“That fall you took upstairs doesn’t seem to have hurt you at all.”
The eager glow of animation faded from his eyes, left him as only a shell.
“Shucks,” he said, “that was Sid Jannix. I seen him fight once. He’s good — awful good. But he ain’t too good. I could have taken him if I’d known who he was sooner, but you know how it is, buddy. You get careless in this business. You get so you don’t want to miss a punch. You try to get set, and get in just the position you want before you turn it loose. You can’t get set on Sid Jannix. You can’t get set on any pug that’s up on his toes. He just threw a fist at me, that’s all. Now let me show you something, buddy. You don’t hit right. You hit with your arms. You can’t do that. You gotta sink your body in back of the blows. Here, let me show you.”
“I want to look at this slot machine.”
“Okay, buddy, sure. I ain’t tryin’ to butt in. I just thought I’d teach you something, that’s all.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“What else do you want to know about the machine, buddy?”
“What are your chances of winning?”
“Pretty good. Of course, if you was to play a hundred dollars right across the board, you’d probably only get forty of it back. That sixty would represent the profit for the house. But, in playing that hundred, you might feed five bucks into the machine without getting over fifty cents back. Then you might play fifty cents, and get four dollars back — see? That’s the way it works. Guys don’t play slot machines the way they play the stock market, putting a bunch of dough in it. They just come in and try ’em out to see if they’re lucky. Or in a restaurant if they get some change in nickels, they put ten or fifteen cents into the slot machines. Then maybe they get hot and pull all the nickels out of their pocket and play ’em. They’ll get a few wins, and they play back their winnings. That’s why they keep machines around restaurants rollered so heavy. They don’t have to let the customer win. Up here, we figure it’s good advertisement to hear the coins jingle in the pay-off up once in a while; but that’s not saying we can afford to donate to charity.”
“What do you mean by a machine being rollered?”