A. Fair: Spill the Jackpot

The manager coughed, a dry, significant, sarcastic cough.

Louie quit talking abruptly.

“Come on,” I said, and pushed toward the door. I looked back over my shoulder. Breckenridge gave me a slow, solemn wink, put his thumb and forefinger to his temple, and made little circles.

“Got a machine I can play with?” I asked Louie. “I want to take it to pieces. It’s five-fifteen now. I have half an hour.”

“Yeah. Down in the basement,” Louie said.

“All right, let’s go down to the basement then.”

We went down the stairs, across the casino to a back door, and down into a cool basement. Louie switched on lights. “What you want first?” he asked.

“How do they fix ’em?”

He said, “There’s lots of ways. They drill ’em right here and stick in a piece of piano wire. Then the machine don’t lock off after each play, and they can keep pulling the handle until they milk the machine dry.

“Or they can drill ’em, stick in a wire, and pull down the trigger that releases the gold award. Or they can take a cup and slide it up through the pay slot. They play until they get a win, and the fingers start to work. Then they shove the cup up in the fingers. That keeps ’em from closing, and they can milk all the money that’s in the tube out through the pay cup.”

“What’s the tube?” I asked.

“Say, you don’t know much about slot machines, huh?”

“Not a thing.”

He looked at me, and seemed rather sheepish. He said, “I guess I stepped on my foot. No bad feelings over the sock I gave you?”

“Only my face is sore, not my feelings.”

“Say, guy, you’re all right. Here, let me show you something about a machine.”

Louie pointed to a workbench. A slot machine was sitting on this bench. It took him only a few moments to unlock the back, take it off, unfasten a couple of catches, and lift out the internal mechanism.

“Here you are,” he said.

“How does it work?”

“Simple. You drop the coin. That pulls back this little finger. You press the lever. That gives the power that starts ’em going. Here’s a little time clock — right down here. That spins around, and when it comes to the first notch, that stops the first wheel. Then a bit later, the second stops, and then the third. Now, a slot machine has five clicks. The first three are the wheels. The fourth is the lock off, and the fifth is when the pay-off snaps. If you don’t get those five clicks, your machine’s gone flooey. Get me?”

I looked at the three dials with the strings of different figures.

“Those pictures don’t mean nothing,” Louie said. “The whole thing comes from these notches in the back. You can see where this shovel slides into the slot in the first one, then the second, and then the third. It’s the notches that count, and the notches are in the back.”

“And how about this tube?”

“That tube is always filled with coins. After it gets filled, the overflow goes into the jackpot and down into the box in the machine. You’ve got two jackpots. After the first pays off, the second comes into the pay-off position and the coins begin feeding into the first one again.”

“Then once the wheels have started spinning, the clock in back determines the time when they’re going to stop?”

“That’s right. It’s a question of timing. That’s what it is in everything: golf, baseball, tennis, fighting — anything.”

I studied the mechanism of the machine.

Louie said, “Timing! That’s the way I won the championship bout in the Navy.”

He danced out into the middle of the cement floor, ducked his head down, raised his left shoulder, and started making jabs at an imaginary opponent, ducking and weaving around, dancing lightly on the balls of his feet, the leather soles of his shoes making a peculiar shuffling sound as they slid over the cement. I let him go because I wanted to study the machine.

“Now, lookit,” Louie said.

I looked up.

“He comes at me with a hard left twice, like this, see?” And Louie lashed out with his left. “You get me?” he asked anxiously, pausing in his shuffle to look over his shoulder, his left arm still outstretched.

“I get you, but let’s get back—”

“All right, then the third time I’m waiting for it. I throw up a block. And what happens? He outguesses me. His right comes across like a pile driver. I manage to duck and—”

“Snap out of it!”

But Louie started dancing again, all around the cellar, his feet stirring up a continual fog of dust as he weaved his shoulders, lashing out quick blows and battering out a blow-by-blow account of his fight. I couldn’t stop him. He was in the ring and I couldn’t get him out. I finally gave up and waited for him to finish. He ended up right in front of me.

“Come on over here. I want to show you. I won’t hurt you, just get yourself in position. That’s right. Now shoot out a right at my chin. Go ahead. Shoot it out. Don’t be afraid. Just give me the works.”

“I’m afraid I could never do it,” I said.

“Shucks,” he said modestly. “It’s easy.”

“That fall you took upstairs doesn’t seem to have hurt you at all.”

The eager glow of animation faded from his eyes, left him as only a shell.

“Shucks,” he said, “that was Sid Jannix. I seen him fight once. He’s good — awful good. But he ain’t too good. I could have taken him if I’d known who he was sooner, but you know how it is, buddy. You get careless in this business. You get so you don’t want to miss a punch. You try to get set, and get in just the position you want before you turn it loose. You can’t get set on Sid Jannix. You can’t get set on any pug that’s up on his toes. He just threw a fist at me, that’s all. Now let me show you something, buddy. You don’t hit right. You hit with your arms. You can’t do that. You gotta sink your body in back of the blows. Here, let me show you.”

“I want to look at this slot machine.”

“Okay, buddy, sure. I ain’t tryin’ to butt in. I just thought I’d teach you something, that’s all.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“What else do you want to know about the machine, buddy?”

“What are your chances of winning?”

“Pretty good. Of course, if you was to play a hundred dollars right across the board, you’d probably only get forty of it back. That sixty would represent the profit for the house. But, in playing that hundred, you might feed five bucks into the machine without getting over fifty cents back. Then you might play fifty cents, and get four dollars back — see? That’s the way it works. Guys don’t play slot machines the way they play the stock market, putting a bunch of dough in it. They just come in and try ’em out to see if they’re lucky. Or in a restaurant if they get some change in nickels, they put ten or fifteen cents into the slot machines. Then maybe they get hot and pull all the nickels out of their pocket and play ’em. They’ll get a few wins, and they play back their winnings. That’s why they keep machines around restaurants rollered so heavy. They don’t have to let the customer win. Up here, we figure it’s good advertisement to hear the coins jingle in the pay-off up once in a while; but that’s not saying we can afford to donate to charity.”

“What do you mean by a machine being rollered?”

He pointed to a bulky piece of metal clamped over one of the sprockets and screwed into place. “See the roller on hat first wheel?”

I nodded.

“Well, that’s a roller. That’s on one of the oranges. Now, you see there’s three oranges on the first wheel, four on the second, and six on the third. That makes a man feel good. You see, the machine stops just that way. One — two — three. Now suppose he gets an orange on the first, and an orange on the second. He’s got time to do a little thinking before be third wheel clicks, and if it’s an orange, he thinks he made it come just by thinking about it. That’s why there’s so many oranges on the third wheel. Six out of twenty. Get me? There’s twenty figures on each wheel. Well, with six oranges on the third wheel, there’s about one chance jut of three that it’ll stop on an orange after you’ve got the;first two oranges. That’s the trick. Getting the first two oranges.