cheating

did you ever cheat? i did.

i cheated because i wanted to know what it felt like to cheat. i was not interested in winning through deceit. i merely wanted to feel what the cheater felt, know the danger of being caught, the thrill of evading my opponent, the darkness in the lie and the dizziness of walking a tightrope between opened and closed, light and dark, truth and lie.

when i was in the air force, stationed in japan, i lived in a dormitory environment. i was a firefighter and our department was attached to the civil engineering squadron, which is to say my dorm was filled with a lot of plumbers and refrigeration and heating guys. well, i made some good civil engineer friends and for a season, a group of us played cards for money several nights a week.

we played spades and typically, i would win or lose anywhere from $40 to $80 per night. my partner was a guy from new jersey named mike truax. the two guys we played against seemed to have our number when we first started playing regularly and we suspected them of cheating for some time. in spades you play in teams of two and a big part of the game is being able to accurately predict how many books your hand will be able to take or carry.

after losing some money and discussing our frustration over how these guys were beating us, we decided to go ahead and cheat. the rationale was that there was no way in the world we believed these guys were better than us, at least in the proportion they had been winning in.

so here is how we cheated. mike and i developed the following complex method one evening before our regular meeting in the day room when i simply suggested it. jokers play in spades and so the two most powerful cards are the big and little jokers. partners are not allowed to communicate when bidding, (which is predicting their haul at the outset of each game.) our system was to casually glance at the ceiling if we had the big joker or at the floor to indicate ownership of the little joker.

i kind of enjoyed the moment when mike and i would send our signals to one another. when i had the big daddy joker i would slyly glance skyward as if searching the heavens for the number of books i would take then i would look across at my partner to gauge his recognition. conversely, as i looked at my hand i would also be tracking truax to see if he was going to look at the floor or above in any obvious fashion.

at the end of the day, all our cheating did was level the playing field in terms of money exchanged. from the time we began cheating on, our exchange of money was nearly equal. any advantage was imperceptible, which again reinforces my belief that todd blakeman and his partner whose name escapes me were cheating too. for me though, i really made the decision to go ahead and cheat based more on the sense of opportunity. i could forgive it myself because i believed mike and i were being worked. moreover, i wanted to know what it felt like because otherwise, i have a real disdain for cheaters. in most everything i prefer losing to cheating any day and i am known to suggest to friends and family that i have an overdeveloped sense of justice.

and so, i had my experience with cheating. i got familiar with the practice in that season without any real sense of guilt or shame. in fact, to this day, i always have wondered about the other team's method for cheating. what was their system? was it complex and did they convey more info than our measly joker insight? maybe it was sophisticated and involved tapping or secret code words or whistles like some kind of gambling neanderthals.