EPISODE 31

I will confess to being a bit elusive so far, concerning the product that we sold at SlipNot.  Obviously, we were in the wholesale business and our wares were the various bits and pieces that make up the modern hair replacement.  But to say that all that we sold were toupees, or weaves, or hairpieces would be to ignore so much of what went on in the industry.  You have to look back at the history of people wearing hair to begin to understand just how far reaching this whole enterprise was, and still is.  We all know that the Founding Fathers of the United States wore wigs and that the tradition of covering the scalp dates much further back in history than that.  Julius Caesar wore a trademark wreath on his head.  Was this because he thought that wreaths were unusually attractive?  Probably not.  It is far more likely that he did so to take attention away from his very bald head.  There is some evidence that he also wore something like a rudimentary toupee, but the fact that he tried to cover up at all indicates that his hair loss disturbed him.  Going back quite a bit more still, the ancient Egyptian pharaohs were known to wear false beards as a symbol of their power.  What is somewhat confusing though was that they also liked to shave their faces, so as to establish that they were of the upper class and therefore able to afford to groom themselves.  Only the rich and powerful had the resources (or time) to take it all off and then carefully put it back on. Queen Hatshepsut, who ruled Egypt in the 1500 century BC, distinguished herself by dressing as a man quite often and wearing the ceremonial beard to convey to all whom she met the magnitude of her great power.  So, for much of history, while pattern baldness was a condition shared by the masses, it was the elite who were most apt to do anything about it.

In the last 60 years, the acceptance of head coverings to conceal pattern baldness has become significantly more commonplace.  For openers, plenty of music and movie stars have made use of various methods to keep their fans from noticing that things were getting thin on top.  Notably, Frank Sinatra, William Shatner and Sean Connery all made use of hair replacement systems, although Connery often went without, particularly when making public appearances when he wasn’t on the set.  Elton John has worn hair for many years and at one point, it was reported that his was among the most expensive custom replacements of all time.  Good hair costs a lot of money and that’s because the unit itself has to look right.  The big money is in maintenance.

Consider that a hair replacement system, or what might once have gone by the name of “toupee” a generation or two ago is now a very sophisticated item.  It begins with a fine mesh made from a synthetic material, which is cut to fit the outline of the top of the head.  Human hairs are inserted into the mesh until the whole thing begins to bear the unfortunate resemblance to a small furry animal.  When taken out of its packing box, a hair replacement is a strange sight to behold.  It doesn’t look like a head of hair really and this can be somewhat off putting.  I once derisively called a case of hairpieces that I saw in the SlipNot warehouse at “nest of rodents” and for a while that stuck.  It’s somewhat self-defeating to have salespeople referring to their product in this manner, as in “That’s a fine looking rat you have strapped to the top of your head.”  As such, the hair replacement itself is not what makes the sale.  The unit itself is quite useless, unless it is properly cared for.

Maybe 40 years ago, one of the most popular ways of attaching the unit to a client’s head was by use of tape.  The tape had two adhesive sides, so that it could be placed on the scalp and then the unit could be attached to the other side of the tape.  This was a pretty good arrangement, except that excessive moisture could easily compromise the whole operation.  An old client of Frank Rotella’s had gone to the Miami on vacation during the late 1980s, blithely jumped into the gentle surf and came up, his head as devoid of hair as a baby’s bottom.  He found his hairpiece floating nearby in the water, grabbed it and hastily retreated to his hotel room to reattach it.  As you might expect, he spent the remainder of his vacation on dry land.  While this was not a unique occurrence, it would be some time before the industry came up with a solution. 

The next innovation was something called “the weave”.  The idea behind it was quite simple.  A client would come into a hair studio to purchase a replacement system and the new hair was woven into the client’s hair, right along the edge of the client’s healthy hairline.  The result was that the system sat tightly on top of the head and could not be removed by wind, rain, or even ocean waves.  For a time then, it seemed to be the answer.  However, there were two problems.  The first was that the tightly woven hair could be a bit painful. The other difficulty was that, as the client’s own hair grew, the replacement system on top began to ride looser and looser, until it began to awkwardly slide around.  Nothing screams out for attention more than a moving hairline and that’s exactly what would happen.  If the goal of hair replacement is discrete concealment, then the appearance of wearing a moving fur ball can be detrimental to that mission.

Hair has been and still is a symbol of vitality and if necessity is indeed the mother of innovation, then the quest to keep hair on people’s heads has been the great motherfucker for the industry.  The next breakthrough was in what eventually became marketed as a “non-surgical hair replacement”.  While surgical hair transplantation does indeed move living follicles to the balding area on the scalp, this procedure can be quite expensive.  In the mid-1990s, when I first worked with Bosco, transplants were charge by the follicle, often at the rate of between $5-$10 per.  Given that a standard surgery involved just shy of 1,000 follicles, this could mean that the client (or patient, if you will) would be expected to shell out between $5,000-$10,000 for a procedure.  Health insurance would not cover this most elective of surgeries, so patients had to pay in full. 

The “non-surgical hair transplant” was part marketing scheme, part new technology.  The technology was actually pretty simple.  SlipNot made a much sheerer membrane than it had in the past, one that was less obvious to the naked eye.  The unit was then attached to the scalp by means of a bonding agent, or to use a more common term, glue.  The client was then able to wash his new hair, swim with it, or have his lover playfully tug on it (if that’s what floated your boat).  In short, you could treat it almost as if it was your own hair, except that it didn’t grow.  It also would tend to fall out.  This of course was the key to the whole marketing plan.  Each unit would gradually lose hair, as the user merrily washed and swam and tugged his way through his days and nights.  Usually, by the end of 6 weeks, the hairpiece would begin to look a little, well, “ratty”.  This was why each unit was sold with a maintenance plan that allowed the client to return to the studio, have the hairpiece removed and have it either cleaned and repaired, or replaced.  During the 1990s, repair was the accepted course of action, mostly because the units cost the client about $400 each.  Given this initial investment, studio owners were under enormous pressure to do what they could to salvage the units they sold.  But time and normal use took a terrible toll on the hairpieces and ultimately, the only reasonable avenue left was to throw the old one away and sell the client a new one.

The next episode of SlipNot will be published on April 7th.

If you'd like to read SlipNot in its entirety, GO HERE.

EPISODE 30

Les started laughing.  Allan was still over in his corner with Kristine, but he looked up briefly to see what was so funny.  Bosco appeared at my left and smiled as Mrs. Inoue revealed a small tray that appeared to be covered with hundreds of very short individual hairs.

“Get the fuck out of here!” I heard myself mutter.

“Yes!”  Mrs. Inoue said to me.  “Would you like to try?”

Mr. Inoue took the melon and placed it on a small circular rack on the bar in front of him.  Mrs. Inoue moved a binocular microscope that had been sitting to one side on the table in front of the melon and then produced an instrument that featured an extremely fine pointed end.  Mr. Inoue lifted the tray of hairs off the table and held it out to me.

“They’re not real, Michael,” Bosco said.

“How they hell do you know?” I snapped.

“Synthetic!”  Mr. Inoue said with a grin, as he nodded at Bosco.  “Come on, try it!”

Bosco laughed as he took the needle out of Mrs. Inoue’s hand.  “This one is used to make the incision, Michael,” he explained as he approached the melon and peered through a magnifier that had been positioned just above it.  “You have to make a space in the scalp for the new follicle to grow, like planting a garden.”  With a smooth motion, Bosco pierced the skin of the melon.

“Ouch!” somebody said and several others laughed nervously.  Bosco was having a good time of it as he repeated the pricking motion in the melon several more times before handing the instrument back to Mrs. Inoue.  She took it and handed Bosco a pair of placing forceps, which he used to pluck a single synthetic follicle off the tray that Mr. Inoue held.  These forceps had very fine points at the nose, almost as sharp as the needle used to make the initial incisions.  Bosco’s hand hovered over the melon for a few seconds as he looked for one of the cut points he’d made.  When he’d located one, he carefully inserted the fake follicle into it.  There was a smattering of applause and Bosco obliged by repeating the procedure until each of the incisions he’d made held a tiny follicle.  When he’d finished, he returned the forceps to a beaming Mrs. Inoue and with a flourish, bowed deeply to the assemblage, who by then were all clapping and cheering their approval.

“Well, Bosco!” Keith boomed, “You have talents we never dreamed of!”

Bosco grinned and he and I stood to one side as Keith came over to try a little surgery of his own.  Mrs. Inoue handed him the needle and Keith began to merrily puncture the melon and slide the fibers in.  After Keith finished and had received the same wildly appreciative response Bosco had earned, several more people came forward to give it a try.  Mr. Inoue placed a second melon in another rack that he’d put on the bar and before long; both melons were surrounded by newly minted surgeons and appreciative galleries.  The booze flowed and the follicle count grew, as did the artificial hairlines on the melons.  After a couple of hours, they resembled the heads of a pair of young boys, shorn with the classic crew cut.  It was, to say the least, a bizarre sight.

I admit freely that I had a great time.  I was able to prove this assertion to myself the following morning when I awoke in my bed feeling like a wet bag of shit.  Tasting the inside of my mouth, I was able to accurately determine that I’d gotten pretty heavily into the Glenlivet…the beer…and god only knows what else.  Our guests had behaved with all the decorum of mob of high school students who have discovered that the parents of one of their classmates has left town for the weekend.  It was all fairly low key stuff though; a little weed, some extra marital sex in the bedroom that I hadn’t staked out as being my personal turf, and a valiant group effort to consume every drop of the liquor that had been provided before daybreak.  I was fairly certain though that I had avoided the aromatic herbs that emerged quite late in the evening, although the scent of it had always been very seductive to me.

Maybe 15 years before all of this, I had tried my hand in growing pot in the back yard at an old cabin I’d rented in the Green Mountain National Forest.  The growing season for almost everything is short in Vermont, but if you start things indoors, you can do almost anything.  Without boring you with all of the horticultural tricks of the trade, it’s sufficient to say that since this stuff is a weed, it grows like one.  Hence, my observation was that even the most seriously challenged home gardener could grow a good crop for personal use.  I grew what I smoked and smoked all that I grew.  It was a wonderfully balanced formula until I discovered that I stopped enjoying the high.  I didn’t get paranoid, like so many folks do.  In fact, I got so relaxed by the pleasant sensation that the smoke provided that I often drifted right off to sleep.  The other downside was that when I awoke after a smoke filled evening, I usually felt at least as badly as I did that morning at the MGM.  Still, I was sure I’d stayed away from smoking any weed though, as my tiny mind was able to consider just how much of a mess awaited me in the room where the fun and games had only recently concluded.

The alarm clock on the bedside table told me that it was 6AM.  I was awake and I dreaded the sight that I knew would meet me in the living room area.  I pulled myself out of bed, judged that I still was wearing my boxers and a t-shirt, and headed out of the protective zone of my room.  At first glance, I couldn’t believe it.  The place was spotless.  To compound my confusion, I smelled freshly brewed coffee.  I saw that the big screen TV was on, tuned to ESPN, and that a lovely woman stood behind the bar, smiling at me. 

END OF BOOK ONE OF THE NOVEL, SLIPNOT

Book Two will begin on Monday, March 31st.

If you'd like to read SlipNot in its entirety, GO HERE.

EPISODE 29

So many things seemed to happen at the party at once that it was almost impossible to take stock of them all.  However, I was able to recall a few of the highlights.  The part of the story that everyone knows was that the Red Sox did indeed win.  It was a thrilling game that went 12 innings before David Ortiz hit the game winning home run that sent roughly half of the people at the party into a bedlam-like state akin to delirium.  At first I had simply figured that they were all Sox fans, but it turned out that what they really all had in common was that they’d bet right.  By 10:30, the winners had all proudly shown off their betting tickets and the losers had littered the floor with theirs.  I’d checked my ticket, to confirm my own wager and that’s when Les suddenly popped up next to me, grinning madly.

“Mikey!” he yelled.  “You’re a genius!”

“I am?” I replied.

“Abso-fuckin’-lutely!  I used your system and look!”

Les pushed a betting slip in front of me that indicated he’d bet $1000 on the Sox to beat the Yankees.  “A genius!  That’s what you are!” he cried.

“But my system called for a bet on the Yankees,” I protested.  It was true.  The Yankees had won the last 3 games, as opposed to the 3 losses suffered by the Sox.  Their record in the playoffs was 6-1 to Boston’s 3-3.  Hernandez had gone 8-2 during the regular season, as compared to Lowe’s 14-12 and no matter how you looked at it, the Yankees had beaten the Sox for the AL East during the regular season, again.  The only factor that favored the Red Sox then was that they had played at home.  I’d bet on the Red Sox out of love, not because I thought they’d win, thus proving that deep down I was a sentimental idiot.  What, pray tell, could Les’ excuse be?

“Sure, I know that!” Les said, his smiled broadening even further.  “But then, I always thought your system was junk.  I just used it to figure out how not to bet.  It worked pretty good, didn’t it?”

It was clear that Les had adapted Allan’s theory about my innate lack of a sense of direction to gambling.  I began to wonder if I was ever right about anything.  I hadn’t paid much attention to it, but the Astros had already won their game that same day on a Carlos Beltran home run in the 7^th, making me the proud owner of a second winning betting slip.  Once I realized that, it took some of the sting out of what Les had told me anyway.

Allan spent a good deal of the evening talking to Kristin Mueller, the editor of the Journal of Hair Replacement.  She was a very attractive woman in her early forties and she had really taken to him.  This was no great surprise.  Allan was a good-looking guy, athletic and in his mid thirties.  But of even greater importance, had an innate talent for actively listening to people.  He held their attention by making sure that whoever was speaking to him knew that he was hanging on every word.  Kristin basked in Allan’s smile as he listened to her next question for the feature she was going to write about SlipNot.  I’m sure Bosco had invited her to the event and it had been a good idea.  The concept of giving the product away would be easier for our clients to swallow if they also got our explanation for making the change from a third party source.  Allan was selling Kristin and from the look of it, she was buying.  He let her control the conversation, all the time smiling and holding her with his gaze.  Kristin was in so deep that she didn’t notice what Allan’s hands were doing while they talked.

As I may have mentioned, Allan had more hair on his head and face than anyone I’d ever met.  He kept it all quite long, but well kempt.  In many ways, he resembled the lead singer of the Black Crows, Chris Robinson.  Just try to imagine Robinson after a $200 styling session and you’ll appreciate what Allan looked like to Kristin.  But while she was looking into his eyes, Allan was fiddling with his beard.  I watched as he attached one and then two braided hair extensions, giving the effect that he had two long pigtails hanging from his chin.  As Kristin looked down at her notebook, Allan glanced over to me and flashed an evil grin.  He then swung one of the pigtails in a circle, just as Kristin finished writing.  When she looked back at Allan, he was once again smiling at her, looking intently into her eyes, the extensions hanging almost motionless from his beard.

To Bosco’s horror, the photograph that accompanied the two-page feature on the SlipNot conference in the next issue of the Journal was of Allan, smiling into the camera with one of the two extensions that appeared to grow from his immense beard fixed between two fingers.  He held it much the same way Groucho Marx used to waggle his signature cigar, as he leered into the camera.

We had left the door to the suite open, so that we didn’t have to run to answer it every time someone new showed up.  The sounds of a large party drew a few hangers-on and not so surprisingly, they too were involved in the hair business.  They included the Inoues, a couple from Japan who were hawking a line of surgical instruments that were designed for hair transplants. 

As is the case with any transplant, donor material must be harvested before it can be moved to wherever you want to put it.  Kidneys, hearts, lungs, arteries and virtually everything that belongs inside of your body must come from someone who either can donate it alive (kidneys, for example) or who no longer needs those organs, as they have just passed on.  But hair doesn’t really work that way.  In order to harvest donor hair, you must remove hair follicles from the person who needs the transplant.  Each patient must “self-donate”.

A single follicle is almost an insignificant thing.  You never notice as one dies on your head.  However, pattern baldness occurs when enough follicles in one general area do so, initially causing the thinning of the scalp and in more advanced stages, what we all know to be a bald spot.  However, if you can remove follicles from another part of the head and insert them where thinning takes place, you can effectively repopulate that area.  In most cases, the donor follicles are taken from the back of the scalp in thin strips.  The individual follicles are then separated and one-by-one, they are inserted where they are needed.

Needless to say, this is fiddling work and the sale of the instruments that do it are big business.  The Inoues were hoping to sell their wares to what was then a rapidly growing surgical hair replacement business in Las Vegas.   Keith was particularly interested in what they had to say and after a little prodding he prevailed on them to go back to their room and to bring in some of the tools they’d designed.

Maybe 20 minutes later, the Inoues reappeared with a large metal suitcase and a brown grocery bag.  Keith had cleared off some space at the bar for them to lay things out.  Mr. Inoue, who was somewhat shorter than his wife stood to one side as she unpacked the case of its glinting contents.  These were among the smallest, most precise looking devices you could imagine, but they all resembled the same kind of instruments you might have seen, either in a hospital or on a prime time TV medical drama.  In other words, there was nothing really new, at least at first glance.

However, once the instruments had been laid out, Mr. Inoue reached into the grocery bag and removed a ripe cantaloupe. 

The next installment will be posted on March 24.

        If you'd like to read the book today, GO HERE.

EPISODE 28

The meet and greet at the Monte Carlo was scheduled to run later on in the day from 5 to 7, leaving me with plenty of time to kick around the Strip.  I ended up at The Pub at the Monte Carlo, where SlipNot had leased one of the upstairs bars for our event.  I took a spot at the main bar, ordered a sandwich and a beer.  By 1:30, the place was beginning to fill up and folks were talking about the Yankees v. Red Sox game, which was due to start in 4 hours.  I was somewhat unhappy that I was going to miss so much of it, but work came first.  I had just ordered a second beer when Les slipped onto the barstool next to me.

“Mikey!  When did you get in?”

I recounted the escapades of the previous day and when I told him about the suite at the MGM, his eyebrows started wiggling.

“Jesus!  We could have a hell of party there, couldn’t we?  I mean, why let a place like that go to waste?”

It was a good point.  The thought had crossed my mind a couple of times while I had wandered around the Bellagio earlier in the day.  But I’d let the idea drift away as I looked at the paintings at the museum and I hadn’t given it any other consideration until it became clear that I had an eager coconspirator parked on my right.  Les was scheming furiously as he grabbed his beer and took a long pull off of it.  He stared at me for a few seconds and then began to speak very rapidly.  The plot was hatching.

“Mikey, I bet I could get Keith to spring for it.  We could tell him that we’re inviting some of the clients and rest our crew over to watch the Yankees and the Sox.”

“But the game starts right when we’re doing our meet and greet,” I reminded him.

“I know.  It’s perfect!  We’ll talk it up during our little event upstairs.  There are 2 TVs at the bar there and we’ll just make sure that they’re tuned in to the game.  It’s the best advertising in the world!”

“I don’t want a zoo at my place though.”

“I know, of course,” Les replied, dismissing my fears.  “Most of the clients are going to want to go to dinner and a show.  We’ll only get the die-hard fans, which’ll be fun!”

I had to admit, Les was beginning to make sense.  We talked over what we’d need by way of supplies and Les took off to find Keith.  He returned 20 minutes later with a huge smile on his face.

“He authorized two grand!”

“You’re shitting me,” I whispered.  Keith rarely okayed budgets for rogue parties.  In fact, this might have been a first for him.  But who was I to question The Great Man and His Money.  Les and I paid the bill and went to find the car he’d rented.

By 4 o’clock, we’d decked out my suite with a modestly obscene spread.  In addition to the boiled shrimp, cheese platters and other edibles, we’d bought a sufficient quantity of Marker’s Mark, Glenlivet, Mount Gay, Grey Goose, wine and beer to inflict a fair amount of damage on our little group.  We’d tipped a guy at the front desk $40 to lend us a couple of hand trucks and then tossed him a bottle of wine for helping us schlep everything upstairs from the car.  With the whole lot safely in place, Les and I walked across the Strip to the Monte Carlo to meet our clients.

Keith and Bosco handed out free drink tickets to anyone and everyone in sight while Les, Allan and I worked the clients as they arrived.  As Les had figured, the TV screens in the upstairs bar that SlipNot had leased were both tuned into Fox, where Jeanne Zelasko and Kevin Kennedy were mouthing out the pre-game broadcast.  The sound was off, which I prefer.  It forces you to pay closer attention to a game if there’s no one telling what you’re supposed to have already seen.  Besides, during the playoffs, TV networks go crazy with slow motion replays anyway.  You simply don’t need stuff like Joe Buck offering up his absurd observation that Aaron Boone’s 11th inning home run against the Sox in the previous year’s ALCS had “predetermined a rematch” with the Yankees in ’04.  But all that our clients saw was a bar that had been laid open for them.  They crowded around the bartender, tossing drink tickets at him and then showering the man with tips every time he served up another round.  Sometime around eight o’clock, I slipped away to the suite at the MGM, to wait for the first of our guests and to watch an inning or two of the game undisturbed.

The next installment will be posted on March 17.

        If you'd like to read the book today, GO HERE.

EPISODE 27

I slept for maybe another 2 hours and after a shower and breakfast at the Studio Café downstairs, I headed over to one of my favorite places in any casino: the Sports Book.  While I have always been a mediocre blackjack player, I have always done well betting on baseball.  I’ve worked out a simple system that has always worked out to winning a little over 60% of the time.  That’s pretty good, if you realize that casinos are built to remove the money from your wallet at one rate while allowing you to win back a percentage of your wagers at a somewhat lower rate, but one that will still entice you to keep betting.  I recall being in Reno, Nevada in 1977 and having a drink with an employee of the Harrah’s chain.  He told me that the average gain vs. loss ratio the casinos operated under then meant that they paid out 85 cents on every dollar wagered.  This obviously meant that the House took in 15% of the gross and so it was in the House’s interest to make sure that while there would always be big winners and big losers, the battle for profits would be waged on the middle where the swings were less violent.  This is one of the reasons why blackjack is so appealing.  A well-prepared and observant player can even the odds so that over time, he or she will at very least avoid suffering large losses, or perhaps, might even win. 

Betting on sports is like this as well, provided you study your sport carefully.  While I enjoy betting on the horses, I have no affinity for it and so I have always bet small and lost small at the track.  Similarly, football (which I enjoy as a fan), hockey (which I played as a youth) and basketball (which I absolutely don’t understand at all) are bad for my financial health.  But I get baseball.  Even though I’ve been a diehard Red Sox fan since the 1967 season, when they lost the Series in 7 games to the St. Louis Cardinals, I know when to bet on my team and when to bet against them.

My system was simple.  I took 5 factors, weighed them equally and then made my decision whether to bet on the game.  Those were: which pitcher had the better record, which team had the better record, which team had the better streak over the previous 10 games, which team had the longer winning streak, and which team was playing at home.  After figuring out these variables, you calculated which team had the greater net advantage. 

For example, assume the following match up:

Pitcher                        Team Record          Last 10           Streak              Home/Away

Reds    9-3                  63-42                         7-3                  2 wins             Home

Mets    8-2                  51-54                         5-5                  4 wins             Away

The pitchers’ win/loss records are very close, so we throw this variable out.  However, the teams clearly have different records, so we award this category to the Reds.  The records over the previous 10 games are different enough to award that category to the Reds as well.  The Mets have a superior streak going, so that favors them and finally – the Reds get one for playing at home.  When you tally everything up, the Reds have take 3 categories to 1 for the Mets, with 1 category discarded.  Any time one team has at least a 2-point advantage it’s worth placing a bet.  That meant that given our hypothetical match up, I would be comfortable placing a small wager on the Reds.  If the spread between the two teams was 3 or even 4 points, then I might place a somewhat healthier bet.  A 5-point break usually meant I could go to the bank for a loan, using my calculations as collateral.

Of course, none of this nonsense means a thing during the playoffs.  A team gets streaky and nothing, but nothing beats a hot team. I learned this lesson by betting heavily on the NY Mets in ’88.  They had beaten the living hell out of the Dodgers all year, taking 10 out of the 11 games the two teams played against each other during the regular season.  The Mets’ pitching staff was amazing (Gooden, Cone, Darling), they won more games than any other team in the National League during the regular season and frankly, there was just no way they were going to lose.  But lose they did, in a very exciting 7-game series.  I got clobbered, my losses were somewhere around a grand and I swore that I would have to come up with a different system for betting on the playoffs.  Of course, I never did.  With no real betting strategy in mind and with the lessons of ’88 rattling around my head, I walked from the Studio Café over to the Sports Book.  Along the way, I passed a giant television set, one so enormous that it eclipsed the one in my room.  I made a mental note to mention this obvious oversight to the management.

‘Excuse me?  But I can see the wall in my room.  Would you please bring me the screen from downstairs to cover it?’

The Patriots were playing the Seattle Seahawks and they had a real shot to build on their winning streak from the previous season to achieve an impossible 19-0 record that went back to the previous season.  There was a rowdy group of men clutching bottles of beer and cheering lustily at every development on the field.  I watched as the Pats moved virtually unopposed through several plays and decided that for this east coast kid anyway, it was still a little early for football and brews.  I had a client who lived on the big island of Hawaii.  He used to tell me how he would wake up at 7:30 every Sunday morning so he could catch the kickoff of the 1PM east coast game, which began precisely at 8AM where he lived.  He’d then watch the second game, which began at a little after 11AM and by about 3:30 in the afternoon, he’d be launching into his third and final game of the day.  My life’s pattern had always revolved around hoping to see the Pats during the early game so as not to interfere with the dinner hour, which the 4PM game always seemed to do.  As for that Sunday evening games, well – I watched them almost as often as Monday Night Football: never.

The Sports Book at all of the casinos would wait each day for the odds to be sent from the Riviera, where they were set, and then the betting could begin.  I took a look at the numbers on the board and saw that the House was giving better odds betting on Houston over the Cardinals.  Oddly enough, in spite of being down 3-0 to the Yankees in the ALCS, the Red Sox were favored to win that night.  Having no logical betting strategy, I figured it might be worth the risk and placed $100 bets on the Astros and the Sox.  Having nothing else to do until I was due to get dressed for the meet and greet with the clients, I decided to walk over to the Bellagio and see what was hanging on the walls of the Gallery of Fine Art.

The next installment will be posted on March 10.

        If you'd like to read the book today, GO HERE.