DOWN ON THEIR LUCK
ALL BETS ARE OFF WHEN ADDICTS TRY TO GET WELL

He gambler's wife was married to The Gambler for nearly a year before he tried the yo-yo trick. They were living in Nevada then and going to the casinos every day.

The yo-yo trick works like this: You take a piece of clear nylon thread and some transparent tape and you tape the thread to a quarter, lining up the thread exactly down the middle, through the eagle's legs. Holding onto the thread, you dangle the quarter into a slot machine. Then you move the quarter just a tiny bit, so that the machine thinks you have deposited it."We would arrive with two quarters and just go from there," The Gambler's wife explains now, sitting in the living room of her home in South Jordan.

It was when she caught onto the yo-yo con that she first realized how much her husband was hooked on gambling. He was such a likable guy except for that, she says. "He was kind and gentle and compassionate, and when he smiled, you couldn't help yourself."

Eventually he was arrested. Over the years he has lost several jobs. His wife started three businesses of her own, but they were all sucked dry, she says, by his compulsion to spend whatever money they had - or didn't have - on poker and horses. She came home one day to find all her furniture gone. He had sold it to get enough money to get him through one more day.

"I've seen him drop $1,500 to $2,000 a week," she says. Over the 17 years they have been married, the losses have added up to probably half a million dollars, she guesses.

The Gambler's wife figures she and her children will probably lose her home soon and may have to go on welfare. Meanwhile, The Gambler has run off to Reno, where some days he wins a little but most days he adds to his losses.

If he doesn't come back by January and change his ways, she will divorce him.

"I'd give my life for this man," she says. It is a statement of devotion - and a prelude to something else, a new conviction she has about climbing out of the sinkhole The Gambler has pulled her into:

"But I won't follow him to hell."

You don't shoot it up and you don't drink it. Yet gambling can be as addictive as alcohol or any drug, says Dr. Gary Q. Jorgensen, who heads up the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Clinic at the University of Utah Hospital.

In fact, says Jorgensen, compulsive gambling "is one of the most difficult addictions to stop."