Forum: ‘Life’s a casino,’ but some of us stick to smaller stakes
By Edie Everette / Herald Forum
Life’s a casino …” croons Charley Crockett at the beginning of “Welcome to Hard Times,” a song recorded in 2020. His voice echoes as if he’s performing to an empty saloon, the tempo calm because there’s nothing left to lose. He tells it like it is, that we are all gamblers telling lies.
I once took a gamble by following a jazz guitarist from my hometown of Seattle to Fairfield Bay, Ark. He played horses and used a bookie who ran a cigar store in Little Rock. My gamble with him didn’t pan out because of my infinite immaturity. After nine months living in Arkansas my father died in Seattle and I flew back home. Yet, while living below the Mason and Dixon line I wrote a restaurant review column entitled “Southern Bell(e),” found that Ozark Mountain fall leaves crack like kettle cooked potato chips and had my first essay published in a college literary magazine.
My sister recently won $42,000 playing cards. She can’t figure out how to email me, yet she sure knows when to hold or fold ‘em. The maddening thing is that when we are at a casino together, sitting side-by-side at neighboring slot machines to play, she always wins. After I’ve used up my allotted funds, I sit and watch her rack up bonus games as bells ring and lights flash, smiling as though I am happy for her.
I miss the old slot machines where you had to pull an arm down to spin the reels. (That saying, “one armed bandit” no longer applies.) I miss the days in, say, Reno when you had to carry your slot change in a little bucket down North Virginia Street, palms bathed in a dull, metallic sheen from handling coins passed throughout humanity.
In both Reno and Las Vegas, a visitor may witness — just outside of the casino doors — folks who have gambled away their homes, families and jobs. It is written in their body language, their tattered clothes, their downcast faces. They have been welcomed to hard times. This “visual consequence” is lacking at casinos that are outside of gambling centers, resorts that are off on their own. Gamblers who lose money at local casinos drive off-sometimes ashamed, sometimes angry; and we never see what follows.
Sometimes gambling pays off. In my early 30s I won a $3,400 jackpot on a Double Diamond machine. I had been waiting for 15 years to buy my first dog, an English bulldog whom I named after Bix Beiderbecke. I felt sorry for that 1920s cornet player who found fame, but when he visited his parents one day, opened a cupboard to find that all the albums he had sent them had never been opened.
I rarely visit our local casinos because I own an old car, have little money and a lot to do. Yet I crave the feeling I have while moving through a casino like a human shark to intuitively zero in on a certain machine. I long to straddle a stool, set down my “free” cup of coffee or Coca-Cola and slip that first $20 bill into a slot that can suck up in seconds what took me hours to make. I love the deep trance I surrender to by believing I have a relationship with these machines; they want to tease yet reward me; they want me to experience making the choice to win or lose because I play it so safe in life.
Why have I always wanted to escape into a trance? I ought to simply be amazed and glad to be here at all, and yet I continually long to run away from life on life’s terms. Gambling takes me to that place where time is suspended and nothing else exists.
Perhaps if, as Charley Crockett sings, I thought of life itself as a casino, being a grown-up wouldn’t feel so hard. Perhaps all of life would be like walking in a clear night toting extra cash, the brain’s reward system lit up like a Double Diamond machine while Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life” blasts from speakers on tall poles sprinkled across an endless parking lot.
Edie Everette is a writer and news junkie who lives in Index.
