Fat Old Woman in Las Vegas: Gambling, Dieting and Wicked Fun (10 page)

Vegas, baby … senior style.

I headed to the shower, plugging in my hot pot along the way and limped into the stall. Fifteen minutes later I was sipping coffee so thick it could be eaten with a spoon.

Emptying the contents of my purse onto the bed, I began my daily ritual. Various coins had been lurking about in the bottom along with a few ticket-in, ticket-out slips I’d forgotten to cash. One was from Mandalay Bay for $1.23 and another from the Luxor for $2.52. Over the next few days there would be more tickets I’d forget about. On the last day, if I hadn’t redeemed them, I’d leave them for the maid. In the past, the total of my unredeemed tickets came to twenty dollars or more. Not a bad tip, if you don’t mind running around the city to claim it.

The coins in the bottom of my bag came to a total of $1.55. I slipped them into my little coin purse. I counted the bills from the zip side pocket that held my daily allowance. I undid the five different diaper pins that weaved through the zipper head and fabric on my bra wallet and removed the contents. I fanned the items out in front of me.

Driver’s License: check

Primary credit card: check

Return ticket: check

Second ATM card: check.

Secondary credit card: check

Cash: check

Three blank checks: check             

Social Security card: check

Card with meds and prescription: check

Health insurance card: check

Medicare Card: check

Phone card: check

Two four-day bus passes: check

Cash – count first, count again, and then: check

If I didn’t do an inventory, I’d find myself panicking throughout the day.
Where’s my fricking train ticket? How much money do I have left? Am I broke? Did I lose my credit card? Where’s my ID?
I’ve stripped off almost all my clothing in a casino bathroom stall a few times to reassure myself I hadn’t lost anything important.

A friend once said to me, “The way you have to travel sounds exhausting.”

I answered, “It is.”

Once I’d verified I had everything I needed to survive and return home, I checked it one more time before packing the items away in my bra wallet’s various zipper compartments. The many diaper pins that held it all together were clicked shut. I tugged at each one just to make sure they were locked. I slipped on the bra wallet and didn’t take it off again until the next morning, when I showered.

I even slept in the darn thing.

The last item on my agenda was to call housekeeping and request to not have service to my room during my stay. I’d rather reuse towels than have a stranger poke about where I sleep.

My cash had dwindled to a few dollars. It was time to hit the ATM.

If I withdrew cash every day for a week, I’d end up paying around fifty-six bucks in fees. If I’d ever applied for casino credit, I could, of course, cash a marker. But applying for a line of casino credit with the money due thirty days later, has never been an option for me. Neither is a credit card advance. The last thing I want is to have every credit card maxed out because I was convinced I was on “a roll”.

If I do not have access to discretionary cash, I do not gamble. Period. The eight-dollar-a-day fee for using an ATM to access my own money is worth it.

I am a gambler, not an idiot. If I have to have an addiction, I’m glad it’s based in sugar rather than playing the odds.

∞

Downtown Vegas is old, cheap and bordering on the indecent. I fit in perfectly.

Across the board prices for hotel rooms, restaurants, buffets and entertainment are far more reasonable Downtown than on The Strip. The slots are rumored to be looser while the minimum bids at the tables are definitely lower. The cover photo of this book of me winning a jackpot was taken Downtown.

I’ve had a few friends who detest Downtown because it is “sleazy”. I like that it borders on the questionable. For a woman, I’ve always been “manly” in my disposition toward sex and nakedness. The more, the better. My good friend Pete loves our phone chats about life and love. He’s always saying, “Talking to you is just like talking to a guy!”

And I respond, “Ah, thanks?”

My attitude can be traced to my discovering
Playboy
magazines at the vulnerable age of eleven. The stash wasn’t hidden very well. I just had to open a dresser drawer and rummage around underneath my older brother’s underwear.

After I discovered its existence, when my family headed out to church, I’d fake being sick in order to stay home. As soon as Dad drove down our gravel driveway, I’d spread out my wicked find on the green Formica kitchen tabletop. I’d read every article, study every sexist ad, and hold up each page with their titillating pictures sideways, upside down, and this way and that.

Sex in most American households in the ’50s and ’60s, was never discussed. Any information I acquired came from reading the pages of Huge Hefner in an era before the term sexism and chauvinist pig became the norm.

If I had been psychic, I would have waited a few years to develop my outlook on life. Gloria Steinem would have been my base of wisdom, not a greasy, geeky looking guy in a silk robe, smoking a ridiculous looking pipe and spouting a new world order based on sex first, a man’s desires second, and everything else afterwards.

But a large part of my personality is the same as many of the men of my generation. When it comes to anything sexual, I turn into a kid who giggles at the sight of a jiggling butt (
She said butt!
). Or I laugh at innuendoes far too long to be anything but immature.

Downtown Vegas is one long adolescent sex joke without a punch line in sight. (
She’s showing her boobies
!) You can’t walk half a block without being confronted with sex, and then more sex. Especially when you’re partaking in the Fremont Experience.

When someone mentions “Downtown”, they’re talking about a five-block-long pedestrian mall beginning on 4
th
and Fremont. The four blocks are shrouded by an overhead canopy of laser lights. Nightly, a spectacle of lights and images flash across the glass ceiling while music and sound effects blast in accompaniment.

Along the side streets of Fremont sits old school casinos like the El Cortez, California, or the Main Street. But Fremont Street itself is where most of the action lies and where the Deuce dropped me off at 11:00 a.m. on Saturday.

Behind me was the beginning of the Zip Line ride that travels high above the pedestrian mall. The Heart Attack Grill was behind me, offensive on so many levels to me. Patrons who weigh three hundred and fifty pounds can chow down, compliments of the house. As far as I could tell, the owners were making money off of a fat man’s pain, yet presented it as a fun experience for all. Though I have been a comedian for a good part of my life, I couldn’t just see the humor.

On the far corner, Denny’s Restaurant bustled with guests. The travel forums I follow usually post questions from incoming British tourists asking if they need a reservation to dine at Denny’s. The resounding answer is always a solid ‘yes’.

Travel forums can be cruel.

Ahead of me, hundreds of tourists roamed the mall ending at the Plaza Hotel. By the end of the day, nearly twenty-five thousand people will have come and gone.

I crossed the street and passed by Crazy Ely Western Village, a combination of souvenir shop and off-sale liquor emporium. A gigantic yellow sign in the window proclaimed, “Alcohol purchased at this location CANNOT be consumed on the Fremont Street Experience.” There is a continuing battle between liquor stores and bars. The current compromise is that all liquor consumed in pubic must be in a plastic container.

Within a half block I stumbled upon a site that made me vacillate between suppressing an urge to giggle while fighting the need to throw up. At a bit past eleven in the morning, the street was dotted with nearly naked street “entertainers.” The image my eyes rested upon was not a pretty site.

Two pairs of sagging and unclothed buttocks were within a hand’s reach. The butt cracks I unwillingly stared at were protected by a thin piece of fabric that disappeared somewhere between two hairy half-moons. The male duo proudly displayed their wares in vivid red mankinies, made famous by the actor Borat. On their balding heads were red cowboy hats, decorated with rhinestones and feathers. Scruffy brown cowboy boots completed their look. A plastic bucket rested in front of them with a hand printed sign taped to it, “Tips Appreciated!”

I scuttled past without contributing. To be fair, I appreciate a muscular tush or even a round, fleshy one. But, this set of drooping and crevice filled buns belonged to two men in their mid-60s whose faces looked like those plastered across anti-meth posters.

Tip-seeking costumed characters, celebrity lookalikes and scruffy panhandlers were beginning to fill the street. The licentious and ribald out-numbered the family safe entertainers two to one. Dora the Explorer stood next to four bare-breasted nuns with breasts the size of the Pope’s hat, tiny pasties covering their nipples. The nuns were rigid and silent, repeatedly slapping a wooden ruler against their palms. Simply put, another photo-op in the making for the folks back home.

Continuing to stroll Fremont, I opted out of stopping by the Mermaid for a ninety-nine cent indulgence of either a deep-fried Oreo or deep-fried Twinkie. On a few of my visits, I’ve managed to consume both deadly treats. Instead, I slid into the Four Queens Casino to escape the street. The smell of cigarette smoke and noise made its assault. Electronic dings, bells, the sounds of fake and real coins hitting metal and a cacophony of chatter struggled to overcome the loud background R&B music.

For the most part, Downtown casinos are old school design with lower ceilings, narrow aisles, poor ventilation and god-ugly multi-colored carpeting. My plan was the same as always. Sit down at a machine and play until a smoker sat beside me. Then, unless I was on a winning streak, move quickly to another machine.

I’d hang around until nightfall, catch a bit of a free concert on the mall, and afterwards, head back to my hotel. Even at my age and with my limited mobility, I’ve never felt anything but safe being on Fremont Street.

Walking several aisles of the casino floor, I spied a Whale of Cash. I liked the game so much I’d downloaded the $1.99 app version on my computer. Cheap, considering what I’ve paid to play it for real. I slipped in a twenty. Twenty-two games later, I finally scored a win of fifty cents. My gambling had barely started and I was already in the hole by ten dollars and fifty cents.

I lifted my butt up slightly to move when a bubbly woman and her friend sat down next to me. Slot players are usually somber, unless they’re drinking or winning. These two gals held jumbo mimosas in their hands. Plastic cheese wedge earrings dangled from both sets of ears.

Cheeseheads! Wisconsinites on an early morning bender! I decided to hang around. I could use the entertainment.

One of the women’s first spin landed her in the bonus round. The duo clinked their two plastic glasses hard. A mixture of champagne and orange juice sprayed over the top and on to the front of their Green Bay Packers sweatshirts.

“You go, Emma!” said her friend.

Emma ended up winning three hundred and seventy-eight dollars in the bonus round. Playing max play at five dollars a spin paid off for her.

“Good for you,” I said, when the bonus ended and the dollar amount flashed on the screen.

Emma responded a friendly, “Thanks.”

“Are you two from Wisconsin?” I asked.

The duo’s loud laughter echoed over the singing of the slots. Emma’s friend asked, “Gee, how can you tell?”

“I’m from Minnesota,” I answered.

“Neighbor,” Emma said before giving me a high five as a few splashes of her Mimosa jumped into my lap. She was too ‘happy’ to notice.

I sat with the two retired elementary school teachers for an hour, playing and snorting out laughs. We had a semi-serious discussion about Harry Potter and how boys who never read books ended up reading. A good story will do that.

We teased each other about which state was better, and who was better, the Vikings or the Packers. By the end of the hour, Emma was up five hundred and forty-two dollars and I was down a whopping two hundred and three.

My giggling stopped as soon as I came to my senses and realized what I’d lost. The machine wasn’t about to pay me back my funds just because I was having a good time. I kicked myself in my virtual butt. If I wanted to taunt someone from a border state, I could usually do that in Minnesota for free. At the speed I was losing, I’d be out of cash by 2:00 p.m. and have to retreat back to Paris, just like Napoleon, my head hanging low in shame.

I bid the ladies adieu and shuffled back onto Fremont where the party atmosphere was beginning to take hold. The number of tourists and buskers had doubled. A mixed bag of professional entertainers, drunks dressed in tattered dirt encrusted costumes, teens banging on paint cans or break dancing lined the street. Overhead, the twelve-story slot themed Zip Line whizzed by me. The ride ended eight hundred and fifty feet from its launch pad.