the U.S. Embassy who knew I liked samba music. I
think I told him that when I had been in Brazil the first time, I had heard
a samba band practicing in the street, and I wanted to learn more about
Brazilian music.
He said a small group, called a regional, practiced at his apartment
every week, and I could come over and listen to them play.
There were three or four people -- one was the janitor from the
apartment house -- and they played rather quiet music up in his apartment;
they had no other place to play. One guy had a tambourine that they called a
pandeiro, and another guy had a small guitar. I kept hearing the beat of a
drum somewhere, but there was no drum! Finally I figured out that it was the
tambourine, which the guy was playing in a complicated way, twisting his
wrist and hitting the skin with his thumb. I found that interesting, and
learned how to play the pandeiro, more or less.
Then the season for Carnaval began to come around. That's the season
when new music is presented. They don't put out new music and records all
the time; they put them all out during Carnaval time, and it's very
exciting.
It turned out that the janitor was the composer for a small samba
"school" -- not a school in the sense of education, but in the sense of fish
-- from Copacabana Beach, called Farqantes de Copacabana, which means
"Fakers from Copacabana," which was just right for me, and he invited me to
be in it.
Now this samba school was a thing where guys from the favelas -- the
poor sections of the city -- would come down, and meet behind a construction
lot where some apartment houses were being built, and practice the new music
for the Carnaval.
I chose to play a thing called a "frigideira," which is a toy frying
pan made of metal, about six inches in diameter, with a little metal stick
to beat it with. It's an accompanying instrument which makes a tinkly, rapid
noise that goes with the main samba music and rhythm and fills it out. So I
tried to play this thing and everything was going all right. We were
practicing, the music was roaring along and we were going like sixty, when
all of a sudden the head of the batteria section, a great big black man,
yelled out, "STOP! Hold it, hold it -- wait a minute!" And everybody
stopped. "Something's wrong with the frigideiras!" he boomed out. "O
Americana, outra vez!" ("The American again!")
So I felt uncomfortable. I practiced all the time. I'd walk along the
beach holding two sticks that I had picked up, getting the twisty motion of
the wrists, practicing, practicing, practicing. I kept working on it, but I
always felt inferior, that I was some kind of trouble, and wasn't really up
to it.
Well, it was getting closer to Carnaval time, and one evening there was
a conversation between the leader of the band and another guy, and then the
leader started coming around, picking people out: "You!" he said to a
trumpeter. "You!" he said to a singer. "You!" -- and he pointed to me. I
figured we were finished. He said, "Go out in front!"
We went out to the front of the construction site -- the five or six of
us -- and there was an old Cadillac convertible, with its top down. "Get
in!" the leader said.
There wasn't enough room for us all, so some of us had to sit up on the
back. I said to the guy next to me, "What's he doing -- is he putting us
out?"
"Nao se, nao se." ("I don't know.")
We drove off way up high on a road which ended near the edge of a cliff
overlooking the sea. The car stopped and the leader said, "Get out!" -- and
they walked us right up to the edge of the cliff!
And sure enough, he said, "Now line up! You first, you next, you next!
Start playing! Now march!"
We would have marched off the edge of the cliff -- except for a steep
trail that went down. So our little group goes down the trail -- the
trumpet, the singer, the guitar, the pandeiro, and the frigideira -- to an
outdoor party in the woods. We weren't picked out because the leader wanted
to get rid of us; he was sending us to this private party that wanted some
samba music! And afterwards he collected money to pay for some costumes for
our band.
After that I felt a little better, because I realized, that when he
picked the frigideira player, he picked me!
Another thing happened to increase my confidence. Some time later, a
guy came from another samba school, in Leblon, a beach further on. He wanted
to join our school.
The boss said, "Where're you from?"
"Leblon."
"What do you play?"
"Frigideira."
"OK. Let me hear you play the frigideira."
So this guy picked up his frigideira and his metal stick and...
"brrra-dup-dup; chick-a-chick." Gee whiz! It was wonderful!
The boss said to him, "You go over there and stand next to O Americana,
and you'll learn how to play the frigideira!"
My theory is that it's like a person who speaks French who comes to
America. At first they're making all kinds of mistakes, and you can hardly
understand them. Then they keep on practicing until they speak rather well,
and you find there's a delightful twist to their way of speaking -- their
accent is rather nice, and you love to listen to it. So I must have had some
sort of accent playing the frigideira, because I couldn't compete with those
guys who had been playing it all their lives; it must have been some kind of
dumb accent. But whatever it was, I became a rather successful frigideira
player.
One day, shortly before Carnaval time, the leader of the samba school
said, "OK, we're going to practice marching in the street."
We all went out from the construction site to the street, and it was
full of traffic. The streets of Copacabana were always a big mess. Believe
it or not, there was a trolley line in which the trolley cars went one way,
and the automobiles went the other way. Here it was rush hour in Copacabana,
and we were going to march down the middle of Avenida Atlantica.
I said to myself, "Jesus! The boss didn't get a license, he didn't OK
it with the police, he didn't do anything. He's decided we're just going to
go out."
So we started to go out into the street, and everybody, all around, was
excited. Some volunteers from a group of bystanders took a rope and formed a
big square around our band, so the pedestrians wouldn't walk through our
lines. People started to lean out of the windows. Everybody wanted to hear
the new samba music. It was very exciting!
As soon as we started to march, I saw a policeman, way down at the
other end of the road. He looked, saw what was happening, and started
diverting traffic! Everything was informal. Nobody made any arrangements,
but it worked fine. The people were holding the ropes around us, the
policeman was diverting the traffic, the pedestrians were crowded and the
traffic was jammed, but we were going along great! We walked down the
street, around the corners, and all over the damn Copacabana, at random!
Finally we ended up in a little square in front of the apartment where
the boss's mother lived. We stood there in this place, playing, and the
guy's mother, and aunt, and so on, came down. They had aprons on; they had
been working in the kitchen, and you could see their excitement -- they were
almost crying. It was really nice to do that human stuff. And all the people
leaning out of the windows -- that was terrific! And I remembered the time I
had been in Brazil before, and had seen one of these samba bands -- how I
loved the music and nearly went crazy over it -- and now I was in it!
By the way, when we were marching around the streets of Copacabana that
day, I saw in a group on the sidewalk two young ladies from the embassy.
Next week I got a note from the embassy saying, "It's a great thing you are
doing, yak, yak, yak..." as if my purpose was to improve relations between
the United States and Brazil! So it was a "great" thing I was doing.
Well, in order to go to these rehearsals, I didn't want to go dressed
in my regular clothes that I wore to the university. The people in the band
were very poor, and had only old, tattered clothes. So I put on an old
undershirt, some old pants, and so forth, so I wouldn't look too peculiar.
But then I couldn't walk out of my luxury hotel on Avenida Atlantica in
Copacabana Beach through the lobby. So I always took the elevator down to
the bottom and went out through the basement.
A short time before Carnaval, there was going to be a special
competition between the samba schools of the beaches -- Copacabana, Ipanema,
and Leblon; there were three or four schools, and we were one. We were going
to march in costume down Avenida Atlantica. I felt a little uncomfortable
about marching in one of those fancy Carnaval costumes, since I wasn't a
Brazilian. But we were supposed to be dressed as Greeks, so I figured I'm as
good a Greek as they are.
On the day of the competition, I was eating at the hotel restaurant,
and the head waiter, who had often seen me tapping on the table when there
was samba music playing, came over to me and said, "Mr. Feynman, this
evening there's going to be something you will love! It's tipico Brasileiro
-- typical Brazilian: There's going to be a march of the samba schools right
in front of the hotel! And the music is so good -- you must hear it."
I said, "Well, I'm kind of busy tonight. I don't know if I can make
it."
"Oh! But you'd love it so much! You must not miss it! It's tipico
Brasileiro!"
He was very insistent, and as I kept telling him I didn't think I'd be
there to see it, he became disappointed.
That evening I put on my old clothes and went down through the
basement, as usual. We put on the costumes at the construction lot and began
marching down Avenida Atlantica, a hundred Brazilian Greeks in paper
costumes, and I was in the back, playing away on the frigideira.
Big crowds were along both sides of the Avenida; everybody was leaning
out of the windows, and we were coming up to the Miramar Hotel, where I was
staying. People were standing on the tables and chairs, and there were
crowds and crowds of people. We were playing along, going like sixty, as our
band started to pass in front of the hotel. Suddenly I saw one of the
waiters shoot up in the air, pointing with his arm, and through all this
noise I can hear him scream, "O PROFESSOR!" So the head waiter found out why
I wasn't able to be there that evening to see the competition -- I was in
it!
The next day I saw a lady I knew from meeting her on the beach all the
time, who had an apartment overlooking the Avenida. She had some friends
over to watch the parade of the samba schools, and when we went by, one of
her friends exclaimed, "Listen to that guy play the frigideira -- he is
good!" I had succeeded. I got a kick out of succeeding at something I wasn't
supposed to be able to do.
When the time came for Carnaval, not very many people from our school
showed up. There were some special costumes that were made just for the
occasion, but not enough people. Maybe they had the attitude that we
couldn't win against the really big samba schools from the city; I don't
know. I thought we were working day after day, practicing and marching for
the Carnaval, but when Carnaval came, a lot of the band didn't show up, and
we didn't compete very well. Even as we were marching around in the street,
some of the band wandered off. Funny result! I never did understand it very
well, but maybe the main excitement and fun was trying to win the contest of
the beaches, where most people felt their level was. And we did win, by the
way.
During that ten-month stay in Brazil I got interested in the energy
levels of the lighter nuclei. I worked out all the theory for it in my hotel
room, but I wanted to check how the data from the experiments looked. This
was new stuff that was being worked out up at the Kellogg Laboratory by the
experts at Caltech, so I made contact with them -- the timing was all
arranged -- by ham radio. I found an amateur radio operator in Brazil, and
about once a week I'd go over to his house. He'd make contact with the ham
radio operator in Pasadena, and then, because there was something slightly
illegal about it, he'd give me some call letters and would say, "Now I'll
turn you over to WKWX, who's sitting next to me and would like to talk to
you."
So I'd say, "This is WKWX. Could you please tell me the spacing between
the certain levels in boron we talked about last week," and so on. I would
use the data from the experiments to adjust my constants and check whether I
was on the right track.
The first guy went on vacation, but he gave me another amateur radio
operator to go to. This second guy was blind and operated his station. They
were both very nice, and the contact I had with Caltech by ham radio was
very effective and useful to me.
As for the physics itself, I worked out quite a good deal, and it was
sensible. It was worked out and verified by other people later. I decided,
though, that I had so many parameters that I had to adjust -- too much
"phenomenological adjustment of constants" to make everything fit -- that I
couldn't be sure it was very useful. I wanted a rather deeper understanding
of the nuclei, and I was never quite convinced it was very significant, so I
never did anything with it.
In regard to education in Brazil, I had a very interesting experience.
I was teaching a group of students who would ultimately become teachers,
since at that time there were not many opportunities in Brazil for a highly
trained person in science. These students had already had many courses, and
this was to be their most advanced course in electricity and magnetism --
Maxwell's equations, and so on.
The university was located in various office buildings throughout the
city, and the course I taught met in a building which overlooked the bay.
I discovered a very strange phenomenon: I could ask a question, which
the students would answer immediately. But the next time I would ask the
question -- the same subject, and the same question, as far as I could tell
-- they couldn't answer it at all! For instance, one time I was talking
about polarized light, and I gave them all some strips of polaroid.
Polaroid passes only light whose electric vector is in a certain
direction, so I explained how you could tell which way the light is
polarized from whether the polaroid is dark or light.
We first took two strips of polaroid and rotated them until they let
the most light through. From doing that we could tell that the two strips
were now admitting light polarized in the same direction -- what passed
through one piece of polaroid could also pass through the other. But then I
asked them how one could tell the absolute direction of polarization, for a
single piece of polaroid.
They hadn't any idea.
I knew this took a certain amount of ingenuity, so I gave them a hint:
"Look at the light reflected from the bay outside."
Nobody said anything.
Then I said, "Have you ever heard of Brewster's Angle?"
"Yes, sir! Brewster's Angle is the angle at which light reflected from
a medium with an index of refraction is completely polarized."
"And which way is the light polarized when it's reflected?"
"The light is polarized perpendicular to the plane of reflection, sir."
Even now, I have to think about it; they knew it cold! They even knew the
tangent of the angle equals the index!
I said, "Well?"
Still nothing. They had just told me that light reflected from a medium
with an index, such as the bay outside, was polarized; they had even told me
which way it was polarized.
I said, "Look at the bay outside, through the polaroid. Now turn the
polaroid."
"Ooh, it's polarized!" they said.
After a lot of investigation, I finally figured out that the students
had memorized everything, but they didn't know what anything meant. When
they heard "light that is reflected from a medium with an index," they
didn't know that it meant a material such as water. They didn't know that
the "direction of the light" is the direction in which you see something
when you're looking at it, and so on. Everything was entirely memorized, yet
nothing had been translated into meaningful words. So if I asked, "What is
Brewster's Angle?" I'm going into the computer with the right keywords. But
if I say, "Look at the water," nothing happens -- they don't have anything
under "Look at the water"!
Later I attended a lecture at the engineering school. The lecture went
like this, translated into English: "Two bodies... are considered
equivalent... if equal torques... will produce... equal acceleration. Two
bodies, are considered equivalent, if equal torques, will produce equal
acceleration." The students were all sitting there taking dictation, and
when the professor repeated the sentence, they checked it to make sure they
wrote it down all right. Then they wrote down the next sentence, and on and
on. I was the only one who knew the professor was talking about objects with
the same moment of inertia, and it was hard to figure out.
I didn't see how they were going to learn anything from that. Here he
was talking about moments of inertia, but there was no discussion about how
hard it is to push a door open when you put heavy weights on the outside,
compared to when you put them near the hinge -- nothing!
After the lecture, I talked to a student: "You take all those notes --
what do you do with them?"
"Oh, we study them," he says. "We'll have an exam."
"What will the exam be like?"
"Very easy. I can tell you now one of the questions." He looks at his
notebook and says, " 'When are two bodies equivalent?' And the answer is,
'Two bodies are considered equivalent if equal torques will produce equal
acceleration.' " So, you see, they could pass the examinations, and "learn"
all this stuff, and not know anything at all, except what they had
memorized.
Then I went to an entrance exam for students coming into the
engineering school. It was an oral exam, and I was allowed to listen to it.
One of the students was absolutely super: He answered everything nifty! The
examiners asked him what diamagnetism was, and he answered it perfectly.
Then they asked, "When light comes at an angle through a sheet of material
with a certain thickness, and a certain index N, what happens to the light?"
"It comes out parallel to itself, sir -- displaced."
"And how much is it displaced?"
"I don't know, sir, but I can figure it out." So he figured it out. He
was very good. But I had, by this time, my suspicions.
After the exam I went up to this bright young man, and explained to him
that I was from the United States, and that I wanted to ask him some
questions that would not affect the result of his examination in any way.
The first question I ask is, "Can you give me some example of a diamagnetic
substance?"
"No."
Then I asked, "If this book was made of glass, and I was looking at
something on the table through it, what would happen to the image if I
tilted the glass?"
"It would be deflected, sir, by twice the angle that you've turned the
book."
I said, "You haven't got it mixed up with a mirror, have you?"
"No, sir!"
He had just told me in the examination that the light would be
displaced, parallel to itself, and therefore the image would move over to
one side, but would not be turned by any angle. He had even figured out how
much it would be displaced, but he didn't realize that a piece of glass is a
material with an index, and that his calculation had applied to my question.
I taught a course at the engineering school on mathematical methods in
physics, in which I tried to show how to solve problems by trial and error.
It's something that people don't usually learn, so I began with some simple
examples of arithmetic to illustrate the method. I was surprised that only
about eight out of the eighty or so students turned in the first assignment.
So I gave a strong lecture about having to actually try it, not just sit
back and watch me do it.
After the lecture some students came up to me in a little delegation,
and told me that I didn't understand the backgrounds that they have, that
they can study without doing the problems, that they have already learned
arithmetic, and that this stuff was beneath them.
So I kept going with the class, and no matter how complicated or
obviously advanced the work was becoming, they were never handing a damn
thing in. Of course I realized what it was: They couldn't do it!
One other thing I could never get them to do was to ask questions.
Finally, a student explained it to me: "If I ask you a question during the
lecture, afterwards everybody will be telling me, 'What are you wasting our
time for in the class? We're trying to learn something. And you're stopping
him by asking a question'."
It was a kind of one-upmanship, where nobody knows what's going on, and
they'd put the other one down as if they did know. They all fake that they
know, and if one student admits for a moment that something is confusing by
asking a question, the others take a high-handed attitude, acting as if it's
not confusing at all, telling him that he's wasting their time.
I explained how useful it was to work together, to discuss the
questions, to talk it over, but they wouldn't do that either, because they
would be losing face if they had to ask someone else. It was pitiful! All
the work they did, intelligent people, but they got themselves into this
funny state of mind, this strange kind of self-propagating "education" which
is meaningless, utterly meaningless!
At the end of the academic year, the students asked me to give a talk
about my experiences of teaching in Brazil. At the talk there would be not
only students, but professors and government officials, so I made them
promise that I could say whatever I wanted. They said, "Sure. Of course.
It's a free country."
So I came in, carrying the elementary physics textbook that they used
in the first year of college. They thought this book was especially good
because it had different kinds of typeface -- bold black for the most
important things to remember, lighter for less important things, and so on.
Right away somebody said, "You're not going to say anything bad about
the textbook, are you? The man who wrote it is here, and everybody thinks
it's a good textbook."
"You promised I could say whatever I wanted."
The lecture hall was full. I started out by defining science as an
understanding of the behavior of nature. Then I asked, "What is a good
reason for teaching science? Of course, no country can consider itself
civilized unless... yak, yak, yak." They were all sitting there nodding,
because I know that's the way they think.
Then I say, "That, of course, is absurd, because why should we feel we
have to keep up with another country? We have to do it for a good reason, a
sensible reason; not just because other countries do." Then I talked about
the utility of science, and its contribution to the improvement of the human
condition, and all that -- I really teased them a little bit.
Then I say, "The main purpose of my talk is to demonstrate to you that
no science is being taught in Brazil!"
I can see them stir, thinking, "What? No science? This is absolutely
crazy! We have all these classes."
So I tell them that one of the first things to strike me when I came to
Brazil was to see elementary school kids in bookstores, buying physics
books. There are so many kids learning physics in Brazil, beginning much
earlier than kids do in the United States, that it's amazing you don't find
many physicists in Brazil -- why is that? So many kids are working so hard,
and nothing comes of it.
Then I gave the analogy of a Greek scholar who loves the Greek
language, who knows that in his own country there aren't many children
studying Greek. But he comes to another country, where he is delighted to
find everybody studying Greek -- even the smaller kids in the elementary
schools. He goes to the examination of a student who is coming to get his
degree in Greek, and asks him, "What were Socrates' ideas on the
relationship between Truth and Beauty?" -- and the student can't answer.
Then he asks the student, "What did Socrates say to Plato in the Third
Symposium?" the student lights up and goes, "Brrrrrrrrr-up" -- he tells you
everything, word for word, that Socrates said, in beautiful Greek.
But what Socrates was talking about in the Third Symposium was the
relationship between Truth and Beauty!
What this Greek scholar discovers is, the students in another country
learn Greek by first learning to pronounce the letters, then the words, and
then sentences and paragraphs. They can recite, word for word, what Socrates
said, without realizing that those Greek words actually mean something. To
the student they are all artificial sounds. Nobody has ever translated them
into words the students can understand.
I said, "That's how it looks to me, when I see you teaching the kids
'science' here in Brazil." (Big blast, right?)
Then I held up the elementary physics textbook they were using. "There
are no experimental results mentioned anywhere in this book, except in one
place where there is a ball, rolling down an inclined plane, in which it
says how far the ball got after one second, two seconds, three seconds, and
so on. The numbers have 'errors' in them -- that is, if you look at them,
you think you're looking at experimental results, because the numbers are a
little above, or a little below, the theoretical values. The book even talks
about having to correct the experimental errors -- very fine. The trouble
is, when you calculate the value of the acceleration constant from these
values, you get the right answer. But a ball rolling down an inclined plane,
if it is actually done, has an inertia to get it to turn, and will, if you
do the experiment, produce five-sevenths of the right answer, because of the
extra energy needed to go into the rotation of the ball. Therefore this
single example of experimental 'results' is obtained from a fake experiment.
Nobody had rolled such a ball, or they would never have gotten those
results!
"I have discovered something else," I continued. "By flipping the pages
at random, and putting my finger in and reading the sentences on that page,
I can show you what's the matter -- how it's not science, but memorizing, in
every circumstance. Therefore I am brave enough to flip through the pages
now, in front of this audience, to put my finger in, to read, and to show
you."
So I did it. Brrrrrrrup -- I stuck my finger in, and I started to read:
"Triboluminescence. Triboluminescence is the light emitted when crystals are
crushed..."
I said, "And there, have you got science? No! You have only told what a
word means in terms of other words. You haven't told anything about nature
-- what crystals produce light when you crush them, why they produce light.
Did you see any student go home and try it? He can't.
"But if, instead, you were to write, 'When you take a lump of sugar and
crush it with a pair of pliers in the dark, you can see a bluish flash. Some
other crystals do that too. Nobody knows why. The phenomenon is called
"triboluminescence." ' Then someone will go home and try it. Then there's an
experience of nature." I used that example to show them, but it didn't make
any difference where I would have put my finger in the book; it was like
that everywhere.
Finally, I said that I couldn't see how anyone could be educated by
this self-propagating system in which people pass exams, and teach others to
pass exams, but nobody knows anything. "However," I said, "I must be wrong.
There were two Students in my class who did very well, and one of the
physicists I know was educated entirely in Brazil. Thus, it must be possible
for some people to work their way through the system, bad as it is."
Well, after I gave the talk, the head of the science education
department got up and said, "Mr. Feynman has told us some things that are
very hard for us to hear, but it appears to be that he really loves science,
and is sincere in his criticism. Therefore, I think we should listen to him.
I came here knowing we have some sickness in our system of education; what I
have learned is that we have a cancer!" -- and he sat down.
That gave other people the freedom to speak out, and there was a big
excitement. Everybody was getting up and making suggestions. The students
got some committee together to mimeograph the lectures in advance, and they
got other committees organized to do this and that.
Then something happened which was totally unexpected for me. One of the
students got up and said, "I'm one of the two students whom Mr. Feynman
referred to at the end of his talk. I was not educated in Brazil; I was
educated in Germany, and I've just come to Brazil this year."
The other student who had done well in class had a similar thing to
say. And the professor I had mentioned got up and said, "I was educated here
in Brazil during the war, when, fortunately, all of the professors had left
the university, so I learned everything by reading alone. Therefore I was
not really educated under the Brazilian system."
I didn't expect that. I knew the system was bad, but 100 percent -- it
was terrible!
Since I had gone to Brazil under a program sponsored by the United
States Government, I was asked by the State Department to write a report
about my experiences in Brazil, so I wrote out the essentials of the speech
I had just given. I found out later through the grapevine that the reaction
of somebody in the State Department was, "That shows you how dangerous it is
to send somebody to Brazil who is so naive. Foolish fellow; he can only
cause trouble. He didn't understand the problems." Quite the contrary! I
think this person in the State Department was naive to think that because he
saw a university with a list of courses and descriptions, that's what it
was.
--------
Man of a Thousand Tongues
When I was in Brazil I had struggled to learn the local language, and
decided to give my physics lectures in Portuguese. Soon after I came to
Caltech, I was invited to a party hosted by Professor Bacher. Before I
arrived at the party, Bacher told the guests, "This guy Feynman thinks he's
smart because he learned a little Portuguese, so let's fix him good: Mrs.
Smith, here (she's completely Caucasian), grew up in China. Let's have her
greet Feynman in Chinese."
I walk into the party innocently, and Bacher introduces me to all these
people: "Mr. Feynman, this is Mr. So-and-so."
"Pleased to meet you, Mr. Feynman."
"And this is Mr. Such-and-such."
"My pleasure, Mr. Feynman."
"And this is Mrs. Smith."
"Ai, choong, ngong jia!" she says, bowing.
This is such a surprise to me that I figure the only thing to do is to
reply in the same spirit. I bow politely to her, and with complete
confidence I say, "Ah ching, jong jien!"
"Oh, my God!" she exclaims, losing her own composure. "I knew this
would happen -- I speak Mandarin and he speaks Cantonese!"
--------
Certainly, Mr. Big!
I used to cross the United States in my automobile every summer, trying
to make it to the Pacific Ocean. But, for various reasons, I would always
get stuck somewhere -- usually in Las Vegas.
I remember the first time, particularly, I liked it very much. Then, as
now, Las Vegas made its money on the people who gamble, so the whole problem
for the hotels was to get people to come there to gamble. So they had shows
and dinners which were very inexpensive -- almost free. You didn't have to
make any reservations for anything: you could walk in, sit down at one of
the many empty tables, and enjoy the show. It was just wonderful for a man
who didn't gamble, because I was enjoying all the advantages -- the rooms
were inexpensive, the meals were next to nothing, the shows were good, and I
liked the girls.
One day I was lying around the pool at my motel, and some guy came up
and started to talk to me. I can't remember how he got started, but his idea
was that I presumably worked for a living, and it was really quite silly to
do that. "Look how easy it is for me," he said. "I just hang around the pool
all the time and enjoy life in Las Vegas."
"How the hell do you do that without working?"
"Simple: I bet on the horses."
"I don't know anything about horses, but I don't see how you can make a
living betting on the horses," I said, skeptically.
"Of course you can," he said. "That's how I live! I'll tell you what:
I'll teach you how to do it. We'll go down and I'll guarantee that you'll
win a hundred dollars."
"How can you do that?"
"I'll bet you a hundred dollars that you'll win," he said. "So if you
win it doesn't cost you anything, and if you lose, you get a hundred
dollars!"
So I think, "Gee! That's right! If I win a hundred dollars on the
horses and I have to pay him, I don't lose anything; it's just an exercise
-- it's just proof that his system works. And if he fails, I win a hundred
dollars. It's quite wonderful!"
He takes me down to some betting place where they have a list of horses
and racetracks all over the country. He introduces me to other people who
say, "Geez, he's great! I won a hunerd dollas!"
I gradually realize that I have to put up some of my own money for the
bets, and I begin to get a little nervous. "How much money do I have to
bet?" I ask. "Oh, three or four hundred dollars." I haven't got that much.
Besides, it begins to worry me: Suppose I lose all the bets?
So then he says, "I'll tell you what: My advice will cost you only
fifty dollars, and only if it works. If it doesn't work, I'll give you the
hundred dollars you would have won anyway." I figure, "Wow! Now I win both
ways -- either fifty or a hundred dollars! How the heck can he do that?"
Then I realize that if you have a reasonably even game -- forget the little
losses from the take for the moment in order to understand it -- the chance
that you'll win a hundred dollars versus losing your four hundred dollars is
four to one. So out of five times that he tries this on somebody, four times
they're going to win a hundred dollars, he gets two hundred (and he points
out to them how smart he is); the fifth time he has to pay a hundred
dollars. So he receives two hundred, on the average, when he's paying out
one hundred! So I finally understood how he could do that.
This process went on for a few days. He would invent some scheme that
sounded like a terrific deal at first, but after I thought about it for a
while I'd slowly figure out how it worked. Finally, in some sort of
desperation he says, "All right, I'll tell you what: You pay me fifty
dollars for the advice, and if you lose, I'll pay you back all your money."
Now I can't lose on that! So I say, "All right, you've got a deal!"
"Fine," he says. "But unfortunately, I have to go to San Francisco this
weekend, so you just mail me the results, and if you lose your four hundred
dollars, I'll send you the money."
The first schemes were designed to make him money by honest arithmetic.
Now, he's going to be out of town. The only way he's going to make money on
this scheme is not to send it -- to be a real cheat.
So I never accepted any of his offers. But it was very entertaining to
see how he operated.
The other thing that was fun in Las Vegas was meeting show girls. I
guess they were supposed to hang around the bar between shows to attract
customers. I met several of them that way, and talked to them, and found
them to be nice people. People who say, "Show girls, eh?" have already made
up their mind what they are! But in any group, if you look at it, there's
all kinds of variety. For example, there was the daughter of a dean of an
Eastern university. She had a talent for dancing and liked to dance; she had
the summer off and dancing jobs were hard to find, so she worked as a chorus
girl in Las Vegas. Most of the show girls were very nice, friendly people.
They were all beautiful, and I just love beautiful girls. In fact, show
girls were my real reason for liking Las Vegas so much.
At first I was a little bit afraid: the girls were so beautiful, they
had such a reputation, and so forth. I would try to meet them, and I'd choke
a little bit when I talked. It was difficult at first, but gradually it got
easier, and finally I had enough confidence that I wasn't afraid of anybody.
I had a way of having adventures which is hard to explain: it's like
fishing, where you put a line out and then you have to have patience. When I
would tell someone about some of my adventures, they might say, "Oh, come on
-- let's do that!" So we would go to a bar to see if something will happen,
and they would lose patience after twenty minutes or so. You have to spend a
couple of days before something happens, on average. I spent a lot of time
talking to show girls. One would introduce me to another, and after a while,
something interesting would often happen.
I remember one girl who liked to drink Gibsons. She danced at the
Flamingo Hotel, and I got to know her rather well. When I'd come into town,
I'd order a Gibson put at her table before she sat down, to announce my
arrival.
One time I went over and sat next to her and she said, "I'm with a man
tonight -- a high-roller from Texas." (I had already heard about this guy.
Whenever he'd play at the craps table, everybody would gather around to see
him gamble.) He came back to the table where we were sitting, and my show
girl friend introduced me to him.
The first thing he said to me was, "You know somethin'? I lost sixty
thousand dollars here last night."
I knew what to do: I turned to him, completely unimpressed, and I said,
"Is that supposed to be smart, or stupid?"
We were eating breakfast in the dining room. He said, "Here, let me
sign your check. They don't charge me for all these things because I gamble
so much here."
"I've got enough money that I don't need to worry about who pays for my
breakfast, thank you." I kept putting him down each time he tried to impress
me.
He tried everything: how rich he was, how much oil he had in Texas, and
nothing worked, because I knew the formula!
We ended up having quite a bit of fun together.
One time when we were sitting at the bar he said to me, "You see those
girls at the table over there? They're whores from Los Angeles."
They looked very nice; they had a certain amount of class.
He said, "Tell you what I'll do: I'll introduce them to you, and then
I'll pay for the one you want."
I didn't feel like meeting the girls, and I knew he was saying that to
impress me, so I began to tell him no. But then I thought, "This is
something! This guy is trying so hard to impr