Day 16

Imagine people sitting in cramped, plastic booths, eating overpriced, mediocre food, watching their friends and loved ones across the room playing various games of skill and chance. It's loud. So loud, you can't have a conversation. Buzzers, sirens, lights flashing. The occasional cheer of a lucky winner. The sound of coins clinking into the metal tray of a change machine.

Anyone who's ever been to a casino would recognize this. The problem is the above description is of Chuck E Cheese's. Last summer, my kids had been begging to go. They see it all the time (it's right next to Target and the movie theater) and the advertisements during Saturday morning cartoons had painted a grand picture. I remember going when I was a kid. Only then, it was Showbiz Pizza. The draw was the video games. Sure, I had an Atari, but if you wanted to play a quality game with cool graphics and sound, the only options were the stand-up games in arcades. So thinking back on this, I told my kids, we'll go when grandma comes to visit. While this put the issue on the back burner for a few months, she did eventually come to visit, and so I had to make good on my promise.

At first, it was exiting, just like when I was a kid. The boys' faces lit up, and the games had changed a lot since I was a kid. There was an F-14 Tomcat game where you sat in a pilot's seat, had realistic flight controls, and the entire thing pitched, rolled, and yawed, according to your movements. It also shook like crazy when you were hit with enemy fire. All of us played that one a few times. Then we went a played ski-ball a little. And within 20 minutes, we were ready to go. But our pizza wasn't even ready.

As we sat in the noisy chaos, the boys got hungrier, I got hungrier, and things were uneasy. I bought more tokens and let the boys go play games, not because of enjoyment or even to try to win, just to pass the time until we could eat and leave. That's when the casino analogy hit me.

Years before, Catricia and I had wanted to take a winter trip over a long weekend in January for my birthday. We wanted to go somewhere warm and within a day's drive. We ended up in Biloxi MS. I'd read things about the Redneck Riviera and was curious, thought it could be fun, but Catricia and I don't gamble. Not that we're necessarily opposed to others doing so, but it's the one aspect of our Baptist upbringing that stuck. We love to play cards, games, etc, but when there's money on the line, the fun goes away.

So there we were in Biloxi. For lack of anything to do the first night, we went to the casino our hotel had a shuttle service to, and it was an awakening. The place reeked of desperation. Cigarette smoke hung so think, you'd think it was a storage house for dry ice. Or that the building was on fire. No one smiled. Everyone had the look of being on the edge. That if they could only win on this next hand or lever pull or button push, then life would be fine. We didn't gamble at all that night. Just ate and left, depressed.

The next night we drove to the Belagio, the most upscale casino hotel on the gulf. Yachts were tied up in the private marina where people cruised in from the blue-green waters and stopped to gamble, go to the spa, spend money in the shops. There was no desperation here. People had money to burn. It was a beautiful building. We felt like imposters.

We cashed some money, played slots for a while. Penny slots were boring. You didn't lose or win enough to matter. Nickels were the same. Quarters were kind of fun. Then Catricia played a dollar slot and won twenty bucks, which put us about even. We thought about leaving, but then saw a video blackjack machine. We played for a bit and lost another twenty. Catricia said, "Let's just go," but I was determined to get it back. I finally won 18 dollars and said that would do. In the meantime, Catricia was watching an older gentlemen sitting next to us, playing two machines at a time. He was nice looking, well dressed. Always had a cocktail near. And he played calmly. At one point, he had to have a cashier come and cash out one of his machines because he had maxed his winnings. It was something like three grand. Maybe more. But while he was waiting, maybe five minutes, ten tops, he won 1800 dollars playing the other machine. We left, and decided that if we had money to blow and knew how to play like that guy, gambling would be fun.

When I was a kid, the only places you could gamble legally were Vegas and Atlantic City. It seemed glamorous and classy. At least on the movies. When they legalized river boat gambling in Illinois, it seemed like a good thing. No different than the lottery really. The taxes went to education. And in an area with high unemployment and no industry, it seemed it would bring jobs. I never went to a riverboat casino, but I imagine it to be like that first Biloxi casino.
It's interesting that when other states besides Nevada and New Jersey started to legalize gambling, they only allowed it to take place on the water, as if the fluid, ever moving nature of the state's borders kept it free of criticism. No one had to claim it. I read once that the Gulf Coast casinos, which despite their enourmous size, are actually floating off shore, were built that way so that if the second coming of Jesus ever took place, the Baptists could cut the lines and toss away the gangplanks, and all sin would be absolved.

In undergrad, we lived in a trailer park, a tough place, a townie park, not one full of college students, but of ex-cons and drug dealers and people generally out on the tiles. We had a neighbor there, Calvin, a black guy about 40 who would come over all the time and hang out with us. We'd give him beer. Loan him our tools when the power company shut his electricity off. And we also tried to encourage him. He was on welfare, always saying he wished he had a job, so one day we went through the paper and said, Here are jobs. They're not great, but they're something. A week later he came to tell us he got a job at a nursing home. We gave him some beer to celebrate. But as soon as he got his first paycheck, he went straight to the Teletrack, an off-track horse betting facility, telling us he'd double his money. Needless to say he didn't. Still he tried each week, because the idea of getting ahead in one turn of luck was so strong. And there was always someone there who won big, like the gentleman in Biloxi, to keep that idea alive.

Here in Oregon the Native Americans are allowed to run casinos on any land they own. I'm always more sympathetic to Indian Casinos. After all the broken treaties and smallpox laden blankets and firewater, what better way for the white man to get his comeuppance than to lose all of his money to the the tribal council. Even with the newfound casino revenue, Native Americans are still one of the poorest demographics in the country. What's sad is that instead of trying to right the wrongs of the past and provide the necessary means and services, the only way we'll do anything is if there's the chance that it might make us rich. It's the same with other gambling. When lotto first happened, no one would agree for that amount of money to be taken from their taxes. So they created lotto, where people willingly give up their money to the state for a chance to win it all. By the way, you have a better chance of getting hit by lightning, twice, than winning the lottery. But no one is lining up for that game.

Not long ago, the city buses in Eugene started carrying ads for the casinos. They usually showed smiling people with fanned out hundred dollar bills and some slogan about being lucky. I didn't think much about them. An ad is an ad is an ad. Then I read a letter to the editor in the paper, written by a nineteen year old kid who was upset by the ads being on public transportation. He then told the story of his mother and her gambling addiction. How she would go to the casino every Friday after getting her paycheck, and how he knew what kind of night it had been when she came home: if she had won, she carried in bags of groceries and wore a wide smile; more often, she came in empty handed, half-drunk, and silent. The glossy sales pitch of that life was too much.

A friend of mine, who is about 18, told me the problem of his generation is represented in the popularity of Guitar Hero. If all the effort and time and skill that's put into playing that game were actually put into learning an instrument, imagine the result. It's the same with the mother in the letter to the editor and my neighbor Calvin and all of the millions of lotto players. If the time and money spent trying to win just a little extra were put into attaining more education or working extra hours or helping a good cause, imagine the result.

It seems we'll do nothing for the greater good without that carrot on the end of the stick, driving us toward action. Sometimes it's an earthly reward, like winning a million bucks. Sometimes it's an eternal reward, like the salvation of our immortal souls. We comfort ourselves by saying these carrots create good for the whole. But it's cold comfort.

So Chuck E Cheese teaches us that going out for pizza with your family or getting to play video games (at home, with a friend, on your cell phone) isn't enough of a treat, that we're entitled to more. After all, a little extra incentive never hurt anyone. You need lights and buzzers and long strands of paper tickets that appear when you win, which you can then go cash in on any number of cheap and useless things. Usually, you're only able to get a small plastic dinosour or a deck of cards. But it's the hope of those things on the top shelf, a remote control car or a new X-Box, that drive you to cash in for more tokens, order another soda, and stare into the mindless void of a game screen for a little longer. You know you won't win the prize. But you're willing to suffer the loss for just a few more moments of hope.