Michigan Bankroll

by Charles Rammelkamp

Isaac Lind

“We called it a ‘Brooklyn roll,’” my friend Bob, who grew up in Flatbush, tells me, “channeling the B-movie gangsters,” when I mention the guy we ran into on his way to the Indian casino near Battle Creek, white shoes, white belt girding a bulging middle-aged tummy, hair in a careful combover, sporting a roll of bills, a Benjamin on top of a lump of ones and fives.

We were on our way north after visiting my disabled mother in the small town where I grew up, in the house she’d lived in for sixty-five years, the last twenty as a widow, gambling on still living another few on her own, the brave face she put on it like that bankroll the guy flashed, the big bill on top hiding the frailty.

I came upon the guy at a rest area, checking himself out in the bathroom mirror; unasked, he told me where he was going. I pointed him out to my wife as we drove away, agreeing he was a real “type.”

“A gangster in his own mind,” I nod to Bob.

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Charles Rammelkamp is prose editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore and reviews editor for The Adirondack Review. A chapbook of poems, Jack Tar’s Lady Parts, is available from Main Street Rag Publishing. Another poetry chapbook, Me and Sal Paradise, was recently published by FutureCycle Press. An e-chapbook has also recently been published online, Time Is on My Side (yes it is).