Gilbert Sorrentino: Little Casino

“Poluphloisboio thalassa.”

“Pollyfizzyboisterous.”

Then, of course, speaking of beaches, you have Gerty McDowell, sweet, yearning, lascivious, lame Gerty. That’s another ticket.

“You’ll never know,” Mr. Bloom, yet another beachgoer, mutters.

THE BUDD LAKE CASINO IS A DAZZLING citadel in the summer sunlight. It is set back, in its gleaming whiteness, from a pale-golden beach, and offers shade and coolness, and the glamour of rattled ice in silvery cocktail shakers, the romantic smell of whiskey and bitters, lemon, and cigarette smoke, and the easy, crisp swing of white big bands on the jukebox. The tunes say, again and again, “peace,” as if the sudden ebbing of the Depression has come about without a price to be paid. The casino was not really like this, as you surely will know, save to a boy of twelve, and by the time he wanted to know just what it was like, it was gone, and the people who could tell him the truth, or, perhaps, their truth, were dead. So it exists, a white dream, “whose terraces are the color of stars.”

A casino is a “little house.”

“Little casino” is a neat tautology.

Hoyle, on the card game, Casino: “Suits are of no importance.” And yet, in the game, a Little Casino is the Two of Spades, and is worth one point. Such contradictions and blithe disruptions are the stuff of poetry.

Like many other things, the game is no longer in fashion. Just as well. There are many instances and objects of value and beauty that should be kept private, even secret. For instance, it is surely all for the best that perhaps fifty people in the world know the author of:

Take me back to the days

Of an old walnetto song

To a walnetto blonde

That pinned the white blossoms over the bosom,

and pulled at the heart’s strings of the world.

Selah.