The Real Story of my Sole Experience With Three-Card Monte

I always tell people that I won at three-card monte.

I tell them that the guy showed me the queen (of diamonds, I think) and two aces (clubs and spades), then shuffled the cards around on a cardboard box top (which is true), and then asked me to point to the queen (which I did).

Then I tell people that he asked me if I was sure that was where the queen was (I was pretty certain), and that he then picked up one of the cards I didn’t choose (he did), to “show everybody which card this man here” (his words, not mine) “hadn’t picked.”

What I then tell people is that he switched the two remaining cards on the box top while my eyes were naturally drawn to the card in his upraised hand (this is the only explanation I can come up with for what actually happened), and that he then replaced the card in his hand on the cardboard box (so far, so good, so far as factual accounting goes).

Then he asked me again which of the downturned cards was the queen.

In the version of the story I tell people (which isn’t true, this version), I was on to his clever ruse. Sometimes I even play it like I slightly menaced this thirty-something-year-old street hustler with the smell of liquor on him (not true in the slightest) when I said, “the queen’s right there,” pointing to the place where he’d moved her while he thought (in this version, I am quick-witted and observant, and maybe even somehow omnisciently hip to this con that I’ve not previously witnessed) my attention was elsewhere. In this version, he splutters a little and then reveals the queen where I’ve pointed. In this version, he gives me back my twenty with a matched twenty, after weakly asking if I want to “go double or nothing.”

Which I don’t. Not in this version. In this version (and offshoots thereof, wherein his boys–his muscle, or whatever–step to me and suggest that I let him go double or nothing, but they improbably back the fuck up with a steely eyed glare from me–a glare that mirrors the one I gave the conning three-card monte artiste) I walk away, twenty dollars the richer.

In this version, the not-real version, I don’t go double or nothing, and then again, losing eighty dollars at a time in my life when eighty dollars mattered. In the not-real version I don’t keep wondering how it’s happening, hoping impossibly that I will be able this time to bring the account to right. Not to win anymore, but just not to have lost.

And again, and again.

In the real version, the one I don’t tell people, I only realize what has happened after I’ve borrowed twenty bucks from a friend later in the evening to drink away my failure. And I don’t return to the spot where he was and demand my money back when this realization occurs to me (his muscle–his boys, or whatever–being pretty intimidating, if they even ever existed and aren’t just something I’ve told people about enough times to make real; the three-card monte artiste himself being pretty intimidating in his urban otherness).

In this version, the real version, it doesn’t even occur to me.