All Gone to Look for America (29 page)

But Reno looks on the bright side. Traffic bollards on street corners are brightly painted to look like piles of casino chips. On the corner of E
Commerce
the effect is spoiled by a hobo asleep on the pavement next to them. A passing ambulance truck halts and two paramedics pile out and take a look at him, pulling on plastic gloves before they consider actually touching him. One of them gives him an investigative kick. He sits up, clearly wondering what time of day it is, which if he has just emerged from a casino I can understand, and stares wildly at them. They get him on his feet but rather than help him into the ambulance, tell him to move along. This is a no-loitering zone. He’s not keen on loitering anyhow, and hurls a lungful of obscenities at them as he shambles off. Disconcertingly, they respond in kind.

A few minutes later, two tough-looking blokes wearing black helmets, black T-shirts, black Lycra shorts and dark glasses jump off mountain bikes next to him and demand his identity papers. It’s only when they turn their backs to me that I recognise the words ‘Reno Police’. It’s not exactly the ‘bobby on a bicycle’ of English mythology, but then in my experience that always was just mythology. I assume they’re genuine, though the souvenir shops along
Virginia
Avenue will print just about anything on a T-shirt. One of a group of less than sylph-like young women in their twenties heading for the Eldorado casino is wearing a T-shirt that reads, ‘Lord, if I can’t be skinny, please let my friends be fat’. The Lord has clearly answered her prayers.

The three casino resorts that dominate central Reno compete for the take with a couple on the outskirts, a city centre branch of the bland national casino chain Hannah’s, the Woolworth’s of the gambling world. And then there’s Fitzgerald’s.

The name is a clue, but any doubts I might have had about which particular
theme Fitzgerald’s hopes will pull in the punters, are blown away by the thick layers of old green paint and, standing near the end of a grubby rainbow near the door, the life-size plastic leprechaun (possibly larger than life-size
depending
on your personal experience of leprechauns). Yep, Fitzgerald’s is playing the Irish card. From the bottom of the deck. And if I were the Irish
government’s
public relations adviser, I’d sue.

The lettering on the sign above the door is done in stick-on letters against a white neon background, like cinemas from the 1960s, except that it isn’t retro, it’s just left over. While advertising hundreds of five-cent and one-cent slots suggests it is really scraping the barrel to pull in the punters. I wander inside and immediately regret it. The bottom of the barrel is the summit of most of Fitzgerald’s punters’ ambitions. The green carpets are faded to the colour of putrid moss, the slot machines still have mechanical arms: you know, the ones you have to pull, unknown anywhere else in Reno. The drinks brought to the sad souls doubling a lifetime’s exercise limit by pulling them are served by dumpy Chinese blokes or women who no longer care to know that the days when they might have looked good in tights and skimpy leprechaun costumes are long gone. Too little Tai Chi, too much Mah Jong. The only exception, as far as age goes, is one young woman who looks as if she might be in danger of producing a whole litter of little leprechauns any minute. The drinks that aren’t free are cheap, as is the food. But I just do not want to know what the ‘House Special 99 Cent Prawn Cocktail’ even looks like. Ah, the luck of the Irish! A sign opposite proclaims ‘Jewellery and Pawn Store’; not exactly an
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for big payouts.

I hurry out, back to the comforting mahogany veneer of the Silver Legacy complex, although it is only now that my jaded eye takes in the obvious: that the outside is a crude
trompe l’oeil
. It has been decorated – if it was meant to be a disguise it is signally unsuccessful – to look like the nineteenth-century street front that was presumably pulled down to erect it. There is even the date 1895 inscribed on the pediment of one of the series of pseudo-terraces, one of which is a phoney grocer’s, the next a mock-up ‘Sierra Pacific’ railway office, and another – with almost a nice touch of irony, the Silver Legacy Casino and Saloon – although pushing the fake doors will get you nowhere.

The real doors on the end, however, are always open, 24 hours a day. I wander back in, with the vague intention of cashing in my two-for-one cocktail voucher with the ‘sophisticated sexy waitresses’ in the Aura bar. The
two-for-one
deal turns out to apply exclusively to a range of brand new house martinis, ‘
each designed to reflect the aura made up by your personality and chakras
’, a bit of
New Age mumbo-jumbo obliquely intended to imply you can open spiritual energy channels by getting wasted on sweet spirits. It’s what the ‘sophisticated sexy waitresses’ are supposed to sell. But they’re all on a cigarette break, and the male bartenders are having none of it.

‘It’s either those or well drinks,’ says Eric, the one nearest me. Unfortunately this doesn’t help. It’s another of those linguistic things. ‘You mean like fruit juice, or energy drinks?’ I ask, assuming – not too stupidly it seems to me at the time – that a ‘well drink’ is something akin to a ‘wellness drink’, which doesn’t make a lot of sense either but back in Europe I would assume to be some sort of vaguely ‘healthy’ alternative to alcohol.

Eric gives me one of those ‘You from Mars?’ looks, and says, ‘Nope, I mean a drink out of the well,’ indicating the sunken reservoir of bottles set into the lower part of the bar on his side.

‘So that would include, say, a vodka martini?’ I suggest hesitantly, off the top of my head.

‘Sure thing,’ he says, taking me at my word, and nonchalantly throwing a half full vodka bottle some four feet into the air, catching it behind his back in between flicking a slice of lime into a cocktail shaker, adding ice, a dash of the vodka followed by a splash of vermouth from another bottle which
miraculously
appears in a third hand that is obviously his cheating secret, before hurling the vodka bottle back into the air, catching it in the lid of the shaker and putting it back on the shelf, while another previously unsuspected appendage has put the lid on the shaker, shaken it and is now pouring the drink. A vodka martini, shaken, stirred and taken on a day trip to Alton Towers all in less time than it takes to say, ‘The name’s Bond, James Bond.’

‘How do you learn to do stuff like that?’ I asked.

‘Not having a life for the past two years,’ he replied with refreshing honesty.

I sit down next to the bar, mostly it’s there, and so am I, and so’s the drink. But also because I’m more than a little in awe of what Eric might perform next. His bartending pyrotechnics are far more riveting than anything I expect the two rather bored-looking females to put on display. Of course, when I say ‘
pyrotechnics
’ here, I’m speaking figuratively. At least I thought I was. Impressed by having such an impressionable audience, Eric decides to show me one of his specials. This consists of dowsing a chunk of paper towels in something
seriously
alcoholic, stuffing them into the necks of a couple of bottles, and setting them on fire. Before proceeding to juggle with them, leaving trails of flame in the air, like a kid with a sparkler on Bonfire Night.

I watch this with some amazement, about five steps back from the bar. Up
until now it had never occurred to me that a Molotov cocktail was something you could actually order at a bar. It’s only a little disappointing therefore when he explains the bottles were in fact empty and made of reinforced plastic, kept specifically for tricks rather than the dispensing of alcohol: ‘Even so, you have to be careful, sometimes the plastic can melt.’

Yeah, right. I’m just (in)digesting that little nugget when Eric gets called off to mix a drink for someone at the other end of the bar. A tipple for which only he, it seems, knows the recipe. An Amateur Arsonist perhaps or a Napalm Nightcap.

With that efficiency that sums up the American casino industry, however, his place is immediately taken by Sean, who turns out to be a South Korean called Sung, who changed his name because the Americans had trouble with it, ‘and I like Sean Connery’. Sean tells me he’s been working in Reno for six years, moving up the casino league to the Silver Legacy which according to him is unquestionably the best. Having seen the Fitzgerald, I’m not about to argue.

At 36, Sean clearly considers himself something of a veteran on the bartending scene, even if he takes his metaphorical hat off to talented ‘flair’ jugglers like Eric. But in his eyes, Eric’s still a kid, a lad in his twenties who may juggle bottles like a genius but hasn’t even had to think about the far more difficult business of juggling money. Sean’s main concern is to stay on the upward
escalator
in the casino business, while still earning enough money to service a large mortgage on a ‘three-bedroom, two-bathroom house’ in the valley.

His home is clearly his pride and joy, his mark of success as an immigrant, but it is also his biggest headache. Bartenders, like most people in the service industry in America, rely heavily on tips, which means they don’t have a high guaranteed salary when it comes to applying for things like mortgages.
Polishing
a glass with a rueful look in his eye, Sean admits to having been enticed into the housing market at its height by a shark broker who secured him a large loan at an affordable introductory rate. But the rate had run out and he was now struggling to pay a whopping eight per cent interest on a property which thanks to the general crisis in the mortgage market, provoked by people less prudent than him defaulting on overpriced loans, was deteriorating in value. This, at last is the mother lode! Here in Reno, I have unearthed the root of all evil: it was guys like the mortgage shark who conned Sean that started the whole global meltdown from which, nursed and fertilised by the greed and stupidity of our own bankers, the world is now suffering.

Supposedly bright-boy traders bought ‘securitised financial instruments’,
that were nothing more than a repackaged share in the debt owed by a
blue-collar
worker who’d been conned by a shark on a percentage into taking a bigger loan than he could afford which quickly reverted to an interest rate he couldn’t repay. All over America in recent years, people who thought they were getting a rung on the ladder to middle-class respectability have had it pulled out from under them and as a result have walked away from the financial system leaving the men who sell the ladders with no customers and barely a leg to stand on.

Sean was by no means an obvious bad debt, with a steady job and a decent credit history, but the mortgage rate he’d been lured into paying was barely sustainable and the costs of rearranging formidable. So far at least he still has his house.

‘Do you ever have a flutter here?’ I asked, considering the temptation he must be under and almost dreading the answer.

Sean stops polishing the glass he’s holding for an instant, looks at me in mystification as if he’s not quite sure what I could possible mean, and then when I wave my arm in a general circle indicating the casino, the whole ‘
get-rich-quick
’ dream at the heart of Reno, he suddenly laughs, shakes his head and says: ‘No. No, no, no. I just work here. I take my money home.’

A man after my own heart, I tell myself, as he moves away to serve another customer. Then again, as a rare visitor to a casino – my brief experience in Niagara notwithstanding – there’s no harm in risking a dollar or two on the touch-screen poker machine winking seductively from the glass bar surface underneath my martini. It’s blackjack, so why not? Just for a laugh. If you play the odds right, you can hardly lose. The machine even tells you how it – the dealer – plays: it always sticks on 17. It’s better still, safer, I’ve read somewhere, to stick on just 16. That way, over time, and if you don’t do anything silly, you’re bound to come out ahead. If not, what the hell? It’s only a dollar.

Hey, what do you know, actually, it’s eight dollars for the price of one, after only a few minutes. Easy as can be. Slide in the note, hit the buttons and out slides a ticket I can cash later. Double or quits? No thanks, sucker! I wish Sean luck and head off to cash my winnings. If only it had been a hundred to start with instead of one, now that might have been something to celebrate.

Nonetheless, with eight nice clean dollars in my pocket – spewed out by another machine with either better security clearance or more important friends – I’m off to the Brew Bros in Eldorado, or wherever it was in the
labyrinth
, your very own in-casino microbrewery for a swift beery nightcap. Just the one.

Brew Bros have a band on, playing cover versions of old Oasis hits, so I have
a couple, like I’d probably planned to all along, and how can I resist taking another stupid machine for a ride. There’s one there, of course, lurking as always under the glass, even in a microbrewery. You don’t just get the chance to hand your money over the bar, you can feed it into it.

And I’m on a roll. Ten minutes later it feels more like I’ve been rolled. My eight dollars is down to just two (which means annoyingly that the beer has been paid for out of my own cash and not, as intended, the casino’s). Well, there’s no point in sitting here with just two dollars, especially when I’ve already proved I can turn one into eight. Magic. Just like that!

Except of course that I’ve also just turned eight into two. How did that happen? This is where I – and probably every other sucker – start to suspect the machines of being in the casino’s employ. I mean, it may say that each game is played with one pack of cards, but come on, they’re virtual cards, aren’t they. How do I know the machine hasn’t got a whole stack of whatever it fancies concealed up its virtual sleeve? Short of it committing a real howler, like dealing up two identical cards – and these machines aren’t that stupid, they’d have holes blown in them if they were – how on earth would I know?

I start to get suspicious when the machine deals itself a lucky run of ‘
blackjack
’ – by this time I need another beer – and the way it keeps getting 20 or 21 every time I’m sitting pretty with a promising-looking 19 or 20. The way it keeps winning with a 17 when I’ve gone bust because I’ve broken my golden rule of sticking on 16. Not that it would have helped, of course, would it? As if the machine didn’t know, smirking there beneath its bulletproof glass, flipping cards at random inviting me to try another hand, as if the night was young and I didn’t have a bed to go to. Okay, machine, you asked for it. I slide in another five-dollar bill. Put up or shut up, you inane piece of plastic-shielded
electronics
. Let’s see the colour of your chips, Intel or otherwise.