When I was younger, and searching for some way out of the dismal existence I was living that is often called the 9 to 5 grind the desire to find a way out through betting was appealing.  If I sat down at a table to play blackjack, my hope was to win enough money to change my life.  I never was happy walking out with a few hundred dollars.

If I was with friends, they would try to pull me away from the table while I was winning.  But I wouldn’t listen.  They didn’t understand.  I needed money that would change my life.

I see that look as I walk through the casino at Yonkers.  I see it as people scratch lottery tickets.  Winning is never enough.  The odds are a few million to one and yet the lines for lottery tickets are around the block.  This is all desperation.  I see it.  I understand it.  And now I have to say that when I was at the casino on Saturday night, I didn’t place a single bet.

The Empire Casino has penny slots.  You can sit at a penny slot machine for hours.  I just sat down next to someone and watched them as they went into this trance state.  It’s similar to drug dreams.  Blank expressions.  Drooping eyelids.  Arms that were getting tired from placing penny bets for hours.  And I had not the slightest desire to place a bet.  Not on the horses.  And not with the slots.

Honestly, if you are relatively satisfied with what you’re doing, it’s hard to imagine getting caught up in gambling.  But then I thought about some of the greatest artists who had severe gambling problems and wondered how much satisfaction they got from their gifts.  The ultimate artist / gambler was Dostoyevsky.  Can you imagine that this writer, who turned out some of the greatest literature was constantly in debt because of his gambling habits.

In fact, do you know how Dostoyevsky died?  And this is ironic.  He was looking for money he had hidden at the top of a bookshelf, and was on a ladder, or maybe it was a chair, and the bookshelf fell on him, crushed him, and he died, squirming to get free of the books.

Besides being an inveterate gambler, he also suffered from epilepsy which wasn’t understood in his day. It was considered a sort of mental illness.  There always seems to be some sort of depth of horror that the great artists (not all but many) go through in order to create their greatest works.  Drink was most common.  But gambling was equally destructive.

Even Mark Twain spent his last years, after having made millions of dollars, and being the most widely published author of his day, was constantly fending off debtors.  Why?  Because he also had a sort of gambling problem.  He sank money into various inventions that never worked.  He sank money into publishing companies that went under.  It seems that the greater that talent, the greater the depth these artists sink to.

And then there are exceptions.  For example, Thomas Mann lived a tidy, non-emotional life.  He would awake at the same time every day, sit down and write exactly two pages of prose.  Sometimes, even if he was in the middle of a sentence, and he had written enough words for the day, he would just leave it in mid-sentence and go off to live a nice leisurely life.  The rest of the day was his – to do with as he wanted.  And that was a guy that wrote very long books.

Talent doesn’t seem to be related to personality.  It’s as if you take any personality – give them the talent gene – and whether they are emotional cripples, or fully functional refined people – the talent will do it’s thing no matter what soil it has been planted in.

Dostoyevsky would have been a gambler, whether he was a writer or not.  Van Gogh probably would’ve gone mad whether he was a painter, or as he was in the beginning, a poor preacher.  Had you given Edgar Alan Poe millions of dollars, he would’ve wasted it on drink and drugs.  Talent – whatever it is – can be nourished, but the soil it grows in, well it seems to me that it’s just something you’re born with, just as you’re born with the talent.

And so, for me there was no gambling.  No desire for it.  I was getting my excitement trying to find new ways to photograph horses.  That was all the excitement I needed.  Could I get into the casino and shoot without having my card or camera confiscated as I walked past the guards.  That was excitement enough.  It was a new form of gambling that had replaced my old desires to make money by watching the roulette ball bounce around.