There is no such thing as paranoia. Your worst fears can come true at any moment.

That’s Hunter S. Thompson. He may well have been a gambler and for all I know he may well have stayed in this very hotel. My room was on the top floor of the Majestic with a concrete veranda overlooking shoulder to shoulder small buildings. There were many one or two-story rundown businesses. The view was a 280-degree radial circumference of a neighborhood unchanged for decades. It was noisy, busy, and near a row of strip joints.

By the way, Jean-Eugène Buland painted this wonderful image. His work is unsurpassed and beautiful. See the faces, all taking turns looking up in bewilderment. It’s as if they are offering an omen. They look away as soon as they meet your eyes. How curious that seems until you realize that when people see you, in fact they see themselves. Healthy people look, smile, and go their way. There is nothing they need to fear. The guilty almost always look away.

If you walked out the door, went down the elevator and connected with reality, you would be in the world of sound and fury as one writer put it. “Life is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing.” Macbeth. But did the bard really mean it like that. Faulkner. I don’t know. I guess they call that irony. Pages upon pages of a challenged individual. Not so much an idiot in my book. Anyway my point is that there can be “harmony and passion” and let the fury burn out. The fury in this case were numerous complaints about a gambling den tucked away somewhere in the obscure drinking hole I was about to enter.

The proprietor of the bar was a skinny narrow-eyed pesky fellow with an absence of any social capacity at all. He’d drag down one cigarette after another and fill a beer glass like a laboratory tech. His clientele, almost all, must have been gamblers of the losing kind. End of their rope so to speak. Gaunt and reticent. I imagined they were all in debt to bad sources and unable to quit.

As in all card games, there is an origin derived from divination. It isn’t remarkable that the modern Western deck of gaming cards had arisen from Tarot. And Tarot is as ancient as card creations come. I wasn’t in the neighborhood by accident. I was undercover on a stakeout. I announced myself as a gambler. I was sweating and felt agitated and ordered a double whisky with a water back. The atmosphere was akin to a latrine in a submarine. In no time I was given the nod and led to the pool room. My bear-sized asian chaprone unlocked a nearly hidden door. I saw a bucket and a mop and that was the last thing I ever saw. Guess what card came up.