Bob the gambler

Blurb

What I'd always liked about Biloxi was the decay, the things falling apart, the crap along the beach, the skeletons of abandoned hotels, the trashy warehouses and the rundown piers jutting out into the dirty water, so I wasn't thrilled that in the last five years our dinky coast town had been turned into an outlet-mall version of Las Vegas, with a dozen cartoon casinos, lots of gussied-up Motel 6 hotel rooms, an ocean of slicked-back hair, and a big increase in unsavory tourists. On this Sunday, after the NFL preseason game, we were sitting on the porch quiet as mice when Jewel held up the newspaper and said, "Raymond. Let's go here and do this," and "here" was the Paradise casino, a dozen blocks away on the beach in Biloxi, and "this" was gambling. So begins this crackball love story with a wonderfully dark underbelly, in which Ray and Jewel Kaiser try out the Paradise. What curious thing happens to them, and how they react to this trick of chance - and through a procession of misadve