stevesbets

“I like to steal from wawa, it’s so easy, you can just put stuff under your coat”…was I seriously sitting across a booth at the Bombay Cafe in the Taj in Atlantic City, dead broke, at 2am with someone I hardly knew who was a serial Wawa thief? How did I get here…

My friends’ and I had all started playing poker in the dorms a few weeks earlier, we had learned that they had 2$ 4$ limit hold em games at the Taj (we played a game similar to limit hold em with each other). My friends and I decided that it would be fun to take a trip down to Atlantic City and try some real poker at these lowest available stakes despite the fact that we could all hardly afford even 2$ 4$ at the time. I was still not really in poker mode so I planned to play blackjack with the 100$ or so that I had access too while the rest of the guys planned to play poker. I referred to most of them in a previous post, Mitten and Gaston were there, along with two other friends I’ll call Xylophone and JJ.

I was driving the van with everyone, each of us locked and loaded with about 100$ or a bit more, and ready for our first night of casino gambling. Mitten, Gaston and JJ wanted to run to Wawa to get a snack for the ride. When they came out they had another guy, I’ll call him “Wes” with them. We had played poker in the dorm with Wes once or twice, so  when they ran into him in Wawa they figured they may as well invite him along.

So the 6 of us drove the hour to Atlantic City, upon arrival the 5 of them went to the poker room and I headed to the blackjack pit. It was cool seeing the sights that we had witnessed hundreds of times in the movie “Rounders”. I started playing 15$ a hand blackjack, as you can imagine with a mere 100$ bankroll I was broke before long and I headed to the poker room to find my friends. They were all in various 2 4 Holdem games and seemed to be enjoying themselves. I see JJ flip up a j5o (which he played in middle position) to scoop a big pot with two pair and he says, “around the dorm we call that the money hand”. He was playing god awful but running hot, Mitten was laughing at him from across the table.

Wes had also had no luck, and he was with me broke on the rail. We were badgering our friends to leave since we couldn’t play, but since they were playing terribly, some of the other players wanted them to stay. This led one man at the table to give us a comp card and told us he would treat us to a meal at the Taj all night diner (the Bombay Cafe). So we got the voucher for the meal (redeemable that night only) and headed to eat.

I became more and more terrified of the the company I was keeping as the meal progressed. Aside from the gem about Wawa that I opened this blog entry with, I learned that Wes was basically a liar, a cheater and a thief. Not only was he willing to bend moral lines for personal gain, but he would bend them just for the sake of it! He just would do ANYTHING he could get away with even if it offered him NO benefit at all because it got his juices flowing. Nothing characterizes this more than when we finished the meal and I threw the voucher (once again, we had no choice but to use this voucher now or never… after this meal it became worthless) on the table. Wes grabbed it and said to me, “No, don’t pay! They aren’t watching us, let’s skip out on the check!” At this point I realized I was in the presence of a true psychopath.

I insisted we leave the voucher, and we soon all left Atlantic City. JJ thought he was the greatest since he had won the most on the trip, nearly everyone was excited about our first trip to the casino. After we parted company with Wes, I told everyone the stories from our trip to the Bombay Cafe. It was at this point that we realized that when we first invited him to AC we interrupted him from committing grand theft Wawa!