Reluctantly—very reluctantly—I ventured into the casino. There was really nowhere else to go, and I was in absolutely no shape to get back in the car. The blackjack tables were as crowded as if it had been midnight, but if anything, the Monday-afternoon clientele at Jackpot Junction was almost as disconsolate and tight-lipped as the wee-hours gang at Treasure Island, and easily seventy percent of the patrons appeared eligible for AARP membership. Wandering among these senior citizens intently feeding the slot machines and disconnected from human contact and conversation, it was hard not to recall the title of the wretched book written by Caitlin Thomas, Dylan Thomas’ widow, in the wake of his death: Leftover Life to Kill.
I eventually was allowed to haul my bags up to another room I wouldn’t have much opportunity to use. Sleep was difficult, since my head was still clanging from the aural onslaught of Treasure Island. After taking a shower in an attempt to wash some of the cigarette smoke out of my pores, I sat down and watched a baseball game before beginning the second night of my grim anthropological adventure.
The evening crowd at Jackpot Junction was much more convivial and boisterous than Treasure Island’s—at least in the hours before liquor sales were cut off. There were lots of couples and groups of young people, almost all of them loud, laughing, and clearly having a goodtime. Some construction workers from Pocahontas, Iowa, had driven up with their wives for a couple days of golf and gambling. They were, a guy named Mike told me, “having some drinks and getting killed at the blackjack tables.” He said this with a big smile on his face.
After the Portside Bar shut down, however, the place emptied out in a hurry, and by 2:30 a.m. it had the feel of an abandoned carnival still running on full wattage. It seemed like both the music volume and the air conditioning got cranked up in the dead hours, which was a good thing, because otherwise I—like many other patrons, no doubt—would not have been able to stay on my feet.
Sometime around 3:00 a.m., judging from my inner clock, I took the lay of the land. One woman who wore dirty, canvas gardening gloves was robotically removing change from the tray of a Tiki Torch machine and depositing it in plastic cups. For a while I took refuge from the tobacco pall in the non-smoking room; it was empty save for a man, perhaps in his late forties, intently playing the slots, and an elderly woman next to him (his mother, I presumed), bundled in a blanket and dozing in her wheelchair. There was a guy in a shiny, black nylon Lakers sweat suit, Fila sneakers, and mirrored sunglasses sitting before a That Girl game, absolutely unmoving. I was reminded of the human statues sculpted by Duane Hanson, which are so lifelike that they can draw double takes from passersby.
At around four o’clock I did manage to have something resembling a conversation with Gary and Bill, truck drivers—“sort of”—from Armstrong, Iowa. They were flat, amiable sorts, and didn’t seem to move from the Lucky 7 machines all night. “What else are you gonna do?” one of them asked, by way of explaining their presence at the casino. “There’s not exactly a lot of night life out this way.” They both seemed entirely unconcerned with the ultimate arithmetic of the enterprise. “You win a little, you lose a little,” Gary (or perhaps it was Bill) said with a shrug. “You can’t have much more fun than this,” his partner added with a perfectly straight face. I couldn’t for the life of me tell if he was serious or pulling my leg.
At five o’clock I sat down at a blackjack table and had a little roller-coaster run, playing through three different dealer changes. For brief moments I played alone, but most often I was joined by a rotating and diverse cast of characters: a couple guys from Kenya, two men and a woman from Southeast Asia, a man from somewhere in the Middle East, and an out-of-work, heavily tattooed construction worker who lived, he said, ten minutes away and had once spent a year dealing blackjack at a casino.
Twice I got a push on blackjack, and I lost twice with twenty. At some point, while playing in a complete stupor and from a position of total ignorance, I was up almost two hundred dollars, but by 6:00 a.m. I’d lost all my chips. By then, the former dealer was the only player left at the table with me. Shortly before I walked away I asked him if he believed in luck.
“Oh, absolutely,” he said. “Ask any dealer. They all believe in luck. Good luck, sure, but especially bad luck.”
The dealer across the table smiled, offered a little shrug, and wished me a good night.