Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Who Would Have Thought?: More Horrible People at the Casino

This past weekend we went to the local Indian reservation with 750 dollars as seed money. Neither Boyce nor Sammy are particularly interested in gambling, but they’re always willing to do something different. Sammy is half-convinced that the passage into heaven will be based on this question from God: “You have five minutes to entertain me with your stories……Go!” Boyce just wants to lose his breath laughing, which Sammy says God will find acceptable in place of entertaining stories. I keep hope that if there is a God, the test for heaven will be how fast someone can dis-assemble an owl pellet.

I have no gambling secrets. Only rules:

1. Rachel never liked to gamble not because she had a moral aversion to games of chance, but because she didn’t like the idea of competing against other people. Therefore I too swore off forever games in which I competed with other people. Therefore I will not play poker, nor will I play blackjack as I do not even want to be against the dealer (the casino as an abstract entity, like aliens or the archaeopteryx, is different). I am only against that sweet-tongued succubus, Chance. Games of choice then are roulette and craps.
2. Slot machines are for non-people, or at least once-people, who have simply exhausted their will to engage with other people. Sammy says slots are for William Loman. I am unaware of this man, but if he likes slots he’s probably ten seconds from driving his car off a cliff.
3. Only low-yield bets. This is for several reasons. First, it stretches the amount of time you get to play. Second, the house always has the odds. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. Therefore, your best plan is to spread your chances and go with low-yield wins and low-yield losses. This means sometimes after five hours you’ve only won ten dollars. Or lost ten dollars. This is what keeps Boyce from gambling. After three low-yield bets he gets irritated and says, “Snake-eyes, baby,” and puts it on something that is not even snake-eyes. In fact, it’s not even a craps table.
4. There are no patterns in luck. Each roll of the dice or spin of the wheel is exclusive from all previous and subsequent turns. If double-zero has come up 20 straight times, it’s just as likely to come up a 21st time as any other number. The wheel is not tilted and the dice are not loaded. The spirits of the great gamblers, Tecumseh and Chief Joseph, would not allow such a thing.

We went to the Indian reservation casino and camped around a roulette table. Boyce and Sammy bet only as much as it takes to keep the dealer off their backs. They generally benefit from my relationship with the dealer, which is usually positive. Dealers respect the scientist, not the snake oil salesman nor the suicide. Sammy often overacts his role of nervous bettor, making grand gestures of wiping his brow and shaking his head, sometimes mumbling, “I just don’t…um…yeah, I’m out this one.” It’s unnecessary, and the other end of the spectrum from Boyce who sits there in silence until the dealer tells him to leave or bet, and then Boyce bets the minimum.

On Saturday we were doing fairly well at the table when we were joined by a man to Boyce’s left. He immediately caught my attention as he began making perfectly absurd bets. He would put ten dollars on a single number rather than one dollar on ten different numbers, and of course every single time he lost. He would simply get more chips from the dealer and continue, once putting thirty dollars on double-zero. He paid no attention, as the degenerates never do, to the fact that I was slowly succeeding while he was quickly nosediving.

Sammy, of course, began speaking with the man as he slowly revealed his life. Everyone around the table found it difficult to look other people in the eye. Why are all these horrible people in casinos?! Apparently the man has fathered many children, admitted he doesn’t pay child support, and gets most of his money from stealing catalytic converters from the parking lots of retirement homes.

Finally, he watched me win two spins in a row and asked me to make the next bet for him. He was laughing when he asked me, holding up an ashtray so that he could not so much spit as dribble his slobber out of his mouth. I showed him what to bet and he did it, but ended up even on the spin. He immediately went back to wild bets on single, random numbers. Sammy asked him if he had any kind of reason for picking those numbers. He laughed and said this next bet was for his girlfriend’s age, and put about forty dollars on 16. He lost and laughed hard, the way I thought some villain might laugh when you cut his arm off only to learn that he had a secret power to let his arm grow right back.

He asked me again to help him with a bet, and I showed him, and again he came up even on it. Sammy asked him why he doesn’t keep betting on 16. That’s when the man said, “I don't care about her. I’m getting rid of her.” It’s as though the man had no sense of continuity, completely unaware of what he had said, felt, and done, and what he was going to say, feel, and do. Boyce couldn’t take it and said, “But you just bet on 16 because of her.” “Yeah,” the man said, “but she may have given me janitorial warts so whatever, she’s gone.”

Boyce and I took different tacks on this. Boyce said, “Yeah, but you knew that when you bet on 16. It’s not like you just learned that in the last ten seconds.” I went this way: “What did you just say? Did you just say…what did you just say?”

The man repeated himself: “janitorial warts.” I didn’t know what to think. Did this man just not know how to pronounce the word, and was changing it to something he incredibly thought similar? Or was this slang for something else entirely? I demanded he tell me again what his girlfriend did. And again he said it. It was just too much. I have already been forced to accept that there are men out there who play video games with some guy who the previous night tried to knife them while a baby sits in a car seat next to them not getting fed, but I have never before been forced to accept something as genuinely baffling as this. When he asked me to help him bet a third time, I refused, and walked off.

If Rachel were there she probably would have asked to see a picture of his girlfriend and kept talking to him until he said something sincerely kind about her. Rachel wasn’t there, though, so instead we spent half an hour trying to figure out which car was his in the parking lot. We’re pretty sure we found it when we found a Mercedes with a bumper sticker that called attention to three different body parts. We let the air out of the tires and went home.