Hello. My name is Matt and… and… (takes deep breath and tries to find the inner strength to go through with this)… and I play bingo.
    I never thought it would turn out this way. My assumption was that my 20's would be a time for swinging with an endless supply of lucky ladies, getting freak nasty at all the hottest clubs, and enjoying some high-quality Columbian nose candy when the party started to die down. Very little of this assumption has come true. Yes, there's a lot of nose candy, but my dealer is Canadian and I have a sneaking suspicion that more than anything, what he's selling me is Pixy Stix. I suppose he took my request for "nose candy" a little too literally.
    But the bingo thing was wholly unexpected. It all started about four years ago when a co-worker of mine, Steve, mentioned that he had gone to the casino the previous evening and played bingo with his grandmother. So, of course, I laughed at him.
    "Bingo?!" I said. "That is an old lady game!"
    "I know," he said. "My grandma is an old lady. And she goes to bingo almost every night."
    "That is sad and pathetic," I pointed out.
    "Maybe, but she wins all the time."
    I was not impressed. "Winning at bingo? So what? She comes home with ten, fifteen dollars?"
    "No. It's usually more along the lines of five hundred to a thousand dollars."
    I stopped laughing.
    "It's not church basement bingo," he explained. "It's at a casino. It's high-stakes bingo. The very least you can win is $250, and that's only if you get there early and play the pre-bingo bingo, which Grams doesn't usually waste her time with. You should come check it out one day. You'd be surprised."
    A few weeks later, Steve and I were heading to the casino, where he and Grams would introduce me to the mighty world of bingo. I was more than a little skeptical of the whole thing, but he assured me that I wouldn't lose any more than $40 and I was going to get about three hours worth of entertainment out of it. And all the secondhand smoke I could possibly inhale. (The casino is one of the only public buildings in California where it's still legal to smoke indoors. And these people take advantage of it. I've often looked around and wondered if they were all having a race to see who can smoke a carton the fastest)
    Before the bingo started, Grams walked me through what was going to happen. She explained to me the meaning of very foreign terms like "buy-in" and "dauber" and "hardway" and the subtle differences between a "line" and a "stamp" and a "block of nine."
    "Don't get overwhelmed," she told me. "If you have any questions, I'll be right here."
    "It's bingo." I said. "Call the number, look at the card, find the number. I don't think I'm going to have a problem."
    The first problem I had was that the bingo caller goes fast. By the time I'd finished trying to find if I had a B-14, he was already on O-63 and taking a breath to announce N-34. The second problem was that for every game, you're playing twelve bingo cards at once. Twelve! And that is if you are a novice and you suck. I saw more than a few people playing twenty-four cards at the same time, while still having the dexterity to light a smoke, eat a snack, and look over at my card to point out that I'd missed one. The third problem was that aside from Steve, everyone else in the bingo room was about five decades older than me. I am a healthy strapping 20-some year old man, and as such, I expect to be able to dominate any 85-year old person in basically any possible activity except maybe for dying. But these old people were destroying me in bingo, and then looking at my cards after a game and saying, "Oh, you were really, really close!" in that tone of voice I would use on an infant when instead of putting the animal cracker in his mouth, he put it in his ear.
    So as the night of bingo neared its conclusion, I was finding myself growing more and more embittered by the whole experience. I was wasting a perfectly good day off so that I could sit in the middle of a giant smoky tomb, being schooled by round after round of World War I veterans at a game I last played somewhere around first grade. And then, in a life-changing twist of fate, I won.
    I was only vaguely aware that I was having a good game when Grams looked over at my card and said, "Oh, you only need two more numbers!"
    "Really?" I said, although by the time the words had come out of my mouth, the caller had already spoken again, calling one of the two numbers I needed. Grams let out a cry of excitement. I daubed the number, still not really quite understanding the magnitude of what was happening. Then the next number was announced, and it was exactly the number I needed to get a bingo. I was completely shocked. I glanced over at Grams and she looked at me, eyes dancing, pretty much bouncing in her seat, and said, "Say bingo! Quick, before they call the next number!"
    So I said, "Bingo." Which was a problem. I only said it. I should have shrieked it at the top of my lungs, because you have to say it loud enough to stop the bingo caller. I'd been told that, but I was completely out of my element and wasn't thinking straight. So after I muttered my lame excuse for a "bingo", Grams yelled it for me. "BING-GOOOOOOOOO!!!" She could not have been happier. One of her grandson's little friends had conquered the bingo. The power of youth had energized her. In its own way, it was completely adorable.
    One of the attendants came over and grabbed my winning card, double-checked it, confirmed that it was a "good bingo", and a few minutes later, came over and began to count out the $1199 in cash I had accidentally won. It was all very strange, but it turned out to be exactly the right amount of money to change my opinion on just how sad and pathetic bingo actually was.
    "Not very!" I thought to myself as I lovingly placed the hundred-dollar bills in my wallet.
    Winning at bingo caused a minor problem in and of itself, which is that it warped my mind into believing that bingo was not just a game, but also a potential full-time occupation. "If I win $1000 or so every single time I go to bingo," I thought, as I laid in bed that night after rolling around naked on my newfound fortune. "Why, I might as well just go to bingo all the time!" Which is exactly what I did for a couple of months after that. See, in all the excitement of winning, none of the old people ever thought to tell the young whippersnapper that winning at bingo the very first time you play is a GIANT FLUKE. It turns out you don't win every time so much as you rarely ever win, which is slightly different. And I, in the midst of an unrelated online sports gambling habit that was about to become a sports gambling problem, didn't even consider that possibility. I just saw dollar signs, and to hell with the emphysema! With my newfound fortune, I could buy shiny new lungs and stave off death for another century!
    I lost the next, oh, fifteen times I went to bingo, at which point it finally dawned on me that if it was that easy, everyone else would be doing it. I tapered off on visiting the casino, developed a healthy respect for bingo and gambling in general, and now only drop by to play once every three or four months. But yes, I still play bingo, as if my age was a typo and instead of being 28, I'm actually 82. And I'm okay with that. I now wear my bingo badge with honor. And when somebody asks me, "What are you doing tonight? Going to the casino?" I look them in the eye, smile, and say, "Bingo!"
    And then they sock me in the mouth, because geez, that is a stupid joke.