A Day with Mickey Appleman in the West Village

Mickey Appleman is a professional gambler.  I spent a day with him in his native New York City.

The term “professional gambler” gets tossed around way too loosely.

Fact is, relatively few full-time professional gamblers exist, particularly when defined as someone who actually earns the vast majority of one’s personal income making bets.  While there are indeed many pretenders masquerading around as professional gamblers, and even more part-time players with other means of financial support, year-to-year professional gamblers who survive long term are a rare breed.

Mickey Appleman is a professional gambler.

The New York City native has been gambling full-time ever since the early 1970s.  He hasn’t worked a regular job since a college degree from Ohio State University combined with a deep commitment to working for social justice led him to the inner city, where he served as a teacher and counselor, who once worked with disadvantaged teens.

However, Appleman defies the simple description as a former social worker-turned professional gambler, as highly unusual as that appellation might be, not to mention the seeming contradictions of making such a transformation.  Whatever task he performs in supporting himself — be it playing long hours in a juicy poker game or making sports bets — the daily triviality of professional gambling comes across more like the means to a more purposeful end.  That’s the impression one gets from spending any length of time with Appleman.

Appleman is certainly an eccentric to many.  Yet he’s also at peace with himself — something not many others can say, especially among the most conventional.  That’s quite a remarkable feat considering the whiplash of emotional stresses Appleman has endured over the past forty years, including weeks with million-dollar swings betting sports, the death of his beloved wife, and raising a son pretty much all by himself.

I spent the better part of a day with Appleman along with his son Alex, where we mostly walked around the West Village, finding the occasional random retreat to dine, drink coffee and philosophize.  Here is where Appleman spent the formative period of his life when he unpreparedly transitioned from a teacher and social worker into a full-time professional gambler.  That makes this place worth visiting again and remembering.

Our day began with the way all good days in the West Village should begin — inside a busy neighborhood coffee shop.  That was followed by a stroll through the narrow streets lasting time enough to need a break.

Appleman isn’t entirely comfortable talking about himself.  The listener almost has to crowbar the best stories out of him.  Then again, perhaps the very best stories as they usually are — which is untold.  No doubt, Appleman is aware of how fascinating much of his life has been, yet he also exhibits none of the bravado commonly associated with rising to the top of a profession.

Indeed, when it comes to gambling — Appleman hasn’t just been around the block.  He’s circled it many times, enjoying the occasional victory lap, while other times running out of gas, and even crashing and burning.  This ride has not been easy.  It’s taken a toll, and Appleman has paid it many times over.

Here we are at John’s Pizza, which is famous for — well, take a guess.

The West Village has certainly changed a lot since Appleman once frequented the private underground games — playing mostly Seven-Card Stud, but other poker games, too.  An area that was once seedy, where discarded needles littered the sidewalks, where sex acts took place in back alleys, where panhandlers roved the streets is now one of the trendiest spots in the City and most desirable places to live.

This doesn’t seem like a place where backroom gambling would have been fostered, not with its jazz clubs, its restaurants, its specialty bookstores, and New York University just a few blocks away.

But the implausible spawns mysterious consequences sometimes, and Appleman’s roots in the West Village — living there, playing there, betting there, and jumping into the occasional street basketball game quartered off by high chain-linked fences — took hold to the rich soil of influences and blossomed into a greater sense of awareness about this magical milieu.

I have a weakness for good pastries and addiction to great pastries.  That’s because they’re so hard to find, except here in New York City.  Italian pastry shops are magnets of temptation, and I cannot resist.  I use the suggestion to sit and talk a bit more as an excuse to indulge myself.  Two hours, two pastries heavy on the cream (I couldn’t decide, so I ordered both), and four cups of gourmet coffee later, I’ve had my fix.

Here’s the front of the building where Appleman lived during most of the 1970s.  It’s a quiet street, peaceful even.  I can see why Appleman loved living here.

For all of Appleman’s wildly entertaining stories and his unique insights into the world of gambling and far beyond, I was most taken with his son Alex, who revealed a great sense of character and composure that I honestly did not expect.  While one would certainly bank on Appleman raising a son to be smart and perhaps even peculiar in a positive way, he seems far wiser than his 28 years.

Alex revealed that he does not gamble.  Never has.  Never even had the inclination to do so.  Not that he’s opposed to it.  Not at all.  Not even that he sees what gambling has done to his father, which is not a bad thing, but it’s a distinct thing with its very own hazards, inevitable pitfalls, and elusive pots of gold, and the very end of invisible rainbows.

Alex has become his own person, his own man, with his own full life.  And although still connected deeply to his father, cemented by the strong mortar of patriarchal responsibilities when Appleman established his own priorities in life and stuck to them, Alex has chosen to pursue a very different path.

This makes Mickey Appleman proud, as it should.

With that as my parting thought, we exchanged goodbyes, and the two Appleman’s walked away — together, but also apart.