When you’re unemployed and web-aware you might find yourself getting little newsletters on how to handle your unemployment. So, according to my newsletter, when unemployed you should view your free time as an opportunity to do several things: 1. Go to museums and experience cultural events, 2. Get healthy and exercise, 3. Provide a service by volunteering. Ok, cultural events are no problem and I have been walking the dog a few miles a day, doing sit ups, push ups, taking vitamins, eating fruit, etc. Today I tried volunteering.

My friend Hannah has a dog that is named Bingo. This is appropriate beyond the lyrical as Hannah, together with her mother and many other folks, runs a bingo parlor. This bingo parlor is a front for an organization known as The Epilepsy Foundation of St. Louis. The long and the short of it is that many, many people come weekly to gamble for a good cause, with all proceeds going to help fund research and assistance programs for people in the St. Louis region with epilepsy. I was asked several times today, “Are you part of the organization?” I guess I am now.

I’d been out there once before to observe, and to begin training, but my weekends were so sacrosanct, given my fifty to sixty hour workweek, that I’d only been the once a few months ago to see if I was interested in volunteering. So today I went and for five hours I worked the floor selling pull-tabs to gamblers in the name of a good cause. This may become a regular Sunday thing for me. Hannah’s mother would like me to eventually become a caller because, “They really go for a male caller.”

If you’ve never been to a bingo parlor or experienced bingo culture, let me tell you that it is a world unto itself. Imagine yourself in a large room, maybe the size of a smaller high school’s gymnasium. The room is a large rectangle divided in the center by a makeshift wall of office partitions with a gap on either end. On one side there are the non-smokers, the cafeteria line and the restrooms. On the other side sit the smokers ruminating in a haze beneath a ceiling of multiple, ineffectual smoke-eating machines.

There are more than ten rows of tables on each side with folding chairs running the length of the room. The room seats hundreds of people. The average age of the patrons is in the mid sixties, but with the premature aging that smoking causes it can be difficult to tell. All ages, ethnicities, and degrees of health seemed to be represented, from the vibrant teenagers working the snack bar to the ventilated wheelchair-bound amputees.

The interior is all white. The office partitions are gray. On each side there is a large bingo scoreboard in the center of the room divider which displays what has already been called, how many numbers have been called, the number of the round, and what the prize is for that particular round. An average prize was four hundred dollars, but the prizes ranged from one hundred and twenty five dollars, to a thousand dollars for the final round. Off duty police officers volunteer to keep watch over the proceedings, and mill in gutted silence around the periphery.

The ceiling of the room is supported by white concrete posts and each post has a closed circuit television hanging from it that is linked to a web camera in the caller’s booth, such that the ping pong ball displaying number and letter about to be called looks out from each television like an Orwellian eye of fortune. The caller’s booth is on a dais located at one of the gaps in the office partitions so that the caller is facing both halves of the room.

“I have a smoking side bingo. Do I have any other bingos? I see two bingos in non-smoking. Can I get a confirmation of a good bingo from one of the volunteers?” Every bingo card has a numerical code that can be shouted out by a volunteer. The computer in the caller’s booth then confirms whether or not the patron has in fact correctly scored their bingo card. “I’m sorry, b52 has not been called. That is not a good bingo.”

The first time I was there a former caller and favored son who had moved to Florida, a rare male caller, came back to visit and play bingo. In the cult of luck-transfer many hands touched his to welcome him and get the grace or juju of a former caller. The luck totems of the players were one of the most fascinating things about bingo.

The first of the layers of totemic luck bringers are the ink dabbers with which players mark their cards. People arrive with special purses that are circular buckets or bags with ten to twenty pockets on the outside and a drawstring for the center. Each pocket holds a dabber of a particular color. The dabbers can look like plain markers or they can reflect a host of characters: from Betty Boop and the Peanuts Gang, to every member of the Cardinals or Rams current and past rosters. People line these dabbers up in front of them like chess pieces, rosary candles, or Polynesian statuary.

Many of the women also bring a single stuffed animal to set at the corner of their playing area. These are primarily rabbits and frogs, though I did see one small Ziggy doll and assorted other oddities. Several of the rabbits had had cloth embroidered bingo sheets sown onto their chests with what I would guess to be the lucky numbers of that player. Some of the rabbits and one frog in particular had been covered in lucky numbers with some kind of black marker, rather than the embroidery. I assumed that to be a cheaper version of the same charm.

A very old African American woman had two large sprouting onions, one white and one red, that she placed in the same corner of her playing area that other women used to house their stuffed animal totems. So older magic is afoot among Brujas and Curanderos of bingo.

For the men silence and bling seemed totemic. Rings and watches, money clips and the special folding of their bills. For everyone it seemed good luck that I was new and male. Any difference can bring luck. One of my co-volunteers, Carol, began to get territorial because so many of her regulars were buying tabs from me.

A tab is like a lottery scratch off ticket that you would buy in a bar or at a gas station only it is made of two pieces of cardboard that you pull apart to reveal whether or not you’ve won. Each tab has five chances to win and can cost between a quarter and a dollar. I had a money belt like a server’s apron and a plastic bucket like a custodian’s, with a handle in the center and two rectangular chambers in which to keep bundles of the pull-tabs. I was also selling a variety of supplemental game sheets for bingo proper.

A speedball is a special game card and is only fifty cents. Circle sevens are also called you-pick-ums and they cost one dollar. An ad on for a game is a dollar and bonanzas, which are alternately called black outs, are a dollar unless you trade a used one in and then they are fifty cents with the trade in. Bonanzas you can play by themselves and I sold a ton of those before bingo even started.

People buy the pull tabs with cash or with winning tabs. I had a few people cash in fifty-dollar tickets and one person won a hundred dollars on the tabs. There may have been many more winners as they can cash them out at the main desk by the entrance as well.

At first you only sell the tabs by themselves. Then, at the start of game eleven, you start to sell them in five-dollar bundles as a mixture of quarter, fifty, and dollar tabs. People went crazy for the bundles and I sold through two full bags of them.

Carol wanted to know if the patrons were getting to me yet. Ten years of bartending and waiting tables provides a certain skill set that translated well to roaming the floor selling things. It was sort of like taking the shot tray around in a crowded VFW hall. I must have walked several miles today. Later Hannah told me that the exercise was why Carol volunteered. Carol has a weak heart that is only functioning at about twenty five percent of its former capacity. Ironically she is still a smoker, and the section that she got territorial about was the smoking section.

We were sitting down on a break drinking soda and eating pizza when Carol leaned over to me and said, “I used to work with a women that would go to all my regulars and I would tell her off, tell her to get the heck out of my territory. When I saw you working my side of the room I was just about ready to yell at you when I saw her face right in front of me telling me to mind my own business.” From this passive aggressive salvo I deduced that Carol was politely setting boundaries and also experiencing visitations from long deceased coworkers. Carol has been a volunteer at that bingo hall for ten years and I set my custodial bucket and servers belt just like she told me, no sense in reinventing the wheel.

I know that bingo is not a soup kitchen, but it really did seem to me that everyone there was aware of an underlying spirit of charity implicit in this dice roll of boxed and diagonal numbers. Many of the women in their forties and fifties had the tell tale marks of off duty nurses who were well aware what patients and doctors would benefit from this weekend lark. Win or lose, the social interactions of these dusty denizens of the bingo parlor seemed themselves a societal benefit and we also did raise a significant amount of money. Now that I am a volunteer I am not allowed to gamble, so I will never be on the receiving end of that big cash prize, but I do see myself in the not too distant future speaking clearly into the microphone, “We have a good bingo in the smoking section. Do I have any others?”