Playing three boxes.

My friendly neighborhood Korean buddy is doing laundry and calls me while I’m still at work but luckily it’s just a fifteen minute walk back, although I’m quick to shuck the woolen workpants for shorts and flipflops, then heading out to the laundromat I haven’t been to in some time mostly because my complex has its own room. Not finding him there, I text him and he turns up, from the bar across the street, the civilized way to do laundry. He rages a little as he loads the wash into the dryers, and his quarters buy us 24 to 32 minutes to go back to the bar and reunite him with his Heineken, my Guinnesses to come.

Anyway, it’s at the bar that things get interesting. My buddy is an actor, and we are chatting about this monologue he’s memorizing, the benefits of transcribing longhand writing we’re trying to internalize (slows it down, make it feel like you’re the writer making choices, provides a sense of ownership and a physical texture to the text), and I’m feeling a bit off because it’s not the sort of Happy Hour where people are very happy at all—who would be, watching World News Tonight? Just when I think we’re going to get kicked out, the friendly bartender lends us a cigarette, and after we come back from our garden detour, my buddy starts engaging the bartender in a conversation about her accent—it’s remarkable, really, how skilled he is at being simultaneously intense and disarming, how much he builds upon, jokes with, reveals a little knowledge to gain a little more, and is ultimately totally engaged and committed without smacking of the touristical or ethnographical air that I fear I emit in such situations. I can’t compete, although in my limited math teacherly ways, when the bartender shows me the “boxes” I can play, I’m engaged—for Monday Night Football (I originally misunderstood this to be the Euro-football), one can purchase, at $2 a piece boxes going from 2 to 100. These numbers represent the target total of both teams’ scores. There are two prizes--$75 for halftime, $125 for the final. I pick the middle range numbers still left: 54, 61, 66. I know that instead of talking to people, I’ll end up typing this up on Excel. We drain our beers and proceed to folding laundry, eating dinner, and practicing our surprisingly adequate Spanish.

I still don’t know if I’ve won.