It was Monday morning at Treasure Island casino near Red Wing, somewhere in the vicinity of 5:00 a.m. It was hard to say for certain; I didn’t have a watch, my cell phone was dead, and there were no clocks anywhere. I know the slow, grinding pace of late nights, though, can feel the hours turnover in my head, and in my skull it felt like 5:00 a.m.
I’d been on the floor of the casino since eleven o’clock the previous evening. My head hurt. I am not a gambler, and am pretty much a stranger to casinos. I was running down, and decided to step outside for a breath of fresh air. The first light of dawn was creeping along the horizon, and standing at the edge of the parking lot you could hear little beyond a distant pulse, the stirring of birds, and the sibilant, sedative rhythm of the sprinklers swiveling in the grass. A distraught woman sat on a curb near the motorcycle area, talking on a cell phone. “Tell her not to be mad at me,” she said. “No, listen. Would you please just tell her not to be mad at me?”
A few feet from me, just outside the main entrance to the casino, a much-older woman sat parked in her elder buggy—one of those motorized contraptions with handlebars and wire baskets. She had a cigarette clenched in her teeth, her eyes were closed, and her head was thrown back at what appeared to be an excruciatingly uncomfortable angle.
The number of players at Treasure Island had thinned out considerably after last call at the casino’s liquor dispensaries, Bongo’s and Toucan Harry’s Bar. The groups of whooping, collegial gamblers—students, older folks from the RV park up the road, golfers unwinding after a day on the course, couples taking advantage of the package deals at the hotel—had departed, but somehow the casino seemed even noisier. Now, though, it was essentially a cacophonous province of solitaries. Among them were an agitated Vietnamese man shuffling numbers on a video roulette game, and an elderly fellow, wearing overalls, driving gloves, ear plugs, and what appeared to be yellow-tinted scuba goggles, who was pounding away at the Nurse Follies slot machine. Nearby, at the counter of the Mongo Bay Grill, a stooped little woman slowly pinched nickels out of a plastic cup and slid them across the counter to pay for her chicken strip basket.
Earlier, after the bar-crowd exodus, I had ventured up to my hotel suite to rest my feet, scribble some notes, and pound down caffeine. The place was lavish: two rooms, two bathrooms, two televisions, a king-size bed, akitchenette, and a huge Jacuzzi. The walls were adorned with art involving palm trees, expanses of blue sea, sunsets, and people strolling on the beach, in keeping with the casino’s Caribbean theme.
In hindsight, the suite was a foolish expenditure. I would use it as little more than a locker for my stuff. Except for this break, I would be downstairs from 11:30 p.m. until 7:30 the next morning, wandering the floors of the casino. I would not sleep in that king-size bed. The Jacuzzi would remain unused.
At 2:00 a.m., when I went back down to the casino, hundreds of people were still scattered around its 120,000 square feet, hunched alone at slot machines or huddled in quiet groups at the blackjack tables. Many of the wee-hours gamblers were quite old, and many of them were Asian; a number of them were Asian and quite old. Some of them were in wheelchairs or motorized carts. The majority of the gamblers who were not old, Asian, or in wheelchairs were young men, most of whom were wearing backward baseball caps and smoking cheap cigars. These characters tended to sport the kind of carefully groomed facial hair common to professional athletes, along with wrap-around sunglasses and sweatbands.
At that hour, the majority of the blackjack action was consolidated at a handful of tables. The players seemed intimidating in their concentration and silence. The dealers had a rapid, almost comically formal style, marked by a stoic demeanor and elegant flourishes that often looked like the sleight-of-hand routines of a magician.
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