Thank you Patti…

The House Always Wins

Lawrence Raymond Bonnin was born in 1933 and everyone called him Larry. He was probably the most Larry person who ever lived — and I mean that as the highest possible compliment. He was big laughs, big stories, a room that got louder when he walked in. He was 5’4” on a generous day and carried himself like he was six feet tall. He was, without question, the best man I ever watched lose.

I still call him daddy. I always will.

When I was little, going wherever daddy went was the whole point. He played poker with the kind of men who stayed up past midnight in rooms that smelled like cigarettes, cologne, and bourbon, and I was right there with him, sitting on his lap learning gin rummy before I could read a chapter book. There was nothing glamorous about any of it — sticky tables, bad lighting, men who laughed too loud. I loved every second. I still have a soft spot for dive bars that probably traces directly back to those nights. It just felt like his world, and his world was where I wanted to be.

He took me to all the racetracks around Chicago — Hawthorne, Maywood, Arlington — we hit them all. He’d hand me two dollars before each race and send me down to the paddock to look the horses over before post time. I was absolutely convinced I could read them. I’d study which ones were calm, which ones were electric, which ones had something to prove that afternoon. I was right often enough to feel like maybe I had a gift. By the time I was ten I knew how to bet to win, place, show, and box a trifecta like it was arithmetic. I loved explaining what a quinella was to novices trying to figure out their racing forms.

For anyone who saw Paper Moon, I was Tatum O’Neal without the grifting. Deep cut, but a movie I identified with deeply.

I wanted to be a jockey. Partly because I loved horses — I drew saddle diagrams obsessively, rode at Girl Scout camp for six summers, and still get on a horse whenever I get the chance. The joke I tell in clubs is that I figured if I became a jockey, my dad would keep coming to the track, and that way he’d have to keep hanging out with me even after I grew up.

He loved bringing me to the paddock. He loved teasing the jockeys too. I’ll never forget the day he teased Pat Day and said, “Well, you’re just a little fella, aren’t you?”

On a beautiful sunny day at Arlington in the 90s I picked a 99-to-1 longshot. Don’t ask me why. Something about the way that horse was moving. The look in his eye. Daddy and I watched that race and somewhere around the final turn, that horse started coming. I mean really coming. By the time he crossed the finish line ahead of the pack, my father grabbed my hand and we were both standing up bouncing like kids on a sugar high. The whole world for about thirty seconds was just the two of us and this impossible horse.

Then the inquiry sign went up on the board.

The horse had elbowed its way through the entire field, hitting every single horse along the way. Disqualified. The bet was gone. My father shook his head and laughed, because what else are you going to do? You win some, you lose some. It was just two bucks.

What I didn’t understand yet, and what I wouldn’t understand for years, was that the inquiry sign was always going up somewhere in his life. The house was always taking it back.

Larry grew up on the South Side of Chicago, and his family eventually moved to what we now know as the wildly affluent Lincoln Park. He was selling newspapers as a little boy during the Depression, when papers cost two or three cents and sometimes people gave him a dollar. That was real money then, the equivalent of nearly twenty dollars today. People loved him even then. He was charming and funny and tiny, and some of them handed him a little extra just because of the way he smiled. He’d bring it home.

At his funeral in 2001, a woman in her eighties came up to me, held my hands in hers, and told me she used to babysit daddy. She talked about how hard he worked as a child, and choked back tears telling me how my grandmother would often spend what he brought home on drinking and gambling.

It was baked into him before he had a chance to choose differently. And something tells me it had been baked into her long before that too.

He stopped drinking in 1989. It was not his choice really. A DUI cost him his livelihood. He was a limo driver at the time, after decades behind the wheel of a cab going back to 1950. His license, his profession, a piece of his identity — all of it suspended in one courthouse morning. He might have gotten off easier, but when the officer pulled him over, my father looked at him and said, “Come on. Even God takes money.” The judge gave him significant community service for the attempted bribe. That was extremely Larry.

When the drinking stopped, the gambling filled the space with a ferociousness that devastated my family for years. The riverboats arrived in Illinois, pushing just far enough offshore to stay legal, and my father found them like water finding a drain. By 1992 or ‘93 he was in serious debt. I was in graduate school in the fall of 1993 when he came to me and asked to borrow $2,000. He’d lost $10,000, he told me. He was sure he could win it back.

It was my first credit card. I took out a cash advance and gave it to him.

A few years later, my mother and I found out how bad it had really gotten. He’d been taking out credit cards in both of our names. The debt was over $60,000. He had to declare bankruptcy. My mother’s credit was destroyed for years. So was mine.

My mother has never fully forgiven him for that, and I understand why. What I also understood, even then, was that it wasn’t malice. He was a man who couldn’t feel pleasure in ordinary life without the hit, who had traded one source of dopamine for another and couldn’t find his way back. The grief of losing his son in 1976 made him drink harder. The debt made him smoke harder. The shame of not having enough made him lose more. Each thing feeding the next. A man buried alive who kept digging his own grave deeper.

His funeral was packed. Larry filled rooms to the end. People loved him, people laughed with him, people drove from far away to say goodbye. His daughters from his first marriage weren’t there. A packed room and two empty seats that said everything about what it means to love someone and not be able to survive what they leave behind.

One sister visited when he was dying for reasons I’m still not ready to discuss. The other told me she didn’t think it was necessary. A week before he died he said “I guess she’s not coming, huh?” I shrugged and in the most Larry moment I ever experienced, he said “I guess I can’t blame her.”

My mother was with him in those final six months anyway. Despite everything he put her through. They went on dates every Monday. She was furious at him and she showed up. That’s also a kind of love, the kind that doesn’t have a proper name.

He died in June 2001. Lung cancer that was surpassed by an aortic aneurysm. He was smoking four packs a day by the end. Before he went, he told me he wished he’d had a million dollars. That he wished he could have taken care of me, that he wished we’d been rich. His last words, in my mother’s arms, were “I’m sorry.”

And then, finally: “It’s not fair.”

He was right on both counts.

I think about him all the time. I think about him when I pass a dive bar with neon in the window. I think about him at the Kentucky Derby every year, even though Arlington Park itself is gone now — demolished and sold, the paddock where we stood together buried under somebody’s future stadium. I think about what it would mean for him to know Griffin and Declan. He would have loved those boys so much. Griffin would have driven him absolutely crazy. He’s a hardcore liberal who would have argued him into the ground on politics, just like I always did with daddy. He would have loved every minute of it. And Declan. He would have been by that boy’s side every single day, doting on him constantly. I like to think he still is.

I thought about daddy this week because the news is full of gambling. But the men gambling with our lives and our future are nothing like him. Not even close.

Larry was sick. He was consumed by something he didn’t choose and couldn’t control, something his mother handed him before he was old enough to know what it was. And something someone had likely handed her long before that. He lost his own money, and then in his desperation, ours. He was sorry for it every day. The last thing he ever wanted was to hurt the people he loved. He just didn’t know how to stop.

What is happening in Washington right now is not addiction. It is not compulsion. It is not a man who can’t stop himself. It is calculation. It is construction. These people didn’t stumble into a casino. They built one. Out of a war. And they’re making the rest of us buy the chips.

Here is what we know. In the minutes before Trump posted on Truth Social signaling a pause in strikes on Iran, roughly $580 million in oil futures flooded the market. No public news explained it. Sixteen minutes later, Trump posted, oil dropped, stocks surged, and somebody made a fortune. This happened not once but repeatedly — the same pattern appearing before the two-week ceasefire announcement, before multiple major market-moving moments. Two Democratic senators wrote to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission demanding answers. An anonymous trader racked up nearly a million dollars on Polymarket betting on Iran war outcomes. More than 150 Polymarket accounts surged with bets predicting a U.S. strike on Iran the day before it happened. The Financial Times reported that Pete Hegseth’s stockbroker was seeking to make large investments in major defense companies in the days before the U.S. and Israel struck Iran. The Pentagon denied it. The White House sent staff an email warning them not to place prediction market bets on the Iran war.

You don’t send that email unless you know what your people are doing.

On Friday the Dow rose 800 points when the Strait of Hormuz was declared open. On Saturday, Iran closed it again and the Revolutionary Guard fired on tankers. And on Sunday — today — the United States Navy fired on an Iranian cargo ship called the Touska, blew a hole in its engine room, and U.S. Marines boarded and seized it. Trump announced this on Truth Social like he’d won a hand. “We have full custody of the ship,” he wrote, “and are seeing what’s on board.” More than 20,000 sailors and merchant seafarers have been stranded on ships in the Gulf since this war began in late February. The ceasefire expires Wednesday. Watch the market Monday morning. I promise you someone already has.

But the war casino is only part of the story. Because while the insiders are trading on ceasefire announcements, something else is happening to the rest of us. SNAP benefits have been slashed. Medicaid and Medicare are being gutted. Healthcare subsidies are disappearing and people are dropping their insurance because they can no longer afford it. Hospitals in vulnerable communities — rural hospitals, hospitals in medical deserts across this country, many of them in red states whose residents voted for this — are closing their doors. Seniors are being squeezed. People with disabilities are losing support. The programs that let people stay in their homes, stay in their communities, live longer and healthier are being hollowed out in real time, and the money is flooding upward at a historic rate.

That is not a casino where everyone plays. That is a casino where certain people always win, and everyone else pays for the losses.

My father lost money he didn’t have and took some of ours trying to find his way back. He died sorry for it. Before he went, all he wanted was to have been able to take care of us.

These men are not sorry. They are not lying awake wishing they could have done better by the people who trusted them. They know exactly what they’re doing. They built the house. They set the odds. And they made sure they’d never be the ones to lose.

That’s the difference. That’s the whole difference.

I miss my daddy. I wish he was here to see how beautiful his grandsons turned out.

The house always wins. Until we decide it doesn’t

Patti Vasquez hosts “Driving It Home with Patti Vasquez” weekdays 5-7 PM CST on WCPT 820 AM. She’s a mom, wife, daughter, caregiver, radio host, writer, comedian, and professional feeler of feelings.