The Drive Home

Nineteen seventy one. I drove from Erie out to a room past Youngstown, six hours in a Buick with a heater that only worked above fifty miles an hour. A fellow named Ray had a game lined up for me, and Ray was never wrong about a game.

I lost it in forty minutes. It was not close. The table played long, my stroke was still cold from the road, and the man Ray had found for me turned out to be somebody else's find first.

By nine o'clock I should have been driving. I stayed until four in the morning.

Here is the part that matters, and it took me thirty years to say it out loud. I was not staying because I thought I would win. I knew by midnight I would not. I stayed because of the drive. Six hours in a cold car, a day I could not afford to lose, gas money I did not have. All of that had to buy something. It felt indecent to go home with nothing when I had paid so much just to arrive.

That is a kind of chasing nobody warns you about. Everybody can spot the fellow trying to win his money back. Fewer people notice the fellow trying to win back his evening. His Saturday. His whole season. But the hours are gone the same as the dollars are gone, and there is no rack you can run that returns them.

I hear it now in different clothes. A young fellow in my hall told me last winter he could not quit following a certain team, because he had been on them since September and he had too much in it to stop. He said it like it was loyalty. I have said the same thing myself, in a Buick, at four in the morning, to nobody.

I drove home in daylight. The only thing those six hours ever bought me was six more.

What is spent is spent. It is not sitting on the table waiting for you to go earn it back. It is just spent, and you are allowed to stand up and leave anyway. If the hours have gotten harder to walk away from than the money, 1-800-MY-RESET is answered by people who understand that arithmetic.

The drive home is a lot shorter at nine than it is at four.

Sal