This is another paperback I discovered in the catacombs of the UNLV Special Collections stacks. The tagline is what sold me: “The most beautiful girls in Las Vegas couldn’t stop Eddie from winning.” Also, Library Journal called it “a groovy novel.” So, I figured, it’s about a card-counting Greg Brady. This might make for an entertaining 250 pages. It was really, really weird.
Sam Ross. The Fortune Machine. New York: Dell, 1970. Paperback, 256 pp. 95¢
The only thing, it seems, more prevalent than books with systems telling people how to win at blackjack are novels with heroes who have a can’t-miss system for winning at blackjack. Particularly in the late 1960s and 1970s, when the idea of card counting and computer analysis were new, many authors developed a fascination with card-counting and blackjack systems play, though they often muffed the details.
The Fortune Machine is one of these books, bringing a young, intense Brooklynite to the temptations of Las Vegas. The hero is Eddie Clark, a young, insecure data entry technician who works for Love Match, a computer dating service. He puts his name into the computer and gets matched with Mary Hackett, a wealthy young woman who is positively spacey. Eddie’s a bit of a cadet himself, so they are actually compatible. The complication: Mary’s rich father despises Eddie, who lives in a garden apartment with his down to earth janitor father. Mary and Eddie conclude that if Eddie can go to Las Vegas and win $200,000 playing blackjack, her father will appreciate the young man’s moxie and financial competence and give the star-crossed lovers his blessing.
So that’s the set-up. Eddie goes to Las Vegas and faces down unfriendly casino managers and his own bodily desires in his quest to make $200,000. In a matter of personal amusemnt to me (a former Trump Taj Mahal employee), the first casino he checks in to is named the Taj Mahal. He does his gambling and finds his fortune. If this sounds like your kind of story, this is a book for you.
But the most interesting thing is that, once Eddie gets to Las Vegas, he does more than play blackjack. He embarks on an odyssey of sexual exploration that enables him to overcome his former insecurities. The women of Las Vegas, in other words, make a man out of young Eddie.
The novel is fraught with Eddie’s tension over his inexperience and the pairing–quite common in the genre–of absorption in gambling and sexual dysfunction. The very first paragraph of the book, describing how nervous Eddie is on his way to Las Vegas, says it is “worse than when I went to the army, than with the first girl I ever had” (5). His ability to gamble, for Eddie, is deeply linked to his libido, and he has serious doubts about both.
In his first few sexual encounters with Mary, Eddie openly discusses a brutally frank self-assessment of his performance. Before they even go to bed, he worries that he will “score a big fat F.” After their first grip of passion, he rates himself a C- or possibly F, but there is a definite learning curve. After the second time he concedes that, “maybe I got up to a C or B-” (69).
Mary, for her part, has bargain basement expectations which mitigate Eddie’s perceived inadequacies. After their first tryst, Eddie fears that he has been “a big fat bust” (again, linking sex to blackjack). But Mary responds with words to warm the heart of any sexually insecure man fishing for compliments:
“You didn’t hurt me,” she said. “And I feel good. Because you’re not queer. You don’t make me feel like dirt. I love you for that.” (65)
So Mary is rich, flakey, and obviously undemanding. All Eddie has to do to maintain the relationship, it seems, is to stay strictly hetero (Mary had previously struggled through an arranged marriage with a gay man, since annulled for non-consumation) and not physically abuse her. Sounds easy to me. But, like most guys, he finds a way to complicate things, so it’s off to Vegas and $200,000.
The night before he leaves, Eddie has an unfortunate bedroom incident that explicitly links his gambling obsession with his amatory inadequacy:
Just as I was about to enter her, a mathematical probability struck my mind. In a full deck your chances of getting blackjack are one in 20 20/23. What a thing to pop into your mind at a time like this.
“What’s wrong, Eddie?”
“They say that gambling and women don’t mix.”
“What about lady luck?”
“That’s nice, baby, but let me be unlucky in love.”
“You’re not superstitious, are you?”
“No. But everything helps.”
She held me close. I could feel the heat of her body, the desire full against me. But it was no use. I couldn’t make it. (13)
Maybe she should have read off one of those basic strategy cards to get him into it. Anyway, for Eddie, sex and gambling are closely intertwined. This was one of the major themes of the book, and was actually critical to the plot.
Once Eddie gets to Las Vegas, he undergoes a sexual awakening at the hands of a series of pleasure-giving women who are readily available to all gamblers. Benny Benson, the casino manager at the Taj Mahal, explicitly tell Eddie that he can procure any woman–any woman–that he sees on the property who strikes his fancy. This is part of the casino’s full service. Benson promises him a complete RFB (room, food, beverage) comp, throwing in, “When do you want the girl” (90)?.
So Eddie gets his experience, all the while beating the house. But, as has been said, success can be just as disastrous as failure. Like a gambler who chases his losses, Eddie gets drawn in by his winning and becomes completely addled. Time means nothing as he bounces from casino to casino, beating the house at blackjack in the evening, then rocking the house with a comped companion in his room at night.
When his girlfriend arrives, it’s a different story, though she’s a remarkably good sport about his having unprotected sex with a series of sexually proficient (and apparently well-traveled) casino employees.
The Fortune Machine is one of those books that lets the reader feel he or she is smarter than the protagonist and most of the characters. There’s just not a lot going on here. Reading about some guy not able to get it up because he’s thinking about basic strategy isn’t really riveting literature. The ideas about computers are interesting, too. Eddie isn’t even a programmer–he only inputs data–but the book makes him out to be some kind of wunderkind. Because he has access to a computer and knows how to enter data, he’s a whiz kid. Of course, this was before the proliferation of home computers, when anyone could spend their time punching numbers into a computer and proclaim themselves a computer-certified expert.
Maybe that’s the most interesting part of the book, outside of laughing at Eddie’s insecurities–the idea that young people, using computers, could overthrow the tyranny of society. This is never explicitly spoken, but remains an undercurrent throughout the book. There are also a few illustrative quotations about the nature of casinos.
BOTTOM LINE: It’s OK, particularly if you’ve got time to kill. Expect to laugh at the book rather than with it, though.