It struck me as inconsistent when I discovered this:
You can gamble away everything you have at Mystic Lake Casino. Your savings, your kids’ college funds, the church collection you were supposed to deposit.
You can eat 10,000 calories in a single sitting at the Mystic Lake buffet for the nominal price of $9.95.
But you cannot drink wine, beer, or any other kind of alcohol on the premises.
Part of me admires and stands behind this policy: Alcohol has devastated the American Indian population — those, putatively, who own and run Mystic Lake — from the day it was introduced. They are a race of people whose bodies do not produce alcohol dehydrogenase, the enzyme that breaks down alcohol so it can be metabolized by the liver. Lack of this substance, paradoxically, not only causes an extreme physical allergy to alcohol, it seems to trigger an unstoppable craving as well. Though I might argue that rich food and fiscal mismanagement have done a great deal of damage to the Indian community as well.
Why, you may be wondering, am I so interested in the policies at Mystic Lake? Well, I’m so glad you asked. It’s a complicated story but if you’ll indulge me for a few moments, I hope you’ll find it’s worth your time.
First, I should cop to the fact that I’m 100 percent against state-sanctioned gambling no matter what the proceeds are used to fund. I believe deeply that the Minnesota state lottery is nothing but a tax on the poor who will inevitably donate their money when a prize is at stake. Here’s why.
It isn’t that they’re careless or stupid or unaware of the odds. It’s that the amount at stake actually has far more value to someone who is making minimum wage than it does to, say, me. There’s a slim chance that I will earn a million dollars: I could sell a book that’s made into a movie that busts all the box office records and results in a an enormous payout. I know; it’s unlikely, but it could happen. For someone who is working two jobs, each part-time and without health insurance, at $7.50 an hour, paying for childcare, rent, and upkeep on a perpetually broken-down car, there is no chance. Zero. If they want to make it out of this endless cycle of poverty, buying a lottery ticket is the only way to go.
About Indian gaming, I’m fiercely ambivalent. It provides a viable form of entertainment for people who willingly drive miles and miles to seek it out. And casinos certainly have raised the standard of living for people once confined to impoverished reservations. Still, honestly, I find the whole business loathsome and dangerous and downright sad.
So it perplexes me that certain older people I know think Mystic Lake is a great place to pass their golden years, playing the slots and eating heaps of seafood and whipped cream cake. Their business, I’ve always told myself. What do I care if they spend their retirement income in such a ridiculous way?
And I didn’t, in fact, until they involved my son.
He turned 20 last week. He is no longer a child. But he is MY child, and he’s been through hell in the past two years. That he has autism is the least of his problems (in fact, quiet, shyness, and mathematical humor are among his most charming attributes). But beginning about a year and a half ago, he was put on atypical anti-psychotics by not one but three different psychiatrists. These drugs are the new panacea of modern medicine — also, coincidentally, the source of enormous kickbacks to doctors from the companies that make them. Ergo, they’re being dispensed like aspirin to a legion of non-psychotic individuals, including those with eating disorders, behavior issues, and benign neurological differences like my son’s.
Here’s the problem. Atypical anti-psychotics block the brain’s dopamine receptors. Dopamine regulates a number of things, including movement, mood, sleep, cognition, and pleasure. It is the last that seems to be most problematic when you start messing with dopamine (or when it is naturally depleted, as in Parkinson’s Disease); without this hormone, the brain does not register the "reward" inherent in hedonistic activities such as eating, gambling, drinking, and having sex. So people who are dopamine-deficient engage in things that should make them experience pleasure. . . .yet they don’t. Which causes them to repeat those activities over and over — eating, drinking, gambling, fucking — in an attempt to achieve their rightful high.
The result: My formerly sweet and guileless son came off a medication he never should have been prescribed in the first place shaky, moody, mean, sleep-disordered, slow to process, and a raging addict. To what? You name it. Pizza, Coca-Cola, cooking wine, card playing, shopping, and girls. In January, after weeks of trying to deal with this snarl of allopathic ills, my husband and I finally — reluctantly — consigned him to a treatment center where he could get the help we were unable to provide.
I raged, sulked, and grieved. For weeks, I couldn’t eat, read, write, or sleep. Then, I noticed that though I was a mess, my son was actually getting better. We would visit and find him polite, clean, and neatly dressed. He’d be attending a group session, working a crossword puzzle, or sitting with a few other residents watching As Good As It Gets. He had begun to make good food choices and lose weight; he was talking about getting out and going back to school. The treatment actually seemed to be working. Until his birthday, that is.
I got the call on Wednesday of last week. His grandparents, my former in-laws, had arrived the day before and signed my son out. Then they’d taken him to Mystic Lake, where they paid his way into the buffet then bellied him up to the tables and helped him mound food onto his plate. After three of four trips back, plus seven or eight sodas, they trooped out to the slot machines where my 76-year-old former father-in-law taught my son how to use the poker slots, gave him a pile of cash, and told him to go ahead and gamble until it was gone.
Later, when they dropped him off at the treatment center, Grandma and Grandpa tucked a 7-pound cheesecake in with his birthday gifts, just for good measure.
By the time I saw my son next, on Wednesday afternoon, he was sick, dumb, and dazed. Haltingly, he told the whole story to the counselors who reported to me that they were thinking of discharging him. Clearly we were not serious about seeking treatment, they said, if his relatives were going to take him on casino junkets. What’s more, it was illegal for a 20-year-old to gamble. Did I not understand that?
"You’re right," I said. "I’m so sorry. Please don’t kick him out. I promise, it will never happen again." Though short of killing an elderly couple — which, don’t get me wrong, I would be very happy to do if I didn’t have two other kids to raise — I cannot think of a way to insure this is true.
So about the alcohol. The fact is, I began to wonder: If his grandparents bought him a 14-course meal and an hour with the slots, did they perhaps treat him to a vodka gimlet, as well? That’s when I pulled up the Mystic Lake site and discovered there is no alcohol allowed on the premises. Goddamn lucky for us.
I’ve already left a note telling staff at the treatment center never again to release my son to a quaint little gray-haired couple from Iowa. Now, I just have to make sure they didn’t stop by Schiek’s to treat h
im to a lap dance on the way back from the casino, and I think — maybe, finally — I’ll have all the bases covered and be able to rest.
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