will leave yourself some money for food or a taxi ride home, that losing $1000 and not being able to save $15 for a taxi home when it's a 3 hour walk and it's 4am and you have work at 6am, is just so blatantly stupid that you simply can't commit that same error again.

And so after the next few times you begin to realise there's a way to make the soul crushing misery of the gambling hangover a little easier to bear, it's quite simple really and only a small trick in the very cluttered bag of tricks that are my Excuses, Reasons and Justifications to continue doing something which is clearly destroying me, it's the imaginary possession.

You see normal people, people who don't throw all their money immediately down a toilet the instant they get it, still tend to not have very much money. Some people save, sure, but the majority of people BUY. If they have $500 sitting in their account and they like the look of that new iPod, they buy it. So the difference between me and them was not that I didn't have any money, but that I had less iPods. I would lose $900 and then say to myself "Well you know that nice camera you wanted? There it is!" and that would be the justification. Throwing more and more onto this imaginary stockpile of goods and services I was soon the proud owner of an imaginary car, boat, holiday to Las Vegas, innumerable electronics and whitegoods and eventually, even a house.

The reality of course was that I was living in a basement, rarely eating, drinking constantly and getting worse very, very quickly.