Elyria provides inspiration for Westlake graduate's novel, "Broad Street Tully"

ELYRIA — As a blackjack dealer and table games coach for more than a decade, he saw the dark underbelly of the casino world, the occasional highs and all the more common lows. David Higgs had enough and walked away from a lucrative career to clear his conscience. But his years in the industry continued to gnaw at him, even after he left, almost forcing him to put pen to paper. The result is a gritty, true-to-life tale set in Elyria and Lorain titled "Broad Street Tully: A Rust Belt Tragedy.'' Higgs, a 2002 Westlake High School graduate, began his career as a blackjack dealer in Detroit in 2007. From there, he moved on to the Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh before eventually landing back home as a table games coach, similar to a pit manager, at the Jack Casino in Cleveland. "I'm a voracious reader, and I've always wanted to write," he said. "It just took a long time to get off the ground. It really takes a lot of dedication and motivation to write a novel. There were pieces of it I wanted to write for a long time. During COVID, it all came together really easily." The novel focuses on Tully, one character who is a collection of all of the worst characters Higgs encountered during his years at the tables. "When I started working in the casino, I thought it was going to be all James Bond and Playboy models, like you see in the movies," Higgs said. "It was the complete opposite. I saw people with problems, real problems, that you never really see until you see it in the flesh. I saw people disintegrating." In real life, Higgs once witnessed a phone call between a father sitting at his table in the casino and his young daughter. The girl was asking where he was because he was supposed to take her to school for her first day. "The dad said, 'I hope you enjoy your first day of school. Daddy can't talk. Daddy's gambling,'" Higgs recalled. In the book, he conjures a similar scenario with a girl calling her dad because he missed her Christmas pageant. "Everything Tully experiences throughout the book has its origins in the truth," Higgs said. "I pulled back the curtain of disillusionment." His ultimate goal with the novel is to show the sinister undercurrent of the gambling world. "People come in and lose every day, day after day," he said. "They are playing when you leave your shift and they are still there playing when you come back in." Higgs worries the surge in online sports betting will foster similar issues for people and hopes his book will enlighten some before they get started. Higgs, who lives in Lakewood, set his novel in the Elyria and Lorain areas during 1999 and early 2000 for the desolate feel of once-thriving cities that were economically depressed. As a DoorDash driver, he exclusively took deliveries in the Elyria and Lorain areas to research more about the cities for his novel. Area residents will read about the familiar Midway Mall, Republic Steel and, of course, Broad Street within Higgs' pages. "For me, it was almost like the area was begging to be used," Higgs said. These days, Higgs continues to work as a dealer, but only for organized charity events, where real currency is not used. He also continues to deliver for DoorDash. "Broad Street Tully: A Rust Belt Tragedy" is available at amazon.com. Contact Christina Jolliffe at ctnews@chroniclet.com.