The Rake Magazine

Tag: gambling

  • I'm Baaaaaaaack…

    Well, I am back from my cruise on the Mexican Riveria with my in-laws, and this vacation made my Top 5 for A LOT of reasons: beautiful weather, zip lining, and not one fight. Ok, well, maybe just ONE…

    I was a little nervous about going on this trip, because I had already decided — after "enjoying" a visit now and then to a casino — that it is in my best interest not to gamble. The first night at sea, there it was: THE CASINO, through which I had to travel for all my family meals. I knew I was in trouble!

    This whole damn thing started when I was only around 10 years old. During a family trip to Lake Tahoe, I wandered into a casino and hid in a corner to watch the adults play. I wanted in. So I paged Mr. M with an emergency phone call and told Mr. M to please put my five dollar bill down on lucky 17 at the roulette table.

    The pit bosses chased me out, of course, but Mr. M remained agreeable. I waited patiently in the hotel room to find out if my number came up.

    Well… Mr. M had been in the midst of a serious winning streak, and to be perfectly honest, my call threw his whole game off. So, after what seemed like an hour, Mr. M came up to my room and handed me back my five dollar bill, along with another five dollars in exchange for my promise to never page him again without a real emergency. He also asked that I stay in the hotel room until the adults were back and warned me NOT to spend my profit but to SAVE it for a rainy day.

    To ensure that I would not lose my original $5, he gave them to me in the form of a chip, which I, of course, could not cash in at the casino.

    When the coast was clear, I was off to the hotel gift shop to see what I could get with my five dollar chip and my new-found wealth of five bucks cash. And there they were, my VERY first PURCHASE, two of the biggest dice I had ever seen.

    I walked up to the cashier and purchased the big dice. When I tried to use the
    chip to buy another pair for my best friend Annie, the lady pointed out that I was not an adult so I could not use that five dollar chip. Well, I had tried… I ran back to the room with my giant dice and my five dollar chip.

    When Mr. M walked in the room — still not too thrilled with my "emergency page" — he told me to give him back the five dollar chip and my five bucks cash, and that he would hold it for me until the trip was over.


    Shit! What do I say?

    All I could think to say was that I had lost the cash, but that I still had the chip.

    "How could you lose $5 sitting in a hotel room?” he asked.

    With my best poker face I told him that I went down the hall to get some ice and somehow lost the bill. He knew I was lying, and I could tell, but I was determined to get home with my new big dice, which I had hidden in my luggage.

    Back in the comfort of my own home, settled into my bed, I finally took out the big red dice and felt horrible! Back and fourth in my head I tried to figure out how I could explain myself to — you guessed it — Mr. M,
    a.k.a. My Father, to whom I had lied. All I wanted was to be like all of
    the hot shot adults.

    At about 2 o’clock in the morning, after a lot of tossing and turning, I
    went into my parents room and fessed up about the whole thing. But rather than yelling and screaming at me, my parents simply asked me to please learn from the experience and understand that gambling is very serious and that is why it is not legal until you are AN ADULT.

    I learned all right, but when I flew to Las Vegas for the first time with my husband — already Legal, of course — I put a dollar into the first slot machine I saw in the airport after we landed and WON a jackpot.

    Who wins jackpots at the airport? Apparently, this genetic lottery
    winner.

    After years of being ridiculously lucky in casinos, however, my time was up.

    So… back to why there was a little fight on the family vacation.

    The second to last night, at the beginning of dinner, I told my husband that I was going up to the room to get a sweater, but I could not control myself any longer…

    I made my way toward the room, and before I knew it I was singing "mama needs a new pair of shoes" with my new gambling friends (who were college guys from USC and U of A) at the craps table. Every time I threw the dice — bada bing — my pile of chips would grow in front of ME and the guys, along with a fantastic new version of "Momma Melly just got all of our moms a new pair of shoes." I thought to myself, "Howard is going to kill me." But, hey, I had just made a lot of money.

    An hour later, I walked back to the dinner table (without my sweater) to
    see the look of complete dismay on my husband’s face, and even worse, on my kids’ faces.
    I handed Howard the cash and felt that same sick feeling that I felt when I lied the first time about gambling.
    It was NOW official: all the fun, all the cash, and even the great new cruise ship song of "Melly just bought all of our Moms new shoes" were not worth the price of disappointment that I had bestowed on my loved ones.

    The reason for the picture of the donkey and I is to show you a visual
    of how I felt after that one and only fight:

    Picture the donkey the other way around.

    The last night of the trip, when my brother-in-law Joel tried to get me to play poker with him I proudly said, "no thanks." Then I went back to the room with my forgiving husband and fell asleep in his arms to the sound of the rocking waves, the smell of the fresh clean air, and memories of all the fun things we did on our family vacation.

    I will share those pics with you when I receive them from my niece
    Katy.

    "Momma Melly" is officially in retirement right now, deleting all e-mails from college guys at USC and the University of Arizona.

  • Mystic Lake Casino: Gorge and Gamble, But Do It Dry

    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.