In Florida: Filling the Hours with Bingo !

By PAT JORDAN

The Big Cypress bingo parlor is a corrugated-tin warehouse the size of an airplane hangar. It is surrounded by ramshackle houses and lots of old cars rusting on cinder blocks and stray dogs with mange and a few horses and small herds of cattle grazing in the swampy heart of South Florida that is the Big Cypress Seminole Indian Reservation. It seats 5,600 players and is the largest bingo parlor in the world. Every Saturday and Sunday morning, players are flown in from foreign countries, bused in from Canada and 38 states, bused in from every city in Florida, or drive in for a day of bingo before they are flown, bused and driven out that same night. They are greeted at the entrance by handsome young Seminole men in black tuxedos who direct them to the ticket windows. There they buy bingo packets costing from $79 to $289. They may win cash prizes ranging from a few dollars to $125,000, or a new Lincoln Town Car, or a beach-front condominium, or a trip to Las Vegas.

Today is a quiet Saturday morning at Big Cypress. There are fewer than 1,000 players seated at the long card tables lined up diagonally across the concrete floor. A plump Indian woman in native dress moves up and down the aisles selling bingo cards. The players have set up their cartons of cigarettes alongside their Bic lighters, their coffee thermoses, their good-luck coffee mugs, their plastic cups of French fries, and their little signs that indicate what bus group they are with. They are mostly silent, hunched over their sheets of cards. Occasionally a cheer will go up and cowbells will ring when someone yells "Bingo!" They scurry up, to a smattering of applause, to the platform in the center of the room to get their cash. If they don't scurry fast enough the other players hoot at them to hurry so they can get on with the game.

The players don't much visit rest rooms or the concession stands. They might miss a number. They seldom buy the chicken, only the fries. The chicken is too messy and requires too much concentration to eat. The fries are easier. The players can pick at them without looking up from their numbers.

Mostly, the players are women. Older, with bifocals resting low on their nose and a cigarette dangling from their lips. Working women of a certain type. They may have waitressed a bit at a truck stop, saved their money and bought a little beauty parlor at the end of town. And when their husband died or ran off with their young manicurist, they took to knitting for a while, or crocheting, or painting ceramic plates by number until their home was overflowing with all that stuff, and they were still lonely, until they discovered bingo. A perfect way to pass the eternally long weekends between work. So they come by the busload to Big Cypress because they are lonely and because they hold on to the fantasy of winning one of the big prizes, but they also come to flirt with Mr. Bingo.

Steve Blad, in his Mr. Bingo tuxedo and jewelry, surveys the players from the center of the hall. "A quiet crowd," he says, his mouth twisting. "I'll get 'em riled up in a little bit." Mr. Bingo is a master at "riling up" a crowd, and has been ever since he took over a bingo parlor for the Otoe- Missouria Indian tribe near Red Rock, Okla., five years ago. At the time he was a marketing analyst with a three-piece suit and a little money to invest. A few years later, Steve took his "foolishness" to Big Cypress.

Within a year, Steve and his group of investors had turned the Big Cypress bingo parlor into one of the most lucrative bingo halls in the world. He claims he took in $15 million last year, 51% of which went to the Seminoles. He and his investors kept the rest. Steve doesn't like to say precisely how much money he makes because, as he puts it, "there's a lot of poverty on the reservation, and I don't want any hard feelin's. But I made in the six figures, well into the six figures last year." He owns a 1988 Jaguar, a boat and a half-million-dollar house.

He knows his customers pretty well. "I go to their trailer homes," he says. "I eat with them in greasy spoons. There's a basic honesty about these people that's missing from those corporate types. These people have their dreams just like I do. No one should take your dreams from you."

Steve Blad was born in Iowa but raised from childhood in Hollywood, Fla., by "old-fashioned, God-fearin', all-American parents," he says. "I was the first member of my family to get divorced, to drink whiskey and to roll dice." He grins his lopsided grin. "You might say, I like to color outside the lines."

His Oklahoma parlor was only modestly successful at first. The players seemed bored to Steve. He wondered how to inject a little life into them. He spent six months doing market research on bingo players and discovered, among other things, that most don't play just for prizes. "They play because they're lonely," Steve says. "So I invented a little foolishness to make them happy while they're losing."

< One day Steve showed up at his bingo parlor in a lavender tuxedo. He put Aretha Franklin's Freeway of Love on the p.a. system and began to dance down the aisles. Steve led a conga line around the hall, stopping every so often to toss dollar bills into the air. The women shrieked and grabbed for them, and when they did, Steve Blad, 5 ft. 8 in., 250 lbs., began gyrating in a pelvic dance. His fat belly rolled, while the women began gyrating right back at him. He kept up this routine. One day they tore off his clothes. "Thank the good Lord I was wearing boxer shorts," he says. "Now if I had been one a them Eur-o-peen men . . ." On another day, Steve held a negligee contest. Women modeled sexy negligees. Steve Blad put one on and modeled it. The women shrieked with laughter. "My Tupperware ladies," Steve calls them. They began to call him Mr. Bingo.

On this Saturday afternoon, after Steve has led his conga line down the aisle, tossing dollar bills into the air, and after he and his lavender tuxedo have disappeared, the parlor quiets down so the p.a.-system announcer can call out numbers. Sherry Levitz, the bus coordinator for "Sherry's Bus People," sits at her table with the little SHERRY'S banner and concentrates on her bingo card. "Oh, I just love to dab," she says, dabbing out numbers with a pink Magic Marker. Then she begins to hum, "22 . . . 22 . . . 22. Come on, 22 . . ." She is a pretty woman in her late 40s, with orange hair, a ruby red satin blouse and white slacks. "Oh, I love to play," she says. "Yes, sir, I never miss a game. I won a $16,000 Mustang convertible a year ago. Drove it right outta here the same day. It started raining halfway home, and I didn't even know how to put the top up." That's one of the satisfactions of playing at Big Cypress, she explains. Instant gratification. "I'm gonna win that Lincoln," she says, thinking of the next week's prize. "I'm gonna trade my Mustang up on that big Lincoln in a minute, baby."

A voice calls out, "Bingo!" Cowbells clang. A woman in her late 50s scurries toward the podium in the center of the room. She looks embarrassed. An Indian girl hands her a fistful of dollar bills. The woman rushes back to her table and almost before she does, the p.a.-system announcer is calling out numbers again. Steve Blad, leaning against the podium, watches.

"Bingo?" he says. "It's boring to me. I wouldn't do it. But they love it. And I love them. You know, this one magazine did a story about me and / described how at the end of the day I walked off to my big Jaguar in the parking lot, and all these people went to their buses with no money in their pockets." Steve grins his lopsided grin. "But they was happy, you know."