The Gambler's Timeless Truth

The Gambler, written by Don Schlitz and most famously performed by Kenny Rogers, is both a perfect story and a perfect song.

This is not an opinion.

This is a fact.

We don't get to decide whether or not it is a perfect song. It has tightly packed lyrical verses and a catchy chorus. We don't get to decide if it tells a perfect story. It has a beginning, middle and end, a vignette with no plot holes. It is technically perfect.

We only get to decide whether or not we like it.

If we don't like it?

Everything the gambler says is still true.

The Gambler will always be a classic because it relates a timeless truth.

Maybe a million light years away, in the strange, incomprehensible language of an alien species, it's not called The Gambler; but there is still a story or a song—or whatever the hell passes for entertainment in this alien world—which expresses this timeless truth.

I hated The Gambler when I was a kid. I also hated Micheal Jordan because he almost always kicked my home team's ass at least four times a year.

I can't deny it though: Micheal Jordan was a master and my ire was never going to stop him from taking over a game when he was determined to win.

Recently, I bought a used car, a 2002 Ford Focus. It has a CD player. I found a bunch of mixed CDs I burned over a decade ago. I started playing these CDs in the car. I had no idea what was on them. I burned them randomly, without rhyme or reason or preference, from the collection of music I had accrued on my hard drive back in what now, in the wake of such a rapid advance in technology, feels like the long ago.

I listened to a lot of different types of music back then, and I found that variety reflected in these mixes. Here is Portishead. Here is Napalm Death. Here is Beethoven. Here is Howlin' Wolf. Here is Lenny Kravitz. Here is Mazzy Star. Here are some old folk recordings I can't identify. Here is Bootsy Collins (Bootsy!). Here is Garbage. Here is Aerosmith. Here is Johnny Cash. Here is A Tribe Called Quest. Here is Nine Inch Nails. Here is the Beastie Boys. Here is Black Sabbath, Hypocrisy, Jewel, Marvin Gay, Tool... the list goes on.

On a long drive home from Southern Indiana to the city of Indianapolis, between Skinny Puppy and Apartment 26, Kenny Rogers' The Gambler started to play. Yes, I hated the song when I was a kid, but at some point I must have warmed up to it, because here it was. Something in me stirred when Kenny began singing the first fateful lines.

I hated the song when I was a kid because my dad used to play it all the time. I loved my dad, but country music... not so much. So, really, I hated country music, and never listened to the song as its own entity. On my drive home, I listened to the words, I listened to the story. I had to hear it again and again, and marvel at how much I had missed before. Now I love the song, because I find that the gambler's advice has been as much an ace up my sleeve as it was for the young man with whom the old gambler rode the train.

I think of Dad. I think of all the times he told me I would regret something, but then I went ahead and did it anyway. He was always right. As I got older, I learned to follow his advice. I think maybe the story of the old gambler and the young man resonates in my life in a way it couldn't before, but the meaning of that timeless story, that perfect song: those were all there, waiting for me to understand them, and in that way my father is timeless too, because he was always there, and still is, in my heart; but, like the song, it took me so long to really understand him.

He passed away last December. I miss him. We always shared a laugh when I admitted my folly. He always said: I don't want to say I told you so... but...

We all know what he said next, right?

Yup. I told you so. And we laughed.

Life is a ribald jest. Why shouldn't we laugh?

Yet I will just as often shed a tear when I think of my father. Though The Gambler expresses a timeless truth, which my father tried to warn me about in his own way, it isn't necessarily a pleasant realization. Why should we have to play life like a poker game? Why can we not be honest and open with each other, instead of constantly having to cold read each other in such a Machiavellian manner in order to learn who we can trust?

Yet we do. So it should make us extra thankful when we encounter someone who we learn over time we do not have to read coldly, with whom we do not have to mince words, beat around the bush, or worry about triggering—with whom, to put it bluntly, we can really be ourselves.

The most beautiful part of The Gambler is when the old man turns back to the window and fades off, fulfilling the prophecy he himself foretold. It's beautiful to me because the young man gains timeless wisdom from the old man for nothing more than a swallow of whiskey and a cigarette, and the old man becomes an indelible part of the young man's story, much as my father has to me.

After all, every hand's a winner, and every hand's a loser, and the best we can hope for is to die in our sleep.