Free Roll

By Brandt Tobler

HAVE YOU EVER WONDERED…?

· What it's like on a daily basis to bet hundreds of thousands of dollars working for some of the largest professional gamblers in Las Vegas?

 

· How to spend a summer house-sitting one of the biggest stars in the world’s 11,000 square-foot mansion; without an invitat

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brandt Tobler
• Release date: May 19, 2017
• ISBN: 9780998794891

Book preview

Introduction

This book was written by me, a stand–up comedian. It will take you through tragedy after tragedy on its path to the funny. Will it make you laugh? Eventually. Will it make you cry? Probably. But I hope it will also make you smile, dream and reflect, while simultaneously inspiring you to never stop chasing your dreams, even if your very own family is constantly trying to derail them.

Family issues, by the way? That’s my story. I was raised on the blustery streets of Cheyenne, Wyoming. I couldn’t wait to get out of the small town life to see if I could thrive in the big city. Before I knew it I was living in Las Vegas, carrying hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, and risking my life every single day. I took a huge gamble on my life while literally gambling on behalf of some of the biggest professional gamblers on the planet. I found myself in a shady underground world of drugs, gambling, sex, and attempted murder. All this while trying to rebuild a father-son relationship that meant so much to me and so little to my dad. My adventures have nearly gotten me killed on numerous occasions but, luckily for you, I survived long enough to write this book for your reading enjoyment.

I guess this book could be called a memoir, but that sounds too fancy. I am far from fancy. I would rather call this book what it is: My Collection of Chaos. And, as a three-time junior college drop-out, I am so proud for finishing it. I never thought I would write a book. Shit, I can barely write an email. But day after day I wrote. In crappy hotel rooms, smoky green rooms, and crowded coffee shops, I wrote. I interviewed countless family members and friends, asking them to go into great detail recounting memories they had been desperately trying to forget. I edited on seven-hour bus trips, proof-read on lousy airport wi-fi, and rewrote page after page while crammed in a middle seat in row twenty-seven between two nosy neighbors. And then one day it was finally done. Or at least I thought it was. (Cue another six months of work and editing!)

The process of writing this book has been a lot like my life. Things haven’t always come easy, but I tried to keep going, every single day. I hope this book will inspire you to do the same, whether you dream of being on the comedic stage yourself or following some other wild adventure of your own making.

Brandt Tobler

Free Roll Defined

The exact definition of a free roll is not one you will find in a dictionary. It is a term I learned from Keith, my boss and mentor, the first day I started working for him as a professional gambler. My job entailed running up and down the Las Vegas strip betting hundreds of thousands of dollars each day while trying not to get robbed or killed. On my first day of work I heard him say it three or four times and I had never heard the term, so I asked him what it meant. He explained it like this; There are two different kinds of free rolls: there’s your traditional free roll and then there’s every gambler’s enemy, the free roll for disaster.

The easiest way to explain a free roll is this: Imagine that I give you two dice and say you get one roll. If you get a seven I will give you a million dollars, but if you roll any number beside a seven you get nothing. That means you have a 16.7% shot at a million dollars, and an 83.3% chance of gaining nothing, but also losing nothing. Essentially, you have a free shot at $1,000,000. Sure, it’s only a 16.7% chance at a cool million, but only a positive outcome can come of it – it’s a free roll. Now a free roll for disaster is fundamentally the same thing, but this time the result can only be negative. Imagine that I give you two dice again. This time if you roll a seven I get your house and car, but if you roll anything else you lose nothing, and you gain nothing. Essentially, you have a free shot at losing your house and car. Now that 16.7% number feels a whole lot more likely and the thought of losing your home and your car feels far more real. This is an example of a free roll for disaster. He always said, The key to life is to find opportunities to free roll as often as you can, and try to limit the free rolls for disaster.

Here is a perfect real life example: If somebody bought this book for you, you are now on a free roll. This book cost you nothing, and you now have a free shot at reading a great book (I know you will enjoy it). If you have awful taste and by the second page you hate it, you can give it to somebody else and you will have lost nothing. (If you are the original buyer, THANK YOU). An example of a free roll for disaster would be if you bought this book and you love it, but then an annoying acquaintance named Mark asks to borrow it. You can’t stand Mark, and you have no idea why your friend Ashley keeps bringing him to your house. But, because you are a very generous person, you reluctantly loan it to him. Now only two things can happen and they are both bad. Mark could take the book and never return it; now you’ve lost your favorite book. Even worse, he does return it; now that annoying guy Mark will be in your house again. Both outcomes are no good. That’s a free roll for disaster. Now that you know how a free roll works, I think you will be shocked to notice how many times you find yourself on a free roll in your everyday life. And hopefully you can limit the number of occasions you are free rolling for disaster. (P.S. Don’t let Mark borrow this book. He sucks.)

Cocaine & Champagne

He was a lying, cheating, manipulative, abusive, drug-addicted thief, but everybody said I had to love him because he was my dad. But then I found myself hugging and consoling my little brother as he laid crying uncontrollably on the floor and I only had one thought in my head: enough is enough. He had hurt everybody in my family both emotionally and physically his whole life. But this would be the last time he made anybody I love cry. I would end the pain once and for all. I would kill my dad. (More on that later.)

But let’s start at the beginning. David Tobler, the paterfamilias, was a three-sport athlete. He played football, basketball, and ran track. He was considered one of the best athletes in the region. He hailed from Dix, Nebraska, a quarter-square mile town nestled in the southwest corner of the Nebraska panhandle. Most of Dix’s two-hundred and twenty-five residents make their living on farms that were handed down from generation to generation. They take pride in working hard in wheat fields and raising cattle. My dad wasn’t like most of the residents. After graduating high school in 1973, Dad went to a small college in northern Nebraska with the goal of playing college athletics and getting a degree in physical education. His first semester away from home was spent drinking nightly and rarely going to class. He quickly realized that college was not for him and dropped out of school. Dad decided to follow my grandfather Duane and his older brother (my uncle Dennis) seventy miles due west from Dix, across the state line, to Cheyenne, Wyoming. The three of them found work on the Union Pacific Railroad. Duane had been making the daily commute to Cheyenne for almost a decade. He would rush home after work each night to spend time with his wife and four kids. The railroad was a good old boys club run mostly on seniority, and everybody took care of one another. Once hired, it was almost impossible to lose one’s job.

The Tobler boys loved working for the railroad, mainly because it was a fairly easy job where they spent most days just riding on a train. They made close to $45,000 a year, one of the highest-paid jobs in the state. After work each day, Dad, Grandpa, and Uncle Dennis loved to frequent the Green Door, a strip club located two blocks from the depot. They would drink whiskey and promise young strippers that they could change their lives. Today the Green Door is the dirtiest dive of a strip club I’ve been too yet—and that’s saying a lot considering where I’ve lived. (To give you some idea: There is no DJ, so the girls have to select their own songs on the jukebox. The stage is no bigger than a picnic table and there is no pole on the stage, only a small metal bar hanging from the ceiling that I would make a large bet could hold a rhino.) My dad, uncle, and grandpa loved this club because the owner would usually bus in new, beautiful dancers from Denver and Salt Lake City each week.

On one bitter-cold and snowy winter night, my dad was frustrated that the strip club didn’t bring in new dancers that week, so he and his friends decided to stumble down the block to the Redwood bar. It was just his luck that a cute young lady named Kim would be there too. She was having a girls night out with her best friend and little sister. She noticed my dad the second she walked into the bar where he and his buddies were playing pool. In small towns like Cheyenne everybody tends to know each other, so my mom was shocked when she saw this tall handsome man she had never seen before. She immediately got a couple of quarters from the bartender, walked over, and set the quarters on the edge of the pool table. This got their attention. And as they all stared at her she sheepishly asked, Can I play the winner? My dad gave her a big grin. He looked at his current pool partner and said, You just lost, and began to rack the balls to start the next game. He walked around the corner of the table and introduced himself to my mom.

Hello beautiful, my name is David. It’s so nice to meet you.

For the next two hours he laid the charm on my mom, paying for her and her friends’ drinks all night long. My mom was very impressed with him. Not only was he good looking; he was funny. She really enjoyed talking to him. But there was one big problem… my mom was engaged.

Earlier in the year her high school sweetheart Tom, whom she had met when she was fifteen and been dating the last seven years, decided to pop the question. The wedding was only a couple months away and this night was what she considered one of her last chances to go out with just the girls. She had no intention of even talking to guys that night; she just wanted to have fun and dance. But as the evening went on and she continued having fun with my dad, it hit her like a ton of bricks: this wedding was a mistake.

She loved Tom, but he was like a buddy. Not somebody she wanted to spend the rest of her life with. At the end of the night, my mom thanked my dad and slipped him her phone number before she walked out to her car. My dad called my mom the very next day and they met up for dinner and drinks. After that night, they began sneaking around and seeing each other almost every day for the next month. Everybody in town knew my mom was engaged, so they had to be careful. Most nights they’d hide out at her best friend Candy’s house. After a while, my mom was confident that her fiancé knew something was going on, so she decided she had to call off the wedding.

The wedding date was still two months away. She figured that was more than enough time to cancel everything her mom had set up. Well, when my grandma heard this, she disagreed. When my mom told her that she was going to cancel the wedding, my grandmother said, The hell you are! I have already paid for the church, the reception, and we have two-hundred-and-fifty guests coming. YOU WILL GET MARRIED! That night she told my dad what my grandma said, and he was not happy. He said, I don’t care what your mom said. I have a better plan. He decided that on the day of the wedding he would park down the street in his brand new white convertible Cadillac, and when my mom got a chance she would sneak out the back door of the church and hop into his car. They would then make the eighty-five-mile drive east to my dad’s grandmother’s house in central Nebraska, where nobody would find them. My mom knew that this was going to upset all of her friends and family, but more than that she knew she didn’t want to marry Tom, so she told my dad, Let’s do it!

Over the next couple days, my mom and dad went to the church several times to plan the best escape route for the runaway bride. They figured out which door she would exit, where he would park, and they did practice runs to see how long it would take her to get to the car. She introduced my dad to the people in the church as her cousin the wedding photographer, and the church let them have free-reign of the building to set up their plan. My mom later told me that planning her escape was more fun than planning the actual wedding.

The morning of the wedding my mom rode to the church with her mom and sister and put on her best fake smile. She told everybody that she was so excited for her big day. They got to the church three hours early and she and her bridesmaids were all in a back room drinking champagne and getting ready. She hadn’t told anyone her plan, and as the time was getting closer she was getting more and more nervous. She knew if she went through with this everybody would hate her. But she also knew it’s what she had to do. My dad told her he would be parked and waiting in the back of the church at 2:30 PM. That was a half-hour before the wedding, and would be the perfect time to tell her bridesmaids she needed a minute alone. As soon as everybody left the room, she would tiptoe out the back door, and be in my dad’s car in thirty-three seconds.

At 2:25 PM she asked everybody to leave the room so she could gather her thoughts. My concerned Grandma asked if she wanted her to stay

No mom, I just need a couple minutes to myself.

Before my grandmother walked out, she gave Mom a big hug and whispered, Kim you look so beautiful today. I am so proud of you. Today will be the best day of your life.

This was the last thing my mom wanted to hear in that moment. She loved her mom more than anything in the world, and knew this would crush her. My mom sat there alone, looking back and forth at the clock and the back door. She knew if she went out that door it would change her life forever. At 2:29 PM she took a deep breath, stood up, and walked to the back door. She slowly cracked the back door and peeked out to make sure nobody watching. She then looked to the right to make sure my dad was parked and ready. She was ready to go! Unfortunately for her, my dad was not. His car wasn’t where it was supposed to be and he was nowhere to be found. My mom closed the door and began to cry as she sat back down.

The second she sat down there was a knock on the door. She said, Come in, thinking maybe it was my dad. But it was only the pastor coming in to check on her. He saw her crying and reassured her that everything was going to be okay. The Lord would take care of her and Tom, and they would have an amazing life together. She smiled. I know pastor, I am just really scared. And she was scared. Only she knew she was in love with another man, a man she was willing to throw everything away for; a man who had forgotten to pick her up.

She touched up her makeup, chugged a glass of champagne, put an enormous fake smile on her face, and told her mom and bridesmaids, Let’s go get me married! She went along with the wedding that afternoon and it was a complete disaster. Tom had celebrated his bachelor party the night before, and his dumb-ass friends had gotten him high on horse tranquilizers. He struggled to walk down the aisle and mumbled through his vows because he could barely talk.

The pastor pronounced them husband and wife, and my mom said his breath reeked of alcohol during their first, awful, official kiss. As they walked out of the massive church doors and down the steps, she kept the fake smile on while everybody took pictures and threw rice at the newly-married couple. When my mom got to the bottom of the stairs she looked to her left, and about a block away she saw my dad sitting in his Cadillac, watching everybody file out of the church. Tom and his idiot friends had ridden their motorcycles to the wedding, and my mom was not going to get on the back of his bike in her beautiful long white dress. She told Tom she was going to ride to the reception with her bridesmaids. On the way to the reception, my mom told Candy to drive by the Four Winds Bar. Candy began to ask questions, confused as to why they were heading to a bar and not the reception. She told my mom, If you want to hit a bar for a quick drink, let’s stop at one that’s on the way. My mom was persistent. It’s my wedding day, take me to the fucking Four Winds now! She wanted an explanation and she knew that’s where my dad would be.

My mom walked into the bar, in her wedding dress, and found my dad sitting in his usual spot. What the hell happened? Where were you at two-thirty?

He was already drunk. He was called in to work the next day so he wouldn’t be able to leave town with her. If he missed another day of work, he would be in big trouble with his boss. My mom was furious. She was about to upset everybody in her life, and he was worried about getting written up at work? My mom stomped out of the bar and went to her wedding reception. When she got to the country club, she was ready to