Frank Baldwin "Balling the Jack."
Tom takes his pay check every week and bets it all on a Friday night ball game. One drunken night, he challenges the captain of the meanest team in the league to a money-match.
"Betting all you have cleans the system," says young Wall Street paralegal Tom Reasons as he hands over $400 of his weekly $447 paycheck to his bookie, Toadie, in bets on baseball games. But it's the low-profile sport of darts that gets Tom into real trouble, in this raucous, raunchy thriller.
When he loses $40,000 on the toss of a feathered sliver of steel, Tom has to outsmart mafia loan sharks to stay in one piece. Along the way, Frank Baldwin manages to tap into the energy of ambitious, amoral, and frighteningly fascinating 20-somethings. Now Tom has to find the $40,000 stake and get his team to win without telling them how much pressure they are under.
A young man searching for the perfect time, the perfect woman, and the perfect life finds the rush he needs to sustain him by gambling his paycheck every week--in this this fast-paced, funny excursion into New York's betting parlors, rock clubs, and assorted bedrooms.
Paperback. 1998.
New book. Book in excellent visual and technical condition.