As a kid growing up in New Jersey, there are five words Victor Lodato remembers hearing over and over again from his mother: “Give me three numbers, baby.”
He didn’t fully understand it at the time, but she was heavily involved in an illegal gambling scheme — which would eventually lead to police raiding the family’s home, and the arrests of both Lodato’s mother and grandmother.
In a recent piece for The New Yorker called “My Mother, The Gambler,” Lodato looks back at his youthful perception of his mother. In spite of the chaos she created — and the alleged mob ties that brought the family to the brink of crisis — Lodato writes that ultimately, he views his mother as an inspiration.
These days, Lodato is an author based in Tucson, and as he recently told The Show, her gambling never seemed strange to him — now or then.
Full conversation
VICTOR LODATO: It was completely normal to me, you know, so it wasn't like there were, you know, strange things going on, you know, or there was a sense of illegality. It was just the milieu that I grew up in. And I think I wanted to write it from the perspective of a child that just all these things as normal without judgment.
I wanted to look at it from a perspective of wonder because, you know, in the piece, my mother's gambling seemed very, very connected to how I saw the world through some of my OCD.
SAM DINGMAN: Yes. That, that was a part that was, was very compelling to me, is that much the same way she had what seems to have been a compulsion towards gambling. You had these superstitious behaviors which, which you were later, were diagnosed as OCD. But tell us what some of those superstitious behaviors were.
LODATO: You know, when I tied my shoelaces, it would, I knew it would be bad luck or, or there would be doom if one side of the shoelace was longer than the other. And if any of the shoelace touched the floor. And I had a ritual where when I left the house, there was a maple tree I could reach the leaves and when the leaves were in bloom, I, I always tapped them three times when I left.
But also, you know, in addition to my mother's gambling, my OCD rituals, you know, I had two very religious grandmothers in the house who were always lighting candles and saying prayers. And so, so there was this feeling of, you know, that we would survive as a working class family based on a lot of rituals.
DINGMAN: Yeah. Yeah. I'm so glad you brought that up. It it, it's like everybody in their own way was making these little gambles or little acts of faith, maybe would be a, a different way of saying it, that if we trust these things to have some kind of magical effect, the family will somehow be able to get by.
LODATO: You know, I think in a family like mine where there's a lot of working class shame, you know, people do not want to talk about it. I think, you know, some of my family are less than happy if they think. Well, why do … You know, they just can't understand why I might want to think about my mother's gambling and talk about it. And for me it was a way of like, understanding myself.
DINGMAN: Absolutely. Absolutely. But another thing that comes through and that you're alluding to there is what seems to me like a shared sense between you and your mom of responsibility for the family's wellbeing. One of the really heartbreaking parts is when there is this moment where you're in danger of losing the house, you write about how your mom says, you know, I was almost there. Like she really believes that, you know, if a couple of her wagers had just gone the right way, she could have pulled this thing off.
And you write that you, to some extent, blame yourself in that moment of, because you, by that point had started to let up a little bit on your, your obsessive behaviors that we were talking about earlier. Do you think that that shared sense of responsibility was something that you and your mom had in a particularly acute way?
LODATO: Yeah. You know, I, I always feel this urge, which is, is sometimes problematic socially because I, I wanna make sure that, probably because I was a very quiet shutdown child, when I'm in social situations, I always am very aware of everyone else and I wanna make sure that everyone else is OK and everyone else is having their moment and everyone else feels safe. And it gets exhausting.
But I think my mother, for some of her selfish habits, was also she was a caretaker. She wanted to make sure everyone else was fine. So I think she, she did have this sense of responsibility because she loved so deeply, as I hope I do as well that, that everyone in the house I love so much.
And I, and I, I sensed at times that, that, you know, it was hard, that money was tight and that I wanted to make sure everyone was fine. I guess my mother was concerned about that, too.
But also I think what your question, why it's interesting is, you know, I was almost there. It's because it implies this voracious hopefulness that my mother had, which I have too, as an artist. You know, it's sort of like, you know, the many years of trying to do things and it not working, you know, you just want to give up. But it's so hard to stop because you've invested so much and every time I think I'm not going to place another bet, I'm not going to write another novel, II'm not going to write another story. I have that same thing in my head of my mother. Oh, but I'm almost there.
DINGMAN: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and, and that makes me think of the part where you talk about how her philosophy was basically, you have to risk everything if you want to win big. And as you're talking about and this is in the piece, that is a helpful mentality when it comes to trying to make a living as a, as a writer.
LODATO: I still feel like we're in this together. I feel like I'm still in a different way. She's very much a part of that. Like when no one else seems to get it, everyone, I'm crazy. I know she would completely get it and say, go for it, baby.
DINGMAN: Yeah. That makes me think of one of the, for me honestly, most heartbreaking moments in the whole thing is the moment where she's, she's dying and she says to you, I'm sorry. And, and I know that she put your family through a lot. But it also seems like there were times when her gambling kept you afloat. How did you receive that apology in the moment?
LODATO: Maybe there were other people in my family who felt like they needed her to apologize. I didn't even feel like an apology was needed. I've never not adored her and I wanted this to be a loving portrait of her.
And I remember another thing she said to me when she was dying, which I hope I can say this without breaking up myself here. But, you know, she said, I don't want people to say bad things about me after I'm gone. And I told her, in the hospital, I said, well, I wouldn't stand for it.
You know, you might, I guess some way of looking at this, you think that maybe this piece is saying bad things about her. But I feel like it's a portrait of her and what a complicated, unique, beautiful hopeful woman she was.
DINGMAN: Your mom in the piece calls it her magic. You know, that, that's what helps her place winning bets or, or win money. And somewhere in what you're saying, I feel like there's this awareness that whatever you're in touch with as an artist, whether you call it magic or something else, there's a volatility to it. It's, it contains promise as well as danger.
LODATO: Exactly. Exactly. You know what's interesting to me? And it's not that she recognized me as an artist when I was young, but like, you know, I felt like , my mother and I got each other because for some reason I have this very distinct memory when she was looking for her three numbers, she always asked me, I don't remember her asking my brother, who I said was older, more confident, you know, more of a jock just like, just and he was, you know, a more socially capable than I was. She didn't ask him for numbers.
So I feel like she recognized something in my inwardness or my weirdness or my, you know who I was, just my mother asking me like, baby, tell me what, give me three numbers, that she thought that I might know what those magic numbers were was a validation that I lived in a magical universe and that I might have access to, to, to whatever luck existed there.
