Las Vegas Makes Me Sick
Yes, this title is all but designed to get me in dutch with the in-laws. So let's just keep our panties on, and see where it goes.
As you know, I spent the weekend before last in Vegas, home of strippers, gambling and my sister. Except the strippers are escorts and gambling is "gaming." That's right, there is no more gambling in Las Vegas. There is simply the playing of games. The government organization which oversees the casinos is the Nevada Gaming Commission. Once you lose enough games, you are broke. I am put in mind of the W.C. Fields line: when asked if the poker he's playing is a game of chance, he replies, "Not the way I play it." Throughout the casinos, you'll see games named Yahtzee and Wheel of Fortune, but they all come down to the same thing - slot machines. But I get ahead of myself.
When I went to Vegas last summer (see the Reader of 7.11.03), I flew by myself, out of O'Hare, on Spirit Air. This time I flew out of Midway on ATA with friends. Radically different experiences. On the way to the airport, I told my companions to expect lots of kids and Asians. Imagine my surprise, then, when Midway was not only not busy, but fairly devoid of both social groups I had expected. Was this to be a much smoother trip?
Oh, foolish man.
The gambling - excuse me, gaming - began at the airport. We arrived early enough to check in with plenty of time for a drink or two before our flight. We repaired to what passed for a pub and ordered some beers, since the hard liquor we craved was not to be found. My traveling companion M decided to play some music, and put a buck in the jukebox in order to receive 3 plays. Michael Jackson's HIStory was the most recent release on the box. By far. M chose a selection. (Not from HIStory.) I chose a selection. M chose an additional selection, and then put in another dollar. His first selection played, my first selection played. The machine refused to give us any plays for the second dollar, and chose to play, quite on its own, random choices from the CD which included M's second selection. Is this a game of chance? Not the way I play it.
ATA, it turns out, is the airline of slim-hipped flight attendants. As soon as we boarded, I noticed the male employees were a bit … mannered. This is not unusual for this profession. But as I started down the aisle, I discovered why this particular version of this particular type worked for this particular airline. I am not slim-hipped. And the only way to make it down the aisle to my seat was a sort of sideways shuffle-ball-change crab step. As one of my companions later informed me, the aisle was not even wide enough to wheel a standard sized carry-on bag. I didn't discover this on my own because my means of locomotion involved taking a step and then having my bag swing back and hit me on the ass, thus prompting the next step. Sort of a perpetual motion device. The seats, by and by, didn't seem any narrower than I was used to, but every time the flight attendants moved the cart up and down the aisle (providing out snack of tiny pretzels and crackers in the shapes of crop circles), I thought I would lose a limb.
As you may know, traveling involves an inevitable letdown. You're looking forward to the trip, you have high expectations, and you are eventually disappointed. This trip, the letdown occurred as we hit the airport. Last summer, Spirit disgorged us into an airport awash in activity: the terminal was new and full of people, even at midnight, there was a vast atrium filled with clattering slot machines, I took a mysterious tram that whooshed me from one terminal to another, where there were shops and more slot machines and redcaps and even more people. ATA dropped us off in a far more manageable terminal, where we walked a short distance to baggage claim and then immediately out the door to ground transportation. It was certainly more convenient. But it felt like we snuck in through the back door. If not for the monitors advertising the 5 different Cirque du Soleil shows, we could have been in Duluth.
It was in the airport that Las Vegas began to make us sick.
One of my traveling companions discovered that his cell phone had gotten turned on while it was in his luggage, and had spent the entire 3 1/2 hour flight looking for service. Its batteries were none the better for wear. Astonishing to me, he had not packed a charger. The phone battery, he explained, generally holds a charge for 4 or 5 days. I don't understand people who are not paranoid. It's not that I always expect things to go wrong, it's just that … yes I do. Or at least believe in being prepared in case they go wrong. Because there's a god chance they will go wrong. I brought my PDA, which I barely used, and I still brought the charger. I brought Walprofen and Zantac 75s because I expected my body to attack me. True, in general I believe that as long as I have my wallet and my keys I'm okay. but that doesn't mean I don't pack one extra pair of socks and underwear, just in case.
The phone was not dead, but it was dying. And this was enough to trigger a meltdown. Not a full-blown meltdown. But the beginnings of one. Remember when Wile E. Coyote eats the entire jar of earthquake pills? And at first just his toe starts vibrating? Like that. Trying to catch a cab and not finding one made it worse. Being told, "It's the weekend, there aren't any cabs at the airport" didn't help. Sitting on a bus to the hotel and waiting for it to fill up as cabs came and went caused additional tremors. So that by the time the bus finally took off, taking 30 minutes to make a 5 minute trip, we were in trouble.
This sort of tension was symptomatic of the entire trip. When we finally got to the hotel, another of our little group discovered that his cell phone, which had worked fine at the airport, couldn't get a signal in our room … and he BLEW UP. Flying makes people so cranky. Any time I am the calmest person in a room, there's trouble, people.
*****
It took the remake of "Dawn of the Dead" ("More Dawn, More Dead") to knock "The Passion of the Christ" out of the top box office spot. This is the summer of creatures returning from the dead to wreak havoc. Coming up next: Hugh Jackman slays vampires as Van Helsing! (Not Van Halen, as I almost wrote.) Al Gore must be kicking himself for not running for president.
*****
Now the last thing I want to do is rail on my friends for their various shortcomings. After all, that won't allow me to focus on my own, which is what you came here for. So I won't discuss the companion who got hostile every day at mealtime because he was on MEDICATION and it had to be taken with FOOD so he had to eat RIGHT NOW. And I'll skip the friend who became so restless at the Liberace tribute show that he checked his watch five minutes in and continued to do so at the beginning and end of every song for the rest of the show. And I won't even go into my own actions at that same museum when I became intolerant (and intolerable) because You Have To Look At These Exhibits In The Right Order, People!
Vegas made us all sick.
But I do want to talk about gaming. There are two things I've learned about gambling, which is what I call it, no matter what Nevada says. Everyone has their own method of beating the house. And everyone else is wrong. A couple I met in the city had the following exchange back in their hotel room after too many cocktails and hours of playing blackjack. He: (as he is passing out in his shark skin suit) Don't me go back down there! She: (eating room service and watching Tony Robbins) Why would I make you go back down there, honey? He: Because I'm a gambling genius! In Vegas, everyone is a gambling genius.
M - of the airport bar jukebox mishap - when to Vegas saying he had no interest in gambling. He was going to drink martinis and see shows and smoke cigarettes indoors. But tickets to O proved impossible to get and you need to do something while you're smoking. He lost his cherry at the slots. M's method, as good as any I suppose, was to play the dumbest games he could find. Of such games there is no dearth. Vegas is following in Hollywood's footsteps by launching slot machines "based on" (which is to say, named after) TV shows. Thus, you have "The Beverly Hillbillies," "The Munsters," "I Dream of Jeannie," and the big new hit - I saw it featured in a plethora of ads - "MASH." Each new game is rolled out by the casinos and the Chamber of Commerce with a major event, as if it isn't the same old slot with a brand new face. (No, I didn't visit any gentlemen's clubs while I was there. But a taxi driver did try to take me and two of my friends to one the first night we were there. At first I thought he was merely an idiot, but later I learned that cabbies get kickbacks for the johns the deliver. Interesting.) Game play has little, if anything, to do with the show. The wheels go round and round, and how the images line up or don't line up determines your payout or lack thereof. Gone are the old fashioned cherries and lemons and bars, to be replaced by lobsters and rhinos and Lily Munsters and chickens in G-strings. Yes, you read that right. One of the particularly stupid games M found was "Chickendales." You can imagine the rest. This complemented his other choices of "Cops and Donuts" and "Winning for Dummies," in the trademarked yellow and black. Gone, too, are the simple days of three in a row and you win. Now games pay out on double diamonds and triple diamonds and quintuple reverse grand poobahs, with lines zigging through payouts in ways that only a surveyor can figure out.
I don't like playing any game I can't understand. And many of the slots are incomprehensible at best. So I stick to video poker. I would play regular poker, but they don't have a quarter table. And I managed to win ten bucks playing a dime machine, so beat that.
I like video poker because I least feel like I am in some control over my destiny. I choose whether to keep cards or not, rather than just waiting to see what the wheels give me. (If you don't know, video poker is basically all five card draw.) My method is one I call "p*ssy play." I play the quarter games, and I play "max bet," which is five coins, or $1.25 per hand. I put in five or ten bucks and play until it's gone. It usually lasts a while. If I lose, I lose. If I win (and this is where the p*ssy part comes in), I immediately cash out. These days, many of the games print a payout ticket rather than giving you coins back. Cashing out right away keeps me from playing until it's all gone. Thus, playing 10 bucks on a bar top game, when I won $45, I cashed out immediately. I didn't really win 45, 'cause you've got to back out the 10 I put in to get it. Then you have to back out the 10 I played before that without winning, and the 5 I lost afterwards. But that's till 20 bucks free and clear, which I would easily have lost if I had let it ride. (Remember the paranoid part?) Not bad for one machine. If a machine takes my five or ten bucks and gives me nothing in return, I leave it. If a machine pays out - and this is my sick part - I also leave it. I figure, now that it has been lucky for me once, it must be done with me. Again - remember the paranoid part.
I left Las Vegas a few bucks up. M was not so lucky. Because he got sick. On Saturday, when I went to the pool and B went to the spa and D went out with his niece and J went to the Hoover Dam, M stayed in. And played. Obsessively. Vegas will do that to you. She shows you the good life, then slaps you down. Beeotch.
Well, this is getting long and I never did get around to telling you how Vegas really made me sick. For now, let's just say it had to do with eating a lot of meat and eggs and potatoes and not drinking nearly enough water. And to be a little more specific, that my GI tract is my Achilles heel, which is only one reason that Brad Pitt is playing that role in "Troy" instead of me, though you would think that after 10 years at war back when the life expectancy was 42, a lot of these guys were not feeling their freshest. In any case, after all that and a 4 hour plane trip back in seats that wouldn't even recline and getting in at 6 am on Tuesday, this past week held some horrible things in store for me. And for now we'll leave it at that.
As you know, I spent the weekend before last in Vegas, home of strippers, gambling and my sister. Except the strippers are escorts and gambling is "gaming." That's right, there is no more gambling in Las Vegas. There is simply the playing of games. The government organization which oversees the casinos is the Nevada Gaming Commission. Once you lose enough games, you are broke. I am put in mind of the W.C. Fields line: when asked if the poker he's playing is a game of chance, he replies, "Not the way I play it." Throughout the casinos, you'll see games named Yahtzee and Wheel of Fortune, but they all come down to the same thing - slot machines. But I get ahead of myself.
When I went to Vegas last summer (see the Reader of 7.11.03), I flew by myself, out of O'Hare, on Spirit Air. This time I flew out of Midway on ATA with friends. Radically different experiences. On the way to the airport, I told my companions to expect lots of kids and Asians. Imagine my surprise, then, when Midway was not only not busy, but fairly devoid of both social groups I had expected. Was this to be a much smoother trip?
Oh, foolish man.
The gambling - excuse me, gaming - began at the airport. We arrived early enough to check in with plenty of time for a drink or two before our flight. We repaired to what passed for a pub and ordered some beers, since the hard liquor we craved was not to be found. My traveling companion M decided to play some music, and put a buck in the jukebox in order to receive 3 plays. Michael Jackson's HIStory was the most recent release on the box. By far. M chose a selection. (Not from HIStory.) I chose a selection. M chose an additional selection, and then put in another dollar. His first selection played, my first selection played. The machine refused to give us any plays for the second dollar, and chose to play, quite on its own, random choices from the CD which included M's second selection. Is this a game of chance? Not the way I play it.
ATA, it turns out, is the airline of slim-hipped flight attendants. As soon as we boarded, I noticed the male employees were a bit … mannered. This is not unusual for this profession. But as I started down the aisle, I discovered why this particular version of this particular type worked for this particular airline. I am not slim-hipped. And the only way to make it down the aisle to my seat was a sort of sideways shuffle-ball-change crab step. As one of my companions later informed me, the aisle was not even wide enough to wheel a standard sized carry-on bag. I didn't discover this on my own because my means of locomotion involved taking a step and then having my bag swing back and hit me on the ass, thus prompting the next step. Sort of a perpetual motion device. The seats, by and by, didn't seem any narrower than I was used to, but every time the flight attendants moved the cart up and down the aisle (providing out snack of tiny pretzels and crackers in the shapes of crop circles), I thought I would lose a limb.
As you may know, traveling involves an inevitable letdown. You're looking forward to the trip, you have high expectations, and you are eventually disappointed. This trip, the letdown occurred as we hit the airport. Last summer, Spirit disgorged us into an airport awash in activity: the terminal was new and full of people, even at midnight, there was a vast atrium filled with clattering slot machines, I took a mysterious tram that whooshed me from one terminal to another, where there were shops and more slot machines and redcaps and even more people. ATA dropped us off in a far more manageable terminal, where we walked a short distance to baggage claim and then immediately out the door to ground transportation. It was certainly more convenient. But it felt like we snuck in through the back door. If not for the monitors advertising the 5 different Cirque du Soleil shows, we could have been in Duluth.
It was in the airport that Las Vegas began to make us sick.
One of my traveling companions discovered that his cell phone had gotten turned on while it was in his luggage, and had spent the entire 3 1/2 hour flight looking for service. Its batteries were none the better for wear. Astonishing to me, he had not packed a charger. The phone battery, he explained, generally holds a charge for 4 or 5 days. I don't understand people who are not paranoid. It's not that I always expect things to go wrong, it's just that … yes I do. Or at least believe in being prepared in case they go wrong. Because there's a god chance they will go wrong. I brought my PDA, which I barely used, and I still brought the charger. I brought Walprofen and Zantac 75s because I expected my body to attack me. True, in general I believe that as long as I have my wallet and my keys I'm okay. but that doesn't mean I don't pack one extra pair of socks and underwear, just in case.
The phone was not dead, but it was dying. And this was enough to trigger a meltdown. Not a full-blown meltdown. But the beginnings of one. Remember when Wile E. Coyote eats the entire jar of earthquake pills? And at first just his toe starts vibrating? Like that. Trying to catch a cab and not finding one made it worse. Being told, "It's the weekend, there aren't any cabs at the airport" didn't help. Sitting on a bus to the hotel and waiting for it to fill up as cabs came and went caused additional tremors. So that by the time the bus finally took off, taking 30 minutes to make a 5 minute trip, we were in trouble.
This sort of tension was symptomatic of the entire trip. When we finally got to the hotel, another of our little group discovered that his cell phone, which had worked fine at the airport, couldn't get a signal in our room … and he BLEW UP. Flying makes people so cranky. Any time I am the calmest person in a room, there's trouble, people.
*****
It took the remake of "Dawn of the Dead" ("More Dawn, More Dead") to knock "The Passion of the Christ" out of the top box office spot. This is the summer of creatures returning from the dead to wreak havoc. Coming up next: Hugh Jackman slays vampires as Van Helsing! (Not Van Halen, as I almost wrote.) Al Gore must be kicking himself for not running for president.
*****
Now the last thing I want to do is rail on my friends for their various shortcomings. After all, that won't allow me to focus on my own, which is what you came here for. So I won't discuss the companion who got hostile every day at mealtime because he was on MEDICATION and it had to be taken with FOOD so he had to eat RIGHT NOW. And I'll skip the friend who became so restless at the Liberace tribute show that he checked his watch five minutes in and continued to do so at the beginning and end of every song for the rest of the show. And I won't even go into my own actions at that same museum when I became intolerant (and intolerable) because You Have To Look At These Exhibits In The Right Order, People!
Vegas made us all sick.
But I do want to talk about gaming. There are two things I've learned about gambling, which is what I call it, no matter what Nevada says. Everyone has their own method of beating the house. And everyone else is wrong. A couple I met in the city had the following exchange back in their hotel room after too many cocktails and hours of playing blackjack. He: (as he is passing out in his shark skin suit) Don't me go back down there! She: (eating room service and watching Tony Robbins) Why would I make you go back down there, honey? He: Because I'm a gambling genius! In Vegas, everyone is a gambling genius.
M - of the airport bar jukebox mishap - when to Vegas saying he had no interest in gambling. He was going to drink martinis and see shows and smoke cigarettes indoors. But tickets to O proved impossible to get and you need to do something while you're smoking. He lost his cherry at the slots. M's method, as good as any I suppose, was to play the dumbest games he could find. Of such games there is no dearth. Vegas is following in Hollywood's footsteps by launching slot machines "based on" (which is to say, named after) TV shows. Thus, you have "The Beverly Hillbillies," "The Munsters," "I Dream of Jeannie," and the big new hit - I saw it featured in a plethora of ads - "MASH." Each new game is rolled out by the casinos and the Chamber of Commerce with a major event, as if it isn't the same old slot with a brand new face. (No, I didn't visit any gentlemen's clubs while I was there. But a taxi driver did try to take me and two of my friends to one the first night we were there. At first I thought he was merely an idiot, but later I learned that cabbies get kickbacks for the johns the deliver. Interesting.) Game play has little, if anything, to do with the show. The wheels go round and round, and how the images line up or don't line up determines your payout or lack thereof. Gone are the old fashioned cherries and lemons and bars, to be replaced by lobsters and rhinos and Lily Munsters and chickens in G-strings. Yes, you read that right. One of the particularly stupid games M found was "Chickendales." You can imagine the rest. This complemented his other choices of "Cops and Donuts" and "Winning for Dummies," in the trademarked yellow and black. Gone, too, are the simple days of three in a row and you win. Now games pay out on double diamonds and triple diamonds and quintuple reverse grand poobahs, with lines zigging through payouts in ways that only a surveyor can figure out.
I don't like playing any game I can't understand. And many of the slots are incomprehensible at best. So I stick to video poker. I would play regular poker, but they don't have a quarter table. And I managed to win ten bucks playing a dime machine, so beat that.
I like video poker because I least feel like I am in some control over my destiny. I choose whether to keep cards or not, rather than just waiting to see what the wheels give me. (If you don't know, video poker is basically all five card draw.) My method is one I call "p*ssy play." I play the quarter games, and I play "max bet," which is five coins, or $1.25 per hand. I put in five or ten bucks and play until it's gone. It usually lasts a while. If I lose, I lose. If I win (and this is where the p*ssy part comes in), I immediately cash out. These days, many of the games print a payout ticket rather than giving you coins back. Cashing out right away keeps me from playing until it's all gone. Thus, playing 10 bucks on a bar top game, when I won $45, I cashed out immediately. I didn't really win 45, 'cause you've got to back out the 10 I put in to get it. Then you have to back out the 10 I played before that without winning, and the 5 I lost afterwards. But that's till 20 bucks free and clear, which I would easily have lost if I had let it ride. (Remember the paranoid part?) Not bad for one machine. If a machine takes my five or ten bucks and gives me nothing in return, I leave it. If a machine pays out - and this is my sick part - I also leave it. I figure, now that it has been lucky for me once, it must be done with me. Again - remember the paranoid part.
I left Las Vegas a few bucks up. M was not so lucky. Because he got sick. On Saturday, when I went to the pool and B went to the spa and D went out with his niece and J went to the Hoover Dam, M stayed in. And played. Obsessively. Vegas will do that to you. She shows you the good life, then slaps you down. Beeotch.
Well, this is getting long and I never did get around to telling you how Vegas really made me sick. For now, let's just say it had to do with eating a lot of meat and eggs and potatoes and not drinking nearly enough water. And to be a little more specific, that my GI tract is my Achilles heel, which is only one reason that Brad Pitt is playing that role in "Troy" instead of me, though you would think that after 10 years at war back when the life expectancy was 42, a lot of these guys were not feeling their freshest. In any case, after all that and a 4 hour plane trip back in seats that wouldn't even recline and getting in at 6 am on Tuesday, this past week held some horrible things in store for me. And for now we'll leave it at that.
posted by John Bliss at
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