vacation notes: poolside blackjack.
Our last night in Mexico, Declan stayed up way past his bedtime playing Uno with some tipsy Midwestern divorcees... wait, maybe I should start this story a different way.
On Saturday, our hotel was taking part in Earth Hour, a global initiative to, something, to show support for climate change action by turning off lights, I think? There was a note in the Activities Calendar suggesting that everyone turn off their hotel room lights and join the Activities staff (the Fun Team) for some poolside entertainment. The Activities director--his name is Alejandro, not Antonio, I had remembered it wrong in my previous letter. Alejandro, who is lovely and also sort of omnipresent at the resort--he was the iguana guy, he handed out smores kits for beachside smores, he ran the ping-pong tournament--Alejandro came around talking to everyone at the pool Saturday morning to encourage us to attend. "We'll have some casino games for the adults," he said, "and some board games for the kids."
When Saturday night rolled around, Dec and I went to check out Earth Hour at the poolside. We had just wrapped up Mayan Night at the hotel restaurant--as I explained to some coworkers before the trip, we were really going all in on being Hotel Activities People.
Earth Hour was pretty sparsely attended. The casino games ended up being a single blackjack table, and board games just meant Uno. They had a second blackjack table ready, but not enough people to play, so while Luis from the Fun Team dealt blackjack, Alejandro and two other Fun Team guys hung out playing Uno with Declan. The first few hands of blackjack, I kept popping back to ask Dec how he was doing, but he waved me off--he was fine, stop bothering him--so I just focused on my own game.
Luis, our dealer, handed out well-worn poker chips around the table. Fifteen chips per person, they're all worth the same, we're not even playing for money, don't worry. He also explained that there are different rules when he's our dealer, he stands on eighteen instead of seventeen, don't worry, we're all having fun here. When I sat down, there were two other people there, an older couple. The man asked me where I was from.
"New York."
"No shit!"
"Uh, yeah. What about you?"
"St Louis," he says.
"Illinois," his wife says.
"Jalisco," says Luis, and he laughs.
The older guy was already many beers into his day. I know this because he told me. "We just got here this afternoon," he said, "and I'm already many beers into my day."
We're joined at the table by four young people, they look kind of college age. One young man sits between me and the old guy, one squinches himself into the corner of the table on the far side, and the two young women sit on my other side, huddled together sharing a chair even though Luis has offered to pull over another chair from the empty second table. The older guy squints at the kid sitting between us.
"I know you, you were at the pool today."
"Yeah, I think that's right."
"What's your name? I know your name. Gregory or something."
"Gideon."
"Right, Gideon. That's not a name you hear very much."
"I guess not."
"Not a lot of Gideons around. Even fewer of them are Black guys! Where are you from?"
Nigeria, says Gideon, eliciting another "no shit!" from the old guy.
"Your English is pretty good!"
Am I supposed to step in here? I mean, all of these people are strangers to me, but what the fuck, old guy. Gideon's got it handled, he smiles and says well, I hope so, it's what my parents speak, and I was only three months old when we came to the US anyway. I can't help it, I laugh a little bit, and I ask Gideon where he's from most recently, then. He laughs too and says San Diego.
It turns out all the college kids at the table are from San Diego. (Did they not know that this isn't one of the woo-girl-spring-break hotels? Poor kids, come to Cancun for spring break and end up playing poolside blackjack with a middle-aged schoolteacher and two drunk retirees.) Luis starts quizzing everyone on whether or not they speak Spanish, and then announces that from this point on we're playing blackjack in Spanish.
Not everyone at the table has much Spanish, but it doesn't matter, not a goddamn one of them knows how to play blackjack. The kid over at the other corner, the one who doesn't talk much, he shuffles chips like he knows his way around a casino but even he can't figure out when to hit (una mas) and when to stand (me quedo). When Lexie, sitting on my right, is dealt a three and an ace, Luis says four or fourteen, and she thinks for a long time before replying, fourteen. Luis himself has a four showing but Lexie finally takes another card, a nine, so now she's at thirteen, she draws again, a two, and then draws again. It is none of my business that these people don't know what they're doing. We're not even playing for money.
(The next morning over breakfast I find myself trying to explain it all to Declan--you assume that every card you can't see is a ten, I said. It's about probability, does that make sense? He says it does, a ten is worth ten but so is a jack and a queen and a king, more things are ten than anything else. His attention was faltering so I didn't bother with strong hands and weak hands, I just let him get back to eating his buffet breakfast special, white toast with sprinkles.)
At some point Luis says the cards need to be shuffled, he hands them to Lexie, who fumbles them and giggles nervously. I offer to take them from her. The next time they need to shuffle, Luis just hands them straight to me.
When the Uno table breaks out into laughter and shouting, I turn around and see that Declan and the Fun Team have been joined by two older women. Everyone at the table is laughing, Declan is practically falling out of his chair, but one of the women is hitting the other one with her cards. I ask what happened and Declan explained that Marjorie and Ginger, his new friends, had never played Uno before, and Ginger had triumphantly shouted Uno as she put down her last card. Marjorie at least knew that Uno meant you had one card left, not that you had already won.
After blackjack wraps up--it turns out to have been a tournament, who knew, and Old Guy beats me by two chips after betting big and getting lucky on the last hand--I ask to be dealt in for the last few Uno hands of the evening. Declan has convinced the table to play with stacking, which is some bullshit variation they play at school. He always asks if we can play Uno with stacking and I always say no because it's crap, but Alejandro said yes, and Marjorie and Ginger agreed because they didn't know any better. Ginger can't keep track of how it works, though, so every so often she leans over and shows all of her cards to Alejandro to ask him which she's allowed to play. "This one first because it's yellow," he explains, "and then this one and this one on top because they're also fours." Marjorie keeps shouting that Ginger and Alejandro are "cahooting" and she doesn't want me to play because I'll be "cahooting" as well, you can't have a mother and son in the same game, it's not fair. And then Declan straight-up plus-fours me and laughs while he's doing it.