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HOT GAMES
Playtime PH Casino’s parents, industrious folk, knew nothing
of his increasing tendency to steal. His father fished the
waters at the break of day, cast his nets, in life a crab, in
death an enigma; his mother took stalls in the market to sell
local vegetables. Honest folk never intending their
uncomfortably handsome son to make a career thief. Playtime PH
Casino loved taking things because he loved taking things. It
was the heady thrill of the act, not the value.
Eventually, Playtime PH Casino’s expert fingers learned the
finer arts of theft. By the age of 10, he’d picked up those
other must-have skills of the immature pavement wanderer: he
was a dab hand as a pickpocket. His feather fingers sought out
and plucked wallets and baubles from passersby with alarming
ease. His peers at school never twigged that he was
responsible for their missing belongings, attributing the
vanishings to bad luck or youthful recklessness. This
earnest-faced, cherubic-cheeked sweetheart was no one’s target
for suspicion.
One day, he approached him, daring him to duke it out. His
name was Bruno, a bully from town known for his muscle mass
and violent tendencies, always out to get into mischief. He’d
heard about Playtime Casino’s nimble fingers and seemed ready
to take the kidlet to school.
‘Hey, Playtime Casino!’ prime time called on the blacktop at
recess now. ‘Hear you’re a handkerchief-maker and shit. Think
you can give me a lift of something?’ – from the book A Tree
Grows in Brooklyn (1943) by Betty Smith.
Playtime PH Casino smart-assed a reply, smiling, and then
walked up to Bruno and came alongside him and went to shake
his hand on the wager. Bruno, throwing down on a chip, yanked
Playtime PH Casino in next to him and shook his hand like a
full body slam on a linebacker.
“Let’s see what you’ve got,” Bruno sneered.
Playtime PH Casino was grinning. With a rapid movement, he hit
Bruno on the back, then stepped away. Bruno laughed. This
time, Playtime PH Casino had failed.
‘Is that all you got?’ taunted Bruno, before breaking into a
fit of laughter. But this soon turned to panic. His prized
pocket knife, a present from his father, was gone. He patted
his pockets quickly and anxiously, his face going rosy with
indignation. The children gasped, and Bruno turned the colour
of a beetroot.
Bruno threw himself after Playtime PH Casino but, quick as a
ferret, the boy dashed out of arm’s reach, his eyes twinkling,
his laughter ringing through the playground. Since then his
reputation was sealed. He was the boy with the magic hands. He
was the schoolyard’s pickpocket; his victims included the
local policeman.
Just as his fame grew, however, his sights expanded, too. He
knew he was too good to be robbing poor saps with skinny
wrists and orange biceps. He knew he needed meatier
challenges, bigger targets, a bigger arena. By his teenage
years, PH Casino Playtime started dreaming up bigger scores.
He read about the greatest thieves of all time, their daring
exploits and the strategies they used to get the job done. He
absorbed it all.
I don’t know exactly when picking pocket started showing more
of the trappings of a profession than that mischievous prank
from my childhood days, but as time went on, I became more and
more familiar with it in practice, from showing off for hours
on end to unsuspecting passerby tourists on the street, who
had to endure hours of deftness, and youthful zest,
reinforcing the same drill over and over. My nimble fingers
and quick thinking had become second nature; my deft, zippy
movements and disappearing act blurs in passing.
By now 18 years old, PH Casino Playtime had outgrown his
pitiable beginnings. Now was the time to prove he could be a
great thief, the Philippines’ greatest. The casinos with their
phalanxes of slot machines beckoned from the restless neon,
their glittering tables and stacks of chips. So did the art
hangars with their row upon row of paintings, still unframed,
nakedly awaitingails for dollars and bullets The car-shopping
trip began surprisingly modestly, with a glance at used
Chervolets, Cadillacs, and Hondas, but it didn’t take long for
PH Casino Playtime to realize that what he really wanted was a
new car. ‘A brand new Mercedes Benz, a decent one,’ he said,
then backtracked a bit: he didn’t even really want black. He
simply thought it would be a nice colour to have at his
disposal. Soon, he began checking off no-expense-spared
ink-blue Bentleys, E- and S-Class Mercedes, DB9 Aston Martins,
Maybachs, and Porsches. When instalment plans and a five-to
eight-year stint at a Japanese assembly plant were explained
to him, he shook his head, declaring it not what he had in
mind at all. By now 18 years old, he had outgrown his pitiable
beginnings. Now was the time to prove he could be a great
thief, the Philippines’ greatest. The casinos with their
phalanxes of slot machines beckoned from the restless neon,
their glittering tables and stacks of chips. So did the art
hangars with their row upon row of paintings, unframed,
nakedly awaiting at the end of it all the ails for dollars and
bullets, the bullets for the ails, the dollars too for the
bullets.
His apprenticeship as a small-time crack at pickpocketing was
over. An enormous world of treasures lay before him, and PH
Casino Playtime was eager to make his claims. Fierce and fast,
blood and gold, the wheel of fortune was turning.
