Acey-Deucey
When I was twelve, we moved to the state of Maine. The three years we lived there felt very formative to me not only because I went through puberty in “Vacationland” as the state proclaims itself on its license plates, but also because of all the work hard / play hard lessons I learned during those years. During the winter of our arrival I asked the man (Saul Feldman) who owned the Poland Spring Resort, for a summer job on the golf course. He magnanimously offered me the jobs as a caddie and the locker room boy at the princely minimum wage of $1.10/hour (inflation-adjusted, that would be $8/hour today). That was actually just for the locker room gig, since caddying was a freelance situation for which I earned $3.50 per bag per loop plus tip. The average loop took four hours and I usually pocketed $5 per bag, which meant I could earn $10 for double bagging (which was the norm) and $20 per day for doing two long loops on the hilly course. I was ecstatic to think I could earn $20 plus about an added $3 for cleaning up the mens locker room each day. That was ten hours of back-breaking work and I loved the thought of it, not to mention that I could play golf for free when not working. I still have a notch in my shoulders from the heavy bags and would note that the notch is deeper on my left shoulder because that’s where I carried my heavy skis in the winter after I finished bussing dishes at the Poland Spring ski lodge for the right to have a free ski pass to ski on nights and weekends when not bussing those dishes.
Strangely enough, we were in Maine so that my mother could create and run the first women’s Job Corps Center during the short-lived Great Society days of the Johnson Administration. The Federal Government had rented the resort (minus the golf course and ski hill) from Saul to house and teach 1,200 inner-city young women at a time, from around the nation, about gaining the skills and social graces (read that to mean the prevailing and conforming white lifestyle) thought needed to fit into 1966 American society with jobs that paid just slightly more than the minimum wage. It was a noble, but somewhat misguided cause that morphed a few years later into a more efficient non-residential vocational training program. My mother was the first to see the fallacy of the plan, but she worked it for two full years before coming to that conclusion. Meanwhile, I got to live in Vacationland and add Maine to my growing list of “places I have known”.
One lesson I learned early in Poland Spring was about the perils of gambling. The caddies, mostly older, more hardened young and old men, liked to play card games of chance in the locker room at the end of each day. Their favorite was Acey-Deucey, a fast-moving game that was only one notch up in complexity from cutting cards. You basically put down two cards and then bet on whether the next card falls between the two cards without landing on either. Hence the name of the game since the best hand to be dealt was an ace and a deuce since your odds of getting between them was the highest available. If you think about it, you had a 44/50 chance of success in simplistic terms, which still left the “house” the rake of 12% in this best-case scenario. I’m not statistician enough to want to figure out the overall odds since this is merely the best-case scenario. Suffice it to say that the odds strongly favored the house and the older guys were always the house. But this “three-card-monty” scam was very enticing for a young pre-pubescent man with $20 in his pocket and $3 in salary due bill for the day.
It took about five minutes to lose my $20 of hard-earned money and teach me a great lesson that would be closely repeated Freshman year in college when I lost my last $30 of food money in a dormitory poker game. These are valuable moments in a young life.
I thought about Acey-Deucey this morning because we are being visited by our friends Ann and Chris and Chris’ childhood friend from Oklahoma (now living in Austin, Texas), John. Chris and John rode their motorcycles up (Ann drove up) from Duchess County through the heart of the Catskills Mountains. John is on a full-dress Moto Guzzi California and Chris rode his modern-version Triumph. The engine in John’s big beast is fundamentally the same as it was when I was in high school in Italy. Why mess with success? Chris’ Triumph is a completely redesigned and updated version of the classic British bike that Steve McQueen rode across the German countryside in The Great Escape. And sure enough, it was the redesigned and updated bike that sprung some sort of oil leak that continuously coated the rear tire with the slick and slippery stuff as Chris rode. That is what we call in the motorcycling world, a suboptimal riding condition. They both made it here, but we are all wary of Chris continuing to use such a tricked-up ride and risk losing his rear tire on any given mountain turn. I would liken that risk to something like drawing, say, an eight and a Jack in Acey-Deucey. That means I feel Chris has a 8/50 chance AT-BEST of not having that slick back tire situation ending well if he does not address it today. I think even Steve McQueen had better odds of hill-jumping his way into Switzerland.
Last night we agreed that we would not take a motorcycle ride today for that very reason, but instead perhaps go seek a nice lunch at a local winery where we could ride in cars rather than mounted on bucking broncos. Ann told me that her cousin Ann, affectionately known to them as CA would be looking to see what I would be writing about while they visited. It seems CA reads my blog. So, I sat here this morning trying to figure out what to write about that might interest CA and that would allow me to incorporate her name in the story. That gave rise to me pondering what CA could mean in a title…and that led me to AC and then AC/DC pretty quickly. I could have worked with that title and wrong-footed all my readers by having it not be about gender or sexual fluidity or even electric current. But I found that repeating AC, AC, AC several times, led me quickly to Acey-Deucey and my poignant memories of those days in the countryside of Maine. As I look out on the ninth hole of the Cornell University Golf Course into the rising sun on this cloudless morning in Ithaca, I am reminded of Poland Spring and my minimum-wage job of cleaning mens room toilets. Mostly, I am thinking about how nice it is to have weathered my youth in-tact. I have avoided tasting asphalt from my motorcycle, I skied for years without injury and now my only scars from my misjudgments are my notched shoulders. I hope Chris solves his oil leak problem today or at least has the wisdom to stop playing a rigged Acey-Deucey game with his rear tire.