News & Articles

Scarlett Risen’s fingers often turned black between storing $5 chips in her pocket, biting on her nails during blackjack and filtering through her wallet at the end of every shoe.  Her notorious rituals were a plank walk in survival, scaling chips through hands, stuffing them in pockets, loading them on the table like a gauntlet for a Jack Cassidy bi-polar binge that may almost bring satisfaction. She wasn’t trying to resurrect a glamorous character from a Joan Collin’s novel, she was living out a modern tragedy with a Stephen King style edge.  

Poverty was  gravitational living on the fringe of wealth and sorrow.  Both outcomes created fear by not knowing how things would end.  Scarlett came to Duluth about a year ago only to find out it was inhabited by old buildings, jockey style snowbanks, smoke stacks on the Western edge of the city and a gray horizon.  Nothing of this appealed to her, only the inside of a worn brick casino with unmatched neon lights in the center of town.

The quirkiness of the dealers and their observance of the “regulars,” players that filtered in and out seven days a week, gave Scarlett a regularity or a sense of home. When she found herself often down to her last ten dollars before payday, she began to imagine the side effects were great for a single mother who left responsibility on the doorstep of one she would like to call a stranger.  But the stranger became herself as her child pushed for answers to her whereabouts and her disappearances became more frequent.

She became the archangel of betrayal to every thing code she had learned from childhood.  Her mother, a penny pinching nurse from the Iron Range, wouldn’t even fix her teeth because she had saved money for her children when she would die.  Her father, a market research analyst at 3M, had six digit savings and countless money in 3M stocks. Her parents were born six years prior to the depression.  They knew what rationing was when a bar of soap or stick of butter couldn’t be found in the 1930s and when you could bring coffee cans in exchange for a movie price during WWII because the government needed tin to make weapons.  

Somehow Scarlett eluded the idea of budgeting, parenting and even church on days she felt to guilty to face the Lutheran pastor.   She would sometimes transpose her religious identity onto her sinful one and bring her Bible to the casino and recite full passages, even chapters she had memorized as a child. She lost 30 pounds from not eating, countless thousands in savings, increasing her work hours to about 60 a week to pay for debts.  Eventually she stumbled onto Gambler’s Anonymous, a kind of sideline gesture that tested her sincerity.  She met Davis, an addicted gambler who quit in June, 2005 and said the lasting memory of his final gambling night was eating a $5 Swiss Mushroom Burger at the casino, the only thing he could distinguish in taste from a life of destruction.  

Davis said “I could gamble still but I choose not to gamble.” God weighed on her heart small nuances of comfort with each person’s testimony.  She realized she must follow the mantra of Psalm 49: 7-8 “Truly no man can ransom himself, or give to God the price of his life, for the ransom of his life is costly, and can never suffice.”   There came a time when Scarlett had to end her indulgence of the brick and neon lights.  She saw an old Asian woman blackjack player who smoked cigars with few teeth, a hollow face and a beggar for money to those around her.  She did not want to become a that kind of regular.  So one day, she stopped rationalizing and stopped spending the paper dollar.  A strong supporter of the Native community, she found a new way to make a contribution now that her fingers were clean.  Now, even $5 spent at Coney Island felt as enriching as the Swiss Mushroom Burger.