Rien ne va plus
Insight Imaging - John. A. Ryan Photography/CreativeCommons
I've managed to lose only $16 in Las Vegas: mainly by not gambling. Or by not gambling much, anyway. Gambling is utterly pervasive in this town. Not only is there roulette, blackjack, poker and every other manner of card game playable in the glamorous central casinos; there are also casinos in the suburbs, like Henderson (officially Nevada's second-largest city, but really just an offshoot of Vegas) where my cousin Cara lives. On Sunday, my first full day here, and a tough one - as well as being jet-lagged and disorientated I'd allowed myself to be talked into drinking far too much beer, wine and whisky after arrival, so that emerging into the hard Las Vegas sun was a little like landing on the surface of Mars. We sought refuge eventually in a local casino, place where every baseball game was showing on TV, where old women in motorised buggies smoke and weave their way electrically between the aisles, smoking (there's no ban here, unlike in next-door California) and trailing stars-and-stripes on bendy little poles behind them.
They play the machines, like everyone here does, even in the bars. Sit down with a quart of beer (they do serve them in quarts, too: that foxed me into getting doubly drunk after a game of nine-ball pool with Cara's boyfriend Brad) and you find there's a video blackjack machine built into the bar in front of you. Feed it with ten dollars, do like the Las Vegans do, and keep on playing to keep yourself entertained as you drink. With luck, you might end up a few dollars ahead - but you need to watch out. By some sneaky psycholigical trick devised by one of America's crooked analysts, these machines are designed to tell you you've won if, say, you stake a dollar and "win" 80 cents back; a rum way of accounting that allows everyone to win while draining your outlay slowly.
It's good that the machines exist, though, or there'd be nowhere in this city for an impoverished writer to waste his cash. There are plenty of places if you're better off. The special, cordoned-off, $300 minimum stake games are full of men - and they are men - who like as though they might be Russians, or else British soccer players.
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