Skipping Towards Gomorrah (9 page)

The bartender, the world's oldest living smoker, and the man without a voice box were all in the tavern when I dropped by the next day. I had tipped the dealers last night at the
Diamond Jo,
so why shouldn't I tip the dealers who really made my last gambling experience so profitable? I almost typed
enjoyable,
but even when I was winning, gambling didn't strike me as much fun. It was stressful. Oh, sure, there was a moment of elation when you won a hand, but that moment was brief, and a second after it was over, it was time to make another bet, time to slide another chip out onto the green felt, and then you were back in Stressville. Would I get a good hand? Would I bust? What's the dealer really got? Winning was better than losing, of course, but the actual minute-to-minute experience of it wasn't that much different.

I said hello, sat down next to the dealers, and the bartender came over and set a Hamm's in front of me before he returned to his regular leaning spot, his butt on the back bar, and one foot on the cooler under the front bar. It was only my second visit to his bar, and I was already a regular; he didn't wait for me to order a beer (at 12:20 on a weekday afternoon), he just brought me what I had the last time I was in. I told my three-man coaching staff that I won, that it went well, that I took their advice and it paid off. They were delighted—not at my skill, but at their own. I tried to give them each fifty dollars, but all three refused to take my money.

“You won it,” said the bartender, “it's your money.”

“Wouldn't feel right,” said the ancient smoker.

“Spend it on your girlfriend,” said the man with the voice synthesizer.

I asked them if I could at least buy them a round of drinks. That was acceptable, and I picked up their tab—which gave me an idea. Later that night, on my way back to the
Diamond Jo,
I returned to the bar. The dealer-turned-bartender was off, but his uncle, the bar's owner, was in. I asked if his bar ran prepaid tabs. Indeed they did. I opened a two-hundred-dollar tab for the ancient smoker and the man with the voice synthesizer.

 

T
he last time I walked into the
Diamond Jo,
I was on a streak. I went in with a strategy—my winning strategy. I played the exact same game I played the night before, the night I more than doubled my money. Before I arrived at the
Diamond Jo,
I made myself promise to rise graciously from the table and exit the casino just as soon as I doubled my money—I wouldn't be taking the stupid risks I took the night before, when I kept on gambling after I doubled my money. I wasn't going to get greedy.

My last night in Dubuque was my last chance to be a whale. I wouldn't be able to bet the maximum—$500 per hand—but I decided to up the ante. I added a zero to the amount of money I was prepared to gamble. Instead of $300 and $5 bets, I gambled $3,000 and made $50 bets. I went to a bank that morning and cashed a money order for three thousand dollars, and I was given a short stack of hundred-dollar bills. I expected three thousand dollars to make an impressive roll, not realizing that three grand is only thirty hundred-dollar bills. It's thick, but it doesn't look like something a gangster carries around with him. Still I was nervous on the walk from the hotel to the casino, which was deserted as usual. In the week I spent in Dubuque, I was the only person I ever saw walk from downtown to the riverfront. Everyone else drove.

It was on the walk to the casino that I made a fatal blunder: I began spending the money in my head. If I played as well as I played the night before—and why wouldn't I?—I would leave the casino with about seven grand, four of it profit. The three grand I brought to gamble with would go back in the bank, of course, but I would return to the tavern and establish a thousand-dollar tab for my coaching staff before I left Dubuque. Every morning for breakfast, I went to a small café around the corner from my hotel, a place called Dottie's, and every day the same waitress took my order. If I won big, I would leave her a hundred-dollar tip. Shit, I'd give her a grand, too. The rest of my winnings, the other two grand, well, I would donate it to some charity or other, or to a group trying to legalize nonmedical marijuana. I would put my ill-gotten gains to good use, I swore, as I walked into the
Diamond Jo
and found an empty table. Two old men wouldn't have to worry about their bar tabs for a long, long time, and I would use the rest of the money to make the world I live in a slightly better place. I wasn't greedy; I was good.

Do I even need to mention that I walked out of the
Diamond Jo
—four hours later—without a cent in my pocket?

Leaving the
Diamond Jo
after losing three thousand dollars was one of the hardest things I've ever done. You would think a person who just lost three grand playing cards would be anxious to get the hell out of the casino. That wasn't the case. I had to force myself to keep walking—off the boat, past the cash machine, out the doors, over the bridge, up the street to the Julien Inn, across the deserted lobby, onto the elevator, down the hall, into my room, over to the couch. Every step was a battle. I didn't want to leave the casino: I wanted to run back to the ATM, withdraw another five or six hundred dollars, sit back down at a table, and try to win back all the money I'd lost. The urge was overwhelming—it was what the bartender at the tavern had warned me about. The cards weren't falling my way, and I didn't get up and go. I kept playing, and now that I was in the hole, all I wanted to do was go back to the casino and keep playing until I made it right, until I won the money back.

I couldn't quite understand how it had happened. What about all the good things I planned to do with my winnings? Didn't that count for anything? What about the tab I established for my coaches? Didn't that count? I played the exact same game, the same game I played the night before, when I turned $300 into $710. Playing that same game twenty-four hours later, I turned $3,000 into zero dollars. How was this possible? It wasn't as bad as my first attempts at blackjack, when I would sit down, lose fourteen straight hands, then get up and go. Shit, I was up much of the night. But the times I was up I wasn't up by much, and those times started coming further and further apart as the night wore on. In between the short times I was up, I fell into the hole, and as the night wore on, the holes kept getting deeper and deeper. I was up $200; then I was down $500. Then I was up $100; then I was down $1,000. Then I crawled back up to around $2,700; then I started falling, falling, falling. When I got down to $1,000, I thought maybe I should quit. Then the money was all gone.

I walked back over the bridge to downtown Dubuque. I had to force myself to keep walking, remembering not to turn around. Turning around and looking back at the
Diamond Jo
wouldn't turn me into a pillar of salt, like Lot's wife. It would, however, pull me back in. I knew that if I turned my head to look, my body would turn with it, and then my feet would carry me back to the casino. I felt as if I were turning inside out, like I was walking through thin sheets of acid, as if each step that took me closer to the empty Julien Inn peeled off a layer of my skin. My heart was pounding. I was raw and I felt exposed and violated and . . . and . . . completely . . . desperately . . . alive.

 

B
ack at the Julien Inn, skinned alive but safe in my room, I sat next to the window and looked at the
Diamond Jo.
Every once in a while, a car went over the bridge, carrying some other sucker down to the boat. I suddenly remembered that woman playing War in Las Vegas, the woman who burst into tears when she lost her last chip. She took a risk, she lost, she cried. She felt something specific and painful—and something personal, since it was her pain. She wasn't living vicariously through Nicole Brown-Simpson or Princess Di or New York City firefighters or an unhappy couple hashing things out on
Oprah
with Dr. Phil. Something happened to her. She had a sensation, something sharp and specific and personal. We live in a culture that celebrates and elevates the victim, so perhaps that woman secretly enjoyed her safe, packaged, consensual victimization at the hands of that casino. She sat in a plush room, on a padded chair, had a complimentary cocktail, and wagered her way to victimhood. And when it was all over, she got to have a good cry—for herself, not for Diana or Nicole or New York City.

I'd been victimized, too—by my own greed and my own inability to get up and leave the casino when it was clear the cards weren't falling my way. Three thousand dollars is a lot of money, but sitting in my room, the lights and TV off, looking out over the
Diamond Jo
and the Mississippi River, I had to admit that I didn't regret the gambling, even after losing so much money. The feelings I had walking back over that bridge the night I won $410 and the night I lost $3,000 were intense and, I had to admit, worth it.

We know the house always wins—the house even tells us so. Shit, the house rubs our noses in it. They give us free cocktails, as if to say, “We make so much money off you suckers that we can afford to give booze away.” They build billion-dollar hotels and resorts and rent us rooms at less than it costs to have our room cleaned every day, as if to say, “We make so much money off you suckers that we can run the hotel part of this business at a total loss and still make millions.” They fill their casinos with brass and glass and marble and gold and carpets and chandeliers, as if to say, “We make so much money off you suckers that we have to sit up nights thinking of new shit to blow it on.” The casinos make money because once we're in Las Vegas or on the boat or at the Indian casino in the middle of nowhere, they know we're going to gamble, and when we gamble, we lose. We know we're going to lose, because they told us so, and yet we gamble anyway. So I don't think greed is the reason people gamble—greedy people own casinos; they don't visit them. People gamble because they want to feel what I felt the night I lost three grand, or that woman felt the night she busted playing War.

“Affluence brings with it boredom,” according to Robert Bork, and I think on this one occasion he's right. “Of itself, it offers little but the ability to consume, and a life centered on consumption will appear, and be, devoid of meaning.” When Robert Bork worries about bored, affluent Americans seeking out ever more degraded sensations, he's slamming the entertainment industry—gangsta rap, teen sex comedies, and TV sitcoms in which small, smart, fictional children disrespect their elders. But entertainment doesn't really provide us with true sensations, only vicarious ones. Films and television rub our noses in the exciting lives of people who almost never seem to be watching films or television. Americans sit in theaters or our living rooms and watch Brad Pitt or Julia Roberts or Denzel Washington take risks, live their lives on the edge, and court disaster. Movies and television feeds us an almost constant diet of cliffhangers, with protagonists making a half a dozen life-and-death choices in under two hours.

In real life, though, how often do we experience a cliffhanger? Our entertainment is aggressively overstimulating because our real lives are oppressively predictable. Bork's right, we're bored—even after September 11, we're bored. Compared to our entertainments and our collective, subconscious fantasies, our lives are too safe, and we're constantly working to make them safer and more boring and predictable. In film and television, however, in our collective fantasy lives, the world is a dangerous place filled with excitement and cliffhangers and life-and-death choices. We learn how to kiss watching movies, we learn how to lie, how to fight, we learn how to break up—all the things we used to learn by observing each other, we now learn by observing a few highly paid stars. We can't help but compare the lives we lead to the fictional lives we consume. We're encouraged to live vicariously through the impossibly exciting lives of fictional characters. In a hotel room recently, I was half-listening to the previews on the in-room movie channel while I sat in the tub; for a small fee, I could watch
Spy Game, Behind Enemy Lines,
and
Lord of the Rings
in the safety and comfort of my own room. Suddenly a smarmy voice-over started asking me questions: “So who do you want to be? A CIA operative? A downed fighter pilot? A sorcerer's apprentice? With On Command, you can be whoever you want, whenever you want. So who is it you want to be?” The exciting lives we're encouraged to fantasize about, the lives we dream about, the lives that are implanted in our subconscious by film and television, are enormously out of step with the lives we actually lead. The comparison between the lives we lead and the lives we watch can be pernicious and suffocating. There is very little suspense in real life, very little drama, risk, or danger.

Except in a casino.

Observing the action at one of the newer hotels on the Vegas strip one night, I was reminded of Mecca, Islam's holiest city. There is a mosque in Mecca built around a rock that Muslims believe the prophet Mohammed was standing atop before he ascended into heaven. That rock now sits in the middle of the mosque's enormous courtyard, and during the hajj, Muslims crowd into the mosque's courtyard, swirling around Mohammed's last known whereabouts, trying to get themselves a little closer to heaven. I thought to myself, Las Vegas is the American Mecca, a holy city, site of the American hajj, a place in the desert where we gather to worship our American God, money. Like the courtyard of that mosque in Mecca, Las Vegas's casinos swarm with people, circling the casino, but instead of circling the last known whereabouts of a long-gone prophet, we circle slot machines and card tables and craps games. It's all about money, I thought, greed, worshiping money.

I was wrong. It's not about money, it's about risk and danger and purchasing a little of the action we see on the screen. In a casino, you can sit down at a table with a drink in your hand and treat yourself to a night filled with cliffhangers. You're taking risks, and the bigger your bets, the more you have at stake, the closer you get to feeling like you're making life-and-death decisions. I felt burning alive—or cinematically alive—when I walked into that casino with three thousand dollars in my pocket, ready to risk it all. And I felt flayed alive, but alive, walking out three hours later with nothing left. And it was worth it.