RAMBLING MAN, GAMBLING MAN

When he was 16, Darryl Purpose found the book "Beat the Dealer" -- a primer on winning at blackjack -- in his stocking on Christmas Day, a gift from his mother.

"I've since forgiven her," the singer-songwriter says from a stop on the road in Florida.

The book launched a gambling career that has gotten him thrown out of casinos and chased by the Russian Mafia.

Today, Purpose is an entertainer known more for winning songwriting competitions, for his fluid guitar playing and for his Sweet Baby James voice than for winning blackjack pots.

Purpose will perform at 7:30 p.m. Friday in a coffee house setting at the University Center Ballroom. The performance is a benefit for KRCU 90.9 FM.

At 19, Purpose left home in Los Angeles to become a professional gambler in Las Vegas. He is good at blackjack because he can count cards, a talent that will get you expelled from most casinos.

He and some other gambler formed a blackjack team, but their goal wasn't friendly competition. "Guys get together and form a business," he said. "You have a plan, investments and talent... It's like a company."

He once won $150,000 in an hour and a half at Atlantic City. He also lost $80,000 in a five-hour play at the old MGM Hotel in Las Vegas. He wasn't addicted to gambling, he says, "but I began to realize that gambling wasn't my heart's path."

Peace activism is another part of Purpose's personality. He was one of the peace marchers who walked across the country in 1986. He had been playing guitar and in bands all along, but the march spurred the formation of a band called Collective Vision that played their way across the country and continued playing for another year.

The following year, he was among 200 Americans and 200 Soviets who walked from Leningrad to Moscow on behalf of peace. In the city of Novgrood, 80,000 people turned out to welcome them.

"There are people who will tell you the Cold War ended that day," Purpose says.

In Moscow, he shared the stage with the likes of Santana and Bonnie Raitt in the first rock concert ever held in the Soviet Union.

Songwriting and gambling aren't so different, he says. Neither is a 9-to-5 job and both require a certain amount of creativity.

"You have to think of ways of card counting that don't look like card counting," he said.

Purpose got into some legal trouble a few years ago. Neither drugs nor violence was part of the story, told in his song "Half Way Home."

"It was the silver lining of a bad situation," he says.

He has recorded two CDs, "Right Side of Zero" and "Darryl Purpose."

"Right Side of Zero" is a song about blackjack, "The Island Song" tells of a friend who swam to an island people say you can't swim to.

Purpose has been touring and singing seriously only about three years now. He won the National Songwriter Competition at Ft. Lauderdale in 1998, the Rose Garden Songwriter Contest in Boston the same years and the Napa Valley Emerging Songwriter Competition in 1996.

He enters songwriting contests because they are one way to get heard. "They are meant to be an entry into the folk festival world," he said.

Earlier this month, Purpose headlined the Ft. Lauderdale Folk Festival.

"I feel like I'm just starting. I'm going to be writing seriously really soon," He said.