There’s a bench at the main entrance of the casino that’s built just for losers like me, and from this perch I watch as the line for the casino buffet starts stacking up. It’s Saturday night, (Prime Rib), but this thing doesn’t open for another half an hour. And yet they keep amassing, walking away from slot machines, the early rounds of bingo, even some straight from the entryway to stand and wait for the buffet to open, all presumably losers who also upon arrival placed $6 into a slot machine and lost it immediately without any of that promised enjoyment like I did.
I surmise they’ve lost also due to basic casino logic, but also because it would be a real tough look to have won big and to then to have made the decision to wait in line for the buffet to open, though it is possible. The casino demands little of us, logic-wise, and encourages membership cards to front-load the financial decision making. I suppose to stand in the line this early is also to impose some kind of spending self-limit, as there are few spaces where it does not cost to simply exist at the casino. I exhausted them all to the point of suspicion in my time there, which is not like normal time at all, but rather its own spacial substance entirely.
I’m at the casino because my love likes playing bingo, which on Prime Rib night draws a full house, and as only playing participants get a seat, I’m set loose with the $6 I have and the conviction to never use a casino ATM. It’s all especially sinister here tonight as the bingo hall will host a costume contest at the mid-way point. Before I left the room, I saw Frankenstein settle in. One woman wore her homemade butterfly wings. There are still always minions in the Midwest, and a man in that wolf mask that we've all seen before. Somebody was slipping into clown pants by the fountain soda machine as I left.
There ought to have been photos taken of all of this, but I realized pretty quickly that not a lot of photos get taken at the casino. It’s terribly odd to be among this amount of people for this amount of time and to see no one take a photograph. They are banned from all the table games for obvious reasons. Truly the only place people seemed to be conscious at all, smiling and communicating and so forth was at the craps table. I guess no one else really wanted to remember the looks on their faces in the flashing lights. They didn’t look like the people on the billboards at all.
And yet the casino has always been the one great congregator, more so than faith or sport or civics, particularly now. And here in Iowa, as I imagine it is elsewhere, you will not find a broader set of demographics in public than at the casino. And why shouldn’t it? This is surely our new city hall, our coliseum, our one true American church, the only come-as-you-are marketplace that’s always selling real tangible hope, and is always open. The American uniforms are all here too, all of the expected hats and slogan t-shirts, especially the purposefully selected Second Amendment shirts worn just a few short hours after they’d found the body of the latest mass shooter.
What better place to mourn yet another tragedy on such an American scale than at the casino? Of course it could have just as easily happened here instead of at a bowling alley, a bar and grill. And our ever-present collective horror is that it still might, as we stumble back and forth from one crowded place to another, ashamed of our indifference to it all, scared that we don’t know when it will happen again and gutted knowing that it will. Because of course it will.
Tonight they gave away knife sets and other assorted cutlery as perks to casino members directly across from the bingo hall. I watched mainly elderly people carrying their packages of sharp implements out towards their cars, and shamefully I thought it was nice that at least everyone was leaving with something.
Mostly I spent the hours that the bingo games took wandering around, several times spilling scalding hot decaf coffee all over my shoes and the carpet. I watched the slot zombies a lot. I tuned in when the few who were speaking tried to explain how their game worked, as if there were actual reason to it at all and not just a cavalcade of light and noise. Eventually I found some televisions where college football and coverage of the shooting competed for control at the bar. I ordered a beer and I swear to you that there were two unexplained maraschino cherries in it.
It’s been some time since I’ve watched someone light up a cigarette indoors, breathed deeply someone else’s decision and stuck around. If you like me have wondered who still is smoking cigarettes, I invite you to investigate your nearest casino for the answer. To this end, the casino sells packs of cigarettes at the cafeteria counter at captive prices. I instead purchased a Banana Moon Pie that they had kept in the refrigerator. It was truly interstellar and entirely inedible, akin to swallowing harvest dust if that tasted like bananas. And cigarettes.
When her bingo games were over, I met my love in the bingo hall. They were setting up for the next game, and as we left I saw a man wearing a “Come and Take It From Me” shirt and holding cash up high in his hand. “Only The Good Die Young” was playing at a reasonable volume, and it felt more important than it was.
It was only a coincidence. I’m sure of that.