The house always wins. It is that simple, stupid! If everyone remembered this catch phrase each time they sat down on a roulette, or baccarat table, they should know the odds are already against them. However, the game at hand, The Three Card Money, is street side savvy, and doesn’t require Corinthian columns, huge ornate tables, and gorgeous ladies to distract you, for ambiance. This is purely a roadside melee, a brawl that bleeds you even before the game is declared. It is the one game no one wins except when the dealer wants you to win. Now you see it, now you don’t.
You’ll swear the card in the middle is the card to flip to win. You watched intently as the man shuffled the cards; you followed his every move, keeping your eyes on that one card, whose flip side is the Ace of Spades. If you are right, you will clean him out. You can feel it, even taste it; the crisp hundred dollar bills on the grass could be yours. Eyes don’t fail me now, you say to yourself. Drum roll, please, you beckon the invisible Watchers. As dumb as you are, you’ll run a staccato series of drumbeats in your head to herald the streak of good lucks you see coming. And then, the pounce: I got this, you mumble. Day could have turned into night in that moment. Your eyes pop wide open like a demitasse spoon, wondering if you had truly lost to a scheme as old as prostitution. Yep, you have been nailed, royally. The dealer with his sleight of hand had beaten you again. You are running out of money and had begun to sweat a little.
How are you going to replace the money you’ve lost…money slated for your mortgage due in a couple of days? More sweat pours. Something is keeping you there and would not let you leave. Greed, or a hybrid of greed…something just as potent, is doing a number on you. The gods of lies and deceit, and there are lots of them in the shuffle game, are holding you steady till they have successfully burned the proverbial hole in your back pocket. You don’t know this; they have got the Dealer’s back…not yours. So, you bite down on your lip, wondering how you could have picked the wrong card the last time. And you were sure your vision was perfect…not just on the twenty-twenty perch, but that you were sure you could see through the universe and count all the floating asteroids one million light years away. And, the Dealer is right there in front of me. How could I have missed?’ you ask yourself.
You may not know this; the Dealer’s gods are standing on each side of you, nudging you, whispering inane drivels into your ears to follow his hands in the next round of shuffling. Now, the once doused confidence is resurrected. You are back to being assertive. You are cool and buoyant, and your previous losses no longer bother you. I can explain this to my wife, you mumble. You are going to throw down the last five hundred dollars to cover the losses you have already suffered. The Lord’s Prayer rolls in, even as God is not listening. And you begin to recite it in a loop, while watching the Dealer going through the shuffle…the one dance he had perfected with the Devil. His hands holding up the cards are palm up, the deck o’cards sitting atop the left palm. He makes his three-card selection and shows them. And then begins the macabre dance. Slowly at first…like a sloth would crawl up a tree. You are doing your best following the hand with the damn cards…especially, the Ace of Spades you must pick to win. ‘I got you babe…I got you,’ you mutter, inside a sly grin. The smile about your face is widening, like the whore with a fistful of cash.
BANG!!! He drops all three cards and looks up to you…granting you a toothed grin of his own; he throws in a countenance any mother would love. At the end, you lose again. That famous last word is true; there is a sucker born every minute. And so it goes: You can’t win a fight that originates in hell proper without Providence in the scheme. This isn’t just you as the weakling; it has to do with everybody who lives with you in that corruption. You are all to blame. Pardon me, but your country truly doesn’t exist; I know; it has the markings of a true republic, because this desert parcel, and the rain-laden collective has a name, and people live in it. You are all engaged, locked inside that dodgy, treacherous two-stepper, because the man in the people’s house, the Devil, and his minions are leading the dance.
These tyrants, these masters of alchemy, all possess unheard of schemes…as in dexterity, to dip their hands into your pocket, purse and lift your wad. Damn!!! They are good, and they are smart, too. They are dressed in those flowing, colorful garbs; borrowed robes, nuanced in braininess, enough to cause you and the rest to cower in fear.
The discordance you hear is strapped with the same stringent dissonance. Only you people can’t hear it, because your slick partners have your ears plugged. Believe me; you and the rest have been strutting without music. You belong to the Devil, and he has you by your balls…and for the women in the country, he’s got them by their balls too. Go figure that one. Because there is a semblance of governance in the polity you abide by, you tend to relax some and give it all to God. You don’t have a prayer. Period! My question to you and the rest: would you sing her praises, this country, that is? Would you die for her? Her boundaries are fluid, where no appointments are required. All walk-ins are welcome. The ones you have picked to run things believe they can steal you out of existence. These tyrants, these masters of alchemy, all possess unheard of schemes…as in dexterity, to dip their hands into your pocket, purse and lift your wad. Damn!!! They are good, and they are smart, too. They are dressed in those flowing, colorful garbs; borrowed robes, nuanced in braininess, enough to cause you and the rest to cower in fear.
Thugs and other senseless beings are imported from surrounding desert lands to augment this non-existing country’s shortfalls on heavies and gangsters: The Three Card Money people: The shufflers of disdain and meanness. Designers of pomposity! Fear brokers with cow-skin pouches filled to the brim and spilling with that special snootiness that rises to the level of infamy. It is clear that every one of you in this depravity holds a measure of equity in the game, and therefore have no remorse joining Hell ’s own choir. Why then do you raise uproar because debauchery is walking among you? Why would you bemoan the dissolution of your common sense you yourselves have caused to happen? Why would you not fight the emergence of newer gangsters from this darkness of filth?
The final nail in the coffin is the rise of that ill-advised mantra: If you can’t beat them, join the sonsofbitches…to steal your country blind.” And then, the lofty belief sears through the badly ruptured system before it morphs into the adage: Only the strong survive. That too, is rising with impetuosity.
The rest of the world is moving along without you, and this country you believe has you back, actually doesn’t. God may have forgotten this kingdom you call home: He gave you everything: You gave Him nothing in return. The rest of the world is modernizing and rebranding ideas and beliefs to match those of gods on that plane of robotic revolution in the vast universe. And yet, here we have this steaming megapolis with her thieving rulers waiting to deliver the coup de grace to the skull of a dying polity. Don’t you feel like taking flight like the seagulls and depart this god-forsaken spread of smut and lewdness and demand that it reconciled her values before you’d return?
If you looked up to the conflagration brewing up in the skies, in the foreground of a brilliant, exotic sunset, you’d want to take that flight to free yourself…your soul, mostly. But you stayed, watching the seagulls become dark blotches as in scuds of drifting black smoke, cruising effortlessly, deeper and deeper into the orange-washed horizon. Maybe, there are those watching what you are watching; their minds could have been made up to follow the benevolent creatures to cover their outer flanks, as a trade-off and consequently buy themselves a one-way ticket out of the hellhole.
You and I should shut our eyes; will our minds to feel the weight of the cool sea breeze from the gulf as it lifts us. Don’t fight the feeling. I’m not. Spread your wings and feel the seduction of flight. Wake up! Bear no violence in mind. Think it over and decide if you must live like swine do. If only the people would rise up and grow similar wings and follow us and vacate this violation, then, we would force these mutts to live alone; spend their billions with no one around to envy, dread and curse them. Let these gavel-headed curs dine alone, sleep alone with no one around to wake and serve them. Won’t you love to see this crass gentry of unthinking humans dwell as hermits in the land of plenty, where there would be no one round to see them showing off, riding in the back seats of their expensive cars? They will have no one around to brag to or make snide remarks about. Why not let them cheer one another in their boisterous frolic? And when they are sick, bloated and blind, let their minds desert them, too. Sounds like prayer? Well, it is.
Just Saying
The land of the thousand cultures! The land of one thousand religions and one thousand languages! Yeah, that’s what is obtainable. Don’t ask me where this place I am talking about is. If you were standing anywhere on the desert lands of Libya just look south. You will find a lot of troubled lands in the great need of help. The colonial masters knew should not have amalgamated eclectic people to others viewed esoterically, to advance their fiefdom. But they effing did. Remember the heartless Tuaregs of the first century? Well, they have been resurrected into gworo-chewing, beer-guzzling Iskas. And they are making you pay protection money…to disburse, minimally, the same money they stole from you. Do you blame them? I don’t. (Tongue-in-cheek) They have found ditch-trapped, helpless people, bound by a cruel twist of fate to stand as one country. It is like butter on bread, and you have been spread thin. So, let the royal screwing begin: The molestation you suffer is penetratingly deep, making the torment eternal almost.
Music Palliates Madness
The youth are standing back, complacent almost. Well, they’re powerless. Good thing they discovered, on their own, a platform of ingenious art to dwell on. From here, they are looking for a way to change the hand they were dealt. Making incredible music is quite a panacea. You may not believe this; the suffering in the land gave rise to this one thing your country is known for….the world over. Badassery Music and dance!!! Are you going to let everything else go because you have invented a new art in jigging? You should know that, that heady affliction you carry around would return each time the music tapered.
Now your days run deep in obscurity and time is running out. How you could still stand on that precarious edge staring your abuser in the eye, with your hands extended and groping for a lifeline, bothers me. And you know damn well he would never pull the punches he has so well telegraphed. Me and the rest of the world watching, know you are down for the count; and we know your ass ain’t getting up to mount any kind of formidable defense…against that haymaker originated from south of hell. But wait a minute: God is looking your way. There is a respite in the works…a possible breather: God is asking you for a dozen people to turn things around for you…as a trade-off, that is, before He would pull you back in from that precarious edge you have been standing on. I hear cries of joy, and people are making small talk, certain you and your fellow citizens can produce twelve good people to make Him want to help. Moments pass into hours. Days come and go. Truth is staring you in the face, and you are beset by your own despicable creations of substandard, painful inaction. Joy turns into wailing, and the once jolly excerpts are transformed and rewritten into elegiac moans. All because, you couldn’t give God what he wanted. You are kidding me, right?
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar, and I must stop till it comes back to me.
♦ Don Chukwueloka Okolo, Houston-based author and award-winning filmmaker is an Adjunct Professor of Radio, Television and Film at the Texas Southern University
- 1 2th June’s Promise, Broken Chains - June 12, 2025
- Anambra Guber: Opposition Intensifies as Soludo Faces Escalating Political Heat - June 10, 2025
- The Novice Advantage: Rethinking Graduate Readiness in a Demanding Job Market - June 9, 2025