Moby Dx: A Novel of Silicon Valley - Volume 1 Max Ebb

Chapter 27 Trouville

After Macau, where he intuited the rudiments of blackjack strategy, Max read Beat the Dealer and became a devoted card counter. There being very little casino poker in Europe at that time, the skills he had developed at that American game remained wasted until he returned home. To basic card counting he added some of his own homegrown count-dependent odds calculations, along the lines of what has become known as EV, or effective value, and these he called, in Parisian fashion, la méthode. When combined with a constant patter that seemed inconsistent with the concentration needed for counting, with some feints that confused casino managers who were tossing card counters as soon as they were detected, la méthode always returned him to Paris with a fat wallet. But blackjack is not poker, where a big pot or a chump move by another player can make your weekend. It’s a game of statistics and slow accretion of winnings. That worked well for Max, as he was tireless. He might have preferred the hand-to-hand combat of taking money from fools, but he did what was practical.

He needed the money. His stipend paid for necessities, but socializing cost far more than that would support. His fellow students were from families of pharmaceutical executives, bankers extraordinaire, senior managers at Petro This and Petro That, or their families had money and no explanation of where it came from. Drinks and eating out, weekends dining at a beach resort at Hyères, skiing with his research group at Chamonix, all were dear. And prostitutes cost, too.

Max paid for all of this, and more, with his gambling winnings. The Casino d'Enghien-les-Bains outside of Paris would have been the most convenient, but Max couldn’t conform to their dress code. Instead, like most weekend gamblers, he made his way to Normandy, home of 1066, 1944, and all that.

Like Minneapolis and St. Paul, the twin cities of Deauville and Trouville are separated by water, and neither one of them is Las Vegas. But the Minnesota simile works for those vacation spots, as they are as white as Wonderbread, and the class difference between them is wider than the Rive Touques. Deauville is relentlessly polite and upscale, filled with luxury goods merchants you could find in Jackson Hole or Miami. It is flat, and its streets appear to have been laid out according to a plan. Trouville is organic, takes all comers, seats them on the sidewalk, and feeds them les fruits de mer: steaming pots of mussels ready to be hand-dipped into sauce meunière, sauces provençale, or some local variety; metre-wide round platters of ice covered with a shellfish extravaganza—several varieties each of crab, lobster, oyster, mussel, and scallop—all served in seaside air redolent of a fresh fish market, which it is. Instead of the brand outlets, you find artists in their own shops selling wood carvings of mermaids, wine shops with fare so unusual the owner hates to part with it, dance clubs with live music, and a social ladder that begins at least two rungs below Deauville’s, whose lowest is “two homes.” And there were the meandering alleyways on the steeply sloping hillside where late at night you might meet anyone and anything could happen.

At Deauville, like at Enghien-les-Bains outside of Paris, Max was turned away at the casino door for dress code violations. Trouville, more forgiving, welcomed any wretched refuse that had washed up on Normandy’s shores. He saw past the oh-so-dreary gaming floor, Reno to Deauville’s Tahoe, outlasting one dealer after another, fifty hands an hour at a table with FF 50 minimums and FF 2500 maximums. Later, as he refined his skills, and in particular when he could play two hands simultaneously, the floor managers would have liked to exclude him, le loup americain, as he became known, but there was no way. All they could do was offer him drinks, meals, and vouchers at nearby hotels, while holding out hope that his discipline would break down.

Max could count on returning home most weekends with FF 10,000, and that was after services rendered by les putes. At the time, only a few years after the collapse of the Iron Curtain and all that went with it, girls from the USSWere—a pun Dear Reader, a black-spirited pun of times—rushed abroad, trying to make six French francs. There was no shortage of trim and hustling beauties with poor prospects and a pragmatic outlook. He’d learned his lesson and paid them in full. A putain was less troublesome for him than a girlfriend, a real person he couldn’t escape from after premature infatuation. Since society looked down on hookers as a class, Max could look down on them without some nagging concern that he might have a problem with women in general. He had no post-transactional cognitive dissonance—no asking “why am I here?”—after fifty minutes with one or two of them, knowing that they’d be gone in ten more. Back in Paris, the cash would keep for a few weeks. And when it wasn’t Trouville, it was Nice, or Menton, or Monte Carlo. He didn’t want to be too regular a regular anywhere.

In Nice, an Algerian gigolo made him an offer he didn’t refuse and Max had his first taste of male. It was furtive at the start, with the young man pressing rough up against him, sending bolts of lightning through his pants, and then his tighty whities. Max was swept away by the aroma of the boy’s armpits, and the texture of small firm nipples in his mouth, and the electric currents of his bunghole being lubricated, all culminating in a screaming, ass-up, face-down packing of man on man. Yes, he felt plenty of disequilibrium—a nasty mixture of self-loathing, alienation, bliss, and the sense of being home, at last—but there was no more “why am I here?” and he knew he’d be back for more.