Mikey Sack O'Nickels

A life amongst the gamblers.

I used to work for this guy named Mike Tomatoes. Tomatoes got that moniker as a teenager when he worked for a Staten Island grocer and it followed him into adulthood and a career as a professional gambler.

I met Tomatoes in Times Square. He was the unquestioned king of the Broadway scalpers, and I was the manager of the first licensed and legitimate secondary market street team. He was a salt and pepper Italian American Staten Islander weighing in around 225. I might’ve had a couple inches on him, but he had 50 pounds on me.

I led a troupe of aspiring actors in matching polos with clipboards, and he commanded a small army of rag tag hockers who were our predecessors. We were the future, a fundamental threat to their way of life. They were our shady ticket uncles, aunts, and grandparents who had all spent at least a few nights in the clink and if they weren’t hocking in the Square, they were likely on a bus to Atlantic City.

Tomatoes often stationed himself with a fistful of tickets and a bag full of cash inside the Olive Garden across from the discount booth in Father Duffy Square. His crew of henchmen — with nicknames like Mamma, Pete the Boxer, and Red Beard — jockeyed for position with us kids in polos at the cross streets of the world and it was often up to me to mediate conflict and keep the peace.

Even though it was a fireable offense to do business with the scalpers, I took a laissez-faire approach. After my boss humiliated me in front of my colleagues, I even found myself escorting tourists to Tomatoes in the Olive Garden if I knew he had a better deal than me. I found myself rewarded with cash and free tickets if something was going dead.

The day after Frankie Avalon got out of jail, he came to the Square to try and assert his dominance over me and my uniformed troupe of ticket selling actors. He faced off with me over a minor “who spoke to who first” spat.

Frankie was a wiry little fuck who barely came up to my chin, and he thought ripping off his shirt to punctuate his shit talk would intimidate me. It didn’t.

When Tomatoes and his motor mouthed Guatemalan wife Wendy partnered with a broker to form their own team of youthful hustlers, I was disappointed he didn’t try to poach me. Perhaps he thought I was too loyal to the boss I hated, or perhaps he just didn’t want to kick off his venture into legitimacy by starting a war.

It worked out because I was growing tired of standing on the street for 40 hours per week no matter the weather. Soon enough, I applied for a job as a concierge, trading the polo shirt and concrete for a suit and a desk in a hotel lobby. I was a decent concierge, but after nearly a decade on the street, I no longer had the patience for uppity tourists expecting to be waited on hand and foot in the lobby of the Times Square Hilton Garden Inn.

After a year of concierging, I swung by Tomatoes storefront on the second floor of an Eighth Avenue gift shop to see if he had anything for me that wasn’t on the street.

Indeed, they needed another desk agent, so I took my place next to a former street colleague and started closing sales that the polo-shirted kids opened a block away in the Square.

Working for Mike Tomatoes was an experience. Every day, he’d come into his office — nothing more than the only desk that wasn’t customer facing — and put the horse racing on three monitors.

He gambled on the horses across eight time zones on two continents, occasionally peaking behind to observe our sales, but mostly just calling his guys in other states to place bets. I once saw him win north of two million dollars on a single wager.

I thought the guy was some sort of god from the underworld. He definitely didn’t not have mafia connections.

Tomatoes also had a tendency to take massive hits off his marijuana vape pen. When I say massive, I mean he filled up his entire 5’11 275 (success had added 50 pounds) frame with vape smoke in one gigantic pull, held while a perplexed look crept across his jowls, then coughed out a cloud that threatened to make a hot box of the entire gift shop.

It was a pretty chill work environment, as you can imagine. Tomatoes shared stories of the old times about Mike the Mountain and Ritchie the Rat while me and my two polo-shirted colleagues auditioned ticket monikers of our own.

There was Brando, who was a soft spoken gentle giant until a lowball offer would piss him off, at which point he would tear the tickets in question up in front of the insolent lowballer.

There was Danny Boy who charmed the Harvard Club’s no-nonsense Irish concierge into only dealing with him.

I was known as Mikey Sack O’Nickels. My superpower was an uncanny ability to switch from silver tongued salesman to calmly and collectedly telling unruly customers exactly where they could shove it if they didn’t like the deal on the table; one more misstep might cause me to swing a hidden bag of coins at the dumbass side of their head.

Mikey Sack O’Nickels doesn’t come out too often now that Danny Boy and I have our own business and we’ve got 20 some odd employees between us and the front lines.

But recently we’ve been dealing with this car service that wants to partner, and the first thing Dan and I said after meeting the husband and wife duo running the cars was that they’re just like Mike Tomatoes and Wendy. He’s an on the make Italian American guy trying to project an air of toughness, and she’s a fast talking Latin American woman with the work ethic of an angry bulldog.

A few days ago, I was waiting for a “very important” call from these two after a week of them failing to respond to our texts. They would call me in ten minutes, they said at 3:45. Two hours and three unanswered texts later, I figured they’d flaked again, overwhelmed by the weight of their own operation. I decided to clock out, step outside, and take a couple tokes off my end of the day J.

The J was down to a roach and it took me a few moments to light up. Often when I’m at the end of a joint, I’ll get higher than I intend, underestimating the remainder of the green as I suck out its last bits of goodness.

Imagine my surprise when returning inside to find a missed call from Car Service Tomatoes. Maybe I shouldn’t have called back, but Mikey Sack O’Nickels had been woken up by the spirit of Mary Jane. On the other end of the phone were my new Tomatoes and Wendy, monologuing back and forth about guarantees this and partnership that, trying to talk me off our weeks established stances.

Sack O’Nickels was having none of it, overpowering both of their monologues, tossing flurries of conversational jabs, and trading assurances without making any promises. They’d called to bully me into a deal and walked away with nothing but a calendar invite.

It may not be the typical hero’s journey, but after a decade plus of a quest that started in Times Square with Tomatoes or that serving now as mentor, now as ally, now as antagonist, it seems as though Mikey Sack O’Nickels has reasserted himself and transformed into the king of his own extraordinary world.

Also,

Thanks.