Hey, everybody, I know you must be saying to yourself, Wait a minute. I thought Gambling with an Edge was over with and it is. I'm starting something new. I'm going to call it Life is a Gamble, or at least that's what I'm calling it for this episode number one, and the idea is that I will have one guest who will tell one story about some big gamble in their life. Now I know an awful lot of gamblers, so there will be gambling type stories, but there will also be stories about much bigger gambles that people take in their lives. It could be a gamble with their health, a gamble with their life, getting a divorce, whatever. And I'm not married to anything about this podcast yet, so it may evolve and change as it goes along. The other thing is, right now you're finding this on the Gambling with an Edge stream, and for at least the first four or six episodes it will stay on the Gambling with an Edge stream, but eventually I will shift it over to its own stream. Actually, I'll probably start its own stream at the same time, so it'll be in two places at the beginning, but eventually it will you'll just find it on its own stream except for YouTube, where that's my personal channel that Gambling with an Edge is on, and so it'll just stay there. I thought for my first guess there would be no better person than my long time, very close friend Darryl Purpose. Both of us have had our lives split in two different worlds, the blackjack world and the creative world. So he has been both one of the best blackjack players in the world and a traveling singer songwriter, and so this will be a story about his taking a very big risk to hit the road as a singer songwriter. Welcome Darrell to life as a gamble, Hi Muskin. It's great to be with you on your first episode. Yeah, thanks so great. Tell me a story. Well, about thirty years ago, I had already done most of the things that eventually got me into the Blackjack Hall of Fame, but I didn't really like casinos so much. So I was hanging out in the Los Angeles area and playing open mics and different showcases songs I had written in stuff and hanging out in that realm. I was dating a woman named Amy Beth. She was a waitress and she we met it at an open mic and somewhere somewhere in the country, somebody got into some trouble and the FED said, Hey, find us somebody who can launder some money. Then that person called a person, that person called another guy, that person called another guy, and that guy called my friend who called me. And being a blackjack player and not really at that point in my life having any serious boundaries and really understanding of, you know, what was legal and what was illegal. You know, we were doing things that almost felt illegal, going into these big casinos and being this David versus Goliath thing, right, but that was all legal, but it had a certain gray area feel to it. And well also the law changed at a certain point, like I don't remember exactly when, but it used to be you could walk up to a cashier's cage in the casino and cash fifty thousand dollars and they wouldn't dream of asking you your name. And then at some point it changed and if you cashed out more than ten thousand dollars, they were required to get a cash transaction report and send a report to the federal government. So you go cash some big check, That's what this was. And it was all a sting, and you know, the DA and the FBI and everybody was there, and they thought they were catching a big money launder, but they realized pretty quickly that they hadn't done that. It was just a blackcheck player. It was comfortable with large amounts of money. And they ended up charging me with failure to file a currency transaction report and sentencing me to ninety days in a halfway house. I was living in LA and the halfway house was in East Hollywood or kind of a rundown area of East Hollywood, and I had to spend ninety days there. And what was that, like, I mean, what happened when you first got there. Well, I wasn't sure what to expect, right, like, took my little bag, but I had had no other encounters really with the criminal justice system, and I checked in, made my way, and prepared to make the best of it. Then on day two, I was hanging out in the lobby area and a gun goes off inside. Well, the gun was not in the room, it was outside. But a guy stumbles into the room and he had been shot. And because everybody scatters, you know, lights go out, people go under desks and everything. And I was very naive at the time. I just thought, well, here's a guy who's been shot. You know, he needs help. And so I went to him and I got him sit up, large African American guy who with big chains, gold chains around his neck, and he had obviously he'd been working out in prison. It was pretty clear. I helped him lay down on a coffee table and I saw where he had been shot in his butt cheek, and I saw the little hole there, and I crawled over to the pay phone remember pay phones, and I called nine one one. I said him, somebody's been shot here, and they said, well is the is the shooter still there? Like I don't know. They said, well, if you can, you know, put some pressure on the on the wound, keep the guy from bleeding, right, And so I crawled back to him and I was like putting some pressure on this little hole in his butt cheek, and then finally the police came. Before before the police came, I just have to say, this is like early nineties or something. I mean, AIDS was a terrifying thing at that point. I mean, did did that even cross your mind? If there's all that blood? Did not cross my mind? No, I really just I you know, I'm a guy who likes to help. I was just trying to help. And so the police came, and the policeman that came was my ex Amy Beth. We had broke up when this whole thing, when I got into this trouble, and but it just turns out that you can become a cop in LA in six months, you go to the police academy and you can become a cop. And she had done that, and then she had been working in that area of East Hollywood that night and she responded to that call. And there we were, me with blood all over my hands and her with a badge. We just left at each other and she said did you see it? I'm like nope, I think. She said, did you see your friend get shot? I'm like, he's not my friend? Right, yeah. Boy. So that was my first real experience at the Halfway House, and I was like, wow, you must be thinking, how can I get out of this place? Well, yeah, I was thinking three months of this, right. But then I go into a meeting with the one of the counselors and I start talking to her and she says, well, you know, this is a work release program. If you have a job, you know, you can go home during the day, and I thought, job, I've never had a job. Can I tell her I'm a professional blackjack player? And I was like, no, no, I can't do that. And then I realized I had recorded a CD in friends living rooms. I had ordered a thousand of them, and I had one in my pocket, and so I pulled it out. I slapped it on this metal table and I said, well, I'm a national touring singer songwriter and I'll need to go home and work on my career. And she said, okay, So there's like no checking at all. I mean, right, I mean you could have said anything, I work at the bank. How would she know? I don't know. And I actually think, like maybe a lot of things in this world, you know, she was just going with her gut instinct. I think she realized that I was not, you know, a habitual criminal in the same way that the Feds thought they were getting a big money launderer and when they met me, they realized no, I was just a just a blackjack player, you know. So she just had a sense of me, I think, and she wanted me to go home during the day, and believe me, I wanted to go home during the day, you know, at this point, I had considered what to do with my music. But and I remember a conversation with my sister where I said, you know, it is there's people that like write songs, then they travel around the country and they sing them for other people and they get played on the radio and they make a living. And She's like, no, that's impossible. And I kind of thought it was impossible. But you know, this wouldn't have been the first time that I'd done something impossible. When when I came to Las Vegas as a teenager and it just decided I was going to be a professional blackchack player. You know, it was a lot. It was a lot of the same feeling right where you know, you just don't know what you can't do. And I think that defines how I have navigated this lifetime. You know. I just did not understand that that's impossible. You can't do that. And so I went home and I did not watch TV, but I got on my computer and I got on the internet and I found a guy who was posting and in his signature it said record label. And I messaged him, I said, you're a record label. I have a record And I also saw a woman who was posting that she was a booking agent, and I said, you're a booking agent. I want a tour. I had no idea what touring was. Nationally. I mean I was playing again, I was playing open mic and that kind of thing in West LA. But I sent them my stuff and they signed me up, and before I had left the Halfway House, I was doing national tours while while incarcerated. You know, it's like they need to know, like where you're sleeping every night, like you have to stay in touch, you know, because you're really incarcerated. I don't think I mentioned it at the time, although later a few years later, I thought it was kind of funny and I did tell those stories. But at the time, I just I just went showed up at the gigs, played the gigs. So you could be gone for a week or ten days on the East Coast playing gigs, and that was all fine, that's right, that's right. And so when I got out of the halfway House, I just I just went all in. I put all my stuff in storage, I slept in my truck. I drove five hundred miles, played for tips and made my way and ended up making a living for the next ten years. And then why did you stop? Well, you called me. I like to say, I'm retired. My friends say, yeah, until you get the right phone call, phone call, that's right. And it was you. It is so funny, and it was you, and you were doing interviews for something you were working on, and so we talked about blackjack and my life in blackjack. And then before we hung up, and you said, you know, people are playing on the internet. You know, you can actually make some money playing on the internet. And I was like, really, And of course I hadn't played blackjack for like ten years at that point. I hadn't gambled for about ten years. I remember I didn't have any Internet at the place I was staying in Colorado Springs. So I went down to the Starbucks and I bought my first PC and I opened it up and I ordered a soy latte. I mean, I was totally the starving artist, you know. I remember ordering one latte and I got real frugal all of a sudden. You know, I don't know what it was. You didn't have any money, you had so one latte and then I would spend the whole day at Starbucks with my PC. And very quickly I was making two hundred dollars a day, and then even quicker than that, I was making two thousand dollars a day. And of course, you know this story. I made a million dollars in that star fucks and bought a house and Netherland in the mountains, and the rest is history. And so I've been kind of going back and forth between these two worlds my whole life. I used to think you could only do one at a time, but I've been I've been mixing it up a little bit over the years. Now I'm pretty much a folksinger, pretty much a folks here. Now. I like to say that the arts is a habit that we have to afford. And for me, also, gambling's always been a way to go back and make enough money that I can afford to go act in a play in a theater or something or make a movie. So well, I haven't made any movies and alone, but yeah, yeah, that that type of stuff. And you know, I was going to say that one thing I'm really proud of because I hadn't made I'd made some money, but I hadn't saved it. I had spent it. And so when I started folks singing back in the nineties. I did not have a stash. I had nothing and you know, nothing to lose, and I just drove around in my truck and sometimes I needed to sell CDs to put gas in the car. And I ended up paying my bills with folks singing for ten years. Proud of that. That's about as big a gamble as you can make. It's kind of crazy. You can't do that really, yeah? Yeah, So did you get any songs out of that expecise? My gosh. I have a song called Halfway Home based on true events. Well. Cool. What we'll do is we'll put that song at the end of this episode so people can hear it. Where can people find you if they want to listen to some of your music? You know, I'm on all the formats that are destroying the world, so you can find me on Facebook and Instagram. Music is on band camp and Spotify. Really wherever you find music. And what about if people want to come see you live, go to darrel purpose dot com and sign my email list and I will I will keep you posted. Okay, Well that is it. Thank you so much for doing this. I think it's a great first episode, and I hope people will get in touch and enjoy your music and go see you live. Thank you much, Akin huge congratulations on your first episode. It's gonna be great and I will be listening well. I first started hanging with Lorely Nicksik, aware of father. We'd steal on down at the five and dime, where she was no man's star. I took a favorite doll from the shell because I thought she deserved it. But the next time I passed by the story saw that she returned, and I look outside my windows, staring across the street. She'd way back, kill light, settle off to sleep, and I feel all and signed my arm. We sha, we were grown. Someday Lord me with me more than have we all. Years later, she went off to college and I went to work for this com broker, And when that didn't pay the rent, I taught myself to play poker. I drive up to her dormitory and I wouldn't clean those fright boys out. I'd show raw the money I had one that I can't see. She had her dad. She looked outside and window, staring across the street. I'd wave back. She killed light, sele off asleep and I feel old and signed my heart. We shaid we weren't grown times I cried to louse more than half wee. But when Lord Lee was accepted down at the police academy, well, I took my luck to y'all of Saint Martin by way of Atlantic City. By the time I lamp inside my boots, I had hidden half a man. But if the argoons don't get you, darling, you know you ask customs. O hell Oh, I wish I had a windows. I could stare across the street and wish the guards would kill a light so I could get some sleep. And I ain't feel old. Signed my heart was shot a fall so I can call my lordly and dreamed me halfwheel and after two years of good behavior, will they finally let me out? Serve the rest of my time? And a skin roll halfway house. Then one night my roommate he broke for roll in knee, came for his race. He pulled a garden. Shots were revered and one ripped through my chess. Hi. I looked outside the window, the sirens in the street close my eyes saw light and they covered me with the sheep, and I felt the whole side my heart I did not feel lone standing there was sly to see halfwe. I looked outside my windows, staring across the street. She'd way back, kill light, sittle on the sleep, and I feel all and side my heart. We shall we were wrong, somebody lorline would be more than half we. The