I settled in at a game next to her and tried to strike up a conversation. Perhaps I should have taken the hint conveyed by the message on her pink sweatshirt—“You Have the Right to Remain Silent – Use It!”—but I was increasingly desperate to chat with someone, having been rebuffed time and again all night (“Not here to talk,” one old fellow had said earlier). A guy with a notebook and a pen perhaps rightfully arouses suspicion in a casino at four o’clock in the morning. Indeed, I had been repeatedly checked out by floor security guards and warned about bothering other patrons.
Nevertheless, I plugged a few dollars into the machine and then casually, out of the side of my mouth, asked the woman if she had a particular strategy for this business. She sized me up briefly, and then offered this advice: “I don’t flit about.” She gave her console a few more spins and elaborated. She picked a bank of machines, she said, and concentrated on those. “They’re all the same,” she said. “Eventually they have to give you something.”
I asked her why she wasn’t home sleeping. She had raised six kids and spent thirty-five years farming with her husband, she told me. She was apparently an expert in not sleeping.
Did she still farm?
“I live in town now,” she said, and then gave a little dismissive wave of her hand that indicated the conversation was over.
I left the woman alone with her cups full of coins and her remaining hours to kill. En route to the bathroom I encountered an agitated fellow hustling away from the blackjack tables, headed in the same direction. He was making a noise from somewhere at the bottom of his throat, a hum that occasionally wound its way into unintelligible muttering. By the time he was five steps from the bathroom he’d already unbuttoned his fly and had his hand down his pants.
Time is money, I suppose, but this looked like a man who was clearly running out of both.