George

“I never won at Bingo,” an old black man with gold rimmed glasses droned to me one October afternoon. We came to the Grandview Retirement Hotel to play games with elderly people; many with no family, most suffering some kind of mental disease or cancer. Walking up to the old Southern style front porch, a breeze of marijuana wafted my way…. “Oh you’ve never won at Bingo?” I sympathetically asked. “Well maybe today’ll be your lucky day.” Sure enough, that gold rimmed glasses wearing man with the black paisley shirt sitting in a wheelchair won Bingo five times that crisp October day. When we left, my bingo partner was relaxing on the front porch, drinking a Sprite and smoking a joint. It seemed, however, that the marijuana wasn’t the only pain reliever in his day.