Smoking

    Casinos are, it seems, the last indoor public structures in Jersey where you can smoke. Every pit floor is divided up into a grid of smoking and non-smoking sections centered around clusters of slots or specific gaming tables. Despite the clear placards and the total indifference of the staff, I still felt bizarre about smoking indoors. Until I lit up, I hadn't realized how completely I assimilated the concept that one just doesn't smoke indoors. I'm reminded of Burroughs comments about being unable to dodge the narc within. This is, I guess, the nanny within.

    A pack of smokes purchased inside Caesar's will run you $12.

    Later, at a dimly lit lounge in Trump's Plaza, Sean would produce from his jacket pocket five Nat Sherman cigars. We'd smoke under a series of television screens showing videos synchronized with the music they were piping into their casino. Apparently, the folks at Trump think Sarah McLachlan's atmospheric brand of chick folk-pop is the proper soundtrack for gambling away one's hard earned cash. No Sinatra, no Dino.

Graffiti

    While walking along the boardwalk, from the Tropicana to the Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum, I saw a curious bit of graffiti on one of the more rundown piers. Some literate painter threw up Thus Spoke Zarathustra, On the Road, and The Stranger, in five-foot tall, all black caps.

Eating and Drinking

    Al orders alcohol by unit price. Sure, he's got drinking preferences, but these are secondary considerations in the light of quantity versus cash. Sitting in a bar in the Wild West Casino, Al ordered mug after mug of this third string swill.
    "If you hate it, why'd you order it?"
    "It comes in the mug."
    He held up the mug, glass made to look like a small barrel.
    "It holds more," he added, clarifying.
    "It holds more beer you don't like."
    "You're looking at it the wrong way."
    We'd never noticed this quirk of his before.
    He does it with food too. He'll scan the menu and figure out what he can order that will also score him the best number of sides and the like.
    We all ate dinner at this joint called Buddakan. If the giant restaurant fight scene in Kill Bill had been shot by Batman Forever-era Joel Schumacher instead of Tarantino, the set would have looked something like Buddakan. Made to look like the courtyard in a temple, the roof is painted dark blue and has pin-point twinkling lights to simulate stars. The interior is dominated by a giant golden Buddha statue.
    At the table, on learning what I ordered, Al informed me that I could have had my main dish along with this other dish, as my selection is actually incorporated into the latter.

Casino: Waitress

    The waitress at that bar was woman in her late forties, not unattractive, but you could see that, in her youth, she'd been a knock out. She was thin, naturally rather than athletically so. She had dark curly hair pulled into a bun. Stay curls escaped the overall do, but the effect was more haggard than pleasingly disheveled. She looked tired. Her black stockings had a hole in them, a gap about the size of a poker chip on the side of her thigh, right above her knee.
    I noticed that when she counted out change, she would count out the money the same way a dealer would. She would gather up all the money into a stack, then lay down the bills in ascending order, slightly overlapping, forming a long line in which the denomination of each bill could be seen.
    I asked her if she'd been a dealer.
    She said she had. She had started at one of the nicer casinos, then worked her way down the food chain, then was taken off gambling tables and put on serving lounge tables.

    The casinos in Atlantic City clearly have a sort of un-official pecking order. This was what the waitress was describing when she mentioned the casino food chain. And, spending only a few hours in each of the casinos, it becomes clear to even the novice what she means. At the top of chain are the posh joints like the Borgata and Trump's Plaza. At the bottom are the more wildly goofy casinos, like the Wild West.
    What makes this ranking unusual is that it is almost entire a matter of style. Not only do the casinos basically offer the same games. They offer them at the same minimum bid. You can't find a game of blackjack cheaper than $15. You'll find $15 games in all of the major casinos, but never anything less in even the tackiest joint. Presumably this prevents warring over the minimum bid, which would hit all the casinos in the wallet as they raced to the bottom. Other services seem similarly calibrated. Within a buck or two, nearly all the other products and services available to customers are priced the same across the casinos. There is some high-end variation. If you want a $300 dollar bottle of Grgich Hills Chardonnay, you'll have to hang out in the classier joints, but your beer by the pint selections are going to be pretty much the same, and comparably priced, wherever you go. When you get to the bottom of it all, there are no pricy or cheap casinos in Atlantic City. They are, from a financial perspective, pretty much the same.
    Ultimately, the status and distinction of a casino is simply a matter of décor. Each one is constructed not to so much compete with the other casinos as it is meant to serve the demographic self-image of a customer group. If you're hanging around the Wild West, it isn't because it is cheaper. It is because you find the upper crust surroundings of the more chic joints uncomfortable. Trump's customers aren't playing for pots any larger than the ones at the more crass casinos, they just feel like they are.

Casino: Gambling

    I'm not much of a gambler. I understand most of your major table games (except, maybe, pai gow, which is now huge and somehow passed completely under my radar). Still, I'm not very good at any of them. I mention this simply by way of putting the following in context. What I feel about gambling, I feel knowing that pretty much any time I put my hand to it, I will lose.

    I'll confine myself to blackjack (for the historical record, I hit the $25 minimum tables), the game I best understand and play most often. To understand the allure of blackjack one must first look at the game head on. From a standpoint of profit and loss, blackjack is a sinkhole. Skill is, for the most part, irrelevant. Certainly, there's a whole body of knowledge out there meant to help player reign in the overwhelming odds, but even the most complicated strategies (assuming one doesn't cheat) cannot actually tilt the odds in your favor. Over an extended period of play, money loss is pretty much inevitable. Even luck, if one believes in such a thing, can only hold out for so long. I can't recall how many times I'd have left the table richer than arrived had I only walked away. The moment one decides to gamble, whether you're admitting it or not, you are committed to throwing money away. And that is, I think, the key draw: Gambling is an illogical waste of money and that is the primary source of its unique pleasures.

    Money, to butcher Wordsworth's line, is too much with us. But not, and here the poet and I differ, because getting and spending we lay waste our powers. In fact, in getting and spending, we engage in nearly everything American society tells us is worthwhile. The logic of capitalism, the balance of profit and loss, is the primary moral framework of the modern world. Who we are, what we do, is most often reduced to matters of exchange. From the mantra that "free markets equal free minds" to those who self-ascribe as "fiscal conservatives, social liberals," what we're all dangerously close to admitting is near universal abrogation of all value in favor of the calculations of the market place. There are precious few moments when we aren't engaged in this mad hustle. Even the two great absolutist dreams of the modern era – religion and science – fight one another while pretending that they, at best, are little more than squabbling handmaidens of the one truly significant intellectual tyrant of our days: profit.

    This is not to say that I'm against free markets or cash. I think those battles have been fought and definitively lost. The brilliance of market-morality was that it was functional and adaptive. It worked, so it won.

    Which brings us to back to gambling. Gambling is the great American potlatch. Its pleasures come from luxuriating in the financial irresponsibility of the act. Like a gift given in a generous and selfless moment, it is one of the few things one can do to, if only for a night, slip out from under the constant relentlessness of cash and its tireless demands.

    Take the chips, for example. Chips are an obviously functional adaptation to the casino table environment. Playing with greenbacks – uniform in shape and color across denominations – would be a boon for cheaters. However, many people have pointed that chips serve a psychological function. They maintain that forcing players to convert their cash to chips allows the players to distance themselves from the actual loss by forgetting that the chips represent money. These critics are half right. I suspect no gambler ever forgets that chips equal money. In fact, at any given moment, I suspect every player at a blackjack table could tell you exactly how much they've got. Instead, the psychological effect is to put money in its place. The dollar bill is more recognized world-wide than the US flag and, in many ways, is a more potent symbol. Stripping it of that symbolic weight gives us a better sense of money as this odd counterfeit, the symbol of an imagined unit of theoretical value. The casino chip puts money in its proper place and, in that, the chip is more real than the dollar.

    The trick, of course, is that you must always come back down. You win or lose. You go back to work. You pay your bills. You be a good citizen now and buy and sell and save and invest. But for a few liberating moments, you're free of that. There are many reasons people gamble. That little thrill is my reason.