That was the good news.
The bad news is it was on Taco Bell.
If you’ve followed this blog for any amount of time – and if you have, thank you, but you really need to spend more time outside – you may remember I wrote here about my time up north. One thing I happened to leave out was the night I went looking for trouble.
Normally, trouble usually has no trouble finding me. But on this night, I decided to act on something I’d heard. I don’t remember if it was in a noir motion picture from the fifties that took place in San Francisco, or whether the concierge at the hotel had mentioned it to me in passing. I'd heard there were all sorts of backroom crap games in Chinatown, and I was setting out to find myself one.
So, very late in the evening, I hailed a cab and asked the driver to take me to Chinatown. When we got near it, he asked for the exact address, and I told him I didn't have one. I wanted to be taken to a crap game.
He laughed, shook his head and told me there weren’t any. By the way he said it, I could tell I’d struck gold with this driver.
I told him not only did I know there were, but I knew that he knew where they were. I was insistent he take me to one of them. After a lot of back and forth, denial and more denial, he finally said he did know of one. But he wasn’t going to take me there.
When I asked why, he said because the games were closed to outsiders, especially Caucasians, and if I went into one I might not come out.
Even if I didn't hear about them in a movie, it was beginning to sound like one.
You know how seeing a police car in the rear-view mirror after you’ve had a couple beers sobers you right up? That’s how fast I lost my desire to play in a back-room crap game.
He took me back to the hotel, where I tipped him generously and thanked him for being so honest with me.
He said, "I don't know what you're talking about."
