Viva La Bingo! by Michael Barrish

I’m here now to confess a lie from my days as a bingo caller

I can rattle off a long list of past professions, including director of a national college scholarship, fruit vendor and professional blackjack player. I’m here now to confess a lie from my days as a bingo caller.

I began calling bingo at fifteen. It was my second job ever, proceeded only by paper boy, a position I quit after just three weeks due to my inability to collect payment from a third of my customers (I actually LOST MONEY as a paper boy).

No, wait, I forgot golf caddie. At fourteen, I spent one wretched afternoon as a golf caddie, during which I inadvertently picked up the wrong ball during a game of alternate two-ball – a transgression for which I was stiffed by the enraged young Ivy Leaguer whose bags I carried.

I obtained my bingo calling job through a friend whose grandmother was president of the Ladies Club at her apartment complex. This club had 50 some-odd elderly members, all of whom, it seemed, were addicted to bingo. They played every Tuesday night, and for about a year I joined them, sitting at the front of the room behind a small metal bingo wheel, calling out numbers. For my services I received six dollars an hour plus all the fresh-baked cookies I could eat.

Now, to understand where the lie comes in, you have to understand a bit more of what a bingo caller does. Aside from spinning the wheel and calling out the number/letter combination of whatever ball comes rolling down the metal chute, the bingo caller must confirm the winner of each round; to do this, he must keep track of each number/letter called.

The keeping track part is done with the aid of a big piece of cardboard with lots of little indentations arranged in a grid. The grid has a place for each ball, and so the caller simply places each ball, once called, into its proper slot. When someone shouts “Bingo,” the caller asks the player to read off the five number/letter combinations that constitute her “bingo.” If these five have number/letter combinations have indeed been called, the player is paid. (If I remember correctly, it cost two dollars to participate in an evening of bingo, and the winner of each round received five dollars.)

At the Ladies Club, the money part was handled by my friend’s grandmother; all I had to do was confirm the bingos. Surprisingly, perhaps, players often made mistakes (I doubt that they ever tried to cheat), and thus I’d usually catch a few false bingos each night. I didn’t enjoy this part. It is no fun to publicly inform a gleeful winner that she is in fact a humiliated loser. But this was my job, and of course there were the cookies to consider.

Actually, I took my work quite seriously, being particularly careful to place the called balls in their proper slots so that I wouldn’t screw up the confirmation process.

And then one day I noticed something. Well, before I noticed this something, I noticed something else: a woman with no friends. She liked to sit in the front row with a chair between her and the next woman. During the intermission, while I was chowing down on cookies, she sat alone, eating cantaloupe out of a plastic container. It was sad. I would have gone up and talked to her myself, but I really had no idea what to say to an elderly woman aside from thanking her for her delicious cookies. But then I noticed the second something, and this second something made me realize how I could be of service to her.

The second something was this: no one but me could see the little balls. Actually, I noticed this from the beginning, but it didn’t occur to me at first what it meant; which is to say, what power it granted me.

Do you see what’s coming? I’m guessing that you have some sense of what’s coming.

Here’s what coming: one day I decided to cheat on behalf of the cantaloupe woman. It was quite simple. During the intermission I lingered past her table and memorized a row of letter/number combinations on one of her bingo cards. In a subsequent game, I called these self-same combinations during the first ten balls or so, virtually guaranteeing her of victory. And it worked: she yelled “Bingo” loud and strong, then read me her winning row. (As a precaution, I had placed the wrongly called balls on the slots belonging to the winning number/letters. Why? Because I was concerned that the cantaloupe woman might OVERLOOK her bingo, in which case the game would continue and I would need to confirm another woman’s bingo. But why, you might wonder, was this such a concern; couldn’t I have confirmed ANYTHING? No, I could not have confirmed ANYTHING, since one of the sharper players likely would have caught a false bingo if I didn’t, and that would have spelled trouble for me, the trusted keeper of the truth.)

I made it a practice of awarding at least one bingo a night to the cantaloupe woman, and several times I granted her the final game, which was worth double. I was never caught, nor did I ever have the sense that anyone even realized that such a thing was possible.

I fancied myself the Robin Hood of bingo callers, stealing from the rich Ladies Club members and giving to the poor cantaloupe woman. It was a stretch – even possibly a lie – but us self-styled outlaws must forgo such considerations. The truth we carry is our own, and it is by this that we must live.

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Michael Barrish was a writer and a freelance web developer. He died in 2023 from pneumonia after being diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of early-onset dementia.

How I Learned periodically reprints stories that appeared on Michael’s website Oblivio between 1999 and 2020. From the about page: “Etymology: Oblivio is Latin. Often translated as ‘forgetfulness,’ it suggests a profound lostness, something akin to the English word oblivion, but more oblivious.”

The Oblivio book is available on demand. Massive thanks to Mickle Maher for preserving this work.