The Spotted Ball, A True Story by Larry Cohen c 2025
Chapter 24
“A future better than our past”
Those of my dear readers who have been with me from the beginning of True Story understand that it has been a winding road. Early on, I mentioned the French author Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) and said I would get back to him. The work that most of my readers have guessed, and guessed correctly, that I would reference, translated from the French is, “The Fatal Skin” or sometimes referred to as “The Talisman” Rather than retell a tale that most of my readers are familiar with in some form or another, I am only going to mention the work as well as that of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s (1821-1881) “The Gambler” Both of these novels should be of interest to anyone who wants a deeper understanding of the mindset of the addicted gambler. The mindset of his very existence, an existence that runs through his blood and in his vital force.
As many of my readers know by now, there is an ongoing push to bring casino gambling into the heart of New York City. The fight at the moment is not if the Big Apple is going to have casino gambling, but who will run it for the City. The “smart money” is betting on Caesars Palace (I still can’t figure out why there is never a possessive apostrophe in the word Caesar…maybe the sign makers thought it was cheaper to make the sign without it).
With this new casino in mind, Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker Magazine, in a recent article, “City of Luck,” writes about the history of gambling in New York City. Adam writes much better than I could ever hope to, even on my best day. With this in mind, I would like to take a few lines from his piece (11 Aug 2025) for my readers to incorporate with what they have read so far in True Story. Adam is more than just a historian. He is one of the great writers whom I have admired for many years. To wit:
“There’s an unchanging principle to gambling: people like to lose money guessing at the outcomes of unpredictable events. We convince ourselves that the next thing about to happen—the outcome of a horse race, the turn of a card—can be known before it does, and that believing in our prescience will allow us to take money from those who believe in their own. Of course, gamblers think they don’t like to lose money; the gamblers’ conviction, naturally, is that they will not lose but win.”
This, my dear readers, is the conclusion of True Story. We buy into an illusion; some of us buy into it with all of the soul, our very being. Some of us bet with currency, but there are other bets we take each day. If we leave our homes in the morning, whether it be for work or school or something as mundane as grocery shopping, we bet that we will return safe and sound. If we take a scheduled airliner, we bet we will arrive at our destination. Some of us bet there is a Heaven, but we hedge our bets and try to carry on in some other way after our demise. We build statues, large ones if we can afford it, and have families in the hope that they will carry on. In that respect, all of us are gamblers… just not the sort tethered to a slot machine, a craps table, or a roulette wheel or scratching at a piece of cardboard “like moles to the earth” in the hope that our future will be better than our past.
The End. The Spotted Ball, A True Story by Larry Cohen c 2025