CAMPOut: Fay's Rehoboth Journal

My partner Bonnie did a brave, tough, loving thing last week. She played the slots with her mother. Okay, you have to know the history to understand the depth of this gesture. My mother-in-law is an unrepentant gambling addict.

For the better part of Bonnie’s 50-something years and the entirety of our 22 year relationship, we’ve been yanking Mom out of various casinos and bingo parlors—often just a step ahead of the mortgage man.

Now it’s tough enough for GLBT people to deal with family baggage related to our sexual orientation, but add addiction to the mix and you have bona fide American Tourister.

For my part, I couldn’t understand what was so bad about bingo. It’s a game we played in school. What????

Then Bonnie took me to the bingo hall. No church basement this. Lights flashed, bells went off and a herd of Winston-puffing gamblers sat glued to their cards, some playing 48 games simultaneously. I was so inept I couldn’t even manage one game card efficiently. Mom, and the 85-year old woman to my left could dab their total of 96 cards with the permanent marker digit dabber and then swoop in to mark mine before I realized my number had been called. I couldn’t even get out of their way in time to avoid having my forearms dabbed like a Jackson Pollack canvas.

Permanently marked in bright colors, I watched the bingomania give way to the next phase of the evening: the unfortunately named ripoffs. These are instant games where you rip off five tabs to see if you’ve won. The bingo mavens rushed the ripoff counter, pitched large bills at the clerk and commenced ripping numbers like crazed pigeons pecking seed. Winners traded winning tickets for more ripoffs, losers shed the debris on the floor. By night’s end, nobody had any money as we waded knee deep in cardboard toward the exits. I was beginning to understand the problem.

Next we heard that Mom went on a Bingo Bus—a five-day tour from Maryland to South Carolina and back, stopping for a chance at big jackpots at all the hot bingo mills en route. All I can say is that by the time bingo Mom and the other gaming nuts got back, they’d gambled non-stop for days, sitting on the bus or in bingo parlors with their ankles swelling like soccer balls.

For five days, nobody wanted to miss a G-18 to go potty. Yuck.

But it was the time we opened our credit card bill to find it speckled with charges from Glen Burnie Bingo World that the poop hit the propeller. After a text-book intervention, the requisite crying and teeth gnashing, followed by the eventual acceptance of consequences, we all wound up at Gamblers Anonymous.

Bonnie and I joined the GamAnon family sessions. Personally, I think the gamblers were all in a room trading tip sheets while we entertained ourselves with sob stories of the pissed and penniless.

Actually, I think Bonnie and I were the entertainment, since the group couldn’t figure out how we were all related. "Oh, you are so lucky to have a best friend accompany you here…" I’m pretty sure we were the only lesbians they’d ever encountered, and I’m positive I was their first Jew.

Be that as it may, life continued with Mom on the wagon occasionally and back on the bingo bus more often than not. But, as they say, life is what happens when you have other plans. Five years ago Mom was diagnosed with ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease.

The disease is as cruel and as powerful as addiction. Combine the two and you have a woman who can’t talk, walk or swallow, but who can con her equally elderly neighbor into taking her to play bingo three nights a week.

When necessity forced Mom to move to assisted living and she could no longer gamble, things got really ugly. One night Mom mounted her mobility scooter, crashed through the nursing home doors and headed for that neighborly getaway car waiting to take the fugitive to the bingo hall.

She was apprehended in the parking lot. You gotta laugh. I think.

Now I know many gay people who have had to take care of aging parents who had often made their children’s lives hell because of sexual orientation issues. But in the end, whether the parents came to terms with their gay children, or were merely senile enough not to remember the family schisms, lots of relationships were pasted back together before, or just as, it was too late.

In Bonnie’s case, her Mom was failing fast, refusing to be fed through her tube, resisting anything to help herself, and generally giving up.

Bonnie showed up at the nursing home and said to Mom, "If you don’t eat, how will you have strength to go to the Slots at Charlestown?" The patient lit up, furiously punched the bell for the nurse to get her dressed and off they went.

While Mom could hardly move or sit up in her wheelchair, she knew which slot machines she wanted and which were unacceptable. Finally, at the very perfect machine, twenty bucks in quarters got swallowed before Mom started to tire. Then, the old lady strained to push the button on the one armed bandit one last time and bang! She hit for a sizeable jackpot.

"I never thought I’d do this again," Mom scribbled on her note pad, her only means of communication. "Love U."

Acceptance, forgiveness, amnesty. It works both ways. We should all be so lucky.