by Vance Lauderdale
on't go down
to Mississippi and play Inner Man Bingo, Vance," my friends cried.
"They'll make you join their Church of the Future, and we'll never
see you again!"
With that ominous warning ringing in my ears, last week a friend and I journeyed down Lamar to Olive Branch, Mississippi, for a rousing night of bingo at the Inner Man Church of the Future. Judging from the curious name, I half-expected a tribe of saffron-robed, crystal-dangling cultists to be running the game, chanting out the numbers ("B-24 is so cool; N-47, now that's a groovy number, man") while new-age music droned in the background.
What
we encountered, however, was somewhat disappointing, because it seemed so
normal. The games are held inside a big, plain, aluminum-sided building
alongside the highway, with steel beams holding up a high ceiling. Rows
of folding tables and metal chairs are set up on the bare concrete floor,
and a balcony wraps around two sides of the main room. More than 200 people
of all ages and all races sit hunched over colored bingo sheets, while a
young guy wearing a baseball cap perched on a raised platform at the front
of the room calls off numbers and announces each game. The only sounds are
the voice of the caller, the thump of the ink dobbers, and the constant
snick of Bic lighters -- just about everybody here smokes, and despite the
hum of four "Smokeeter" machines hanging from the ceiling, it
gets pretty hazy by the end of the evening.
On the main level is a cashier's booth where you buy game cards, next to a snack bar doling out hamburgers, chicken strips, milkshakes, candy bars, and soft drinks. In the back is a row of electronic bingo games, right next to the Sugar Loaf Toy Shoppe, a plastic box where you risk 50 cents to pick up a stuffed animal with a toy crane. We didn't bother with those.
Despite our big-city airs, we quickly discovered that we didn't know squat about bingo. In the old days, my folks would have the butler take me to bingo games at Clearpool, and you'd simply cover a single card with dried beans. Easy as pie, and in fact, one of the main sources of the Lauderdale fortune.
It's lots more complicated now. First of all, you don't buy a single card; you plop down eight bucks and get a "game pack" that contains eight different-colored sheets, with each sheet holding six bingo squares. You can buy as many as you like; we saw plenty of players with sheets spread all around them, and the old-timers even bring glue-sticks with them so they can stick their sheets down and keep everything tidy.
Leave your beans at home. You pay a dollar and buy a "dobber," a plastic bottle of colored ink with a foam-rubber tip, which you "dob" your numbers with. By the end of the night, we were smeared with red and blue ink -- but then that happens whenever we use a ball-point pen too.
And forget about just trying to line up five numbers in a row. That's for sissies. Each game is different here, and the caller announces complicated variations such as "Inside Frame" (where you try to form a small box), "Double Bingo" (five in a row twice), "Kite" (four in a corner, with a diagonal line), and more. "Speedball" is hectic, since you have to fill the whole card, and the caller doesn't bother with the B-I-N-G-O letters; he just fires off numbers rapid-fire ("8, 73, 23, 45") until someone shouts, "Bingo!"
We didn't know any of this at first, and my partner began to sob pitifully because it seemed so confusing, but a nice fellow at the next table -- spotting us as bingo babies -- soon showed us what to do. After bugging everyone around us by tearfully pleading, "What number did he call?" we also learned to check the lighted boards set up around the room. As each number is called, it lights up on the board, which also has a neat little illuminated diagram showing each game's winning configurations. An "L" marches around a card, for example, to show you all the ways you can win when playing "Crazy L."
We relaxed even more when we realized there was no pressure to join the Church of the Future, whose services are held in the same room on Sundays. At intermission, you can fill out a membership application and get a photo I.D. card which entitles you to four free bingo games, "subject to all by-laws of Inner Man Church of the Future," but that's all you'll hear about the church. Or maybe they just decided they didn't want us.
There's a definite bingo etiquette. For one thing, you keep quiet. With so many sheets to watch, playing takes considerable concentration, and it amused me to watch some of the "pros" -- their eyes quickly scanning the sheets, dobbers in hand, as they quickly stabbed the correct numbers like robots. One elderly woman nearby had half a dozen different-colored dobbers, one for each game, and she even glued her sheets together in perfectly neat rows. Despite her preparations, it wasn't a good night for her. "I wonder if anyone ever beats up that caller," I overheard her tell her companion, after losing yet another game. "I'd sure like to get him out in the parking lot and beat him up." Bingo brings out the brute in everyone, it seems.
I don't think it was the caller's fault. Numbered balls are circulated by some kind of air-blowing contraption in a clear plastic box. One at a time, a ball flies up to an opening, and the caller then sets the ball in front of a video camera, which shows the number on monitors around the room. After a second or so, he then calls the number, and signs around the room warn, "Number Not Official Until Called," so you have to be patient.
When you bingo, one of the "floor-walkers" (that's what they're called) takes your sheet and yells out a four-digit number printed on it. The caller then punches that number into a computer, which tells in a flash if that particular sheet has the proper winning numbers -- quite a sophisticated setup. As far as we could tell, no one yelled "Bingo!" by mistake, which is a good thing, since some of these people take their games quite seriously, and it would be awkward to tell the crowd, "Oops, my mistake," after they had already torn up their sheets and pasted down new ones. That would get you beat up in the parking lot, I imagine.
The game-packs are only used for every other game, in the main session that begins at 8 p.m. In between, you buy individual sheets for a dollar apiece from the floor-walkers. The game-pack games pay off a whopping $400 each; the in-between games pay $75. There's also an early-bird series that pays off $30 per game. At the end of the evening, everyone gears up for the "Jackpot Coverall," which pays a whopping $1,000, though the night we were there, two people won at the same time, so they had to split the pot.
Those were the lucky ones. My friend and I played all evening, and not only never won a single game, we never came close. But we'll be back. After all, we paid a buck for those dobbers and there's still plenty of ink in them.