At that time, I was just out of high school and scrambling to make my way in the real world. My job didn't pay very much, so I was into anything nefarious that could bolster my income. I had improved my early teenage years intake of cash by stealing from my sister's piggy bank. I knew it was wrong and I was racked with guilt, but I still did it. She didn't come by money any easier than I did, but desperate people take desperate measures. I eased my conscience by promising myself that I would put it back as soon as I could, but I never got a chance to do that.

Soft drinks were a nickel, a cheeseburger was fifteen cents, a six pack of bottled beer was $1, and two fourteen ounce draft beers cost a quarter at happy hour. So a few cents went a long way.

When she opened the bank after several years to find a meager sum awaiting her, it was obvious what had happened. I don't recall her screaming at me or anything, but she was very disappointed. I was most chagrined and I still feel bad about it.

My grandmother and my sister were irritatingly honest, but not me. "Yeah, Ma and Sis just wouldn't go over to the dark side, but I did, see. Nobody was gonna give it to me, so I just had to take it, see. Yeah." Just like Cagney or Bogart in the movies.

Sis got out of it by marrying young, but Ma (my grandmother) just kept wringing her hands and worrying and cheerfully doing the best she could. I was just a klutz, blundering my way through life, like the time I: accidentally threw her outfit for my sister's wedding in the garbage; lost my new graduation clothes; stranded her at the WinnDixie; dropped Uncle Kenny's carefully homemade Easter basket in the yard; prematurely set off the boy scouts' bonfire; fell into the Christmas tree; and dropped my brand new Tex Ritter six record set that she hauled from Florida on a train, breaking every one. Most of those incidents were covered more thoroughly in previous stories.

Well anyway, this Winn-Dixie thing came up and they started playing the game in the little bar where I was hanging out, and I watched them play for a few weeks, when the germ of an idea began forming in my brain. I noticed that they used the same cards every week and they were ancient. They were bent and torn like crazy.

Meanwhile, a waitress at the Pub Steakhouse, where I also hung out after work, collected hundreds of the Winn-Dixie cards each week. Someone was giving them to her. So I put these two things together and came up with a brilliant idea.

The cards would be a cinch to memorize, as they were already "marked,"  and the waitress let me look through her stack of cards each week. The scarcest number for each race was obviously the winner, so I wrote those numbers down and memorized them before each Saturday. The ten cards were always sitting on the bar and easily accessible to memorize the flaws in each one.

There were five races every week with ten horses in each one. Ten guys would pay $1 each and the bartender would spread the ace through ten cards on the bar face down, and the players would grab one. This was repeated before each race with the winner collecting ten dollars. There was a new shuffle and draw before each race. I padded my income by ten or twenty dollars every week for two years without the slightest bit of suspicion.

I would scramble for the winning card each week for the first race or two, then relax and grab whatever card was available. Every few weeks, I would lose on purpose and piss and moan about it so everybody knew I didn't win anything. No one ever suspected a thing. I even won three races a couple of times and got away with it. So that kept me in beer money for two years, then alas, it went off the air.

Even though Ma was gone and didn't get to share the take, it was still a sweet deal while it lasted, see, Yeah.