Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash
My grandmother—whom my siblings and I pejoratively called “Granny” because she was the stereotype of a cranky, complaining, nasty-to-everyone senior citizen—was a chain-smoking Bingo addict. Granny had sacrificed half a lung to Winston 100s and thousands of dollars to Catholic Bingo halls all around Columbus, Ohio. The smell of tobacco, intermingled with the cloying gardenia aroma of White Shoulders perfume, not to mention the baby-blue ink stains on her fingers from marking countless Bingo cards, clung to her like a second skin until the day she died in 1999. Granny first introduced me to Bingo when I was nine-years-old and she dragged me with her to Bishop Watterson High School one Saturday night while babysitting me. I remember sitting silently the whole time, never daring to interrupt her as she maniacally marked her cards and muttered to no one in particularly every time one of her numbers wasn’t called. Only when she won $50 on a speed game did she acknowledge my presence, and even then it was just to tell me to get her cigarettes from her purse.
It was nearly 50 years later that I felt Granny’s presence once again in the ghostly clouds of cigarette smoke that surrounded a group of Bingoers who sucked in last minute drags before they entered Schultz Elementary School in Delaware, Ohio, drags that would have to sustain them for three hours as they sat in the school cafeteria and prayed for the right numbers to be called. For reasons that are still unclear to me, I had decided that I needed to play Bingo. I would like to think that it was nostalgia for simpler times that spurred me to want to play. If I am being honest, though, it was more likely the belief that I was going to win big, a belief that comes to someone who is bored on a steamy August night in Ohio the way religion comes to a solider in a foxhole during a particularly nasty firefight.
While Granny preferred to play Bingo on her own, I was glad that I was able to persuade my wife, Dana, and our friend, Stacey, to be my partners in an endeavor that felt oddly like something nefarious. We smiled politely as we walked past the smokers and pulled on the heavy double-doors that opened into world that was a bizarre mixture of Parent/Teacher Night and Happy Hour at a bar on the wrong side of the tracks. We took our place in line to pay our admission and buy what I assumed would be a pad of Bingo sheets. When I heard the woman just ahead of me say, “I’ll take a large computer, a cookie jar, one pack of speedballs, and an additional nine pack,” I knew that Bingo had changed from the days when Granny played. Whenever Granny talked about Bingo, computers and speedballs and cookie jars were never mentioned. Rather, she would talk about how the numbers were or were not on her side on a given night, and that would be the extent of it. When the woman at the cash box asked, “And what can I get you?” I smiled sheepishly and looked back at Dana, hoping that her librarian instincts would activate like a Wonder Twin’s power and that she would rescue me from my ignorance. When I saw that both she and Stacey were as much out their element as I, I looked at the woman with the eyes of a simpleton, hoping that she would take pity on me as some teachers take pity on the slowest student in the class. After an awkward pause, I finally admitted, “We’re Bingo virgins. Can you help us?”
In my ears, her response, uttered at what seemed to be the speed of an auctioneer’s bidding, sounded like the roar of a jet engine.
“Sounds good,” I said. We’ll take that.”
“Don’t forget to get your daubers,” the woman instructed.
“Oh, we won’t,” I said confidently.
As we walked into the cafeteria with all our Bingo paraphernalia, I turned to Dana and asked, “What the hell did I just buy?” There was no reply.
We chose a table closest to the door, perhaps subconsciously acknowledging a need to escape quickly just in case everything went wrong. I scanned the room to see how to set up all the items I had purchased: a computer approximately the size of the personal Casio keyboard Granny had given me once after a successful night of Bingo; a sheaf of Bingo sheets with nine games printed on each; a pad of five speedball games; and a sheet that listed the order of the games and that included diagrams of the all the possible ways to win games named “Double Bingo,” “Postage Stamp,” “Cover-All,” “Six Pack,” and “Luck 7s.” All we needed were our daubers, the brightly-colored, sponge-tipped ink bottles Bingoers use to mark their games.
While Dana went off to find daubers for us, I perused the tables surrounding ours. Looking down the rows I could see that the vast majority of players had some form of good luck charm in front of them. The variety of tchotchkes around us perfectly complimented the variety of players. Two tables to the left, a woman who looked to be 80 carefully arranged a phalanx of troll dolls in front of her, each of which had the same blue-black hair as their human overlord. Behind her, a man wearing a 5XL Ohio State sweatshirt offered three strands of buckeyes and an Brutus Buckeye bobble-head to the Bingo gods. I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t thought to bring my own charm, remembering that Granny had once told me that she always took a plastic Sinclair Dino figurine with her to every Bingo outing. I felt naked, unprepared, and certain that luck would not smile favorably on me this night.
“They’re already calling out numbers,” Stacey said excitedly.
“For what game?” I said.
“It must be for the first sheet on top,” she replied.
Frantically, Dana handed out the daubers so we could begin marking our sheets. I took the neon sky-blue dauber, looked up at the big, bright, Bingo board hanging on the wall near the entrance, and began marking the numbers that had already been called. It was an uphill battle, however, because I was already six numbers behind and new numbers were being called faster than I had anticipated. How did Granny ever keep up? I wondered. She would never even play Euchre with us because she said we played too fast!
“I have no idea what I’m doing,” I finally blurted out.
“I’m right there with you, man,” Dana said with an annoyed chuckle.
Finally, a man wearing a Pittsburgh Steelers t-shirt and semi-toothless smile leaned over from the table behind us and put us out of our misery. “They’re doin’ the Bonanzas. You’re markin’ the wrong sheet. They don’t start that till the regular Bingo at 6:30.” Our annoyance at marking the wrong sheet was tempered with our sense of relief that we no longer had to try to catch up.
“Damn,” Stacey said. “Who knew Bingo was so complicated.”
I wish I could say that we, with four Master’s degrees and three-quarters of a Ph.D. between us, were quickly able to adapt and learn, but that would be far from the truth. The fact is, our level of annoyance and tension only grew with each new game. The only moment of hope came when Dana yelled out, “Bingo!” I looked over at her sheet and quickly realized that she didn’t know the game that we were playing was a coverall, which required every number on her sheet to have been called.
“It’s not a Bingo. This is a coverall,” I whispered.
“No Bingo! No Bingo!” Dana yelled out. “I’m sorry. I’m drunk,” she told the crowd, who probably would have attacked her had they not realized there was still a game to be won.
“I can’t take her anywhere,” I told the room. A soft laughter bubbled around the cafeteria, and then was quickly silenced with the next number called.
With each new game, I found a new curse word to express my frustration. I began my chain of expletives with Granny’s one-and-only curse word, “Shit!” Anytime anything went wrong for Granny, “Shit!” was her go-to word. Sometimes, if she was particularly upset, she would say, “Well, shit!” for emphasis. I tried to imagine how many times the word “Shit!” hissed through her dentures and past pursed lips in the saintly atmosphere of the Bishop Hartley Bingo Hall. If her Bingo nights were anything like this night, I imagined that the number must have been very high indeed.
Eventually, though, as my losing streak continued, I ran out of words. For a moment, I began to sympathize on some small level with Granny, a woman for whom I never felt any sympathy while she was alive. Maybe this was part of the reason why she was so cranky and unpleasant to everyone. Maybe she just needed a few more wins to assure her that the unseen forces of the universe were not always against her. But when, during the last game of the night a weathered, leather-faced woman won—a woman whose skin had been wrinkled and tanned by God-knows-how-many cigarettes to suck a point that it was difficult to determine whether she was in her fifties, sixties, seventies, or eighties—when that woman yelled “Bingo,” I swear I heard Granny’s smoky voice claiming victory followed by her phlegmy laughter at everyone who had come up one number short. All I could muster was a silent flip-of-the-bird to my losing Bingo sheet, an act that Dana photographed and posted to FaceBook as a public record of our futility. After all, losing is a dish best enjoyed with others. And in Bingo, as it is in life, there are more losers than winners.
Kip Knott’s debut full-length collection of poetry—Tragedy, Ecstasy, Doom, and so on—is currently available from Kelsay Books. A new full-length collection of poetry, Clean Coal Burn, is forthcoming in 2021, also from Kelsay Books. More of his work may be accessed at kipknott.com.
