A Trip to the Casino

Well the money's pouring down and the people all look down,
And it's floating out of town
I hit the second deck and I spend my paycheck,
And my wife that I just met, she's looking like a wreck
-Wilco, "Casino Queen."

This past Friday evening, I found myself bundled up in -20 degree weather, wedged into a bus that looked like a trolley, sipping a can of Old-Style and watching the smoke and lights of the South Side of Chicago whip by. It was a good friend's birthday party, and we were on our way to Hammond, Indiana. We were going to the Casino.

If you go to the Hammond Horshoe's Website, you will be greeted with a video of a suave, Bond-like man of about 50 strolling into the casino with a briefcase full of money. Music that sounds like it's been lifted from Pulp Fiction or Snatch plays in the background. We see the "infamous gambler" land at a craps table, and as he throws the dice, we hear the sound of jets taking off. In no more than than 5 seconds, we see video of: sky diving (with a snowboard), a fighter jet, a skier in mid air, people riding ATVs through the desert, a soccer player doing a bicycle kick, a white-water kayaker, a women ripping her shirt open to expose a red satin bra, a motorcyclist, a surfer, and finally, the space shuttle taking off in a cloud of fire. The man walks out of the casino 3 rolls later with 1.5 million dollars. He now has two suitcases full of cash. We are informed that "Horshoe ignites the true gambler's soul." There is one minority in the video—an out-of-focus black man in the background of the gambler's march to the craps table.

You can see the casino for at least a couple of miles. It's built in the middle of a bunch of gas stations that advertise cheap meat and fireworks in an almost pun-ish fashion: "Big bangs for cheap." From the road, the building looks at least as big as the Field Museum in Chicago, and houses a hotel, several restaurants, and an enormous parking garage. The casino itself is a sort of barge-like monstrosity on an inlet of Lake Michigan.

We were getting excited, wondering what the night would hold, and we clambered out of the trolley-bus and pile into the Casino. The first impression I had is not of the decor of the lobby, which looks like something you might see in budget hotel in South Florida, but of the overwhelming smell of cigarette smoke. Smoking indoors in public venues has been banned in Illinois for a year now, and I had forgotten the heaviness of the air of smokey bars. On a wall, a sign tells us that "Responsible gambling is not leaving your child unattended." We checked our coats, the smokers lit cigarettes, and walked into a maze of flashing lights and slot machines.

The Hammond Horseshoe allegedy contains 46,000 square feet of gambling space and houses over 2,000 slot machines. To my virgin eyes, it seemed like far more. I had never been into a gaming portion of a casino. When I was thirteen, my family and my grandmother packed into a room the size of a walk-in-closet in the bottom of a cruise ship and went to Cozumel, Mexico (where my dad hired a driver and took us to see the corrugated metal shacks on the other side of the island). I once convinced my mom to play a dollar at one of the twenty slot machines at the storefront casino on one of the decks. She won five dollars. The next day, I convinced her to play the five dollars. We lost it all, and she swore off returning. When I was twenty, I stopped off at the Indian Reservation Casino—Sky City— in New Mexico to eat a disgusting avocado burger in the middle of the night on my way to the World's Largest Dream Catcher outside of Winslow, Arizona.

And here I was in the middle of a football field of slots with names like "Rembrandt's Riches," "DaVinci Diamonds," and "Who wants to be a Binoinaire?" Where to go first? The bar? The gaming tables? The bathroom? I looked around with wide eyes and couldn't help but thinking, as I do whenever I am at a dance party, that my education in Christian schools had failed me in social skills that I never thought I'd admit to wanting (namely grinding and gambling).Remembering the slot machines on the cruise ship, I had loaded my pockets with spare change. I reached into my jeans and with a little bit of effort to find the coin slot, jammed a quarter in the slot machine, then pushed the button. Nothing happened. I was on the verge of putting another quarter in when my friend informed me that the machines took either cash or casino cards. I looked up at the hundreds of cameras hidden by copper balls, became a little worried, then walked to the bar. There I was dissapointed that unlike Nevada Casinos of which I had heard, drinks are not free. They are cheap, though, and I was delighted to see Wild Turkey on special. Then I began what amounted to five hours of strolling up and down the casino floor.

There were no Danny Oceans, no men like the man in the video on the Casino's website. Nor was this anything like Casino Royale, which I had recently seen. The people were the same kind of people that walk into the staffing agency where I work and try to get an eight-dollar an hour job on an assembly line. Women with low-cut shirts exposing names tattooed on their breasts, men wearing their shirts from the plastering union that employs them. They had canes. They looked like they had smoked two packs a day for thirty-five years. Some were gathered around the gaming tables with bright eyes and stacks of chips. Others were seated at the slot-machines, mindlessly pushing the play button over and over again (their arms would get tired by pushing the lever.) They had their Horshoe cards on bungee cords so they would never leave them in a machine. Some of them rested their head on the machine, their finger moving up and down like the needle of a sewing machine in slow-motion.

The majority of the $3.7 billion in revenue of Harrah's, the owner of the Horshoe franchise, and nearly 80% of the company's operating profits come from slot-machines. Harrah's uses rewards cards for their slot-machines so that they can track players' age, gender, area of residence, games played, and amount of money spent. Players are encouraged to sign up because they can earn rewards, much like a credit card, based on how much money they spend. But it gets worse. The central processing center in Memphis Tenessee tracks the data on each gambler and generates marketing strategies tailored for each one. They know how much each will spend and what sort of coupons and incentives will get them to return regularly. Out of towners are given discounted rates on hotels. Locals are given free meals at the restaurants. The money pours in, mostly from local residents. The ideal Harrah's customer according to the data? A 62 year-old woman who plays dollar video poker and lives within 30 minutes of the Casino (according to a marketing book I found on google books...which was concerned only with praising Harrah's strategy).

What is in thirty minutes of Hammond, Indiana? Chicago, yes, but I don't think the majority of the players were from Chicago. My friends and I were the only ones on the shuttle trolley-bus (I like writing that word.) Rather, I would bet that the majority of the players were from Hammond, or nearby Gary, with its median household income of under $30,000. I had no business being at the casino. But I couldn't help but think that these people had less.

The birthday boy managed to walk away with $150 dollars in winnings from Black Jack. Another friend walked away with $600. This didn't suprise any of us. His mom enters mail-entry competitions as her job and has won vacations, a cruise, video game systems, and plasma tvs, among other things. He won a trip to France to be a ball-boy in the 1998 World Cup. Luck is in his blood. And with his black blazer, dark jeans, and leather boots with a zipper on the arch, he looked like a gambler.

I had walked in with the intent of spending no more than $40 on gambling. My secretarial job and my student loans wouldn't permit me to spend more. I spent $3. Or $3.50, I should say, as I won 50 cents on a slot machine and then immediately lost it. I was too frustrated with the slot machines to spend any more. I thought it was a matter of pulling a lever. Nope. There's all sorts of betting options and video screens that pop-up. The minimum buy-in for Black Jack was $25, so I didn't play that either. Instead, I wandered around in the smoke for a long, long time, gazing with a confused awe at what was going on around me.

Yes, I had a good time, but the whole thing seemed rather Dante-esque. Like an outer ring of hell, in which people are punished with the banality of their desires for an eternity under bawdy chandeliers.