I Pulled Trump First in Reno
Adventures at the 2016 National Bridge Championships
Day 1
The first thing that hits you is the smoke, stale and fresh cigarette and cigar smoke mingling in the windowless cavern at the entrance to the casino’s hotel. We immediately feel coated with smoke residue; the air has a thick haze, the neon buzzing like a bug zapper on a hot August night. People are roaming the halls smoking. Ashtrays are piled on tables, perching on countertops, and nestled beside the slots. There are cigarette machines! The surgeon general seems to have taken a pass here in Reno.
We look at each other, my mother and sisters and daughter. We have come to Reno, Nevada for the National Bridge Championships. No, we are not Grand Life Masters; we are not even competitive players. The event advertised classes for people at all levels and tournaments for newcomers. My mother has been playing social bridge for over 50 years, and I’ve been attempting to learn for two.
Bridge had surprisingly brought us together after a lifetime of mother-daughter conflict. We finally found something we shared. The tournament sounded fun. We knew we might be out of our depths; we had no idea how far.
My sisters and daughter decided to come along for the ride, and registered for a class that promises to teach them bridge in a day. “Good luck with that,” my mother says. It seems preposterous to anyone who knows the game and its complexities, its myriad rules, and manifold demands on memory and math skills. They’re not daunted. How hard could it be? My mother says, “You’ll see, you’ll see,” in that particular inflection perfected by Jewish mothers, all knowing and all seeing. Still, I’m glad they’ve come. I can’t remember a single time when schedules and desires have meshed that would put the five of us together on one junket. I’m excited they want to learn bridge.
When we were little, my sisters and I loved it when our mother’s bridge ladies came to our house to play. My mother would use her best china, buy a wonderful Entenmann’s cake we would spy through the cellophane window of its crisp white box. We’d help her set up the table with its thin-as-broomsticks legs tucked underneath and take out the pretty twin set of cards only used for these nights. We were impressed with the ladies, their clothes and heels, accessories and hairdos. I loved hanging up their minks and refilling the crystal candy dish like a loyal servant. Yet for all that fascination, none of us learned to play. The world seemed to leave bridge behind, or we did.
We are staying at one of the three tournament-designated hotels: the El Dorado. It connects to the more upscale Silver Legacy and the more downscale Circus, Circus through a network of labyrinthine passages. We haven’t even registered or picked up our room keys when there is rumbling among us that we’re staying too long. That’s the kind of troopers we are.
Behind the registration desk, an enormous banner advertises the musical Footloose on the main stage. Things are looking up. We’re in. We have an inexplicably high tolerance for third-rate musical theater and the actors who give it their all. I always wonder if these jobs are stepping stones or swan songs; the apogee of their careers or the end? How many degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon?
We can barely find our way to the elevator bank to our rooms. The floors, walls, and ceiling are a soundboard of lights: flashing lights, pulsing lights, light strips, splashes of neon, and twinkle lights. An enormous Swarovski sign becomes one of the landmarks we will use to find our way back to our rooms. Later we will designate additional markers like crumbs to navigate the passages, including a caricature artist’s stand, a brightly lit case of cakes that could inspire a Wayne Thiebaud painting, and an enormous plaster fountain inspired by the Trevi, only the putti look like Smurfs swallowing arcs of water shooting out from the horses’ mouths in a bizarre tableau of golden showers.
You would think that sexual energy would throb in a place like this where day is night and night is long. But instead it feels strangely asexual. Large men in cargo pants roam the corridors, the women more sensible than fashionable. Solo people dot the casino’s miles of slots, pulling the arms like lonely masturbators. The games flash neon like the porn stores in Times Square, the names of the games a lurid mix of pop culture and macho posturing: Brittany Spears, Star Wars, The Wolf, and Natural Born Killers. The cocktail waitresses who dart around seem marred in one way or another: a torn stocking, spaghetti straps that have lost their will to live, and threadbare tops with patches of sequence hanging by their threads. I imagine their latchkey kids coming home to an empty house or waking up in one. I imagine some of the women taking college courses trying to find a way out of the El Dorado’s smoke-filled cavern, my imagination always veering toward Lifetime movie about grit and dreams. Or maybe it’s me starring in a Lifetime movie about a mother and daughter trying desperately to bond and signing up to play in a National Bridge Championship without a single master point between them! She’s Bette Midler and I’m Tina Fey. (It’s my fantasy, I can cast it.) And yes, we prevail and go all the way to the top, win the competition.
It’s after 9 p.m. when we finally find the convention center. The welcome table is unmanned, the reception area empty. There are pamphlets and stacks of the Daily Bulletin along with boxes of tiny red pencils embossed with the name of the organization, the American Contract Bridge League. It’s the largest in the country, boasting over 167,000 members. The ACBL, as it is known, was founded in 1937 and has a network of 3,200 bridge clubs around the country. They host 1,100 tournaments annually and three North American Bridge Championships that attract approximately 8,000 players. We are at the epicenter. Only the greeters have abandoned their posts. My younger sister goes behind the desk and mock greets us. She’s a comedy writer in L.A. and quickly seizes the opportunity for sketch comedy. Only we’ve come a long way from Connecticut, and it’s the end of a long day. None of us play along. She shrugs and shoves three of the tiny pencils in my pocket. They remind me of the kind used to score in mini-golf.
A heavyset man with a long beard marked by a skunk stripe running down the center emerges from the ballroom where a tournament is in progress. I glimpse the rows and rows of bridge tables twice as long as grocery aisles but similarly flagged with signs designating the level of play. The room is as quiet as a church with the low rumble of people saying their prayers. The median age of the crowd appears to be in the sixties. Retirees, I suspect, though there are some teen players as well. I will later discover they are cut-throat. I don’t know how to process this scene. My mother and I are used to playing in casual, chatty games. You drop the wrong card, you can take it back. You butcher a hand, no biggie. When you’re the dummy (the hand that sits out), you can take a bathroom break, check your phone.
Eventually we find the registration room; the giveaway is clusters of people holding identical blue totes decorated with a cartoon donkey holding in his hooves the sign for North American Bridge Club on a piece of splintered and weathered wood, a folksy touch. We sign up and get our swag bags (which come with snacks, a patch with the ACBL logo, and a deck of cards). Moods momentarily lifted by the swag, we venture over to the late-night welcome reception. I won’t go into great detail except to say that the wings were free, the bar was cash, and the singer in the band had seen far too many weddings. One of the waiters kept winking at my daughter, which was creepy. The room was sparsely populated and no one was on the dance floor. We took this as our cue to go turn in for the night.
Day 2
Everywhere you look, the brain is assaulted with sights that make no sense: at 10 a.m., a man with a straw cowboy hat sits in front of a Barbie slot machine; in an area designated for Keno, there are rows of seats where grown men and women are draped over chairs like a room of high school students waiting for the detention bell to ring; there are clusters of bridge players clutching their swag bags and scoring books like tourists in search of a guide; and in the midst of all this, a woman from the ACBL walking around with a sign: “Ask Me!”
I can’t ask her what I’m doing here, though I am asking myself. I can’t ask her how it is after rebelling against my mother’s conventional and traditional life and deeming her bridge and tennis lifestyle trivial, I am here with her, as her partner.
Twenty-plus years of therapy never made a dent in getting along with my mother. But this game, this game of hers, has forged something between us. Just the fact that I have made the effort to learn something of hers has had a profound effect — though at the moment we are running around “like maniacs” (her term) to find a bathroom before the first class starts. When we stumble upon a restroom not too far from the class, tucked into a corner pocket of the casino, it makes us disproportionately happy.
We have signed on for a two-hour class with Jerry Helms, who is both a highly ranked player and popular teacher. His class will focus on the “one no trump” bid exclusively. Helms is a handsome man in his sixties, looks like he played football and somewhere during the class allowed as much. He wears a button-down shirt, Levi’s, and a cloth belt. He missed a belt loop in the back and every time he walks by our table, I feel like mentioning it.
Lots of people here for the class seem to know one another, warm greetings and all that; these tournaments also serve as a kind of reunion for bridge fanatics. A few people sit alone, looking conspicuous, until one of the ladies in a lab coat with the ACBL emblem on it shepherds them to a table — like the way you would help a new kindergartener find his way in an unfamiliar classroom. Jerry makes his way through the tables with a handheld microphone. He puts us at ease right away, promising not to call on us unless we raise a hand. He isn’t going to humiliate anyone. He doesn’t need to: that’s what bridge is for.
People talk about how difficult bridge is to learn, how you can never stop learning, how it is always, changing, always challenging. It’s a little like the Talmud in that it is also open to interpretation. Jerry is good at what he does, combining borscht belt patter, stale but well meaning jokes, and anecdotes about his football player son and his prowess on and off the field (a chip off the old block?). Demonstrating his strategies for turning losing cards into winners, he has the room in his thrall. When he shows how a string of low clubs could be bid and win a hand, we collectively marvel as if he had cut a woman in half.
Following Jerry’s class, a two-hour session of Duplicate play commences. Duplicate Bridge is different from the social bridge we play in a number of ways but the biggest difference by far is the ban on talking. It’s as if we’ve gone from a country club game of tennis to the U.S. Open. In fact, every now and then when the room gets a bit noisy, one of the proctors shushes us as if we are taking our SATs. My mother and I are unfamiliar with the etiquette of Duplicate. We keep putting the cards in the wrong place; my mother keeps asking questions only to be silenced by our opponents with stern glares. I keep giving her a signal to stop talking by waving my hand in front of my throat. These hand signals only serve to confuse her more.
A helper comes over to show my mother how to use the bidding boxes after she drops a few of the bidding cards and messes up their order. The woman is talking to my mother as if she were mentally challenged. And the more soothing her tone, the more menacing it seems. I fully believe this woman could run a penitentiary based on the pleasure she seems to derive from humiliating my mother with her ageist and condescending tone. I feel protective of my mother. She is 85, a little stooped, her face scored with lines of age, her breathing shallow. But she’s come to Reno, is always up for an adventure. None of her bridge ladies would have been this bold. How dare this prison guard talk to Bette Midler this way. Did you ever know that you’re my hero?
At the end of each tournament, a computer-generated print out ranks each team and partnerships race over to see the results the way high school students swarm the bulletin board to see what parts they were cast in the play. This is not second grade tee-ball; everyone is not a winner. In fact, the winners get acrylic statues and their pictures affixed to a bulletin board. Whatever. I’m curious to see our standings: We are in the 36th percentile. One of the ladies in a lab coat looks at me and says, “Nowhere to go but up.”
My mother and I are bleary. We’ve been beaten up pretty badly having lost every hand but one, and mostly on account of my poor bidding. I’m actually kind of upset but my mother shrugs it off. She says things like who cares what other people think and what matters is having fun. I don’t remember my mother as an optimist. On the contrary, she was the person who said things like the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t and out of the frying pan into the fire. In our world view things could only get worse, you weren’t allowed to hope for too much. The evil eye was alive and well. Only now, my mother seems sincere. It’s easy to imagine that age has mellowed her, but I realize it’s something else: I have mellowed when it comes to her.
Day 3
We drop my sisters and daughters off at the “Learn Bridge in a Day?” five-hour class. We wish them well as if they were making their first trans-Atlantic voyage on a nineteenth-century clipper ship. We go off to the next tournament a little more confident. We know our way by now, we’ve located the restrooms, we gotten the hang of the Duplicate boards and bidding boxes, or at least are making fewer mistakes. Nothing could be worse than the day before when I failed to follow suit (accidentally, of course). When the mishap was detected, the opponent, a woman with half-spectacles tightly pinching the end of her nose with a brightly-beaded pair of Croakies, raised her arm Mussolini-style, and called out: “Director!” You would occasionally hear others calling out for the director across the room. It always sounded to me like a sniveling sibling calling out for mom or dad to get his brother or sister in trouble. She started it. But this was different, this was serious business. I started mumbling apologies profusely as if I had just come out of fugue state and realized I dismembered someone.
The woman with the half-glasses kept her hand in the air.
My face was burning, my heart pounding, and my shame as great as any I could remember in my life.
Finally, the director came over, a tall man in sagging khakis and a faded polo shirt, his glasses so coated in grime it was a wonder he could see through them. “She reneged!” the woman said, “She didn’t follow suit.” Oh, to be a minor character in The Crucible and burn for my sins.
“What happened here?” he asked, assessing the error, more a friendly librarian than strict principal. This came as a huge relief. He sorted us out and the game continued. We would be penalized with a trick. That was all that happened, but I still couldn’t shake the shame or forgive the woman who acted as if I killed a baby, and played out the rest of the hands with my head and eyes trained on the fan of cards before me, giving her the bridge silent treatment.
One saving grace in playing tournament bridge is that after you play three hands, you play new opponents. One pair from every table moves down the line. It looks like a square dance or speed dating only it’s slow. Kenny and Ash, the next duo we play, are from San Francisco and have only been playing for a year and half. It’s clear that Ash has quickly grasped the rules and loves to play. I get the impression that Kenny is struggling with it and maybe going along as a good sport.
When each game ends Ash grills Kenny on why he played a certain card, or failed to trump, or trumped a trick they had already won. These kinds of questions and disputes are common among couples and they can tend to get nasty. It’s just an observation, but I’ve witnessed couples taking each other down in a way friends wouldn’t dare. Only when Ash peppers Kenny with accusatory questions about his playing, Kenny firmly responds, “Not now,” or “No criticism, thank you” or “Please, Ash,” his inflection fair but firm, as if were denying a child a cookie before dinner. Ash would usually mutter something under his breath just then (bridge players, like most people, want to get the last word in).
My mother and Kenny decide to take a nap that afternoon (not together) and Ash I agree to be partners, and play in the next tournament. He was marvelous to play with: gracious and welcoming to every pair we played, aggressive in his bidding, and happy to aim high and lose rather than miss out on the action. When I make mistakes, he doesn’t grill me the way he had Kenny, but makes friendly suggestions (proving my theory of spousal abuse at the bridge table). Plus, when Ash says “it’s just a game,” I sense that he means it, unlike most of the people we play with. “It’s just a game,” they say. Only they mean: It’s just a game that we won.
My sisters and daughter emerge from their bridge immersion with bridge-brain, but happy. Yes, they feel they got the basics, yes, it was confusing but the teacher did a great job of laying down the foundation. They picked up some catchy phrases to remember bidding protocol and recited them like nursery rhymes. More, they wanted to keep playing. They like it! They really like it!
That night we go to a hipster neighborhood for dinner. My teenage daughter had sussed it out one afternoon and came back to the hotel carrying bags of vintage clothing. It turned out Reno was more than a smoky casino; we ordered expensive drinks off the cocktail menu. Mine was called “A Long Happy Life” and was the most exquisite mixture of green tea-infused gin, lime, pomegranate juice, and wheatgrass. In truth, it tasted like a freshly-mown golf course and was about the best thing I ever had.
Back in our hotel room, my daughter watches Girls on her computer, headphones cradling her ears, while my mother, two sisters, and I sit down for the first very game of bridge we will play as a family. We use the cards from our swag bags, also decorated with the donkey mascot. My mother, still dubious that my sisters could learn in a day, starts quizzing them on bridge basics. I tune her out as I shuffle the cards, listening to the satisfying whinny of the two halves of the deck as they merge in my hands. After our last tournament, I heard one couple ask another if they had played the mother-daughter team. I hadn’t realized we had made an impression, or, worse, had gotten a reputation. I didn’t care; I liked being referred to as the mother-daughter team, as if those words could unspool all the years of misunderstanding and wind us together at the same time.
My older sister starts to deal. It’s uncanny, but she holds the cards in exactly the same way my mother does. My little sister, her forehead furrowed, starts to count the points in her hand like a dutiful beginner. And my mother starts to mutter as she arranges her cards in suits, the ban on talking lifted, back in her element. I pick up my cards. Maybe this is how the movie ends.
The Bridge Ladies by Betsy Lerner, May 3, 2016. Harper Wave.
Available for purchase at Amazon, Powell’s Books, BarnesandNoble.com, Apple iBooks, or your local independent bookstore.
