Phil Mushnick
ON HIS BEST DAY Carton's strong Saturday show a stark contrast to weekday rubbish
LATE in his life, W.C. Fields, bibulous gambler, was spotted reading, of all things, the Bible. An astonished friend asked why.
Without looking up, Fields muttered, “Looking for loopholes.”
That brings us to the self-destructive gambler and curious specimen Craig Carton. Understand that compulsive gamblers have severe self-delusion in common. After weekly settling their debts with bookies, they sit at a red light in their overly financed cars, relieved and self-satisfied, telling themselves, “Now I’m even.”
Carton’s Saturday morning show on life-destroying gambling, heard over gambling revenue-reliant and invested WFAN, is surprisingly good and highly worthwhile, though Carton, the rest of the week, endeavors to prove he isn’t worth any intelligent listener’s short while.
For starters, on Saturdays he’s a good listener. This past Saturday he allowed a recovering addict, Drew, to tell his story with Carton interrupting only to ask good questions.
On Saturdays Carton works clean, no sense that he’s eager to reestablish his pre-prison popularity among creeps by being the station’s crude, name-calling, scatological, defamatory Master Creep.
Despite (or maybe because of) working clean on Saturdays, he has been entertaining, an interesting raconteur with a serious message he doesn’t wield as a cudgel.
Drew, a Gamblers Anonymous member who juggled credit card debt — the worst kind short of blackmail — until he could no longer answer his wife with anything stronger than conspicuous lies as to what happened to their lives.
To that Carton added a Ralph and Alice Kramden farce: the time he thought he’d verbally settled a debt with an A.C. casino collections agent — he had the cash and, they agreed, he would come down to make good in two days. They agreed. He even challenged his wife to listen in on a second confirmation call so she could share that truth.
But then the agent told them that, no, Carton still officially had unpaid markers. Busted. And she was done believing him that it was someone else’s error or fault. It’s said that unlike alcoholism, you can’t smell compulsive gambling. But wives can.
Carton was just another pampered high roller who lost his casinos’ love and VIP status to become a no-morecomps pariah because he defaulted on his credit.
With Carton joined by Dan Trolaro of the N.J. Council on Compulsive Gambling, his
Saturday shows have two consistent missions:
To let people know, especially at a time when sucker sports gambling, and no longer the love of sports, is being shoved down their senses, that no one falls alone. Hardly.
And the only gambling “system” that has proven effective is to seek and sustain help. For all the bad-odds parlays WFAN pitches, Saturday’s Carton show is the only one that doesn’t promise to “make it rain” anything better than the plagues, Misery and Regret.
Saturday mornings at 9:30, Carton throws a changeup. Conditioned to success by going low, he travels a high road. His enabling helicopter service to Atlantic City has been canceled. His federal serial number and those mug shots aren’t worth a spin at a penny slot machine.
Recidivism among problem gamblers is high. Arnie Wexler, a living saint for his 45 years of successfully counseling rockbottomed gamblers, tells us that many who give heartfelt personal testimony at G.A. meetings are still plunging.
Thus time should tell if Carton’s has gone straight or whether his Saturday show is an exercise in leafing for loopholes. He doesn’t like me and I don’t like him. But I’m rooting for him.